See that baseball shooting skyward in the Dodgers logo above? There’s a good chance that it was one of the 270 hit in a blue and white uniform by Eric Karros. He is, after all, the guy who hit more home runs than any other Dodger since the team’s 1957 move to the West Coast. Stretching things back to the first time Abner Doubleday allegedly spoke Brooklynese while dodging a streetcar, Karros ranks third in the all-time Dodgers longball leaderboard.
Only Duke Snider and Gil Hodges stand ahead of the 1992 NL Rookie of the Year in terms of Dodger home runs. 2018 Rookie of the Year Shohei Ohtani is in his second year with the club and currently has 81 in a Dodgers uniform. He’ll need another 189 to match Karros, or a little less than 25 annually through the remaining years of his decade long contract. Is Shohei on pace and healthy enough to be a career 450-500 HR guy? Those are the career totals he’ll need in order to surpass the Dodgers first baseman that famously never made an All-Star team.
In voters’ defense, it should be noted that Karros’ All-Star caliber years overlapped with the peak seasons of Mark McGwire and Jeff Bagwell. If part of a midsummer squad, Karros would have been rightfully considered the backup backup firstsacker. Indeed, that is the role in which he was assigned when he first made the big league club. The 1992 Dodgers were trying to convert the exceptional outfielder Kal Daniels into a first baseman after a series of knee injuries and had World Series veteran Todd Benzinger waiting in the wings as his backup. Both quickly went down with injuries, propelling Karros into a lineup in which he promptly hit 20 HRs, 30 doubles, and made a run at triple digit RBIs. The latter is notable considering this was a team that struggled offensively on the way to 99 losses.
That production had not been expected. At the time he had not been touted as one of the organization’s more promising prospects. He couldn’t run as fast as many teammates and was not a hard thrower. He had all of 12 home runs to his credit over the previous four years of minor league ball. Yet, by the time his MLB career ended he had put up similar career numbers to Matt Kemp.
Karros was the first of a Dodger threepeat in Rookie of the Year winners. His breakout ’92 campaign was followed by the arrival of the even more obscure Mike Piazza. Both would eventually find themselves ending their playing days not in Dodger blue, but in the green and gold scrapheap of Oakland.
1993 Finest Refractor: Eric Karros
11 years before putting out a card of a green and gold-clad Karros outside a batting cage, Topps wrote him into the checklist of their inaugural Finest cards. Like the card of temporary Dodger teammate Eric Davis, it was plentiful enough for me to assume it would be easily obtained. Just as with my Davis refractor, each time I reached for a copy I would either be met with immovable asking prices well above my target range or a surprise encounter with a card that was higher on my want list. I must have selected a half dozen other harder to find names when shopping for an Eric Karros card before landing this one.
The last few dozen refractors that I profiled all arrived via a series of purchases out of the breakup of another collector’s complete set. Arriving many months later, this card represents the first acquisition I made after “the find” that allowed me to put set completion within sight. There’s not much of a story to this one – I saw the card listed for sale with a fixed price, shrugged my shoulders, and clicked a button.
The biggest story involving my card is how quickly I filed it away after pulling it out of the envelope. The card dutifully went into storage, but was placed in an out-of-order spot that I thought would allow for quick retrieval so I could properly finish the cataloging process. Photographing the card, recording full purchase details, and updating various databases was soon out of mind. By the time I remembered it, the card had gotten shuffled in with the rest of the collection. The lack of entry in my database threw off some of my collection tracking for a bit and caused my dashboards to scream at me that the numbers were out of balance and I didn’t recall which item was causing the issue. The records were eventually reconciled and all is once again shiny and well.
Sometimes I am as absent minded as a fan filling out an All-Star ballot.
Fun Fact: In the 1990s Karros used an America Online bulletin board to keep up an early form of baseball blog that he called Karros Kronicles.
