[Terry D]

Well, you never can tell. Periodically I type in the name of a player I've been looking for for years, and what do you know, he comes up after all. Case in point: Kevin Blankenship, my most recent discovery. Blankenship was a right hander out of the University of Arizona. He was having a career best season at AA Greenville in 1988 (2.34 ERA, 127 K) when the pitching-short Braves called him up and gave him two starts. Blankenship didn't pitch badly (0-1, 3.38 ERA) but in September the Braves traded him and fellow hurler Kevin Coffman to the Cubs for catcher Jody Davis. Oops. Davis was a horrible bust for the Braves, while neither Coffman nor Blankenship ever got much of a shot in Chicago. Blankenship got into a grand total of eight major league games between 1988 and 1990, finishing with a career won-lost of 1-3 with a 4.59 ERA. Blankenship is not hard to find as a Cub, but the attached watermarked image is the first and so far only one I have seen of him in an Atlanta uniform. The shot comes from the Jim Rowe Archive courtesy of ebay selller bbcemporium.