Higher calling: Reno’s Rob Richie reached the Major Leagues then gave it all up

[Isabella]

Richie’s priorities were with his faith.

“I don’t feel like I’m punishing myself,” he said in 1990. “Baseball is not in my plans. I didn’t go through all of this (retiring) just to go back (to baseball) later on. I feel I’ve made a decision I will stick with.”

Richie, who later moved to Kentucky with his wife Loreece (they met while at Hug High) and just turned 55 years old (Sept. 5), never did go back to baseball.

The question remains, even 30 years after The Decision, just how good Rob Richie would have been in Major League Baseball.

“He might have hit a ton. Who knows?” former Detroit Tigers manager Sparky Anderson told the Detroit Free-Press in 1990. “The boy’s a winner and he’ll always be a winner for doing what he did. His religion is very important to him. He never put baseball above it. That takes a lot of courage.”

The Free-Press in 1990 likened Richie to another famous baseball player who had a brief career. Archibald “Moonlight” Graham played just one game in the major leagues and retired to become a doctor. His story was fictionalized in W.P. Kinsella’s book, “Shoeless Joe” and portrayed by actor Burt Lancaster in the movie “Field of Dreams.”

“If I’d only got to be a doctor for five minutes, now that would have been a tragedy,” Graham says in Kinsella’s book. “You have to keep things in perspective. I mean, I love the game. But it’s only that. A game.”

https://www.nevadaappeal.com/sports/higher-calling-renos-rob-richie-reached-the-major-leagues-then-gave-it-all-up/

[The Librarian]

Interesting.... and thank you.

I've added him to my list: