Orioles Debut #897- Clay Rapada

Clay made his Orioles debut while I was out of town on my honeymoon, becoming the 897th player to appear in a game for the Orioles.

Being this close to player number 900, I'm starting to wonder who that might be. It's pretty hard to predict since you never know if a trade will happen or who will get hurt; there's such a wide variety of possible situations that might arise that singling out a specific player is close to impossible. But I'm going to give it a shot anyway, with the assumption that Mr. 900 is already in the Orioles system. And I have no idea when/if he will ever be healthy enough to appear in a game for the Birds, but I'll go out on a limb and guess that Justin Duchscherer will be 900. Why not, right?

But back to Clay, after all, this post is supposed to be about him. At this point, he has appeared in two games for the O's. His debut on Monday April 18th against the Twins went very well as he struck out three of the four batters he faced and didn't allow a baserunner. Unfortunately, his second outing was nothing short of awful. In Saturday's game against the Yankees, he only was able to get one out while allowing three earned runs. Let's hope we see more of the good Clay.

Clay made his MLB debut with the Cubs in 2007, and has since pitched parts of three seasons with the Tigers and later appeared in a few games for the 2010 Rangers.

This Topps '52 card is his only card in a major release thus far, the rest of his cards are from sets of the Minor League teams that he's played with. I got it in a SCN trade and am still working on my first in-person autograph of him.

Good luck Clay!