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.

But I don’t mean it’s difficult for a player to achieve Cooperstown enshrinement, though it undoubtedly is.

No, what I mean is that it’s really hard for us as fans (or writers or players or whatever you might be) to figure out who should be in the Hall of Fame.

Sure, some of the choices are clear — Willie Mays, in. Von Hayes, out (though it pains me to say that). But then there are all the in-between guys. Guys who either played for a long time and put up big overall numbers because of it, or guys who didn’t play all that long but were fairly blistering in their primes.

In that first group, you have dudes like Tommy John and Harold Baines.

In that second group, you find the likes of Albert Belle and Sandy Koufax.

And then, of course, there are the pariahs, guys who have somehow or another alienated a large swath of fans and voters. Guys like Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Pete Rose, Curt Schilling, Vince Coleman. (OK, maybe Coleman has other issues affecting his HOF candidacy.)

On top of all that, you have shifting ideas about what makes a great player. More and more, modern evaluators of all types don’t care much about things like batting average, runs batted in, ERA, or pitching wins. At the same time, Sabermetrics has helped establish new standards with strange names like Wins Above Replacement (WAR), OPS+, ERA+, defensive runs saved, and on and on.

All in all, the picture is messy.

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But that also makes it fun. I mean, we’re no longer just debating whether Mike Trout is better than Mickey Mantle, but also the relative merits of Jim Rice and Bobby Grich. Did Rice’s dominance in the late 1970s and early 1980s in traditional areas like home runs and RBI trump Grich’s long-term excellence when viewed through more analytical lenses.

To this point, you’d have to say yes since Rice is in and Grich is out, but you’d get plenty of arguments these days if you said Rice was the better player overall.

So when I laid out my 2019 Spring Training Baseball Card Challenge, I knew Day 33 (today) would be particularly, um, challenging. Because today, I’m charging myself with talking about a card of a player who made it to the Hall.

I could have taken the easy route and picked out a Ken Griffey Jr. rookie or some achingly beautiful Frank Robinson card from the 1950s or 1960s. But, as great as those players were, they weren’t all that fun when it came to the Hall of Fame, because everybody knew forever that they’d both slide right in.

You want a guy who made the debate really fun? One of the first I can remember is Bert Blyleven.

A quick rundown of Blyleven’s Major League resume reveals …

• 22 years spread among five different franchises
• A 287-250 record with a 3.31 ERA
• 3701 strikeouts over 4970 innings
• A single 20-win season (1973)
• Three top-five Cy Young award finishes (1984, 1984, 1989) but no top-two finishes
• 430 home runs allowed, including 50 in 1986 and 46 in 1987
• A World Series championship with the 1987 Minnesota Twins
• A 1.198 career WHIP
• A 118 career ERA+
• 95 (!) career WAR

Basically, on the surface, Blyleven falls into that Tommy John-Harol Baines class of players who stuck around forever and consequently piled up a bunch of numbers. But those last three lines tell us something else.

They tell us that Blyleven was more than just an “accumulator” — he was an elite pitcher for two decades, at least by Sabermetrics standards.

In fact, JAWS has Blyleven as the 16th greatest starting pitcher EVER, nestled right between Phil Niekro and Steve Carlton, and far, far ahead of recent inductee Jack Morris. Like Morris, though, Blyleven had to wait a long time to get the Cooperstown call. In fact, it took him 14 full turns through the electorate, finally gaining enshrinement in 2011.

But Blyleven didn’t have to wait that long to get his due from everyone.

In 1984, Donruss complemented their breakthrough base set (you know, the one with the Don Mattingly rookie card), with a couple of oversize issues.

First, Action All-Stars returned for a second year, and Blyleven was included.

More pertinent for this discussion, though, “Be Home” Blyleven also found his way into the 60-card Donruss Champions issue. That set showcased then-current players who excelled in one phase of the game or another, then compared them to the all-time leader in that category.

For instance, Mike Schmidt was paired with Hank Aaron since both gents knew a thing or two about home runs.

Blyleven drew an even tougher comparison partner, as Donruss linked him on the career strikeouts list with the great Walter Johnson. Admittedly, Blyleven’s stats look anemic there in black and white underneath those of The Big Train, but the Dutchman would indeed eventually surpass Johnson’s mark of 3508.

And, while that Donruss card does mention Blyleven’s otherworldly curveball, it doesn’t touch on another area where he was at least within Johnson’s universe: shutouts.

