Card Corner--Chico Salmon

Once again, we travel 40 years back in our baseball-card time machine...

Chico Salmon was never more than a utility infielder for those great Orioles championship teams of the late 1960s and early 1970s, but he was one of the game's genuinely colorful characters. (He also had a funny name that kids in the 1970s butchered with regularity. I used to say his name like SAH-Mun, as in the fish, but it was actually pronounced Sahl-MAWN. Little did I know about Spanish accents and pronunciations back then.) Born Ruthford Eduardo Salmon, the native Panamanian forged a nine-year career as a utilityman in the sixties and early seventies, but earned most of his notoriety for his rather extreme fear of ghosts. Salmon was so fearful of otherworldly spirits that he refused to sleep in the dark. Salmon's trepidation apparently stemmed from his childhood, when his mother and other adults warned him that ghosts could enter rooms at night if the windows were left open or keyholes in the door were left unplugged. Salmon maintained his extreme fear of ghosts well into his adult years. It wasn't until 1964 that Salmon overcame his fear of sleeping in the dark. A stint in the military will do that; the Army wouldn't let Salmon sleep with the lights on in his barracks.

Having conquered his sleeping "phobia," Salmon experienced his first major league tour of duty that same year. As a part-time player with the lowly Indians from 1964 to 1968, Salmon earned the nickname "Super Sub," a tribute to his ability to play seven positions--the four infield spots and all three outfield locations. Here he is seen in his 1968 Topps card, his final as an Indian. Doesn't he appear to be looking around the corner, perhaps out of fear that a ghost might be coming down the third base line?

After the 1968 season, Salmon was drafted by the expansion Seattle Pilots, but he never did suit up for the Pilots' team made famous by Jim Bouton in Ball Four. Tommy Harper won the Pilots' second-base battle during spring training, making Salmon expendable and leading to a trade with the Orioles, who acquired him in exchange for journeyman pitcher Gene Brabender. Although Salmon had lost out on a chance to play regularly (what with Boog Powell, Dave Johnson, Mark Belanger, and Brooks Robinson ahead of him), he did become the primary utility infielder on those Orioles' teams that won three straight American League pennants from 1969 to 1971, including a World Championship in 1970.

Unlike most utility infielders, Salmon posed more of a threat with his bat and his legs than he did with his glove. As one of his Baltimore teammates said in 1970: "If Chico's hands get any worse, we'll have to amputate."

Although Salmon's fielding and his worries about ghosts often made him a prime target of clubhouse barbs, he did earn respect for his baseball intellect and his commitment toward youth baseball. After his playing days ended in 1972, Salmon worked as a scout and served as a manager of the Panamanian team in the World Amateur Baseball Series. He continued to guide and help amateur teams in his homeland right up until his unexpected death from a heart attack in the year 2000. Not only did that Chico Salmon have a good name; he was a good man, too.