Rick Reichardt isn’t a name that rolls off the tongue for many baseball fans. The left fielder never made an All-Star team, he never led the league in any statistical category, and unless you are steeped in the history of Angels baseball, you might never know of him. On his 77th birthday, I thought it would be interesting to look back at how his first contract with the Angels led to the creation of the MLB amateur draft.
In 1963, Rick Reichardt was one of the top college stars in the country, playing as a two-sport athlete for the University of Wisconsin, where he twice led the Big 10 in batting and also started at fullback for the football team that was ranked second in the country before losing in the 1963 Rose Bowl to USC.