If looks could strike you out… then the piercing look in Nolan Ryan’s eyes here would certainly do it. Steve McCatty looks moody, a bit sad, & deep in thought. Their caps spell “Has”.

Both hurlers faced fierce competition for the ERA titles in 1981. Seriously, just look at the back of this card. Every single pitcher that qualified for the top 10 in each league, were all below 3.00. That hasn’t happened again in the 30 years since.

Future Hall of Famer Nolan Ryan led the way among them all, with a super slim 1.69 ERA, which still stands as the 2nd best post-1968 ERA. This was the first time Nolan led the league in the category.

Now wait you say – “the Astrodome was an extremely good park for pitchers!” and you’d be right. It was especially good to Nolan in the strike-shortened 1981 season, helpin’ him to home ERA of just 1.11. Despite that though, he still had an awesome 2.14 ERA on the road, so he still would’ve won the NL ERA title if he pitched only on the road.

Yeah, that’s how hot he was.

So at first, Baltimore’s Sammy Stewart won the title. A couple days later, it was still being reported that McCatty came in 2nd. After a review of the rules, the Scoring Committee then stripped Sammy and gave the title to Steve because the rule actually removed part of an inning from Sammy and added part of an inning to Steve.

As if that wasn’t insane enough, it makes the situation crazier when you find out that a similar “by the rule” situation happened twice before, decades earlier. What happened then? Well they did the smart thing — “they ignored the rule, and did what common sense told them was right“.

So Steve McCatty appears on this card when he didn’t really have the lowest ERA in the AL among qualified pitchers. Fortunately you won’t see this insanity anymore. Retrosheet, Baseball-Reference, Fangraphs, or MLB.com each accurately show Sammy and Steve’s real ERA for 1981.

Every single one of the guys on this card had the exact same amount of wins in ’81, with 14. That’s got to be the weirdest thing about it. I mean, all 5? That’s got to be pretty unusual.

Probably even weirder, is that they were all tied at 13 too. Yep, at the end of play on September 22, 1981, these five pitchers along with Fernando Valenzuela, were tied with 13 wins a piece. The difference between them in the end, was what happened afterwards—

McCatty, Vuckovich, & Valenzuela pitched the best but their teams had trouble scoring for them. In fact, Fernando’s final start was 1-0 loss to the 39-68 Padres with Fred Kuhaulua on the mound?

Other than Fernando, the only N.L. pitcher to just miss the big tie in the end, was Steve Carlton. He’d won most of his games earlier in the year, going 9-1 on a 2.80 ERA before the strike.

Strangely, his Phillies had trouble scoring for him after the strike was over. His second half ERA of 1.93 would normally be enough to pull off the 5 wins he needed. Unfortunately, he only went 4-3. He didn’t reach the tie at 13 or 14.

As for the American League pitchers, Pete Vuckovich actually had a blown save, which balloons his ERA in the above table. So it’s notable that in his final 2 starts, he gave up just 1 run in 15 2/3, but still couldn’t get credit for a win in either start. He was incredibly hot, but seemed to suffer the same problem as Carlton & Valenzuela.

Jack Morris’s ERA, BB/9, and HR/9 easily make him look bad, but he’s probably the most interesting story of the bunch here. He won his 14th, against Scott McGregor who was looking for his 13th. Since Scott won his next start, this game effectively kept Scott from being on this card.

Jack faced up against Pete Vuckovich a few days later, with both the pitchers sitting at 14 W’s, hoping to pass each other. Neither of them won it, but if either of them had, then one of them wouldn’t have been on this card.

Besides Scott McGregor, there was another A.L. hurler who just missed out on being pictured here, was Kansas City’s Dennis Leonard. From September 8 onward, he went 6-1, with a 1.39 ERA.

Dennis had been having a rough year up to that point, but he would’ve appeared on this card if he didn’t get a no decision on Aug 25th when he faced Jack Morris, or on Aug 10th when he faced Dennis Martinez, or the loss he got when he matched up against Pete Vuckovich in June.

Dennis is the reason though, why McCatty isn’t the sole American Leaguer on this card. October 2nd, they faced off in a wonderful pitchers duel in Oakland. Steve was lookin’ for his 15th win, which would’ve put him on this card alone with Tom Seaver.

Both pitchers went the distance, but Dennis came out on top with a 2-0 victory, effectively sticking McCatty at 14 wins.

I never realized when I was a kid, that there were almost more players for this card ’til I started lookin’ into it a couple months ago. Now it fascinates me how intertwined this all was.

