Wednesday, December 1, 2021

My Favorite Manager of All-Time

No mail today, but I do have another card that's been sitting on my desk which arrived over the past weekend.

I don't really remember Andre Dawson swatting 49 homers and winning the NL MVP for the last place Cubs in 1987. I was only nine years old at the time and professional baseball was still a foreign concept to me. 

Two years later I was memorizing the backs of baseball cards and following The Boys of Zimmer as close as I possibly could, as the Cubs were on their way to winning the NL East. What a fun summer that was!

Ryno, The Hawk and Mad Dog were the big names, but they had a great supporting cast in Dunston, Grace, Sutcliffe, Wild Thing, Les Lancaster, Mike Bielecki, Dwight Smith and Jerome Walton.

For the record, I think these movie poster cards from Topps, found in Archives, are a pretty creative idea. Good on Topps. 
Rino? Never seen it spelled that way before!

Don Zimmer seemed to be the glue that kept my favorite childhood team together. I'm not sure if he's my favorite manager of all-time, because maybe that's Joe Maddon's spot, but it's difficult to best memories from one's youth. 

Do you have a favorite manager?

5 comments:

  1. My favorite Cubs GM is Leo Durocher, but that probably says more about my age than anything else.

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  2. Love the movie posters. I really wish there was one per team. My first year as a fan featured Roger Craig as the manager and Zim as the 3rd base coach and that was just a really fun pair to have as the voice of the team.

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  3. Terry Francona. He brought two titles to Boston, and a Hall of Famer in my book.

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  4. I second Matt's vote for Francona. And I like the movie poster concept on a card. I'm puzzled as to why the text only refers to each player by their nickname - and makes no mention of Don Zimmer at all.

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