Top 60 All-Time Greatest Blue Jays: #47 Damaso Garcia
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Damaso Domingo Garcia Sanchez| 2B | 1980-1986
Damaso Garcia was born February 7, 1955, in
Moca, Dominican Republic. As a young man, he was more into soccer than baseball. He was captain for the Dominican Republic’s national soccer team at the Central American and Caribbean Games in 1974. The
Yankees
signed him as an amateur free agent in 1975 as players from the Dominica Republic weren’t included in the amateur draft.
Damaso got up to the majors for a few games in 1978 and 1979, but the Yankees had
Willie Randolph, and Garcia wasn’t going to move him off second base. The Yankees traded him,
Remembering 16 Yankees who died in 2020, including Whitey Ford, Phil Niekro, Don Larsen, Horace Clarke
Updated Jan 01, 2021;
Posted Dec 31, 2020
Yankees alums that died in 2020 include (clockwise from top left) Whitey Ford, Don Larsen, Jay Johnstone, Bob Watson and Phil Niekro.AP
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Six weeks later, Tony Fernandez was gone just a quarter-century after his season-ending injury in spring training opened up the Yankees’ starting shortstop job for a 21-year-old rookie named Derek Jeter.
During this awful year of the pandemic, one that led to baseball having a 60-game season with no fans, the sport suffered loss after loss.
Seven Hall of Famers died in 2020, two of them Yankees, franchise great Whitey Ford and knuckleball phenom Phil Niekro.
December 30, 2020
Of the thousands of pitchers who have reached the majors, fewer than a hundred mastered the knuckleball that maddeningly erratic, spin-free butterfly well enough to rely upon it as their primary pitch. None of them succeeded to the extent that Phil Niekro did. “Knucksie” learned the pitch from his father, a coal miner and semiprofessional hurler, at the age of eight, and while he didn’t establish himself as a big league starter for another 20 years, he carved out a 24-year-career in the majors, winning 318 games, striking out 3,342 batters, starting more games than all but four pitchers, and earning a spot in the Hall of Fame.