Card of the Week: 1987 Donruss #9 Fred Lynn Diamond King
Posted by Andy on April 10, 2010
Oh, so very much to say about this card and the 1987 Donruss set. Let's talk about the set first and the specific card I chose second.
For all three major baseball card manufacturers active at the time (Topps, Fleer, and Donruss) 1987 was a big year due to the many excellent rookies that came out of the set. Among many others, the 1987 Donruss set has the first regular-issue Donruss cards for Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro, Greg Maddux, Bo Jackson, Kevin Brown, Barry Larkin, Will Clark, David Cone, Wally Joyner, Bobby Bonilla, Ruben Sierra, Jamie Moyer, Randy Myers, Terry Steinbach, Kevin Mitchell, Mike Greenwell, and many others. That's quite a few HOF-caliber players, All-Stars, Rookies of the Year, Cy Young winners, etc.
The set itself was pretty good, fairly on par with the Donruss sets of 1984 and 1985. Among the negatives, however, were:
- As you can see from the example card above, the design lent itself to "showing off" miscut cards. The little baseball designs on either side made it quite obvious when a card had poor left-to-right centering.
- The black border all around, again, showed off any dings or chips
- Most of the photos were either headshots or closely-cropped action shots. There weren't very many true action shots, which Topps still did the best with at this time.
Many people wouldn't say the first two bullet points above were marks against the set. In fact, it meant that cards were easier to inspect and made obtaining high-quality examples more of a challenge. This (plus the fact that the set was produced in smaller quantities) has always been reflected in the pricing, as 1987 Donruss cards have always been more valuable than Topps cards of the same year and player.
I'll talk more about the specific card above after a brief interlude to discuss stats.
As has been well-documented, 1987 was a strange year in baseball as home runs flew out at a record pace. Many people have maintained that the baseball was different this year but MLB denied it. Something was definitely going on, though.
Check out the table below showing seasons with the most players with 20+ homers but no more than 60 RBI.
| Rk | Year | #Matching | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2009 | 7 | Jay Bruce / Chris Davis / Jonny Gomes / Garrett Jones / Mike Napoli / Carlos Quentin / Alfonso Soriano |
| 2 | 1987 | 7 | Steve Balboni / Barry Bonds / Ellis Burks / Nick Esasky / Bo Jackson / Fred Lynn / Fred McGriff |
| 3 | 2008 | 6 | Jay Bruce / Eric Hinske / Mike Napoli / Kelly Shoppach / Marcus Thames / Ty Wigginton |
| 4 | 2006 | 5 | Chris Duncan / Morgan Ensberg / Jonny Gomes / David Ross / Marcus Thames |
| 5 | 2005 | 4 | Rod Barajas / Casey Blake / Jonny Gomes / Reggie Sanders |
| 6 | 2003 | 4 | Adam Dunn / Morgan Ensberg / Alex Gonzalez / Matt Stairs |
| 7 | 2000 | 4 | Darrin Fletcher / Charles Johnson / David Justice / Daryle Ward |
| 8 | 1999 | 4 | Russ Davis / Glenallen Hill / Todd Hundley / Ruben Rivera |
| 9 | 1979 | 4 | Dwight Evans / Dale Murphy / Jim Spencer / Champ Summers |
| 10 | 1973 | 4 | Oscar Gamble / Dave Kingman / Rick Monday / Jim Wynn |
| 11 | 1966 | 4 | Jimmie Hall / Mickey Mantle / Dick McAuliffe / Art Shamsky |
| 12 | 1961 | 4 | Earl Averill / Steve Bilko / Johnny Blanchard / Wally Post |
The Steroid Era, when everybody and his grandma has been hitting homers, is well-represented. But then there's 1987 stuck right in at the top. There's really no good explanation for this other than the theory about the baseballs changing for that one season. In 1988, MLB changed the balk rule so as to focus attention away from HRs going back to normal and onto something completely opposite.
Take a quick look at the back of the card below and read the first sentence. Don't you just love grammatical errors on baseball cards? Of course, they should have just used the correct adverb form and said there's just one way Lynn plays baseball: hardly. After 1985 the guy never appeared in as many as 120 games per season.
The Diamond King was a long-standing tradition for Donruss. They first started it in their second set in 1982. The overall style remained very similar for many year, which is nice. Diamond Kings continued into the 1990s and 2000s although the style did eventually change a little. They were always portraits of players, which I think was a very nice addition to the sets. Many of the issues (especially the 1980s ones) included both a portrait and a mini action shot, such as a mid-swing Lynn as seen above.
Some of the Diamond Kings left a little to be desired. Sometimes the portraits were not very good and sometimes the choices were just odd. It was a little like the All-Star game in that each selection process required one player from every team. So sometimes bad teams with no really good players still got a guy represented in the Diamond King set. I'd like to write a separate article about that and I'll post it here sometime later.
Lynn was a pretty good choice, however, for the 1987 set based on his 1986 performance. The 1986 Orioles had been a last-place team and the only really good offensive players were Eddie Murray, Cal Ripken, Larry Sheets, and Lynn, who led the team in OPS+ at 137. He tacked on a few more decent years before retiring in 1990. I'm glad he got this Diamond King honor.
April 10th, 2010 at 11:40 am
Lynn was a great player, and I think it's unfortunate he didn't get a much longer look on the Hall of Fame ballot.
April 10th, 2010 at 12:20 pm
Take a quick look at the back of the card below and read the first sentence. ["Fred Lynn plays baseball one way — hard."] Don't you just love grammatical errors on baseball cards?
You're going to have to help me out here. Where's the grammatical error?
