Best Cards: Andy Van Slyke
(This is Best Cards Ever, a never-ending quest to find the single best baseball card of every player.)
A tie! I do Twitter polls to decide who to do for each of these pieces, picking four names — sometimes largely at random, sometimes with a theme — and letting you fancy reader folk (well, like one or two dozen of you) decide whose best cards I’m going to be finding.
For this one, the choices were Andy Van Slyke, Marquis Grissom, Mickey Morandini, and Bobby Thigpen, and … well, nobody likes Thigpen, but Van Slyke and Grissom pulled 38.9% of the voting each, so I got to be the tiebreaker. I chose Van Slyke for two reasons: First, because the last two of these were on Greg Maddux and Javy Lopez and I wanted to go non-Brave, and second because reader @butterjc81 made a point to specifically mention Van Slyke, and none of you Grissom stans out there said anything. So it’s Andy Van Slyke day!
Like Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance, I wonder how famous Andy Van Slyke would be if he hadn’t had the Bonds-Van Slyke-Bonilla trio helping his noteworthiness. The three played five years together in Pittsburgh, 1987-1991. In that time, Bonilla had four All-Star appearances, three Silver Sluggers, and four years with MVP votes. Bonds only had one All-Star appearance and two Silver Sluggers, but he added two Gold Gloves, an MVP runner-up, and an MVP win. Van Slyke did hold his own — two All-Stars, five Gold Gloves, two Silver Sluggers, two top-five MVP finishes and votes another year — but I firmly believe none of the three would have been as famous (Bonds possibly excepted) without the others around.
Does that matter? Nope! Alan Trammell and Lou Whitaker helped each other’s fame. Robin Yount and Paul Molitor helped each other’s. The ‘90s Braves pitchers all fed off each other. That’s how it works. But I do think it’s interesting.
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Andy Van Slyke
Career: 1983-1995 (STL, PIT, BAL, PHI)
WAR: 41.3
Hall of Fame: Nope, didn’t even get a vote
Through the age of 31, Andy Van Slyke had played nine years in the major leagues and had produced 39.7 WAR. He was coming off a year where he had been an All-Star, won a Silver Slugger and his fifth straight Gold Glove, and finished fourth in the MVP voting. It might not have been a surefire Hall of Fame track, but it was certainly within the realm of possibility. He probably had the dreams.
He played only three more seasons, 268 more games, and produced only 1.7 more WAR before he was out of the league by age 35.
Just like baseball has become a game where people say anything short of a World Series is a failed season, it has become some kind of insult to say a player wasn’t a Hall of Famer. Andy Van Slyke had a fantastic career. He didn’t have a Hall of Fame career, even if he had a Hall of Fame start. That’s not an insult. But it is true.
(As always, thanks to Check Out My Cards for being able to track these down.)
The worst Andy Van Slyke card
1988 Starting Lineup Cards #ANVA
The Starting Lineup cards were secondary to the Starting Lineup figures, of course, but if you make cards, you open yourself up. And this card is like 90% of the way to being really nice. But … why off-center? He’s shuffled off to the right of the image just enough to crap him in with the Pirates logo. Could you not find a way to crop the shot so he’s centered? Alternatively, could you not put the Pirates logo in the bottom left? There are Andy Van Slyke cards that are worse in a vacuum, but the fact that this one is so close to being pretty and just swerves off the map at the last possible second is so egregious that it gets downgraded.
(Also, the back of the card lists his first team as “Cards,” but his second as “Pitts.,” and that wild inconsistency in team labeling is just bananapants.)
Honorable mention
These aren’t the best of his cards. Sometimes they aren’t even that good. But they need to be mentioned one way or another.
1993 Kraft Singles Superstars Pop-Ups #30
“Dad! Dad! Can you pick me up some cheese when you go to the store?”
“Cheese? But Mikey, you’re lactose intolerant.”
“I don’t care, dad! I can get an Andy Van Slyke card!”
In conclusion, marketing is and always has been weird.
1993-1995 Cardtoons #77
Okay, this legitimately could be not only the worst Andy Van Slyke card; it could be the worst card of any person in any sports ever in the history of ever. The egregiously bad illustration. The insanely stupid puns on the back. The black-eyed Parrot of Doom, which I assume has some relevance to Cardtoons but is just terrifying. It’s all just so, so bad. But it is clearly that bad on purpose, so I don’t want to say it’s his worst card when it is doing it intentionally. Still, so bad.
(I will say that “Andy Van Tyke” is a funny name pun.)
1993 Donruss #414
If Andy Van Slyke had quit baseball in 1991 and become a cricket bowler, this card could legitimately look the exact same. You know, if they make cricket cards. I have no idea.
1993 Upper Deck #480 (Tim Wakefield/Jay Bell/Andy Van Slyke)
Worst boy band album cover of all time.
1995 Score #352
(Documentary narrator voice) “Baseball took a strange turn in the 1994 season when Pittsburgh outfielder Andy Van Slyke perfected the art of ball levitation. It didn’t help him or the team win a game in any way, but fans were enthralled.”
1993 Score Dream Team Gold #4
This is some serious “Nickelodeon child star who developed a drug problem in his 20s but has a comeback Christian album in his early 40s” energy here, which is even more remarkable because he was barely in his 30s when the picture was taken.
1994 Upper Deck #83
Cardception!
1993 Upper Deck #124
Okay, so here’s my question. He’s holding his left elbow, correct? So you’d imagine he took a pitch off the elbow and this is him getting ready to head to first. Except … Andy Van Slyke batted lefty. His left elbow was pointed back toward the catcher. I guess he could have jumped back from an inside pitch and not gotten his back arm out of the way? I just want to see video of how this came to pass. That’s all I ask.
1993 Score #524
So apparently whoever drew the 1993 Score card illustrations just thought every player looked like Jay Leno? It’s weird.
And now, the top four Andy Van Slyke cards of all time.
4. 1993 Upper Deck – On Deck With #D25
Look, I don’t know for sure. I could probably figure it out if I hunted things down and tried really, really hard, but these pieces are something I write in an hour or two the night before publish, and that’s way different than actually doing work. So I’m just going to settle for “I don’t know, but…” And with that caveat, I want to say that … Andy Van Slyke is absolutely doing an impression of Fred McGriff in the Tom Emanski ads here. He just is. No, don’t tell me I’m wrong.
(Also, the back of the card — which I’m not putting here because it’s vertically oriented and the front is horizontal, and that makes putting both on here strange — has the following things about Van Slyke listed: “Favorite pastime: Reading the U.S. budget deficit.” “Message for kids: Grow up to be a conservative Republican.” “One thing I would change: The president. I don’t like liberals.” And, I didn’t know Andy Van Slyke was our first Fox News loudmouth.)
3. 1992 Score #655
Props for the unique view of a player. We don’t often get headfirst dive shots, and we have gotten even fewer of middle-aged balding dads doing it. Looks good.
2. 1993 Topps Stadium Club #394
He was sliding headfirst in the other card. He slid feet first here. Andy Van Slyke was a player of many slides. He also needed to keep his helmet on, because this is a better look.
1. 1992 Donruss Triple Play #3
I really liked this Little Hotshots subset. Actually, dirty little secret: I loved the 1992 Triple Play set. I know, they were made for kids and I was 8 when they came out, so it was perfect for me then, but even now it’s true. It was a card set that tried something different, but did so with consistency and a clean design that was still kid-oriented. And maybe in this picture Andy wasn’t a liberal-hating deficit-reader.