You know the story by now … 74 undigested peanut-butter-and-‘nanner sammiches in his gut … a drug store in his bedroom … embarrassing bathroom scene right there at the end.

But no matter how much “evidence” has been presented over the years, there are plenty of The King’s fans who never really believed he died on that fateful day.

Reports started surfacing not long after his purported death that he was still roaming this earth, and not as a ghost, but as a real, live everyman.

Folks ran into Elvis in greasy-spoon diners across the South.

He’d be spied shopping at a Piggly Wiggly or picking up toilet paper (amen!) at a Winn-Dixie.

Or, very often, he’d be barreling down some long, lonesome highway in this 18-wheeler.

No, Elvis didn’t die on that fateful porcelain-encased night at Graceland … he just pulled back from the limelight, took the money he’d made over 20 years as an American icon, and decided to just live for once!

And the funny thing was, these stories weren’t all just stories. Sure, you might discount your neighbor Carl’s insistence that he ran into The Pelvis in the alley behind the local watering hole late one night as nothing but drunken ramblings, but some of the the accounts were backed up by evidence.

Photographic evidence.

That’s right — every once in awhile, the King-seer in question would have the wherewithal to pull out his or her Polarioid or Kodak flash and snap a picture of Elvis in his natural habitat of the moment. In case you’ve never seen one of those shots, they most often looked about like this:

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Now, I know what you’re thinking here … that’s just a picture of the 1977 Topps Chuck Hartenstein baseball card. And you’re right, officially speaking. But I’m telling you, this is what post-dead (and nearly-dead, for that matter) Elvis looked like through at least the late 1980s.

And consider a couple of pieces of supporting evidence …

First, here is what Hartenstein looked like on his most recent card before 1977, on his 1970s Topps issue:

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Do you really think that’s the same guy?

Second, 1970 was the last time Hartenstein played in the Major Leagues until he showed up with the expansion Blue Jays for the 1977 season. Sure, there were some minor league stops in there, but then weren’t those just the sort of places — minor league stadiums, ratty team buses — you might have found Living Dead Elvis in subsequent years.  Hmmm …

And, third, Hartenstein’s last game came on July 26, 1977 in Toronto, against the Texas Rangers. That was just a few weeks before Elvis supposedly winked out.

So, is it a coincidence that the two disappeared at almost exactly the same time, or is Hartenstein’s Canadian exit somehow tied to the mystery surrounding the death of Elvis Aron (misspelled “Aaron” on his grave!!) Presley.

Look, I’m not saying Elvis and Chuck Hartenstein were or are the same person.

I’m just saying that Elvis and Chuck Hartenstein were or are the same person, maybe.

And that there’s a chance it’s Elvis, not Hartenstein on Chuck’s 1977  Topps baseball card (and his 1977 O-Pee-Chee card, for that matter).

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Who knows? Maybe it was just one last chance for Elvis to wink at his admiring fans before riding off into the sunset.

(This has been Day 45 of my 2019 Spring Training Baseball Card Challenge, wherein I examine a silly card. And, you have to admit, Elvis looked pretty darn silly on these “Chuck Hartenstein” baseball cards!)

Check out the entire series of 2019 Spring Training Challenge posts here.

No one is immune to those ravages, but some of us are more susceptible and impressionable than others.

Like children, for instance.

And baseball fans.

Both groups are often searching for information about things they don’t yet know well, and both are often looking for sunny forecasts. Tell them (us) what they (we) want to hear, and you probably have a receptive ear.

And when you have young baseball fans, the effects can be compounded. That reality played out on a personal level for me in the summer of 1983, just as my friends and I were starting to get into baseball cards.

One day, one of those guys and I arranged a “play date” — we lived in the country, so getting back and forth between each other’s houses was sometimes an ordeal, and required planning. After a few hours running around in his yard, looking for and finding plenty of adventures, his mom called us in for lunch.

While we downed our bologna sandwiches, potato chips, and grape pop, the afternoon rains set in. Soon thereafter, so did the sleepiness, and we decided it would be much more fun to find something to do inside for the afternoon.

Luckily, he had accumulated a few baseball cards that spring, and so had I — and I just so happened to have brought some along with me. (Truth be told, we were all always looking for an opportunity for a pop-up trading session).

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I probably had a couple hundred cards in a small box I lugged along that day, and I’m guessing he had maybe 500-600 in his collection. Our options were limited, in other words, but we didn’t really know that at the time. We were too busy devouring every glimpse of a “new” card or unknown player, and every morsel of information on card backs.

By that point, I had already spent many hours reading through all my card backs, inadvertently memorizing stats and facts. I knew my buddy had done much the same because, in an earlier get-together, he had recited some glowing bit of Topps text about Barry Foote that I had only recently come across myself. My friend made out like it was his own original thought, and I let him have it — but I knew the truth.

