Here's when it might possibly end

September 17, 2024

Some days I consider why I started this blog-ish exercise in internet content creation. It’s surely not for the money, although Substack does offer various subscription models to entice writers to create for them. I suppose it’s because I’m trying to take baseball card collecting to its ultimate conclusion, and the smiling young Thad Bosley shown above is as good of a stopping point as I’m ever going to get.

The nine-year old kid that I was when this baseball card was produced in 1978 didn’t know the first thing about Thad Bosley. He sure wouldn’t have been aware that Bosley’s first tenure with the California Angels had already come to an end, since he was traded along with Bobby Bonds to the Chicago White Sox after the 1977 season was over.

The Bonds trade had opened up right field for the Angels’ free agent signing of Lyman Bostock. Reggie Jackson and George Steinbrenner had wanted Bostock, and so did Ray Kroc and the San Diego Padres, but in the end Bostock wound up signing with the Angels for $2.3 million over five seasons.

Sadly, Bostock’s career in Anaheim never came anywhere close to that. When he was murdered in Gary, Indiana in late September of 1978—after the Angels had played an afternoon game against the White Sox in Chicago—Bonds was no longer on the White Sox roster, and Bosley’s season had come to a halt, for reasons I can’t quite determine at this time. He played in both ends of a doubleheader in Oakland on the preceding Sunday, and then was somehow left off the team’s roster for the remainder of the 1978 season. He then played another two seasons on the South side, and bounced around with a few teams, including the Angels again for a brief spell in 1988, before retiring after the 1990 season.

Today is Thad Bosley’s 68th birthday, which means that by 12 years from today, every one of the 600+ living players that I currently have on baseball cards from the 1970s will be at least 80 years old, if they should make it that far. And an as-yet unknown number of them will be wherever it is we go after our time on this planet is up.

Ironically enough, I’ll also be 68 years of age, or as old then as Thad Bosley is today. Whether I can make it that far is anyone’s guess, but if I do I imagine that chronicling the demise of old ballplayers from the 1970s will be about the last thing that I should be doing.

So if all goes well it’s 12 years and I’m out, starting today. Let the countdown begin!