1989 Topps card for DeWayne Buice

I find people with weird names particularly interesting and this is certainly not the first blog posting I’ve written concerning weird names but while I was stumbling around through my collection I had to stop and take a second look at DeWayne Buice.

The card front features a skinny Mr. Buice immediately after throwing a pitch in the general direction of some unknown batter. His face features a Ned Flanders mustache bristling in anticipation of his friend the catcher coming out to say hi and maybe patting his butt gently.

Anyway, I did a little research on DeWayne like I normally do when I feature a player’s card on my blog and found this interesting tidbit on the Baseball-Reference.com bullpen wiki page for DeWayne Buice.

Buice was in Southern California one evening in November 1987 looking for a Chinese restaurant in the area, after wandering around the neighborhood without much luck, he went into a baseball card store called “The Upper Deck” to ask the owner about the restaurant. The owner recognized Buice and offered a 12% ownership stake in his baseball card company he was trying to start, if Buice would get him in touch with MLBPA. The company he started was called Upper Deck. Buice entered into a four year contract with the company. After the strike in 1994, Upper Deck gave Buice six more years of ownership. Between 1988 and 1998, Buice earned $15 million because he couldn’t find a Chinese restaurant.

“Whoa.” -Neo, Matrix Returns, 1997

And this one time a company did all this bad stuff and fraud and then went out of business.

I was just thinking the other day that I really wanted to see more really cool and funny cards included in my collection that weren’t about baseball but were instead about events that are of little to no significance to anybody outside of the small percentage of people that maybe have been directly involved. Is that too much to ask?

Apparently it is because there are just no card makers out there that are willing to take the extra steps necessary to produce more cards and bloat a years inventory so to collect the entire set you not only need to purchase all the player cards in a regular and miniature size, you also have to collect a bunch of worthless fact cards and pieces of Doritos bags that may or may not have been picked out of the trash from Derek Jeter’s third night at the Holiday Inn -Seattle Tacoma Airport in 2009 (he would normally get the spicy kind but opted for cooler ranch because earlier that night he burned his tongue on an overly microwaved hot pocket).

Oh wait, you’re telling me this already happens, Yippie!

Be still my heart!

I can remember the excitement so vividly. Me, a mere child, sitting on the floor at home after being dragged around the grocery store for what was undoubtedly the worst 2-3 hours of the week. My patience, which was worn as thin as tissue, was soon to be rewarded as my mother would produce a single pack of cards. Now these packs were no $20 8-16 count gold foil limited edition, drizzled with truffle oil and packed with the finest dry aged Kobe beef tenderloin. No, these were just simple cards, a 32 or 64 count perhaps, wrapped in plastic. Cards for the working man, cards for the proletariat. I don’t need no fancy cards, do I look like Donald Trump??  I’d feverishly grasp at them, tearing wildly at the cellophane wrapper just to see what’s inside. Did I get it, did I get the card I had been hoping for?

Checklist #657…hells yeah.

Steve Martin, outfielder for the High Desert Mavricks

OMG Really Steve Martin of SNL fame?? Don’t be silly, he’s too busy worrying about the latest banjo technologies (strings, wood) to focus on maintaining the level of skill required to burn out after a couple years playing AA ball. So who is this imposter? Well, it’s difficult to say these days because of shoddy record keeping in the latter part of last century and because he never played above AA.

What we can say about Mr. Steve Martin is not much. He played 5 seasons in the minors for various teams primarily in the Padre’s organization and at various levels. His stats were mediocre and he couldn’t spell Mississippi (allegedly). Turn his 1991 Classic Best card over and you’ll see he weighed 180 pounds, riveting stuff. The best factoid is that his middle name is Whittaker and that’s a pretty sweet name.

Probably should have read "Going Attraction"

I can only imagine how disappointing it must be being featured as a “Coming Attraction” by Topps early in your career only to play a handful of games in the majors before fizzling out into obscurity. Terry Jorgensen knows this disappointment well.

