Best Cards: Will Clark

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

I don’t know what it was that made my brother a big Will Clark fan. His MLB debut came one day before I turned 2 years and 4 months old, so it certainly wasn’t my decision. All I know is, by the time I was cognizant of this sort of stuff (my first concrete memory was “We’re having an earth…” in the ’89 World Series), my brother loved Will Clark and Gary Carter, so I loved Will Clark and Gary Carter.

My brother somewhat moved on from Clark in later years. He still liked him, still likes him, but he was always more migratory in his fandom. Me, though? Clark joined the Rangers in 1994; my first ever AIM screen name was TexRang409 (408 enterprising Rangers fans had beaten me to the punch). He signed with the orioles in 1999; my Yahoo screen name was (and still is, if you can believe it) ClarkCamdnClark. He was traded to the Cardinals in 2000; my AIM name briefly stopped over at StClarkLouis28 before I actually moved on to screen names that were actually about me.

Fandom is a funny thing. Like, anyone reading this probably knows of my over-the-top Eric Hosmer fandom these days. It’s borne of my taking a liking to him as a prospect and it stayed even as Hosmer never came particularly close to realizing the promise he showed as he was coming up. These days, he’s an average-at-absolute-best player making over $20 million a year as maybe the worst hitter in what should be a contending lineup, he’s shown no willingness to adjust his approach even as he’s had two slugging percentages under .400 in the last four years, and he’s married to a Fox News host. I don’t know Eric Hosmer the person, but I imagine he and I would not be fast friends. Regardless, there’s at least some part of me that still says “WOO ERIC” on those rare occasions he actually produces like he’s paid to.

So let me just say that I’m aware of most (all?) of the stories about Will Clark. The story that ran in the Tony Gwynn memorial. The stuff with Jeffrey Leonard. The people who call him their least favorite player ever, and I assume that’s not for on-field reasons. I … I cannot say what is/was in Clark’s heart, and I cannot say whether those stories are the full, unadjusted truth. I can just say that there’s a part of me that wishes I weren’t a Will Clark fan, at least to the extent that I am. At the same time, when I saw that the Giants are planning to retire his number July 30 (assuming there’s, you know, a baseball season), I gave (and am giving) serious consideration to taking my first ever trip to California to experience it.

Sports fandom is a mixed bag, is the point.

Will Clark

Career: 1986-2000 (SFG, TEX, BAL, STL)
WAR: 56.5
Hall of Fame: No, which probably makes sense; fell off the ball after 4.4% in his only appearance, which does not

Years ago, Bill James (before some of his increasingly, uh, questionable opinions) wrote a thing about the Hall of Fame and PEDs, using Clark as his focal point. The crux was that we penalize the best producers of the era for their supposed steroid connections that helped boost their numbers far above their peers, but the logical corollary to that point is that you should inflate your opinion of the numbers of the next tier of players who (you assume) took nothing. Clark was never connected to anything (did Clark use? No idea, but if he did, and if it was to aid in recovery, it failed in that regard for him), and so, James reasoned, his one-and-done on the Hall of Fame ballot didn’t make sense, because, as a supposed clean player, he should be looked at more fondly.

Personally, I don’t really factor PED usage into any Hall of Fame opinion I have much at all. If a player is an extreme borderline case, I might use it as a final tipping point against, but even at that I try to ignore it. We don’t know who did, we don’t know what impact (if any, yeah I said it) they had, we can’t really do that much moralizing this much after the fact. It’s silly. But even taken at face value, Clark’s numbers were those of a borderline Hall of Famer, especially as the Jack Morrises and Harold Baineses have made it in recent years. His WAR total would be right in line with many inductees, well ahead of others. His 1989 was a legendary year, he had four different top-five MVP finishes, he had signature postseason moments, he had one of the best last seasons ever (voluntary retirement division). No, Clark wasn’t a top-five first baseman, but he would not have lowered the Hall of Fame standards at all. And instead, it was just *poof* and gone. It’s all extremely silly.

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

The worst Will Clark card

2020 Topps Stadium Club #200

Listen, for the majority of this series, I’ve generally avoided cards that came out after a player’s retirement, because the companies had an unfair advantage. If you’re putting out an active player’s card, you have one year of pictures, during which you might have gotten a dozen shots of a player if you’re lucky, and you’re turning around 700 such cards. After they’re retired? You can choose from hundreds over their career and take however long you want to make it perfect. It’s more of a surprise if a card *isn’t* great.
Which is why this is so egregious. *What in the hell is happening here?* Did the card photographer catch Clark on his way to a wedding? Did they specifically doll him up in this for the picture in the clubhouse? Is this a studio locker room that they hung a Clark jersey in to look specific? And why beige-and-gold, the single most boring color combination on the planet. Combine it with a hairline that screams “mid-level factory worker” for reasons I can’t really explain, and the only conclusion I can draw is that someone at Stadium Club a couple years ago felt about Will Clark the same way Bomani Jones does.

