Around The Card Room, Take 10

I got a new bobblehead this past weekend that I was really excited to own. 

It did not come with a bat, but the Ebay seller made it right and my bobblehead bat arrived in the mail this afternoon. 

The bat is an important part of this bobblehead.  

Here is the new bobble.  

The four baseballs on the bat are four home runs. 

All four home runs happened in a single game. 

If you are not familiar with Mark Whiten, let me show you three minutes of video from Mark Whiten's best game ever, which included four home runs against the Cincinnati Reds in September of 1993. He also drove in twelve runs tying Jim Bottomley with the National League record.  

Amazing, especially for Whiten. He was a great defensive player with an incredible throwing arm, but not really known for his offense outside of this single game.  

Here is the side view.  

Here is the back with the date of the four home run game stamped on the back of the bobble.  

Last 90 degree turn. 

Great bobble that is going to find a permanant home on a shelf in my baseball card room. These pictures are actually on top of a bookcase. We've got a Mackenzie Gore autograph in the background, Sophie Cunningham, and Felix Hernandez. Mark needs more Cardinals around.  

This seems like a good spot.

This seems like a good spot.  Let me put his bat back and Mark will be home.  

I Love The 1990 Cardinals Part 29 - Mark Whiten

The title of the post says that I am writing about Mark Whiten.  If you watched baseball during the 1990s, Mark Whiten's entire legacy is remembered by one game against the Reds in 1993.  He hit four home runs, drove in 12 runs, and earned the nickname "Hard Hittin Mark Whiten".  Let's just get this out of the way......

The Cardinals during the first half of the 1990s were able to bring two pretty good outfield prospects, in the persons of Bernard Gilkey and Ray Lankford, up from the Minors to replace the Vince Coleman and Willie McGee.  The pair were pretty exciting to watch and were branded as the future of the franchise.  

However, the team did not have a long-term third outfielder.  The team had Felix Jose for a few years, he was traded to the Cardinals from the A's for Willie McGee, but he was not a very consistent player.  Jose also had some unique antics, conversations with the Gatorade come to mind.  The Cardinals shipped Felix to the Royals prior to the 1993 in exchange for Gregg Jefferies, and then picked up Mark Whiten from Cleveland for Mark Clark.  

Whiten spent two seasons with the Cardinals.  If you look at his back of the baseball card stats from 1993 you could easily get the impression that the guy was a good hitter.  That season he hit 25 home runs, drove in 99 runs, stole 15 bases, and scored more than 80 runs.  Not bad numbers considering the early part of the 1990s were not the most talented Cardinals teams.  

In 1994, Whiten hit some more.  If you look at his splits though, month to month, he was rather streaky and inconsistent, which is sort of how I remember him.  Sure, he could get into one every once in awhile, but ask any Cardinals fan from the 1990s about him, and once they get past the four home run game they will probably tell you all about his defense.  More specifically, he limited base runners to one base at a time.  There were not a lot of first to third base runners on balls hit to right field the two years he was on the Cardinals.  

A pair of former Pirates coaches and a former Cardinals manager spent time raving about Mark Whiten's throwing arm back in a 1994 Los Angeles Times article about the former right fielder.  Two of them compared his arm to a certain strong armed outfielder.  

Pirates coach Rich Donnelly:

"We were in St. Petersburg in spring training, and he went into the corner for a ball and made a 300-foot throw, no hops, and nailed Carlos Garcia at third.  He eggs you on. He'll lope after a ball to see if he can get you to run, picks it up . . . and bam, you're dead."

Another Pirates coach in the mid 1990s, Tommy Sandt, said:

"If (Roberto) Clemente had a better arm than his, I'd like to have seen it. I mean, how good can you throw it?"

and former Cardinals manager Red Schoendienst, who worked as a part-time coach with the Cardinals throughout the 1990s, agreed with Sandt's evaluation of Whiten's throwing arm:  

"As far as arm strength goes . . . it's a tough call between Clemente and Whiten."

Onto the baseball cards.  

Since I got the 4 home run game out of the way at the top of the post, mentioned it again somewhere under the first baseball card, I will visit the topic once more with the first of my favorite Whiten Cardinals cards.  

Whiten was on the Red Sox during the 1995 season, but Upper Deck gave him a Cardinals card in their Collectors Choice set.  If you weren't around for the 1990s, it was the company's inexpensive card brand, generally sold at retail stores.  Surprisingly, Whiten does not have a ton of cards that celebrate his four home run game against the Reds.  

The highlight type cards in this Collector's Choice set celebrated the big moments and achievements from the first half of the decade, which included Whiten's 4 home run game.  Did Topps ever make a highlight card for Whiten?  Can't remember every seeing one, but I know that as soon as I typed that and hit publish, I would probably be proven wrong.  

Next.  

There are dozens of non-descript Mark Whiten cards from the mid 1990s.  Many of them do little to distinguish themselves from the rest.  Whiten's one well known feat was not enough to push him into many of the nice premium products, but Topps did put him into the 1994 Finest set.  While he was not an All-Star, more like the third best outfielder on the team, he was still a better option for Topps than Todd Zeile or Luis Alicea.  

Not into the Christmas look either, but the green border actually looks good on this card with the red border, and the red on Whiten's Cardinals uniform.  