On this day, my trade partner was looking through my box of cards to see if there was anything of interest to him when his eyes went wide and his body tensed. I knew he’d found some cardboard gold.

“Not much here,” he said, poker face stiff and flushed. “I might be able to give you something for this Dave Laroche … I guess.”

He pushed the card forward just a smidge from the rest of the stack, and I could see it was a 1983 Topps Super Veteran card. I had opened enough packs that spring to know that the Super Veterans included guys I knew pretty well, like Pete Rose, Reggie Jackson, and Steve Carlton, but also a few players who were mysterious to me as recently as January of that year– Kent Tekulve, Jim Kaat, Ted Simmons.

And Dave LaRoche.

I still didn’t know much about LaRoche as the days grew hot, but I did know — thanks to that Topps card — that he had been around since 1970, which was basically forever. And, from the card back, I knew he was 10th on the all-time saves list, with 125. And that he had some All-Star and postseason credentials to his name.

Oh, and he sort of looked like my friend.

LaRoche, then, was a star. At least in our eyes. No wonder my bud wanted that card!

But that was just fine with me, because I had spied the perfect return as I thumbed through my friend’s cards — a 1983 Donruss Storm Davis.

I didn’t know it was Davis’ rookie card, and I only vaguely knew what a rookie card was, anyway.

I didn’t know Davis was a pretty good prospect for a good Baltimore Orioles team.

Nope, what I knew was that he looked like a real ballplayer on the front of that card … and that his name was, “Storm.”

That was plenty, and the deal was swung.

Looking back, neither one of us really got the better end of that trade, but both of us won because we got to spend time with new cardboard, we got to learn about new (to us) players, and we were able to strengthen out friendship.

What more could you ask from a rainy summer afternoon?

(This look at “a card I traded away” checks in at Day 43 in my 2019 Spring Training Baseball Card Challenge.)

Check out the entire series of 2019 Spring Training Challenge posts here.

They’re all around us, all the time, whether we are able to or want to see them.

For baseball fans, nowhere are the game’s beginnings and endings so poignantly evident as they are during Spring Training. And they’re just about impossible to ignore.

There is the young phenom who hits the ball like Mickey Mantle and explodes out of the hole like Rickey Henderson.

There is the grizzled veteran moving over to first base after a decade in the outfield or across the diamond at third. He’s still fit, still a torrid hitter, but can he make the transition? Time … and Spring … will tell.

And then there is the old man, trying to hang on with yet another team, or maybe lumbering into camp with his usual team but decidedly reduced from his prime. Gray hair, a paunchy belly, a gimpy gait, flat muscles, extended warm-up times … they’re all telltale signs of baseball’s old men.

Thing is, in order to reach old age in baseball — say, 38 or 40 or 42 — you have to be somebody in the first place.

Probably, you were an All-Star somewhere along the line. Certainly, you’ve collected a lot of playing time and shown your self to be dependable, and you’ve also piled up a lot of *something* along the way — hits, runs, wins, saves, strikeouts.

And, if you do find yourself among baseball’s geriatric crowd, there is a darn good chance you’re something even more … a superstar, likely, maybe even a Hall of Famer in waiting.

No matter which group you find yourself in, though, one common tie binds most of the guys who play the game for two decades or so: they have tasted some sort of postseason glory during their careers.

But, that’s not always the case.

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The roll of players who never made it to the World Series, in fact, could rival some of the best teams ever assembled — names like Ken Griffey Jr., Ryne Sandberg, Phil Niekro, Rod Carew, Frank Thomas, Ichiro Suzuki.

It’s a fascinating list of players, and served as the main inspiration for my decision to pick a card here on Day 31 of my 2019 Spring Training Baseball Card Challenge that shows a player who never won a World Series.

As compelling as all those guys are, though, no Fall Classic outsider tugs at the heartstrings quite like Mr. Cub, Hall of Famer Ernie Banks.

Banks served notice early on that he was something special, smacking 44 home runs in his second season in Chicago (1955) before pouring on the gas in 1958 and 1959 to cop the National League Most Valuable Player award each of those seasons.

The Cubbies weren’t much to look at in those days, though, losing 90, 81, 94, and 92 games in Banks’ first four full seasons. They did a bit better during his MVP campaigns, then bottomed out in 1962 and again in 1966, losing 103 games both years.

In ’67, though, Chicago climbed all the way to 87 wins and a third-place finish in the NL. Another third in 1968 led to optimism for 1969, and the Cubs looked like they might win the sparkling new NL East division for most of the summer. Of course, a late stumble, coupled with the surging and Amazin’ New York Mets left Banks and his teammates on the outside yet again.