While Johnson finished with an out-of-reach 110, Blyleven stands ninth on the all-time list at 60, just one behind Tom Seaver and Nolan Ryan for pitchers who began their careers after 1960.

So, is Bert Blyleven in Walter Johnson’s class as a starting pitcher? Of course not, but he’s not as far removed as you might think on an average day full of hyperbole around players with bigger “names.”

And Blyleven is, absolutely, a deserving Hall of Famer … and a Champion.

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

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And yet, that’s the task laid before me — and you — here in Day 12 of my 2019 Spring Training Baseball Card Challenge — to pontificate on my first baseball card ever.

Now, I have a pretty good idea of what my first card was, in the sense that I’m 98% positive it hailed from the 1981 Topps set. If not that, then 1981 Donruss or 1981 Fleer … but I’d bet on Topps.

Beyond that, I even know almost exactly where it came from — the toy aisle of our local Marsh grocery story here in central Indiana. I could probably narrow it down to GPS coordinates with a high degree of accuracy if I had to.

But which was the very first card I pulled out of a pack?

It’s all conjecture because, a) it’s been a couple of generations ago (I’m freaking old!) and b) I hated baseball cards at the time. Hated them. Resented them for not being toys. Held ill-will toward my mother because she brought me a pile of cardboard junk from her weekly trip to the grocery store rather than the normal hunk of plastic or foam junk, like a Nerf(ish) rocket launcher or cheap plastic handcuffs.

You know … toys.

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I do know which cards showed up all the time, though, like Rob Picciolo and Steve McCatty. Those drab green Oakland A’s uniforms were the bane of my toy-craving childhood existence, and they seemed to be everywhere.

In fact, I’ve already staked a claim that the 1981 Topps Steve McCatty was my first baseball card, and I wrote about it here. And it may well have been. In my heart, I think it was my first.

But I don’t know for sure, and besides, I’ve already written about that Debbie Downer in mushy brown cardboard enough.

So here, I’m going to tackle another of the cards that always seemed to turn up in my packs, and one that also made an impression on me. And I’ll tell you, nothing makes quite as strong an impression on a young kid as does someone who is mad at you, who stares holes through you.

Al Williams, on 1981 Topps card #569, has been staring holes through me for nearly 40 years now.

I have no idea what I did to tick off Al Williams, but from the time I first laid eyes on this card, I could feel his disdain for me. Why, if I had so much as twitched, he might have come right out of those yellow borders and told me what was what.

So I didn’t twitch.

But looking at the card now, I think maybe it was more a combination of things that made me feel sad or disliked rather than Williams himself.

I mean, consider …

• Williams is in a drab Minnesota Twins uniform that looked (looks) to me like a cloudy day.
• He’s sitting in front of a dungeon, with who knows what horrors locked inside.
• He’s sitting, just looking on at something out of frame (he’s not even looking at me, as it turns out). Even back then, I knew baseball players should be on the field, basked in sunshine.
• The photo is just … so … grainy, like a child’s vision of the future.

And the card back doesn’t help much, with big open blobs on his stats box that just say “DID NOT PLAY” (twice) and “PLAYED IN INTER-AMERICAN LEAGUE” with no explanation in either case.

At least the cartoons at the bottom of the card were cool, even if they didn’t look like Al Williams.

Maybe Williams wasn’t mad at all but just waiting for his turn to make an impact with the Twins. That chance would come the same summer this card was issued, the split-season mess of 1981, when he stepped into the rotation and became a consistent if unspectacular starter.

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From ’81 through 1983, Williams made 77 starts among his 85 appearances, racking up a 4.15 ERA and recording an exactly league-average 100 ERA+.

Williams turned 30 early in the 1984 season, though, when the Twins were busy building themselves into a contender on the backs of several outstanding young players. That translated into a reduced role for Williams and a return to the Triple-A Toledo Mud Hens for three games.

That October, Minnesota released him.

And, though Williams made 16 starts for the New York Yankees Triple-A team in Columbus (the Clippers) in 1985, he was done in the Majors, and then done in professional ball.

All in all, Al Williams owns a 35-38 Big League record, with a 4.24 ERA, which is slightly better than what I managed to do in baseball.

More than that, he was on my first ever baseball card, in 1981 … or, at least that’s the way I see it today. Tomorrow might bring a different answer.

