More than a fairly good player, he just didn't have enough peak to go with the long career. Like other Dodger batters of the Sixties, an underrated hitter.

One of my favorites due to his lengthy back of his baseball card during the Seventies.

Former teammate of Jim Fairey, which was always confusing.

Oldest player in 1978 at age 39; you wouldn't make a top 10 with that these days..

More than a fairly good player, he just didn't have enough peak to go with the long career.

I think the combination of Dodger Stadium and his inability to handle LHP consistently killed Fairly's numbers during his prime. It didn't help that he missed a month with bruised ribs in 1966, when he was off to one of the best starts of his career. It took him another month after coming back from the injury to get on track, but he was torrid down the stretch and was one of the key performers in the Dodgers' "last hurrah" pennant push. But he crashed and burned big-time over the next two seasons.

-- MWE

He was a quality ballplayer.

But I pray to the Lord every night that someone will cut out his tongue.

But I pray to the Lord every night that someone will cut out his tongue.

You know when he was pretty good? And I'm stretching a bit to call him that. Working Giants games in, I guess, the early or mid-'80s with Hank Greenwald. His play-by-play innings were terrible, but sometimes, during Greenwald's innings, Fairly would be on-mike, and Greenwald would ask him questions to get him to tell stories or offer actual played-the-game insights. It was one of the many ways that Greenwald was a fantastic broadcaster, he could make a guy like Fairly into something listenable.

As a Seattle-area resident, I've been forced to listen to Fairly on a regular basis for the last decade or so. Fortunately, he usually works radio only nowadays, so if I'm watching TV, I get the "pleasure" of hearing Dave Valle or Dave Henderson instead. Bad as they are, they're better than Fairly. And the combination of Rick Rizz and Fairly has to be heard to be believed...

As a ballplayer, though, Fairly was pretty good. Because of his era and his home park, his stats during his prime years hardly jump out at you, but he was a good, solid line-drive hitter who was a member of three World Series winning teams.

I remember, in the off-season before Ron Fairly started announcing SF Giants games, Jon Carroll, a SF Chronicle non-sports columnist, devoted an entire column to how bad an announcer Fairly was since Carroll had previously lived where Fairly was previously an announcer (southern California?). If anything Fairly was even worse than predicted. But he was a decent player back in the day.

Carroll had previously lived where Fairly was previously an announcer (southern California?).

Yeah. He started out with the Angels, I'm pretty sure. He played with them at the end of his career. He actually started his broadcasting career reading the sports report on the 10 o'clock news on KTLA-5, the Cowboy's TV station. If you had told me then that he would still be in the business nearly 30 years later, I'd have said you were on drugs.

And, this being the late '70s, you probably would have been.

I'll be he's the only guy in baseball history who had a 1000 ribbies and no more than 77 in any year.

Fairly was a terrific value in the old BJCB and other variations by Stats/ESPN.