The Baseball Card Blog

6 Pack Analysis: 1989 Donruss
Pack 6

I don’t know about you, but I’m sick to death of 1989 Donruss. The gradient fills, the boring-ass headshot to majestic action shot ratio leans way to far in the direction of the former and I really can’t get over that the distribution within this box is just horrendous. Seriously, between assessing Pack 5 and tonight’s Pack 6 I opened something like 14 to 17 packs and I think I got at least 10 Chris Browns and maybe something like 8 doubles of Pat Borders.

So while I’m relieved that this is Pack 6 and I can open the rest of the box tonight and file the cards away in my closet, I’ve been trying to approach getting a double the way I used to: if it’s a good player, that’s awesome because I can probably trade it, or, more probably, I can put one in a box in the closet where no light will hit it (and thus not decrease its precious value) and the other one in a binder in nothing less than an Ultra-Pro page (which I used to buy by the box and kind of—but not really—cherish the lame Stadium Club card that would come in it, either of Barry Bonds or Mike Piazza, both of whom would be snazzed up in a tux—I guess for no other reason than to propel the metaphor that because Bonds and Piazza are on their way to the prom, your cards will feel that way too. I wonder who they took with them to the prom…one guess each: Bonds took Sid Bream (to reminisce about glory Pirate days and because Sid told him once (just before slipping into a prolonged unconscious state after losing a no-holds-barred arm-wrestling match with R.J. Reynolds) that he knew Danny Aiello (when really what Bream meant was he liked that movie The Pickle, starring Aiello, and wasn’t it funny that he, too, was in a bit of a pickle, after unwisely deciding to arm-wrestle R.J. Reynolds). Bonds thought Aiello knew Spike Lee and Bonds really liked She’s Gotta Have It. Bonds thought he really connected with the ‘She’ in the title, only instead of him needing sex with men, he needed attention, which he could get if he arrived at the prom with Sid Bream. As for Mike Piazza, I bet that his first choice was Tommy Lasorda. You know, one of those ‘My teacher is the only one who understands me’ kinds of things. But then, when word got out, Lasorda felt kind of awkward, so he held a press conference and made up some shit about spilling Slim Fast on his tuxedo, and he didn’t want to rent. Then, to make it worse, Piazza overheard Tom Candiotti say that hall-monitor Orel Hershiser was going to ask Mike to go with him. So he quickly snapped out of his funk and asked Ramon Martinez. But Ramon said he could only go if he brought his younger brother Pedro. Piazza was angry but he relented after Pedro baked him a cake.)).

But if I get a double of a lousy player, it’s not just unceremoniously filed away (though that’s the only visible action). The card is mentally recorded and added to the Encyclopedia of Important Baseball Facts That Will One Day Prove Itself Useful in my brain, so that if I ever run into someone like Pat Borders on the street, I will outwardly say “You were awesome on the Jays,” while inwardly think “You totally screwed up my enjoyment of opening packs of 1989 Donruss. Because of you I had one less chance of getting a Ken Griffey, Jr., rookie. Thanks a lot, jerk.” I will feel good because I made Pat Borders feel special (if however briefly) and because I was able to rise above embarrassing him in public (no matter how many Griffey rookies he robbed me of). Similar things filed away while opening Pack 6: Jeff Robinson was actually considered worthy of being (and thus was) a Diamond King. I wonder if he owns the Perez-Steele painting of himself. I bet he hangs it over the fireplace, or better yet, has it in a hideous gold rococo frame and behind it keeps his safe, where all his valuable baseball cards and 7-11 souvenir Slurpee lid discs are safely hidden. Also, Dave Righetti does not have eyes. He only has eyebrows. Lastly, Jack Howell definitely had a thing for eye-black.

Pack 6

Rick Schu I don’t know if getting Schu as the first player is a good or bad omen for the rest of the pack. As I said before, I opened quite a few between Packs 5 and 6, so I know that Mike Greenwell’s Diamond King is a bad omen, Darnell Coles is not so bad and actually, for all the shit I beat down on Pat Borders, he’s not that bad a card to get first because you’ll invariably get a Fred McGriff Diamond King.
Gregg Olson Getting Schu means you’ll get Gregg Olson the Pitcher. 2 Gs was pretty great, much better than Greg Olson the Catcher, although you know it would’ve been great if somehow they ended up on the same team. Then one of the ace editors at Donruss would’ve done something great like ‘The Olson Twins’ or ‘Greg & Olson’ or something equally inane. I bet that not even the high school interns at Fleer would touch that combo with a ten-foot pole, they would’ve let Donruss have that one, just to watch with ironic glee as the Donruss editors congratulate themselves on a job well done. Who would’ve thought? Both Greg(g) Olsons on one team! A toast to you, fellow editor, another feather in the Donruss cap! Sad, just sad. On another note, I think it would’ve been better for Donruss to scatter the Rated Rookies across the set. It’s like they were scared that a rookie would get lost or something.
Paul Kilgus Snore.
Tony Gwynn Diamond King Am I the only one who thought that Tony Perez was the guy who painted these portraits? Also, what’s up with the James Bond opening credits thing going on behind Tony Gwynn on this card?
Danny Darwin You know, if he hadn’t been traded mid-way through 1986 in anticipation for the Astros’ play-off run, Darwin would’ve had 5 straight losing seasons. That’s saying something, because Darwin lasted a long time in the majors. And really, he was one of those guys where you gave him the benefit of the doubt when he was on the mound, even if his record sucked. I always thought that in the off-season Darwin was a cowboy. He always reminded me of a tall, background kind of cowboy, like the one who would’ve been another town drunk with Andy ‘Friar Tuck’ Devine in Stagecoach, tall and quiet and always twirling his gun (and if he lived in a city and was not a cowboy, then replace the twirling of the gun with checking his pocketwatch, adjusting his monocle and twirling his mustache in anticipation of his next safari).
Terry Leach Other players who’ve worn #26 on the Mets: Frank Viola, Alejandro Pena, and of course the immortal Dave Kingman.
Francisco Melendez Remember how if a player had a longer name than others, then the kerning would be tighter for his name, and/or the lettering would be thinner? I always thought that was kind of funny, because one of the great things about the 1986 Topps set was the larger, teach-yourself-to-read lettering used on the front. Except for Fernando Valenzuela’s card. I bet that if Melendez had had a card in that set, Perry White, the curmudgeonly old Topps editor (on leave from the Daily Planet), would’ve shortened his name to Franny Melendez (kind of like when they shortened Roberto to Bob Clemente. I kind of hated those Clemente cards where they called him ‘Bob’. It’s like calling Robert DeNiro ‘Bob’. You just don’t do it, unless you know the guy).
Dave Righetti Like I mentioned before, Righetti was born without eyes. Seriously, when you glance at Righetti, all you see are eyebrows, right? Am I the only one who sees this? And you know it’s only going to get funnier when he’s an old man. It’s like the guy’s a Muppet. It’s impossible for me to take this guy seriously.
Don Slaught I bet that the other Yankees called him ‘Sergeant Slaughter,’ and if they didn’t then shame on them.
Chris Brown No comment.
Will Clark MVP You know, no one ever really talks about when insert cards started, but I think that without going all the way back to the Sixties when Topps inserted everything imaginable into their packs (Topps Bucks, the Topps Game playing cards in the 68 set, a swatch from Perry White’s day-worn suspenders) a case can be made that Donruss and Fleer really energized inserts at the end of the 80s. Fleer had the über-cool All-Stars and Donruss had the sort-of-cool MVPs. I opened a lot of packs of the 1988 set and never really got any of the Donruss MVPs (I think I may have got the Mattingly MVP), but in 1989 there was just so many of them and they were printed as regularly as the rest of the set. Not really the best design, huh.
Jack Howell I would like an Angels fan to tell me if Jack Howell was any good, because I’m not entirely sure.
Jeff Robinson Diamond King It’s almost like a normal, non-baseball playing person won a contest and got to have their portrait painted by creepy old Tony Perez and Donruss was gullible enough to include it in the set.
Tom Gordon Nowhere does it say ‘Flash.’ But he does sport a prominent gold chain, he’s got good teeth and could probably, if he suddenly found himself on the Reds, shave off his mustache, then secretly shave off his eyebrows and paste them where his mustache once flourished. You know, for when he goes out on the town. This was one of the best Rated Rookies to get in 1989. It’s still a great card, if only because he looks just genuinely excited to be in the majors, even if it is with the Royals.
Andy Van Slyke MVP Man, that’s two MVPs in one pack. See what I mean about the distribution numbers being the same as the regular set? Also, it looks like his hat doesn’t fit him, like it’s a couple sizes to big. Why couldn’t they just take shots head-on; Van Slyke’s all bent out of shape in this photo, and 1988 was his career year. They really could’ve made these MVP cards more appealing.

Overall Analysis

So Rick Schu wasn’t that bad a card to get at the top of the pack. With 7 of the 15 cards being pretty good, that’s a 47% success rate. Also, it’s interesting that I got Chris Brown because this shows that his card was not one you’d get in a sequence. It may have been double- or even triple-printed, but its distribution was random, which I take to be a good thing. No Red Sox, again, which is giving more and more credence to the conspiracy theory I’ve come up with that a Donruss executive went through every pack and took out all the Sox cards, then ironed the packs closed again, like those shifty card dealers at the back tables of a baseball card show who charged really low prices for older packs. Oh, and I almost forgot, the puzzle piece wasn’t that bad either. I’ll give a more formal analysis of this box in my next post.

Gather ’round, for I have seen it. Sometime in the fall of 1988, in Bannockburn, Illinois, a pack left the Donruss packaging plant in a box that was destined not to see the light of day for almost twenty years. And while thousands of children and teens and some older guys (longing to relive the joy of finding a Lowell Palmer card in their pack of 1970 Topps when they were a kid) soldiered forward opening pack after pack of the worthless and generally disappointing fare from Donruss that year, receiving nothing for their devotion except fifteen Mike Bieleckis and enough Candy Maldonados to seriously consider opening a savings account and not buying any more cards, this pack—the closest I’ve come to a Perfect Pack—sat harmlessly in a warehouse or perhaps the basement of Mr. Mint’s lesser-known adversary Mr. Excellent (and I really wish there had been a Mr. Excellent; I would’ve paid to get a Polaroid of him and me at a card show autographed in sharpie).

I really didn’t think I’d get this good a pack. Hell, even the puzzle piece is worthwhile (though not the whites of Spahn’s eyes, which I think is the piece de resistance of this puzzle). Now I’ll shut up about how great The Pack is and tell you (lovingly) about each card.

