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Major League Baseball loses an icon as Al Kaline dies at 85

Major League Baseball loses an icon as Al Kaline dies at 85

This entry was posted on April 6, 2020 by BlowoutBuzz.

He was just 18 when he was a rookie but went on to be an 18-time All-Star in 22 seasons all with one team, a 10-time Gold Glover and a World Series champion.

But ultimately Al Kaline was Mr. Tiger.

Kaline died at age 85 on Monday -- 40 years after he went into Cooperstown on his first year on the ballot, an honor alongside another beloved veteran from the past, Duke Snider, after a career spent entirely with the Detroit Tigers and no other team.

Kaline never led the American League in home runs or RBI but he was the AL batting champ as a 20-year-old in 1955 when he also had a career- and league-high 200 hits. By the end of his run as a Tiger in 1974, he had 3,007 hits and that was among the Top 10 players in MLB history. (He's 31st today.) He hit .297 with 399 homers and 1,582 RBI in his career.

His cardboard debut comes in the 1954 Topps set, his first of more than 4,500 cards made since then. He appears on more than 1,600 different certified autographs, too, and has been a regular signer for most card companies for years.

According to this piece from the Detroit Free Press, he made his MLB debut a week after graduating from high school and that was in part thanks to his parents.

“They’d always helped me,” Kaline said. “They knew I wanted to be a major-leaguer, and they did everything they could to give me time for baseball. I never had to take a paper route or work in a drugstore or anything.

“I just played ball.”

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This entry was posted in Baseball, Vintage and tagged MLB, Topps, 1954 Topps, Al Kaline, Al Kaline baseball cards, Al Kaline autographs, Detroit Free Press on April 6, 2020 by BlowoutBuzz. ← Previous Post Next Post →

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