‘Legendary’ Brewers trading card lineup chosen
Mike Caldwell or Teddy Higuera? Pete Vuckovich or Ben Sheets?
The question of who was better goes back to the earliest days of baseball and has fueled countless hours of bleacher banter, rainy-day discussions and barroom conflicts.
“This was an idea as a kid collector I had in my head forever,” said Jon Finkel, publisher for Beckett Media, which focuses on the sports collectible industry.
“When I finally got to Beckett, I was like, ‘Hey, can we turn one of these arguments my friends and I used to have into this massive season-long campaign?’”
And so it is. Together with trading card producer Topps, Finkel and his staff have launched a project to name all-time legendary trading card lineups for all 30 Major League Baseball teams at the rate of one per week throughout this season.
The Milwaukee Brewers’ team, revealed Monday, is the seventh to be announced.
And the answer to the combined questions that started this story is Sheets.
“Teddy Higuera came out on the heels of Fernandomania, the card was cool, he was cool, there was a bit of a surge right around him,” Finkel explained last week, “but for someone a little younger, yeah, Ben Sheets, he was the guy for a while.”
Sheets was an all-star four times, including his rookie season of 2001, and over eight seasons with the Brewers he recorded more than 1,200 strikeouts, second in team history.
Higuera was second in rookie of the year voting in ’85, averaged 17 victories over his first four seasons and finished with a 94-62 record and club-best 3.61 ERA.
As for Caldwell (102-80, 3.74 ERA over seven-plus seasons) and Vuckovich (4026, 3.88 in five seasons; Cy Young Award winner on the 1982 World Series team)?
“When you take any kind of nostalgia out of when they played and what they meant to you (personally), we found that sometimes the stats don’t lie and (we take into account) what a player meant when they came in,” Finkel said. “So when you get to brass tacks, the back of their baseball card, for that one in particular, it was really Sheets and Higuera who were the two we were after."
Half a dozen people or more were involved in any selections, Finkel said, producing many obvious picks but also considerable discussion regarding others.
It’s important to note, these aren’t necessarily the greatest teams, they’re lineups of “legendary” players from each organization, and they’re chosen by people involved in the trading card business.
The New York Yankees, with their 27 World Series championships and 118year history, would naturally have more stars than, say, the Tampa Bay Rays, who’ve been to the playoffs three times in their 20 years. The discussions held regarding those two teams will be markedly different. And each team has a “utility” selection to accommodate a second legend when there’s a logjam at one position.
The general factors in the selection process, according to Finkel, were:
❚ A player’s meaning to the organization.
❚ Skills and recognition. Gold Gloves and Silver Slugger awards, MVPs and all-star appearances count.
❚ National star power. Robin Yount was exclusively a Brewer and Paul Molitor primarily a Brewer, but their Hall of Fame careers transcended Milwaukee.
❚ And, a bit of a wild card that came into play with some players but not all, what they and their baseball card meant to the hobby.
“Prince Fielder, the ’06 Topps card, for him coming out, there were all those stories of he’s a 12-year-old hitting home runs at Yankee Stadium with his dad … that first card meant something because we were kind of waiting for him for, like, eight years to get to major-league baseball,” Finkel said. “So to me, that was one that really stood out.”
For the sake of transparency, Finkel is a diehard Boston Red Sox fan who uses an autographed 1987 Mike Greenwell card as a bookmark.
The Beckett / Topps all-time legendary Brewers lineup is:
SP Ben Sheets
RP Rollie Fingers
C B.J. Surhoff
1B Cecil Cooper
2B Jim Gantner
3B Paul Molitor
SS Robin Yount
LF Ryan Braun
CF Gorman Thomas
RF Corey Hart
UTIL Prince Fielder
“We had a long talk about (Jonathan) Lucroy or Surhoff,” Finkel said. “B.J. Surhoff came up at a great time in collecting, the card we wanted to use was great, but there was a case to be made that Lucroy had a stronger arm, maybe better allaround.”
So now the floor is open. It's your turn to debate.