Best Cards: Sid Bream

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

I wonder what it’s like to be a person who is known for only one very specific thing. Like, not “baseball player,” but specifically “scored the winning run in the 1992 National League Championship Series.” I’m sure Sid Bream is happy that’s what he’s remembered for and not “let grounder roll through his legs in the 1986 World Series” or, I don’t know, “Bartman,” but still, it’s gotta be tedious, right?

“You’re the Slide guy!” “I mean, yes, but I also played 12 years in the major leagues, played in the playoffs three times. I have four kids, I’m a motivational speaker, I’m corporate chaplain for PGT Trucking.” “Nah, dude, you did the Slide! That was sick!”

How many times do you think Bream has had to sign a photo of that play in the ’92 NLCS? Per a quick eBay search, it’s A LOT. There’s even a dang bobblehead of the play.

I don’t know Sid Bream. Never met him. Maybe he’s one of those guys for whom that’s a thrill each and every time. But (no shade!) there are some guys who have to get tired of it eventually. I’m not saying that’s him. I just wonder what that experience is like.

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Sid Bream

Career: 1983-1994 (LAD, PIT, ATL, HOU)
WAR: 11.1
Hall of Fame: lol no

Something I knew, but didn’t really think about until doing this, is that Bream’s series-winning slide in 1992 came against … his old team. Like, conceptually I knew he had been a Pirate not long before becoming a Brave, but it didn’t really hit me that he scored that winning run against a bunch of his old teammates.

Doug Drabek, who Bream walked off of to reach base, was his Pirates teammate. So was Orlando Merced, Bream’s first base backup and the first baseman at the time. So was Stan Belinda, who relieved Drabek and gave up the hit. So was Barry Bonds, who was the left fielder who tried to throw him out at the plate. So was Mike LaValliere, the catcher who tried to tag him out.

In the moment, I’m sure all Bream thought was “woo, World Series.” But surely at least one of the guys he celebrated in front of was a friend. Do you think there’s any bitterness? I figure there’s got to be some bitterness.

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

The worst Sid Bream card

1995 Topps #19

Bream retired during the strike in 1994. That means this card came out after his career was over. He played 46 games in his only year with the Astros in 1994, limited to 70 plate appearances in largely pinch-hitting duties (he only played 62.1 innings in the field). He actually hit well! He slashed .344/.429/.426, good for a 130 OPS+ that was actually the best of his career (albeit on a small sample). Still, because of age and injuries, he was only a shadow of himself. And to memorialize that wind down of a career, we get this shot, of him sitting on the bench (something he did a lot of that year) looking out at the field (something he did a lot of that year), not playing baseball (something he not-did a lot of that year). And it’s not even a good picture! The photographer had to have over-flashed that thing. His shadow is so damn stark. Sorry for a bad last card, Sid.

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.

1983 TCMA Albuquerque Dukes #15

Look at Sid in that card, pictured when he was probably about 23. Now scroll up a little and look at the Topps picture, taken when he was probably 33. Dude aged exactly zero days between those two pictures. Now look at modern-day Sid Bream. I don’t know what the dude does, but the dude does it right. Congratulations on a complete lack of aging.

1985 Donruss #470

I can’t find information about when Sid and his wife Michelle got married. (To be fair, I didn’t look that long.) But he had his mustache in 1983, and he kept that thing all the way through to today. Based on that, I believe her to have been his childhood sweetheart, and they were married, or at least dating, for the entirety of his career. Because that is the mustache of a man who was told at some point that he looked like Tom Selleck, and the person who told him that has been with him ever since. It … it ain’t Magnum, though.

1986 Topps #589

“You HAVE to make sure you get his entire bat in the card.”

“You sure, boss? If we crop the bat, no one’s gonna care. Probably won’t even notice. And then we can, you know, zoom in on the athlete.”

“NO! The bat is the most important thing! If you crop the bat, maybe they won’t even know he’s playing baseball! Do. Not. Crop. The. Bat. At. All.”

