47 years later, a former Yankee top prospect’s quest to get his face on a Topps baseball card: Sliders (2024)

The reminders arrive at least three times a week, 3 ½-by-2 ½-inch snippets of the life he should have had. People still want Gil Patterson to sign his baseball card from 1977. He wonders why they care, but he’s flattered, anyway, and returns each card with his signature across a photo of somebody else.

Patterson is 68 years old and has reached 50 seasons of working in baseball. In 1977, at 21, he was the best prospect in the New York Yankees’ farm system at the height of their Bronx Zoo glory. That spring, Topps awarded Patterson a coveted spot on a four-player rookie card.

Clockwise from left, card No. 472 depicts Don Aase, Bob McClure, Dave Wehrmeister…and Sheldon Gill, a catcher who barely made it out of A-ball. The Yankees, apparently, had sent Topps an image of the wrong Gill/Gil, and that’s the player shown above Patterson’s name.

“Don’t worry, you’ll have 15 more,” Sy Berger, the Topps impresario, told Patterson that spring in the Yankees’ Fort Lauderdale clubhouse. “You’re only 21 years old.”

But there would be no more Topps cards for Patterson. While the others on his card combined for more than 1,200 major-league appearances, Patterson made just 10. He beat a Hall of Famer, Bert Blyleven of the Texas Rangers, in his fourth career start. He never won again.

“I still owe George 299 wins,” Patterson said last weekend. “I promised him 300. I’m 299 short.”

Now the minor-league pitching coordinator for the Oakland Athletics, Patterson was back at Yankee Stadium for Old-Timers’ Day last Saturday. He wore his 1977 championship ring, as he always does, and slipped into a pinstriped jersey with his old No. 22. That was Patterson’s age when the Yankees won the World Series without him that fall; he was home in Florida with a dead arm.

Patterson’s rise had been swift: three levels by age 20, with a 24-8 record and a 2.26 ERA across two seasons. Before the ’77 season, the Yankees refused to trade Patterson to the Cincinnati Reds, straight up, for Tony Perez. They would not include him in a deal for Bucky Dent, either, acquiring Dent from the Chicago White Sox only when they substituted LaMarr Hoyt, a future Cy Young Award winner.

“Gil Patterson’s arm has sunk a million trades,” wrote Moss Klein, the Yankees’ beat writer then for the Star-Ledger. The Yankees, he added, were “expecting many big seasons” from their untouchable future ace.

“Oh, he’d have been outstanding,” Dent said last week. “Had a great feel for the game, great stuff. That game in Boston, he struck out Lynn, Rice and Yastrzemski on, what, nine pitches or something?”

Not quite, but Patterson did fan eight Red Sox in 5 ⅔ innings at Fenway one night. Carl Yastrzemski was so impressed that he called Patterson one of the five best young pitchers he’d ever seen.

“Nolan Ryan, you can see the fastball coming,” Yastrzemski told Newsday. “This guy, he sort of short-arms it and it explodes on you.”

Alas, by then, Patterson had already lost his best fastball. In the majors, he said every pitch “was like a knife going through my arm.” Long before pitch counts and innings limits, the Yankees – under general manager Gabe Paul – had sent Patterson to instructional league and then winter ball after his magical 1976 season.

Altogether, he estimates, he threw a staggering 280 innings in that age-20 season. Nobody thought to protect him from himself.

“I’m 21 getting told to go pitch, so you go pitch,” Patterson said. “That’s why nowadays, you’ve got to tell the pitchers they’re done. Not too many people ever want to come out of the game, so you can’t ask them how they feel. If you think they’re done, get them out.”

Patterson had eight operations in all, to his rotator cuff, labrum, ulnar collateral ligament and so on. He missed two full seasons and played parts of the next three in the low minors. Out of work in 1983, he took a job parking cars at a restaurant in Fort Lauderdale, throwing left-handed against the outside walls after closing.

Steinbrenner went to the restaurant one night, recognized Patterson and offered him a coaching job for life. It was a kind gesture, but the work didn’t last: coaching for a Yankees farm club in 1984, Patterson refused an order to have Al Leiter – a hard-throwing, sore-armed teenager – pitch through pain.