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

(Check out our rundown of the most valuable 1981 Topps baseball cards.)

Carew came to the plate 694 times that season and banged out an amazing 231 hits for an almost scary .388 batting average (to win the AL batting crown). He also tacked on 69 walks to record a .449 on-base percentage. Throw in 128 runs, 14 home runs, 100 RBI, 23 stolen bases, and 8+ WAR, and it’s not hard to imagine why he won the American League Most Valuable Player award that fall.

It was an absolutely amazing display.

But do you remember the rest of the story of that long-ago season? The other superstar who toiled alongside Carew for that 1977  Minnesota Twins that finished fourth in the old A.L. West?

The guy who finished runner-up — albeit a distant runner-up — to Carew in the batting race?

It’s understandable if you whiff on those bits of trivia … time is a savage foe who gnaws away the memories that were once so clear, and who packs away all but the brightest and most persistent lights, pushing them to the back of our lifes’ closets under our kids’ old clothes and that pile of faded dreams.

But in that long-ago summer, a young man named Lyman Bostock roamed the outfield for the Twins, starting 83 games in center and 58 in left field. At 26 years of age, Bostock built on the profile of a budding offensive star he’d sowed over the previous two seasons, smacking 14 home runs, scoring 104 runs, driving in 90, stealing 16 bases, and batting a robust .336.

At the end of the year, the Minnesota teammates had finished 1-2 for the batting crown.

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It all came at an opportune time for Bostock, too, as he reached free agency after the season. The Twins either opted not to or were unable to re-sign him, though, and he took his big bat to the California Angels. His relocation — and his bat, naturally — was rewarded with a raise from $20,000 to $450,000.

Bostock’s decade-long trek through the upper reaches of baseball had led him from high school in Los Angeles at Manual Arts down the road to Anaheim, but, though it looks like a short trip on the map, it was a circuitous route. Stops along the way included Cal State Northridge, a 26th-round selection by the Twins in the 1972 June draft, and layovers at Single-A, Double-A, and Triple-A in the Twins’ system.

Bostock finally debuted in the Major Leagues early in 1975 and spent the next couple of seasons solidifying himself as a fixture of the team … until he was gone to California.

That first season with the Angels wasn’t what either side had hoped it might be. In 147 games, Bostock hit a solid .296 — solid, but not on par with his .318 career mark entering the season or the upward trajectory expected for a 27-year-old in his prime. His power numbers were down, too, connecting as he did on just five homers and picking up 24 doubles after banging out 36 in 1977 with the Twins.

The silver lining to any disappointment with Bostock’s first-year performance in Anaheim was that the Angels competed for the division title most of he season, eventually finishing tied for second with the Texas Rangers. As usual (it seemed), the Kansas City Royals took the flag.

Plus, he’d surely do better next time around. Maybe the Angels would take the whole thing!

Of course, if you already know anything about Lyman Bostock, you know that his baseball story ends here. Following an afternoon game with the Chicago White Sox, Bostock visited an old friend with his uncle, Thomas Turner. There, Bostock made a couple new friends and left in one of their cars. Before they could get where they were going, the estranged husband of one of the ladies chased down the vehicle and fired his shotgun into the backseat.

Bostock took the brunt of the shot and died a few hours later at St. Mary’s Medical Center in Gary, Indiana.

And just like that, a promising baseball career, and a promising life, were gone.

Baseball cards are of course a gross triviality when considering matters of life and death, but they nonetheless help us remember times gone by and folks who may have faded from our memories.

By the summer of his death, Lyman Bostock had appeared on a handful of Topps cards, and his 1978 card even featured one of those “nifty” custom Topps airbrush jobs to get him in an Angels uniform.

His 1978 Kellogg’s card, issued in packs of cereal that season, dallied with no such conceit. Instead, the Kellogg’s cad shows Bostock kneeling with a bat in his Twins uniform, ready to inflict some more damage on opposing pitchers. The background of the 3-D card shows green turf and infield dirt bleeding into a blur of stands, with any number of nondescript and unidentifiable faces.

They’re all lost to the ages.

But thanks to cards like the bright and groovy 1978 Kellogg’s issue, and to folks with long baseball memories who refuse to forget, we can still remember Lyman Bostock.

We can appreciate the wonderful player he was, even if we’re left to ponder what great feats were left in that wicked bat.

(This is Day 11 of our 2019 Spring Training Baseball Card Challenge. Read all of the posts in that series here.)

