Greg "The Moon Man" Minton

When I set out to build collections of the players I'd admired and followed over the years, for some reason I felt the inextricable pull toward collecting one Greg Minton, the San Francisco Giants and later California Angels reliever famously known as "The Moon Man". Well, I know why, and it wasn't really because he was one of my favorite players while he was around (although he was excellent for the Giants, particularly from 1979-1982).

It was because of this baseball card you see here, which is seriously one of my Top 10 of all time. You may notice that I've been using the image from it as my avatar since this blog started. It's quite possibly one of the worst airbrush jobs in the history of baseball cards. Minton's glasses look painted on. It reminds me of the Spanish woman who tried to personally restore a Jesus Christ fresco in her village several years ago. When I returned to card collecting, I started by ensuring that I had a copy of this 1978 Topps gem, and decided to keep going with Minton from there.

Again, it isn't just because of Minton's doofy card. When I was in my early days of baseball fandom, Minton and Gary Lavelle were our closers, our 8th/9th-inning guys - though I can't remember who really owned the job. By 1980, the job was mostly Minton's; by 1983, he and Lavelle were trading off again to see who'd get the save. For those four years, 1979-1982, Minton kept his ERA under 3.00 all four years and under 2.00 twice. Oh, and he broke a major league record over that time by going 269 and 1/3rd innings without allowing a home run (see "Record Breaker" card below).

Maybe I dug him so much because of the glasses, which I also wore until 7th grade. Here's an excellent 1982 Fleer card showing Greg rocking all four eyes in style. Oh - and the "Moon Man" sobriquet that he collected? Apparently the guy wasn't a weirdo in the Bill Lee mode - he just happened to be really big into pranking his teammates. From an early 80s Sports Illustrated piece by Ron Fimrite:

To his teammates on the San Francisco Giants, Relief Pitcher Greg Minton is Moon Man or Moonie. Minton, good-natured sort that he is, accepts their characterization with only one disclaimer: "I don't do things the same way other people do, but things come out the same anyway." Ah, yes. When Minton dives into a swimming pool, it may be from an apartment-house balcony. When he decides to skateboard, it could well be down the Great White Way. And when he goes courting.... But that's a story for later.

Talk about leaving one hanging! Anyway, I've been doing a good job collecting Minton's cards of late. It's certainly not an expensive endeavor - I just bulked up on his latter-years California Angels cards and got pretty much all of them on Card Barrel for 18 cents each. Here are a few I pulled from the bunch over the course of Greg Minton's 1970s and 80s career.

Your 1976 Phoenix Giants

For most of my life, the path for a minor leaguer toiling in the San Francisco Giants organization to get the call to the bigs ran through Phoenix, Arizona. From 1966 to 1997, Phoenix was the AAA franchise for San Francisco, and whether they called them the "Giants" (1966-1985) or the "Firebirds" (1986-1997), if you were one step away from that final promotion, you were plying your trade in the Valley of the Sun.

It has long been reflexive of me to speak of the guys "down in Phoenix", even once our AAA team had moved to Fresno and then later (and currently), Sacramento. When I re-entered this card accumulation racket this past year, I got a hankering to see if there might actually be minor league cards for my childhood hero, Mr. Jack Clark, pictured to your left. Well, turns out there was an entire set for the 1976 Phoenix Giants, and I bought it on eBay. I'm gonna show you a few of them here.

Each of these 4 fellas comes from a set of 22 cards. Well, they're not exactly cards. They're more like photos, with superimposed autographs, a Valley National Bank logo and the little Giants logo you see in the lower left. There's nothing on the back. They're floppy, like photos. Hey. let's call them photos. The four gentlemen I've scanned from the set each made it to bigs - with Greg Minton having had an exceptionally distinguished career, along with Clark. Johnnie LeMaster was a bit of a Giants punchline during the time he started at shortstop, but it seemed like he anchored that position for at least four or five years. Most of the others in the set did not make it to the big club.

Skip James got scanned because he shares a name with my all-time favorite bluesman: Skip James. (Yes, even better than Patton, Johnson, Hurt and all them). He made it to the parent club in 1977 and 1978 for a total of 36 at-bats and a career average of .167 before playing out his career in Japan. Do you call that a "cup of coffee" in the bigs, or is 36 at-bats more like a couple of mugs? I'm not sure, but I actually remember him being on the team as a pinch-hitter. I was all of 9 years old. but I remember.

Anyway, take a gander at these 1976 Phoenix Giants and let me know if you ever saw these heroes play some AAA ball back in the day.