Card of the Moment #59
January 26th, 2011 by slangon
1967 Topps #39 Curt Simmons
I always love getting a card where upon receiving it, I say “Hmm. Great. Another boring looking common,” but after doing 30 seconds of digging around on the interwebatory database, I get all excited to have that particular card. I must admit however, although I wasn’t incredibly excited by this Curt Simmons card, I was rather amused by his flat top. You could land a damn airplane on that sucker. He also has some of the pearliest white pearly whites I can remember seeing on a baseball card.
Snarky comments on what a guy looked like 40 some odd years ago aside, Curt is actually a pretty interesting dude.
He pitched in the Majors from 1947 to 1967, less 2 years spent in the military in ’50 and ’51. He won 193 games and had a career 3.54 ERA and 1697 punchouts. Now those aren’t exactly Hall of Fame numbers there, but you would think that I would’ve at least heard of someone who won just under 200 games, struck out just under 1700 guys and averaged just over 3.5 runs per 9 innings over the course of 20 years. But alas, I was blissfully unaware of the existence of Curtis Thomas Simmons until this piece of cardboard found it’s way into my possession. Funny how things like that happen.
Curt played for the Phillies, Cardinals, Cubs and. briefly, the Angels. He spent the majority of his career in Philadelphia and was the left handed compliment to Robin Roberts during the “Whiz Kids” era of Phillies baseball.
This is where the interesting part comes in. Simmons was actually from Pennsylvania, Whitehall Township to be exact. He was a key part of his high school baseball team winning three straight league titles. He was also part of a team of high school all-stars from the Lehigh Valley. In 1947, the Phillies owner Bob Carpenter had arranged to have those high school all-stars play the Phillies in an exhibition game. Simmons, a high schooler, struck out 11 Phillies and the game ended in a 4-4 tie. As a matter of fact, the only reason the Phils tied the game was due to a late inning error on the part of the high school all-stars. Otherwise, a Major League team would’ve gotten beat by a bunch of high schoolers. Granted, it was a Major League team that went 62-92 the year before, but still.
I guess that performance might’ve influenced Philadelphias decision to sign Simmons and give him a $65,000 signing bonus later that year.
This is actually Curts last Topps card and you can see from the back of the card that he already had a very long career by the time it was issued. Curt was, along with Smokey Burgess, the last player to formally retire who had played in the major leagues in the 1940’s. That, of course is not counting Minnie Minoso, who retired in 1964, then un-retired in 1976, and then un-retired again in 1980.
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