“Sigh. Okay, boss. Whatever you say.”

1991 Studio #142

It would take you 1.4 seconds to convince someone this picture is actually cut from an “addiction help” advertisement. No shade on Bream at all, but man they nailed that aesthetic.

1987 Donruss Opening Day #168

I like to mock our sports movies of the 1980s and 1990s for their casting choices. Tim Robbins as a hotshot pitcher? Timothy Busfield as a slugging first baseman? John Candy as a former sprinter? Yeah, screw it, who cares. There was no credence given to whether the person in question could actually do those things, and about as much given to whether the person looked like they could do those things. And I maintain that that was a good point — you wouldn’t cast Paul Giamatti in Brad Pitt’s role in Moneyball today, but 25 years ago they’d have thought about it — but then I see Sid Bream in the 1980s and … in about half of his pictures, he looks like a dude out of central casting who looks like a ballplayer but has never actually done it. I beg your pardon, moviemakers of the ‘80s and ‘90s.

And now, the top three Sid Bream cards of all time.

3. 1995 Upper Deck Collector’s Choice Best of the 90s #55

If this card had been a 1993 card — i.e., if it had been a card that came out immediately after the play and not a retrospective shot a couple years later — I might rank it #1. It’s a cool card, a cool shot of a cool play. I might question Collector’s Choice opting for a best-of-the-decade subset when the decade was barely half over, but they could have done this in 2000 and the card would still play.

(I will say, though, that I bet Mike LaValliere is no fan of this card. And if John Candy had wanted to go into baseball acting, I found a character for him.)

2. 1992 Topps Stadium Club #478
1. 1994 Topps Stadium Club #79

It’s mid-summer, 1992, and the bosses in the penthouse of Topps are finally looking through all the lower-tier cards that their company put out that year. They come across Bream’s card and look at one another for just a moment. Finally, one of them gets hits a button on his phone.

A few hours later, Jim the photographer steps on the elevator. He’s never been called to the top floor of the Topps building before. What could they want? He remembered his friend Ted getting in some serious trouble over the Billy Ripken “fuck face” card. Could he have made the same sort of mistake? He needed this job. Jeanine was pregnant, and the doctor had just told them it was twins. He couldn’t afford to be fired. On top of that, “baseball card photographer” is all Jim had ever wanted to do. When he was a kid and his brothers would play sandlot games with the boys down the street, Jim would hover around the sidelines taking pretend shots and framing pretend cards. If he lost this job, he didn’t know what he’d do.

It’s too late to worry about that, though. Each ding of the elevator heralds a new floor, and a new bead of sweat trickling down Jim’s back as he wonders what he could have done wrong.

Finally, the final ding dings, the elevator doors open, and Jim steps off. It opens right into the offices — they didn’t need a hallway or a foyer or a secretary on the top floor, because you didn’t come up there unless you were summoned. Jim looks around the room at four stern-faced older men, the kind you’d expect to see laughing over scotch and a stock sale, all staring at him.

Jim is tall, but in that moment he feels short. He’s only 25. Still a kid. He figures there will come a time someday when he’ll stop feeling like everybody older than him is also bigger than him, but he isn’t there yet. In his head, even though he is 6’1 and the tallest member of this group couldn’t have topped 5’10, Jim feels like they are looking down at him.

“You called?” he asks as he walks forward.

“Sit down,” the oldest, fattest one says. Jim complies quickly, dropping into an oversized leather chair that he figures costs more than he made for the entire 1992 set of pictures. The same old one steps forward and Jim sees a card in his hand. He tries to squint to see which card it is, but the windows in the office are open and the sun is streaming in behind the man. All Jim can see is the rectangle.

“Did you take this picture?” the man says, holding the rectangle out to Jim.

