Cinquante

I've been down in S. Florida now for a little over 2 years, and I've grown quite accustomed to the amount of Spanish I hear.  I'm slowly learning numbers and a few words here and there that help me with my work (paquete=package for example).  But for this post, I decided to go back to my Canadian roots and throw the French word cinquante at you, which means the number 50.

I decided to look up the #50 on baseball reference dot com to see which Blue Jay wore that number the longest.   I had a notion of who it might be, and the site confirmed my guess:

The Terminator, Tom Henke wore the number in Toronto from 1985 through 1992, the longest period of any Jay.  I chose the 1992 Donruss card to show because the other day was the 25th anniversary of the Blue Jays first World Series title.  Interestingly, it wasn't Henke that closed out the series, it was Mike Timlin on the mound when Otis Nixon made the final out.

Speaking of flame throwers who wore the number fifty, here's another one whose career was ended too early...

J.R. Richard was well on his way to having a great career when a blood clot in his neck caused a stroke in 1980 and unfortunately ended his major league career.  He won 74 games over a 4 year period between 1976-1979, struck out 300 batters twice and led the NL in ERA once.  It surprised me to read that he still holds the Astros single season strikeout record with 313; I thought that maybe Nolan Ryan or Mike Scott may have surpassed that over time.

I tried to think of a Maple Leaf player who wore the #50 (it isn't as common in hockey), and could only think of one, Jonas Gustavsson who was the Leafs back up goalie for 3 seasons early in this decade.  Instead, I found another goalie who has had a great career so far while wearing #50, Corey Crawford.

It surprised me that this is already Corey's 8th season as the starting goalie in Chicago; I wouldn't have thought it was more than 5.  Corey also has had some great mask designs while in Chitown, I must try and find some for my goalie frankenset.

I also thought of one card in my collection with the #50 on the back that was worthy...

Why all this obsession with the number 50?

Today is my 50th birthday.  I guess I'm going to have to change the header on my blog, as I'm no longer a 40-something collector.

Merci d'avoir lu, Robert