And, as it turned out, that 1969 season would be Banks’ last as a full-time player.

In 1970, he was limited to 72 games and hit just 12 home runs, but the team did finish second again, winning 84 games.

That continued strong showing in the standings was enough to bring Banks back for one last run at October baseball, at the tender age of 40.

About the time Spring Training 1971 rolled to full steam, the first packs of 1971 Topps baseball cards hit store shelves. Collectors must have been taken aback by the black borders, but many were probably wowed by the photo on card backs. And, while there was no Banks card in that first series, astute fans surely realized he’d be there later on — and he was, apparently captured in mid-sentence on card #525.

As it turned out, that would be his final Topps card.

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Well, almost …

Because Topps likes to tinker, to test things out. And one of the things they tested out that summer was a ticket-shaped set called Baseball’s Greatest Moments, and you couldn’t very well talk about baseball’s greatest moments in 1971 without invoking Ernie Banks … so there he is on card #36.

Among the many great Banks moments Topps could have chosen to commemorate, they landed on his five grand slams — grand slammers, in 1971 Topps vernacular — in 1955.

The card is laid out in a horizontal format, with a color head shot on the left, and deckle-bordered black-and-white action shot showing Banks coming out of the batter’s box to the right. The back is a miniature above-the-fold newspaper with the five grand slams highlighted in the “article” title, with a cropped portion of the front action shot to the left of a block of descriptive text.

It’s a great card from a great, scarce test issue that honored one of the great players of the era — whether or not he ever made it to the World Series.

And, by pairing this card with Banks’ base card, Topps paid subtle homage to Ernie’s enthusiasm for the game — “Let’s play two!”.

Check out the entire series of 2019 Spring Training Challenge posts here.

If you’ve ever been to a Major League stadium or even paid attention to the non-action shots on a television broadcast, you know there are plenty of dark crannies that aren’t readily accessible to the average fan.

What lurked in the shadows beyond the bullpens in the old cookie-cutter stadiums like Riverfront Stadium and Veterans Stadium?

What happens behind the Green Monster scoreboard when winter sets in and the Boston Red Sox are scattered to the winds.

And what sort of aquatic secrets do the Kauffman Stadium waterfalls harbor?

I’m sure a select few folks know the answers to these individual questions, but the rest of us are left to speculate.  And it was these types of mysteries that began stirring in my addled brain as I considered which card to profile on this Day 27 of my 2019 Spring Training Baseball Card Challenge.

See, my task today is to talk about a card showing a stadium I want to visit but never have. The field for this one is wide, because I’ve only made it to a handful of big-league parks — Riverfront Stadium, Great American Ballpark, Fenway Park, Jacobs Field, Busch Stadium (though not to see an actual game).

So I decided to first pick the park I most want to visit, then find a card that shows that park to some degree. If said cardboard could also help me answer one of the game’s lingering questions, all the better.

And, with all due respect to Dodger Stadium, AT & T Park, and Camden Yards, the place I most want to visit is Wrigley Field. It shouldn’t be all that hard to accomplish considering my Hoosier roots, but the trip to Addison and Clark has somehow eluded me to this point.

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I’ve seen Wrigley in its televised glory hundreds of times over the years, though, and it seems to me there’s no other venue that can capture the neighborhood feel and deep history all in one fell swoop quite like the Chicago Cubs‘ home. Maybe someday I’ll prove that notion to myself.

In the meantime, I’m left to ponder how wonderful the place must be, but also to wonder what sorts of creatures might be hiding in the fabled Wrigley Field ivy. I mean, that stuff’s been there since before World War II, right? There’s been plenty of time for an infestation of one sort of another to develop.

So I went searching for a card that might give me an insight into he secrets of the ivy, and my first stop bore fruit. As an ancient man who has been collecting baseball cards since they were made out of granite, I remember vividly that roughly 112% of all 1981 Donruss cards featured the Wrigley Field ivy in the background. (The other -12% were the test cards that were actually better than their Topps counterparts.)

I could have picked anyone of those cards for this piece, but there was only one that really made any sense: card #553 of Dave Kingman.

By the time Kingman signed as a free agent with the Cubs before the 1978 season, “Kong” was already pretty much who he was going to be — a monstrous dude with a monstrous swing who could hit the ball out of the Grand Canyon but couldn’t get on base or do a whole lot else, including stay in one place for long.

Still, it’s somewhat astounding it took him so long to land with the cubs, considering how “cozy” the Cozy Confines were, especially with favorable wind conditions. You might say he was born to play with the Cubs.