The Yankees fired Patterson after that season, and when injuries indeed slowed Leiter’s progress, Patterson – in a gesture of friendship – helped him rebuild his delivery and save his career. He went on to instruct at Dent’s baseball school and has spent the last 33 seasons in various coaching roles for the Oakland A’s, Yankees, Arizona Diamondbacks and Toronto Blue Jays; Roy Halladay won a Cy Young Award under Patterson’s guidance with Toronto in 2003.

“He has done in coaching what a Hall of Famer does on the field,” said Craig Lefferts, the longtime assistant to Patterson with the A’s. “He loves what he does. He loves his players, and he goes to bat for them like nobody else.”

Lefferts made his mark in a dozen major-league seasons; he saved a World Series game, led the league in appearances, and even hit a walk-off home run. What feats would Patterson have achieved, with the arm he once had? That chapter will never be written.

“He’s always talking about all the great things I did, and I tell him, ‘I was nothing like you,’” Lefferts said. “I mean, he was going to be one of the greats. We have that conversation all the time: what could have been?”

The question has gnawed at Patterson for 47 years. Maybe he’d have struggled. Maybe he’d have thrived. Maybe he’d be rich – but that’s never been the point.

“It’s funny, would I rather have won $500 million in a lottery when I was 21 or pitched for 10 years but only made, like, $20,000 a year and lived in a three-bedroom, two-bath house like I was brought up in, with five brothers and a sister,” he said.

“I’d rather do that and play for 10 years than have the money. Because I loved pitching, oh my God.”

Patterson laughed softly. He made the majors with a storied franchise, and he’ll always be proud of that. But there’s no video footage of himself on the mound – if it hasn’t surfaced by now, it probably never will – and he yearns for something else to mark his brief stay at the top: another Topps baseball card.

He’s trying.

“I called them and I told them the story: ‘I’m 68 years old and I’d like to have a card with my picture on it,’” Patterson said. “They said to send an email. So I sent the email and the heading was ‘Sad baseball card story,’ and I explained it.”

Topps typically does not issue coaches’ cards, but a representative sent Patterson an encouraging response. He would seem an ideal fit for their Allen & Ginter set, a vintage-styled product that produces cards for all sorts of figures in and around the game – including, ahem, some of your favorite baseball writers at The Athletic. And if sportswriters can have their own baseball cards, it’s only fair that Gil Patterson, with 10 games on the mound but half a century in the game, should have one too.

With his own picture on it this time.

Gimme Five

The Royals’ Cole Ragans on coming back twice from Tommy John surgery

Fourteen months after his second Tommy John surgery, the Texas Rangers’ Jacob deGrom is working his way through rehab games. Two years after his second, the Dodgers’ Walker Buehler is back with Los Angeles, but struggling to find his old form.

It’s not easy, this second TJ stuff, as Cole Ragans would know. Ragans made a hard-won spot on the All-Star team this summer and is 10-8 with a 3.28 ERA for the Kansas City Royals. A first-round pick by the Rangers in 2016, Ragans had Tommy John surgery in March 2018 and again in May 2019, costing him three full seasons of development (2018-2020).

He’s made up for lost time since his trade last summer from Texas, helping Kansas City make a playoff push as part of a deep rotation. Through Wednesday, the Royals were the only team in the majors with four starters who have worked at least 130 innings this season with an ERA of 3.50 or below.

Here’s Ragans’ perspective on what it takes to come back from two Tommy John operations:

The hardest part is the head: “I think it was more on the mental side of things, trying to keep confidence in myself. Three years from not playing baseball is tough. I’m not saying I didn’t appreciate baseball before, but it made me appreciate being healthy and being able to step on the field and throw a baseball every single day. It’s awesome.”

Support helps you stay confident: “Success breeds confidence, I think. But also, you got to have a little confidence before you have success to get to the success, if that makes sense. But my wife’s helped me a ton through the surgeries and stuff like that. She really pushed me, and on bad days she told me, ‘Tomorrow’s a new day, go from there.’”

Back to the operating table, back to the grind: “The first time I made it all the way to a game, almost. Two days away from a game, and then it blew out again. So I knew what I was getting myself into going through the second surgery. So it was just: do the little things right, make sure I’m ready to go. It’s almost like a trust the process and…trust the trainers, trust the staff and all that kind of stuff and go from there.”

