Best Cards: Joe Carter
(This is Best Cards Ever, a never-ending quest to find the single best baseball card of every player.)
There were two Joe Carters, and he more than just about anyone else bridged the gap between traditional baseball thinking and the sabermetric movement. Case in point: Carter spent the 1990 season with the Padres. It was not only his worst season, it was arguably the worst season across the big leagues that year. He hit .232/.290/.391 and also put up his worst career fielding numbers. It all combined to -1.7 bWAR.
But he also played every game, led the National League in at bats, and had 24 homers and 115 RBIs, so he got MVP votes.
He wasn’t a strong MVP candidate, to be clear. This wasn’t a top-five finish or anything (he finished 17th). But that slash line, that WAR total is usually reserved for a guy on his way out of the league, not a 30-year-old garnering MVP votes. For the “RBIs matter!” crowd, Carter was a superstar, averaging 106.8 per year over a 12-season span 1986-1997 that included 76 in the strike-shortened 1995 and only one other year under 100 (98 in 1988). For the more analytic-minded observer, Carter was far more … well, average. In that same 12-year span, he put up an OPS+ of 106, which is slightly above the 100 average, and given that he was almost entirely a corner outfielder during that stretch, “slightly above average” ain’t great.
Carter has one of baseball’s all-time moments, with his walk-off World Series winner, and a long career as a roughly average hitter who also managed to largely stay healthy and ply his trade in a key spot in some good lineups, meaning he put up some excellent counting numbers at a time when those exact counting numbers gave him far more fame than his general profile might have suggested.
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Joe Carter
Career: 1983-1998 (CHC, CLV, SDP, TOR, BAL, SFG)
WAR: 19.6
Hall of Fame: 19 votes in 2004, his only year on the ballot
I feel like I always need to couch this stuff. Carter was not a Hall of Famer, and he shouldn’t have been. He was, in a lot of ways, one of the most overrated players in baseball history. His best MVP finish — third place in 1992 — came in a year he put up 2.5 WAR, lower than all but three of the 46 players who got any MVP votes in either league that year (George Bell had -0.2 WAR and a 20th-place finish; Albert Belle had 2.0 WAR and a 23rd-place finish; John Wetteland had 1.5 WAR and a 22nd-place finish). That’s all true. But it doesn’t take away from what was still a very good career.
Carter won two World Series. He made five All-Star teams. He, as I mentioned, had one of the single most famous home runs in baseball history, and one of the single most famous plays in all of sports history. He made almost $50 million in his career at a time when “almost $50 million) was an insane amount of money. There’s an urge among many people to say that “not a Hall of Famer” is some sort of knock. It absolutely isn’t. Carter was in the top 1% of baseball players on the planet. That he wasn’t in the top 0.5% is not an insult.
(As always, thanks to Check Out My Cards for being able to track these down.)
The worst Joe Carter card
2005 Playoff Absolute Memorabilia – Team Quads Spectrum Single Materials #TQ-64 (Tony Gwynn/Joe Carter/Trevor Hoffman/Brian Lawrence)
This card takes the bottom honors out of sheer randomness. Brian Lawrence played five years with the Padres starting in 2001. He totaled 1.3 WAR with the team and was never anything approaching very good. Hoffman and Gwynn obviously have Padres legacies, but even Hoffman didn’t join the team until 1993. And then there’s Carter, who played only one (as mentioned above, very bad) season in San Diego, and it was in 1990, three years before Hoffman and 11 before Lawrence. There’s no common bond among those four beyond “were in San Diego at some point in their lives.” Add in the fact that they got a bat for Lawrence (career slash line: .131/.168/.166) and this card is just gibberish on gibberish on gibberish.
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 Fleer #703 (Cal Ripken Jr./Joe Carter)
Per Google, Ripken is 6’4, Carter is 6’3. Look at that picture. Is this a Lord of the Rings situation here? Does Ripken have a Tom Cruise clause where he has to look way taller than everyone? This isn’t even fair.
1994 Stadium Club #300
1994 Upper Deck #91
1996 Leaf Studio #86
1990 Upper Deck #53
I know I spend a lot of time mocking drawings of the players in this space, because we are as a group so bad at it, but … that’s Tim Meadows, guys. That’s not Joe Carter. That’s Tim Meadows.
1993 Score #506
And that is … well, I would watch the video of them smushing Joe Carter’s head in a hydraulic press, there is that.
1995 Topps Stadium Club – Power Zone #PZ4
I know that’s a standard illustration, but … putting it there means it’s a pop-up to the shortstop, guys.
1998 Skybox Circa Thunder – Rave #60
Joe Carter is, as I write this, 60 years old. Which is interesting, because in this card from 22 years ago, he is also 60 years old. Crazy how time works.
And now, the top four Joe Carter cards of all time.
4. 1992 Topps Kids #89
That is the best drawing of all time, I will brook no dissent on the subject, and I will not be taking questions at this time.
3. 1996 Upper Deck Collector’s Choice #350
“So wait, you’re telling me that I’ve averaged over 100 RBIs for more than a decade now, hit one of the most famous home runs ever, and I’m going to go down as an all-time overrated player? Get the hell out of here.”
2. 1994 Studio – Heritage Collection #3
I’m kind of surprised this isn’t more of a thing. Or maybe it is and I’ve just missed it. But man, you’d think the CC Sabathias and Curtis Grandersons and Doug Glanvilles of the world would have been all over the idea of doing cards in old Monarchs and Black Crackers and Clowns uniforms. I would buy up that set in a minute.
1. 1995 Upper Deck Collector’s Choice #59
Considering how iconic Carter’s home run off Mitch Williams to win the World Series was, and how picturesque his trip around first (and the rest of the way, but around first especially) was, there are surprisingly few cards (at least that I found) dedicated to that moment. This is the best one I could find, and man, it’s so good.
I’ve spent some time (relatively) dogging Carter in this space, because he really was just an average-to-slightly-above player for a long time who stumbled into a reputation as a lineup anchor/slugger type based on the fact that he regularly hit behind guys who were on base a lot. And that’s all true. But the number of players who would trade their careers for Carter’s? That list is long. How good would you have to be to not want to trade that for an iconic World Series walkoff? Presumably Bill Mazeroski is fine. Maybe Bobby Thomson, maybe Kirk Gibson, maybe a few others wouldn’t make the trade just based on the ridiculousness of the moment. Maybe Derek Jeter, Yogi Berra, Frankie Frisch are fine from a “number of titles” perspective. Maybe Barry Bonds, Ted Williams don’t need the accolades because of how good their careers were. But add it all up? The list of players who wouldn’t trade their careers for Carter’s is probably shorter than the number of cards I listed here.
“Touch ‘em all, Joe, you’ll never hit a bigger home run.”