In his first year by the lake, Kingman turned in a Kingman-esque season, featuring 28 home runs and 79 RBI. In 1979, though, it all clicked, and Kingman slammed 49 homers, drove in 115, and even hit .288.

The perfect marriage was working perfectly.

Then, 1980 brought injuries that limited Kong to just 81 games and saw his production fall to .278, 18, 57. Before the 1981 season could even begin, Chicago traded him to the New York Mets in exchange for Steve Henderson.

Nothing could erase the work he’d done with the Cubs, though, or the idea that Kingman’s rightful place would always be there among the ivy, tantalizingly close to home plate, especially for a slugger of his stature.

To drive that point home, collectors spent that first summer of Kingman’s Mets tenure pulling his ’81 Donruss card from fresh wax packs. Captured there in cardboard bliss for eternity was a smiling Kong, enveloped by the green ivy of his natural habitat.

And, this card also solves one of baseball’s mysteries — we know what lives (or lived) in the Wrigley Field ivy. It’s Kong himself.

Check out the entire series of 2019 Spring Training Challenge posts here.

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And, naturally, baseball cards.

Even though my mom had started buying cards for me on her weekly trip the grocery store way back in 1981, I outright resented them for the first couple of years. After all, baseball cards weren’t toys, and I wasn’t even a baseball fan.

But then in the summer of 1983, as I was preparing for my last year of grade school (sixth grade), something changed. Part of it was the gorgeous cards popping out of wax packs that season, especially the ones from Topps. Part of it was that my family started going to a lot of antique shops & shows, and flea markets, where there were always plenty of cards for sale.

And part of it — probably the largest part of it — was that the Cincinnati Reds started popping up on our local television station on a regular basis. Were they there in before? Maybe, but I hadn’t noticed.

I noticed in 1983, though.

To me, those baseball games, and the Reds, seemed all sunshine and good times, even though they were busy losing 88 games on their way to an even worse season in 1984 … and even though they were losing an all-time great in Johnny Bench, who would retire at the end of the 1983 season. None of it mattered, because I had found my team, and that made all the difference in the world.

As we’re all wont to do when we find a new passion, I talked about baseball and baseball cards and, especially, the Reds, incessantly from summer of 1983 on into the early parts of the 1984 season. I was obsessed, and everything I did outside of school — and even inside of school, sometimes — revolved around getting more cards and learning more about the game.

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I was a very lucky kid, because my parents always listened to me and fed my passions to the extent they could as a hard-working middle-class family. They made sure I had a trumpet to play, they kept me in reading material, they got me a dog.

So I should’t have been surprised that they were up for advancing my fandom, but …

When my dad sat me down one morning and told me he thought we should go to a Cincinnati Reds game that summer — 1984 — my jaw hit the floor. Then I nearly shook the house to its foundations with all my excited jumping up and down.

What an incredible feeling — I was going to Riverfront Stadium!

Weeks of planning and frothing at the mouth ensued, but finally, on the morning of June 23, 1984, Mom, Dad, and I piled into our old Dodge pickup truck and headed south(east) to Cincinnati. The trip itself was a blast, as we stopped to eat a couple of times, hit a garage sale or two, even visited a couple of card shops in Cincy.

But nothing in the world compares to that moment you first set foot inside a Major League Baseball stadium, and I’ll never forget the way my heart darn near exploded when I caught my first glimpse of the ethereal green Riverfront turf winking at me through the concourse as we walked to our seats.

And then there was the rifle pop of the ball hitting Dan Driessen‘s glove during warmups …

The lineup card exchange with San Diego Padres manager Dick Williams and Red skipper Vern Rapp …

The mild disappointment in seeing Mark Thurmond and Charlie Puleo on the mound instead of, say, Andy Hawkins and Mario Soto …

The absolute thrill of sitting low in the right-field stands, so close to Tony Gwynn and Dave Parker that they actually turned to acknowledge us when we called their names.

Wow!

The Padres, of course, were en route to a World Series appearance, while the Reds were awaiting the return of Pete Rose — unbeknownst to me — before they’d start their climb. So it wasn’t too shocking that San Diego took the game by a score of 5-2.

But the Reds would have had a fighting chance were it not for the only home run of the game. Sure, it was already 3-1, Pads, when Carmelo Martinez connected on a solo shot off Bob Owchinko in the top of the sixth, but that swing pretty much took the air out of the 22,000-strong crowd.

What I remember most about that play is how fast the ball got out. You watch a homer on TV, and it seems so suspenseful, but that Martinez clout was just gone.

And despite his Reds-clubbing antics, those “heroics” made me an instant fan … I pulled his cards aside into my “good” pile for years to come. So what better choice than a Martinez pasteboard for this entry, on Day 24 of my 2019 Spring Training Baseball Card Challenge, where I pick a card of a guy I saw play in person?