OK, then … lean in close …

I don’t keep up with the new card market.

In fact, I haven’t kept up with the new card market since, oh, about 1993. Maybe 1994.

There are a lot of reasons for that …

All of the new issues coming out around that time, with parallels and chase cards and super premium cards and … *sigh* … and, well, it all sort of confused me. That was on me to a great extent, because I was in grad school at the time and didn’t have much mental space for anything else new.

But then I got married … started a family … started the old career path.

In those years, I did have a bit of time, and a bit of mental space, and I went back to the new card well here and there … and left confused every time.

I suspect I’m not alone in this scenario, and the truth is I’m not sure I want to change it. So much time has passed and so many hundreds of sets have been pumped out in the last 25 years that I’m not sure I could ever catch up with it all, even if I wanted to.

Thing is, though, I’ve never stopped following baseball itself in the here and now (or the there and then, as it were).

I watched the rise of the latest New York Yankees dynasty.

I watched the fall of curses for the Boston Red Sox (over it) and the Chicago Cubs (yay), and the continuation of the Cleveland Indians‘ woes.

I watched the so-called steroid era rise up and then get smacked down, with home run hitters suddenly becoming social pariahs.

I watched the power return over the last few years, with all sorts of explanations that don’t involve drugs, and everyone just sort of accepting it. Now there is talk of lowering the mound or moving it back or adding the DH to the National League …

Yep, baseball is a funny game, and I love every minute of it.

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Every once in awhile, too, I sneak another peek at those new cards — sitting over there on the shelf at Target or waving at me from across the card show floor or flashing by on this blog or that.

And you know what? They look darn good, for the most part. I like them and could collect them under the right circumstances.

I also realize that you can’t really do a proper Spring Training Baseball Card Challenge without including new cards in some fashion. After all, spring, and Spring Training in particular, is about new beginnings, new players, new teams, new hopes, new, new, new. So how can I leave out new cards?

I can’t.

So here I am, picking a brand new card to talk about on Day 7 of this challenge.

My gut — my heart — told me to pick one of those 1984 throwback cards … Heritage or Archives or whatever … or one of the other pasteboards that Topps put out this year but look like they came out in one of my years.

That felt like a cop-out, though, so I decided to be a bit more rigorous and pick a current card of a current player. Even more than that, I wanted a 2019 card, and a 2019 card that I could actually go out and buy right now if I wanted to.

So I perused the roll of 2019 Topps Series 1, which came out in late January, and found one I like … #116, Miguel Sano.

What’s good about this card?

Well, Sano had some health and conditioning problems last year, and his off-season wasn’t as quiet as you might hope, but he’s still a youngish slugger who made the AL All-Star team in 2017.

More importantly, the card’s base design is at least OK, with a hockey-stick inner border design that’s an obvious nod to 1982 Topps baseball. Since I can’t control Topps’ choices for their base design, I’ll give myself a pass on that particular throwback.

I also like the horizontal orientation of the card, and Sano looks pretty, um, neat (I’m old, remember) crouched down at third base with his sun glasses down, ready to field anything that comes his way. At least we know he can’t use the old “lost the grounder in the sun” excuse for any miscue.

And finally, Sano sports the old interlocking T-C logo on his cap and that same logo threatens to swallow him up from his left, looming on the outfield wall like some 1980s baseball insignia version of Godzilla.

Overall, it’s an awesome visual that reminds me instantly of Kent Hrbek and those other great Twins of my youth — Kirby Puckett, Frank Viola, Gary Gaetti, Dan Gladden … um … Sal Butera … Mark Salas.

You get the idea.

And, yes, I know that Gaetti was a third baseman, like Sano, and Hrbek was a first baseman, but this shot of Sano reminds me of Hrbek first.

I already conceded a lot by drawing on a brand new card … it’s not likely I’ll soften on this Buy-A-Vowel point any time soon.

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

The temperature plummets, and the wind whips around you like a playful puppy, except instead of licking you and nipping at your heals, it steals the warmth right from your very soul?

You know, that kind of cold. The kind where you bundle up and turn the heat up and then crank up a space heater right in front of you for good measure … and yet you’re still shivering?

Yeah, it’s an awful affliction. But I have the cure.

Well, maybe not the cure, exactly, but at least a way to trick your mind into thinking warmer thoughts.

Here’s the secret …

Look at your baseball cards.