6 Pack Analysis: 1989 Donruss
Pack 5

Bryan Harvey There was a time when Bryan Harvey was the shit. I think that time lasted roughly 25 minutes. No really, there was a time when being a rookie and getting nearly 20 saves in a season was, if not outright sensational, then at least front-page news (even if the front page was the only page, the newspaper was a crudely mimeographed sheet you printed in your basement, and the name of the paper was The Official Bryan Harvey Fan Club Newsletter).
Jeff Russell While Bryan Harvey was a big deal for a little while, Jeff Russell was a big deal for a longer while. He was a great closer, no doubt about it. Also, if you pictured him without facial hair, he looked a lot like Howie Mandel (and, as a sidebar digression, why hasn’t NBC had Mandel blow up a rubber glove with his nose yet on Deal or No Deal? I’m serious. It would make the show about twenty thousand times more enjoyable). But really, the big news here is the photo. Minus a little fat around the cheeks and swap out the Rangers jersey for a white unitard and you’ve got Freddie Mercury. I can even picture Jeff Russell pitching this way, gesticulating wildly after each pitch, strutting around the mound after striking out a batter, and pointing to Brian May at first, (who the Rangers would get in a three-way trade in 1988 that would send Pete O’Brien to the Pirates and a young John Smiley and a curly black wig to England to join Queen half-way through recording a farewell album).
Ryne Sandberg What can you say about him that hasn’t already been said: he was the 2B of the Eighties, and another ‘loser’ the Phillies got rid of in favor of the future Hall of Famer Ivan DeJesus. Man, who was running the Phils in the Eighties, anyway? Presumably it was someone who knew nothing about baseball. Or it could just as easily have been the work of a fictional character, like Mayor McCheese. Yes, that’s who I’m going to refer to whenever I talk about a bonehead move by the Philadelphia front office.
Barry Lyons Okay, now if this was truly a Perfect Pack, Barry Lyons would be Roberto Alomar or even Sandy Alomar, Jr. But, instead, it’s Barry Lyons: Mets back-up catcher extraordinaire.
Mike Moore What makes a baseball player successful in the eyes of those who follow the game? Is it consistent greatness or do you just need to have a flash-in-the-pan brilliance about you that convinces others to see something that may or may not really be there? Take Mike Moore for example. The guy had one good year, where he won 17 games. Every other year (up until this card was printed) he was a lousy pitcher on a perennially lousy second-division team. So why do I think of him as a good player? Is it because I think he looks like a Punch and Judy puppet? Or is it the Chris Bosio Theory, that he’s considered a success but wasn’t ever really one? I’m full of questions today.
Mike Flanagan By this time Flanagan wasn’t very good. But that’s all right. He had already proved he would always be viewed as a successful major league pitcher. A definite plus to an already halfway-decent pack.
Steve Lombardozzi His inclusion doesn’t hurt the overall rating of the pack because of his name (and because he was a World Series hero, but mostly because of his name). I understand how shallow that sounds, but it isn’t every day that you get a card of Lombardozzi. Especially growing up in Massachusetts, where the Boston Globe sportswriters like to beat it over your head when a player makes the majors who happens to be from a town in the state. Lombardozzi’s from Malden, and if you’ve never been to Malden then you haven’t lived. Actually, the last part of that’s not really true.
Carlton Fisk Diamond King Yes, I actually got a Diamond King. Remember the year that Donruss pulled them from the regular set and made them a special insert? Jeez, they were hard enough to get, let alone as an insert…Gotta love the DK of Fisk. I think he may be one of the only players to be a DK in more than one year while he was on the same team. Nolan Ryan was a King in 1982 with the Astros, then King of Kings in 1990 when he was on the Rangers. And I think Tony Gwynn was a King twice with the Padres.
Fred McGriff He was, inexplicably, one of my favorite players. I think it originally had to do with the fact that he was one of the most underrated players of his generation, he usually got the accolades but never the national press that followed others, and he played in relative obscurity for most of his career (except for the parts with the Braves). Because of all these things, he was always included in the great subsets and insert sets that took over in the mid to late 1990s, and his cards were always cheap. He may be the first Hall of Famer with a rookie card valued at less than $8.
Kirby Puckett I think I may have started to cry when I found out he died. When I was a kid I thought he probably wore eye black all the time (even when he wasn’t playing baseball), because it made him look tougher. Really, everyone should wear eye black all the time, because, hell, it does make you look tougher.
Ozzie Guillen It’s amazing, but at one time in the late Eighties, there were at least four Ozzies playing in the major leagues: Ozzie Smith, Ozzie Guillen, Ozzie Virgil and Ozzie Canseco. That is incredible. I don’t think there’s anyone with that name playing today.
Wally Joyner Did you know that Wally Joyner has acted in not one but two Mormon-themed movies? It’s true. In fact, his role in the first film was a recurring role in the second one. What did he play, you ask? Wally was an angel. I know, I know, those kooky Mormons. Next thing you know they’ll have Shawn Bradley play a talking tree (like that creepy tree from the old Fun Fruits commercials, only really pale and 7’6” tall).
Ray Hayward I can’t tell you who this guy is or what he accomplished on the field, but I can tell you that he was traded from the Cubs with another nobody for a nobody apparently worth two nobodies. And all of it happened on St. Patrick’s Day, 1988, a day when many nobodies got drunk for no other reason than they were alive and they liked to drink. At least Ray Hayward had a reason to get wasted.
Rick Sutcliffe I like Rick Sutcliffe. Did you know that the Cubs gave up Joe Carter and Mel Hall for him and Ron Hassey? It’s like they were convinced that Sutcliffe had a couple more seasons in him and Hassey had another perfect game in that gigantic brain of his. Of course, they were right on both accounts, though Hassey’s second perfect game would come when he was with the Expos.
Kevin McReynolds Oh my God, I got Kevin McReynolds. I think his cards completed the holy triptych of Over-Hyped Met Rookies (Gregg Jeffries and Kevin Elster were the other two), though, now that I think about it, wasn’t he an Over-Hyped Padre Rookie? Along with the worthless-upon-impact #1 Draft Pick card of Shawn Abner from the 1985 set. Either way, I got excited when I got a card of him and I don’t think he was really that good to begin with. Isn’t it funny how card value and actual, statistical performance never seem to quite match?

Overall Analysis

It’s not every day that you get two bona fide superstars, a Diamond King worth something in a trade, your favorite player, four good to very good pitchers, and Wally Joyner and Ozzie Guillen all in the same pack. The success rate here is a mighty 73% (11 good to great cards out of a possible 15), so I’m not so far off-base to call this a Perfect Pack. In fact, it’s a very apt title. What would have made this an Über Pack would be the inclusion of at least one Red Sox player, preferably Ellis Burks. If I didn’t already know that Mayor McCheese was running the show down in Philly, I would’ve sworn he was behind the scenes in Boston when the Sox inexplicably dumped Burks to make room for the immortal Bob Zupcic (sidebar note: you know how Baseball Reference lists ten players the player in question is most like? Well, #9 on Zupcic’s list is the great Olympian Jim Thorpe (who was generally a horrible baseball player)).

Fight! Fight! Fight!

After watching the ’Stros roundly beat the tar out of the Cubs that afternoon, Hal Lanier and Jose Cruz decide to celebrate down under Michigan Avenue at the Billy Goat Tavern. Little did they suspect to find Carlton Fisk and Robin Ventura parked at the bar, well into their fifth round, after mistakenly dressing up in their early Twentieth century unis on the wrong day for the White Sox Old Timers Game. Lanier and Cruz take stools towards the end of the counter, but when Fisk notices Lanier across the crowded room, he lumbers over to him and after slinging an arm over Lanier’s and Cruz’s shoulders, loudly calls him ‘Bob,’ and goes on to boom out a story about he and Dewey Evans got to meet him in the dressing room after a well-fought game against the Celtics in the old Boston Garden. When Lanier can finally get a word in, he tells Fisk he’s got the wrong man. Fisk, now belligerent, demands an autograph from Lanier. Lanier refuses. Fisk calls him a name. Cruz stands up. Ventura rouses himself and jumps to back up Fisk. Fisk quickly strips to the waist and, raising his fists, calls Lanier out. Out of nowhere a ring is drawn on the floor in chalk. What follows is tag-team, stripped-to-the-waist, bare-knuckle fisticuffs, 1890s-style.

So who wins? Will Hal Lanier have to sign a basketball for Carlton Fisk? Will Jose Cruz get to try out those roundhouse leg sweeps he’s been practicing out in his garage late at night? Does Robin Ventura even know where he is?

You tell me.

I learned something really great just now: U.L. Washington’s real first name is U.L. For that reason alone, U.L. Washington’s rookie card is the Fantastic Card of the Day. Really, for all the stuff that’s been written about classic sports names, it really doesn’t get any better than having initials as your real name (sidebar: my own grandfather’s real name was B.F.; his father’s first and middle names were Benjamin and Franklin, so they shortened it). It gets you thinking…did U.L. have a relative with a name like…Uncle Levi? See? I can’t even think of a man’s first name that starts with the letter ‘U’. Also great about this card, it’s Mickey Klutts’ rookie as well. That’s two great names on one card. I think the only way that this could’ve been topped was if Bake McBride and Sixto Lezcano somehow ended up on the same card.

And personally, I would like to know what happened to Sixto Lezcano. I’m not so concerned about Bake. With a name like Bake McBride you will pretty much have the best life imaginable: get up around 2pm every day, sit around, maybe make some microwave macaroni and cheese, watch Jeopardy!, prank call Larry Bowa, Google yourself, call your country-singing wife Martina McBride who’s out on the road touring, and maybe watch a little Nick at Nite. Then later head down to the basement, smoke part of one of the Championship joints from 1980 you keep in that old cigar box next to the furnace, burn a little incense, get out that Wailers record that opens like a lighter, put on your engineer’s cap, flip on the transformer and generally chill out while your massive, basement-engulfing O-scale model train setup does its thing.

But Lezcano—I wonder if he tried to hold a job down after retiring, like driving a snowplow. Or did he tour the globe, one vegetarian restaurant open-mic night at a time, playing acoustic guitar? Or maybe he’s one of those genius hermits who sell their World of Warcraft characters on eBay? Or, best of all, did he become a pirate? Does he live on a ghost ship or on a deserted island? And drink rum around gigantic bonfires with Keira Knightley? I can see it now, them staying up for hours, just talking, (because Sixto can listen, baby), she telling him about how Orlando Bloom can’t act his way out of a cardboard box and he regaling her with stories about Charlie Moore, Dick Davis and the rest of Bambi’s Bombers and how Keith Richards—his real father—coaxed him to retire and focus on the open road and eventually the open sea, armed with just a pair of spikes and a six-string, El Mariachi-style. Him being Richards’ son would explain Sixto’s vast improvisational skill on the guitar, as well as his passion for hard liquor and telling rambling, hard-to-believe tall tales about Gorman Thomas, Pete Vukovich and the night he invented the drum solo at Ben Ogilvie’s jazz joint.

