Andy Tracy: Two Autographed Rookie Cards

Andy Tracy was by no means a baseball superstar in the Majors, but when he attended Bowling Green University, he starred at both baseball and football; he went back to his alma mater after retiring - he's currently the baseball team's hitting coach.

Tracy holds the distinction of having been drafted twice - first by the Philadelphia Phillies, then the Montréal Expos; it was in Montréal that he would have his best season (2000) in most categories, including games played (83), at-bats (192), hits (50), home runs (11), on-base percentage (.339), walks (22), and so forth. The only time he bested his 2000 batting average (.260) was when he had 5 hits in 12 at-bats with the Phillies in 2009, good for a .417 average.

He was also in the Phillies' organization when they won the 2008 World Series, but only appeared in 4 games (2 plate appearances) in the regular season and none in the playoffs. He was one of the most popular players on their AAA affiliate Lehigh Valley IronPigs, however, and once held the distinction of being the oldest minor-leaguer in the U.S.

And to think 2000 was his rookie year, things were looking up, he was backing up Lee Stevens (first base) and Michael Barrett (third base, before his move to catcher)... it did not quite turn out that way:

from BaseballReference

He signed two copies of his Rookie Card - #T2 from Topps' 2000 Traded And Rookies set in blue sharpie for me back in the day:

These Spring Training pictures will enable me to slot him as #66 in my Expos Numbers Project; he wore #46 (2000) and #22 (2001) in the regular season.

Two Ryan McGuire Autographed Cards

What's great about Montréal summers is the entertainment offer: F1 racing, festivals (Jazz, French-language songs, three just for comedy, four for films, one of Afro-American culture, the hard rock and heavy metal festival, one for electronic music, the indie-and-pop Osheaga, the experimental music festival not too far off, a poutine festival, a beer festival, there are really too many to remember...), three paid holidays, the heat...

Plus two summertime sports teams, the CFL's Montréal Alouettes (that I last went to three years ago when my brother and I had season tickets) and the MLS' Montréal Impact (which I've never seen live because I'm not into soccer).

It's almost hard to remember we once had the Montréal Expos, too, particularly considering the only baseball news I've been aware of in the past decade was the retirements of the two last players I'd known of (Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera) and the on-again, off-again relationship between Alex Rodriguez, steroids, and the penalties he gets from using them.

And baseball steroid used is synonymous with Mark McGwire, whose rookie cards sold for hundreds of dollars when he chased and then set the single-season home run record (70) in 1998; they now go for around a dollar.

The Expos had a brief moment using that last name at around the same time; however, Ryan McGuire spells his last name with a "u"...

McGuire was a left-handed first baseman who, in 1998 appeared in 132 of the Expos' 162 games, but only went to the plate 244 times (for 210 official at-bats), usually coming in late in a game as a defensive replacement after a replacement hitter would fill in for starting first baseman Brad Fullmer. His batting average was a lowly .186 that year, down from .256 in his rookie season the previous summer.

He had started his MLB career with hits in 12 straight games while the team used that to surf on a 10-game winning streak.

His statistics normalized in 1999 (batting .221 in 88 games and 171 plate appearances, with 7 homers, 2 doubles and 2 triples), but it went downhill from there, as he only appeared in a single game with the New York Mets in 2000, then went on to bat .185 in 48 games with the Florida Marlins in 2001 before posting a lowly .077 average with the Baltimore Orioles in 2002.

I was pretty busy in 1998-1999, what with being a musician who traveled from Montréal to New York on a weekly basis combined with one university (Concordia) and a college (Vieux-Montréal) and an extremely active social life that saw me out in bars on a nightly basis, so I didn't go to the Olympic Stadium much those years, meaning I wasn't there to see McGuire play when he did well.

I did have him sign a couple of cards when he came to town with the Marlins a few years later, both in a skinny black sharpie that couldn't have been mine and both showing him in the Expos' grey away uniform. First, here is card #303 from Topps' flagship 1999 Topps set, showing him playing defensively:

And here's card #123 from the 2000 Topps set, showing his reaction after hitting a pop fly:

These cards pencil him in as #6 in my Expos Numbers Project.