Big revelation, I know, given that you’re reading these words on a baseball card blog, but hear me out.

First off, I acknowledge that baseball stretches through most of the calendar year and that plenty of baseball games are played in the cold. Heck, I wrote a whole post on that subject yesterday.

But like I also said in that piece, baseball is a summer game at heart. I mean, would you be so interested in all the diamond happenings if we went right from Spring Training to the World Series each year, without six months of rising-then-falling temperatures, and hopes.

I sure wouldn’t.

From the early sunshine of Florida (and Arizona) to boiling All-Star Games to a Nolan Ryan fastball to blistering pennant races, baseball has always thrived on heat.

And baseball cards do a pretty good job of showing us that fire, which is why Day 6 of this 2019 Spring Training Baseball Card Challenge prevails upon us to consider a card that looks hot.

Now, there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of pasteboards that could have gotten the call here, so I pretty much just worked through some stacks until a card screamed out of the flames to me.

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And the one that did is … the 1983 Fleer Don Baylor card (#77).

I’ve always been a from-afar admirer of Don Baylor, ever since I saw his 1979 Topps card in the 1982 Topps Kmart 25th Anniversary set (yes, that set again). That’s the issue, in case you’ve forgotten, that depicts miniature versions of Topps cards from 1962 through 1981, each one showing an MVP from the given year.

So I knew early on that Baylor was the 1979 AL MVP when he played for the California Angels.

By the time I held that 1983 Fleer card in my hands for the first time, I could also see (from the stats on the back), that 1979 had been his career year — it’s tough for a mere mortal to top .296, 36 home runs, 139 RBI, and 22 stolen bases. Especially given that Baylor was moving into his mid-30s by the time I “discovered” him.

Still, he was a slugger who could do plenty of other things on the field, especially with a bat, and he looked like a nice dude, to boot. Somewhere along that time, I learned, too, that Baylor had a penchant for taking a baseball to the arm or rump to get on base and help his team out.

Gotta love that.

But my admiration remained of the “afar” variety because it was the 1980s and Baylor played not just for another team, but for American League teams. Which meant I hardly ever got to see him play.

What I knew of him, though, I loved … right down to his cardboard. And that 1983 Fleer card was no small part of the Don Baylor ethos in my mind.

Here you had a guy who had reached the pinnacle of his sport yet was there in the batting cage, batting gloves on both hands, bat tucked under his arm, either ready to or having just put in even more time honing his craft.

I’m not sure where or when this photo was taken, other than to say it was before 1983 and it was someplace hot — likely on the road, given that Baylor is wearing his dark navy blue Angels road uniform.

You know it’s a hot day because 1) the sun glares in the reflection off Baylor’s batting helmet, 2) Baylor is wearing short sleeves, and 3) dude is covered in sweat from the combination of his day’s work and the heat of the sun and/or locale.

And yet … he’s smiling

Hot, sweaty, working hard, and happy to be doing it all.

What more could you want in a baseball player or in a baseball card?

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

Have you ever heard of Bruce Look?

Chances are you haven’t unless you were a diehard fan of the Minnesota Twins in the 1960s or collected the 1969 Topps set like it was going out of style. You know, with enough doubles of every player to field his own team.

I hadn’t heard of Look, either, until I was poking around the cardboard web looking for some interesting things to pin recently.

That’s when I stumbled across this friendly looking guy:

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This card is pretty interesting (to me) for a few reasons …

First off, I don’t ever recall seeing it before.

Now, that’s not a complete surprise seeing as how it was issued a few years before I was even born. But I’ve been around this (card) game for a lot of years, and this is a base card from the mid-series of a non-scarce issue. If you gave me those criteria for any particular card, I’d guess that I’m at least familiar with it.

Not in this case, which is pretty sweet. I mean, how often can you say that you “discovered” a new pasteboard from a nearly 50-year-old baseball card set?

Beyond soothing eyes fatigued by yet another sighting of the 1982 Topps Tom Veryzer card, though, the Look Rookie Card is fun because it presents something of a mystery.

Flip it over, and you see …

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Not only had Bruce Look been “a football star for Michigan State,” but he was “the best hitting rookie on the Minnesota roster” in 1968.

If you look at his page on Baseball Reference, though, you’ll see that 1968 was his only season in the Major Leagues.

So what happened?

Well, that college career probably had something to do with it.

