Best Cards: Juan Gonzalez

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

A request! One of our subscribers (Nate Tepp, longtime follower) requested Juan Gonzalez for an edition of it, and while I still left it up to a Twitter survey, those are easy to manipulate if you’re the one choosing the options. I didn’t really think Jeff Blauser, Tom Henke, or Matt Williams stood a chance of beating him. So basically, the fix was in.

I became a Rangers fan in November of 1993, which is not-at-all coincidentally exactly when Will Clark went there in free agency. I was 9-almost-10 at the time, which is exactly when I was cementing my baseball fandom, which meant my Rangers fandom solidified itself in place for life. Well, at the time, Gonzalez was coming off what was ultimately his best season, 6.5 WAR and a league-leading 46 home runs and .632 slugging percentage.

I’ll say more about his baseball performance in a moment, but I want to note here my all-time favorite Gonzalez memory: In 1998, the Rangers played the Mariners on Sunday Night Baseball on ESPN on the last day before the All-Star Break. Gonzalez went into the game with 97 RBI and a shot to become the second player ever with 100 RBI at the break. At the time, we weren’t so educated about the inherent lack of value of the RBI, and I was 14, so I was hyped. We were at my brother’s house for dinner that night. My brother does not like baseball. My brother does not like sports. (My brother is a jerk.) He didn’t want baseball on. I told him that we were having baseball on. So we had baseball on.

Gonzalez had four RBI in the game. He got the 100. I was a 14-year-old dork at my baseball-hating brother’s house going nuts about a random summer game. It was silly. But I remember it so clearly, right down to my brother hating every last thing about it.

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Juan Gonzalez

Career: 1989-2005 (TEX, DET, CLE, KCR)
WAR: 38.7
Hall of Fame: Nope, only lasted two years on the ballot

Okay, back to the baseball talk. Historically speaking, Gonzalez is simultaneously over- and underrated. He won two MVPs and had four top-five finishes. He had a career OPS over .900 and won six Silver Sluggers. I bet people wouldn’t remember that about him. On the flip side, he didn’t reach even 40 WAR, he somehow made only three All-Star teams, and (partly because of steroid rumors, partly not) fell off the Hall of Fame ballot super fast. In short, pegging a specific ranking for where Gonzalez should sit among the 1980s-2000s sluggers would be a surprisingly tough ask.

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

The worst Juan Gonzalez card

2000 Pacific Aurora #55
1998 Topps Chrome Milestone Refractor #MS4

We’ve got a tie here, two cards with an action shot and a still. And based on his face in both stills, the last thing the photographers said before *click* was “Oh, and by the way, your dog just died.” Like, I’m not saying every player needs to smile like it’s sitcom opening credits from 1989, but Gonzalez is rocking serious “very special episode” face in these cards, and I don’t think “man, I’m gonna cry” is the aesthetic card companies really need to be shooting for.

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.

1994 Upper Deck Fun Pack #215
1995 Upper Deck Collector’s Choice #90

These cards might have been the straight-up worst if I hadn’t called other illustrated cards the worst in the past, but I felt like I needed to diversify. But man, these drawings are so bad I literally want to just say they are straight-up racist. And these are done by the same artist, right? So, like, they contracted the dude for some 1994 cards, and they saw the 1994 cards, and still brought him back for 1995? Not great, fellas.

1998 Select Numbers #2

I don’t even remember Gonzalez starring in Now You See Me 3, but I guess he must have, because these are some clear promotional materials right here.

1996 Upper Deck Collector’s Choice – You Crash The Game Redemption #CR28

I have a vague recollection of all the crappy promo cards from the ‘90s, and I do remember the “You Crash The game” set, but I don’t guess I remember the 1996 version. I only have the Check Out My Cards versions of these cards to give me direction, so someone help me out — are these Sportflics-ian holograms? Because they don’t look like it, but if that’s not the case, then … they just made a card subset with super-blurry pictures inside a starburst cutout? That’s real bad.

1995 Bowman’s Best – Mirror Image #5 (Juan Gonzalez/Juan LeBron)

First off, they couldn’t even get the image right, because that’s Carlos Beltran, fellas. Second of all, that’s a bona fide big-league star featured alongside a first-round pick who never ended up making the major leagues, always a risk when you do this sort of “current/future” feature. But third, hey, it’s LeBron!

1998 Upper Deck Collector’s Choice – Starquest #SQ18

Love to collect QSUTEASRT cards.

1998 Skybox Dugout Axcess – Gronks #3

I don’t remember these cards, and I have no memory of “Gronks” being a term to describe … sluggers? Powerful guys? I don’t even know what “Gronks” is meant to signify here, and I can’t even google it now because any search of “Gronks” leads to … well, you know. I wonder if Gronk collects these cards. I would if I was him.

Also, quick shoutout to Skybox for deciding “Access” wasn’t nearly metal enough and tossing that X in there.)

1999 Upper Deck Encore #171

Card companies had a real problem with saying a guy was really good at something while illustrating him failing at it, like in the Gary Carter piece where they highlighted his great fielding with a picture of him not making the play. So here, we have “Strokes of Genius” accompanied by an image of this great hitter … checking his swing poorly. I could swear card companies wanted to make players look bad about half the time.

2004 Upper Deck Reflections #198

In the late-middle of the Friends run, when Rachel was dating Tag, Jennifer Aniston got her hair cut super-short (a bob? I don’t know hairstyles) right in the middle of the season. Nobody on the show ever commented on her new hair, despite the fact that Jennifer Aniston’s hair was the most famous hair of a generation until Donald Trump came along and ruined hair conversations forever. And it always infuriates my wife when those episodes come on in reruns, because she wants them to acknowledge it. Like, when Matthew Perry and Matt LeBlanc changed hairstyles between Seasons 1 and 2, they wrote a whole plotline in about Phoebe giving haircuts. But Aniston and her iconic hair changes in-season, and they don’t say a word? She gets so mad.

Anyway, Juan Gonzalez is in a Royals uniform here, and I hate it.

And now, we count down the top four Juan Gonzalez cards of all time.

4. 2004 Topps Pristine – Going, Going Gone! Bat Relics #GGG-JG

Yeah, he’s on the Royals again here, so maybe I’m a hypocrite, but this card is real, real pretty. I want to go back and collect all the cards in this insert set. Good job, Topps.

3. 1994 Fleer – Pro-Visions #6

The cowboys hat. The fringed batting gloves. The brand. The torn sleeve. The horses in the background. The … yellow-brick road? Okay, I don’t get that part. This card packs in every last stereotype of Texas it can think of, all in service of a Puerto Rican 23-year-old who as far as I can tell didn’t establish any long-term ties to Texas. But dammit, it works.

2. 1997 Pacific Crown Collection #200

The 1997 series of these cards featured the flashy version of the players’ names along the sides of the card, except they predominantly used vertical pictures of the players, meaning you had to read the names sideways, and they were so embellished that it could actually be hard to figure out what the vertically oriented name said. And this card, just using a horizontal orientation for the card, fixes the problem almost completely. If the entire set had been horizontal pictures with the fancy name along the top, this would’ve been an iconic set.

1. 1994 Pinnacle #350

Card photographers often struggled to get good action shots of swings, and I don’t really know why. But like above, with the check swing, or players in the ‘80s, who almost universally looked like actors who had never seen a baseball hired to portray sluggers, baseball cards featuring swings all too often just fail to meet the mark. But man, here’s this. Maybe Gonzalez swung and missed. Maybe he popped it up. Maybe it was a foul ball. I don’t know. But in my head, this was an absolute rocket over the fence, and if you have any proof to the contrary and show it to me, I will hate you for life.