Nice story on Mario Soto

[OnBaseMachine]

Kudos to Sun Deck poster HalMorrisRules for finding this.

The day after I saw the movie I started looking at this Mario Soto card. I hadn’t looked at it since childhood, and if I’d done so before seeing Sugar I probably would have taken note of his confident expression and paired it with my knowledge that within a few years Soto would be among the best pitchers in the game. I would have assumed that Soto was simply blessed with a gift, and he knew it, and doubt or pain never entered into his inevitable rise to the top. But then I flipped over this card yesterday and saw that the first line of statistics contained no statistics at all but the capital letters “On Disabled List.” I thought of Sugar limping around with a foot injury, banished from the game, watching from the stands as his team played. I imagined Mario Soto as a seventeen-year-old, unable to pitch. The following season, in Eugene, Oregon, he finally could take the mound, but just a little, 5 games and 30 innings pitched, suggesting that he was still struggling with injuries. (In later years, Soto shied away to a great extent from throwing any breaking pitches, fearing that doing so would cause another arm injury.) Besides physical problems, Soto had another less visible kind of difficulty that first season.

complete article:
http://cardboardgods.net/2010/03/15/mario-soto/

[Ron Madden]

Originally Posted by OnBaseMachine

Kudos to Sun Deck poster HalMorrisRules for finding this.



complete article:
http://cardboardgods.net/2010/03/15/mario-soto/

WOW!

Great article, Thanks for sharing.

[RedFanAlways1966]

Good stuff.