Best Cards: Jeff Conine

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

Maybe this is a race thing, where I’m calling the white guy “scrappy” and “a real lunchpail type,” but it’s kind of crazy to me that if you were discussing the best athlete in MLB in the ‘90s and ‘00s, the correct answer might actually be Jeff Conine.

After all, this is a guy who came into the league at 24 and played until he was 41, who saw time at first base, third base, left field and right field, hit 214 home runs and stole 54 bases with a career .347 OBP … and after he retired became an Ironman triathlete. You don’t see Barry Bonds out here running marathons, is what I’m saying.

I’m dusting off the old Best Cards Ever conceit, in part because I enjoy the process, and in part because I have the manuscript for Book 3 of my After Life series open in another window and demanding that I work on it, and I CAN’T THINK OF ANYTHING RIGHT NOW. Like, I have a plot in my head, and there are beats I know I’ll be getting to soon, but I’ve had the current chapter sitting in front of me for a couple weeks, and rather than sit and stare at it for another day or whatever, I figure I’ll try writing something else for a bit and see if it kicks the writing brain into gear.

TL,DR: Daniel procrastinates. (But buy Life After Life, Book 2 in the series, available for preorder now and released May 13!)

Jeff Conine

Career: 1990-2007 (KCR, FLA, BAL, PHI, CIN, NYM)
WAR: 19.5
Hall of Fame: Nope, not a single vote in his lone appearance

Conine was a middling reliever in college, only coming to the plate once in his UCLA career and getting hit by a pitch. So of course, the Royals drafted him in 1987 … as a first baseman … in the 58th round. This wasn’t a prospect. This was a favor.

He made the bigs as a September call-up for the Royals in 1990 as a first baseman and struggled through 22 plate appearances. After spending the 1991 season in the minors learning to paly the outfield, he returned to Kansas City in 1992 and … still struggled. Conine was selected by the Marlins in the expansion draft, and that’s when it clicked. He finished third in Rookie of the Year voting in 1993, then made the All-Star team and got MVP votes in 1994 and 1995. Of course, by then he was already 29, so it wasn’t like he had the brightest of MLB futures ahead of him. He was just a late bloomer who had a couple of good years (maxing out at 3.5 WAR in 1996) before becoming a journeyman.

But here’s an exercise: Google “Mr.” and each baseball team, one at a time. Mr. Diamondback. Mr. Astro. And so on. Some teams don’t have anyone with that nickname. But some do. You get some all-timers, like Ernie Banks and Al Kaline and Minnie Miñoso, and they’re almost entirely old guys. (And some very weird ones — did you know Alvin Davis is Mr. Mariner?) The only one that has a guy who plied his trade predominantly this century is (unsurprisingly) the Nationals, since they didn’t exist in the 1990s and have had Ryan Zimmerman for a long damn time. But other than him, the most current player on the list, and probably the primary “Mr.” nickname you think of after Mr. Cub, is Mr. Marlin, Jeff Conine.

Yes, that’s largely because he was with the team at its inception, played for it for a long time, and was pretty good. But still, that’s a cool thing that very, very few players can claim.

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

The worst Jeff Conine card

1993 Upper Deck #479 (Inaugural Catch, Dave Magadan/Orestes Destrade/Bret Barberie/Jeff Conine)

You want to say that a team in its first season wouldn’t have many stars to choose from for its debut “look at our fancy players” card. And granted, the debut 1993 Marlins didn’t acquire Gary Sheffield until midseason, so he couldn’t make the card. But they did already have Benito Santiago, who had made the All-Star team each of the prior four years. They had Walt Weiss, a former Rookie of the Year. They had rookie speedster Chuck Carr. They had 45-year-old Charlie Hough, who was never great but was definitely remarkable just for longevity. They had Bryan Harvey, who had made the All-Star team and finished fifth in the Cy Young voting in 1991. So Upper Deck chooses to highlight …

• Orestes Destrade, who hit .182/.286/.242 over parts of two seasons in 1987-1988 before washing out of the league and landing in Japan for four years, signing back with the Marlins for his age-31 season and was back out of the league two years later;

• Bret Barberie, who cratered in 1992 after a good 57-game rookie campaign in 1992, about whom the best they could think to say was “he hit four home runs in spring training”;

• Dave Magadan, who had 21 home runs in 701 career games before joining the Marlins and wasn’t even on the team until July;

• Conine, who, granted, turned out all right for the Marlins, but entered the year as a 27-year-old with 37 career games and an 86 career OPS+.

