A Greg by Any Other Name Is Still a Prospect

Where half a rookie card passes for an ID

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1988 Fleer Gregs Myers & Tabor (#644) - Card of the Day

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A couple weeks back, we ran into (baseball) Johnny Rutherford, who turned out to have been born a year earlier than his 1950s baseball cards would have led collectors to believe.

A reader pointed out that this common yesteryear practice — shaving a year or more off a birth date — gave a player his “baseball age,” which he could wield to inflate his prospect status or even improve his negotiating leverage.

Another way to obfuscate a player’s age as they’re moving through the prospect pipeline? Just don’t talk about it at all.

A case in point is the 1988 Fleer Major League Fleer Prospects card you see at the top of this post.

On the left is Greg Myers, who you might remember for his long 18-year career in the majors, made possible by a decent enough stick to hit .255 and the ability and willingness to crouch behind the plate whenever and wherever the need arose.

On the right is Greg Tabor, who you might remember (though likely not) as one of just two Tabors to make the major leagues, joining 1930s and 1940s Red Sox and Phillies third baseman Jim Tabor.

Greg T. didn’t last long in the bigs, appearing in just nine games for the 1987 Rangers. He picked up a double in nine at-bats while striking out four times between September 10 and October 4 that season.

Any hopes Tabor had of sticking with the Rangers in 1988 evaporated when they traded him and Dave Meier to the Cubs for Ray Hayward on March 17 (Happy St. Patrick’s Day, indeed!). The Cubs sent him down to Triple-A Iowa to start the season, and that’s where he stayed all season.

And there was no next season for Tabor.

All of which meant that, when collectors pulled his first big league card from 1988 Fleer wax packs that spring, it was also his last big league card, even if no one knew it yet (and unless you count his 1993 Keebler card).

Indeed, if you were a young fan or collector who relied on baseball cards to tell you who was who and who was going to be who, well, you might have been left with the impression that either of the Gregs was as likely as the other to turn up at a major league park near you on any given Tuesday evening.

Heck, if you turned the card over, you might have gotten the impression that Tabor had a slight edge:

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Identical batting lines, except for the fact that Tabor drove in a run in 1987, while Myers didn’t.

Of course, one important piece of information is missing here — the players’ ages. Heck, Fleer didn’t even give us baseball ages.

If they had, maybe it would have struck some of us (probably not me, though) that Myers was five years younger than Tabor. That relative youth had to count for something, didn’t it?

As it turned out, it did, seeing as how Myers was back in the majors by 1989 and stayed there until 2005. As it also turns out, Myers is still nearly five years younger than Tabor today.

But today belongs to the other Greg on Myers’ RC because today, Gregory Steven Tabor turns 64 years old.

A Breezy Farewell

Tabor struck out in his final major league at-bat against Seattle Mariners ace Mark Langston, on the last day of the 1987 season. Tabor had started the game at second base for the Rangers in place of (mostly) regular Jerry Browne.

But when the Rangers loaded the bases with one out in the bottom of the sixth, trailing 6-1, Texas manager lifted Tabor for a pinch hitter — Dave Meier, who became Tabor’s traded-with the next spring.

Meier struck out looking against Langston, who, along with Alvin Davis had been trying to make Seattle hobby-relevant for a couple of years. Read more about the dynamic duo and their early cards right here.

Season(s) in Hell?

The 1987 Rangers finished 75-87, tied for last in the old American League West with the California Angels. Texas at least had some exciting young stars and hope for the future, though, so that rough campaign might not qualify as baseball Hell…though it was a 12-game dropoff from 1986, and any season with Valentine at the helm is at least an adventure.

But if you want an inside look at some really rough (but unforgettable) years in franchise history, check out the classic Seasons in Hell (affiliate link), by Mike Shropshire. Even if you’re read it before, it’s one of those places you need to go back to every once in a while, just to remind you how good the book is and how much things have changed.

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