Jerry Turner Is Ready for 1980s Baseball
And he has plenty of company at the birthday cake table
Today’s Lineup…
☀️ Card of the Day - a sunny birthday celebration
🎂 A crowd at the cake table
🎲 Game game name game
1979 Topps Jerry Turner (#564) - Card of the Day
Look through Jerry Turner’s 20 or so Major League Baseball cards, and you won’t find him smiling all that much.
Plenty of early posed shots with the bat, a few action shots later on (also with the bat), and even a couple of candids.
Mostly, though, not much of a smile.
Even so, when I think of Turner, it’s this image that comes to mind — beaming under the hot sun in his San Diego Padres uniform that looks like the opening credits from a 1970s Saturday morning cartoon show, eager for a new decade of baseball.
Truth be told, I don’t know much about Turner beyond what his cards and the record books tell us — 10 years in the majors, parts of 9 with the Padres (splitting 1981 between the Friars and the White Sox), one season with the Tigers.
Oh, and he made more appearances as a pinch hitter (326) than at any single position in the field — he topped out with 305 assignments in left field.
Still, the man lived the major league dream for a full decade, with a couple of summers in the minors as a lead-in.
Once he was out of the game? There’s not a whole lot of information about him that’s hit the wire in the last 40 years, but he once described himself as a “very religious man.”
And there were reports as late as the 2000s that he was coaching and/or managing for a couple of independent clubs in California.
What we do know for sure is that Turner passed away on August 20, 2023 … that he appeared on some fine looking baseball cards … and that today would have been his 70th birthday.
Happy birthday, John Webber Turner, wherever you are!
A Crowd at the Cake Table
For what it’s worth, Turner had to beat out some tough cookies among January 17 birthdays to nab the “Card of the Day” slot up there. Here are just a few of the other baseball men born on this day in decades gone by:
Mayo Smith (1915)
Don Zimmer (1931)
Denny Doyle (1943)
Darrell Porter (1952)
Chili Davis (1960)
Plus a whole bunch of young whippersnappers born from the 1970s forward.
Oh, also plus Peter Marshall’s boy. You know, the The Hollywood Squares guy? Kid’s name is also Peter, but he retained his dad’s original last name.
Yeah, Pete LaCock turns 72 years old today, and that’s always worth celebrating. His 1977 Topps (#561) oughtta do:
By the way, did you know that LaCock was the second-to-last batter Bob Gibson ever faced? Pete hit his only grand slam off Gibson in a game between the Cubs and Cardinals on September 3, 1975.
Game Night with Dad
You can find all sorts of memorabilia and old episodes of The Hollywood Squares online in various places. There are even a few iterations of board games, but the 1974 is great because it shows a big image of LaCock Marshall:
Great for those nights when you’re hankering for a father-son comparison fest.
—
I could go on about these January 17-birthday guys all day. Zimmer and Porter and Chili and Mayo — great names, great stories.
But I don’t have all day, and I have a date with some 1981 Fleer cards, where Popeye will glare at me and Porter will take his hacks wearing a Groucho Marx getup.
Thanks for reading.
—Adam
More cardboard fun:
Great stuff....Denny Doyle and Darrell Porter, both with World Series memories. Doyle, in fact, running home from 3rd base in Gsme 6 of the '75 World Serious as fellow Jan 17 bday boy Don Zimmer hollered "no-no-no!" George Foster threw him out, which set the stage later for Carlton Fisk's heroics. Why did Denny run? He thought Zim, then the 3rd base coach and the next year elevated to skipper of the BoSox, was barking out "go-go-go!" Or at least that's the lore.