1987 Fleer #231 Cliff Johnson

1987 Fleer card number 231, Cliff Johnson. He looks like a friendly walrus, doesn't he?

The back of Cliff Johnson's 1987 Fleer card. He's classified as a "power hitter," obviously the best of the four classifications.

I have another blog that I very rarely update, Baseball Cards of the 1970’s and 1980’s. I’ve only posted a handful of articles on it, and I’ve decided to post my occasional baseball card-themed updates to this page as well, to improve their visibility. Here are my thoughts about the 1987 Fleer card of Cliff Johnson. 

Bill James wrote of Cliff Johnson in the 2001 edition of his Historical Baseball Abstract that if someone would have made Johnson a DH/first baseman from the very beginning of his career, he would have hit 500 home runs. That might be stretching it, but James’ estimation says something about Johnson’s prodigious power. 

The first Cliff Johnson baseball card I remember getting was his 1975 Topps card. Unbeknownst to me, it was his rookie card. I found it, as I found so many of the baseball cards from my childhood, rooting through the 1970’s commons at Shinder’s. If you didn’t grow up in the Twin Cities, let me explain Shinder’s to you. It was a store that sold newspapers, magazines, comic books, baseball cards, and other collectibles. (And they had an “adult” section in the back of the store!) Shinder’s had several locations throughout the Twin Cities, but the one I frequented most was the Richfield location off of 70^th Street and France Avenue. (Technically off of Hazelton Road, but 70^th was the other cross street.) I spent many, many hours there as a youngster in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. My Dad could at least buy tobacco for his pipe there, but I’m pretty sure it drove my Mom batty to wait as I examined the huge stack of cards and tried to remember if I already had a 1977 Bob Forsch or not. 

I liked the bright colors of the 1975 Topps set, and I was always partial to crazy uniforms, which means there are a fair amount of Houston Astros cards from the 1970’s and 1980’s in my collection. So, I purchased Cliff Johnson’s 1975 card, for 10 cents or however much it was, and took it home with me. Eventually I wanted to transfer Cliff’s card from the plastic sleeve it was in to a sleeve in a binder. Shinder’s put tape over the top of the sleeves their cards came in, which I would cut off with a scissors. Usually no problem, but there wasn’t much room in this sleeve between the top of the card and the tape, so I tried to cut the side of the sleeve. Big mistake. I ended up trimming the side of Cliff’s card pretty badly. (I’m happy I didn’t know it was his rookie card at the time!) Oops. 

So that was my introduction to Cliff Johnson, and he gradually became a familiar presence to me in the commons box at Shinder’s. Johnson also played just long enough to make it into all three of the 1987 baseball card sets. As anyone who grew up in the 1980’s will tell you, 1987 was the year that baseball cards achieved perfection, with the iconic Topps woodgrains, the awesome blue Fleers, and the Donruss that had baseballs in the middle of the card borders. (I’m being perhaps a little sarcastic about the perfection of 1987 baseball cards, but for a lot of folks in my generation, these sets were the ones that really started us on our collecting adventures.) 

Johnson’s 1987 Fleer card is a pretty great one. I really enjoy the 1980’s cards where you get a triple dose of the team logo-on the hat, the jersey, and the card itself. I love that Blue Jays logo, and I’m happy they’ve gone back to a very similar variation of it, after ditching it for much of the decade of the 2000’s. It’s just a classic, perfect logo. It tells you all the information you need to know: there’s a Blue Jay, they play baseball, and the maple leaf tells you they’re Canadian. 

Cliff Johnson was one of those players who took a long time to find his way in baseball. It wasn’t his fault; it was more like teams couldn’t figure out what to do with him. Johnson only exceeded 400 plate appearances in four of his seasons in the majors, and the first time wasn’t until 1980, his age 32 season. He still put up four seasons of 20+ home runs and ended up with 196 longballs for his career.

When Johnson was with the New York Yankees in 1979, he famously got into a locker room fight with closer Goose Gossage. Gossage ended up with a sprained thumb and missed almost three months of the season. Not surprisingly, Johnson was traded to the Cleveland Indians before Gossage came back from his injury. 

