Dan Boone, 1991 Crown/Coca-Cola All-Time Orioles #42

Yesterday I arrived home to find a telltale small white box sticking out of my mailbox. It was from longtime blog reader and commenter William, who was kind enough to send an assortment of Orioles cards to help me celebrate five years of doing this sort of thing. There were quite a few cards that were new to my collection, featuring players ranging from Brady Anderson to Matt Riley to Zach Britton.

William's only request was that I write up the 1991 Score "Rookie Prospect" card of Dan Boone. Regrettably, I'd already covered that ground way back in May 2008, which might well have been before William started reading me. But there is good news, and it's twofold: First, in rereading that old blog entry, I feel that I did justice to Boone's improbable story, and it still holds up years later. Also, this gives me an excellent chance to recap it in handy bullet-point form! To wit, the Life and Travels of Daniel Hugh Boone:

-June 1973: Boone, aged 19, is drafted by the California Angels in Round 15. He does not sign. Over the next three years, he is in turn drafted by the Angels (again), the Yankees, and the Padres, and declines to sign three more times.

-June 1976: Drafted in the second round by the California Angels, the now-22-year-old southpaw finally signs a pro contract.

-1977 through 1980: Dan's minor league apprenticeship takes him through Salinas, CA; El Paso, TX; Salt Lake City, UT; Amarillo, TX; and Hawaii.

-1981: Boone makes his major league debut with the San Diego Padres at age 27. He has a solid rookie season in relief, putting up a 2.84 ERA in 63.1 innings.

-1982: He's not especially effective in 20 appearances split between the Padres and the Houston Astros, allowing 15 earned runs in 28.2 innings (4.71 ERA).

-1983-1984: Dan continues to struggle at AAA Tuscon (Astros) and Vancouver (Milwaukee). Following the 1984 season, the 30-year-old is out of organized pro ball.

-1989: The lefty re-emerges in the short-lived Senior Professional Baseball League, relying on a knuckleball to log a 3.16 ERA for the Bradenton (FL) Explorers.

-1990: Now 36, Boone signs with the Baltimore Orioles. He goes 11-5 with 8 saves and a 2.60 ERA at AAA Rochester, earning a September callup at age 36. In his first taste of the big leagues in eight years, he logs five shutout innings of relief spanning three games. In the Birds' penultimate series of the season, Frank Robinson gives the veteran a spot start in the nightcap of a doubleheader against Cleveland. He takes the mound in the bottom of the fifth with a 3-1 lead, but allows the Indians to tie it up before being yanked with two outs. This will be his final game in the majors. He departs with a 2.79 ERA for the year, and a 3.36 mark for his career.

-Late 1990: Dan returns to the SPBL and has a 5-1 record and a 1.85 ERA when the league folds at midseason.

-1995: As the MLBPA strike plods onward, owners of 27 MLB teams (only the Orioles hold out) open Spring Training with "replacement players". At 41, Boone is back in Padres' camp...at least until the strike is finally settled in early April.

-1989-2002: Dan also turns up in amateur leagues in California and Alaska, and appears to have finally stopped playing early this century at age 48.

Dan Boone's story is definitely one worth revisiting. Thanks, William!

Dan Boone, 1991 Score #715

There's something I really admire about baseball players who take advantage of every opportunity to play the game, no matter how far removed it might be from the major leagues. To me, it speaks of an unquenchable love for the game. Besides, you never know where it might lead. Jim Bouton famously returned to the semi-pro diamonds a few years after the backlash from Ball Four helped to blackball him from the bigs. As a knuckleballer, he knew that he still had enough in the tank to pitch at the highest level, and got none other than maverick White Sox owner Bill Veeck to give him a shot to work his way up from the minors. He didn't get very far, but decided to push on for one more year with another club. That would be Ted Turner's 1978 Atlanta Braves; at the age of thirty-nine he won eleven games at Savannah before getting the callup. Eight years after throwing his last pitch in the major leagues, he held his own, even picking up a three-hit, six-inning win over the Giants.

Dan Boone, who is actually a seventh-generation descendant of the famous frontiersman of the same name, was similarly irrepressible. He was drafted by the Angels in 1976, but didn't sniff the big leagues until 1981. Then a 27-year-old rookie with the Padres, he made the most of his opportunity, crafting a nifty 2.84 ERA. He allowed just two home runs in 63 and one-third innings of relief. Boone struggled the following season as both a Padre and an Astro, appearing in only twenty games with a 4.71 ERA. He wouldn't make a major league roster in 1983 or 1984, and when the Brewers released him during the latter year, he found himself OOB: out of baseball.

There's not much information out there concerning the next five years of Dan's life, but he resurfaced in pro ball in 1989. That was the inaugural year of the ill-fated Senior Professional Baseball League, a winter league for thirty-to-fiftysomethings in Florida. The thirty-five-year-old Boone returned wielding a veteran pitcher's best friend, the knuckleball. He went 4-3 with a 3.16 ERA, at which point the Orioles came calling. He spent much of 1990 at Rochester, ranking seventh in the league in ERA and pitching a no-hitter. According to the back of this card, Boone said that he "had to fight back the tears the last three innings". In mid-September, he accomplished the improbable, following Bouton's lead by returning to an MLB mound after an eight-year absence. He fared pretty well, yielding three runs in nine and two-thirds innings.

Perhaps realistic about his chances of sticking around (even with a team as mediocre as the early 1990s O's), Dan Boone returned to the Senior League that winter. He was even better than he'd been in his first go-round, racking up five wins in six decisions with a scant 1.85 ERA. Unfortunately, the league folded in midseason with Boone leading the circuit in wins.

You won't be surprised to hear that Dan's story doesn't end there. According to this site, he also pitched in the San Diego iteration of the Men's Senior Baseball League, an organized amateur league, between 1989 and 2002. That would have made him forty-eight when he finally hung up his spikes. But in between, he took one more last gasp shot at the big time. You might remember the gruesome spectacle of Spring Training 1995, when the owners attempted to force the striking players' hands by opening camp with replacement players, a motley collection of minor leaguers and retired fringe players. With nothing to lose, there was Dan Boone, pitching in a Padres uniform at forty-one years of age. Of course, the strike was settled and Boone was one of the many fill-ins who was sent packing. But Dan Boone was a guy who made the most out of every opportunity in his career, to say the least.

As a final note, you have to love the audacity of Score to slap a "Rookie Prospect" tag on a card for a player who pitched in fifty-seven major league games prior to 1990. I'm pretty sure your rookie eligibility doesn't grow back after a certain amount of time.