The best team in the Florida State League named for a fish, the Clearwater Threshers, has been securely parked at BayCare Ballpark for the past few weeks, with a homestand that featured the Bradenton Marauders, the Jupiter Hammerheads and the Fort Myers Mighty Mussels until they engage with the Tampa Tarpons on July 7.
Quick question about referring to the largest planet in the solar system and its place in The Sunshine State. Jupiter is no doubt a fine city. But if your seatmate on a plane asked where you lived and you responded, “Jupiter,” would flight attendants zip-tie you to your seat?
Meanwhile, the blue birds traipsed away from their home domicile, TD Ballpark, over the past week, playing teams in no certain order such as the Lakeland Flying Tigers, the Bradenton Marauders, the Fort Myers Mighty Mussels and the aforementioned Jupiter Hammerheads. (The Earthly beings.)
The Class A Canadian offspring of the major league Toronto Blue Jays will play a homestand against the Tampa Tarpons, Jupiter Hammerheads, Lakeland’s airborne striped cats and Tampa’s fighting fish at TD Ballpark ending on June 30 when they ditch Dunedin for Jupiter.
Following their respective July sojourns and August creeps in, the two teams will have about six weeks of the season left to dispatch opponents. After that we will have just over a month left before the soul-crushing, dark and murky conclusion to the FSL Grapefruit 2026 season.
It will be during that desolate time without local rounders that we consider Ed Spiezio, a journeyman shortstop for the St. Louis Cardinals and San Diego Padres who hit .235 in 1971. Maybe Billy Grabarkewitz, a Los Angeles Dodger who hit .225 in 1971 will enter a conversation. Surely you must recall Moe Drabowski, a Cardinals hurler. Drabowski, who went 6-1 for the Cardinals, they of the obnoxious “Cardinal Way,” and the team that would have lost the 1982 World Series if the Milwaukee Brewers’ Hall of Famer Rollie Fingers had been available but was not due to injury, had his moment on the sun-soaked pitching mound.
Perhaps you’re curious about the fates of two youngsters, catcher Terry Humphrey and outfielder Keith Lampard listed on a rookie card playing for the long-since deceased Montreal Expos. Humphrey squatted behind the plate for about nine Major League seasons, and Lampard, who passed away in 2022, played 62 games for the Houston Astros. Not exactly superlative careers. But they had a longer career than you did.
And let’s not forget Phil “The Vulture” Regan, who pitched for the then-lowly Chicago Cubs and went 8-9 in 1971.
If your mother hadn’t thrown out your baseball cards when you went into the armed services or enrolled in college, these are the relics of another era, a time when baseball was baseball and Dark Lord Commissioner Rob Manfred, or previous villain Bud Selig, hadn’t screwed up the game with 10th-inning zombie runners, constant replays that deny umpires of their extensive training and the further dilution of the game’s human element, you might still have Speizio’s card.
Baseball cards were the lingua franca of young baseball enthusiasts in the 1970s, a time when giants like Henry Aaron, Roberto Clemente, Pete Rose, Joe Morgan and Johnny Bench of the Big Red Machine, an era when other superstars — like Willie McCovey, Willie Mays and Bob Gibson — appeared as shining faces on baseball cards.
The time of the baseball card left us years ago when the cards, which have no intrinsic monetary value on their own, became money-making commodities and the childhood innocence of the youthful card collection became a resource for paying college tuition or buying a flashy ‘67 American Motors Javelin.
Back then, a wax wrapper-enveloped packet of 10 cards went for 10 cents, a piece. You could make 10 times that sum by mowing Grandma’s lawn. Each package even included a rock-hard stick of bubble gum that your mother warned you shouldn’t chew unless you wanted to break a tooth. You chewed anyway with no negative dental implications.
Now, however, the local general emporium slaps a $4.99 price tag on a box of cards. The contents include “randomly inserted cards, packs, parallels, autographs and more!”
More? Does that mean Casey Stengel’s dental records are inside?
Sure, a modern box of cards might include Milwaukee Brewers retired Hall of Fame shortstop-center fielder Robin Yount, but you’ll also get the long-forgotten Henry Cotto and Steve Buechele. Even Darryl Boston, who played for the White Sox, not the Boston Red Sox, jumped out of a recently purchased box.
The thing about baseball cards is they helped kids learn the players, their statistics, even what they looked like. They were educational tools for kids who loved the former National Pastime. Kids came to engage players because of a baseball card. They followed the players’ careers and the fortunes of their teams.
But at $5 a throw, kids must be finding other ways to spend their moolah.
As a result, a generation of fans is missing one of the game’s sweetest traditions. And a new generation will turn away from the sport. They have no entry point.
Somewhere Ed Spiezio, whose 1972 card is worth $2.76, must be shedding a tear.