One final note about U.L. Washington. I think it would be really awesome if major league baseball was dissolved today and a new league of warring legions, based on where you lived and where you grew up (but also based on bloodlines and having the same last name) took its place. That way Rocco Baldelli would be on the New England team and U.L., Claudell and Ron Washington would’ve been on the same team, and the backs of their uniforms would’ve been fun because it would just say ‘Claudell’ or ‘U.L.’ or ‘Ron.’ Also, I would make Paul Newman the honorary manager, and I would hold a special ceremony before the team boarded the bus for the first time and give the three Washingtons a suitcase containing a slot car racing set and three pairs of black hornrim glasses.

When I would choose to collect a new set, a deciding factor to go for it would be whether or not the set featured special cards. Topps pioneered the special card, starting with the O’Brien Brothers card in the 1954 set and the Mantle/Berra card that closed the 1957 set. The special became a staple in the Sixties, didn’t really hang around in the Seventies and then was brought back into the fold by Fleer in the Eighties. And for the most part, a special featured all-star caliber players. I can’t put into words the momentary excitement and longer-lasting disappointment of finding a special card in your pack and have it feature Howard goddamn Johnson.

Topps always made the special card relevant and topical. For the most part they featured at least one player anyone cared about, (and when Upper Deck came around in the Nineties they realized this and kept the tradition alive), but for a while there in the Eighties and early Nineties, it seemed like the hapless Fleer photographer went to a bunch of games and got random players to stand next to each other, then went back to his station wagon in the parking lot and wrote a couple sentences of how the two players might connect. Juan Samuel and Tim Raines? How about Doubles and Triples? It almost sounds like they’re on one of the teams in the Laff-a-Lympics. How about Dave Winfield and Kent Hrbek? They look like they’ve never met, but presumably Mr. Veteran and Mr. Rookie are best buds and only rivals in the press. Here’s how one of their conversations might have gone:

Hrbek: I enjoy hunting and fishing in the off-season.
Winfield: I once killed a bird on the field then crouched over its carcass and ate it raw.
Hrbek: Okay. I was actually going to ask you about playing in San Diego but now I don’t know if I want to.
Winfield: I liked the sea birds there ’cause it’s warmer. The meat isn’t as tough.
Hrbek: Uh-huh.
Winfield: I used to keep a hutch in my backyard and sometimes if the moon was full I’d go out there and just sit.
Hrbek: Oh yeah? You know, I’m pretty good at mimicking birdcalls.
Winfield: And then I’d bite the head off one of them if it made eyes at me. I can see pretty well in the dark, so it’d really have no chance of flying away and make me think it wasn’t them. But one got away once…
Hrbek (throwing his voice to make it sound like Twins Manager Billy Gardner): Hey Rook! Get in the cage!...Well, nice talking to you. See ya around.
Winfield (staring into space): I tracked it down, though. I killed it on the field and then crouched over its carcass and ate it raw.

And how about Robin Yount and Buddy Bell? First of all, implying that Bell is worthy of taking part in a Superstar Special (or really anyone on the 1982-3 Texas Rangers with the exception of Ferguson Jenkins) is an exaggeration, but it does allow us to see what Ric Flair looked like as a younger man. Are you kidding? The two must be brothers, if not the same person. Have you ever seen them in the same room together? And if you have, what kind of function were you at?

Donruss tried to get in on the action with one or two special cards per set, but never really knew how to finesse it. Take this card of Vince Coleman and Wille McGee from the 1986 set. No, Vince is not a ventriloquist’s dummy sitting on McGee’s lap, though it does seem that way. Donruss gets points for the topic and the players chosen, but just as promptly loses those same points for having one of their crack high school graphic designers make Coleman look tiny in comparison to the gargantuan McGee. Seriously, they’re on the same team; just make them stand next to each other. You could probably even convince them to hug or high-five and smile winningly at the camera, like an Olson Twins poster. It was probably for the best that Donruss didn’t waste their time with the special card (they had the incomparable Diamond King, after all); Fleer did make some beauties.

I remember buying the Gooden/Clemens card at a show. I think I paid a dollar for it, but it was totally worth it. I think that if I saw this at a show (if I went to shows today) I’d probably still pay a dollar for it, that’s just how awesome this card is. Think about it: two great pitchers at the top of their game, meeting in the World Series, from one of the best sets of the decade on one of the most desirable cards from the set. You’re goddamned right I’m gonna pay a dollar for that. One of the best cards ever (even if I don’t really care about either player, nor would I give either a dollar if I saw them on the street…unless I had a camera with a timer and we could recreate the photo on the card. Then I might consider giving Dwight Gooden a dollar, though the most I’d give Clemens is maybe twenty-five cents, and then only if he needed a quarter and I had one and he had two dimes and a nickel…but not if he only had nickels. I really don’t like getting so many nickels). And how cool is the Al Oliver/Tim Raines double special card from the 1984 set? Wicked cool. Look at their expressions: Raines wants to hurt someone; Oliver is just happy to have all his limbs intact and still be playing.

The last great Fleer superstar special is from the god-forsaken 1991 set (the one that made you barf when you opened the first pack of the year, and even though you tried to convince yourself that it was going to be okay and you kept buying packs, it wasn’t going to be okay. It was never going to be okay). ‘Second Generation Stars’ Ken Griffey, Jr., and Barry Bonds. What a card, and you know, it’s not very valuable (but only because Fleer sent a PO to the printer with a few extra zeroes in the quantity ordered). They both look normal in the picture, just like regular guys. If you took their picture together now, Griffey would look the same, maybe a little heavier with added weight from age and Bonds would look like he ate a still-inflated moonwalk.

In various ways in the early Nineties, Upper Deck tried to capture the same magic that Topps and Fleer were able to showcase. Some weren’t that great in the first couple of years, though by 1993 they hit a goldmine (if you ask me). With the Teammates subset, each team got a special card, and while some teams had questionable entries (who would you flank the immortal Brett with from the Kansas City Royals? Wally ‘The Mormon Ferris Bueller’ Joyner? Or maybe Gregg ‘Mickey Dolenz’ Jeffries? You tell me, because I’ve run out of ideas), most were good and a few were even fantastic. The Cleveland Indians card was fantastic, with Belle, Sandy Alomar, Jr., Thome, Baerga and Kenny Lofton. When this set came out, I thought four out of those five guys were going to the Hall of Fame. Okay, that’s a stretch, but Belle and Lofton for sure. The Yankees card and the Reds card were funny, if only because Roberto Kelly was on both of them. Gotta question the integrity of Kelly, don’t you? Or at least figure out who at Upper Deck was totally in love with him.

Fight! Fight! Fight!

Who would you pick in a fight?

Scenario:

Otis Nixon is waiting in line at a Luby’s Cafeteria, and all of a sudden Hall of Famer Robin Roberts cuts in front of him. Nixon’s pissed. I’m not sure if I’d provoke Robin Roberts if I were you, Otis. He may have cut in front of you, but you’re going to get your clock cleaned if you mess with him in his quest for the last piece of blueberry pie. Roberts goes for the piece of pie, Nixon bum-rushes him (still got speed, baby!), flips Roberts’ tray, Roberts reaches into his sock for his shiv and we got ourselves a fight!

Who’s going to win?

You tell me.

6 Pack Analysis: 1989 Donruss
Pack 4

You remember Lionel Simmons, one of those can’t-miss rookies on the Sacramento Kings in the early 1990s? And you remember how he went on the injured list because of Nintendo Thumb? Well, I’m left handed, but tonight on the train I noticed that my right thumb is slightly bigger than my left. In celebration of this discovery, I’d like to put forward a wholly unscientific explanation: my right thumb is bigger than it should be because I’ve given it a work out over the years opening packs and sorting through baseball cards. This explanation is much more comforting than the idea that something may be seriously wrong with me. Thinking about this got me thinking appreciatively about the fine art of opening a pack.

There are a few different techniques in opening a pack. I’d like to talk about two of them, and both techniques can be employed by the novice and the expert collector alike. First, there’s the Quickie, which involves ripping open the wrapper and then flashing through the cards in succession quickly. This way is good for when you’re on your way home from the drugstore or en route to a job interview or the emergency room and you just don’t want to deal with all that post-pack guilt (I’ve explained ‘post-pack guilt’ in an earlier post). The Quickie requires that you possess a basic knowledge of the set, current players and what constitutes a good card.

The second way to open a pack is the Set Builder. This involves examining the pack, examining each card and checking against the inventory in your head of cards you really need and others that you might as well throw away now before you get attached to them and they sit in your closet until a dusty afternoon when you visit your parents’ house and, just for the hell of it, you go digging for something really important in your closet and you remember, just as you open the door, “Oh right…baseball cards.”

To collect cards is to open packs. Since November or so I’ve been obsessed with finding a Perfect Pack—the chance occurrence that all of the great and good cards from any given set would make up one pack. But last night, while I opened Pack 4, my mind started racing: is there such a thing as pulling The Worst Pack Ever? There’s a very good chance, when you’re opening packs, that you’re going to get at least one half-way decent card. But what about the chances of not getting even one good card? I’ve gone to great lengths to assign statistical values to cards and assess Perfect Pack criteria, but I’ve not done the homework for what makes a pack The Worst Pack Ever (though I’m pretty sure that if you get doubles of Geno Petralli you’re almost half-way there). Is there a pack out there from a late-Eighties set full of Rangers, Expos, Phillies and Padres? I don’t know the answer, but I think I came pretty close to pulling The Worst Pack Ever last night with Pack 4 of my 6 pack analysis of1989 Donruss.

Pack 4

Tom Foley • Bill Long • Devon White • Alan Ashby • Tim Jones • Steve Jeltz
Ron Robinson • Shane Mack • Candy Maldonado • Andy Van Slyke
Joe Boever • Luis Rivera • Daryl Boston • Joe Hesketh • Ken Williams

I honestly couldn’t bring myself to go through them card by card. Not tonight. It’s like going through a roll call after a massacre. I know what you’re next thought it going to be: c’mon, Ben, it’s not that bad; you got Andy Van Slyke and Devon White in there. And technically you’d be right—those two guys were pretty good, even great at times. But their inclusion feel like a consolation prize somehow, like a Quality Control worker at Donruss looked through a random test pack and was like ‘Holy jeez! We can’t let a pack get out with Steve Jeltz and Shane Mack as the big prizes…quick, toss me one of those soon-to-be-worthless Devon Whites…”

Okay, just a few thoughts on some of the cards.

Steve Jeltz
I would like a Phillies fan to explain the mystery of Steve Jeltz to me. He barely hit his weight (he weighed 180lbs. with an average of .187 in 1988), he was somehow the Phils starter at short for a number of years, and his hair was unbelievably bad. And not just in this photo—every photo of Jeltz showcases his jericurl in full effect. Even his name suggests he’d sport the hairstyle or that he’d be really fast around the bases, though of course Jeltz didn’t hardly steal a base because he never got on base because he couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn if he drove at it in a dump truck. It’s almost like the Phillies spent a little too much time kicking themselves that they got rid of Julio Franco, so in 1985 the general manager dressed up as a woman and hit the dance clubs with a blank contract tucked in his garter. Result? Enter the hitless Jeltz.