April 10th, 2010 at 1:54 pm
It's commonly accepted, but I believe wrong, to use 'hard' in the sense that it's used there.
April 10th, 2010 at 2:39 pm
OK, I think I get it about the grammatical "error." Fred Lynn played baseball cheerfully, not cheerful. Fred Lynn played baseball happily, not happy. Fred Lynn played baseball hardly, not hard. The obvious meaning is that Fred Lynn played baseball while he was cheerful. Fred Lynn played baseball while he was happy. Ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...........
April 10th, 2010 at 4:21 pm
This may be a record, but I'm not sure how to verify, but Lynn had 4 straight seasons of 23 HR. I know the Big Donkey Dunn came close last year, after having four straight 40 HR seasons.
Lynn preceded the four 23 HR seasons with a 21 and 22 HR the previous 2 years, and followed with a 25. Pretty consistent.
About the 1987 season being a strange "HR" year, BrooK Jacoby became the first player ever to amass 30 HR a .300 BA with fewer than 70 RBIs until Hanley Ramirez did so in 2008.
April 10th, 2010 at 7:07 pm
I seem to remember that in 1987, home runs were flying out at a much faster clip in the first half of the season. Apparently, after the All-Star break, they let some of the "rabbit" out of the ball. Maybe some cork flew out of the bat, as well. That may have been the year that Whitey Herzog was suspicious of Howard Johnson's slugging ability.
April 10th, 2010 at 7:07 pm
I thought you were just making a joke about his durability.
April 10th, 2010 at 8:54 pm
Andy, it's grammatically correct to say, "Fred Lynn plays baseball hard." In that sentence "hard" is functioning as a special kind of adverb, a "flat" adverb, which is an adverb that does not add -ly but retains the same form as a related adjective. See this link for some further explanation of flat adverbs.
Some of the more common flat adverbs include "deep," "direct," "easy," "flat," "free," "full," "hard," "high," "just," "last," "late," "near," "pretty," "real," "rough," "sharp," "short," "strong," "sure," and "wide." They occur in many, many expressions that are not only commonly accepted but grammatically legitimate.
One of the interesting things about flat adverbs is that many of them have different meanings if the -ly ending is added to them. Hence the familiar "Workin' hard, or hardly workin'?" Similarly, a quarterback looks deep, whereas an analyst (say) looks deeply. Baseball has tons of expressions that use flat adverbs — "hit a fly ball deep to center," "worked him high and tight," "throwing free and easy," "hit it square," "knocked him flat," "rallied late," and so on. (The word "shortstop" is based on the expression "to stop [the ball] short.") Many of these expressions have a colloquial feel to them, but there's nothing defective about them from a grammatical standpoint. In fact, by economizing on syllables, they add vigor to the game description ... or to whatever else is being written or spoken about.
And, like you, I'm glad Fred Lynn was honored with a Diamond Kings card.
April 10th, 2010 at 10:22 pm
Fred Lynn, born on Feb. 3, 1952, was the great hope of those of us born in 1952 to get one of us in the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame. There were times when, based on their reported ages at some points in time, I thought that Lynn's Boston teammate, Jim Rice (born on March 8, 1953), and one of their Yankee nemeses, Rich "Goose" Gossage (born on July 5, 1951) were 1952 babies, but alas, they weren't.
I wonder if it's too late for Jim Riggleman, born November 9, 1952, to turn things around in his managerial career to have a Hall of Fame chance. Or maybe we can hope for Ron Washington, born April 29, 1952, who hasn't had as many bad years from which to recover, to be the one.
April 10th, 2010 at 11:25 pm
There were some absolutely terrible players that were Diamond Kings. The one that really stands out in my mind was Joe Magrane from the 1990 set. Although, the selections weren't as bad as the MVP subset that was in the 1991 Donruss set (Candy Maldonado?? Really??).
Lynn strikes me as someone that would have benefited had the advanced stats been around during his hall of fame candidacy. I don't think he would have gotten in regardless, but I think he would have gotten a longer look.
April 11th, 2010 at 2:38 am
As it turned out, HoJo was a legit slugger. But Dale Sveum, Wade Boggs, Wally Joyner et al were not. (Actually, Joyner wasn't pointed out as a fluke at the time. He'd had a good rookie season in '86, hitting 22 HR, and bouncing up to 34 in '87 didn't seem so odd -- just a good young player getting better, and maybe with a little juiced-ball bounce. But he never again hit more than 21 after that, averaging just 13 per 600 PA, so in retrospect it was more an artifact of the strange '87 season than we realized.)
April 11th, 2010 at 6:04 am
KT: Thanks for that detailed explanation. I have to admit that the use of such adverbs in sports has always bothered me...especially ones like 'looking deep'. I think I have also been sensitized by the number of mistakes in children's books including tons in Dr. Seuss such as 'he went past fast!'. I suspect this is one of those language things that started off being incorrect but became so commonly used that it was eventually adopted as being correct, such as using the word 'loan' as a verb, which was officially changed roughly 10 years ago.
April 11th, 2010 at 11:24 am
I see nothing wrong with verbing nouns.
April 11th, 2010 at 7:51 pm
Wow, 1952 was sure a piss-poor birth year for major leaguers. Only 3 guys with 6000 PA (Lynn, Roy Smalley, and Darrell Porter), and on the pitching side no careers better than Mike Krukow, Joaquin Andujar, and John Denny. By contrast, the previous year - my year - gave us 4 players with 10000 PA, headed by Dave Winfield. On the pitching side, Goose Gossage is in the Hall, and Bert Blyleven will be.
Ken Boyer had 4 straight years of 24 home runs, 1961 to 1964.
And verbing nouns weirds language.