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Well, the experiment is over. A. J. Hinch has been relieved of his managerial duties in Arizona. A move that made sense to very few people at the time has been reversed.

Topps started putting Olympics cards in their sets in 1985. These were cards for the players on the American team in the Olympics. That 1985 set includes the first cards for future major-leaguers including Mark McGwire, Cory Snyder, and Oddibe McDowell. They next included them in the 1988 Topps Traded set to cover the players from Team USE in the 1988 summer Olympics. That set included rookie cards for Jim Abbott, Robin Ventura, Mickey Morandini, Charles Nagy, and Andy Benes.

I'm not entirely sure what these 1993 cards represent. If they were players from the 1992 Olympic team, I'm not sure why they weren't part of the regular 1993 set, plus Hinch was not on the 1992 Olympic team. Anyway, within the 1993 Topps Traded Team USA cards are rookie issues for Carlton Loewer, Todd Helton, Dustin Hermanson, Todd Walker, Danny Graves, and Paul Wilson.

The 1993 Topps design is nice. I believe this was the first regular-issue Topps set that included photos on the back (this was true for both the regular 1993 Topps set and the 1993 Topps Traded set.) It makes for a nice card with a big photo on the front, small headshot on the back, nice colors and basic design, and the traditional stats and bio. A nice, traditional set.

Please leave a comment below with a caption for the photo above, telling us what Hinch was thinking as this photo was taken.

Hinch did not have a particularly notable major-league career as either a player or manager.

Let's take a look at some of his career achievements, such as they are:

• He had 26 go-ahead plate appearances, although only one of them came in the 7th inning or later. That was in this game when his 7th-inning single scored Dave Magadan to break a 1-1 tie.
• He homered off 31 different pitchers, but just one of them, Kelvim Escobar, gave up more than 1 to Hinch.
• The most RBI he had in a game was 4, twice:

  Rk	Date	Tm	Opp	Rslt	PA	AB	R	H	2B	3B	HR	RBI	BB	SO	WPA	RE24	aLI	BOP	Pos. Summary
  1	2002-05-14	KCR	MIN	W 8-1	4	4	2	2	0	0	1	4	0	0	0.085	1.938	.780	8	C
  2	1999-08-14	OAK	TOR	W 13-5	5	5	1	1	0	0	1	4	0	0	0.093	0.949	.236	9	C

  Provided by

Baseball-Reference.com: View Play Index Tool Used
Generated 7/2/2010.

I don't have too much else to say about Hinch, except this: I think it's a shame that he became a manager so early in his career. He would have been well-served to manage in the minors for a while. He was a victim of a poorly-run Diamondbacks organization (the same one that just fired a GM with no previous head-GM experience and more than 5 years remaining on his contract.) I am afraid that we might never see Hinch on the field again--a fate much worse than he deserves.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 3rd, 2010 at 7:00 am and is filed under Card of the Week. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.