Best Cards: Darryl Strawberry

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

Darryl Strawberry was on Buster Olney’s podcast last week, and Buster brought up the fact that Straw was on both the 1986 Mets and the 1998 Yankees, telling him he had to decide between the two which was better. Straw picked the Mets, and part of his argument was that they faced better competition that year.

To be clear: Comparing teams across eras, even only a decade-plus apart, is largely semantic and wholly subjective. The Yankees went 114-48 and then 11-2 in the playoffs; the Mets went 108-54 and then 8-5 in the playoffs. There’s a difference there, but not so great a difference that you’d be crazy to pick the Mets. But man, Straw’s argument is silly. I guess what he’s going for is that it was tougher for the Mets to get to 108 wins than it was for the Yankees to get to 114, but doesn’t it also stand to reason that the better a team is, the less likely it is to even face appropriate competition? Darryl was basically arguing that the Mets were the better team because the Yankees were too good.

That doesn’t have much to do with his career or his baseball cards, but it did just happen in the podcast, so it’s on my mind.

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Darryl Strawberry

Career: 1983-1999 (NYM, LAD, SFG, NYY)
WAR: 42.2
Hall of Fame: 6 votes in 2005 and off the ballot

Two things about Strawberry’s career: First, shorter, is the fact that he’s one of only three players (along with Jose Vizcaino and Ricky Ledee) to play for all four New York-originating teams in his career, and he’s the only one to play for only those teams and no one else. Useless trivia, but interesting.

Second is that Strawberry had the start of an absolute Hall of Fame career. He reached his age-30 season at 40.3 career WAR, nearly as many as Jim Rice had in total and more than guys like Dave Winfield, Kirby Puckett, or Lou Brock had at the same age. Of course, those guys went on to have relatively decent aging periods, while 30-and-over Strawberry managed only 1.9 WAR over the final eight years of his career and effectively relegated himself to the “good not great” market of ballplayers.

Still, he’s a dude who, as mentioned, played for two of the all-time teams, made eight straight All-Star teams, won a Rookie of the Year, and had four top-10 MVP finishes. And while round numbers aren’t any more meaningful than not-round ones, he ended his career with 1,000 RBIs on the nose, which is pretty cool.

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

The worst Darryl Strawberry card

2005 Donruss Classics – Stars of Summer #BOS-5

There had to be a reason they chose to have him so wildly off-center, but I confess as to not being able to figure out what it is. Is it literally just so the faded old-timey scene in the background can display the hitter? Because that’s a bad reason. Also, Straw hit .243 in 214 games over three seasons with the Dodgers and definitely saw his career take a downward turn, and this card didn’t come out until six years after he retired, so I super don’t understand why we’re featuring his Dodgers career here.

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.

1991 Fleer – Pro-Vision #12

“Take a bad illustration of him. Add an atom or something around the bat. Make it … dusk? Red sky at night, sailor’s delight, right? And then at the word ‘nuclear’ on the back to make it look like it’s logical. Boom! That’s a baseball card!”

1993 Upper Deck – Boyhood Friends #477 (Eric Davis/Darryl Strawberry)

Get you a man who looks at you like either of these guys looks at each other.

1989 Bowman #387

Rob Neyer (are you reading this? Hi Rob!) has a crusade against athletes having illegible signatures. A lot of the time, it doesn’t matter that much — if you get a card signed, well, you can always tell who did it — but a lot of other times it really matters. When I would get player signatures on balls at games back in the day, I’d look at the balls years or even days later, have no idea who signed them, and just use the ball as a ball because “Look, [someone] signed this card!” isn’t exactly an exciting story to tell people. But here’s another instance where it really matters. The 1989 Bowman set did away with printed player names altogether in favor of a signature, and unless you really knew what a player looked like (tough now, real tough 30 years ago), the signature was the only way you could know who they were from the front. Strawberry did good. Lots of others didn’t.