I’m not saying the debut Marlins had a lot of stars to choose from, but this card absolutely screams “Look, these are the four guys we could scrape up, don’t question it, okay?”

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.

1990 Best Memphis Chicks #8

So all I can figure here is that they posed the shot, and the ball was all the way in his glove, and the photographer — who, it should be made clear, was the card photographer for the 1990 Memphis Chicks, which is to say this was an intern with a camera — said “Hm, you can’t tell the ball’s in the glove, what if people are confused?” And Conine was either too nice or too much of a rookie to point out how stupid that was.

1996 Topps Stadium Club #280

Uh, no, Jeff, that’s wrong.

1997 Pinnacle X-Press Men of Summer #89

No, Jeff, not that either.

1994 Pinnacle #30

Good job, Jeff! Closer! You probably want to remove the donut, though.

1992 Topps Stadium Club #683

It’s the most “little league photo shoot” pose of all time, which makes me wonder if photographers are still doing this nonsense for the kids. Like, the bat-over-the-shoulder pose looks fine. But this just looks silly. Is it just a matter of “gotta get baseball stuff into the shot”? Just let the kid have his hand on his knee, guys. Gloves look weird like that.

1990 Southern League All-Stars #46 (Frank Thomas/Jeff Conine)

Frank Thomas was the seventh overall pick of the 1989 draft out of Auburn. He was an ex-Olympian, something like the biggest dude on the planet, and a known future superstar right out of the gate. Jeff Conine was a 58th-round pick in the 1987 draft who had had one plate appearance in college. He hit better than expected, but even still, this was a dude who would more or less wash out for the Royals and be left open in the expansion draft. That he had a good career is nice, and sure, he was in fact on the Southern League All-Star Team in 1990, but man, at the time, this wasn’t “look at these future stars!” so much as it was “look at these two dudes who were standing near each other while we had a camera!”

2004 Donruss Studio Rally Caps #RC-26 (numbered to 499)

I refuse to believe anyone thought this set looked good. This was “Listen, we burned through all our good ideas in the ‘90s, and also all our ‘eh, fine’ ideas, and this is what is left. Just find some players who are up for looking dumb and let’s do this.”

1995 Topps Stadium Club #401

He’s one billion percent standing on a stool there, right? Or they have a dummy wall and he’s just standing? There’s no chance that’s an actual jump. Card photographers are so lazy.

2017 Topps Stadium Club #406

It is physically impossible to look like a badass in teal.

And now, the top four Jeff Conine cards of all time.

4. 2016 Topps Archive All-Star Signature Edition #94OPC-238

“Mom, can we get mid-‘90s Jay Buhner?”

“No, son, we have mid-‘90s Jay Buhner at home.”

Here’s mid-‘90s Jay Buhner at home.

3. 1994 Upper Deck Fun Pack #117

Remarkable? Nah. But it’s a fun angle that we don’t see much (even if those socks are freakin’ tragic and any time you can get a look you don’t often get, that’s a plus.

Flip side: “the Marlins became the only N.L. team to sweep Giants’ pitcher Bill Swift”? What on earth inspired that blurb? That’s the most ludicrous blurb I’ve ever seen. What on earth.

2. 1993 Topps #789

Is that the exterior of Joe Robbie Stadium (or whatever it is the Marlins played in that year)? Is it some random spot in Miami? Is it just a backdrop the photographer had? I have no idea, but come on, that’s cool looking. And considering Conine became synonymous with the team for a generation or so, I like this shot as his debut Topps card.

1. 2007 Topps Heritage #276

So I’m going full circle on the “Do I only think this because he’s a white guy?”-ness of it all here, but this is just about the most old-timey a player could possibly look on a card. Of course, Conine was 40 or 41 when this picture was taken, which would have made him early 30s in this style of card’s heyday (people got older younger back then). And he was a Red at the time, which is one of the old-school franchises (and he’s not in freakin’ teal). But man, without remembering exactly what Ted Kluszewski looked like (not like this, but still), if you told me they accidentally but Conine’s name on a Big Klu card, I’d believe it.