Fleer Stuck with Dickie Thon All Along

They capped his career a decade after he almost didn't have one

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1994 Fleer Dickie Thon (#193) - Card of the Day

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A single pitch can change the course of baseball history.

That’s no big revelation, and there are plenty of examples to prove the point:

• Ralph Branca’s pitch to Bobby Thomson that became the “shot heard ‘round the world” in 1951.

• Ralph Terry’s doomed delivery to Bill Mazeroski to end the 1960 World Series.

• Tracy Stallard’s fastball to Roger Maris that toppled Babe Ruth.

All single pitches, all changed the game in some way forever. And, of course, every season produces its own share of sport-changing moments that all begin with a single pitch.

But, while the above examples leave about half of observers happy, some of the most monumental and devastating pitches leave no winners behind at all. And no one sees them coming.

Such was the case when Astros shortstop Dickie Thon stepped in to face Mets starter Mike Torrez in the bottom of the third inning at the Astrodome on April 8, 1984. It was just the fifth game of the new season for both teams, and both had high hopes.

That went double for Thon, who seemed on the verge of entering baseball’s upper echelon of stars.

After three partial seasons (two with the Angels, one in Houston) of pretty vanilla production, Thon broke out with a 1982 campaign that featured a .276 average, 37 stolen bases, 73 runs scored, and Gold Glove-caliber defense (without the actual award). He also led the National League with ten triples. It all added up to 6.1 WAR (Baseball Reference version)…and then Thon was even better in 1983.

That summer, the 25-year-old raised his batting average to .286 while stealing 34 bases and scoring 81 times. His defense remained at elite levels, too.

And, best of all, Thon hit a monstrous 20 home runs.

Now, 20 home runs does not sound “monstrous” at all these days, but consider that Mike Schmidt’s 40 homers led all of baseball, and you start to get a feel for the context of the era.

And then you have the fact that Thon was a shortstop. Cal Ripken Jr. hit 27 homers that season, but the middle infield was still pretty much no-man’s land when it came to power output.

Ditto squared for the Astrodome, Thon’s home field.

Take a look at the park factors from the era (courtesy of Statcast via Baseball Savant), and you’ll see that the hitters were about 55% less likely to go deep in the Astrodome than in the average ballpark. Thon’s bat certainly seemed to enjoy hitting the road, as he hit 16 homers away from the Dome in 1983 and just four at home.

And that season, all of Thon’s goodness added up to a whopping 7.4 WAR, tops in the National League among position players and behind only John Denny(!), Ripken, and Wade Boggs in the majors overall.

I know, know…nobody knew about WAR in 1983, and a lot of people still don’t care about it today. Point is, though, Thon was one of the best players in the game.

He was also hitting .353 to start 1984 when he stepped into the box against Torrez.

Torrez had caught Thon looking in their first matchup that night, a called third strike away. The right-hander figured Thon might be looking for the same thing the second time around, so he came inside…but a rising fastball got away from him. And Thon saw it too late.

The beaning left Thon crumpled at the plate, then rushed to the hospital, then in surgery to repair his fractured left orbital bone three days later. In between, there were moments where Thon and his family and his teammates and his fans — and Torrez — didn’t know how bad things were. Or how bad they would be.

Things were bad.

But Thon would live.

Eventually, he would recover to have a semblance of an everyday life.

He would even make it all the way back to the majors by the next spring. He played 84 games in 1985, hitting .251 with six home runs and 29 RBI. The vision improved, some, as time went on, but it was never quite the same.

And neither was Thon’s game, understandably.

Still, he played in the big leagues through 1993, moving on to the Padres, Phillies, Rangers, and Brewers through a series of non-trade transactions.

Thon never did climb that final rung that looked to be in his grasp, vaulting himself into conversations around the greatest players in the game. But even with the devastating beaning and the hard years that followed, Thon put together a big-league resume that included a .264 batting average, 71 home runs, 435 RBI, 496 runs scored, 167 steals, and 23.9 WAR in 15 years.

And, even though his last game was in October of 1993, Thon still landed on a handful of career-capper baseball cards the next year. That includes the 1994 Fleer number you see above, where Thon makes one more putout. He looks good doing it, even if the uniform doesn’t look quite right.

Today, Richard William Thon turns 67 years old.

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Passing in the Houston Night

The last hit Thon collected before his beaning was a single off of Dick Tidrow of the Mets in the bottom of the sixth inning of a game at the Astrodome on April 7, 1984. If that date sounds familiar, it just might be because it was Dwight Gooden’s big league debut.

Gooden went five innings and gave up a single run. He also struck out five batters, including Astros number-three hitter Dickie Thon to end the first. Thon was Dr. K’s first victim on his way to a rookie season for the ages, one that would help juice up the Traded/Update card market that fall. Read about Gooden’s first Topps card right here.

As for Tidrow, he was just about at the end of the line of a 13-year big league career — he’d make his final appearance exactly a month later. Earlier in the decade, he received some not-so-royal cardboard treatment from Fleer. Did Fleer really hate Dick Tidrow? Decide for yourself.