Friday, September 10, 2010

Dominican Baseball Card #3: George Bell

The latest Dominican Baseball Guy Dominican Baseball Card is a 1990 Score #286 George Bell card.  Toronto Blue Jays fans remember George Bell fondly I am sure.  The Dominican Baseball Guy decided to scan the front and back of this card, because these Score cards have cool insert pictures on the back.  Of course, you can see his full stats at George Bell's Baseball Cube page since it is kind of hard to see the stats here.  Bell did this before steroids came around when it was actually an amazing incredible feat to have 47 HRs and 134 RBI in a season.  George won the AL MVP for this season, and he was the first Dominican to win an MVP award.  He played for nine years that were all super productive (seven with Toronto, 1 with the Cubs, and 1.5 with the White Sox).  Bell is a member of the Rogers Centre's Level of Excellence, the Blue Jays Hall of Fame.
 
Bell has been in the news lately because the Dominican Baseball Guy's Dominican Player of the Month, Jose Bautista, just broke his Blue Jays single season home run record that was set in that 1987 season.  Mark Zwolinski of the Toronto Star interviewed Bell for this article, and David Perkins of the Star wrote this article after Bautista broke the record.  Bell has been following Bautista and says that Bautista is one of his favorite players.  He is happy that a fellow Dominican is breaking his record, and says that everyone in the DR is following him:
“They love what Jose is doing. They’ve always had the older guys like (Albert) Pujols, and Pedro Martinez, but Jose is running away with the home-run lead and he’s close to breaking (Bell’s Jays record). A lot of people are talking about it here.”
This is typical in the DR.  Everyone wants to see the Dominicans playing in the big leagues and hopes that they do well.  Dominicans root for their fellow Dominicans above all else.

George Bell now owns a construction company in his home town, the Mecca of baseball, San Pedro de Macoris, DR.  He is also an avid golfer, has a 1 handicap, and plays lots of golf in the DR and throughout the US.  He still has family in Boston and splits time between the DR and the US, as it is only a 2 hour flight or so to Florida or the northeast coast.  Congrats George on a great career and life!

The Dominican Baseball Guy has so many Dominican Baseball cards that he is going to start doing a Dominican baseball card post 3 times a month, on the 10th, 20th, and 30th of every month.

2 comments:

  1. Nice post! Bell was a great player - too bad his knees gave out so soon.

    The back of the card says that Bell led the AL in total bases with 270 in '87. He did lead the league in '87, but actually had 369 total bases.

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    Replies
    1. Wow, quite a catch, impressive. Thanks for the visit. And lost in all this is the fact that George Bell killed in RBI baseball on original Nintendo.

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