1992 Topps Kid #47

At some point someone is going to have to explain this card set to me. “Awful illustration that in no way represents the player but is an exaggerated cartoon of a dude who has never heard of Leg Day, and then we put a poorly cropped photo of his head on top of it” wasn’t the entire card set, but there was a lot of these, and they were so bad.

1993 Select #21
1995 Select #5

I like how Select’s entire oeuvre for a while there was just “very normal cards, except the angles are like 15° off one way or the other.” Just radical.

1992 High 5 Reusable Decals #DAST

This technically isn’t a card, but I don’t have it in me to see this image and just scroll past, I’m sorry. And I know the “helmet over cap” thing was actually a thing, but … Straw, my man, you were one of the coolest dudes, and this is the least cool look you could possibly have. We gotta eliminate this image from our collective consciousness. (He said, while raising its relevance in the collective consciousness.)

1991 Donruss – Grand Slammers

The 1991 Donruss set was like the baseline card set. It was utterly unforgettable in just about every way, despite lots of angles and colors and lines, and other than Diamond Kings, the “Grand Slammer” subset was the hardest it tried to be different, and that was just with a starburst. It’s like the card set some kid collects in a Disney show before having it stolen from him and learning a valuable lesson.

1993 Upper Deck #820

Yeah … that’s Bobby Abreu.

1990 Classic #33

Did y’all have the Classic baseball board game? I had like a dozen copies of it. I’m almost certain I have one in my closet right now. I literally never played it. I probably missed out. I bet it’s fun.

And now, the top four Darryl Strawberry cards of all time.

4 (tie). 1990 Star Ad Cards #DA ST/1992 Upper Deck All-Star FanFest #43

At some point we need to have a long conversation about baseball players and blowing bubbles, because they are all so good at it, and it’s like they don’t even know they’re doing it. You’ll see guys blowing bubbles as they swing, as they run the bases, as they catch fly balls, just about anything (but not pitching, that I recall). And I’m not saying blowing bubbles is exactly the hardest thing in the world, but, like, doesn’t it take some of your attention to do it? It’s not like you’re just doing something else and sipping a soda from one of those helmet drink holders. Generally, athletes focus when they athlete themselves … except gum. For now, we settle for a couple Strawberry bubbles. (I wonder if it’s strawberry bubble gum. That’d be fun.)

3. 2018 Topps Stadium Club – Chrome Gold Minted #SCC-4

Normally I settle for the base versions of cards. “This card, but with silver foil” or whatever is largely silly. But man, this is the prettiest damn thing. The regular version of the card is nice, but add the slight sepia-ing here and it’s just drooly.

2. 1989 Score – Scoremasters 42

The back of this card says “Darryl has immense talent that has not been fully tapped.” And, I mean, sure, you always say that sort of thing. But this card is a 1989 set, but it has a 1990 copyright on the back. If they made it after his 1988 season, he had just put up a .911 OPS and finished second in the MVP voting. If they made it after 1989, he was a 27-year-old who had been worth 16.3 wins the previous three years. How good did they think this dude was gonna get?

1. 1989 Starting Lineup #DA ST.1

Honestly, I don’t even have a good reason why this one tops the list. I search a player’s cards on COMC, scroll through every single one on file, open a new tab for each one I think is even marginally interesting, and then afterward I get to winnowing. (I end up with a lot of open tabs.) Some that I know will be in the top four I slide over to one side, and others I just make jokes about as they come to mind. I scrolled past this one a bunch of times and couldn’t really decide what to do with it, and eventually it outlasted everything else to appear here. It’s just so … what it is. It’s a very ‘80s design of a very ‘80s player in the most ‘80s uniform. At the time he was one of the 10 or 15 best players in baseball, and you’d swear looking at him that he knew it. Things went worse for Strawberry for a long time after this (but by all accounts he’s doing really well these days), sort of like they did for Starting Lineup in the ‘90s and into the 2000s. But I don’t think there’s any great meaning here. I think it’s just the ‘80s thing, a cool card of a cool player.