it's been over a year since i acquired this card
but this post kept getting delayed for one reason or another. not today.
the card is a fairly elusive piece of cardboard that comes from the 1989 version of the active batting leaders topps put in hanger/blister packs back then. there's also a green version from 1990 that i wrote about here. in that post i mentioned that it would probably take some time for me to track down the 1989 card. i was wrong.
i was actually pretty close to pulling the trigger on a sealed version
which provides pretty much all you need to know about what makes a player one of the active batting leaders. murray, of course, went on to pass the 3,000 hit milestone but saw his average dip to .287. murray's .295 average at the time of this card would put him 12th among active players today - right behind albert pujols (whose average is in decline) and just ahead of freddie freeman.
that made me wonder - can you guess who the 10 active players are who have a better career batting average than pujols? i certainly would not have been able to do so.
I'd say Altuve, Trout, and Miggy. By the way... we must be on the same wavelength... because I'm showing off a 1990 card I picked up at the flea market tomorrow.
ReplyDeletei forgot about altuve when i tried to name the players. you are right on those three. i would never in a million years guessed michael brantley, but there he is.
DeleteI think I'd have been lucky to guess five of the ten guys on that list. Also I've never seen a sealed hanger pack with those weird oddballs in them. Probably better to just buy the single one, rather than have 100 more '89 Topps cards taking up space!
ReplyDeleteI don't remember ever seeing these as a kid, the cards, not the blister packs, so it's kind of interesting to learn about them all of these years later.
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