Good stuff can take time: “I mixed in the cutter the first year after, and then last year, after I got traded, I mixed in the slider. I tried to throw those earlier, like right after TJ, and I couldn’t figure out the comfortability thing of it. So I was like, all right, let’s take the cutter and use it, kind of manipulate it a little. And then last year I finally found a grip that worked with the slider.”

No one is to blame: “I think sometimes it’s just a freak thing, like it just happens. You can do all the arm care you want, eat the right way, do everything and sometimes it’s just part of the plan. You’ve just kind of got to go through it. Some guys are very fortunate to not have to go through it – good for them, that’s awesome. But I don’t know if there’s anything (you can do). It’s just take care of your body, do your arm care and stuff, and hopefully it doesn’t happen.”

Off the Grid

A historical detour from the Immaculate Grid

Larry McWilliams and Gene Garber, Royals and Braves

I share grids every day with my pal Sweeny Murti, who covered the Yankees beat for many years for WFAN in New York. On Sunday, when the Grid asked for an alumnus of both the Royals and the Atlanta Braves, I picked Larry McWilliams, and he took Gene Garber.

“Together we stopped (Pete) Rose’s hitting streak,” Murti texted – and indeed, our picks did that on Aug. 1, 1978, at Fulton County Stadium in Atlanta.

Rose had hit in 44 consecutive games, the longest streak in the majors since Joe DiMaggio’s hallowed 56-game streak in 1941. McWilliams, a lefty making his fourth career start, walked Rose to lead off the game, then retired him on a line out and a ground out. Then Garber, a veteran sidearmer with a distinctive, whirling wind-up, got him on a line drive double play in the seventh.

With two outs in the ninth and Atlanta leading 16-4, the crowd greeted Rose with a standing ovation. Rose fouled a bunt on the first pitch, chopped a 2-1 pitch at the plate for another foul, then fanned on a changeup to end the game and the streak.

Garber leaped off the mound in celebration, while Rose – who had famously plowed into a catcher to win an exhibition at the 1970 All-Star Game – fumed at him for making a competitive pitch instead of challenging him with a fastball.

“Garber pitched me like it was the seventh game of the World Series, throwing changeups, especially on 2-2,” Rose snarled later, adding that he hoped he would face Garber the next night. “I want to hit one right back up the middle at him, and I mean hard.”

Rose would face Garber 22 more times in their careers. He collected only four hits in their matchups, but never struck out again. His 44-game hitting streak remains the longest since DiMaggio’s; only Paul Molitor, with a 39-game streak in 1987, has come within five games.

Classic clip

Tug McGraw performs “Casey At The Bat”

Eighty years ago today, in Martinez, Calif., the world welcomed Frank Edwin McGraw – better known as Tug, he liked to say, from his aggressive style of breast-feeding. Tug McGraw, a reliever for nearly two decades with the New York Mets and Philadelphia Phillies, was never shy about his passions, and spent much of his 59 years eagerly spreading his love of baseball.

When McGraw signed autographs, he added a smiley face to his name. He wrote a children’s book from the perspective of a baseball. He co-authored a comic strip called “Scroogie,” named for the funky pitch Ralph Terry taught him. And, as you see here, he once performed a rousing rendition of “Casey At The Bat” with Peter Nero and the Philly Pops.

When he gets to “somewhere hearts are light,” McGraw pats his heart rapidly, as he often did on the mound in a tight spot. There’s a knowing laugh from the audience, and from McGraw himself.

That was the essence of McGraw. He was a performer who always understood the pulse of the crowd, an irrepressible scamp so endearing that fans of both the Mets and Phillies – who tend to really hate each other – could at least bond over shared affection for the Tugger.

McGraw might be best known now as the father of the actor and country star Tim McGraw, his son from a relationship in the minor leagues. It took years for the two to form a bond, but when they did, in the 1980s, they became very close. I knew Tug a bit in the early 1990s, and when I told him I’d enrolled at Vanderbilt University, he mentioned that he had a son in Nashville who was going to be a big star. He sure was right about that, and as you’ll see from this clip, Tug clearly passed down his comfort on a stage. Enjoy!

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(Top photo of Gil Patterson at Yankee Stadium last weekend: Andrew Mordzynski/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)