How many players can say opposing pitching became harder after Nolan Ryan retired? Cleveland second baseman Carlos Baerga can, as he produced his finest season in 1993 and sports what is possibly the best career stat line of anyone facing Ryan. He batted .600 against baseball’s strikeout king, never once striking out.
Baerga was a switch hitting second baseman and became the first MLB player to ever hit a home run from both sides of the plate in the same inning. He was seen as a legitimate rising star in the early 1990s and his ’93 Finest refractor was a hot commodity. After all, he did hit home runs from both sides of the plate in the same inning in an April 1993 game. A Beckett price guide from the end of that year shows collectors were offering as much for Baerga’s shiny cardboard as they were for Don Mattingly. Power hitting infielders like Ryne Sandberg and Cal Ripken had proven their hobby power but were entering the second decade of their careers and it was beginning to look like Baerga would be next in line to take their place.
Wait a minute. Carlos Baerga as a power hitter? I don’t recall any batting or home run titles. Didn’t he finish his career with roughly average wOBA and WAR production? Don’t you rank a couple thousand guys higher than him?
Yep, 100% accurate. To get in the minds of pre-strike collectors, you have to look what had been accomplished through that point in time. Just look read the back of his 1994 Leaf Gold Stars card:
Leaf’s editorial staff made a direct comparison of Baerga’s hitting prowess with that of Rogers Hornsby. Anytime your stats line up with an all time top-10 player you’re doing something special.
Writeups of Baerga’s career tend to tell a tale of a promising player whose production fell off a cliff as the years went on. While the first years were certainly more productive than his final decade, I’m not seeing the massive collapse that seems to be implied. He had two fantastic seasons in 1992-1993 that validated the narrative of Baerga being the next great hitting infielder, and his role as the heart of the resurgent mid-’90s Indians gave him some cover when a bit of regression set in. The narrative survived longer than his Hornsby-esque bat, and it was the distance between that story and his actual production that overshadowed the much less severe actual drop in performance.
He was with the team when they returned to the 1995 World Series after a 41 year absence. His SABR bio speaks of his leadership following the deaths of teammates Steve Olin and Tim Crews. He was a popular and outgoing personality that quickly worked his way into the hearts of Cleveland fans.
That World Series appearance and his position in the hearts of everyone at Jacobs Field made for one of the most unforgettable baseball cards of the 1990s. The Indians and Braves revisited their World Series matchup with a March 1996 exhibition game during Spring Training. Attending the event was Christie Brinkley who, in addition to having been a three-time Sports Illustrated cover model, had developed quite a bit of talent on the other side of the camera. After seeing her photography skills appear in several magazines, Pinnacle Brands sent her to Florida to capture images of the participants for use on the company’s cards later that summer.
Brinkley arrived at the ballpark with rolled up photo backdrop, tons of props, and a notebook filled with ideas that aligned with the quirks of each player. Tom Glavine was photographed swinging a golf club on the mound. Marquis Grissom was being tracked with a radar gun. Chipper Jones was shown with bubble gum and David Justice was depicted on the receiving end of megaphone catcalls.
Props and poses were directed based what each player was best known for. That’s how we got cards showing a boxing-gloved Jim Thome ready to hit something hard and Kenny Lofton running off with two bases at a time. A smiling Albert Belle even somehow made the cut.
Baerga’s turn in front of the camera came with a request to show his status as the heart of the team. Taking his shirt off, Brinkley used a paintbrush to add a heart tattoo to Baerga’s chest. In typical baseball card fashion the anatomical placement is a bit-off center, but it works. Behold the magnificence that is the 1996 Christie Brinkley Collection Carlos Baerga card!
Before you buy up dozens of this card and hand them out at your kids’ next Valentines Day class project, be sure to look at what is in Brinkley’s hand on the back of the card. She is holding the paintbrush.
1993 Finest Refractor
At one point Baerga’s refractor was seen as being just as desirable as that of Don Mattingly. More recently, it was seen as a semi-tough number to check off the list for set builders. That situation resolved two years ago after a miniature hoard of a few dozen copies was disbursed one at a time by a single individual. That distribution seems to have now subsided. While I did not acquire my copy in the sale of these cards, their presence did space out the competition enough to give me breathing room to snag the one now residing in my collection. That semi-tough state pushed the acquisition into the later stages of my set building quest, making it the 187th name crossed off my 199 card want list.
