it took me about 20 minutes to figure out the lyric i had in my head as i was pondering this 2004 donruss leather & lumber rivals card of barry larkin and hideo nomo:
then hit came to me. duh. "eye of the tiger", which includes the line "rising up to the challenge of our rival". that probably doesn't mean anything, but i feel like this card - the last of four i needed for my dodger collection - falls short of the standard i would set for considering two players to be rivals. it did not, in fact, rise up to meet the challenge.
according to baseball reference, larkin had 15 plate appearances against nomo. he was 3 for 11 with a hr, a double, 4 walks and no strikeouts. he was 2 for 3 against nomo in the 1995 nlds, but that was quite a while before this card was issued. in fact, nomo faced the reds just once in 2003 - the year prior to the card's release - and larkin didn't even play in that game. the one home run larkin hit off of nomo wasn't a big deal, either, as far as i can tell - it was number 182 of larkin's career. and, while the reds and dodgers were historic nl west rivals at one point, they weren't in the same division when nomo entered the league.
most of the other cards in the set makes more sense to me, but there are some that may be similar to the larkin/nomo card, and i am not going to try to figure them out. however, there are position rivals (like derek jeter/nomar garciaparra), geographical rivals (like frank thomas/kerry wood), notable series rivals (like mike piazza/roger clemens), all of which make sense to me.
even the other dodgers in the set - don sutton vs. reggie jackson, duke snider vs. phil rizzuto, and orel hershiser vs. darryl strawberry - make more sense than nomo vs. larkin. at any rate, i am happy to have the "base" team set complete.
I saw this title in my blogroll, and immediately started to try and think of what that was from. I would've got it with a little more time, but thankfully was put out of my misery with your first paragraph.
ReplyDeletei was embarrassed as to how long it took me to figure out.
DeleteGreat song. One of my favorites when I was a kid.
ReplyDeletei suspect you did your time, took your chances.
DeleteNice use of the "Eye of the Tiger" lyric :)
ReplyDeleteI'd completely forgotten about these and hadn't seen much of them since I pulled a Tommy John/Rod Carew relic out of a pack at the time. I wasn't that thrilled even though Carew is a HOFer, since most of the checklist is a lot more interesting (at least to me)
that is an odd pairing, too. they were teammates with the angels, and i wouldn't say the angels had a rivalry with the yankees in either of john's stints with that club.
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