Best Cards: Terry Pendleton

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

Terry Pendleton played 15 seasons in the major leagues. He played in five World Series, won an MVP and finished second another year. He was an average to above-average player for a long time. And he did a big chunk of it on the Braves, meaning he was on everybody’s cable TV all the time.

And I bet you have no lasting Terry Pendleton memories.

I like to say something interesting about each player in these intros, but it’s possible the most interesting thing about Terry Pendleton is that there isn’t anything interesting about Terry Pendleton. A search on YouTube for him leads to a walk-off home run in 1992, a first pitch in 2019, and Lonnie Smith’s baserunning error in the 1991 World Series (on a Pendleton hit). His Wiki page doesn’t include anything of interest beyond some baseball facts.

Terry Pendleton was just a dude who played baseball. He did it for a long while, he was pretty damn good, and that’s … all.

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Terry Pendleton

Career: 1984-1998 (STL, ATL, FLA, CIN, KCR)
WAR: 28.5
Hall of Fame: Got one vote in 2004

So we all know Pendleton won the 1991 NL MVP. He did it with a .319/.363/.517 slash line and 6.1 WAR. Barry Bonds finished second that year. He had essentially the same slugging percentage (.514), but topped Pendleton by nearly 50 points in OBP (.410). He drove in 30 more runs, for those who care about that, but because he waked so much, Pendleton’s batting average carried it. Bonds was worth nearly two more wins (8.0) than Pendleton. Tom Glavine, who finished 11th, had 9.2 WAR. Ryne Sandberg, who tied for 17th, had 7.0 WAR. Will Clark led the league in slugging and had a virtually identical on-base percentage. Pendleton had a great year, but man did we not know how to evaluate baseball in the early ‘90s.

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

The worst Terry Pendleton card

1994 Upper Deck Collector’s Choice #372

The pitch was high, and maybe inside, so I assume it was called a ball. Still, it’s an incredibly anticlimactic card, featuring a photo of what I can only call “an aggressive take.” It’s close enough that we might be seeing him take a strike, but even if it’s a ball, it’s just such a blah shot for a card set that typically opted for more interesting views. This was really the best they could do? I’m bored of Terry Pendleton just looking at it. (Maybe that was the point, given what I said above about him.)

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.

1982 Donruss #534 (error and correct)

I recognize they didn’t have easy access to Google and the like back then, but how do you make this mistake? I checked to see if his name was, like, “Jeff Terry Pendleton,” which would make this far more understandable, and nope. Terry Lee Pendleton. So someone was making this card and was just like “Hmm, yep, he looks like a Jeff.”

1993-94 Z Silk Cachet Covers #TPCR.1 (Terry Pendleton/Cal Ripken Jr.)

Ah yes, a very nice card featuring Cal Ripken and (squints) young Cuba Gooding Jr. (We would also accept rookie Andruw Jones.)

1995 Bowman #371
1996 Donruss #345

In obituaries, the overwhelming trend is to use one of the last good pictures of the deceased. Betty might have been a beauty queen, factory worker, mother of six, and all-around wonderful lady in the 1950s, but she died in 2018, so her picture looks like … well, someone who was 95 years old. I’m not saying it’s definitively the wrong approach — it always stands out when someone dies at 89 but the picture is from their high school diploma — but it does stand out that the last memory we get of some people who lived huge, full lives is of them looked feeble and old and barely resembling their old selves.

Anyway, here’s chubby Terry Pendleton in a Marlins uniform.

1995 Topps Stadium Club – Ring Leaders #34

You know the Mitch Hedberg bit about ESPN Classic? “I was watching ESPN Classic the other day; the dude hit a foul ball. Fuckin’ classic, man.” That’s all I can think when I see cards like this. “Terry Pendleton bunted. Fuckin’ metal, man.”

And now, the top four Terry Pendleton cards of all time.

4. 1993 Topps Stadium Club #338

I don’t know if I just didn’t appreciate Stadium Club at the time, but I find myself gravitating toward them in this series far more than I expected to. These are pretty. I feel like it should be boring that they were like “Whatever, stand next to the indoor batting cage, it’s fine,” but it just works. Maybe it’s the lighting, I don’t know. Go Stadium Club.

3. 1991 Simon & Schuster Little Big Leaguers Book Cards #TEPE

Every single card set should have an insert or subset of players, at least the most famous ones, as kids. Honestly, until the last 15 years or so, they could have just taken pictures of random kids and been like “Yeah, that’s young Mike Schmidt, whatever.” Outside of Mr. and Mrs. Schmidt, who was gonna know? They at least have to go through the effort now of finding actual young pictures of players, but these are damn cute, and we should have more of them.

2. 1983 TCMA Arkansas Travellers #15

Cover up the player name. If I showed you this card and said this was, I don’t know, Sunny Jim Echols on the 1943 Atlanta Black Crackers of the Negro Leagues, you wouldn’t really argue with me. Terry Pendleton was a man without a time period. It was great.

1. 1993 Pinnacle #473

As I mentioned, early-career Terry Pendleton looked like he could have been placed just after integration and fit in seamlessly. Late-career Terry Pendleton looked like he should have been cast in a kids baseball movie by a casting director who didn’t know what baseball players really looked like. The fact that these two Terry Pendletons were (a) the same Terry Pendleton and (b) less than 10 years apart is amazing and wonderful.