A private memorial service is scheduled for Friday. He is survived by his wife of 37 years, Jody Karin Raymond, four children and 15 grandchildren. After starring at Canoga Park High School, he was picked by the Braves in the 17th round of the 1971 amateur draft. “We share our deepest condolences to his family and friends.”īiff Benedict Pocoroba was born in Burbank, California, on July 25, 1953. “We are saddened to hear of the passing of former Braves catcher Biff Pocoroba,” the team said in a statement. Who the hell is Bif Pocoroba Did you get to talk to Hal After getting the cards, wed hide away in a bunker at an undisclosed location to cut up the cards. He retired at age 30 and began a second career running a specialty meat business in suburban Atlanta. Pocoroba was released by the Braves after playing just four games early in the 1984 season. “With shoulder problems he became our go-to LH bat off the bench." “Poco once threw out 11 straight base-stealers in spring training,” Murphy wrote on Twitter. Voice of the mathematically eliminated (est.Longtime teammate Dale Murphy, a two-time NL MVP who began his career as a catcher before moving to the outfield, remembered Pocoroba as a “key member of our early '80s team” before injuries derailed his career. He is going to hand it gently to the boy with his whole life in front of him. He hasn’t thrown his bat away in a tantrum but holds it carefully. From what I can tell, Billy Almon is accepting his fate with dignity and care. I’ve been blessed with a staggering amount of gifts in my life, and still out in front of me are the lives of my two sons, who are as young now as I was when baseball cards were forming my brain. I’m Billy Almon, or standing in Billy Almon’s place, more or less. Now I’m on the other side of most things. So I never had the experience of seeing it as a kid, when my favorite thing in all the world was playing little league baseball, and my favorite moment in little league baseball was being on deck, bat in hand, about to get an at-bat. But who would want to enter such a universe as the one that has reduced him to such brown and yellow and gray mediocrity? In truth I didn’t get this card as a kid but received it as part of a dumping of old cards on me last year from a friend of a friend who was getting rid of his collection. You could imagine he’s about to hand you the bat, that it could be your turn. He is looking at me, or if you’re the one looking at this card, he’s looking at you. ![]() This is why he’s still in possession of the bat. He has not only failed to reach base but has failed to even put the ball in play. He’s holding it in such a way as to enable a handoff to a bat boy. If he were approaching home plate for an at-bat, he wouldn’t be holding the bat this way. Billy Almon is clearly returning to the dugout after failing to reach base. The action shown in this Billy Almon card tells a different story. That’s an after wherein the before seems so close at hand it crackles with life, an after that suggests itself as part of a continuum of drama and action and victory. I think about another iconic action card, Johnny Bench’s 1976 card, where he stands amid swirling dust like a gunslinger who’s just gunned down another challenger. ![]() I’m living and have been living in the after for a long time. For what is my mind but something built on baseball cards, on early childhood attachment interwoven with a want and need to attach to my older brother and to all things colorful and exciting? Everything before baseball cards was unconscious, and everything after it had within it at least some fragment of baseball cards. I think of the 1974 Cleon Jones card that is in my mind the first baseball card I ever saw, the one that started to lay the whole foundation of my conscious mind. It’s an action shot, but what is the action? In some other famous cards with action shots, the action captures an element of the game that’s at the heart of why the game came to mean so much to us, the drama, the excitement, the heroism. This is one of my favorite baseball cards.
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