Look wasn’t signed by the Milwaukee Braves until 1964, when he was 21 years old. He would spend the rest of the summer with the Single-A Binghamton Triplets of the New York-Penn League.

That November, the Los Angeles Dodgers selected him in the first-year draft and kept him at the Single-A level in 1965 … and 1966. In 1967, he made the jump to the Triple-A Spokane Indians, which prompted the Twins to pick him in the Rule 5 draft.

In case you didn’t know, teams are required to keep their Rule 5 selections on their 25-man rosters the entire following season, so this move punched Look’s ticket to the Major Leagues.

As Topps mentioned, Look did OK at the highest level, hitting .246 in 139 plate appearances over 59 games. He also added 20 walks to raise his on-base percentage to a healthy .353.

Alas, he was a 25-year-old rookie for a middling team (79-83 record) who didn’t wow his employers over a full season. When new manager Billy Martin arrived, the Twins were ready to win now (then), and Look evidently didn’t fit those plans.

He was shipped to the Triple-A Denver Bears in 1969 and moved right along with them when the Twins Triple-A affiliate became the Evansville Triplets in 1970.

Before the 1971 season began, the Twins traded Look to the New York Yankees, and he started that tear with the Syracuse Chiefs

In July, the Yanks swapped him the Milwaukee Brewers, who also dispatched him to Triple-A … which just happened to mean a return to the Evansville Triplets.

And that was the end of the road for Bruce Look as a professional baseball player, who made only a brief splash in MLB but managed to wrangle a pretty decent looking Topps card out of the deal.

But there is an interesting postscript — or prescript — to Look’s story …

His older brother is Dean Look, who was a quarterback at Michigan State before playing one game for the New York Titans of the American Football League (AFL) in 1962. The elder Look also pitched in three games for the 1961 Chicago White Sox.

But Dean Look achieved greater fame as an NFL official for nearly four decades, including a moment that most fans from 1980s have etched in our minds — he called the touchdown that resulted from “The Catch” when Joe Montana and Dwight Clark somehow hooked up to beat the Dallas Cowboys in the 1982 NFC Championship game.

No matter how you “look” at it, Bruce Look, his older brother Dean, and Bruce’s 1969 Topps baseball card all deserve another … or a first … well, Look.

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Sometimes, a little bit of luck in timing and location can make all the difference in the world.

Take the Jack Morris rookie card, for example.

If the 2018 Hall of Fame inductee had made his debut before 1977 or with just about any team other than the Detroit Tigers, he would have had one rookie card.

And if he had made it to the Major Leagues a few years later, he likely  would have had three rookie cards, and that’s what everyone would have expected.

As things stand, Morris got a cup of coffee with the Tigers in the summer 1977, appearing in seven games and going 1-1 with a 3.74 ERA. That was enough for Detroit to call him back to Motown early in the 1978 season.

It was also enough for Topps to tag Morris for card #703, a Rookie Pitchers card he shares with Larry Andersen, Tim Jones, and Mickey Mahler.

Here is what that one looks like:

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But the Tigers probably wouldn’t have called Morris up at all, not right then, had they been, say the New York Yankees. After bottoming out in the mid-1970s, though, Detroit had invested in a youth movement, and their minor league moves were paying off in the spring of 1978.

Ready to reshape the Big League team were youngsters like catcher Lance Parrish, second baseman Lou Whitaker, shortstop Alan Trammell, first baseman Jason Thompson, left fielder Steve Kemp, starter Dave Rozema … and bullpen hand Jack Morris.

Of course, Morris was destined for the starting rotation, too, and moved into a full-time starting role in 1979.

Before that came to pass, though, it just so happened that hast food monarch Burger King decided to ramp up their baseball card promotions. In 1977, BK had tested the cardboard waters with a Topps-made set devoted to the Yanks and available with food purchases in the New York area.

That apparently worked out well enough that the King wanted more in 1978, expanding their sets — and markets — to include the Houston Astros, Texas Rangers, and, yes, the Detroit Tigers.

The Yanks were back on the docket, too.

But it’s that Tigers set that really paid dividends for a generation of baseball card collectors. Among the 23 cards issued in the Motown BKs were solo cards of Whitaker, Trammell, and Morris.

While most of the Burger King cards were just copies of the corresponding base Topps cards, that wasn’t really possible with the three youngsters — they all appeared on multiplayer cards (like Morris’ above) in the regular Topps issue.

