# Dave Rosello
Dave Rosello looks like a playa here. In 1982, this guy growin’ an Oscar Gamble on his head with a Bud Abbott mustache spent the season with the AAA Charleston Charlies. He’d hung around the major leagues for almost a decade but couldn’t even impress the Indians during spring training this time. He was released on March 26, 1982.
I wonder sometimes what it would be like to be in that situation. He probably looked at his card throughout the year and kept thinking that one day he’d get back to the majors. After all, the Cubs gave up on him after 1977, trading him to the Indians for two career minor leaguers and then spent all of 1978 in AAA before finally making it back to the major leagues for 56 games of 1979.
In all honesty, Dave Rosello was never a major league talent. I mean, he was a career .277 hitter in AAA, only getting on base at a .337 pace. Sure, shortstops back then didn’t need to hit, so I should be focusing on his defense stats right? Well, his defensive stats show him as being worth negative runs…lots of negative runs. For example, for his career, his rTot/yr is -34.7 runs as a major league player. That basically means he was costing his team 35 runs every 1,250 innings he played SS. Ouch.
His best season had been 1978, for the Indians AAA club in Portland (the Beavers), when he hit .282/.365/.429. At some point in his career he played winter ball in Puerto Rico too, but I’m not sure if he did that a lot or just a little.
The back of his card mentions some trivia about Reggie Jackson and Tom Seaver. Back then, before the internet, you couldn’t just look this stuff up. You could only find tidbits like this on the back of cards and in baseball magazines, or by listening to commentaters during games.
