A Cardboard Tour of the Mariners

I have to preface this post with a couple of admissions.  First, I shop at thrift stores.  I love buying people hostile white elephant gifts, the kind you give and watch as they struggle to accept them gratefully.  Last Christmas the best gift I gave someone was a Richie Sexson bobblehead I found sitting on a deserted shelf on December 23rd.  These are the kinds of experiences that don’t emerge from a Pier 1.

My other confession is that I collect baseball cards.  Saying this is always tough because I want to do two things: I want to say that this isn’t such a bad thing, and at the same time I want to say that I don’t really collect them that much.  Dennis Miller once said that collecting baseball cards is basically "collecting pictures of other men."  I’m not one of those guys who circles dates on the calendar to run down to the hobby store and throw a hundred dollars down on the newest series of Bowman’s Best.  It is not something that I need to budget.  I am, however, the sort of guy who recognizes the name Bowman’s Best.

So judge as you see fit.  The purpose of this apology/preface, however, is to talk about the other evening, when I noticed one of those clear plastic baggies with the top stapled shut, containing about twenty or thirty cards.  From the front of the stack Dave Valle squinted at me, the way he did at every curveball for about half a second too long.  So I shrugged my shoulders and threw away a buck for the chance to rifle through someone else’s discarded childhood.  More than half the cards are Mariners, and several of them are interesting, at least to me.

So with your permission (and, hopefully Rob Neyer’s, since this is a shameless ripoff), I’d like to take a look at a few of those cards, and reflect, because reflection is the panacea of the soul:

• Bobby Ayala (1997 Fleer #616)

Bobby Ayala is making that mid-throw face that you’ve seen on baseball cards since time immemorial: that rubber-cheeked, ligament stretching frozen moment which makes you appreciate how unnatural the act of pitching a baseball really is.  Seeing Ayala’s face gives me the same facial expression.  But looking back on his career, I’m afraid it’s time to submit a small apology to the Second-Worst Reliever in Mariners history.

It turns out that Ayala was never as bad as he made himself look.  In 1996, Ayala’s first fall from grace, his ERA was 5.88 but his FIP only 4.49.  His truly disastrous 1998 season, the one that turned his name into a full-fledged curse word, he was perhaps the unluckiest pitcher in all of baseball: his ERA was 7.29 but his FIP was 3.96, actually the third best total of his career.  I suspect Russ Davis owes someone an apology.  I tend to treat Ayala the way I do Dan Meyer: a guy who wasn’t good enough and shouldn’t have needed to be.  Woody Woodward’s inability to discern even passable, cheap relief pitching talent is one of the mysteries of our time.  Not one of the big ones, but one of them.

• Alex Rodriguez (2000 Fleer Showcase, #1)
  
  This card has no flavor text describing Alex Rodriguez, no history, hopes or dreams.  I find this rather fitting.

• Julio Solano (1989 Mothers Cookies, #26)
  
  It doesn’t happen often, but occasionally I’ll see a Mariner name and realize that I have absolutely no recollection of their existence.  Solano actually pitched for two years with the Mariners, after being acquired in exchange for Doug Gilver, another player whose identity is an enigma.  Solano’s numbers are probably more interesting than he himself is: he posted a positive WAR once in his six seasons, and he managed to obtain a BABIP under .200 not once but twice.  It’s no small feat to not only be terrible, but to be lucky to be terrible.  This is the sort of man who made Mike Schooler look so good in comparison.  My only question: Mother’s Cookies put out a set each year, and each set contained 28 cards.  There wasn’t anyone else who could crack the top 28?  It is a 40-man roster, is it not?

• Mariners Coaches (1989 Mothers Cookies, #27)

Nothing too special about this card, except to note that first base coach Rusty Kuntz bears a moniker that either ranks as #1 or #1A on the all-time Mariner Name Rankings.  (For the other one, please refer to the bottom of the post, because names like these are even funnier out of context.)

• David Segui (1999 Skybox Thunder #26)

The flavor text on the back of this card reads: "Yo, David. Goliath ain’t nothin’ but a thing to you.  We know you be slayin’ pitchers like yesterday’s news.  Yeah, it’s all good." Skybox, always an aggressive, forward-thinking company, obviously decided to instill a voyeuristic feeling to its cards, by allowing the fan to listen in on an inspirational conversation between the company and Segui himself.  Reading this card just makes me wish someone had actually walked up to Segui as he was waiting by the cage, and uttered these exact words.  How would he react?  Would he smile?  Would he call security?

• John Olerud (2000 Topps Gold Label #14)

John Olerud is the Will Clark of professionalism.  It may appear that he is looking at things, but in fact, he is looking at results.

So there you go.  I’m pretty pleased with the purchasing power of my ninety-nine cents.  Now I’m going to go throw these in a cardboard box in my garage for twenty or thirty years.  I’m sure they’ll be worth a dollar by then.

(P.S.: Dick Pole.  Hee!)