Small print, big player
Some of the smallest type in newspapers comes with the daily sports transactions. Seemingly always been that way.
Among the transactions from 61 years ago today is one for a 19-year-old, amateur free agent signing with a Houston Colt .45 team that just a month earlier finishes its first season with a forgettable record of 64-96.
The player Houston signs for a $3,000 bonus is a 5-foot-7, 140-pound infielder from Oakland, Calif.
Houston sticks the kid in Class A for nearly all of the 1963 season before bringing him to the major leagues at the end of that season.
He ends up playing in just eight games that summer for Houston and spends all but the final two weeks of the 1964 season at Class AA San Antonio before yet another late-summer, 10-game promotion to Houston.
From there, this diminutive infielder never spends another day in the minor leagues as he plays in the majors for five teams over the next 20 years, finishing with all 2,517 career hits, 10 All-Star Game appearances, five Gold Gloves for his work at second base, two Most Valuable Player awards and two World Series rings.
Oh, yeah, he is elected in 1990 to the Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility.
His name?
“The beauty of baseball is that it is a game of equal opportunity,” Morgan says. “It doesn’t matter where you come from or what you look like. If you can play, you can play.”