Best Cards: Kent Hrbek
(This is Best Cards Ever, a never-ending quest to find the single best baseball card of every player.)
I would imagine there are two things most people remember about Kent Hrbek these days: Weird name, and weird tag. Weird name speaks for itself — “Hrb” is not exactly a common combination of letters. Weird tag is that play in the 1991 World Series when Hrbek and Ron Gant got all tangled up, and exactly what the right call should have been is often a matter of what team you root for.
His Wikipedia page is fascinating. Whoever has updated it has some close ties to the Hrbek family, with the praise for Hrbek and such. There are two different “career” sections that start identically but then go in different directions. And then there’s what I can only call a very weird set of comparisons:
Eric Karros was a good ballplayer. But that’s about it. Clark was a borderline Hall of Famer. Karros had 10.4 career WAR, Clark had 56.5. Vic Wertz played from 1947 to 1963. He was dead before Karros, Clark, or Justice ever entered the league. Justice played some at first base in his rookie year, but never saw the position again; Clark, Karros, and Hrbek combined for one career inning off of the position (Hrbek played an inning at third in 1990). Best I can tell, Mr. or Mrs. Hrbek gathered up the names of a few hundred different ballplayers who were average or better, but not Hall of Famers, and then pulled five out at random.
That’s not really relevant to anything, but man, that’s weird, right?
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Kent Hrbek
Career: 1981-1994 (MIN)
WAR: 38.6
Hall of Fame: Nope, 5 votes in his one year on the ballot
My favorite thing about Hrbek’s career is that the Twins basically ran it back again 20 years later. Kent Hrbek and Justin Morneau were both northern boys (Hrbek’s from Minnesota, Morneau’s Canadian) who spent most/all of their careers with the Twins. Morneau had the MVP, but Hrbek had a second-place finish. And then there’s this:
Morneau’s going to appear on the Hall of Fame ballot after next year, and he’ll get a small handful of votes (probably; he could get zero) and fall off the ballot. Just like Hrbek did. When that happens, someone remind me to find the person who wrote Hrbek’s Wikipedia page to put Morneau in that list.
(As always, thanks to Check Out My Cards for being able to track these down.)
The worst Kent Hrbek card
1991 Studio #87
If you remember the Gary Carter edition of Best Cards Ever (a big LOL at anyone remembering a piece I wrote a month ago about some baseball cards, but whatever), I had a very stupid realization about the Studio cards — namely that they were called that because they were, you know, studio shots. It had just never occurred to me. Most baseball cards are action shots of some kind, or at least candids or dugout shots of them being people. The Studio collection went a different way with it, and it generally worked.
But if you’re going to bother doing a studio shoot, shouldn’t you take the time to make them look not, you know, disastrous? I understand that Hrbek was never the most beautiful man, but this picture makes him look like he’s about two seconds away from a Picasso painting. If I had to guess, exactly a half-second before this picture was taken, he did not have a smile, and exactly half-second after, he had a full smile. But sure, Studio guys, use that shot in the middle where his mouth is making six expressions at once.
Honorable mention
These aren’t the best of his cards. Sometimes they aren’t even that good. But they need to be mentioned one way or another.
1982 Donruss #557
This is a worse card than the above one in a vacuum. The only thing keeping it off the worst slot is that it was a 1982 card, not a 1991, and nine years in photography technology works out to about 80 in real time. On top of that, sure, this picture was posed, but at least it wasn’t a literal studio shoot. This is a bad card, but it’s at least understandably sad.
(While we’re here … bless you, Kent, for that sneeze.)
1992 Fun Stuff Baseball Enquirer #12
What? Seriously … what?
2005 Upper Deck Past Time Pennants – Past Time Signatures – Silver #HR
2013 Panini Hometown Heroes – City Hall Signatures #CHKH
I get that they can go back and get a billion pictures of players from whenever they want, and there’s nothing stopping them from making every last card they possibly can, but, like … it’s Kent Hrbek. On a telephone. In 2005. Or it’s Kent Hrbek. Without a logo. In 2013. Do we really need to bother with all of this?
