Best Cards: Kirby Puckett
(This is Best Cards Ever, a never-ending quest to find the single best baseball card of every player.)
Last time in this space, I tried to find the best card in the long career of Gary Carter. My plan for this series is to toss some ideas of names out there on Twitter and let readers decide who’s going to be next. Of course — spoiler warning — I can’t pretend to be doing anything else from now on, and when I ask you to pick a player, you’ll know why. This time, though? People voted blind:
Kirby Puckett ran away with that poll. It didn’t occur to me until after the fact that I was painting myself into the corner of breaking down two different Hall of Famers who both died prematurely, but here we are.
Anyway, this is our quest to find the best baseball card in the history of Kirby Puckett.
Kirby Puckett
Career: 1984-1995
WAR: 51.1
Hall of Fame: 2001
Puckett had among the shortest careers possible to be a Hall of Famer, which is not really his fault, with vision issues forcing him to retire at age 36. With no extenuating circumstances, Puckett would have been a fringy Hall of Famer at best, but there were of course those circumstances, so he sailed in on the first ballot. (There are also post-career off-field issues that are certainly detractors.) Anyway, he had a big quota of career cards, with two World Series titles and a perfectly timed run as his team’s biggest star, so there is plenty to choose from here.
(As always, thanks to Check Out My Cards for being able to track these down.)
The worst Kirby Puckett card
2019 Leaf In The Game Used Sports – The Gr8est of All-Time 8 relics #TGT-10
I mentioned in the Carter piece how I’m reluctant to give extra credit for modern cards about former players, because they have more resources, capabilities, and time now. Well, the obvious inverse of that is that modern cards should have a higher floor, and any failures are that much worse. And considering that, what in the holy hell is this? There are bits of game-used memorabilia from eight different huge names on this card, except that only three of them get pictures and the other five get only jerseys. It’s horribly arranged, insultingly composed, and ridiculously muddled. This card is apparently special (numbered to 35), but good lord, would I happily trade it for a silly checklist card. Y’all can rein in the silly memorabilia trend now, thanks.
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.
1996 Select Certified Edition – Inter-League Preview #15
Fun fact: Interleague play (not “inter-league,” ya Select weirdos) didn’t actually start until 1997, so they were really jumping the gun here, even moreso by the fact that Puckett not only didn’t play in ’97, he didn’t even play in ’96. But whatever, better too early than too late I suppose. My question is whether guys like Alan Benes here preserve cards like this. Like how Bob Bonner’s Topps rookie card was also Cal Ripken’s so it’s actually worth a fair amount of money. Do the Beneses and Bonners of the world get to go around saying, like, “Yeah, my card’s worth X dollars”? Because I would absolutely do that, and then when someone asked further questions I’d mumble quietly and change the subject.
1997 Donruss – Cal Ripken Jr. “The Only Way I Know” #1
Technically a Ripken card, but look, Kirby’s right there. And yes, I know Ripken is famously tall for a shortstop, and Puckett was built like a bowling ball, but putting these two high-end professional athletes who play the same dang sport next to each other is just hilarious. They couldn’t get Puckett a Bob Costas-ian box to stand on or something?
1992 Score Dream Team #886
“Sorry boss, I know Puckett’s catch in the World Series was one of the coolest sports moments ever, but legitimately no one in the world got a picture of it. No, I don’t know how, it’s crazy. What? You want me to half-assedly recreate it in a studio? I mean, I can, but … No, no, that’s fine, we’ll do it. Listen, could you just credit me as Alan Smithee on this one?”
1993-95 Cardtoons – Big Bang Bucks #BB6
1993-95 Cardtoons – Grand Slam Etched Foil #F7
1993 Metz Baking – Food Issue #KIPU
1992 Fun Stuff Baseball Enquirer #43
So in the 1980s and 1990s, you couldn’t just jump onto a website and post or apply to a job. You had to hunt them down, send letters, find connections. Or apparently, if you wanted to draw baseball players for trading cards, you had to be the boss’s 4-year-old son with no artistic ability or knowledge of what humans actually looked like. Just some scribbles and then voila, a baseball card.
1989 Topps #650
Do you think Puckett just got up, is just about to go to bed, or is on 500 different tranquilizers here? And how exactly did this come to be the chosen picture?
1995 Topps Traded & Rookies #162T
Look, I could say a whole lot about Puckett’s off-field stuff, and it’s pretty awful. I don’t want to just ignore it, but it’s also unpleasant to talk about it vis-à-vis baseball cards. So I’ll just say that it’s impressive that you can look at this card and not be sure who is actually the worse guy here.
1993 Donruss – Masters of the Game #13
“Emboss it again!” “Carl, we already embossed it six ti…” “Emboss. It. Again!”
And now, the top four
4. 1991 Score #891
Listen, I would trade my physique for prime Puckett’s in about a second, even if it means I’d be three inches shorter. But he’s hardly the poster boy for “ideal athlete body.” This is the spiritual predecessor of Prince Fielder’s ESPN Body Issue spread. But damn man, it works. The shadows at the bottom, the dark bat, the smile. This is a damn pretty card.
3. 1993 Topps #200
I want to know how this card came into being. Do card photographers carry around cases of props like guys running photo booths at a wedding? Was this on display at the Twins stadium and Puckett was just like “mine”? Also, imagine a giant like Aaron Judge or Richie Sexson holding this bat. Maybe it only looks big because Puckett was such a wee fella.
Also, that’s a pretty background.
2. 1997 Upper Deck #415
This card set was a favorite of mine as a kid because it was the first one (at least as far as I recall) to give an actual caption for the picture. It didn’t really matter — for a card like this, it would be easy to figure out when it happened, and for a generic action shot, well, who cares — but it’s a neat addition that I wish more cards made, either on the front or on the back. There were several cards that year that used some variation of the “Puckett waves to the crowd at his goodbye ceremony” shot, but the caption bumps this one up a notch or two.
And the best Kirby Puckett card of all time …
1. 1990 Upper Deck #48 (Checklist)
A checklist. A damn checklist. The back of this card is just the checklist for that year’s Twins cards. But man, after spending that time above mocking cards that were illustrations over photographs, I gotta give it up for this one. Not one but two illustrations, and they’re both very well done. It’s a card worth remembering (I bet if you closed your eyes and pictured a Kirby Puckett card before reading this, it was one of the few that came to mind), and checklist or no, it’s just gorgeous.