Wow, now that’s a card. Two of the greatest base stealers of all-time, on the same baseball card. I absolutely loved this card when I was a kid, for that very reason. you can keep your home runs, steals and triples are far more exciting.

Neither Tim Raines nor Rickey Henderson had any real trouble leading their league in steals in ’81 In fact, Tim, had 50 steals by mid-June when the strike halted all the games. Oh yeah, 50 steals but he’d only been caught 6 times. 6 TIMES!

That amazing 89.2% success rate was really the only thing that separated the two during the first half of the season. Beyond that, they had the same amount of XHB (18) and the same OBP (.419).

Tim was in the midst of breaking rookie record for steals in a season, and had a shot at breaking the all-time single season record for steals in a season. The strike held him back from getting a chance to break that 2nd record.

Nobody in the NL ever challenged Raines that year for the lead in steals. When he reached 50, his nearest competition was at half that — 26. If he didn’t play another game all year, he would’ve led the league anyway, ’cause nobody else managed to steal more than 39 by the end.

I think people forget just how great Tim Raines was.

Over in the American League, things weren’t much different. Rickey Henderson was having a tougher year than he did in 1980, but still never really had trouble winning the AL Stolen Bases title in ’81.

The closest he came to letting it slip away, was at the end of August when Seattle’s Julio Cruz was just 3 steals behind Rickey. It was just too hard to catch Rickey though.

In hindsight, this card was a declaration of a new era. From 1981 – 1984, Rickey & Tim would be the stolen base leaders every year in their leagues. Gone were the days of Ron LeFlore, Willie Wilson, or Omar Moreno, leading the league.

Obviously, this is one of the coolest cards in the set when you’re an eight year old and I dubbed it “the card of five stars”. You’ve got 5 of the best players AND they’re the home run leaders!

It all starts with Mike Schmidt, who led the National League in homers for the fifth time in his career. His 31 HR’s might sound like an unimpressive number, but he did it in only 102 games played as the Phillies played just 106 that year.

Just doin’ a rough estimate, 31 HR’s in about 2/3 the usual amount of games, means Mike was on pace for about 45 homers. Even if he slumped a little, he probably would’ve reached 40 for the second straight year.

At the mid-season break though, he was stuck in a three way tie that included George Foster and Dave Kingman. Another dangerous slugger and fellow future Hall of Famer Andre Dawson, was just 1 homer shy of them.

Mike wedged out a little breathing room after the All-Star game, smacking 9 HR’s in late August. He had a 4 HR lead over Andre & Dave when September began.

As this card tells us, Dawson and Kingman faded in the end while Schmidt left them all in the dust the rest of the season.

The A.L. race for the home run lead was a much more rabid affair. Actually, it was kind of like the A.L. batting race, with a pair of sluggers coming from behind.

Stormin’ Gorman Thomas led the major leagues with 15 HR’s at the break. Only two behind him in the A.L., were Tony Armas, Dwight Evans, and Gary Gray.

Gary Gray? Yeah, that’s right. A uniquely named nobody was finally getting some playing time in Seattle and making a run at being noticed.

Well, Gary Gray returned to being Gary Gray after the break, and didn’t hit another homer all year.

Meanwhile, after the break, three stars named Bobby Grich, Eddie Murray, and Greg Luzinski were heating up. By September 35, Gorman and Tony were leading the A.L. with 21 HR’s a piece.

It was really anybody’s to have, but Gorman just kept staying one step ahead of the pack. At the time, many figured he was going to end up with the most HR’s in the league. After all, he did it just two years earlier with 45.

But just like in the A.L. batting race, which was Richie Zisk’s to lose, this was Gorman Thomas’s to lose — and he did. He didn’t hit another homer for the rest of the season. He wouldn’t hit another home run til game 5 of the playoffs (the division series against the Yankees).

Greg Luzinski would only smack a pair before the season finished, and that just wouldn’t be enough in this race.

Now, I really should mention how hot Bobby Grich was. From September 20 – October 2, he hit .409/.449/.727 with 4 HR’s. He was just on fire. The 4th homer in that hot stretch came on October 2, and made Bobby the first to reach the 22 homer plateau in ’81. Oh yeah, it was an exciting one too, being a 1st inning 3 run blast.

The next night in Kansas City, Tony Armas joined him at 22, with a 2-run homer in the 6th.

With a day left to the season after that, both Tony & Bobby must’ve been thinkin’ they could win the HR title. The last day of the season though, neither of them would sneak ahead.

