Wednesday, December 13, 2017

All I've Got of Him: Brooks Kieschnick

It was big news last week when the Angels signed Japanese star Shohei Ohtani.  A power hitter with a 100 mph fastball, the guy seems pretty impressive.

The chatter on a two-way player brought the name Brooks Kieschnick to mind among Cub fans.  He also ended up a two-way player, though he wasn't especially good at either.

In the mid-Nineties, Kieschnick was the crown jewel of the Cubs system.  He was a power-hitting outfielder and was going to be a star at Wrigley for years to come.  He hit .345 over 25 games late in the 1996 season.  There were cards galore of him.

Unfortunately, the crown jewel was zirconium.  In 1997 he hit just .200.  He was left unprotected in the upcoming expansion draft and was selected by the Devil Rays.  He bounced around a few other organizations and then hooked up with the Brewers.

It was there that he reinvented himself as a reliever and pinch hitter.  He spent two seasons in Milwaukee doing double duty.

My collection includes 42 cards of his including a rule-following autograph.  That is an awful lot of cards for a guy that played in just 64 games for the Cubs.


2 comments:

  1. Kieschnick is one of my main player collections and I think it's safe to say that I haven't purchased more than a handful of the 80 different cards I have of him as a Cub. A large amount of my BK cards came as throw-ins through trades with bloggers. They were coming in with such regularity at one point that I decided, "Hey, I might as well collect the guy!" The fact that he was a two-way player toward the end of his career helped that decision as well.

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  2. Grew up watching Cubs on WGN in the 90's and remember him being labeled the next big thing. But Sosa and a young pitcher named Kerry Wood made everyone forget the hype. Love the 1997 Collector's Choice. Mayhave to try and get all his Brewers cards.

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