Bill Long
This uniform takes me back. I played little league when these cards came out and my team was the White Sox. I still have my sweaty hat with the cursive C on it. We wore t-shirts emblazoned with ‘White Sox’ so we never got to wear the full kit. Which leads me to ask: did Bill Long spill chocolate or put a cigar out on his pants or is that big spot supposed to be there? Also, I’d really like to understand why pitchers often frown or stick out their lower lip in their wind-up. Bill Long’s expression suggests he doesn’t have teeth, or perhaps he chewed tobacco (or perhaps both). This would explain the spot on his pants: he wanted to spit out his chaw, but because he didn’t have teeth, his lips couldn’t hold it all in for an aimed spit, so it fell in his lap. Sick!

Ron Robinson
Unlike Long and countless others, Robinson always looked like was smiling when he pitched, like Bo Diaz flashed him a joke in finger signs and he couldn’t hold it in until after his delivery. Ron Robinson also had a rather weird shaped head, and in combination with his pillbox trucker hat and on again off again Maddox beard his head seemed about the size of a watermelon. It’s a miracle that Ron Oester could see the plate when standing behind him.


Shane Mack
I always had an indescribable relationship with cards of Shane Mack. I always felt like he was meant to be a star and if I willed him to be one then he would start hitting consistently, make the All-Star team and retire comfortably after leading his many different teams to the pennant. And after retiring, he and I would become pen pals and I would tell him how I had willed him to be a star and that he owed at least half his riches to me. He, of course, would send me a check in the mail, and after depositing the check, I would promptly go down to 47th Street and purchase the small, action figure-sized Al Pacino in Scarface encrusted in diamonds (complete with precious stone-encrusted machine gun). I’ve seen it with my own eyes. It does exist, so don’t even joke about me making this up. I would buy it if Shane Mack gave me half his savings, or even a small unspent portion of his 1991 World Series share, but things we dream do not always come to pass.

Joe Boever
When you start looking more and more at cards, you begin to notice that many players resemble one another, like those who play in the major leagues are part of a large, in-bred family (I don’t think this observation strays too far from the truth). In the case of Joe Boever, he looks a lot like Greg Maddux when Maddux sports a mustache, which leads me to another thought: what if the person of Greg Maddux was really Joe Boever all along? If so, it would make at least some sense: the journeyman reliever had a few seasons with a Maddux-in-his-prime ERA. So maybe it was actually the other way around: when Maddux got sick of piling up Hall of Fame credentials all the time for a consistent winner, he moonlighted as a journeyman reliever for a handful of teams until the mid-1990s, when he split with his ’stache, and therefore, his alter ego Joe Boever.

Devon White
How did this guy miss? He and Wally Joyner, they were supposed to carry the California Angels into the postseason year after year until they keeled over on the basepaths, and they’d be lovingly buried in center field and by first base, respectively, on the Angels home field. So what happened? Neither had bad careers, it’s just…I guess both were surrounded with so much hype and attention when they broke in in 1986 that they could never live up to the hope and dreams that fans and collectors invested in them. White was an All-Star, a winner of multiple Gold Gloves and hit for power, for average, he was fast and a great fielder. But really, if you look at the 1986 Topps Traded and 1987 regular issue Topps sets, only the Barry Bonds card has retained its value since they came out and even that too will eventually, inevitably drop.

Overall Analysis
Okay, so it’s not the Worst Pack Ever, but it’s certainly close. I got 3 Expos, 3 White Sox, and not even one Red Sox player (and that’s through four packs! Not even a goddamn worthless Jody Reed! What the hell?). I got mostly commons, some doubles from previous packs, and really no big stars if you don’t count Andy Van Slyke and Devon White. And even if you do count them, they’re not bona fide stars (I would say that both are regional stars at best, though nationally respected). I’d be pissed to get this pack. Hell, I am pissed to get this pack.

One of My Favorite Cards: 1959 Topps Coot Veal

As with other Topps cards where a nickname is used in lieu of a real name, the story behind the nickname is never explained. And really, with a nickname like ‘Coot’, nobody cares that your name is really Orville. In fact, it would be better if you signed your name ‘Coot’ and left Orville at home with the other Nineteenth century names. What would really take the cake would be if you went to the courthouse and had your name officially changed to ‘Coot’. Because really, if you were born with a name like Orville Veal, you’d be doing yourself a favor in changing it.

This is one of my favorite cards because the guy looks relatively normal but has an unbelievably ridiculous name. Every so often a guy pops up like this: Bake McBride, Shooty Babbitt, Razor Shines, Toe Nash and Stubby Clapp come to mind immediately, though there are others. I would argue that most great players are born, not made, but I think everyone would agree that unless your name is Cal McLish or Randy Ready, great names sometimes need a little help.

Everyone has a dream, and it’s good to have at least one that will probably never come true, because it gives you reason to keep going day to day because maybe someday, maybe even later today or tomorrow, the winds will change their course, the stars will align and it will come true. One of my dreams was to play for the Red Sox, and as a child I really thought it could happen. It sounds so naïve, so sweet, but really it was much more complicated than that. If I was on the Red Sox, then I could live at home in my parents’ house and my Mom and Dad could take care of me forever. Think about it: I’d never have to go to school, I could eat ice cream whenever I wanted and I could lounge around all the time…of course I’d also play 26 games a month as the starting left fielder for the Old Towne Teame. Which would mean that I’d be in incredible shape, though maybe I could get away with Ron Fairly’s physique from his 1979 Topps card.

Anyway, because I would be on the Sox, I would get my own baseball card. Really, that was one of the most important parts of this dream, and as I got older, while the part about living at home dropped out of the dream, the baseball card part didn’t. And if you really start thinking about it, if maybe you weren’t that good and were only in the league for one year, what if you got your own baseball card and it sucked? Like if they caught you picking your nose, or you were striking out or your eyes were closed, or there was a spot on your glasses, or maybe you had bad skin or had forgot to shave that day? The list is endless, and as you go through old stacks of cards you begin to notice a trend: a lot of players don’t always photograph well (the great ones included). Don’t get me wrong—I’d still love to have my own baseball card, no matter how the photo turned out. Because truly, some of the greatest cards are the ones with the worst, most embarrassing photos on the photographer’s roll, and some players, instead of being naturally ugly like George Foster, just can’t seem to get a break in the way they look in their photos.

For most of his career, Steve Carlton looked like a young Charles Grodin, but for a brief period in the early Eighties he just couldn’t get a break. Jeez, even the venerable Steve Stone, he of the commanding Seventies mustache looks bad in this Victory Leaders card from 1981 (did the Topps photo editors have to erase potentially embarrassing tattoos from his arms? They look they had been hermitically sealed and kept in a cool, dark place for many, many off-seasons…though maybe he lived in the Albino Village the editors at Weird New Jersey talk about in issue #8).

Or how about Tony Perez? Talk about bad card. His 1982 In Action card is really lame. The only part of him in action is his batting helmet, which for some reason is already flying off his head and he hasn’t even left the batter’s box. It usually took Rickey Henderson at least half-way to second before he lost his helmet. I guess at this point Perez just wanted to show the Sox brass that he could still run.

Some shots are too bad not to use. Like the 1975 Topps version of Ron ‘The Original DH’ Blomberg’s endless impersonation of the creepy Burger King mascot (the one with the wax-museum-on-a-hot-day face). Or like Kent Hrbek’s close-up on his 1983 Topps card. Or Curt Schilling’s headshot on his 2000 Fleer Tradition card, the one where it really looks like he’s wearing makeup and like he had some of Bill Buckner’s overzealous chest hair grafted where his own natural eyebrows should have been. Or Gary Carter’s ridiculous smile on his 1987 Topps All-Star card. It really looks like someone at Topps stole an animator’s clay face model for Roger Rabbit, chopped off the ears and dressed it up in a Mets uniform. Look at his All-Star card from 1982. He looks relatively normal. Something definitely happened to Carter besides getting older. It’s like he went to a plastic surgeon to get a facelift and the doctor accidentally gave him more wrinkles.

Then there are the cards that transcend time; the ones that embody a player’s entire career. I always thought it would be great to have George Brett as an uncle. This card only reinforces that. Can you imagine? That would mean that your father is Ken Brett, and that you would be relatively good-looking, and as a kid you would get to go in the clubhouse and meet all the players, and then hang with Uncle George, and he’d take you to dirt bike races and teach you how to eat a corndog and other fun things. I get this all from this one picture. But if your uncle was George Brett, then you couldn’t be related to Earl Weaver (unless they were related by marriage (not to each other)), and that brings up an important question that could be debated probably forever: Who was the biggest character in baseball in the 1980s? Was it Brett? Or Weaver? Or Rick Dempsey or the San Diego Chicken? My money’s on Weaver for one reason and one reason alone: there may have been other brilliant managers and other showmen with the umps, but who else could accomplish all that and sport this hair? Only Weaver. There is no other.

When a great player contributes a truly bad card, that’s how you remember them for years to come, maybe even for their entire career or your entire life. It’s like a great director putting their name on a shitty movie. Because seriously, how could War of the Worlds have sucked as hard as it did with Spielberg at the helm? Ohhhh, like that. I’ll remember that movie for a long time, not only because it sucked, but the way it sucked was astonishing. I saw it at the Ziegfeld and for the first twenty minutes I thought ‘Man, this is gonna rock all the way through!’ And I couldn’t have been further from the truth. You know, I was going to talk about Dwight Gooden’s conventional Topps rookie card from 1985, and how ugly and old he looked in the photo, but now that I think about it, his career and War of the Worlds are so similar that it’s hard to pass up the opportunity of comparing the two. Okay, Gooden comes on the scene in 1984, the Topps and Fleer Traded sets go through the roof, and he’s unbeatable for about three years, and, like the first twenty minutes of the movie, everything’s all normal. Tom Cruise’s life is kind of a steadfast hardship and all of a sudden shit hits the fan, a giant storm comes out of nowhere and aliens are transferred through bolts of lightning in what is the highlight of the film. From there, Tom Cruise’s life gets all messed up and that damn kid won’t stop screeching. And that’s pretty much the whole movie. All the aliens die, Cruise’s other kid walks into a fireball but somehow easily survives, and, in the other highlight of the film, Cruise kills a unintentionally-hilarious psychopathic Tim Robbins with a shovel off-camera, like somehow the production ran out of money and didn’t want to have to choreograph that fight. I personally would’ve liked to see how the 4’ 10” Cruise might kill the 7’ 3” Robbins with a hoe and a shovel. Does he hit him over the head? And how exactly does he pull that off? Similarly, Gooden—for roughly twenty minutes of his career—can walk through fireballs and come out okay. But then all of a sudden he’s a coke addict, and his career begins to suck real hard, and while that might be slightly disappointing for a movie that had a good chance to be enjoyable, it’s heart-wrenching to watch in a person so good at what they do, someone with endless potential. And for some reason you can see all of this in his 1985 Topps card. It’s like he can see that he’ll get to live his baseball dream, but it’s going to be a long hard road, and, unlike his counterparts in War of the Worlds, he’s not entirely sure that he’ll make it out in one piece.

