When Dave LaRoche Was a Chase Card

I'll give you my Super Veteran for your Tony Gwynn

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1983 Topps Dave LaRoche Super Veteran (#334) - Card of the Day

Do you remember what you were doing 13 years ago? For me, 2011 seems like it was yesterday — last week at the most. Time pretty much stands still when you’re an adult of a certain age, or at least it has for me.

But when I was a kid, just digging into baseball cards in 1983? Thirteen years might as well have been 113 years. Every day was an adventure, and every year that passed by seemed like another lifetime slipping away, for better or for worse.

If I ever needed visual evidence of just how big a span 13 years was, the 1983 Topps Super Veteran Dave LaRoche card gave it to me.

There on the right-hand side was “old man” LaRoche, who was passingly familiar thanks to his base Topps card, his Fleer card, and the one or two other cardboard slabs picturing him I had come across since my mom started buying me packs in 1981.

But on the right-hand side…whoa! It was nothing less than a timewarp, a black-and-white shot of a young man who purported to be the same guy as the Yankee on the right. The cap was unlike any I had seen, and the tint of the photo screamed 19th century, but those sideburns clamored to be counted among the denizens of the 1970s.

What did I know about placing this thing chronologically, though? Heck, I wasn’t even alive in 1970!

Of course, there were other Super Veterans in the 1983 Topps set, most of them featuring men with more accomplished resumes than LaRoche. Many of them also stretched back much further, to the early 1960s.

But there was something about LaRoche that really stood out.

Part of it was that his timeline was so close to falling within my lifetime, and yet the visual evidence suggested his origins were ancient.

And part of it had to do with those sideburns. For me, growing up in rural Indiana in the early 1980s, chops like that cried “hillbilly,” which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Our community was pretty much hillbillies, rednecks, work-a-days, teachers, and a few imported folks who worked at the local college. Most of us were a mix of multiple of those things.

Mostly, we were just different degrees of the same types of folks.

Anyway, one of my collecting friends, whose dad had LaRoche ‘burns and who aspired to grow them himself one day, decided that Dave LaRoche was the second coming of Mike Marshall the Elder. This kid had to scoop up every LaRoche card that entered our neighborhood.

Which worked out pretty well for me when said kid pulled a Pete Rose or Mike Schmidt or Johnny Bench or Mario Soto card. I was willing to talk business.

As it turned out, this SV card was LaRoche’s last Topps card and, except for his 1983 Fleer card (Donruss passed him by that year), his last card overall.

Because the 35-year-old LaRoche made just one appearance for the 1983 Yankees, surrendering two runs, mopping up in a blowout loss to the A’s on August 23. The damage came on a Jeff Burroughs home run that drove in Rickey Henderson before LaRoche coaxed a flyball from Carney Lansford to end the frame.

And with that LaRoche wrapped his major league career, but his bloodline would be back in the 2000s: sons Adam LaRoche and Andy LaRoche both put together big league careers of their own.

Today, daddy LaRoche turns 76 years old.

An Un-Carney Ending

The last batter LaRoche ever faced in the majors was Oakland A’s third baseman Carney Lansford, who popped out to Yankees shortstop Roy Smalley to end the top of the ninth on August 23, 1983.

LaRoche worked just that one inning, giving up a two-run shot to Jeff Burroughs that scored Rickey Henderson right before Lansford gave up the ghost.

Ten years later, Lansford was still doing his thing, albeit somewhat miraculously and not without some major bumps in the road along the way.

Read all about his comeback and at least one of the baseball cards that chronicled the whole thing right here.

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I don’t know about you, but these guys have me feeling like a Super Veteran myself. I’ve been around for a while, and I have a lot of experience in, like, breathing and stuff.

Might be time for a comeback. If Carney Lansford can do it at 35, surely I can do it at “a lot older” but also with a lot less baseball wear-and-tear on the old carcass.

If nothing else, I’ll probably “come back” tomorrow for more inane typing.

Thanks for reading.

—Adam