Womack: SABR member Clay Sigg pens tribute to single-franchise MLB players
From SABR member Graham Womack at the Roseville Press Tribune on March 15, 2017, on SABR member Clay Sigg:
Growing up in the 1960s, some of the Major League Baseball players Clay Sigg admired most—Sandy Koufax, Roberto Clemente, Stan Musial—all had one thing in common.
Each spent their entire MLB career with one franchise. While technically the Brooklyn Dodgers signed Clemente before Pittsburgh Pirates general manager Branch Rickey plucked him as a minor leaguer via the Rule 5 Draft, and while Koufax moved with the Dodgers in 1958 to Los Angeles, each man never donned another big league uniform or had to have their baseball card airbrushed to show the hat of a different team.
It’s an increasingly rare feat in a baseball world where free agency has turned so many players in recent decades into travelling acts, vagabonds and mercenaries available to the highest bidder.
Sigg recently completed a 12-year project researching and writing about the 177 players in the 20th century who spent their entire career with one team. The Granite Bay resident—by day a broker married with a wife and three adult children—has a book published in June 2016, “Hometown Heroes: The Single Franchise Baseball Stars of the 20th Century.”
Read the full article here: http://www.thepresstribune.com/article/3/15/17/granite-bay-author-clay-sigg-pens-tribute-single-franchise-mlb-players
Originally published: March 16, 2017. Last Updated: March 16, 2017.