Best Cards: Bobby Bonilla

(This is Best Cards Ever, a never-ending quest to find the single best baseball card of every player.)

The famous thing about Bobby Bonilla these days is the still-running contract, and believe me, I’ll get to that, but I want to open with a question about another thing Bonilla got paid for.

In Rookie of the Year, we saw Henry Rowengartner break his arm, recover, realize he can throw the ball a bajillion miles an hour, harness that ability, and become the best pitcher in baseball. Totally believable. The one player who had Henry’s number was Heddo, played by Tom Milanovich, who was 40 when the movie came out and looked like … well, not a big leaguer, unless it’s John Kruk:

But we did see Henry strike out so many other players, including some real big leaguers who made cameos. At one point in a montage, Barry Bonds, Pedro Guerrero, and Bonilla pop up, all swinging and missing and looking amazed at this kid striking them out. On the movie’s IMDb page, those three are credited as “Three Big Whiffers.” So this movie got a superstar in Bonds and two big names in Guerrero and Bonilla, had them look bad against a kid, and even basically insulted them in the credits.

This isn’t Little Big League, where Ken Griffey Jr. and Randy Johnson appeared but still got to be superstars. This is big names coming in and looking like doofuses. So my question is … do the players demand a bigger paycheck to look bad? When it’s just a quick cameo like that, does a Bonds or a Bonilla step back and say, like, “Okay, you pay me X to appear in your movie, but if I’m going to look bad, it’s more like 2X”?

It doesn’t really matter. It’s just something I’ve always wondered.

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Bobby Bonilla

Career: 1986-2001 (CHW, PIT, NYM, BAL, FLA, LAD, ATL, STL)
WAR: 30.3
Hall of Fame: Nope, got two votes in his only year on the ballot. Same as Ken Caminiti.

Bobby Bonilla was really good? He was perhaps slightly overrated, owing to the Bonilla/Bonds/Andy Van Slyke trio in Pittsburgh, but he topped 4.0 WAR in four straight years 1988-1991, with top-16 MVP finishes all four of those years, including a second-place finish in 1990 and a third in 1991. He had 100-plus RBIs four times, put up a 100-plus OPS+ every year from 1987 to 1997, and made seven All-Star teams.

It dried up real fast, though. From 1986 to 1994, nine years, he put up 28.3 WAR. And then from 1995 to 2001, even more years, he put up … 2.0. Bobby Bonilla was probably never on a Hall of Fame track, but he went from star to very much not-a-star quickly. He hung on a long time, though — how many of you realized he was still playing this century?

(As always, thanks to Check Out My Cards for being able to track these down.)

The worst Bobby Bonilla card

1997 SP #80

The early Marlins uniforms were never particularly flattering. And this picture was taken with Bonilla in batting practice duds, on the back half of his career, at 32, 33 years old. But it’s also a damn batting practice shot where he looks like he got fooled on a changeup, and he looks like chubby dude who won a chance to take batting practice on a big-league field through some fantasy camp. This is one of the best athletes in the world, even at the time, and he looks like a football player visiting an MLB team and looking like he doesn’t know how to sports. Come on, SP.

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.

1992 Ultra-Pro Page Promos – Box Topper #P1
1992 Ultra-Pro Page Promos – Box Topper #P17

Listen, I don’t ask for much in this world. But I need an oral history of how these happened. I need it.

1993 Upper Deck #484 (Eddie Murray/Howard Johnson/Bobby Bonilla)

Props to Bonilla, who is the only one of these three who looks like an actual baseball player. Johnson looks like an actor who is faking it; Murray looks like a little league coach who tried to wedge one of the kids’ helmets on his head.

1986 Fleer Update – Factory Set #U15

I know things have a look of their era, and something that looks good to me now might be eminently mockable in, say, 2050. I get that. But what the ever-loving hell were the White Sox doing? There was an entire generation of White Sox baseball where the uniforms might as well have been designed by a frantic costumer who forgot he had a project due and had to make something out of the last eight things in his outfit closet.

1998 Topps Stadium Club #157

The best you could say about Bonilla as a fielder is that sometimes it didn’t completely overshadow his offensive contributions. Per his Baseball Reference page, he only had three seasons where he was not worth negative defensive WAR — 0.1 in 1987, 0.0 in 1988, and 0.1 in 1994. For his career, he was worth -15.6 dWAR, a hard number to get to. In 1998, with the Marlins, he was “only” worth -0.1 dWAR, but then he only played 28 games. There is no way you can say Bonilla was anything but a bad fielder.

What I’m saying is, this is a picture of a blooper, and he absolutely did not make the catch, and I love it for that.

1996 Pinnacle #30

Yeah, a ball was just hit his way and he’s scared.

1990 Upper Deck #366

“Hey Bobby, imagine a ball being hit your way.”

And now, the top four Bobby Bonilla cards of all time.

4. 2000 Upper Deck #318

I have small hands. Relative to my height, they’re very small. I know more than a few women whose hands are larger than mine. So when I see something like this, Bobby Bonilla holding two baseballs in his hand with room for like a half-dozen more (or my favorite card of all time: Kelly Wunsch holding five baseballs!), I’m just super jealous.

3. 1987 Donruss #558

I made fun of the White Sox uniforms earlier, so now’s the time to go the other way. The Pirates’ old-school uniforms, including those hats, were glorious. Make every last uniform out of the Pirates’ uniforms of the 1970s and 1980s. Just Pirates vs. Pirates vs. Pirates. It’s okay. We’ll adjust.

2. 1994 Studio #113

1. 1994 Upper Deck #344

Back to back to wrap things up. Okay, so that contract. Bonilla was terrible for the Mets in 1999, and they wanted to cut him. But they still owed him $5.9 million. Instead of paying that out, they negotiated: The Mets wouldn’t pay Bonilla the $5.9 million then, but they’d pay him $1.19 million every year from 2009 to 2035, totaling $29.8 million. Every year, when July 1 rolls around, everyone makes “LOL Mets” jokes. And it’s probably true that Bonilla loves getting that check each year (even if there’s every chance it could have been more through investments and whatnot). That said, the Mets absolutely did not screw up here.

Now, part of that was that the Wilpons expected a massive windfall in the form of some sweet, sweet Madoff cash before the bill would come due, and sure, that didn’t work out (and oh man, did it not work out). But Bonilla needed to be gone from the Mets one way or another — he had already promised to make Shea a nightmare that season if he stayed around without playing time, and man would that have sucked. And after clearing Bonilla’s almost $6 million off the books, the Mets turned around and acquired Mike Hampton on a $5.75 million price tag. One likely doesn’t happen without the other. So what happened next? Hampton had probably his second-best season and won the NLCS MVP, and the Mets went to the World Series.

Oh, and Hampton left in free agency that offseason to the Rockies and Denver’s wonderful school system. Which meant that the Mets got a compensation pick in that year’s draft. Which they used on … David Wright. (Read all about the entire Bonilla timeline in the 2015 USA Today piece.) So sure, it’s roundabout, but without the Bonilla restructure that we all laugh at now, the Mets likely don’t make the 2000 World Series or end up with the best position player in team history.

Now, the above cards were from 1994. Bonilla didn’t know this stuff was going to happen at the time, obviously. But looking at them, there’s just a small, tiny part of me — especially in the Upper Deck one — that sees his cocky, confident look, and imagines him saying to the future, “Y’all don’t know just how important I am.” And sure, that’s probably not true. But I choose to believe it, because it’s so very fun to do so.