Monday, October 2, 2017

I Love The 90s Cardinals Part 6 - Chad Hutchinson

Over the years the Cardinals have had several two sport athletes.  A quick rundown of a few.....


Bob Gibson played basketball at Creighton and briefly for the Harlem Globe Trotters.....



Brian Jordan played football for the Atlanta Falcons......



more recently, but a little more obscure, outfielder Adron Chambers played football at Mississippi State.



Back in the late 1990s the Cardinals tried bringing in a two sports athlete from Stanford.  Chad Hutchinson was a stand out for the Cardinal in both baseball, as a pitcher.....


and played quarterback for their football team......


In the late 1990s the Cardinals had rolled the dice on several high-end, high dollar, draft picks.  Some, like J.D. Drew turned out fairly well.  Others like Rick Ankiel were sort of a mixed bag.  As for Hutchinson....

The Cardinals drafted him the second round of the 1998 Draft and paid him $3.5 million dollars not to touch a football.  His first summer in the Minors was successful.  Hutchinson pitched in 8 games, 44 innings, with 51 strikeouts.  At the end of the 1998 season he started appearing in prospect rankings.  Baseball America had him as high as 42nd.

Card companies started cranking cards of the high end prospect.  My favorite was his 1999 SP Signature Series card.  Obviously a lot of great Cardinals cards in this set, but Hutchinson was one of the good prospect cards at the time....


All of his rookie cards are Upper Deck products.  This card is obviously the best of the group.  He had three other cards that year:  Upper Deck base, Upper Deck Victory, and SP Top Prospects.  The Prospects card pictures him in a Prince William (A Ball) uniform, but the rest use the same exact picture.....




There were a few more baseball cards of Chad Hutchinson after this card, but not many.  He stayed in the Minors the next two years and seemed to regress along the way.  He finally reached the Majors in 2001, pitched 3 games, and ended his baseball career with an ERA of 24.75.  His record was 0-0.

Then Hutchinson disappeared from baseball and reappeared as a quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys.   He started 9 games in 2002, threw more interceptions than touchdowns, and the team only won 5 games.




Pretty sure that would be deemed unacceptable for that franchise.  In 2003 he was a back-up in Dallas behind former Cubs prospect Quincy Carter.  Hutchinson was a back-up for the Bears the next season, he did manage to start 5 games along the way too, but did not have a good performance.  That was the end of Hutchinson pro sports career.  

1 comment:

  1. Chad Hutchinson... that's a name I haven't heard in a long time. If I recall correctly, he was actually slated to be the Bears' starter going into the 2005 season (after an injury to Rex Grossman), but ended up being cut right before the end of the pre-season, in favor of Kyle Orton. I remember thinking that it was so cool that he played in the MLB and the NFL and was rooting for him solely because of that fact. But, like many a Bears QB, it obviously didn't work out.

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