I won’t get to live my baseball dream. And though I’ve learned how to make my own baseball card, it’s not the same. But I’m okay with that.

Fantastic Card of the Day

For some reason, Kirk Gibson’s career didn’t end with that home run in the 1988 World Series (though it probably should have). And if you watch the tape of that at-bat and his mangy, hobbled lope around the bases, it’s like a crystal ball look at the rest of his career (minus the glory). Here was a guy—a borderline superstar for the Tigers—reduced to being a journeyman for the Royals and Pirates before coming home to Detroit to finish what should’ve ended after the Dodgers won it in ’88. But the reason why this card is the Fantastic Card of the Day is because you’d never know he’d lost his power. Look at him: he really looks like the Incredible Hulk or maybe an older, balder Hulk Hogan, training for a comeback. I want someone to film a rock-opera version of The Kirk Gibson Story, starring a clean-shaven Burt Reynolds as the older Gibson looking back on (and singing about) his days with the Tigers and the Dodgers. I’m going to work on the casting, but they could definitely get Warwick Davis to play Alan Trammell (though they’d always have to shoot tight close-ups, which might prove iffy during lengthy dance sequences) and maybe The Edge would play Jack Morris and David Bowie Orel Hershiser (and maybe they could write a whole Hershiser subplot with a song called The 59 Innings of My Heart). And how about Carl ‘Apollo Creed’ Weathers to grow back some kick-ass facial hair and don the spikes as Chet Lemon? I might pay to see that movie.

In fact, you get Jose Canseco and Tony LaRussa to redo the Puttin’ on the Ritz number from Young Frankenstein and I might pay full price.

One of the best things about Beckett Baseball Monthly is that they publish letters from readers. I always feel let down when they don’t publish more of them, and over the years the number of pages of letters seems to have dwindled (much like the pages of the price guide of the sets that matter—those made 1992 and before. Have you noticed that? Here…in the December 2005 issue, three pages encompassed all sets between the T206 in 1909 and the 1994 Collector’s Choice Gold Signature parallel set, while the year 2004 took up fifteen pages alone. I think that’s crap, though I know your argument: that’s what Beckett Vintage is for, but where can I find that publication? Somebody email me and tell me). So in the spirit of Readers Write, I give you Ask Ben a Question Or Tell Ben A Story.

I’d like to kick things off by saying that it pleases me to no end that so many people like reading, talking and sharing about baseball cards. When I was a little kid (and even to a certain extent as a teenager), it always amazed me that other people collected cards, though I doubted that they reserved the same passion and time and energy for it that I did. And on those rare Saturdays that I bought cards down at the Watertown Mall during one of their saggy versions of a baseball card show, I always thought I was giving my new cards a good home, a better one than they had known in the back of some crusty old dealer’s station wagon. And while they may have seen more of the world than I had, I still thought I was doing them a favor, and that someday they would thank me. I’m not entirely sure how the cards were going to thank me, but I like to think that the cards I welcomed into my life appreciated my fervor for them. Anyway, it’s nice to know that there are others like me out there (and that they’ve found this little site and have contributed in their own way to its existence).

Also, I know that many readers have wanted to leave a comment on a post, but didn’t want to go through the hassle of signing up for Blogger. I can’t say that I blame you. Here’s the situation: Josh has done a great job of keeping the site up to date, like with the search and RSS features, but we really just don’t have the money to pay for our own hosting. It’s as simple as that. And until we have our own hosting, I don’t think there’s anything we can do. Post a comment anonymously or email me. I read all the emails I get and in the future will try to answer as many as I can, either privately or through this kind of post. Speaking of that, let’s get to the questions and/or stories…

Was there a demand for a "baseball button"? Until I had them, I would never have believed that some folks might want to wear a small button image of their favorite player on their lapel. After I had them, I was sure of it. Was this some kind of pay-off with the ever-powerful button folks or was this just an ill-conceived idea? Why are they so goddamn worthless today? Back in the day, I can remember actually thinking "these are so unusual (read: idiotic) they will be worth big dollars in the future." Now they're going for $4.50 for a big unopened box?

Richard, via email

I’ve never lost sleep over it, but the baseball button (and the baseball disc and the baseball coin, for that matter) has been a perplexing contribution to the world of baseball-related stuff. It really is weird: these things, no matter their age, have very little value. Oh sure, if you have a Christy Mathewson Sweet Caporal pin from 1910 with the small lettering, it’s going to be worth hundreds of dollars. But not thousands, like his baseball cards. Speed ahead fifty-five years to the Salada Tea coins and you’re looking at maybe just under $100 for a Mays or a Clemente in perfect condition, but that’s nothing in comparison with the value of their cards. And would you not agree that it would be harder to keep a metal pin or coin in good shape for fifty or even close to a hundred years than it would a baseball card? Both are hard to keep in good shape, but coins and pins (unless you collect political ephemera or are a high school kid sick of the world and love to rile The Man with hard-hitting photo pins of the New Kids on the Block and ironic post-modern wordplay, like ‘I brake for Cubans’) are not going to be in high demand and therefore quicker to wear, rust, getting crunched, lost in the air conditioning vent of your dad’s pickup truck or lodged in your throat. No one’s going to gag on a baseball card…unless, of course, it’s this mangled 1984 Nestle/Topps Darryl Strawberry.

I've got an unopened box of Donruss cards from 1990 or 1991. Are they more valuable as is, or would I be able to get more for them if I opened them and saw what I have there. Just curious.

Neil, via email

Neil, if you have spent the last fifteen or so years waiting for the right time to rip open that unopened box, now’s looking like a good one. And as much as it brings me pain to tell you this, they aren’t worth anything. In fact, I’m developing a theory that 1991 was actually the worst year for baseball cards and baseball card collectors (even though Topps Archives debuted that year, which got everyone in the Topps Fortress thinking about more ways to reap untold millions from their past).

In the late 80's-early 90's, Eric Plunk pitched for the Oakland Athletics. Check out his baseball cards, especially the 89 Donruss, and the 90 Topps. Long story short, a buddy of mine and I got drunk in high school when my parents were out of town. We got bored and went through my entire baseball card collection and decided Eric Plunk is the ugliest baseball player to ever live. Once you see the cards, you'll know what I mean.

Joel, via email

Eric Plunk was indeed a weird looking dude. But ugliest? To someone who’s drunk? I dunno…what about Kent Tekulve? Or Oil Can Boyd? Yes, that Oil Can Boyd, the one whom my dad approached in a hotel parking lot in Sioux City, Iowa, while The Can was addressing a streetwalker while sitting on the hood of his gigantic Town Car, or something equally ridiculous, like the Duke’s Cadillac in Escape from New York. And what was he doing in a parking lot in Sioux City, Iowa, let alone talking with a hooker? He had been thrown out of a game in neighboring Sioux Falls, South Dakota, so he obviously had time to get down without getting down on himself. So what did my dad tell him? He shook his hand and said “We love you, man.” I was never more proud of being a Red Sox fan in all my life.

Here's my Tom Gordon story, true story. At BP my wife was attempting to get our baseball signed by as many players as she could, so I took up the time talking to Tom Gordon. As many fantasy players and baseball card collectors have come to know, 2003, Tom Gordon was magically known OFFICIALLY as Flash Gordon on his cards, on MLB.com, and in fantasy games. So first thing I asked him was why his name was now Flash. Evidentally, he was heading to the shower and the MLB official asked what he wanted his official entry to be this year, and he jokingly said Flash. He comes out of the shower, and the chick is gone, and he's known as Flash in every program, card, website for the remainder of the year. In 2004, this was corrected, and he was once again known as "Tom" but I hope this story solves the riddle that only losers like me wondered to begin with.

Joe, via email

Thanks for the story, Joe. It gets you wondering, doesn’t it? I mean, I guess anybody could technically go down to the courthouse and change their name to Flash, too, but I don’t know if anybody would take a guy named Flash Nussbaum seriously.

I live in the Boston area & due to the insane prices of rent have often thought of selling off my old collection of baseball & basketball cards. Do you have any suggestions on the best way to go about getting rid of all of them at once?

Brent, via email

Brent, there used to be a monthly called the Want Ads. It was a great place to sell your baseball card collection, as well as used restaurant equipment or that old Camaro up on cinderblocks in your backyard in Revere. I don’t know if the Want Ads exist anymore, but the modern, Internet equivalent of this is Craigslist. I would try there. I would also ask around at card shops to see if they buy estates or private collections. I would try starting at J.J. Teaparty in Downtown Crossing (near Suffolk University) and go from there. The guys there are pretty knowledgeable and will most likely be able to point you in the right direction.

I’d like to wind this down with two requests from readers. I don’t think I’m going to be able to help them, but maybe someone else reading this will.

I love your site. Seeing the Gary Maddox card the other day reminded me of a great quote from Dave Parker. I guess it was during the late 70's & someone asked the Cobra about possibly playing in Philly & his response was, "It'd be great, we would have a greyhound in center, a pig in left, & Adonis in right."

Do you by any chance know the name of a set of cards that came out in the late '90's early 2000's that had absolutely awful "street cred" rhymes/poems about each player on the back of the cards? I can't find the few I had, but they are comic gold.

JD, via email

I know you just cover baseball cards, but I'm really looking for someone to unearth the mystery of the 1977 Topps Dan Fouts -- specifically why there's a wood-paneled station wagon in the background with some people milling around it. Did the Chargers play their home games in a local park? I really would like to find out.

Mike, via email

Hooray, now you really can Syndicate This Site.

Pack 3

I’ve stopped collecting more than once. I stopped in 1995 after putting together the first series of the regular issue of Upper Deck and then I started again in 2003 to put together the Topps Heritage set (I’m still only about 11 cards from completing the Master Set). After that set I stopped again. And the reason I stopped both times was because, to paraphrase B.B. King, the thrill was gone. At the time, I couldn’t quite put my finger on why I suddenly saw buying packs differently, but I think I’ve since figured it out.

There are two distinct feelings that a collector feels upon opening a pack. After the inspection of each card, the sorting by number, team and on a rank of good to bad and the search for a coveted insert card, one feeling is a nice, full contentment with the world, (that things would suddenly go my way because my skills at picking packs gave me a Brett, a Sandberg all-star, a Puckett and three Red Sox all in one pack). The other feeling would be a deep bitter resentment, that somehow the guy behind the counter with the b.o. and the nubby fingers and the stained shirt had willed me to find a bad pack, that if only I had bought another pack that one would’ve contained the Alomar rookie, but instead I ended up with doubles of Dennis Rasmussen, a checklist, Dane and Garth Iorg, a manager and a couple losers from the Tigers and/or Indians. Both feelings are valid, in fact equally important to someone who collects. You can’t really enjoy those great packs without going through the rock-bottoms of each set (my God, it’s really almost too much like a drug habit, isn’t it?).

