Bubba Links
Baseball Links
Because how can you not love a baseball player named "Bubba"?
Courtesy of an anonymous informant: some scans from the 1994 Bellaire High School yearbook. It's called The Carillon. (I'm pretty sure I had a yearbook called The Carillon. Can't remember which one it was, though. We moved around a lot, so I have yearbooks from so many different schools it isn't even funny. I seem to recall the cover was blue, but that's all I remember.)
"Richard Crosby" was a junior that year. Which is kind of odd, since you'd expect a guy born in 1976 to be a senior in 1994. I'd noticed that Bubba was a year older than you'd expect when he was drafted, but never knew if it was because he'd taken a "gap year" or what. Looks like his parents started him a year late. Either that or it's some oddity of the Texas school system.
No, I don't think he flunked a year. His sister was a senior in '94, which means she's also a year older than you'd expect for her grade. A lot of parents do that. It's supposed to give the kids an academic and athletic advantage. My mom's a teacher, and she's always said there's a sharp difference between the kids born in the first half of the year vs. the kids born in the second half of the year. In the lower grades especially, the difference in maturity is quite noticeable.
(Many teachers, aware of this, try to time their pregnancies so their kids are born early in the year. This can backfire. I know one teacher who planned for her baby to be born in January. He was two months premature - born in November. In some states, he would have been forced to wait until the next year. But not in Hawaii. He ended up younger than most of his classmates - and constantly getting in trouble in school!)
There really isn't a lot of baseball stuff in the yearbook. Only a few photos, and no stats. This is probably because the baseball season is near the end of the school year, and the yearbook staff would have been up against the deadline if they wanted to get the yearbooks to the students in time for them to get them signed.
Here's a photo of the varsity baseball team:
Bubba is in the second row, the second from the right. Here's a blow-up:
There are also individual photos of the varsity team. Bubba wore #9 in high school, too:
I wondered if there were any photos of Ray Knoblauch (Chuck's dad and the Bellaire pitching coach) in the yearbook, but apparently there aren't.
One of my sons was born in June and his grade school teachers always told us that he was somewhat immature. A lot of parents do pull their kids back a year here.