1994 Upper Deck #98
Waitwaitwaitwaitwaitwaitwait. You can’t do this. If you’re going to make a card for a retired player in 2005, you can’t use a picture you’ve used for a card in the past. At the very least, you gotta use a new damn picture. This is breaking the sacred covenant of card maker and card buyer. This is not okay, Upper Deck. Not okay at all.
1994 Topps Stadium Club #224
Well, this card raises a question I never thought of before: Do you think umpires (a) are aware when they make it onto a baseball card, and (b) collect them? If I were an umpire, I would be hunting down every single time I appeared in a stray picture, at the very least so I could know if I looked dumb somewhere.
But the reason I included this card is the back. Because … do you think they know “razing the roof” means, like, tearing the roof down? Even if it were “raising,” it wouldn’t really make sense. “Razing”? Gibberish, Stadium Club. Gibberish.
And now, the top four Kent Hrbek cards of all time.
4. 1983 Topps – All-Star Set Collector’s Edition #35
Hey, do you think Kent Hrbek dipped? I think Kent Hrbek dipped.
Anyway, this card is perfect for putting itself in an era and a setting. It accomplished its goal in a big way.
3. 1983 Donruss #19
Y’all saw that last card, right? The picture of Beatles-hair, chunky Kent Hrbek? This card came out the same year. In this card, Kent Hrbek is a teen icon. I’ve highlighted all these illustrations of players on other cards, taking these super in-shape, attractive pro athletes and making them look like slugs. This one is like them making up for that.
2. 1991 Topps Stadium Club #248
In doing this project, I look at every card the Check Out My Cards database has on a guy. For someone like Greg Maddux, that was like 70 pages, 100 cards per page. It got tedious. But even for a guy like Hrbek, it was close to 400 cards. Just over and over and over of the same guy in various poses, interspersed with a few weird drawings and the occasional way-out-there image. You’ll see the same guy in a hundred different poses, but also a hundred variants on each pose. This is the pitcher starting his windup, this is the pitcher with his arm three-quarters of the way back, this is the pitcher with his arm over his head, so on and so on.
These are all pro athletes. Yes, it’s baseball, and that means these guys aren’t all the most chiseled, but they are still pro athletes. And that means most of these guys look like athletes in their pictures. Well, Kent Hrbek was not the most chiseled guy. Tom Milanovich played Heddo in Rookie of the Year, and it was silly that they made the big chunk of a guy play a slugger, because that’s not really how it works. Except in the ‘80s it did, and Kent Hrbek made it work to the level of having a pretty decent career. He’s in the top tier of baseball players ever, which makes him in the top percent of a percent of a percent of all humans ever. And he did it despite spending most of his career looking like he should be on a beer league softball team.
So scrolling through a million pictures of Kent Hrbek is different than scrolling through a million pictures of Andy Van Slyke, or Javy Lopez, or Jay Buhner. There were a lot of pictures of him with a big butt, a double chin, whatever. I say this not to insult him, because lord knows he was an excellent athlete, but because it’s very noticeable when you spend so much time looking at better-to-the-eye specimens.
That’s why this card stands out. It’s very hard to look slick in mid-action baseball shots, even for the most athletic guys. A lot of cards of players swinging the bat or throwing a pitch make them look like aliens possessing a body and not really knowing what to do with it. Hrbek is no exception, really, with plenty of his cards looking super awkward. But here? He doesn’t appear to have a big gut here, with the shirt seamlessly tucked into the pants. He’s swinging the bat with his legs planted, looking basically like you want a baseball player to look. Sure, he still has a bit of a double chin, but overall, this is the most athletic Kent Hrbek ever looked in his life.
1. 1992 Donruss Triple Play #135
And then there’s this. It’s super fun, but still, LOL, Kent.