So you want to know how to tell that you’re not an avid collector anymore? Go down the local CVS or the Wa-Wa, buy a pack of the new Topps (to be reviewed in detail next week here at Baseball Card Blog) and go through it like you used to when you were a kid. If you feel one of the two emotions described above, there’s still an avid collector somewhere inside of you. If you don’t feel anything (except maybe a small pile of guilt collecting in your gut from spending almost three bucks on a pack of baseball cards), then you’re not an avid collector anymore (or maybe you never were).

I feel that I haven’t had much of a connection to new cards, or really any major issue in the last ten years, but when I look through my old cards (like when I came across Otto Velez’s 1980 card and I realized he was only one letter away from having not one but two palindrome names) and when I open packs of 1989 Donruss (as I’ve done this past week) these emotions return (even though I know they never really left).

Pack 3

1. Kevin Gross I remember the most sought-after Phillies player from this set (besides Mike Schmidt) was Ricky Jordan. Other than Jordan and Schmidt, there wasn’t anyone worth having. Even Phillies fans didn’t buy their team set, except to get Jordan and Schmidt. You don’t believe me, do you? Well, here’s my case in point: Kevin Gross, excuse me pitcher Kevin Gross, in a batting helmet, obviously during batting practice. To me, this photo says that the best hitter on their team is their pitcher, and he better get in extra licks at the plate or the Phils won’t be in the hunt in October. It was fun and irreverent (or devastating and groundbreaking, depending on how you approach baseball cards) when Upper Deck showed Nolan Ryan in a tuxedo as part of series two in their breakthrough 1989 set—not when Donruss showcased Kevin Gross in his batting helmet. That was just sad.
2. Duane Ward It’s incredible, but Ward is almost an exact face double for Peter Saarsgard. I wonder if Maggie Gyllenhaal would also, by extension, date Duane Ward. Better keep her away from SkyDome during a Blue Jays Old Timer’s Who Were Never that Great game, or she might run on the field and kiss him on the pitcher’s mound, like a younger, waifish version of Morganna, the Kissing Bandit. Remember when you got up kind of early on Sunday mornings and watched This Week in Baseball? Morganna featured prominently on that show, especially when there were Nolan Ryan-related highlights. I think she kissed him more than anyone else. And every time he would say her name, Mel Allen felt an uneasy pang of jealousy…just once why couldn’t she sneak into the voice-over recording booth and smooch Mel Allen on the cheek while he was narrating a Rick Dempsey mad dash around the bases during a rain delay? They could’ve even given her a mike so that the world could’ve found out if she had a high, pip-squeak voice like I always thought Miss Elizabeth had (of Macho Man Randy Savage fame), or if it was a tracheotomy-like growl, like the Macho Man himself.
3. Ken Dayley Yet another player who looked a little like Judge Reinhold, but not enough to matter.
4. Chris Bosio Was it just me, or was there a conspiracy promoted by Chris Bosio’s agent, baseball card companies, sportswriters and major league franchises in the 1990s to make unsuspecting collectors and baseball fans think that Bosio was better than he actually was? I think Mark Portugal was in on it too, and maybe Delino DeShields. Whenever I come across cards of these guys I think “Wow, Chris Bosio! He was great, wasn’t he?” and I don’t know if I really believe that because I don’t know any better, or if I’m just lying to myself because that’s something I want to believe.
5. A Picture of the Completed Warren Spahn Puzzle This was always one of my favorite Donruss cards, any set, any year. And it’s funny, too, that in 1988 the card of the completed Stan Musial puzzle was one of the more desirable cards in the set because he’s the best player in the set. Not that Warren Spahn isn’t the best player in the 1989 set (he is), just that the 1988 set was a real snoozer (except for the Glavine, the Alomar, and the mother lode that briefly was Mark Grace).
6. Stew Cliburn Uh-huh.
7. Curt Schilling Gotta say, as a Red Sox fan, that I was really excited that we traded for Mike Boddicker. But I also can say that if the Sox had held on to Schilling and Brady Anderson, there’s your starting center fielder (if you move Dewey to the DH and convert Ellis Burks to right) and your starting rotation includes Clemens and Schilling.
8. Don Carman Another stellar Philadelphia Phillie, this one with a name like a small-time mobster. Says on the back that he lived in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, one of the most posh communities surrounding Philadelphia, and also home to Donovan McNabb. I wonder if McNabb moved there on recommendation of Don Carman, the import/export magnate and former Phillies mop-up pitcher.
9. Tom Brookens How’s this for a worthwhile, meaningful career: The only reason I know who Tom Brookens is is because of his error card in the 1989 Upper Deck set, and even then I don’t really know why that card is important. But, you know, this card of him has all the markings of a classically bad baseball card: Batting helmet, check. Big glasses, thick mustache…check and check. Bad lighting and batting glove, check, check. Photo obviously taken in an empty park during spring training? Done and done.
10. Chuck Crim Here’s my story of how Chuck Crim got his own baseball card, told in ten sentences or less. The Donruss photographers went to go take shots of the Brewers. One of them grew up a Milwaukee Braves fan, and asked if he could get dressed up and have his photo taken like a player in a Milwaukee jersey. The other photographers (roustabout paparazzi on loan from Star Magazine) kind of liked the idea and conceded. They took the guy’s photo and when they made it back to Donruss HQ, someone in the photo department came across the photo. Not knowing who it was, she sent it to research, who contacted the photographer pool, who said it was his good buddy Chuck Crim. Not knowing who that was, research assigned the job of stat check to an intern. Not finding a record for anyone named Chuck Crim, the intern made up stats for him and fudged the sources. Research hastily approved the name, the photo, the stats and sent the card to press. The intern even did a nice job of giving Crim rags-to-riches credentials, as at the bottom of his Career Highlights paragraph it says: “Was not even on Brewers’ 40-man roster in spring training ’87, but made team after compiling 1.08 ERA and 2 wins for 16 2/3 innings of work in Cactus Lg…”
11. Steve Sax The world had big plans for you, Steve Sax. What happened along the way?
12. John Tudor I’ve written about the idea of the ‘minor star’ or the ‘semi-star’ before, and I think you can say that the real gem beauty of the minor or semi-star is that in any given game they do something and show just the slightest flash of brilliance, and for that second it makes the audience perk up and gets their mind racing to think You know, John Tudor could make the Hall of Fame, if only he’d pitch like this every night… Really, it’s the Derrick Coleman Theory in basketball applied to baseball.
13. Nick Esasky I still would’ve been happy to get this double, because it would mean that, along with the Biggio double, I could probably trade them to my friend for a Ozzie Smith or Dave Winfield or maybe, if I threw in another couple cards, a Kirby Puckett MVP card, like the one on the box.
14. Randy Bush Back-up filler from the Twins.
15. Dan Pasqua Pasqua was the late Eighties version of the Matt Stairs Idea: he’ll give you some power, but he’ll also strike out a heck of lot and give you maybe 60 hits a year that aren’t homers, which means his average will be crap, and will probably bring down the team average. Rob Deer was this kind of player, and so was Greg Vaughn for most of his career (and our good friend Gorman Thomas, who I always thought was the most intimidating baseball player ever…I could picture him decked in furs, pillaging a Nordic village as easily as I could him signing autographs for sick children and sweating through a post-game interview).

Overall Analysis

Not a great pack. If this were still 1989, and I was still 10 years old, I would’ve been excited to get Schilling, Tudor, Sax, Esasky, the Spahn puzzle card, Pasqua and maybe Bosio (though I wouldn’t know why). That’s not bad, nearly a 47% success rate, though if I tried to trade those 7 cards at the time I probably wouldn’t even be able to get a Wade Boggs in return. And who wants a Boggs? Even his girlfriend threw him out of a moving vehicle.

Pack 2

There were a number of things that separated Donruss from Topps and Fleer (and later Score and Upper Deck). First, as Evan points out, they gave the full name of every player, so you could see that Roy Smalley really was Roy Smalley, Jr. (something you'd already know from the Topps father-son cards done periodically, but never while I was collecting cards). Topps did include full names in a few issues during the Fifties and Sixties, which was really great with players referred to by nicknames on the front of their cards, or had especially long real names, like it was with Cal McLish. I think his full name was Calvin Coolidge Julius Caesar Tuskahoma McLish (though he sometimes went by the nickname of ‘Buster’). Donruss would’ve had a field day with that one. Actually, they probably would’ve given him a larger All-Time Greatest Name card, similar to those special All-Star cards you got in weird grab bags sold at independent toy stores (the independent toy store of my childhood was Mr. Big on Moody Street in Waltham, Mass., where I remember making special trips with my Mom to buy packs of first and second series Garbage Pail Kids instead of basketball cards…I mean, getting Joe Blow in a pack was a big deal, and besides, nobody’s ever heard of Michael Jordan, right? So who would want his rookie card…jeez, hindsight’s a bitch sometimes).

Another thing that Donruss did that the other companies didn’t was that it listed how the player got on their current team (amateur draft, free agency or ill-advised trade), which I thought was actually the most fun thing about Donruss cards. I always loved sorting cards and coming across a player who got traded straight up for a future Hall of Famer, like Garry Templeton (though if I was the Padres GM at the time and someone told me I could get Templeton for Ozzie Smith, I might make that trade), or players involved in ridiculously complex trades that included a lot of nobodies and a superstar.

I’ve been giving it a lot of thought, and I think I’ve come up with some kind of break down of what each card company stood for. Topps was as American as a wood-paneled basement; it transcended the hobby. If your Dad stopped at the corner store on his way home and thought of you and bought a pack, it was most definitely going to be a pack of Topps. It being Topps brand baseball cards meant more to him as a grown-up reflecting on the hobbies of his youth than it ever could to you as a kid. Some things never change: Coca-Cola, IBM, Ford and Topps. Donruss and Fleer, no matter what your argument may be, were and always have been also-rans (Fleer less so than Donruss). Fleer was Topps’ little brother, the one who’d always try to prove he was cool enough—ever since the early Sixties. Donruss was the kid obsessed with numbers and computers, the one who saw beauty in facts, figures and statistics. Fleer always seemed to have a subconsciously soft edge to it, all rounded edges and brightness (a lot of white through the years), whereas with Donruss, it always felt like the cards were prepared by a mad mathematician intent on keeping thorough utilitarian statistics and couldn’t really give a shit about photography or design (as long as it had a futuristic, computer graphics appeal).

