Minor League Baseball Cards of New Canaan Players

It’s Opening Day Eve.

For baseball fans like me, winter is just one long delay from the final game of the World Series and the first pitch of our national pastime.

Here’s a short list of distractions that get me through the dark months: Election Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Sporting News fantasy baseball preview issue, March Madness.

New Canaan is, among other things, a storied baseball town.

For today’s edition of eBay Saturday, we’re paying homage to a few New Canaanites who have ascended to professional baseball—specifically, the guys whose minor league baseball cards you can find on the ecommerce site in a search.

Each of the cards listed below is selling for $12.99 or the best offer. Here’s quick blurb on each of these athletes—chime in as you like in the comments thread below and if you have one or more of their cards, upload it to our gallery.

• Curt Casali, 2010 Cotuit Kettleers: A 4-year starter for Rams baseball who primarily played catcher, Casali fatefully would fill in to pitch in 2006, leading them from the mound to their most recent FCIAC championship that season (the last one before that was 1989 when Aaron “Ace” Gallo was on the hill). The 2007 New Canaan High School grad went 1-for-8 this spring with the Detroit Tigers and was dealt this month to the Tampa Bay Rays, according to The Detroit News.

• Paul Devlin, 1989 Lynchburg Red Sox: This talented athlete (and writer) may be known around the world outside New Canaan for a great cameo in 1988’s “Bull Durham”—what you may not know is that while at NCHS, the lefty slugger broke the single-season record for hits in the FCIAC, a record that had been set by no other than Bobby Valentine of Stamford. Devlin graduated NCHS in 1982, playing here for longtime coach Keith MacBain, and went on to the University of North Carolina before making his way into the Red Sox organization.

• Lee Jones, 1982 and ’83 Redwood Pioneers: Dave Stewart of the New Canaan Advertiser gives us a great profile on Jones, still a town resident, here in this article. A standout football as well as baseball player who played for the , Jones was drafted as a pitcher by the California Angels.

• Bill Brakeley, 1990 Helena Brewers: I’m not finding a lot about Brakeley online, except to see on his Baseball Reference profile that the southpaw hurler in 1991 posted a respectable 3.78 ERA playing A-ball in the Milwaukee Brewers organization, fanning 116 batters in just 123 innings that season.

Have some more information about local guys who went on to play baseball professionally? Let us know here in the comments thread.