Sunday, June 7, 2020

GIMMIE A DO-OVER: 1978 OSCAR GAMBLE

For fun today, following on the recent footsteps of my re-done 1978 Richie Zisk card, I present my 1978 Oscar Gamble card, showing the slugger suited up for the Pale Hose instead of the Topps-issued airbrush job of him as a San Diego Padre:


Coming off of what turned out to be the best season of his 17-year Major League career, Gamble set career-highs in home runs (31), runs batted in (83), runs scored (75) and total bases (240) as a member of the Chicago White Sox “South Side Hitmen” team.
That 1977 White Sox team was a good one, based in large part to the fire power they had in their line-up, as they finished 90-72 for the season.
Besides Gamble and his 31 homers, they also got strong contributions from Richie Zisk (30 homers), Eric Soderholm (25 homers), Chet Lemon (19 homers), Jim Spencer (18 homers), and Lamar Johnson (18 homers).
As a team the ChiSox ended up hitting 192 homers for the year, very nice muscle display!
As I mentioned the other day in his “dedicated rookie” post, I never realized that during his entire career, Gamble only had ONE season where he topped 500 plate appearances, and that was in 1974 while playing for the Indians (he had 508).
In 4502 career at-bats, Gamble hit 200 homers. Not bad when you think about a full career would be around 8000 at-bats. We’re talking 400+ homers from him.
Always aware of his numbers, he'd frequently talk about his "home run ratio", and years later Jim Kaat, while broadcasting games on the YES channel, would always bring that up when some current player was hitting home runs at nice pace.
Nevertheless, Gamble played 17 seasons in the Big Leagues, with those 200 home runs, 666 RBIs and 656 runs scored over 1584 games between 1969 and 1985.