Best Cards: Steve Avery

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

A couple years ago, I was working on the third book in my After Life series of zombie novels and had gotten stuck. After a couple weeks of writing about two-thirds of a single paragraph and then erasing it several times, I put the whole thing aside and wrote about the best cards in the career of Jeff Conine, just to say “Hey, I wrote some words” and hoping it would spark some further creativity.

I can’t say whether it worked or not, because things aren’t necessarily that linear, but I did eventually finish the third book (You can buy it and the rest of the trilogy! Do that thing!). Today, I have no specific writing project I’m working on (I do have another novel coming out in June — so fancy — but it’s already written). What I do have is a desire to have a specific writing project I’m working on. I have between 1,000 and 10,000 words on a half-dozen different ideas written, but nothing that feels like it’s coming together into something I want to actually be my next book. Having a mental block when you have a plot in mind but can’t get the right words in the right order is an issue. Having a mental block when you just want to write and have nothing else lined up is … I mean, it’s much more frustrating. I don’t have to write, but I want to write, and I want to know what it is I’m writing, and right now, I just don’t.

Anyway, here’s Steve Avery. Maybe he’ll work me out of my funk.

Steve Avery

Career: 1990-2003 (ATL, BOS, CIN, DET)
WAR: 12.5
Hall of Fame: Nah, didn’t even make the ballot

The day I’m writing this part of the entry (we’ll see when I finish it!), Craig Calcaterra quote-tweeted a @BaseballInPics tweet that had a picture of Avery alongside Greg Maddux, John Smoltz and Tom Glavine and asked if it was the best rotation ever, and he said “This is either Pete Smith, Kent Mercker, Jason Schmidt, or Terrell Wade erasure.” Which … yes. It’s also erasure of Denny Neagle, Kevin Millwood, Odalis Perez and heck, John Burkett. Maddux-Smoltz-Glavine were either the best trio of starters any team has ever had, or at least on the medal podium. But we couldn’t leave well enough alone, and the baseball world collectively insisted on there being a fourth there. Personally, I was partial to Millwood, but just about every guy named above got at least a mention as being the Fourth Horseman of the Atlantapocalypse.

Avery was the first one, though. He was with the Braves before Maddux, was the team’s third overall pick in 1988, finished sixth in the Cy Young voting in his first full season, made his lone All-Star Team in Maddux’s first season in Atlanta. We wanted so hard for there to be a fourth, and it just never really came together.

In a sense, Avery is a (much lesser) version of Scottie Pippen. We’ll never really know how Pippen would have been perceived without Michael Jordan. Would he have been much less famous without the superstar helping him to titles? Or would he have been much more famous had he not operated in the superstar’s shadow all that time? Similarly, would Avery have thrived without the “Hotlanta” pressure heaped upon him, or would he be all but forgotten because he was a flash in the pan who put up 11.3 WAR from age 21 to 23 and retired after his age-33 season with only 12.5 total? I don’t know.

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

The worst Steve Avery card

1993-95 Cardtoons – Grand Slam Etched Foil #F-4 (Steve Bravery)

I’ll forgive the Avery/Bravery pun if you make me. Whatever. There’s literally no relevance beyond that, but they have to force puns where they have to force puns. But two questions about the front of the card:

• Are Avery’s claws … deflating the baseball? Does the cartoonist know what is inside baseballs, and that it is not air?

• Why is there a caterpillar? There’s a caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland, but there’s not one in The Wizard of Oz, is there? I googled and couldn’t find anything, but maybe I’m crazy.

If those were the biggest problems, I’d probably have mocked the card a bit, but it would have been buried in the middle of this. But now let’s look at the back of the card:

This anatomy thing is an absolute disaster. Like, it starts out fine, if a bit forced. Toes the rubber, foot on the bag, shin guards, legs out a hit. I’m with you. Belly flop, kind of forced. Breaks his wrists, I mean, fine, but this is kid-themed, and I feel like kids are going to think that’s a literal break, but I’ll accept it.

WHAT THE HELL IS THIS NEXT ONE.

“Necks year”? It’s not even a good pun! It’s the most forced thing of all time. It’s completely stupid, and if you have to go that far to make your theme “work,” that should be a sign that your theme is a failure.

(Also: You can write until or you can write ‘til. You cannot write ‘till. “Till” is either to dig the soil or where the money goes in a cash register. Putting the apostrophe there is just “I don’t know words.”)

And then from that disaster, we go to beanballs and then … just words that we use in regular life and forcing them into baseball. Take, like, four extra seconds, guys. Just a little longer. This was so, so, so dumb.