That last day of the season, at about the same time of the afternoon, Eddie Murray joined them with a 3rd inning blast and Dwight Evans hit his 21st.

You’d think that would be the end of it, but no. Dwight hits another homer in the 8th inning of his game, to make a four way tie atop the leaderboard!

Thus, Dwight gave birth to the awesome “card of 5 stars”.

This was my first impression and my lasting impression of Mitchell Page. Older fans probably remember him as a hot young hitter who lost out on being Rookie of the Year in 1977—to future Hall of Famer Eddie Murray. In hindsight though, he had a massively better season than Murray. That season, Mitchell had hit .307/.405/.521, good enough for a 154 OPS+, with 6.0 WAR. Eddie had only a 123 OPS+ and 2.9 WAR, but hit 6 more HR’s and drove in 13 more runs. Took him about 100 extra PA’s to do it though.

Mitchell stole a fat 42 bases that first year and got caught only 5 times. Nobody else on the team had more than 5 steals.

He began to slump hard in ’79, when his OBP slumped for just .323 and his slugging down from .459 to .335. Apparently this wasn’t due to physical inability, but mental focus issues and a growing inability to stay relaxed at the plate. This led to him trying out some new training method known as “muscle memory training”, which seems to have helped him during the last month of ’80.

Contrary to the video in the link above, Mitchell didn’t hit anywhere near .344 in the last month of 1980, but more like .242 — a full 100 points lower. So this muscle memory training clearly wasn’t as good as it was all cracked up to be.

In 1981, his production slipped further below the depths of an average major leaguer. As a result, the A’s were using Mitchell mostly in the minors that season. These days, I think the team would’ve just sent him to see a sports psychologist and he would’ve been fine.

He hit great for the Tacoma Tigers in ’81 and ’82 though, helping the team win back-to-back division titles in the PCL. I’m guessing ’cause he felt more relaxed & focused in a non-major league situation.

He did have one moment of awesome in ’82 though. It came on August 15, in Oakland, facing the division leading Angels. With the score tied at 2, Mitchell Page comes up to lead off the bottom of the 9th. After taking one pitch for a strike, he slammed the next one for a walk-off homer that not only won the game but sent the Angels down into 2nd place.

Woah, you’re kiddin’ me, right?!?

He’s even got this look on his face like he’s a little nervous, with this slouch that says “I’m not quite sure how to pose manly but I think this is it.”

Compared to his 1980 card, this one is just flat boring. A simple dull pose as opposed to firing a pitch to the plate in a game. Even the lettering on his jersey looks unfinished, as if nobody even bothered to care to color it in.

This makes for a very fitting card at this point in his career, as this was the season his career started downhill. Back in ’80, he was a big deal. He was now faltering with arm problems and wouldn’t get surgery to fix it. Stubbornness isn’t usually a good thing.

From ’81 to ’82, his ERA rose a full 1.66 runs. He went from leading the AL in shutouts to not throwing any at all.

Just like his cards, he went from interesting to boring. he wasn’t even a laughingstock pitcher who’d put up a 5.00-something ERA and make you laugh at the team. He was just suddenly a 97 ERA+…just about average. Dull. Nothing special, nothing horrible.

In fact, he had the exact same ERA in both ’82 and ’83… how dull is that? After posting a 2.33 ERA, you really shouldn’t be pulling off a pair of 3.99 ERA’s as an encore.

Random career facts & stats—

• Used a toy bat during a spring training game in ’82
• As of 2010, is the Washington Natinals pitching coach (hello Strasburg!)
• Allowed righties a .308 OBP, but .361 to lefties
• 7-1, 2.88 ERA against the ChiSox
• 1-7, 6.36 ERA against the Yankees
• 11-3, 3.39 ERA pitching on 3 days rest

I was wearing my plastic Oakland A’s helmet and tossing my whiffle ball up a little, waiting for it to slide back down into my swinging zone. Then I just smack it over my backyard fence into the left field upper deck. The upper deck was actually the roof of a neighbors garage, but not to a boy obsessed with baseball.

I still think of that moment when I think of Tony Armas. Always. It flashes through my head whenever I hear his name. Just like the image on this card. This is how I still picture him.

It was always one of my favorite cards from the ’82 set. It shows a star player looking like he enjoyed his baseball life & there’s glimpses of two other players. Two other All-Stars. That’s awesome!

