Unpossible Autograph Friday- Jesse Jefferson

The Orioles family lost another member last week when former pitcher Jesse Jefferson passed away from prostate cancer on Thursday, September 8. He was only 62 years old.

Jesse was the Orioles 4th round draft pick in 1968 and eventually made his MLB debut with the 1973 Orioles. He pitched in Baltimore for two more seasons before bouncing around from White Sox to the Blue Jays to the Pirates to the Angels over his final six seasons in the Majors. For a comparison to a modern Orioles pitcher, check out this post I wrote comparing Jesse to Daniel Cabrera back in May of 2010. Essentially, they were both flame throwers who had a hard time keeping the ball in the strike-zone, resulting in many walks and hit batters. Jesse is best remembered for being a member of the inaugural 1977 Toronto Blue Jays team.

Jesse was one of the early through the mail (TTM) requests I sent out when I got back into the hobby in mid 2009. He was only a 9% signer, possibly due to his health issues, but I never got a response from him. Luckily, I was able to add this signed card to my collection via Ebay. He had a really great and legible autograph. If you check out yesterday's Chris Davis post, I said that Chris signs his D like a J, and it looks a good bit like the two J's in Jesse's signature.

RIP Jesse.

Jesse Jefferson Was Probably Daniel Cabrera's Private Pitching Coach- UPDATED

Here is the career advice that I think Jesse gave D-Cab at the start of his career; "Give up a bunch of home runs, make sure your win-loss record is well below .500, and don't be afraid of throwing wild pitches or hitting batters. Oh, and keep that career ERA around 5."



Cabrera was an even more wild version of Jesse, but they both had control problems, as is evidenced by the fact that they both walked precisely 520 batters. Weird, right?

There is an outside chance that D-Cab could make it back to the Bigs to add to that total while I think it's safe to say that the 61 year old Jefferson has officially hung up his spikes. Yeah, it took JJ almost 200 more innings to walk that many batters but D-Cab has 152 more K's, so pick your poison.

UPDATE- A man claiming to be Jesse's son left this "eloquent" comment ( I edited it to keep things PG):
"F@#$ both of yall...that's my father you dumb f*$& are talking about..if my father or Cabrera had a f@$#ing pitching coach to help them with their control like pitching coaches today you wouldn't have s@#$ to say."

And here's what I have to say about that:

Sorry if I offended you, but I don't feel like I was particularly rude in my post, I was just merely making a connection between two Orioles pitchers who had similar stat lines. Your dad's stats are what they are, and although it's possible that your dad would have had more success if he had different coaching, there's no way to say for sure. 

Also, here is the link to the post that I wrote shortly after your father passed away. I feel like I was quite respectable to him in that one.

So maybe, do a little bit more research before the next time you blast someone on the internet. After all, people can write almost anything they want online, and I feel like what I did was fairly trivial.