If Your Birthday is July 7th...

...you share with the world's most famous rock and roll drummer. Ringo Starr. While there's little info to connect him with baseball -- unlike his onetime band-mate, there aren't any pictures of him enjoying a game at Yankee Stadium (or anywhere else) -- plenty of ballplayers share his birthday. And the odds are that some of them are Beatle fans, From the top, there's infielder Yangervis Solarte, who made his big league debut with the Yankees in 2014, before being traded to the Padres for Chase Headley.
Here's Mets 3rd base coach Tim Teuful, The Greenwich, Connecticut product broke into the majors as a Twin, but is best remembered as Wally Backman's righty platoon partner at 2nd base on the champion '86 Mets,  Below, he tries to help umpire a close play in front of him.
Below, a look at John Buck, who caught for seven major league teams in his 11-season career -- and spent much of 2013 with the Mets, where he smacked 15 homers in 101 games.
Besides Teufel having a Twins connection, a  couple of other onetime Minnesota players share Ringo's birthday: Chuck Knoblauch and Dan Gladden,
Let's not overlook the legendary pitcher Satchel Paige, whose greatest work came in the Negro Leagues. Denied a chance to compete against legends such as Babe Ruth and Ted Williams, he still earned their admiration as one of the greatest ever to take the mound before his almost-too-late chance to dazzle with the Indians and Browns.
And one other name deserves mention -- the first player-turned-umpire I can recall. Bill Kunkel spent three seasons in the early '60s pitching for the Athletics and Yankees and then nearly 20 years as one of the most respected umpires in the American League. He worked a pair of World Series... and five AL Championship Series. If that wasn't enough to fill "the back of his card," he also worked as an NBA referee for a couple of years. Bill (who died way too young from cancer, at age 48) is also the patriarch of a dual-generation baseball family -- his son Jeff spent parts of eight seasons as an infielder with the Rangers and Cubs.
A pretty good birthday bunch for July 7th!

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