88 Score Rookie & Traded Set

We complete this set not with a bang, but with a whimper. Destrade was a well-regarded rookie at this time but disappeared from the big leagues after 1988. Disappeared until 1993, that is, when he got a shot with the first-year Marlins and posted a 20-HR season. He fell off considerably in 1994 and that was truly it for him. Destrade had spent 3 of those intervening years (1990-1992) in Japan, where he hit 42, 39, and 41 HR while playing 130 or fewer games each year (the season in Japan is shorter than in MLB.)

I don't see any particularly interesting words on the back, so here are some anagrams for Orestes Destrade:

Retreaded tosses
Dread sore testes
Rotted deer asses

Mark Grace is one of those guys who looked the same on his last baseball card as he did on his first baseball card. His body shape was the same and he aged very well. This is a nice photo, except for the poor batboy who is blocked by Grace's knee.

The card back is pretty interesting to read. Richie Zisk thought that Grace had 25-HR power, but he never topped 17 HR in any season.

Best words on the back? The phrases "good head" and "best looking." Heh.

Interesting to see 3 other players mentioned on the back too: Zisk, Chris Gwynn, and Keith Hernandez.

Grace had a great career but will never make the Hall of Fame.

This photo was probably taken at the same game as Bob Dernier's since they're both at Wrigley.

For Phillies fans, this was a great card to have in 1988 as Jordan ripped onto the scene that year (but unfortunately never became a decent full-time player despite a career OPS+ of 103.) Oddly, Jordan's full real name is Paul Scott Jordan.

I was tempted to choose "slick", "fluke", or "heroics" as the odd word here, but in the end, I went with "Maine", a word I think you see less often on a baseball card than those other three.

The beauty of having two photos on a single baseball card is the yin and the yang of it all. An action shot, then a posed head shot. It's a great combo. Here we have two extremes. On the front, we have one of the strongest guys in the pre-steroids era of baseball looking like he's about to totally pulverize a baseball. I don't know if that ball is going to hit the sweet spot or not, but it's a great photo. Now flip over to the back. Balboni looks like such a sweet little puppy!!

As an aside, I noticed that on the front, Balboni's helmet has his number on the bill. That was also true on the last card (Dernier) but not the one before that (Kittle.) Did some teams put numbers on the bill and some not?

Still more background comments, as here we see about two-thirds of the Indians second-baseman for 1988, Julio Franco (one of my favorite players.)

The copy on the back is a bit odd....Upshaw walked a decent amount, but I wouldn't go so far as to say he had "an eye for walks." He never finished in the top 10 in walks in any season, and he finished 59th (out of 153) in walks for players with 4500 to 5000 career plate appearances.

Buckner adds class and punch wherever he plays? I find that commentary to be a sort of dig at Buckner, pointing out that he's moved from team to team quite a bit. That's kid of stupid given that in 1988 he joined only his 4th team in 20 seasons.

CARD

Anybody familiar with Nettles will cringe when they see this card. It's weird enough to see him in a Padres or Braves uniform, but seeing him in an Expos jersey is just ridiculous. I'm not sure why Montreal brought him there for 1988 after he showed very little in 1986 or 1987, and was 43 years old.

Nettles has some awesome rubber bat action in this photo.

I wonder why they out his position as "IF" and not just "1B, 3B" seeing as the last time he played an IF position other than those 2 was 1 game at shortstop in 1980.

STAT

That last season for Nettles is one of the more recent years where a guy appeared in at least 80 games but had no more than 93 AB. Pitchers are excluded from that search, of course.