Pack 2

1. Mark Davis Are you kidding? I just got this card in Pack 1. This is a bad thing, and I remember from my pack-buying days that if you got a double right away, there was a better than very good chance you’d get other doubles in the pack. You’d be getting cards from the same press sheet, and after a while, like by May or something, you could predict which cards you’d get in a pack just by viewing the first card. Judging by getting Davis as the first card, I’d say it would be safe to assume I’ll get at least one of the following players in this pack: Chris Speier, Bob Kipper, Charlie Puleo, Mitch Williams, Steve Rosenberg, Mark McLemore, Craig Biggio and Jose DeLeon. That really doesn’t bode well for the chances of this being a good pack.
2. Candy Maldonado Well, I’ll tell you this: I’m happy it’s not Speier. I’ll also tell you that I never understood the draw of Maldonado. Wait, scratch that last sentence. After consulting the back of his card, it has come to my attention that Candy is short for Candido, which makes him Candido Maldonado, which is totally fantastic. I'd really like to make a comparison to Voltaire's Candide right about now, but Maldonado's career wasn't exactly a series of pratfalls before excelling in the playoffs with the Blue Jays. Nor do I know anything about his mental make-up (that is, if he was especially optimistic in the face of hardship), but I will say this: If I was a grown man and my name was 'Candy', there would be about a 100% chance that I'd either be the star of a real-life Midnight Cowboy or I'd be Candy Maldonado.
3. Ron Darling I always thought Darling kind of looked like a man version of Phoebe Cates, which in and of itself is totally messed up.
4. Rafael Palmeiro Raffy was always a favorite of mine, both because he seemed like a pretty average guy and because he played for perennially awful teams. Like everyone else, it was kind of hard to take watching him defend himself into retirement about steroids. I just ended up feeling bad.
5. Luis Rivera This is a pre-Red Sox Rivera, though even then he sported those Bob Watson glasses. Have you noticed, when perusing a Beckett monthly, that cards of players fetch more when they’re on a good team. Like Johnny Damon, for example, or David Ortiz. Damon’s cards from when he was on the A’s aren’t worth as much as when he was on the Red Sox. Same with Ortiz and his Twins cards (not counting his Fleer rookie). I always thought that was weird. On a completely different but very similar point, you’d think that Cub cards from the Fifties would be worth more, because people were probably more apt to destroying those than of the Yankees, Dodgers, Cardinals or Red Sox. But they’re not; Yankee and Dodger cards from the Fifties and Sixties go for about 1.5x the value of other teams. So I would guess then that this Rivera is worth roughly three cents (about one half of the value of one of his cards from when he was on the Red Sox).
6. Steve Rosenberg Steve Rosenberg. That’s two. There will be more.
7. Mark McLemore Oh Donruss print runs, why do you taunt me so? Even 17 years later, you still get the better of me.
8. Craig Biggio I’m not really mad about this double, because it still counts towards the merits of the pack, which up until now were looking kind of iffy.
9. Jose DeLeon I hate you, Jose DeLeon.
10. Milt Thompson Here’s where things get tricky. It’s hard to say whether the seeding sequence of cards 6 through 9 ends with DeLeon, or if it continues with the rest of the pack. This could set a precedence for Packs 3 through 6, especially if they’re all from the same press run. On Thompson: I always felt kind of bad, that he was going to be on bad teams for his whole career (early Eighties Braves, late Eighties Phils), and he was a pretty good player.
11. Norm Charlton A really boring card of a pitcher I never understood. Is there such a thing as a player having a filler career? There were years when Charlton was good, right? But his career just kind of feels like it happened because it had to have happened to somebody. That last sentence sounds awfully mean, and I know that it takes a lot of perseverance to make it to the big leagues, but still…
12. Chris Brown Nothing like having your photo for the year be one of you checking your swing. What does that say about you as a player? That you’re conscientious? That you maybe didn’t read The Science of Hitting all the way through, but you skimmed part of it when Tony Gwynn was taking a nap?
13. Craig Lefferts I always thought it was risky being in the major leagues and being named Craig. Just ask Craig Nettles. Or was his name Graig Nettles? I honestly don’t know, as most of my knowledge of baseball comes from baseball cards. It’s like your fate is decided by a design student interning for the summer at a card company. You’re lucky if your card comes out without your photo being reversed (just ask Juan Gonzalez or Brian Downing) or of someone else (just ask Carlos Beltran, Barry Bonds and Johnny Ray and Al Leiter), your stats are all right (I can think of at least two instances of stat typos) and they have your position listed correctly (just ask Ryne Sandberg). It’s amazing there weren’t more mistakes.
14. Bob Walk This guy wasn’t that bad. If only he was sporting a mustache in this picture, then he and Drabek could’ve gone out to bars and tried to get women to think they were twins.
15. Andre Dawson Holy crap, it’s Eriq LaSalle from Coming to America! The Hawk was one of my favorite favorites ever. I can’t believe he’s not in the Hall of Fame yet. When he gets in, does he go in as an Expo or a Cub? I think you could make a case either way. Personally, I’d like to see him go in as an Expo, if only to keep the Montreal Expos in baseball forever.

Overall Analysis

It’s a shame this pack was full of doubles from a previous pack, but like assessing a defendant’s guilt during trial, you really can’t take past problems into account. So, as a pack, it’s got a 27% success rate, with 4 good cards out of 15 (Palmeiro, Darling, Biggio and Dawson). Still no Red Sox players, not even Wes Gardner, which is surprising because I remember having about 100 of his card from this set.

A few months ago, when I first thought about writing about baseball cards, I bought two boxes of cards from Dave and Adam’s Card World. I got a big box delivered to me at work (because having a package delivered to your apartment in New York City is just about the worst thing you can imagine), and upon having it handed to me, my coworker fell back in shock as I instantaneously regressed back into a nine year old boy having his birthday and Christmas all rolled into one. The boxes were case-fresh and came padded with Styrofoam peanuts.

If you never collected cards, there are no words to describe the feeling of seeing two whole boxes placed in front of you, 36 packs to a box. There really aren’t. I spent under $20 and I got maybe 200 hours of pure enjoyment, with none of that horrendous post-pack-binge guilt of blowing fifty bucks on new cards while children are starving all over the planet and here I am an adult, when I should really give the money to charity or treat me and my ladyfriend and the old guy down the hall out to Popeye’s and then maybe go rent Awakenings again. You know. To feel good about myself and that I’m not a vegetable in the psycho ward at Bellevue. And it would be okay if I cried, because that’s Robert DeNiro up there taking all those drugs—for the good of science and progress—and if you can’t cry during a DeNiro movie, then you’re not a man. But I didn’t have to go through all that, because I bought these cards wicked cheap.

The boxes I bought were 1987 Topps and 1989 Donruss. I thought this would be a good starting point: late-Eighties sets full of stars, semi-stars, Hall of Famers and rookies. (As a sidebar, is there any more intoxicating word or phrase than ‘rookie card’? I would bet that, for card collectors at least, this is one the most powerful phrases in their lives, right up there with ‘I don’t know…take them all for a dollar,’ and ‘Holy shit—it says ‘Fuck Face’ on the end of his bat!’ There are also pretty good cases for ‘game-used,’ ‘short print’ and ‘Joe Charbonneau’, but ‘rookie card’…I dare you to name another hobby-related word or phrase as captivating.)

And when I started to write, I thought it would be interesting to tackle two major issues. The first is interesting, but not really relevant to this post, so I won’t really get very far into it. I was going to try to figure out the Topps system of card numbering, based on established stars, their past season’s performance and other special factors (with numbering rewards set to both bases of 9 and 10, so for instance, both the numbers 500 and 221 would be excellent; 500 because many years that was reserved for Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays, and 221 because it would fall in the center of a page of cards…if you were an über-nerd and bought Ultra-Pro (or cheap imitation) clear plastic pages and showcased your sets in three-ring binders).

The second issue I wanted to research was the idea of pulling the ‘Perfect Pack’. I figured out a system of positive and negative statistical ranking of cards in any given set based on player, team, whether it was a special card or not, whether it was a harder to find card, whether it was a double or a real loser. An example of a real loser card would be Manny Lee, Toronto Blue Jays, 1987 Topps. I opened maybe ten packs of those and found Lee’s card in almost every pack. Therefore, based on the fact that he’s a Blue Jay, he’s not a star or even a remotely decent player and that his card could possibly have been double or even triple printed that year makes him a ‘Real Loser Card.’ And while statistics are fun to figure out (hell, most of what makes baseball great is that people who will never, ever be able to hit a baseball going faster than 60 miles an hour can make snap a judgment about a player’s soul based purely on their statistical career), they don’t make for consistent storytelling (at least not in my case).

I figured that a Perfect Pack must be assessed based on the merits of each card and how they complement each other. That’s why, over the next week, I humbly present to you a 6-pack qualitative analysis of 1989 Donruss.

Pack 1

The first thing I want to say before I open the pack is that I never found Donruss wrappers especially intoxicating. I bought the cards not because I was drawn to the packs, but to simply keep up with my friends. I was always drawn to Topps packs; there was something especially Pop Art about them that I liked. Another thing I want to add is that a very good argument can be made that the grading and condition grades of cards have been relatively meaningless since the advent of foil packs. When cards came in wax packs, the wrapper had a way of destroying or staining or sticking to cards, thus killing their value before you could even see if it was a Joe Boever or Dave Parker all-star. Foil does not interact with the cards in any way (plus, and this might be the more telling thing about why card conditions are almost meaningless now, cards are almost all glossy today). Do you remember the Topps Tiffany sets in the Eighties? I always thought it was lame to have glossy cards; I thought it meant the card was a special send away or you bought them at Kay Bee Toys or Toys-R-Us and that therefore the only place you’d be able to find their pricing would be in the Sportscard Collector Digest yearly price guide.

I remember on more than one occasion coveting the possibility of selling all my Todd Worrell rookie cards and turning a handsome profit, which would then be invested back into Robin Ventura rookie cards and thus would begin a vicious cycle of believing every bloated price I found in those ridiculous yearly guides.

Really, putting prices in yearly guides should be outlawed. If a company wants to put out a yearly guide, it should be a large book full of pictures of each card from each set. It would be more of a yearly compendium of cards, like a visual checklist. Actually, I can picture Beckett doing one of these for every year and calling it the Visual Encyclopœdia of Baseball Cards. I know I would buy something like that; no pricing, just a big picture book of every card produced from a given year. 1958 would be about ten pages long and 2003 would be somewhere around six hundred pages long—but I would buy both volumes because both years are equally important in the progress of baseball cards. Maybe we could petition Beckett to team with Taschen and make these books affordable…anyway, on to Donruss, 1989.