And what better card than his 1984 Topps base issue?

It’s a good-looking pasteboard that I was still pulling from wax packs even as I headed to Cincinnati for the first time, and it highlights the poetry of the game.

For, you see, Martinez is pictured as a member of the Chicago Cubs, for whom he played briefly in 1983. He was part of a big three-team deal in the off-season, though, that landed him with the Padres for his official rookie season.

That fall, the Padres dispatched the sweetheart Cubs in the National League Championship Series.

Ain’t this a beautiful game?

Check out the entire series of 2019 Spring Training Challenge posts here.

But that’s pretty predictable, and I’ve written about Raines on a few occasions in the past. One of my goals for this series is to tap into the stories of guys who don’t get a lot of attention … or at least haven’t gotten much attention here on Wax Pack Gods.

So I went back to the drawing board and began rolling through my mental Rolodex, trolling back through the years. 1990 … 1989 … 1988 … 1987 … 1986 … 1985 … 1984 … bingo!

During the summer of 1984, I made my first visit to Riverfront Stadium to see my Cincinnati Reds play. But the Riverfronts were pretty putrid that year, so I spent much of the hot months watching (and loving) the upstart Chicago Cubs.

I grew very familiar with those purple-block-lettered Cubs cards in the 1984 Topps set, and one of the guys who seemed to pop up all the time was Chuck Rainey.

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I didn’t really realize it at the time, but Rainey had spent the first several years of his career with the Boston Red Sox before they shipped him to the Cubs in exchange for Doug Bird in December of 1982.

The following year was one of his best and the only time he spent all season as a full-time starter. Toiling for a 1983 Cubs team that went 71-91, Rainey posted a 14-13 record with a 4.48 ERA. And much to my chagrin — now, because I didn’t know about it then — Rainey also one-hit the Reds on August 24, with Eddie Milner recording a two-out single in the ninth to break up the thing.

Take that, Mr. Spring Name (although, in truth, I’d have been rooting for the no-hitter at that point).

But with the Cubs off to the races in 1984, and with the addition of eventual Cy Young winner Rick Sutcliffe, Rainey became expendable. So on July 15, general manager Dallas Green sent Rainey and (eventually) Damon Farmar to the Oakland A’s for Davey Lopes.

In Oakland, Rainey posted a 1-1 record with a 6.75 ERA in 16 appearances … and was never heard from again.

Well, not as a professional baseball player, anyway.

Apparently Donruss did not get the memo that Rainey was done, though, and they granted him card #618 in their iconic black-bordered 1985 set.

And so Chuck Rainey pulled off what so many Hall of Famers — including Willie Mays, Bob Gibson, and Mike Schmidt — could not. He got a career-capper card.

No wonder he looks so self-important on that ’85 Donruss A’s card. Or is he challenging us … daring us to flip that card over?

“Go ahead. Take a look. It’s all there.”

And it was. And is.

Which goes to show, no matter how rainy, or Rainey, a Major League career turns out to be, it’s still a Major League career.

And that’s pretty darn sunny in my book.

Check out the entire series of 2019 Spring Training Challenge posts here.

Consider the case of the 1981 Donruss Mick Kelleher baseball card and the 2018 Chicago Cubs …

Dynasty Delayed

The 2018 Chicago Cubs were a somewhat star-crossed club who suffered through injuries, sub-par performances, and off-field issues from big names like Yu Darvish , Kris Bryant, and Addison Russell, yet also get clutch production from guys like Javier Baez, Kyle Schwarber, and Cole Hamels.

The result?

After struggling to find their mojo in the first half of the season, the Cubs seized first place in the National League Central on Friday, July 13, and never let go.

Well, almost …

After building their lead to a season-high five games on September 2, Chicago played at a mediocre 14-12 clip the rest of the way. Probably good enough most seasons to hold serve, but the Milwaukee Brewers were busy going 18-6.

The teams were tied after 162 games, in other words.

That set up a one-game playoff for the Central title, to be played at Wrigley Field on October 1 — the Brewers won, 3-1.

And that set up the Cubs to play the Colorado Rockies in the NL Wild Card game, again at Wrigley Field. On October 2, the Rox beat the Cubs 2-1 in 13 innings.

If you include the Cubs last loss of the 162-game schedule, a 2-1 clinker at the hands of the St. Louis Cardinals on Saturday, September 29, Chicago dropped three of four home games at home to seal their fate.

And in each of those losses, they managed just one run. Yuck.

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You might feel sorry for these Cubs if they were the Cubbies of old, the ones who scrapped together a decent team once every 15 years or so only to implode when things got real. It’s tough, though, to find real sympathy for what is now a huge payroll team that was — and still may be — expected by many to run off a string of championships when they copped the World Series title in 2016.

