Glenn Hubbard

(ATL 1978-1987, OAK 1988-1989), .244/.328/.349, 1084 H, 70 HR, 1 All-Star Game

Glenn Hubbard is one of those names and faces from the past that, quite frankly, don’t mean much. He just doesn’t. That’s most names and faces, right? But Hubbard, I met him in 1988 at a card-signing event. He was playing for the Athletics then, and they’d just lost the World Series to Kirk Gibson and the Dodgers. He signed a couple of my baseball cards. He wasn’t a very big guy, and by this point he had a little pooch belly.

Advanced metrics now tell us that Hubbard was a great fielder, and also he wasn’t a complete zero with the bat, either. He walked a lot and ran the bases pretty well. I’ll always remember him in his powder-blue Braves uniform, him and overweight Bob Horner and all-American hero Dale Murphy. Hubbard was just an accessory to those two, but he was part of something real and deeply Southern and forgotten. Before 1989, which was this watershed moment in American history that nobody can or will ever write about, something yet remained of the distinctive sporting culture of that region: NASCAR, WCW wrestling (“the superstars on the SuperStation!”), and the Braves as the sole MLB representative of this old, Texas-not-included South.

Dale Murphy and Ric Flair were supermen. They bestrode the spaces below the Mason-Dixon line like colossi. Flair was in his forties by the time 1990 rolled around, and Murphy was all but out of baseball. So was Glenn Hubbard, who retired in 1989 to much less fanfare. But it was an end to something, and that wasn’t nothing. The world I lived in would never be the same.

–Orville Redenbacher