If you need to sum up outfielder Gil Coan in a single word it would be “speed.” Before the Washington Nationals entertained fans with presidential mascots running footraces, one of their predecessor teams was sending Coan out to run laps against track stars. He even raced a horse (and won!) from right field to home plate. Perhaps the fact that he was missing one of his thumbs made him more aerodynamic.
Coan had little power, relying on his legs to generate extra base hits. His first major league hit was a bunt single, followed up in the next year with limited plate appearances offset by an amazing .500 batting average. He tallied more triples than home runs in about a decade of play and managed a second place finish in stolen bases in 1948. Defensively he had good range in the outfield, leading the league in putouts in each season in which he appeared in at least 75% of his team’s games.
Staying in the lineup proved to be a challenge as odd injuries seemed to be a recurring issue. He fractured his skull during a slide into second base, contracted a baffling skin infection from contaminated sand, and was even hit with a midseason case of appendicitis.
The Nationals seem to have gotten all they could from Coan, sending him on a four-team tour for the last bit of his career. He finished with a breakeven 0.0 wins above replacement, but this is heavily influenced by a ferocious drop in speed that erased all the cumulative WAR he had built up until he was first traded.
My Gil Coan card is interesting and almost spectacular for two reasons: 1) The gigantic white borders would look amazing if my copy was properly centered. 2) The nameplate obscures the ability of viewers to count the number of thumbs present. This was the final card I picked up on the way out of the 2023 Chantilly summer card show. That particular show took a while to yield enough cards to make it worth six hours of travel and almost all my 1952 pick-ups came from a common bin tucked away at a table in sight of the concessions area. Finding any of the semi-high numbers in one of these bins is always a joy and was a fun way to salvage what had been a very long day.
As planned, the trip had been intended to land a very big name for my ’52 set building project. While the day closed with Gil Coan as my final acquisition, the big card turned out to be less than 12 hours away from joining it.
