Quote:
Originally Posted by Rainmaker
This was on the minor league thread about Simicich:
John Simicich: What a debut!
I have not been able to find out why John Simicich left baseball following the 1959 season at the age of 20.. But the Philadelphia Phillies' third base prospect had one of the most impressive professional debuts of any player who promptly went nowhere.
Breaking in at age 18 with Brunswick in the Class D Georgia/Florida League, Simicich had a season young players could only dream of: he was batting champion with a .358 average; he also led the league in hits (156) while also drawing 103 walks (a .484 OBP!) and driving in 104 runs in under 120 games played. He did, however, commit 29 errors over the full season at third.
Moved to the 3-I League as a 19-year-old, he had a moderate dropoff (7-64-.267) with 39 errors. And that was it; career over.
Don't know whys and wherefores, but it seems a crying shame to end it at age 20 with that kind of start. Anyone know background?
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It appears he may have suffered a shoulder injury that cost him all of the 1960 season. They refer to it as a "damaged shoulder". Not sure what that means. After that, I got nothin'. He gets a mention in a 1968 article in which a sportswriter, who apparently didn't think much of the Phillies trade for Don Money, goes through a list of Phillies prospects who never panned out (but he offers no details on Simicich, just the name). There was a John Simicich who died in 1985 who was the right age, but that's via a paper at
NewspaperArchive, with whom I do not have an account. Looks as though that Simicich drowned, whether he was the ballplayer or not.
Note: it's worth noting that there are several examples, in the papers' reports of his play in 1959, where he was just godawful defensively. A couple of times, they refer to him as "caught sleeping" (meaning a play he should have made on a grounder got easily by him).