But just because the lovable losers are now the bombastic bombs, that doesn’t mean we can’t look back at the gory glory of Chicago’s painful past.

And what better way to do that than with some hideous cardboard.

Crappy Cubbies

If we step back through Cubs’ records over the years, we see that the losingest Chicago teams took the field in 1962, 1966, and 2012. Those first two teams were immortalized on 1963 and 1967 Topps cards, respectively, and those are two stellar sets.

That 2012 team was a “Suck for Luck” special that was designed to tank in order to build the supposed juggernaut we see today.

So I’m going a bit deeper in the stack, to the 1980 Chicago Cubs, who finished at 64-98 and in last place in the old NL East.

Not only that, but the Cubs finished last in the National League in OPS+ (83) and fielding (.974), while somehow hitting the league average for ERA+ (101).

Given all that, if you were looking for a poster boy to represent those light-hitting 1980 Cubs, you couldn’t do much better (worse?) than second baseman Mick Kelleher.

Now, Kelleher wasn’t the Cubbies full-time second-sacker in 1980. That honor belonged to Mike Tyson, who started 104 games and batted a robust .238 in 363 plate appearances, good for an OPS+ of 65.

Kelleher made 15 starts at second and five at shortstop, amassing 107 plate appearances in 105 total game appearances.

He slashed .146/.217/.177 with no home runs, one double, one triple, four runs batted in, 12 runs scored, one stolen base, and three times caught stealing. It was an amazing display that netted him a 9 OPS+ and a whopping -1.1 WAR.

That 1980 season was Kelleher’s ninth Major League campaign, and while he had never done much with the bat before, he had established himself as a veteran.

That status, and the need to fill in their Cubs’ cardboard rosters, enticed Topps and Donruss to include Kelleher in their 1981 sets. Fleer somehow abstained, and you have to give them props for that.

The 1981 Topps Mick Kelleher card is pretty decent, stats on the back notwithstanding. It features Mick in a posed throwing shot, showing the Cubs pinstripes and Cubbie logo to good effect in front of a gorgeous blue sky.

You want to be there, on that day, even if the Cubs stink.

Inauspicious Debut

The 1981 Donruss Kelleher?

It’s an embodiment of his — and the Cubs’ — 1980 season.

A smiling Kelleher kneels in the on-deck circle at one of the cookie-cutter 1970s sports bowls — Fulton County, Veteran’s Stadium, Riverfront Stadium? — in his powder blue road pajamas.

And he’s leaning on a bat that looks too big for any man to swing, let alone one with a .215 lifetime batting average.

That would all be enough to make the card front mostly preposterous, but add in the typical blurry, grainy lens work thatamrred most 1981 Donruss pasteboard, and you have a classically terrible baseball card.

At least the back is relatively uncluttered by 1981 Donruss standards, thanks to Mick’s limited career highlights …

1979 – Hit .571 against San Francisco pitching.

The irony of all this is that 1980 Mick Kelleher couldn’t have sniffed the 2018 Chicago Cubs starting lineup if he’d had Ernie Lombardi‘s nose, yet they essentially fielded a one-to-nine of Kellehers to round out their season.

And it only cost them a couple hundred million dollars to do it.

No wonder Kelleher is smiling at us from that awful, and suddenly wonderful, 1981 Donruss card of his.

(Check out the rest of our 2018 playoffs posts here.)

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Baseball cards reached something like a local maximum in 1987, when all three major manufacturers issued sets with definable character and at least a hint of scarcity (well, maybe not Topps).

It may not have been Everest, but it looks like a pretty nice peak from the vantage point of the 21st century.

At the time, we all thought baseball cards would only get better and better every year, but that was probably too lofty of an expectation from the beginning. It only took until the 1988 cards hit store shelves that spring to figure out we were in for an adjustment …

Topps looked pretty, but it was everywhere.

Donruss looked pretty awful, and it was everywhere, including places Topps wasn’t.

And Fleer …

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Well, Fleer seemed a bit scarcer. It wasn’t bleeding out onto the streets like Donruss was.

But whereas in 1987 Fleer had taken a step toward what we imagined a premium set might look like, the 1988 cards seemed … gimmicky. Cheap.

The red-white-and-blue-with-sprinkles design always reminded me of a Little Debbie Fourth of July snack cake and combined with the cheesy backs to make the whole thing seem like one of Fleer’s cheapo box sets.

On growth hormone.

Like a big ol’ “Revco Presents Baseball Superstars and Sorta Stars and Commons and Guys You’ve Never Heard Of” box set that you could pick up for $30 with the purchase of any piece of home medical equipment (minimum purchase $100).

