Sports

Digging Through My Baseball Cards

By December 9, 2011June 18th, 2018No Comments

Random baseball and basketball cardsThis week I decided to step it up a notch and select some cards that weren’t just sitting at the bottom of the pile. Instead these cards were all in a protective sleeve in a Baseball Card Collecting Album. That means at one point I thought all of these players had potential and that their cards needed to be given a little extra love and care. Boy was I way off on these guys.

1. Adam Keefe, 93′ Upper Deck “NBA Draft” – Adam Keefe in college. Stud. Adam Keefe on the Hawks. Dud. Keefe was Stanford’s all time leader in field goal percentage (.600) and in 91′-92′ set school single-season records for both points and rebounds. This led to him being the 10th overall pick by the Hawks. Once he got to the NBA he was nothing more than a guy who came off the bench and gave his team 5 ppg. Had Keefe thrived in the NBA he could have been the Michael Jordan of Gingers. Here is the one and only video of Adam Keefe showing us that white men can not jump.

2. Lee Mayberry, 93′ Upper Deck “NBA Top Prospect” – Like Keefe, Mayberry was a much better college player than pro. When the highlight of your career is playing in every game in your first four years then you know that things haven’t exactly gone as planned. Durability is a good thing, but if you only averaged 5 ppg then it doesn’t really mean much. The thing that I like the most about Lee Mayberry is that talking about him reminds me of Todd Day.

3. Greg Anthony, 91′ Upper Deck “NBA Draft” – Things that have never been said before with a straight face: “That is a pretty sweet denim on denim look that you are rocking”. Anthony could make this look even better if he was sporting some LA Gear High Tops with a big tongue. There is nothing that I can say about his journeyman NBA career that’ll match the awesomeness of this outfit.

4. Pete Harnisch, 89′ Donruss “Rated Rookie” – Harnisch resembles Rod Farva from SuperTroopers in this card. Unlike the NBA guys above Harnisch was actually a pretty good player (at times). In 91′ he made the All Star team despite a 5-7 record (he had a league best 2.22 ERA). Later that year he became the 17th NL pitcher to strike out three batters on nine pitches in one inning.

5. Kevin Seitzer, 88′ Topps “All Star Rookie” – Seitzer’s career started out very promising. He hit .323 with 15 HR, 83 RBI, 12 SB’s, and an AL best 207 hits. This lead to an All Star appearance and finishing second in the Rookie of the Year voting behind Mark McGwire. Though he hit above .300 numerous times and was a career .295 hitter he was never able to match the success that he had his rookie season. He was somehow an All Star again in 95′ even though he hit only 5 HR’s and 69 RBI’s for the entire season. You’ve gotta love the “everyone gets a representative rule”.

6. Geronimo Pena, 91′ Upper Deck “Star Rookie” – The Cardinals sure wished they could have yelled “Geronimo” on this guy after his first season. Apparently Upper Deck was using the term “Star Rookie” very loosely back then because Pena was anything but. He lit the Cardinals organization on fire by hitting .243 with 5 HR’s and 17 RBI’s his rookie season. That year he played in 104 games, which was the most of any season by far. In 93′ he was 5th in the NL in errors with 12. Nothing like swinging a soft stick and also being a dumpster fire in the field. On the pedigree of this card alone the Cardinals amazingly kept Pena on their roster for 6 seasons before releasing him. The Indians must not have done their homework because they scooped him up right away and he delivered a .111 average in 5 games. That was all she wrote for Geronimo.

 

Rob Cressy

Rob Cressy

Sports loving free throw specialist and yinzer living in Chicago who is awesome most of the time, has run with the bulls in Spain, and is a graduate of Second City's Improv program.