The 1987 Fleers offered some interesting information on the back of the cards. Hitters were classified as “dead pull hitters,” whatever that was, “singles hitters,” “spray hitters,” which we all knew was just another term for “singles hitters,” and “power hitters.” Cliff Johnson was a power hitter. You had to respect that, since power hitter was clearly the best of the four categories Fleer had delineated. With his mustache and grin on this card, Johnson looked like a friendly walrus. On the cards where he’s not smiling, he looks like a grumpy walrus, and not someone you’d like to get into a locker room tussle with. He’s also listed as 6’4” on his baseball cards, another good reason to stay away from the walrus if he looks grumpy. 

By the time the 1987 baseball cards were released, Cliff Johnson’s career had come to an end. He was granted free agency after the 1986 season ended, but no one signed him. I wonder if he might have been a victim of the collusion scandal of the mid 1980’s that saw owners conspiring to keep free agent signings to a minimum. Of course, it might have simply been that Johnson was a 39-year-old DH/pinch hitter, and no one was interested in signing him for 1987. As a power hitter who walked frequently, Cliff Johnson would fit well in baseball in 2019. Hopefully teams now would know where to play him.

Mint Condition, by Dave Jamieson

It's the baseball off-season, so I thought reading a book about baseball would be the best way to keep the spirit of baseball alive during the gloomy winter months. "Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession," by Dave Jamieson, chronicles the history of baseball trading cards, from their introduction in the 1870's and 1880's to the present day. Confession: I love baseball cards. I collected them voraciously in my childhood, and I still make the occasional purchase online or at a card show. Jamieson is only a couple of years older than I am, so his memories of the baseball card boom of the 1980's and the collapse of the baseball card market in the 1990's are my childhood memories as well. And Jamieson gets extra points because his all-time favorite baseball card set is the 1987 Topps set, which is my all-time favorite set as well. (You can see an example of the 1987 Topps set above.)

But onto the book itself. Jamieson dug deeply into the rich history of baseball cards, and I learned a lot from this book. The first time baseball cards created a sensation among young boys was in the 1880's, when cigarette companies inserted cards into their packs of cigarettes. This had the dual effect of both promoting brand loyalty to collect more cards, and also of making these young boys eager smokers. Win-win for the cigarette manufacturers. According to Jamieson, the popularity of the baseball trading cards helped establish cigarettes as a tobacco product at a time when they were seen as hopelessly lower-class. (People with status smoked cigars or pipes.)

Back in the olden days, baseball cards were not issued every year, and the next time they make a major reappearance is around 1905-1915. These cards were again mostly made by cigarette companies, and they included the most famous baseball card of all time, the 1909 T206 Honus Wagner. The Wagner card is noteworthy not only because Wagner was one of the greatest players of his era, but also because it was produced in very limited quantities. Sources vary as to whether Wagner objected to the card because he did not want to be associated with a tobacco product, or if he was angry because the company was using his image without his permission. Whatever the reason, the Wagner T206 is very scarce, and an example of it in good condition has sold for more than $2 million at auction, making it the single most expensive baseball card ever.

After around 1915 tobacco companies stopped issuing baseball cards, presumably because their product was selling so well that they saw no need to include giveaways like trading cards. There was a lull in the baseball card market until 1933, when Goudey, a gum company, started producing baseball cards again. Goudey would include 1 card as an enticement to purchase a stick of gum for 1 penny. The Goudey cards were very successful, and a number of other gum companies, notably Bowman, jumped on the baseball card bandwagon. By the late 1940's, Bowman had established itself as the leading baseball card maker. But within a decade the Topps gum company, despite coming late to the baseball card party, would have a virtual monopoly on baseball card production. How exactly did this happen? Jamieson is able to shed some light on it, but I would have liked more detail on the battle between Topps and Bowman. Topps issued it's first real set of baseball cards in 1952, and in 1956 Bowman sold their baseball card rights to Topps. How did Topps bring down Bowman in just 4 years? Well, a lot of the credit goes to Sy Berger and Woody Gelman, who basically created the 1952 Topps cards, and in doing so, created the prototype for the modern baseball card. Berger and Gelman chose the dimensions that nearly all baseball cards would use from that point on, and they decided to include statistics on the back of the card. That was huge. Bowman's cards had narrative sentences on the back, which might incorporate some stats. It would usually read something like this: "Zernial batted .262 and slugged 29 homers while patrolling the outfield last season. The A's have high hopes for this young slugger in the years to come!" But Topps had a full row of all the most important stats from the previous season, hits, runs, RBIs, home runs, batting average, and they also had the player's career totals. And this was at a time when these stats were not readily available to youngsters. There were not comprehensive books of baseball statistics, so the newspaper and baseball cards were how kids knew what their favorite players had done. And so, despite making some beautiful cards, like their classic 1955 "television" design, Bowman sold out to Topps.

