Best Cards: Ryne Sandberg

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

Before looking up some stuff to write this, I had completely forgotten Ryne Sandberg spent parts of three seasons as the Phillies manager. I had forgotten it took him three years on the ballot to make the Hall of Fame. I had forgotten that he won nine straight Gold Gloves. I remembered the trade, I remembered the one-year retirement, I remembered the league-leading home run total, but I swear, Sandberg has by and large become a rumor.

Maybe that’s just me. Maybe that information is solidly in the memory banks of all the other baseball fans out there. But I don’t think so. I feel like Sandberg’s career — 16 seasons over 17 years, an MVP, 10 All-Star appearances — has gotten overlooked in recent vintage. I don’t know if that’s because the second base position became so strong for a few years there that his numbers pale in comparison, or because the Cubs were bad for most of his career, or what, but I don’t think I’m wrong to say Sandberg has become less famous than you’d expect from a Hall of Famer who spent so much time on a team whose games were on TV more than anybody but the Braves.

Anyway, that’s mostly just my interpretation. But for all Ryne Sandberg accomplished, I feel like he’s only sort-of remembered.

Ryne Sandberg

Career: 1981-1994, 1996-1997 (PHI, CHC)
WAR: 68.0
Hall of Fame: 2005

The reason it seems weird to me that Sandberg isn’t better remembered is that it was genuinely a great career. He won the NL Gold Glove every year 1983-1991. He was an All-Star every year 1984-1993. He was the MVP in 1984 and got votes in 1985 and 1989-1992. He won seven Silver Sluggers. He only got two chances to play in the postseason, but hit .385/.457/.641 in 10 games, and might have become a legend for his 1989 performance if it hadn’t come against Will Clark doing even more. (Yes, I forced a Will Clark reference in here. You’re lucky I haven’t done six different pieces on his cards so far.) And as a guy with such a noteworthy career, Sandberg accordingly had a lot of cards.

The worst Ryne Sandberg card

1993 Score #530

So apparently, the artists at Score in the mid-‘90s thought Ryne Sandberg was a young Jay Leno. I get these are caricatures and not meant to be exact depictions, but, like … couldn’t they have tried a little? This is horrific.

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 Leaf Preview #2

Boss at Leaf: “I mean, that’s a decent picture for our Wes Chamberlain card, but you can’t really see his face.”

Photographer: “No, no, boss, that’s for the Sandberg.”

Boss: “Wait, Ryne Sandberg? Where’s … the little bit of fielder you can see in the background? Why?”

Photographer: “Honestly, I forgot we were even gonna do Ryno, and I found this picture at the last minute.”

Boss: *Sigh*

1996 Fleer Ultra Respect #8

One of the trends in cards in the ‘90s was to just slap some word across the cards, like the players were kittens dangling from branches and these were all motivational poster. I imagine this subset came along late in the trend, and they were like, “Well, ‘intimidation’ and ‘grit’ and ‘determination’ have all been used. ‘Respect,’ I guess? I dunno.”

That said, I would be shocked if there wasn’t a whole host of Derek Jeter Re2pect cards in the last couple years.

1997 Score #537

I was wrong! “Grit” came the next year.

1994 Donruss Triple Play – Medalists #6 (Ryne Sandberg/Craig Biggio/Robby Thompson)

Do you think even Robby Thompson sees this card and is like “What the heck was I doing there?”

1997 Donruss Studio #41

“Hey there kids, we’ve had an awful lot of fun here talking cool baseball plays. But the best play you can make is…” (pulls out chair, turns it around backward, sits on it) “…Jesus Christ.”

1986 Sportflics #51 (Ryne Sandberg/Steve Garvey/Pete Rose)

Because this isn’t Harry Potter, I can’t show you how this card looked moving. So I’m stuck with this still version, which looks like the middle picture on an Animorphs book. Not great.

1993 Upper Deck #483 (Randy Myers/Ryne Sandberg/Mark Grace)

I imagine there were rumors in the ‘90s that Sandberg and Grace had actually merged into one person patrolling the right side of the Cubs’ infield, and they had to make this card to dispel those rumors. And Randy Myers is there for some reason.

1991 Fleer #709 (Ryne Sandberg/Cecil Fielder)

Who do you like better, Ryne Cecil or Sandberg Fielder?

2005 Donruss Diamond Kings #449

There is some serious “Tom Brady’s court sketch” or “Ronaldo’s bust” energy here.

And now, the top four Ryne Sandberg cards of all time.

4. 1992 Score Dream Team #442

A fun trend of photos to watch is people taking pictures of Instagram influencers taking their pictures. You know, pretty girl lying down in a kiddie pool, the Instagram photo looks reflective and magical, the “10 feet back” photo looks absolutely comical. This is one of those cards where I wish we had that image. I imagine the photographer lying down on the ground looking up at a Ryne Sandberg making the awkward “getting ready” pose and I just love it. (Yes, there are much better odds this was in a studio, but my way’s funnier.)

Anyway, I have an uncomfortable level of love for clouds, so this card is great.

3. 1992 Topps #300

On its own, this card is pretty cool. You don’t get many progression cards like this outside of Sportflics. I give credit to Topps for trying something with this card. The silly part is when you compare it to the best of the 1992 set, which was predominantly workaday cards with little to no experimentation. Look at the full set laid out, this card’s weird. By itself? It’s cool.

2. 1994 Upper Deck Iooss Collection All-Star Jumbos #5

Walter Iooss has done very famous photography of some of the best athletes in our history, has spent years working on the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, has been exhibited in the Newseum and the Annenberg Space for Photography (thank you, Wikipedia), and is all-around one of the most noteworthy living photographers. And I know his name, and know it well, entirely because he did some work for Upper Deck in the mid-‘90s where he took some fancy pictures of baseball players. But hey, dude was good at it.

1. 1991 Topps #740

Somehow, the prettiest card in a long, illustrious career is from 1991 Topps, one of the most mundane card sets in our collective history. These cards had the boring red backgrounds, the awful blue bottom lines that looked like bad newsprint, and were all-in-all one of the most forgettable and cheapest card sets of all time. And yet buried deep within that set (#740, good lord) was this card, a wonderful action shot of a great ballplayer swinging, the catcher already looking up at wherever the ball is going, and the great Wrigley brick wall in the background. We don’t know (and probably couldn’t track down now even if we wanted to) whether this swing resulted in a hit or a home run, but with the way Sandberg’s and the catcher’s (is that Darren Daulton?) heads are going, I’m just choosing to believe it was a home run and you can’t stop me.