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 Upper Deck Iooss Collection All-Star Jumbos #22 (Will Clark/Dean Palmer)

I am a sucker for certain clickbaits, and one of them is “movie poster photoshop fails.” You know, two right hands on one body or a gun firing when the actor’s hand isn’t on the trigger, that sort of thing. This card reminds me of the poster for *300*, where … well, just look at it.
Gerard Butler was flexing hard there. And he was doing it with nothing in his hand. Look at it again. That’s a fancy sword. A fancy sword that Gerald Butler has never seen in his life. Someone photoshopped that thing in there, and it was not exactly perfectly done, because the angle is all jacked up.
Do I think Walter Iooss took a picture of Will Clark with his arms crossed and then decided he should add a bat in the most awkward way possible after the fact? Nah, not really. But I don’t *not* think it.

1992 O-Pee-Chee Premier #146
1994 Sportflics Rookie & Traded #1
2020 Topps – All-Stars #85AS-29
2021 Topps Triple Threads #39

I’m always amazed at players who blow bubbles mid-play. Like, you swing, run to first, and have a bubble half out of your mouth as you’re leaving the batter’s box. Or you’re sprinting to catch a fly ball and there’s a bubble half out of your mouth. I understand they do it so much it’s just about instinctual, but still, I can’t wrap my head around it. And maybe it’s just because I noticed it with him more than anyone else, but Clark is probably the most frequent offender in memory. It’s so weird!

1996 Topps Bazooka #43

But somehow *not* on the literal bubble gum card? WTF, guys.

1988 Classic Update Blue Travel Edition #225

I wanted to mock this for finding the one time ever that Will Clark dropped down a bunt, but he had nine sacrifice bunts as a rookie and three more in ’87, when this picture was probably taken. (I didn’t look for any bunt hits or failed sac bunts, but it’s not that important.) So I guess I should apologize to the fine folks are Classic. In my defense, though, he had those 12 sacrifice bunts his first two years, and then exactly one over the remaining 13 years of his career.

1995 Pinnacle #269

In probably 1993 (because I was old enough to form concrete memories and he was still on the Giants), I went to a Reds-Giants game in Cincinnati. Like any kid, I had a glove, a baseball, a pen, and a desperate desire to score some sweet, sweet autographs that I would never be able to identify even a week later. I was down the Giants’ foul line, yelling for any random Giant I could, hoping against hope that Clark would pop out.
And then disaster struck. I dropped my baseball. I had a handful of signatures on the ball, and I was there with a group of other kids, and suddenly my ball fell from my glove, rolled across the warning track, and settled near a handful of other balls that were there for warmups, only distinguishable by the illegible signatures.
This would not fly. The kids there with me banded together. No longer did we wish for signatures. We had a singular goal, to use our collective voices to summon one of the players to return my baseball to me. We yelled at player after player, and player after player either didn’t hear or ignored.
And then, the white whale. Will Clark came out. He waved to us kids without really seeming to acknowledge us, trotted out to the balls, picked up one seemingly at random, and trotted out to the outfield to warm up. And that “at random” ball? I mean, you can guess it.
We screamed. We hollered. I thought I was going to cry. And then after about six steps, Clark turned around, laughed, returned my ball to me, and signed for all of us. It was the best moment of my little life at that point.
I have no idea where that ball is now.

1992 Upper Deck #175

I guess it makes sense, but it never really occurred to me that players would have someone else do the eyeblack for them.

1986 Donruss Highlights #1

Clark famously homered in his first big-league at bat, and did it off of Nolan Ryan. Heck of a way to start. Worthy of a card, even. But … he did it against the Astros, because, you know, that’s who Ryan played for. He’s facing the Cubs on this card. I get maybe they just didn’t have a photographer on hand for that game, but couldn’t you have taken five minutes and at least found a picture of him where you couldn’t immediately identify the opposing team so you could at least *pretend* it’s from that game?

1998 Pacific Invincible Team Checklists #27 (Juan Gonzalez, Ivan Rodriguez, John Wetteland, Rusty Greer, Will Clark)

When I used to play laser tag as Laser Quest, my game tag was “JuanIvan22.” I don’t really know why that was, but whatever. RIP Laser Quest.

1984-91 O’Connell & Son Ink #208
1992 Fun Stuff Baseball Enquirer #10

I’ve made fun of a lot of drawn cards over this series, but for real, what are we doing here?

Okay, so apologies for what comes next, but I have to do it…

1989 Mother’s Cookies Food Issue #1
1990 Bowman #231
1990 Donruss #707.1
1991 Fleer #259
1991 Stadium Club Skydome #28
1992 Donruss #214
1992 Leaf #12
1992 Triple Play #59 (actually a Brett Butler card)
1992 Topps #330
1993 Score The Franchise #26
1994 Score #10
1995 Sportflix UC3 #132
1995 Topps DIII #21
1997 Donruss #137
1997 Ultra Gold Medallion Edition #G130
2000 Ultra #195
2004 Topps Retired Signature Edition #59
2005 Upper Deck Classic Seasons #CS-WC
2021 Stadium Club #299

So Will Clark was a star right around the time that cards super-exploded, with every company with more than eight employees putting out its own set and most of them having a dozen subsets. Beckett kept having to reduce the font size of its price listings because there were just too many cards out there. So I get that when you have a billion cards, you need a billion pictures. I didn’t even include all I could find, because it was getting silly!