Keith Evans Autographed Card

I might be cheating or at the very least stretching it a bit by including Keith Evans as #64 in my Expos Numbers Project, considering he never actually played for the Montréal Expos - or any other MLB team, for that matter - in the majors; instead, the 220th pick of the 1996 draft spent most of his time in AAA ball with their affiliate Ottawa Lynx.

He had a couple of 70-strikeout seasons with the Lynx but mostly had a losing record in the NCAA (15-22 in three seasons), in AA (8-11 over two seasons) and AAA (13-27 over five seasons). He was a starting pitcher at every level except AAA, where his ball control was no longer enough and his lack of a powerful fastball definitely hindered him.

And yet here he is, in a major card set, from Topps' 2000 Bowman collection (card #433 in the set, his Rookie Card, showing him wearing the Expos' final striped white uniform in training camp (no name plate on the back):

He signed it in blue sharpie in either 2000 or 2001 when he was playing in Ottawa.

Peter Bergeron Autograph Card

Peter Bergeron played for the Montréal Expos in five of their final six seasons of existence (he spent the summer of 2003 playing exclusively in the minors, in AAA ball with the Edmonton Trappers, but was in the Expos' system from 1999 until relocation in 2004), and like the rest of the team, was an inexpensive can-do-the-job, middle-of-the-pack lead-off hitter with decent speed but a batting average below .250.

He also didn't get that many walks, but at a quarter million per year, he was basically all the team could afford, as the fans had stopped coming after all the fire sales and the certainty of the team skipping town when owner Satan Jeffrey Loria bought out all the minority stakeholders.

He never played another MLB game after his stint with the Expos, despite siging free agent contrats with the Chicago Cubs, Baltimore Orioles, Philadelphia Phillies and Pittsburgh Pirates. In his final season in 2007, he played in AA (for the Altoona Curve) as well as the independent Atlantic League's York Revolution.

Upon calling it quits, he ran and was an instructor at former teammate Michael Barrett's baseball school, Barrett Baseball; he also started scouting for the Los Angeles Dodgers last season.

Honestly, those last few years of the Expos are a blur. It was painful seeing them get reduced to a low-level team whose good players would be given away even before they were due to get paid, and the owner didn't care about putting a decent product on the field, or selling decent products at the stadium, let alone stop it from falling apart. I still wish him the best... of what torture has to offer.

Not so for Bergeron, though, who signed this card for me in thin blue sharpie at some point:

It's card #WW6 (of 15) of the Who To Watch subset of Fleer/Skybox's 2000 Fleer Tradition set, and shows him in the team's beautiful grey/final (away) uniform. Ironically, he's seen wearing #33 (which he wore from 1999 until 2001, but finished wearing #11), the number previously worn by Carlos Perez, whom he had been traded for.

Tshimanga 'Tim' Biakabutuka Autograph Card

With another Montréal-area player in the NFL this year (Samuel Giguère), and one who is close to retiring (Jean-Philippe Darche), I thought it'd be nice to remember the guy who made it all possible: Tshimanga 'Tim' Biakabutuka.

Biakabutuka was born in Kinshasa, Zaïre, in 1974 but moved to Montréal in 1978 - incidentally, the year I was born. His family still lives in the area. He didn't take up playing football until late in high school, but was impressive enough to catch the eye of the Vanier College coaching staff, where his play was so spectacular he was given the nickname 'Touchdown Tim', despite playing running back, a position more about winning yards than scoring.

In fact, he was so good that the University Of Michigan gave him a full scholarship to play football there. And he didn't just show up and phone it in: to this day, he still holds the school's second highest single-game rushing performance, with 313 yards. That performance helped him get drafted in the first round by the Carolina Panthers in 1996, with the 8th overall pick. He left Michigan with 1818 yards in his final season - a record that still stands to this day.

Unfortunately, injuries got the better of him in the NFL and he was forced out of the line-up in 2001, despite being convinced he could still pull it off. His per-carry numbers are pretty good, but he never played more than 12 games, never carried the ball more than 173 times, and never rushed for more than 718 yards in a single season; Wikipedia calls him a ''first round bust'', but I call him an inspiration for my generation.

This card is from Fleer's 2000 NFL set, the Autographic/Fresh Ink sub-set, showing him in his Panthers' white uniform, ready for a carry.