And, no matter how good Topps is at their craft, even they can’t make one player look like four players, or vice versa.

So each of these guys, all of whom will someday be in Cooperstown, instantly doubled their baseball card count. And, in each case, that new rookie card was an upgrade over the original.

Here is the Morris single from that Burger King set:

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Now, I’ve already told you, in this post, what I think of the 1978 Burger King Jack Morris card, but you can decide for yourself.

Is it better than his base card?

Is it better than Trammell’s card?

Than Whitaker’s?

That’s the beauty of baseball cards, and, especially these Burger King cards …

You can have them your way!

At least in a binary sort of way.

(Check out the rest of our posts on the 2018 Hall of Fame class here.)

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Look, we all know that the 1983 Donruss Cesar Cedeno card is the greatest baseball card of all time.

Or if not the absolute greatest, at least in the top one-and-a-half.

So it’s not really fair to compare the rest of this humble set to the pasteboard of a man who could light up a wet cigarette while standing inside of a fire extinguisher. It would be sort of like picking the best character on The Wonder Years and leaving Winnie in the mix.

Again, not fair.

And besides, I’ve written about this card before (how could I not have?).

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In order for this exercise to have any meaning, then, we have to throw out Cedeno (something that happened about 25% of the time in his Major League career) and focus on the other 659 Donruss cards.

Some obviously don’t make the grade, like …

• Checklists
• Cal Ripken (he’s pissed)
• Brad Lesley, looking not very Animalistic
• Matt Keough and his chagrin
• Bryan Clark and another chronically bad baseball card picture

There are others, though, that are quite good and were serious candidates as I whittled things down …

• Tony Gwynn, Ryne Sandberg, Wade Boggs — solid shots of three great players on their Donruss rookie cards
• Reggie Jackson, who seems to always look good on cardboard
• Storm Davis, who appears ready to actually storm the Majors for several years to come
• Nolan Ryan, hiding something wicked behind his leg kick
• Pete Rose, up close as he bursts from the box
• Rickey Henderson stalking another base
• Dave Hostetler in a home run trot
• Carl Yastrzemski tossing a ball to himself, ready to slam it at 104 years old

That Yaz card is especially compelling.

So are many others.

In fact, there are a lot of really sweet shots in this set, even if the photos still suffer from some graininess and blurriness.

Still, in this moment I find it hard to get by card #90 of Rod Carew.

When this card was issued, Carew was a little over halfway through his seven-year run with the California Angels and rounding the corner on a Hall of Fame career that would culminate in a .328 average on the strength of 445 doubles among his 3053 hits, with more than 350 stolen bases thrown in for good measure.

I didn’t know much about Carew when I started pulling this card from wax packs that summer, but the numbers on back popped out like my mom’s bad knee … even at an ancient 36 years of age, Carew had hit .319 in 1982 and, at that point, had a .331 lifetime mark. The “CAREER HIGHLIGHTS” on the back of that ’83 Donruss card also told me that Carew hit .388 in 1977 — wow!

But as great as all of Carew’s bona fides are, it’s the card front that solidifies its place at the top of this issue.

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For starters, this card is just sunny, much like that glorious Cedeno card. It makes you want to be at the ballpark and would make you smile if Carew himself weren’t so intense.

He’s crouched there in the world’s spotlight, his Angels home white uniform glaring like a snowball at high noon, Angels A-plus-halo hat angled perfectly toward the camera. Veins stand out in his neck as he glares in toward home plate, waiting for the pitch. Carew’s eyes are squinted under the bill of his cap, and his lips are jammed together and pursed just so, as if to say —  “Oooooooooo, even I can’t believe how good I am!”.

But Rod Carew probably wouldn’t say that. From all I know about him — admittedly not a whole lot — he seems to be a humble enough guy.

His body definitely speaks, though, and his outstretched, vein-streaked arms and tense shoulders say, “I’m ready.”

Carew looks like a consummate middle infielder, ready to dive or run or throw or whatever he needs to do to get the out. He was a second baseman for so long, it’s hard to remember, and believe, that he spent more time at first base in the long run.

And, even when I see this late-career card, I always think, “second base,” until I hone in on the details for the millionth time and notice that big mitt. A quick glance at the position designation on the bat head confirms that Carew is a “3” instead of a “4” on this card.

Given all that, the 1983 Donruss Rod Carew has to be one of the best baseball cards of a second baseman masquerading as a first baseman ever.

