Introductory post

 Hi, I'm John and I'm a huge fan of Dan Quisenberry. And I've decided that I want to collect all of his cards. I already have a blog, Adventures of a Baseball Card Collector, but I'd like to have a separate blog devoted to Quiz. 

You might be wondering why I'm such a big fan of Quisenberry. He's not in the Hall of Fame, I'm not a Royals fan, and I've never seen him pitch. In fact, he died before I was born.

There are a lot of reasons for loving Quisenberry, I think. First, there's his awesome sidearm motion.

He was a great pitcher, too. Though his peak was short, he had some great seasons. In 1983 he had a 1.94 ERA, saved a then-record 45 games, and walked just 11 batters in 139 innings. For his career, he had a 2.76 ERA, 244 saves, and only 92 unintentional walks in 1043.1 innings. 

But the greatest reason might be how nice Dan Quisenberry was. Here's a passage from the New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract that I think describes him well:

"Dan Quisenberry had neither the body nor the ego of a major league athlete, yet he was one of the best. He was a skinny man with a long nose and small teeth and a pencil moustache, and he was a beautiful man. 
    I couldn't say that we were close, but Quiz and I did a radio show together one summer... some of you may remember it. He was funny and quirky, and he was brilliant. Quiz used to play a game with Denny Matthews, Royals broadcaster, which tells you something about him. "Your word for today is 'homily,' he would tell Matthews, or 'xenophobic', or 'divaricate.' "
    Your word is 'penumbra,' '' Matthews would respond, or "triumvirate," or something. Denny would have to figure out some way to work the word "homily" into his broadcast without the listeners realizing that anything was going on, and Quiz would have to figure out some way to work the word "penumbra" into his post-game interview.
    One time a guy called up the show, told us about a time when he was ten years old and met Quisenberry in a grocery store. He asked for his autograph, which Quiz gave, but then the Quiz started talking to him, just like (he said years later) a real person. "You playin' baseball?" Dan asked him.

    "Yes," the kid said, he was playing baseball.

    "You got your glove with you?"

    Quiz wound up playing catch with the kid for twenty minutes in the supermarket parking lot.

    Unusually approachable, very comfortable, more human than athlete. He loved words, loved to play with oddball ideas, and wrote poetry.

    I never knew anyone who would give an unexpected answer to a question more often than Quiz, unexpectedly honest, unexpectedly profound, or just off-the-wall. "I never asked 'Why me?' " he said about the brain tumor. "Why not me?"

(I took out a lengthy paragraph so it wasn't too long.)

I feel like this card sums him up well: 

I use this picture as my avatar on Net54.

Anyway, I collect Quisenberry because he was great, his cards are fun because of the pitching motion, and because he was really nice.

I mentioned that I wanted to super-collect him earlier in the post, which is surprisingly doable. He has 234 cards, and most of them are from the '80s. Because of his early death, he has very few post-career cards, and almost all of them are buybacks or cut signature cards. And I'm not going to worry about those cards. I currently have 27 of his cards, so I have a long way to go. 

Any cards not in my TCDB collection are needed: https://www.tcdb.com/CollectionBrowseP.cfm/pid/4773/Dan-Quisenberry?Member=John1941&CollectionID=1&Filter=G

I hope to use this blog to chronicle my quest for all of his cards, but I won't do just that. I plan on doing a post on whether he belongs in the Hall of Fame, and when I get his book of poetry I'll review it.