Cram appeared in five games for the Royals, going 0-1 with a respectable 3.24 earned run average over 16.2 innings, with ten strikeouts against six base on balls.
He’d spend all of 1970 in the Minors, so of course Topps would give him a slot on a multi-player rookie card in their 1971 set. Makes sense doesn’t it?
As a matter of fact Cram wouldn’t make it back to a Big League mound until the 1974 season, now pitching for the New York Mets, when he appeared in a career-high 10 games, going 0-1 once again but with a sparkling 1.61 ERA over 22.1 innings.
You’d think this was enough to give him a card in 1974, but no, and I am trying to find images of him as a Met so I can create both a 1975 and 1976 card.
Anyway, in his two seasons with the Mets in 1974 and 1975, he posted identical records of 0-1, appearing in 14 total games while posting ERA’s of the aforementioned 1.61 and 5.40 respectively over 37.1 innings of work.
In 1976, he was back where it all began, Kansas City, where he worked what turned out to be the last four games of his MLB career, not factoring in a decision and posting an ERA of 6.23 over 4.1 innings.
He would go on to pitch in the Kansas City minor league system for another five years, through the 1981 season, before retiring for good, ending up with a record of 0-3, with a final ERA of 2.98 over 23 games and 48.1 innings.