The Wrapper
It says on the bottom of the pack that if you sent 3 wrappers and $8.00 and $2.00 for shipping, Donruss would send you the Diamond King set in jumbo version. Did anyone actually do this? None of my friends did this, and I don’t think I had $10.00 at any one time until I was 14 years old. If you’re reading this and you sent away for these cards, please email me. I want to see one of these things, because the Diamond Kings were always a highlight (especially when you found out that the Padre DK was someone like Tim Flannery or Eric Show…jeez, what a waste…).

The Puzzle Piece

I’ve railed against the merits of inserting a puzzle piece before, so I’ll spare you that diatribe here. But seriously, what was the point? I would’ve been much happier if they’d inserted coupons for mayonnaise or an instant-win scratch ticket, you know, to get kids addicted to gambling just like their favorite sports heroes.

1. Carlton Fisk Fisk was always a favorite of mine, and before I knew the whole Haywood Sullivan-Shoddy LeRoux contract story, I never knew why he left Boston. Also, what makes this card great is that in 1989 someone at Donruss woke up and had the big idea to show players in dramatic, Roy Hobbs-style action poses. Fisk is great here, more than compensating for the ridiculous White Sox uniform.
2. Willie Fraser I don’t know anything about Willie Fraser, but again, another dramatic shot with the player’s face in darkness.
3. John Fishel This could very well be Fishel’s only Donruss card, and the fact that he got a card goes back to the filler theory. The back of the card tells of great things to come for Fishel, that he was going to land the Astros’ utility job in ’89. He also kind of looks like a clean-shaven John Kruk in his photo, like Meatloaf lost a few pounds (but not too many), cut his hair to a manageable mullet and learned how to bend at the knees.
4. Jose Oquendo Yes, it’s true: I’m a Jose Oquendo fan, if purely because he could play at every position. On the front of his card here it gives him the position of IF, and I bet that sparked a debate at Donruss when they were doing research and the layout for his card. Also exciting: it says on the back that he was traded from the Mets to the Cardinals for Angel Salazar, the very same Argenis Salazar I wrote about a few weeks ago.
5. Darren Daulton When the mooooon is in the seventh house/and Jupiter aligns with Mars/then peace will guide the plah-ah-nets/and Dutch will take his place among the stars…
6. Nick Esasky I remember I was excited when the Red Sox signed Esasky. Then it turned out he had chronic vertigo or some kind of vestibular neuritis and he couldn’t play baseball anymore. He was one of those guys who would alternate having good and bad years, like he would hit twenty homers (when that meant something) and then he’d relax the next year and only hit twelve, then feel threatened by the idea of Schottzie sending a passive-aggressive message from management and pooping in his locker and he’d go out and hit twenty again.
7. Mark Davis This guy got a ridiculously gigantic contract, right? For doing almost basically nothing, right? Or am I confusing him with Mike Moore? Is he the one who won the Cy Young for one of those crap Padre teams in the Nineties, or am I confusing him with someone else named Mark Davis? If you want to talk about achieving large things in baseball and still maintaining anonymity, I think Mark Davis might be your man…or I could be thinking of somebody else.
8. Chris Speier He bounced around, didn’t he? He may actually have been more of a success if he hired himself out as a Steve Garvey lookalike. Garvey don’t want to be in court that day? Send Speier! Actually, maybe he looks more like Wayne Gretzky. Hope he can skate.
9. Bob Kipper The Pirates had a deep roster in the late Eighties early Nineties, but apparently that didn’t stop them from holding local Who Wants to Pitch Tonight for the Pirates? contests, of which Kipper was a winner. Oh wait, I just read the back of his card…he was part of the trade that took Candelaria out of Pittsburgh. And isn’t Kipper a kind of fish? I bet he never had anyone tell him that he was the Fish that Saved Pittsburgh.
10. Charlie Puleo Yeah, not a great card. Double negative points for being a Brave.
11. Mitch Williams Shit, man, it’s motherfuckin' Mitch Williams! Somebody break out the effin' PBR...I’m sorry for all the swearing, it’s just a knee-jerk reaction whenever I see Wild Thing’s face…he’s even got a wispy soulpatch going…this is what I think of when I think of Texas, don’t you?
12. Steve Rosenberg Ray Romano meets Ozzie Canseco. Did he ever get in a game?
13. Mark McLemore This guy has been in the league for forty seasons right? Wait a minute, this calls for Baseball Reference. Nineteen seasons. Now that’s a major league career.
14. Craig Biggio This is his regular-issue Donruss rookie card. The inclusion of this card transforms the pack from average to pretty good. Now explain this, and I know I’ve already brought up the idea of Biggio looking like a child, but: would you argue that Craig Biggio and Tom Brady have the same face, and if you agree with that, can you explain why Biggio looks like a child and Brady does not?
15. Jose DeLeon DeLeon’s arms look like they were painted onto the photo. They are especially well-defined.

Overall Thoughts

As I said above, the inclusion of Biggio in this pack makes it a pretty good pack. If I got this pack in 1989, I probably wouldn’t have known who Biggio was. Getting Fisk as card one lifts the expectations of the pack. I’m not saying I expected getting a Brett in the same pack, but at least a Rated Rookie, even if one of the crap RR’s. But this pack is pretty good. With 5 out of 15 cards being even remotely good (Fisk, Wild Thing, Daulton, Biggio & Esasky), that’s a 33% success rate. By no means is this a Perfect Pack, but it’s not especially disappointing either. If this was the first pack I had opened for 1989, I would have been encouraged that Donruss wasn’t phoning in the design, like they did in 1988, they weren't against using more dramatic photography and I hadn’t found a Red Sox yet, although I did get an Honorary Red Sox in Fisk, and that would be encouragement enough to open Pack 2.

Note: I didn't realize that Stargell passed away. I've replaced all mention of him with Boog Powell, who I'm pretty sure is still very much alive. Long live Pops.

Ever notice that the only thing most people can agree on in regards to baseball is how greedy everyone is? The players make too much, the owners raise the ticket prices every year (except in Pittsburgh, where they still think it’s 1979 and you can buy a bleacher ticket for $12 or something and sneak behind home plate, just like those really smart Braves fans in the late 1980s, right before the Braves got really good. I remember watching their games on TBS and mistakenly think that it was a rain delay, when really nobody showed up, including most of the team...and by the way I think a bleacher ticket at Fenway is reaching $450), the concessions are outrageous (I mean, who really wants to eat Boog Powell barbeque for $25 a rib? Unless I can watch Boog Powell actually wrestle a wild pig in the middle of a circus maximus, watch him apply the sleeper hold on the pig and kill it with his bare hands, I just don’t think I’d be getting my money’s worth…or better yet, I’d pay $50 to watch a tag-team round robin between a team of two wild pigs versus Boog Powell and Reggie Smith—I’m sure between them they could catch a couple wild pigs. Of course, since it’s a round-robin, that would mean that the other teams would be as follows: Cory Snyder and Kevin Seitzer, a leopard and Hal McRae, and the Junkyard Dog and Moondog Spot. I’d be pulling for the Junkyard Dog and Moondog Spot, but something tells me that nothing can beat a leopard and Hal McRae, especially if it involves destroying the crap out of things), and many teams are moving all of their games on tv to cable (which really stinks for those whose only contact with baseball will be Sundays with Tim McCarver and Joe Buck. Insert your own Deliverance joke here; c’mon, I even set you up with the whole bit about the wild pigs. Now you gotta do it).

Players have been greedy since the dawn of man. One famous example is Hal Chase, the star of the Hilltoppers in the 1910s who would openly bet on the games he played in, while he was playing in them. In the 1920s and 1930s, players like Satchel Paige would jump leagues and teams mid-contract for more money. Some players go to other countries just for the cash (see the case of Bob Horner in Japan), and others luck out and have a career year and are unjustly rewarded with huge sums of money that may inspire them to bring home a paycheck all in Sacagawea $1 coins, dump the coins out in a room in their monstrous McMansion, strip down to their bathing suit and frolic around in them…all to the tune of the Ducktales theme. They might even choreograph their movement to coincide with the part where Scrooge McDuck sticks his head out of the pile of coins and spits out a steady stream of gold. Somehow I can picture Mark Bellhorn doing this. But there are other, more deserving people who will never get the chance.

One guy is Jack Clark. Clark, who spent much of his career on the injured list, performed well but never good enough to be considered a superstar (can you name any superstars with unibrows?), for teams both good and bad. Clark, who scored major pay days but then somehow sunk all the cash into one thing or another until he had to claim serious, major league bankruptcy. If you were Jack Clark, how would you have spent your money? If it were up to me, I would’ve gone into the soft drink bottling business with Joe Morgan. If I couldn’t get into that racket, I would probably try to secure a patent on temporary tattoos you can apply with a warm washcloth, because who knows what untold riches might await the lucky bastard who could get that one off the ground. I would probably call them Jack Clark’s Baseball Tattoos, and I know just how I would market them. I’m thinking low-budget TV commercials that air real late at night and during Saturday morning cartoons on UHF channels, and it would basically be me, Jack Clark, standing in front of a mirror with my shirt off, admiring my arms, covered in tattoos of Kirk Gibson, Orel Hershiser, Willie McGee, Mark Gubicza and, of course, me, Jack Clark. Then a pretty lady would come up behind me, squeeze my bicep and I would look into the mirror, directly at the camera and nod and smile. Oh man, I’m a genius! Are you kidding? Those would sell like hotcakes! And I bet that I could save money by drawing all the tattoos myself. That way, people would see that I’m a pretty smart businessman and a talented artist, you know? I guess I would have to change the name to Jack Clark’s Baseball Tattoos by Me, Jack Clark. That way people would know that I made them. I don’t know how much I would charge, but probably somewhere around $0.35 for a pack of four. And here’s the real trick! I would buy them all up so that they’d become real scarce, then I’d leak them back into the hobby one at a time and make a bundle! I’d be remembered as Jack Clark, the entrepreneurial genius who once played baseball, not Jack Clark, the former baseball player who turned his finances to shit.

Fantastic Card of the Day

I wrote a few weeks ago about the fact that Topps sometimes couldn’t their act together fast enough if a player changed teams. When this happened during a year when they didn’t tack on a Traded set, they would airbrush in a new team name on the player’s cap, or crop a photo so the team name wouldn’t be visible. Well, I think I may have come across the mother lode. It seems that in this 1978 Topps card, thanks to playing for four different teams the previous season, the company decided to go whole hog in and airbrush Dave Kingman’s entire photo, including his hair, face, neck and shoulders. If this had been the first time I had ever seen just how ugly Dave Kingman is, I would swear he’s an amalgamation of other photos. If you look at his face for a real long time (which I don’t recommend anyone do under any circumstance), he kind of looks like what Derek Jeter would look like if someone drugged him, threw him out of a moving vehicle in the middle of a non-descript city and he stumbled around outside for a couple of years, gained a little weight, got a job at an OTB and grew out his hair. I’ve walked past the OTB down the street from my apartment in Forest Hills and I know I’ve seen at least one person who looks like this. Could he be The Kingman?