On July 15th, 1990, Chicago’s Bobby Thigpen became quickest to reach thirty saves in a season as the White Sox beat New York 8-5.

Thigpen is one of those names that just sticks with you. Like:

• Boof Bonser
• Coco Crisp
• Goose Gossage
• Buster Posey
• Mudcat Grant

When I played fantasy baseball in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Thigpen was a highly coveted player. In the early 1990s, the South-Siders had some pretty good teams. This was also the era when the dedicated “Closer” was really a thing so mangers managed differently than they do today.

In 1990, Bobby Thigpen led the League in number of games pitched, 77. He also led the League that year with 57 saves and got a lot of votes in the Cy Young and American League MVP voting. Thankfully though he didn’t win either of those awards.

I have written here before about my antipathy toward The Closer role as it developed in the last decades of the 1900s. It was over-rated and I think a lot of managers could have won a lot more games over the years if they had realized that sticking with what was working rather than going automatically to the designate “Man” would have been the better option for them. In 1990, for example, Thigpen blew 8 Save opportunities. Not enough to catch OAKLAND which won 103 games, but pretty darn close.

I had Thigpen on a couple of my fantasy teams. He made my fantasy team better. Looking now at the list of names above, I would take any one of them (with the exception of Bonser, of course) on a fantasy team. But to quote Juliette, “What’s in a name?”