But good freaking lord, how badly did they want us to see Clark try to make a play at first? One of those isn’t even a Will Clark card. Guys, “first baseman crouches slightly to catch a pickoff attempt or a force out” is not an exciting play, I’m sorry.

And now, the top four Will Clark cards of all time.

4. 1999 Fleer Mystique Gold #37

To the extent that you think about Will Clark’s Orioles tenure, you probably think of it as something of a disaster. After all, the team spent big on Clark and Albert Belle and Delino DeShields and Jeff Conine, traded for Charles Johnson and Juan Guzman, and still had Cal Ripken and Brady Anderson and Mike Mussina and B.J. Surhoff and Harold Baines and just so many names you should know, and yet they went a combined 152-172 in 1999 and 2000.

The thing is, though? The big names kind of worked out in 1999. Clark only played in 77 games, but he put up a 128 OPS+. Ripken, 144. Belle, 143. Baines, at 40 years old, 151. The only regulars who didn’t have at least a 100 OPS+ were Johnson, DeShields and Mike Bordick, and none of those three was selected for his bat. The pitcher staff wasn’t great, but Mussina was still a star and Guzman was competent. The team had a positive run differential.
Clark played 156 games for the Orioles over a year and a half before getting traded to the Cardinals. He hit .302/.404/.477 there as a 35-/36-year-old, putting up 3.5 WAR over basically a season of work. He wasn’t a star anymore, and hadn’t been since at least 1994 and probably more like 1991, but he was still a good hitter. He was older by then, and stockier, and his elbow injuries had largely sapped the home-run power he had had early in his career, but that famous swing was still productive enough. Really (and I didn’t plan to tie this back around), Clark’s career is what Eric Hosmer’s *should* have been.
This isn’t a perfect shot of his swing. It should be mid-contact, slicing through the zone to line a double to right-center. But you can tell that (or something approximating it) is what happened here. He’s older there, he’s not an MVP candidate or the most feared hitter in the league. But it shows even an older player looking as much like his younger self as he still can, and it’s great.

3. 1993 Triple Play Nicknames #4

The swing isn’t as good, because this is probably a foul ball down the third-base line that he was late on, but it’s Clark in his prime, back when “Thrill” actually worked as a descriptive nickname and not just a “rhymes with ‘Will’” one. The Triple Play Nicknames series featured Crime Dog, and Prime Time, and Junior, and Big Hurt, and Ryno, and Rocket, and Express, and Wizard, and Doc. It was a good-if-unremarkable subset, and Clark’s simple, powerful nickname fit real well.

2. 2001 Topps #400

Before the 2000 season, my brother (still a Clark fan, if not a rabid one) and I were discussing where he might sign after the season. My brother, if I recall correctly, guessed he might go to the Cubs. I mulled over the options for a minute and said “I honestly think he might retire.” My brother said I was crazy, but I noted how Clark had only played more than 125 games once since 1993, his son had been diagnosed with Pervasive Development Disorder (a form of autism), he might not want to relocate away from Johns Hopkins for a last gap, any number of things.

And then Clark had his season. Early in his career, he had been a superstar or close. The number of better players in baseball in the 1987-1989 range was short, and it might have been empty. In the ‘90s, he was … fine. Big year in 1991. One All-Star appearance in Texas. Two playoff series, in which he hit about as well as I would have. But in 2000, he was fine (.301/.413/.473) in Baltimore, then got traded to St. Louis to fill in for an injured Mark McGwire, and filled in about as well as he possibly could have. He hit .345/.426/.655 (167 OPS+) in 51 games, then .345/.382/.414 in two playoff series for the Cardinals. He wasn’t going to walk away. He was going to ride that celebratory picture you see up there into another two-year deal, maybe as a DH, maybe for … I don’t know, the Mariners or something.

But you know what came next. That year’s World Series ended Oct. 26. Clark announced his retirement Nov. 2. Doing it that soon tells me he was pretty sure all along. I spoke to my brother. “You called it?” he said.

“I did?”

Clark’s final season had been so good, so damn good that I had forgotten my prediction. No one would walk away after 3.9 WAR, after a 145 OPS+, after a Baseball Weekly cover that I still have in a box in the garage. Instead, he did what I said and refused to hang around as a journeyman whose son was receiving treatment and care elsewhere, and now, that Baseball Weekly cover is side-by-side with a page from our local newspaper that carried the announcement that featured a picture of Will Clark, with the Cardinals, celebrating a victory in the NLDS.

That same picture you see just above this.

The best damn photo.