Part of the cheese that I suppose was intended to be artsy and sophisticated was the ghosty white fade-in at the top of cards, where each photo jutted over top for a flat 3-D effect.

Now, Fleer had used a similar device in 1987, and I wasn’t crazy about it then, either, but it was something fresh to try.

Once.

When the fade came back in 1988, though, it seemed to eat even more photo real estate. As a result, there are tons of posed shots and up-close action shots that really aren’t action shots and tiny little figurine pictures.

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But one guy who shows up as none of that is Chicago Cubs catcher Jody Davis (#414).

Davis makes no concessions for this card.

He is a catcher in the middle of a play at the plate, and he has a tag to make.

Runner dude looks out to me.

Davis is in full lunge mode, ready to eat dirt if he has to. You can keep your little misty stuff at the top of the card, too, because Davis is having none of it.

He’s more than happy to duck down, not just to nab the runner but also to stay the hell away from your cakey white perfume, Fleer.

He will, however, doff his catcher’s mask because, you know, gotta show off the grill.

So, yeah, I picked another catcher.

And?

It’s Jody Davis. He’s railing against the degradation of our hobby. He’s fighting the Fleer frou-frou and winning.

He’s got the best card of the 1988 Fleer baseball set.

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(This is the 24th in our series of posts about the best baseball cards from the 1980s. Check out the rest of those posts here.)

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What does a Hall of Famer look like?

Is he muscular or wispy, maybe even fat or skinny?

Is he short or tall? Does he have any discernible physical abnormalities?

Does he have all his hair and, if he does, how does he care for it?

These are all questions with unknowable answers, of course, because there are as many different types of Hall of Famers as there are Coooperstown enshrinees themselves.

And the task becomes all the more difficult if we’re talking about future Hall of Famers, especially if we’re trying to predict that ultimate status before guys even really get underway in their careers.

But that’s sort of what we all do when we buy into rookie cards of young players, whether we consider that speculation, investing, or just collecting.

Back in 1987, as the hobby was booming in earnest, we didn’t care too much about those labels — we just wanted to get our hands on the RCs of guys who would become superstars and, eventually, Hall of Famers.

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Some players were easy to pick out …

Will Clark and Mark McGwire had both played with the USA Olympic Baseball Team and went on to craft stellar college careers. They projected as solid (or much better) Major League hitters.

Bo Jackson was a physical specimen unlike any we’d ever seen, and he had the raw talent — with at least some polishing already in place — to succeed on the gridiron and the diamond. He was in our buying fold, too.

All of these guys were big, strong, and/or charismatic even on their cardboard, like their 1987 Donruss Rated Rookie cards.

On the mound, pitchers like Randy Myers had the eye of the tiger on their cards and were physically imposing, by the numbers at least — 6’1″ and 190 pounds in Myers’ case, with tons of strikeouts in his bio on the card back.

Rated Rookies made it easy to zero in on players Donruss thought were can’t-miss, but would any of them become BIG TIME stars?

All we had to go on was the RR designation, whatever scouting reports we could get our hands on (if we bothered with such things), and our eyes. Did the guy look like a Hall of Famer in the making?

Consider one case as an example exercise, another Rated Rookie who

• Had long, scraggly hair flapping out from beneath his Chicago Cubs cap.
• Sported pipe-cleaner arms and legs that were just a touch girthier.
• Wore a stringy mustache with a big gap in the middle that made him look like a high school sophomore trying to flex his newfound puberty.
• Gazed toward the plate as he pitched with half-open eyes that didn’t seem to give a damn.
• Stood 6’0″ and weighed *what?* 150 pounds according to the back of his card.
• Had pitched 31 innings for the Cubs in 1986 and crafted a 5.52 ERA while allowing 55 base runners.

How would you rank this guy as a Hall of Fame candidate?

That Rated Rookie status notwithstanding, I’m guessing your socks are still firmly on your feet, having not been knocked off by Greg Maddux‘s early presentation through his 1987 Donruss card.

And most of the hobby felt the same way.

None of us took much notice of the young man whom the Cubs selected out of high school in the 2nd round of the 1984 draft until at least 1988, when he went 18-8. Even then, his cards were still pretty much buried by McGwire, Jose Canseco, Roger Clemens, Clark, and others.

But when we did our yearly scan of our personal commons bins looking for guys who had broken out since the last time we scanned — you did this, too, right? — we probably went ahead and promoted Maddux to the box that held Dan Driessen and Mark Davis and Joe Magrane and Lonnie Smith.

The semi-stars.

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If not in 1988, then in 1989 or 1990 or, certainly, in 1992 when Maddux won his first Cy Young award.