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 Bowman’s Best #109 (Steve Avery/Bill Pulsipher)

Avery was a “failed” prospect inasmuch as he came up for a bit and couldn’t make it last. Bill Pulsipher’s relative failure is much more depressing. He was part of Generation K, the Pulsipher/Jason Isringhausen/Paul Wilson triumvirate that was supposed to pop and become the Mets’ answer to the Hotlanta rotation the Braves had. But it super never worked, combining for less than 16 career WAR. Pulsipher was … fine as a rookie in 1995. 1.7 WAR, 3.98 ERA. But he was shut down late in the season with elbow soreness and didn’t pitch in the bigs again until late June in 1998. (Wilson was even worse, throwing 149 big-league innings in 1996 and then not again until August 2000.) It was real sad.

The point is, man, there were some people in 1994 who thought they had struck gold with this card. Putting it in plastic covers, stashing them away. And today, it’s probably worth approximately 3.4 cents.

1993 Upper Deck #816 (Checklist)

I work from home and the kids are in school now, so all of a sudden I have a lot of quiet time. (This is not a complaint; my life has been extremely loud for five years.) So I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts, and one of those is “Pod Meets World,” the Boy Meets World rewatch show with Rider Strong, Danielle Fishel and Will Friedle. And they’re generally very high on their experience with the show, but every once in a while you can feel them wince at something that didn’t age well, that wouldn’t be made today, that wasn’t exactly the best idea.

Anyway, here’s Steve Avery in front of a Native American caricature.

1993 Topps Finest #160

Card designers have to hate baseball players, man. You get these nice, generally vertically oriented pictures of a pitcher throwing, or a hitter hitting, except either the pitcher’s arm or the hitter’s bat is so far to the horizontal that you just have to crop it out. It’s gotta be annoying as hell.

1995 Topps #430

Oh no, Steve Avery’s gonna fall over backward.

1994 Topps Team Stadium Club #32

Oh no, Steve Avery’s gonna fall over forward.

1993 Upper Deck #472 – Strike Force (Greg Maddux/Steve Avery/John Smoltz/Tom Glavine)

I can’t decide what I’d think of this card if I were Steve Avery. Like, do you have fond memories of being this really cool unit that had everyone excited? Or are you bitter that everyone else here did so much in their careers and you … didn’t?

Also, for the record: Greg Maddux was nowhere near this picture. This was three pitchers, then they signed Maddux and the Upper Deck folks were like “Crap, insert him.” He wasn’t even kind of there.

1992 Fleer #349
1996 Collector’s Choice #453
1996 Topps #165

I bet you remember the Braves’ big trio of pitchers being surprisingly good hitters for being pitchers. And I’ll tell you now, that reputation is almost entirely because of (a) that “Chicks Dig the Long Ball” commercial and (b) we love to lionize people who are good at things by saying they are good at everything. John Smoltz had a 16 career OPS+ with 5 home runs in 21 years. Greg Maddux had a 5 OPS+ with 5 homers, 23 years. Tom Glavine? 22 OPS+, 1 homer, 22 years.

Just getting it out of the way now: Avery wasn’t any good either. He had an 18 career OPS+, 4 homers in 11 seasons. But I feel OK saying he was the best hitter on that team. .252 slugging (.210 for Glavine, .205 for Maddux, .207 for Smoltz). None of them could hit. Avery could not-hit the best.

And now, the top four Steve Avery cards of all time.

4. 1990 CMC AAA ProCards A & AA #277

Listen, I’m a sucker for two things. The first is an obvious they-tried-here photo on a card (you’ll see shortly). The other is a guy we know as a grizzled vet pictured as a virtual kid. That’s what we have here. Lookit the young face! Lookit the almost mullet! You’re cute, kid.

3. 1994 Bowman #189

I’m right-handed, and also I never really pitched after Little League. Combined, that means I know very little about savvy pickoff moves, especially from lefties who raise their lead leg, hold, and don’t commit to whether they’re going to go to the plate or throw over as long as possible. I remember practicing with Ben Gnau, one of our lefty pitchers in high school, with the coach telling him to hold longer, longer, longer, until Ben lost his balance. Obviously, Avery’s throwing a pitch here, but it’s still a fun thing for me to think about.

2. 1993 Upper Deck Iooss Collection #WI5

The Iooss Collection was, at least as far as I remember, a pretty famous group of cards. And sure, maybe Upper Deck couldn’t/didn’t want to spring for the super-famous photographer to do his fancy cards every year, but … couldn’t they have tried to emulate it? Wouldn’t it have been cool to try about 15% harder on card pictures? Stadium Club did it to great effect. But Upper Deck was like “Hey, we got Iooss in ’93, that’s it for anything tryhard, get over it.”

1. 1992 Topps #574

This is the counter to my complaint about pitcher arms being difficult to frame earlier. Just zoom out! You get Avery’s entire body. You get the scene set (Hi Wrigley!). You get the atmosphere that is key to baseball, a pitcher all by himself, with only blurry little Jeff Blauser (I assume) even visible. It’s a cool framing that we don’t get as often as we probably should.

And they did it in 1992 Topps of all things. How this photo didn’t get sent over to the Stadium Club offices is beyond me.