Friday, March 15, 2019

RIP Leroy Stanton

Sad news this week - former MLB and NPB outfielder Leroy Stanton died in a car crash at age 72.  Stanton originally came up in the Mets organization and was dealt to the Angels in the 1971-72 offseason in the same trade that sent Nolan Ryan to California.  He spent five years with the Angels before being taken by the Mariners in the 1976 expansion draft.  He had the best season of his career in Seattle's inaugural season of 1977, leading the team in hitting (.275) and home runs (27) and sharing the team lead in RBIs with Dan Meyer (90).  He didn't perform nearly as well in 1978 and the Mariners released him.  He signed on with the Hanshin Tigers for the 1979 season and hit 23 home runs but only hit .225 while striking out 136 times.  He spent 1980 with Puebla in the Mexican League before retiring.  He coached in the Blue Jays organization in the late 1980's and early 1990's.

As far as I can tell he had five baseball cards in Japan in 1979 - four Calbee cards along with a card in the TCMA set that year.  I only have the TCMA card:

1979 TCMA #86
3/16/19 UPDATE - I got a recent Ebay win of three unopened 1979 Calbee packs in the mail today and coincidentally one of the packs contained another card of Stanton:

1979 Calbee May's Best #32

2 comments:

SumoMenkoMan said...

Sad news.

Brett Alan said...

Sorry to hear this. As a Mets fan it still gets me that even if we had traded Stanton even up for Fregosi, the Angels would have gotten the better of the deal!