Unless you’re a diehard (and old) Texas Rangers or Cleveland Indians fan, you might not remember Tom Ragland.

After all, Ragland was drafted out of high school by the second incarnation of the Washington Senators way back in 1965. From there, it took him six long years before he tasted his first cup of Major League coffee.

Debuting with the Senators in April of 1971, Ragland made it into just four games that spring before the Sens sent him down again. He’d be back for six more contests in September, and that ten-game body of work was enough to land him on the a 1972 Topps Rangers Rookie Stars card (#334), along with Bill Fahey and Jim Mason.

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See the subtle difference there? The Senators moved to Texas and became the Rangers in the 1971-72 off-season. Of course, Topps had no opportunity to get shots of those guys in actual Texas uniforms since such a thing didn’t exist, so they just airbrushed off the old “W” logo on their caps.

Ragland played in 25 games for the Rangers in 1972, but Texas traded him to Cleveland in November. And Topps apparently wasn’t impressed enough with his .172 batting average to include him in their 1973 set.

That next year, though, 27-year-old Ragland lined up as Jack Brohamer’s second fiddle at second base in Cleveland and hit .257 over 67 games for a pretty bad Tribe team (71-91).

That performance got him his second Topps card the next year, but by then, he was back at Triple-A, this time in the Houston Astros system (Denver), and he’d never return to the Majors.

And, so, it looked like Ragland would also never appear on a real Rangers card in an actual Rangers uniform.

(1993 Keebler Texas Rangers – [Base] #34 – Tom Ragland – Courtesy of COMC.com)

But then, in 1993, Keebler (of tasty Elfin fame) undertook a massive project to issue one card of every player, coach, and manager to ever appear in a Rangers uniform, and to hand them out at Texas home games through the season.

And that’s how Tom Ragland, retired nearly twenty years and gone from the Rangers for exactly two decades, appeared in his thick-rimmed 1970s specs on a black-and-white Texas Rangers baseball card (#34) in 1993, making you want both more of these cards and a box of cookies.

It’s a beautiful (and tasty) combo.

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