RIP Oct 4, 2020

This week we have lost several former MLB players, including Jay Johnstone, Bob Gibson, Lou Johnson, and Ron Perranoski. Yes, another former MLB player died this week at his own hands after reportedly killing a woman. This post will say no more about that.

Lou Johnson played 8 MLB seasons with the Chicago Cubs, California Angels, Milwaukee Braves, L.A. Dodgers, and Cleveland Indians. He hit .258 with 48 homers and 232 RBIs in 677 games.

Johnson is a also member of the Syracuse Baseball Wall of Fame. In 1963, Johnson batted .296 with 15 HR and 71 RBI in his only season in a Chiefs uniform.

1963 (#238), 1966, (#13) & 1968 (#184) Topps cards.

Ron Perranoski and Lou Johnson were Dodger teammates from 1965 to 1967. Perranoski played in the major leagues from 1961 to 1973 for the Dodgers, Minnesota Twins, Detroit Tigers and California Angels. He had a career record of 79-74 with 178 saves and a 2.79 ERA.

1971 Topps card #475.

Jay Johnstone was good enough to play 15 full seasons in the majors and parts of five others from 1966 to 1985. He was largely a platoon and role player, starting over 100 games in only three of those years – but he had a solid lefty bat, providing 102 career home runs and a .267 batting average.

According to SABR: He was also one of the game’s craftiest pranksters and better storytellers, as he recounted in three entertaining books. His gags were innumerable, and among the best was trapping Tommy Lasorda (whom he liked to impersonate by padding himself with pillows) in the manager’s room at Dodgertown by tying his doorknob to a tree and stealing the mouthpiece from his telephone. Johnstone’s maxim was never to hang around to see the results of a prank, because that gives you away as the perpetrator. It’s even better to frame someone else, as he did by surreptitiously wiping chocolate on Jerry Reuss’s pants leg after sticking a gooey chocolate brownie in Steve Garvey’s glove. “In perhaps his greatest stunt, he slipped into the team’s Dodgertown clubhouse with carpenter’s tools and cut Ron Cey’s locker down to penguin size, putting a tiny stool in front of it.”

I would like to have personally known this guy...

1971 Topps card #292.

Hall of Famer Bob Gibson went 251-174 with a 2.91 ERA for the Cardinals from 1959 to 1975. He won two Cy Young Awards, in 1968 and 1970. More about him in a future post.