Forgotten Treasures: Bobbleheads and Glory

You take your glory where you can find it.

If you’re a first-round draft pick by a major league team, you expect that glory to arrive pretty quickly, and with the team that drafted you. Sure, maybe you’re traded away before your big league debut, but that just means you’re in demand as a hot prospect. It’s nothing but a minor glitch in your otherwise uninterrupted path to stardom.

But, sometimes, far more often than these young players would like to acknowledge, that glory either never arrives or arrives in a completely different way. They know not everyone makes it, but they just assume that will happen to their peers. Surely it won’t happen to them.

It does happen to them, though, all the time. Something pops in their arm, or they can’t handle being away from home, or the curveballs in Double A are just too much for their Low A skills to hit. And so they flame out, done at 24 or even younger, and return to their hometown with a few memories, maybe a baseball card or two with their image on it, and whatever’s left of their signing bonus. Often it’s all crammed into the sports car they bought with their first check, and are still driving five years later.