Jim takes it. Sid Bream. He doesn’t remember every picture he ever took — no photographer does — but he knows he was at several Braves games taking pictures. There were even some Braves-Expos games. He can’t say for sure that he took the picture, but he figures he probably did. He squints at it for a moment. There’s nothing in there obviously objectionable. Are they mad that Bream is partially obstructed by the baserunner? Jim likes the framing of the shot, if for no other reason than this was a cool angle for a card, Bream stretching into foul territory for an errant throw and, if Jim wasn’t much mistaken, making the play.

But there isn’t anything there that jumps out to Jim as bad. No fans in the background making an obscene gesture, no unzipped flies displaying something.

Jim flips the card over. That’s right, the back of that year’s Stadium Club set don’t even include new pictures, just reprints of the player’s rookie card. Silly tweak to the set that year, but Jim was only 18 when Bream’s rookie card came out, surely that couldn’t be his fault.

He flips the card back to the front and squints one more time. Finally, he internally shrugs. He was sure he had taken the picture. If there was something wrong with it, there was something wrong with it. He’d apologize. Maybe they’d forgive one mistake.

“I … I think so, sir,” Jim says.

The old man looks back at the others. They nod, infuriatingly offering no tells for Jim. The old man looks down at the card again, softly shaking his head inscrutably.

Seconds pass. Jim can feel the sweat. It’s like taking pictures at a Rangers game in August. Brutal. Part of him thinks they turned up the thermostat in the room just to make him uncomfortable, but then the old man in front of him has to outweigh Jim by 100 pounds and he seems fine.

Finally, the old guy meets Jim’s eyes … and he smiles.

“Jim Cornwell, you beautiful son of a bitch,” he says. “I love this card. We all do.”

“You … you do?” Jim says.

“It’s beautiful!” another one says. This one is particularly short and spindly, like a sapling that hadn’t yet blossomed into full tree status. But he’s confident, his voice deep. “We want more. More like this.”

“More?” Jim asks. “More plays at first base?”

“So many more!” the sapling says. “Sid Bream, play at first base. If you can make this exact card again for the ’93 set, we would be delighted.”

Jim thinks about this. He’s actually set for some time off coming up. He’s completed most of his photography work for the next year’s set. He figures he can probably move some things around … and then as he thinks this he remembers that Bream just hit the disabled list.

Sapling raises his hand. He has clearly seen Jim’s hesitation. “Stop, stop,” he says. “Let me guess. You already did the pictures for this year?”

“Y-yes sir,” Jim says.

“That’s fine. Your contract with Topps has been extended two years. You will be a staff photographer through the ’94 set. We are expecting good things out of you, Jim Cornwell.”

The next few days are a blur. Jim tells his family. Jim tells his wife. They can finally buy a house. They can set up a college fund for the kids. All because of one Sid Bream photo? Is the picture really that good?

Jim looks at that card pretty often. He even frames it and put it on his wall. Because of that card, his career is finalized. Because of one innocent Sid Bream picture, taken at a date he doesn’t even remember.

Jim studies up over the next year. He prepares for Bream’s games like a soldier going to war. Bream’s getting older, more brittle, but Jim will make sure he gets his chance. He goes to game after game that season, but it never works out just right.

And then the game. Bream’s playing first base in Atlanta, against the Reds. Reggie Sanders is up. He hits a grounder up the middle. It’s going to be a close play, but Jim is set up for it. He watches closely, snaps his camera as many times as he can. He’s wasting film, but that’s okay.

When the 1994 set comes out, Jim has a party. He doesn’t even know if the bosses are going to like the new card, but he’s going for optimism. He gets a box and tears through the cards. He finds it. No. 79. That’s his picture.

Two days later, he’s walking off the elevator into the office again. All four guys are still there. This time, they’re smiling. They’re each holding a glass of scotch. And sapling has a second one in his hand that he reaches out to Jim.

“Jim Cornwell, you beautiful son of a bitch,” the old guy — a little older, a little fatter — says again. “You did it again.”