And it’s also the best card of the 1983 Donruss set, non-Cesar Cedeno edition.

(This is the eighth 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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Ken Landreaux once lived the baseball dream …

He was good enough in high school for the Houston Astros to select him in the eighth round of the 1973 draft, but he wanted more. So he headed to Arizona State, became a standout there, and raised his status enough for the California Angels to select him with their first-round pick (sixth overall) in 1977.

That put Landreaux just down the road from his hometown of Los Angeles (Compton) and kept him in the warm weather he’d always thrived in.

It was a good fit, and Landreaux found himself in the Major Leagues by that fall. In 116 games through the end of 1978, he struggled to put up big numbers (.229 batting averages, five home runs, 28 RBI) but showed enough speed and glovework to catch the eye of other teams.

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One of those clubs was the Minnesota Twins, who liked Landreaux enough to insist he be included (along with Dave Engel, Paul Hartzell, and Brad Havens) in the deal that brought Rod Carew to the west coast in February of 1979.

Though the move north might have been tough to swallow at first, Landreaux adjusted quickly and established himself as a budding star with the Twins in 1979, hitting .305 with 15 homers and 83 RBI.

He wasn’t the only reason to be excited in Minneapolis, either, as Minnesota crafted an 82-80 record that summer thanks to a young core of players and the guidance of manager Gene Mauch.

The Twins were inconsistent early in 1980, though, and they entered their April 23rd home game against Landreax’s old team, the California Angels, with a 6-7 record.

In that game at Metropolitan Stadium, things got much worse, as the Angels thumped the Twins, 17-0.

While Angels hitters were teeing off against Minnesota pitching, California starter Bruce Kison was nearly untouchable, allowing just four walks and a solitary hit.

That base knock came with one out in the bottom of the ninth at the hands of Kison’s former teammate … Ken Landreaux.

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Kison retired Rick Sofield and Butch Wynegar after Landreaux’s double, but the no-hitter was gone.

While Landreax’s heroics did nothing to help the Twins that spring afternoon, it did serve notice that he was a man with tenacity, who never gave up. As it turned out, those traits would show up again and again over the next several weeks.

Game after game, Mauch wrote Landreaux’s name in the lineup, and game after game, Landreaux did what he was supposed to do — hit.

In fact, by the time the Baltimore Orioles rolled into Minnesota on May 31, 1980, Landreaux had hit safely in 31 straight games, a Twins record that stands to this day.

During that streak, Landreaux batted .392 to raise his season average to a hefty .356.

But against Scott McGregor on that final day of May, the hits finally ran dry. That in itself is nothing to lament too intensely, as McGregor was in the midst of a 20-win season and was a legitimate Cy Young contender.

Landreaux’s streak had been a rare bright spot in a dismal run for the Twins, though, and without it, there was little joy for a team that stood at 18-29 entering June.

Things didn’t get much better from there.

By the time Mauch was fired after an August 24 loss to the Detroit Tigers, the Twins were 54-71, and Landreaux’s average had fallen all the way to .272.  Minnesota finished strong (23-13) under Johnny Goryl, and Landreaux recovered to hit .281 on the season, but things were never quite the same.

On March 30 of 1981, just before the eventual strike-shortened season began, the Twins traded Landreaux to the Los Angeles Dodgers in exchange for Mathew Reeves, Kelly Snider, and Mickey Hatcher.

And so, after two years and heroics that most Little Leaguers can only dream about, Ken Landreaux was back home.

The marriage worked well, as Landreaux anchored center field and hit .297 with 18 stolen bases to help the Dodgers all the way to the World Series, where they beat the New York Yankees, four games to two.

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Over the next few seasons, Landreaux continued to develop his wheels, reaching the 30-steals plateau twice and helping the Dodgers content most years.

By 1987, his playing time and numbers had slipped significantly, and LA released him after the season. Landreaux played a couple more years in the minors (for Baltimore and the Dodgers) and then retired.

On his career, Ken Landreaux batted .268 on the back of 1099 hits, collecting 91 home runs and 145 stolen bases along the way.

Any of those accomplishments would fulfill most boyhood baseball dreams beyond all realistic expectations, but Landreaux went even further beyond.

For one glorious stretch in the spring of 1980, he was Joe DiMaggio and Pete Rose.

Anything was possible.

(Check out our other player card posts here.)