Foster had a few call-ups with the Giants before they traded him to the Reds and help set a course of baseball history that we remember as the “Big Red Machine” Cincinnati Reds.
It turned out to be one whopper of a trade for the Reds, as they gave up Frank Duffy and Vern Geishert to get a guy who’d go on to slam 20+ homers in a season seven times, including his monster season of 1977 when he hit 52, becoming the first player since Willie Mays in 1965 to do so.
As a matter of fact between 1966 and 1989 Foster’s 52 homers were the only time a player reached that number.
For his efforts in 1977 with those taters, his .320 batting average, and league-leading 124 runs scored and 149 runs batted in, he took home the MVP and was voted as a starter for the all-star team.
He would lead the league in homers again in 1978 with 40, along with RBI’s with 120 (his third year in a row doing so), and go on to start in three more all-star teams before becoming the first $2 million dollar man in baseball when he signed with the New York Mets before the 1982 season.
By the time he retired at the end of the 1986 after 15 games with the Chicago White Sox, he finished with 348 homers, 1239 runs batted in and 986 runs scored along with a .274 average and just under 2000 hits with 1925.
