Dick Sharon's Stealth Star Power

It's not who you know, it's who you're traded for

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2003 Jewish Major Leaguers Dick Sharon (#108) - Card of the Day

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If you judge a major league career solely on the basis of draft position and the players a guy was traded for over the years, you’d have to call Dick Sharon a star.

For starters, the Pirates selected Sharon out of Sequoia High School Redwood City, California, with the ninth overall pick in 1968, just five slots behind Thurman Munson. Sharon landed ahead of both Greg Luzinski and Gary Matthews

Other future big leaguers selected in that draft included Tim Foli, Pete Broberg,Bobby Valentine, Don Castle, Junior Kennedy, Lloyd Allen, and Rich McKinney.

It took a couple of years for the young outfielder to get his bat cracking, but Sharon showed good speed right away, stealing 11 and 20 bases in his first two minor league seasons.

In 1970, the lumber started to heat up, too, as Sharon hit .254 with 22 home runs and 71 RBI at Single-A Salem. The next two summers saw successive promotions, and Sharon seemed to be knocking on the door to Three Rivers Stadium as 1972 waned.

The Pirates had other ideas, though, and traded Sharon to the Tigers in November for Jim Foor and Norm McRae. Those weren’t exactly household names, but then, neither was Sharon.

Even so, after just 16 games at Triple-A Toledo to open 1973, Sharon got the call from the Tigers. On May 13, manager Billy Martin brought Sharon in as a defensive replacement for Jim Northrup in right field in the top of the seventh inning in a tie game against the Brewers.

Sharon didn’t come to the plate that debut game, but he made 90 more appearances as a rookie that year, batting .242 with seven homers, 16 RBI, and two stolen bases. It was enough to land him a Topps rookie card the next spring and a full season on the Detroit roster under new manager Ralph Houk.

After batting .216 in 60 games in 1974, though, Sharon was on the move again. That November, Detroit traded Sharon, Ed Brinkman, and Bob Strampe to the Padres for Nate Colbert.

Colbert was battling back issues that would soon curtail his career, but he was still viewed as a premium slugger…at least the Tigers hoped he could rebound from a rough 1974.

In San Diego, Sharon found part-time duty in the outfield and as a pinch hitter in 1975. The results were familiar: .194, 4 HR, 20 RBI, 0-2 in stolen base attempts.

That October, the Friars sent Sharon to the Cardinals in exchange for Willie Davis, one of the great underrated stars of the 1960s and 1970s. Davis would put up a solid 1976 for the Padres before heading to Japan for a couple years and then playing for the Angels briefly in 1979.

As for Sharon, he never took the diamond in the Cardinals system. Instead, St. Louis flipped him to the Angels in January 1976 for minor league pitcher William Rothan.

But Sharon didn’t make it out of Spring Training with California, either, as the Angels traded him, John Balaz, and Dave Machemer to the Red Sox for Dick Drago in March. Drago was no slouch on the mound, of course, and holds some certain place in BoSox lore as a member of the 1975 pennant winners.

Sharon spent 1976 with the Triple-A Rhode Island Red Sox…and then he was done in pro ball. He didn’t make the cut in the 1976 Topps set, which means he doesn’t have a career-capper card.

Or, rather, he didn’t have a career-capper card until 2003. That’s when the American Jewish Historical Society issued a 149-card set of Jewish Major Leaguers. The goal of that set was to chronicle every Jewish player who had made it to the majors, and Sharon made the cut on card #108.

On the back of Sharon’s card, we do get a complete accounting of his major league stats though with limited “columns” and not in the usual tabular form:

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Of course, as we’ve learned, that narrative misses out on Sharon’s hidden draft-position-trade-name star power.

In case you were wondering, Richard Louis Sharon was born on April 15, 1950.

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