Last one.  

Finally a card with a picture of Mark Whiten playing defense.  The best part of this card is the fact that it not only shows Whiten making a nice catch in front of an outfield wall, but flip the card over to the back and.....

we've got some base runner who is about to get thrown out.  I specifically tried to find a card of Whiten playing in the field, it took awhile to find, should have just gone straight to the Upper Deck cards.  I knew I was going to find one there.  

I leave you some homework:

Repeat after me: Mark Whiten had a great arm.  One of the best ever.  

The next time some baseball fan mentions the fact that he hit four home runs in a game, cut them off, and start talking about him holding base runners to single bases.  

A song from 1995 on my IPod, it's not a Kurt Cobain cover, other way around....

A Venerable Old Card Part 45

I have spent a lot of time on late 1980s and early 1990s cards recently.  I have a few upcoming posts with even more cards from this era coming up over the next week or two.  So much fun to look through and find cool players from some of the different sets from this era.  This week my baseball card sorting time was partially spent flipping through some 1991 Fleer Ultra cards.

Ultra was one of those "premium" sets from that era, so there were many cards that were fun to look at, but one card stood out to me.  Not a Cardinal at the time, but shortly after this card was made Mark Whiten earned a permanent spot in Cardinals folklore.

The Ultra set featured his rookie card with the Blue Jays......

It's a little weird to see Mark on the Jays since he really only spent a pair of partial seasons with the team before he was traded to the Indians.  My first memories of Whiten came with the Indians in the early 1990s.  The Tribe had an outfield of Whiten, Kenny Lofton, and Albert Belle.  Pretty impressive trio of young players.  The Indians ended up flipping him around to the Cardinals for pitcher Mark Clark.

The four home run game was one of the few bright spots for the early 1990s Cardinals.  Whiten is still remembered far and wide by Cardinals fans for this one single game.  The rest of his time in St. Louis was spent looking for consistent performance on offense.  Whiten was a defensive whiz which kept him in the starting in the starting lineup for the Cardinals and kept him around in the league after the Birds shipped him off to the Red Sox where he became a fourth outfielder.  

One of the "premium" features of the Fleer Ultra cards was the picture set up on the back of the card....

The picture of Whiten on the back of the card was very typical of what Whiten looked like at the plate.  Standing flat footed, not very much movement, but he somehow seemed to generate a lot of power when he made contact.  

Great card, cool player, good memories.  More 1990s cards later this week.  

Happy Mark Whiten Day!

The Cardinals had some lean years in the early and mid 90s.  The end of the Whiteyball era in St. Louis meant no more teams built on disrupting speed and defense.  The ownership of the team passed on from Gussie Busch to his son who decided to run the team on the cheap.  Like with any rebuilding process in baseball, the Cardinals went young and brought up young players like Ray Lankford, Bernard Gilkey, Brian Jordan, Todd Zeile, Geronimo Pena, and the list could go on....

Each young player naturally had some faults that irritated a Cardinals fan base that was accustomed to winning teams.... Todd Zeile always took the first pitch and then played with his batting gloves, Ray Lankford and Brian Jordan struck out frequently, Geronimo Pena was always hurt.

Worse than the frustration with the young players was the ownerships refusal to spend any money to fill holes on the roster.  For example, in 1993 the Cardinals were within striking distance of the first place Phillies, but the team decided the best route to improve the team was to trade for Todd Burns.  Burns was not a good relief pitcher with the Rangers that season, but sported an ERA over 6 down the stretch for the Cardinals.  Fans heaped blame on manager Joe Torre, but in retrospect, the ownership of the team was squarely responsible.

Another one of the Cardinals budget cutting maneuvers during the 1993 season was to trade pitching prospect Mark Clark to the Cleveland Indians for outfielder Mark Whiten.  The Cardinals had gotten inconsistent play out of the young outfielders, so naturally the owners added another young and inconsistent player (read cheap) to the mix.

Whiten had some raw power in his bat, but he was really a defensive whiz in the outfield.  Nobody took an extra base on Whiten.  Nobody.  He is probably one of the top 5 outfield arms I have ever seen in person along with Rick Ankiel, Vladimir Guerrero, Jose Guillen, and Larry Walker.  Whiten had a pretty good first year as a Cardinals posting 25 home runs and 99 RBIs.  A big chunk of that damage came in one night in Cincinnati twenty-one years ago.......

It was a pretty incredible feat at the time.  I realize a few players pulled this off during the steroid era, but at the time Whiten hit his four runs, he was just the 12th players to reach that plateau in a single game, and the first since Bob Horner in 1986.  The moment made Whiten a bit of a cult hero amongst Cardinals fans.  Fan favorite might be too far with Whiten, but definitely beloved.  

The Cardinals traded him to the Red Sox after the 1994 season for St. Louis native, Scott Cooper, hoping to fill the void the team had at third base.  Whiten's career floundered after St. Louis and he became a fourth outfielder bouncing around the league and up and down between the minors.  As a fan I ran into Whiten several times after his Cardinals years and always wished him well.  I actually got to see him playing for the Buffalo Bisons in 2000, against the Ottawa Lynx, after he had been demoted by the Indians for the final time.  He had a huge swing, a bad attitude, and a cannon of an arm.