CAREER

It's really tough to understand Nettles' career. On the one hand, he seems somewhat overrated for being on some of the great Yankees teams as well as a Padres team that went to the World Series. He had only one year with 100 RBI and 2 years with 30 HR. So it's sort of easy to write him off as someone who benefited from being in the right place at the right time (sort of like Scott Brosius.) But then look at the 10 players he's most similar to in his career:

1. Darrell Evans (905)
2. Gary Gaetti (895)
3. Ron Santo (860)
4. Dale Murphy (851)
5. Carlton Fisk (845) *
6. Brian Downing (835)
7. Johnny Bench (820) *
8. Chili Davis (818)
9. Don Baylor (818)
10. Gary Carter (816) *

That's 3 HOFers and 2 other guys (Santo and Murphy) whom many believe belong in the HOF.

CARD

Nice shot of Tabler here. An action shot with visible jersey number is O.K. in my book. Plus there's the bonus mullet on the back.

STAT

Indeed Tabler drove in a lot of runs. Check out this list of most RBI by guys since 1980 with fewer than 50 career HR. He's way up on that list, but notice how many fewer games and PAs he had than most other folks on there.

CAREER

Tabler was known as Mr. Bases Loaded for good reason. In 109 career PAs with the bases loaded, he had 108 RBI despite homering only twice. He batted .489 with 43 hits in 88 ABs.

I picked two guys at random for comparison:

Reggie Jackson, 235 PAs, 187 RBI, .296 BA (60-for-203), 11 grand slams

Don Mattingly, 163 PAs, 127 RBI, .292 BA (38-for-130), 6 grand slams

Unfortunately for Tabler, his performance with the bases loaded is pretty much all you can say about the guy's career.

CARD

Moreland's bat looks sort of rubbery in the photo.

This seems like a good time to point out how good the text on the back of these cards is. Take a read on the back of Moreland's card and you learn quite a lot about him. Compare this to the text on the back of his 88 Topps card, or his 88 Topps traded card (which are the same, incidentally.) At least those Topps cards feature complete sentences, a bit of a rarity for Topps from this era. The Score cards, by comparison, are always complete sentences and give a lot more info than the Topps cards.

Score did make some sacrifices in order to fit all that text on there. More to come on that later.

STAT

Moreland just crushed Kevin Gross and Bill Gullickson.

CAREER

I don't have too much to say about Moreland. He benefitted more than most from the homer-crazy year of 1987, taking the opportunity to post his only season with more than 16 homers. As a result, he's remembered in some circles as a home run hitter despite finishing with a career OPS+ of just 104. That's not a terrible number, just not what you'd expect from a true power hitter.

For me, the two other memorable things about Moreland's career are his performance in the 1981 NLDS for the Phillies and his having been traded for HOFer Goose Gossage.

CARD

There is a lot to like about the 1988 Score set. Rather than list all the great attributes here on the first card post, I'll mention them as we go along in the set. This particular card happens to be an awesome photo, capturing Clark's gazed fixed on the incoming pitch

STAT

The text on the back mentions Clark's streak of games with a walk. Here is a link to such streaks, showing that Clark tied Toby Harrah's mark of 16 games in the A.L. and fell one shy of Willie Randolph's A.L. mark of 17.

Unsurprisingly, that record has since been broken. Here is a link to such streaks occurring 1993 to 2008, and Barry Bonds had 2 streaks longer than 16 games. Nick Johnson had one too.

CAREER

Clark is actually underrated, I think, for a few reasons. One was that although he was a power hitter, he didn't amass very large HR or RBI totals in many individual seasons, topping 30 HR just once and 100 RBI just twice. Another was that he didn't go to the playoffs very often. And another is that his big free-agent contract with the Yankees was perceived by many as a bust even though the numbers suggest he performed pretty well in his last several seasons. Don't let those factors fool you, though. Clark had a career OPS+ of 137, and was over 125 every season from 1978 to 1991 (except for injury-lost 1986), a period that includes his final years with the Yankees, Padres, and Red Sox, barring his last half-season in 1992. He walked nearly as much as he struck out and was a pretty productive player.

I remember him more for stuff that happened after he retired, such as going bankrupt while owning many cars and allegedly begging for the Dodgers hitting coach job because he needed the money.