And years later, when Maddux was a household name for the Atlanta Braves and looking like a HOF lock, we marveled at how such a greasy looking kid had turned into something more. So much more than we ever imagined he could be.

It’s that long-term journey that we take with our cardboard heroes, from commons to veterans to superstars to Hall of Famers, that make baseball cards such an unbreakable habit. Like the game itself, this hobby is an epic novel that spans generations and allows us to watch boys grow into men, even as we ourselves grow into men.

For all its symbolism and its lessons about judging a book by its cover and its significance in the history of the hobby and the game, the Greg Maddux Rated Rookie card is the best card from the 1987 Donruss set.

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(This is the 20th in our series of posts about the best baseball cards from the 1980s. Check out the rest of those posts here.)

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The 1984 Fleer baseball card set is like that vanilla ice cream cone you ate last summer at the State Fair.

You remember that one, right? You slid it in right after the giant turkey leg but before the deep-fried Twinkie, and you washed it down with an elephant ear?

Yeah, that ice cream cone. Sorta got lost in the shuffle, right?

Same story with the 1984 Fleer base set.

It was a nice, bright issue, maybe the crispest of the year when you consider overall design, cardstock, and photos.

But, aside from funky cards like Jay Johnstone in a Jay Johnstone hat and Glenn Hubbard in a snake, 1984 Fleer didn’t’ really do anything to stand out from Topps and Donruss.

Sure, Fleer had rookie cards of Don Mattingly and Darryl Strawberry, but so did Topps and Donruss.

And, while Fleer felt less plentiful than Topps, it couldn’t compete with Donruss on the scarcity front. And Topps was loaded with special stuff like all-time leaders cards and a card honoring 1983 retirees Gaylord Perry, Carl Yastrzemski, and Johnny Bench.

Just to pile on and help bury Fleer a bit deeper, Donruss unveiled their Rated Rookies in 1984 (at least on card fronts — they designated guys with that award on card backs in 1983).

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Those cards — Rated Rookies — felt special right from the beginning, even if we didn’t know who all the players were. One player we did know, however, was San Diego Padres outfielder Kevin McReynolds.

Sitting as we were right at the sparking point of rookie card mania, collectors were hungry to find out who would be the next big thing, and hobby and baseball magazines and pundits were eager to help us out. In the case of McReynolds, that meant pointing out he was the first-round draft pick of the San Diego Padres in 1981 and that he had monster power potential.

So it didn’t take long for the McReynolds hype to couple with the Donruss hype to form one of the hottest and most expensive cards of the new card year.

But as the hobby went batty over that RR of the young slugger, astute collectors figured out there was an alternative.

That would be the 1984 Fleer Kevin McReynolds rookie card, in case you missed the title of this piece.

Now, that Fleer card didn’t bestow any special status on McReynolds but it was bright and sunny, and it showcased an athletic young McRenolds finishing his swing and starting his run to first after tagging a baseball.

It’s a really great-looking card, complete with Padres logo in the lower right-hand corner and a shot into the Padres dugout behind McReynolds.

And all those Padres references took on added meaning as the summer wore on and it became clear that San Diego was going to make the playoffs.

McReynolds played a big part in that success, too, batting .278 with 20 home runs and 75 RBI to help the Pads outdistance the Atlanta Braves in 12 games to win the old NL West. If you like your stats just a bit more eggheady, those numbers were good for 5.4 WAR.

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Thanks to Fleer, we could pull McReynolds’ rookie card from packs even as his star blossomed on the field, something most of us couldn’t afford to do with the escalating prices of Donruss.

That fall, McReynolds kept his name in the hobby limelight despite the excitement surrounding Mattingly, rookie sensation Dwight Gooden, and Ryne Sandberg‘s breakout season with the Chicago Cubs. Combining his efforts in the NLCS against the Chicago Cubs and in the World Series against the Detroit Tigers, McReynolds hit an even .300 with one dinger in the postseason that fall.

It would be the Padres only hurrah during his tenure by the sea, which ended in a December 1986 trade that sent him (and others) to the New York Mets and brought Kevin Mitchell, Stan Jefferson, and Shawn Abner to the Padres.

All told, McReynolds crafted a solid 12-year Major League Career that didn’t quite live up to the hype laid out before him, much like his 1984 Donruss rookie card.

Neither one never really stood a chance when you consider the expectations their early success engendered.

But his 1984 Fleer rookie card?

Now, that’s a different story. It was and is an underrated gem that you might even say is the best card in the set when you consider the whole — aesthetics, sneak-up-on-you goodness, and historical significance.

And, in fact, I do say that.

(This is the 12th in our series of posts about the best baseball cards from the 1980s. Check out the rest of those posts here.)

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