Day Twenty Five: Rich Amaral

This Mother's Cookies edition Rich Amaral card needed to be blown up to a very large size. It's a perfect image of all the great contradictions of the 1990's Seattle Mariners. Here is a man pretending to field a baseball on a pretend grass field, wearing strange dad shoe runners, with the look of a data analyst in a horribly beautiful hat that could only have originated in the early 1990s. And of course all of these things are true: This is a very bad picture, posed in the most obvious of ways, with the most minimal of curation in the design and fashion of the shot, and the man it portrays is hardly an Adonis. But this is a great baseball card as well. Because it shows the authenticity of Rich Amaral. A career minor leaguer who broke into the bigs with a splash back in 1993. Let's talk about one of the most lovable Mariners of all time.

After writing about a perpetual Man of Sorrows such as Ryon Healy I felt like I could use some remembering of guys who exceeded expectations rather than fell abysmally short of them. So what better place to find that than in the unsung career of Rich Amaral. Amaral played his first major league game in 1991 for the Mariners at the age of 29. He didn't play a full season until 93 when he was 31. That is quite a long time to wait to get your shot. Almost beyond the limit of possibility really. But Rich Amaral made the most of his shot. He took his opportunity and never looked back. That first full season of 93 was a gem. It was so much fun to watch Amaral setting the table for the big thumpers emerging in the middle of that lineup. Griff and Tino, Buhner and Blowers (Edgar was injured pretty much all of 93). In many ways, Rich Amaral was a far superior second bagger to the man that he replaced, Harold Reynolds (oh I am so sorry HR but it's true!). He had a great glove, could run the bases decently, and best of all, he got on base a lot. Amaral scored 53 runs in 110 games. That is a fine stat. That whole year was a refreshing return after the 1992 Bill Plummer-led shit show. Lou's first year as manager saw the Mariners get back above .500 for the second time in 3 years and it was just the start of the good things to come. As I said before, Rich Amaral got meaningful AL ROY votes that year and placed 5th. Pretty good for a 31 year old rookie.

And his career stretched through the 90s. There were so many what ifs in the 1994 season, but Amaral was a tangible component of the 95 Refuse to Lose bunch. Certainly the memorable basepath shufflers from that run are Vince Coleman and Joey Cora, but Amaral was a big part of it too. He could play pretty much every position and by all accounts he was a great team mate. And he was eternally the feel good story. He played until he was 38 after logging 10 years in the bigs. He once had an OBP above .390 (1996), and he was one of Lou's very favorite players. And he is definitely on my short list of favorite guys to fondly remember. Do yourself a favor and look at Rich Amaral's stat line, then look back at this Mother's Cookie baseball card. It's hard to believe that they are related. But that's baseball isn't it? Sometimes things even work out.