Friday, March 4, 2016

MISSING IN ACTION- 1977 CLAY KIRBY

Here’s a “missing” 1977 card for former pitcher Clay Kirby, who closed out a decent 8-year career in 1976 with a handful of games for the Montreal Expos:


Kirby appeared in 22 games for Montreal, finishing up with a 1-8 record with a 5.72 earned run average over 78.2 innings.
Those would be the last Major League games for him, after five seasons with the San Diego Padres and two with the Cincinnati Reds between 1969 and 1975.
He can probably be considered the first pitching ace of the San Diego Padres organization, putting up some solid seasons for terrible teams from the team’s inception through their fifth year in existence.
1971 would easily be his best season, when he posted a 15-13 record with a 2.83 ERA, 13 complete games, a couple of shutouts and 231 strikeouts.
On a good team this guy easily would have posted 20+ wins that season, but as it was his final career stats suffered, ending up with a 75-104 record with a 3.84 ERA, eight shutouts and 1061 strikeouts over 261 games and 1548 innings pitched.

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