Let’s take a look at Terry’s playing history. 1989 was the first year he played in the majors and it was rough. In 10 games with the Minnesota Twins he had 27 plate appearances and a .174 batting average, not surprisingly he returned the minors.  In 1992 he returned to the Twins and had a short but respectable season with 63 plate appearances in 22 games and a .310 batting average, a sizable improvement from his first go-round. Unfortunately it wouldn’t last and after a fairly lackluster showing in the 1993 season he was demoted back to the AAA Portland Beavers and never returning to the Majors.

The card itself is pretty snazzy. It’s a little gaudy and the Hollywood-esq background is a bit over the top but compared to most of the other feature cards that came before or were included with the 1993 Topps set it’s miles ahead. It doesn’t look massively stupid or exceedingly cheap which was something that plagued a lot of these types of cards. There is one goofy thing about this card though. In the designers attempt to save the beautiful background and font work from the scourge that is Terry’s equipment they removed the bat from his hands. This gives the effect that he’s doing some kind of weird modified “stirring the pot” dance, very uncool.

A famous pitcher and lover of ballet.

Noting that today is Nolan Ryan‘s 64th birthday, this is the perfect chance for me to break down this card because it really bothers me.

It’s a fairly standard 1973 Topps card and it features pitcher Nolan Ryan while he was with the California Angels. The photographer(s) have him standing in front of what looks to be the dugout before game time in a filling stadium. They’ve also got him making a clichéd pose, arms above his head, hand in his glove like he’s about to throw a pitch into the outfield. It all seems about par for the course and while kind of lame, doesn’t really irritate me

What really bothers me is the perspective of the card. Everything is cocked at a weird angle, he isn’t standing straight up and the wall behind him is especially bad. It’s like they took advice from 1990′s marketers on making their baseball cards look more extreme.

At least they managed to line up the bottom of the mezzanine properly.

What are you the visitor going to notice?? Probably nothing, all old links will autoforward to their corresponding page on the new domain and will do so indefinitely. All the images work, the DB still works, all the formatting is the same, the only think that has changed is the address. The only issue I’ve noticed so far, and it should be a problem for long, is the site search won’t work until google starts listing my new domain in the directory.

If you are a webmaster that is currently linking to my site, please update your link and if anybody finds anything erroneous or out of the ordinary please let me know!

Excuse me sir, you spelled my name wrong.

1991 Classic Best, it’s hard to find the words to describe how I feel when thinking about this card set. They are very cheap, made of flimsy cardboard not unlike the free cards gathered from cereal boxes. The photos in general are horribly staged and uninterestingly done. As I was browsing the teams a few weeks ago I ran across a minor league team who’s three random cards were 3 players in the same stance again the same background, the only difference being the name on the scoreboard in the background changes to match the player featured. It’s not all bad though, I very much enjoy browsing through the set, picking out the “future” stars and regular players, and getting a small glipse at their stints in the Minor Leagues. Players like, Ryan Klesko, Chipper Jones, Mark Wholers (I have a Braves fixation), Pedro Martinez, J.T. Snow, Reggie Sanders, and Davy Lopez.

Wait, Davy Lopez? I’ve never heard of a Davy Lopez, what gives? The minor leagues is a pretty dynamic place. Players are constantly coming and going switching in between the various different levels, being traded, getting drafts and being dropped from rosters. The process of finding, listing, and photographing players must be difficult but keeping track of these guys as they are moving around must be a nightmare. Understandably, there are errors in this set and sometimes players are listed under different name then they were commonly known in the majors.

Back to Davy. Davy Lopez is Javy Lopez and was one of my favorite players as a young fan. Javy Lopez played a total of 15 years in the MLB, mostly with the Atlanta Braves, and had a decent career. He was a 3-time all star, won a World Series, and hit 20+ home runs in 2/3 of the seasons he played.

Had I not been working on this project I probably would never have found this gem of a card but I as continue to work and find more of these it reminds me why I started in the first place.