It's clear from "Mint Condition" that Topps didn't really want Jamieson digging too deeply into their closet, as Berger was the only former Topps employee he was able to interview. And there are some skeletons in Topps's closet, as they intimidated other companies from issuing baseball cards and basically had a 25-year monopoly, from 1956 until 1981. Topps pressured young prospects to sign exclusive baseball card contracts with them, meaning that other companies couldn't even get their foot in the door. Topps was the only game in town. And this led to some sloppiness on Topps's part. Like using the same photos for a player year after year. (Claude Osteen's 1963 and 1964 cards use the exact same photo, it's just cropped differently.) Or not bothering to obtain a photo of a player in his new uniform after he was traded. Which led to numerous cards of players without hats on, or players whose uniforms have been airbrushed almost beyond recognition. But Topps still changed their cards during this period. For example, beginning in 1971 photos from actual games were used on cards, which lent an excitement to some of the cards.

Eventually, the Topps monopoly began to crumble, as Marvin Miller, the new head of the player's union, took a much more aggressive stance against Topps in the late 1960's, arguing that they were getting rich off of baseball cards and barely compensating the players. (Miller was right, Topps paid most players $125 per year for use of their image.) Topps eventually let the player's union get a slice of the pie from baseball card sales. And Fleer, a rival candy company, launched a lawsuit alleging that Topps was running a monopoly. Eventually, Fleer was successful in their legal action, which opened the door for competing card companies to issue 1981 baseball card sets. Fleer and Donruss both issued their inaugural sets in 1981, and both were low-quality compared with Topps. Photos were blurry and errors were plentiful as the cards were rushed into production. However, despite Topps' fear that the market was not large enough to support two card companies, let alone three, baseball card sales jumped. Legal action by Topps meant that Fleer and Donruss could not package their cards with chewing gum, so Fleer included team stickers as a bonus, and Donruss included puzzle pieces for a puzzle of an all-time baseball great. (I never put the puzzle pieces together. Sorry Donruss! But at least the puzzle pieces didn't stick to the cards the way the gum did. My Dad once broke a crown on a stale piece of Topps gum.) An irony of the baseball card business is that the companies that produced the cards were actually candy companies, and in the beginning, it was supposed to be the gum that sold the cards, not the other way around. But at some point, the baseball cards became much more desirable than the gum.

As the 80's went on, Fleer and Donruss both greatly improved their quality, and the baseball card boom continued. I would have liked to know more about how Topps responded to Fleer and Donruss entering the market. Did Topps do anything special to make their cards better? (Looking back at their 80's sets, it really doesn't seem like they did.) The only things I can think of are the 1982 Topps "In Action" cards, and that the 1983 Topps set features two player photos on the front. Jamieson focuses on the 1989 entry of Upper Deck into the baseball card market, which proved that fans were willing to pay more money for a higher quality card. As the card market peaked in the early 1990's, all of the companies were overproducing cards at a staggering rate, and there were simply too many sets on the market. The 1994-95 baseball strike didn't help sell baseball cards, and that was around the time that I really stopped seriously collecting new cards.

As the baseball card market tanked, so too did the companies. Fleer was bought out by Upper Deck, and Donruss lost their license from MLB in 2006. For the 2010 season, the only company authorized by MLB to produce baseball cards was Topps. So we're back where we started, with a Topps monopoly.

Jamieson writes that baseball cards have become much more of a business than they used to be, and he doesn't think this is a good development. I definitely agree with him. Sure, there's joy in finding out that you have a card that's worth a lot of money, but I also take joy in common cards that aren't worth anything. It might be just a player in a crazy uniform, like the Astros' "rainbow" uniforms of the 70's and 80's, or it might be a fond memory of a journeyman outfielder like Tom Paciorek, but those memories take me back to my childhood. I still enjoy my baseball cards, and I'm very happy that I still do.