Mets Card of the Week: 1991 Sid Fernandez

1991 TOPPS SID FERNANDEZ

This is a card from the junk wax era. But to me, this is the last great Topps set. The 1990 and 1991 sets aren’t thought much of by collectors and that’s a shame. The 1990 set was colorful without being garish and the follow-up was a modern take on the traditional card design. There’s not one base set the rest of the century that measures up. Although when you have to come up for new designs for however many products Topps was releasing in the 1990s, it’s not surprising that the base set became almost an afterthought.

More packs were purchased by me for this set than any set released since the late 1970s. A large part of the reason was because this was the 40th anniversary for Topps and to celebrate they were randomly inserting either an original card from their past or a mail-in rebate for a card from the 1952-56 period where the cards were larger. Sure, my hope at the time was to get the ‘52 Mantle but any card from the 50s or 60s would have been nice to show up. Alas, no insert cards from past sets came my way.

But the ’91 Topps cards that were in the packs were a real nice surprise. Topps had mastered the action shot and even went a step further having much more interesting posed shots than in previous years. The posed shot that stands out is Roger Clemens in front of the manual scoreboard in Fenway. But this action shot of Sid Fernandez is pretty sweet, too.

Generally, the cards with landscape orientation are a turnoff for me. But with the way Fernandez is cropped, with his post-delivery self off-balance and filling up the entire card, makes it jump out in a good way.

If you never got to see Fernandez pitch, he was sort of like Chris Bassitt in that while the results were generally good, it was often a slog to watch him pitch. From 1984-1989, Fernandez was 69-44 for the Mets. Unfortunately, my main memory of Fernandez was that he started the first playoff game I ever attended, Game 5 of the 1988 NLCS against the Dodgers.

Coming on the heels of the tragic Game 4 loss when Dwight Gooden gave up two runs in the ninth inning and Roger McDowell gave up the game-losing run in the 12th, the Mets needed a good outing from Fernandez. The Mets famously went 10-1 against the Dodgers in the regular season. The only loss was by Fernandez, who allowed 2 ER in 6.1 IP and saw his record drop to 2-5 with the outing.

But from that point thru the end of the season, Fernandez was 10-5 with a 2.42 ERA. He closed the season with four consecutive wins and he won his final six decisions. But Fernandez didn’t have it in the playoffs, as he put the Mets in a 6-0 hole, in what wound up a 7-4 loss.

Anytime my friends and I discussed Fernandez from that point forward, we were sure to mention the playoff outing where he was throwing beachballs to the plate. And we always called him Fat Sid, the first player to get the dreaded fat comment from me since Mickey Lolich.

Ron Darling and Keith Hernandez always say nice things about Fernandez in the booth, which always makes me feel bad about the venom I’ve tossed in his direction. So, instead of that playoff game, from now on I’ll try to remember this 1991 Topps card, instead.

Topps baseball cards, a force for good since 1951.