Even when I was a kid, I knew this had to be a photo from the day of the ’81 All-Star game (August 9, 1981), ’cause you can see three different uniforms and one of them is definitely the sleeve of a Phillies player in his road uniform. I could always identify that Phillies sleeve as Manny Trillo, because Trillo’s card makes it obvious.

I could never figure out who the other player was though, until just a few days ago. I just had to look up each All-Star who wore the number 7 and a uniform with those colors. Turns out that player is California Angels SS Rick Burleson.

So this photo was shot on Sunday, August 9, 1981* just before the All-Star game, and gives us a trio of All-Stars—Tony Armas, Rick Burleson, and Manny Trillo.

Besides the card itself being one of the best cards out there, some on the field highlights of Tony’s 1982 include slugging a multi-HR game in Minnesota. This game featured Tony Armas whalloping a 2 Run HR in the top of the 12th inning for the win.

A couple months later he showed off his defense in Toronto when he made 11 putouts in a single game in rightfield. The ’83 Topps set made a record breaker card memorializing this performance, but the card’s photo isn’t from that day. You can tell because the card shows him playing on natural grass, and Toronto has astroturf.

In August, he smacked a grand slam off the Red Sox Bob Stanley in the 6th inning to give Oakland a safe 6 run lead. It’s probably no coincidence that the Red Sox traded for him after the season.

* – In ’81, there was no All-Star break. The players for the game weren’t in town the day before for any kind of home run contests or other usual All-Star festivities. The All-Star game was the first MLB event after the strike, and the next day everybody was off with their regular teams again. Therefore, we know this photo was from the day of the game, and not from any other.

Mike Davis didn’t hit well in short stints in 1980 or 1981 with Oakland, so the A’s left him in AAA Tacoma for most of the 1982 season, bringing him up in September. He did well in Tacoma, posting a .389 OBP. So once he got another chance in the AL, he went on a tear….hitting exactly .400, putting up a .909 OPS, and a 156 OPS+ in 77 PA’s between September 6 – October 3, 1982.

Sure, anybody can get hot for 77 PA’s so it wasn’t that hard, right? Well, I have a couple lists for you about this. First, here’s the entire list of batters 1942-2009 who’s hit .400+ with at least 70 PA’s for the season..

1. .411 – Todd Haney (81 PA’s in 1995)
2. .400 – Mike Davis (77 PA’s in 1982)
3. .403 – Bob Hazle (155 PA’s in 1957)
4. .407 – Ted Williams (110 PA’s in 1953)

Short list eh? Of course, this is short because anybody hitting .400 will continue to get more playing time until they cool off. Haney & Davis were September callups, Hazle filled in for an injury during the end of a season, and Williams I have no data for. So likely, if the end of the season didn’t stop these guys, we can be sure that more games would’ve pulled them beneath .400 eventually. That doesn’t remove its impressiveness though, ’cause hundreds of guys have been called up in September or come back from an injury to play the end of a season and none of them pulled this off.

Which leads to another question about batting .400. What’s the longest anyone’s hit .400 for, during a season? (by PA’s) I did a little research and compiled what I think is a complete list (1969-2009) since the mound & strike zone changes began favoring the batter more—

1. 455 PA’s, George Brett (1980)
2. 440 PA’s, John Olerud (1993)
3. 394 PA’s, Larry Walker (1997)
4. 385 PA’s, Tony Gwynn (1997)
5. 359 PA’s, Rod Carew (1977)
6. 316 PA’s, Nomar Garciaparra (2000)
7. 292 PA’s, Tony Fernandez (1999)
8. 290 PA’s, Chipper Jones (2008)
9. 290 PA’s, Rod Carew (1974)
10. 279 PA’s, Rod Carew (1983)
11. 268 PA’s, Andres Galarraga (1993)
12. 268 PA’s, Roberto Alomar (1996)
13. 249 PA’s, Rico Carty (1970)
14. 245 PA’s, Wade Boggs (1986)
15. 245 PA’s, Todd Helton (2000)
16. 244 PA’s, Carney Lansford (1988)
17. 238 PA’s, Paul O’Neill (1994)
18. 231 PA’s, Lenny Dykstra (1990)

That’s the most I’ve found.

These lists really punctuate how hard it is to hit .400, for anybody — great players, backups, fill-ins, call-ups, and recalls.

After 1982, Davis played several years in the majors as a regular, but never even hit .300. His last two seasons were for the Dodgers and this is how most people remember him — the man who drew a walk just before Kirk Gibson’s home run in the ’88 World Series. Maybe Mike Davis remembered the Rick Cerone trivia bit on the back of Mike’s card in ’82.