That Time Sabes and Pudge Teamed Up

It was back-to-back hobby magic!

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1986 General Mills Bret Saberhagen - Card of the Day

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If you were like most baseball fans in the summer of 1984, you were probably too dazzled by the Tigers and Dwight Gooden and the Cubs and Don Mattingly v. Dave Winfield and the Padres and Tony Gwynn and the Mets and Ryne Sandberg and all the rest of that magical season to even notice that Bret Saberhagen pitched for the Royals all year long.

As a rookie swingman, the lanky right-hander went 10-11 with a 3.48 ERA, two complete games, a shutout, and a save in 38 appearances. That performance didn’t win Saberhagen any Rookie of the Year votes, but it did earn him a slot in Kansas City’s 1985 rotation and in each of the major 1985 baseball card sets.

His sophomore season started in anonymity, too, but Sabes started to pick up steam in the second half of May. After a shellacking at the hands of the Yankees on the 12th of that month, his record stood at 2-3, “supported” by a 4.62 ERA.

By the end of May, though, Saberhagen was 5-3 with a 3.51 ERA. From there, it was mostly wine and roses as he cruised into the All-Star break with a 10-4 record and 2.78 ERA. Collectors were starting to take notice, digging through our early-season stacks of could-bes to pull his rookie cards and inch them closer to our Goodens.

Of course, entering the season as a little-known and getting off to a slow start meant Saberhagen had to settle for watching the All-Star Game on TV like the rest of us, or at least not as a member of the American League squad.

Had the Royals’ wunderkind turned things around a few weeks earlier, maybe he could have teamed up with future Hall of Famer Carlton Fisk in the A.L. battery that July night in Minnesota. As things played out, that was a matchup that almost never materialized.

Almost.

See, all Saberhagen did in the second half was raise his record to 20-6 while holding his ERA at a pretty steady 2.87 as the Royals won their second straight A.L. West crown. Then, after hanging on for a seven-game victory over the Blue Jays in the ALCS, the Royals likewise ousted the Cardinals in an epic full-tilt World Series.

Sabes went 2-0 with a tiny 0.50 ERA in 18 innings during the Fall Classic to cop MVP honors. Then, after the season, he won the A.L. Cy Young Award in a landslide over Ron Guidry and even picked up some MVP votes.

To say Saberhagen was a hot hobby commodity entering the offseason, and on into 1986, is an understatement on the order of saying that George Brett was a bit ruffled by that whole pine tar kerfuffle.

Indeed, Saberhagen was everywhere you could buy fine (or cheap) cardboard in 1986, from Topps, Fleer, and Donruss base sets to 7-Eleven discs to box-bottom panels to Kitty Clover potato chips to…boxes of General Mills cereal. In Canada.

And it’s there, at the breakfast table in the Great White North, that we’ll take our daily dive into collecting obscura. Because, in the summer of 1986, General Mills issued six “booklets” of baseball cards, each arranged in five double-sided panels that folded like an accordion to form a little colored-border booklet.

Aside from possibly providing fodder for Fleer’s 1991 debacle (though not all the booklet “cards” are yellow), these babies also provide a collecting challenge.

First, these cards and/or full booklets aren’t all that easy to locate nearly 40 years on. Compared to the mainstream sets from the same year, distribution was limited and prone to damaging the cards — you ever try to survive a long trip inside a cereal box?

Second, the cards are a bit oversized, with a lengthwise measurement of 3.75 inches, a quarter inch longer than “standard” cards.

And third, the individual cards aren’t really cards at all, but “pages” of the booklet. Any singles running around out there in the wild had to have been cut away from their brethren by hand, adding to the difficulty in finding top-notch copies.

The consolation to all this — besides having another cool old issue to track down — is that each card is a two-for-one deal. That is, there aren’t any card backs. Instead, one player appears on each side of each card, with the players inextricably paired up.

So, if you’ve read this far and get the basic gist, can you guess who’s on the backside of the 1986 General Mills Booklets card of Bret Saberhagen?

Here, let me give you a hint…

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Yep, none other than Pudge himself, appearing as the cover man for Booklet #2.

And just like that, the 1985 Dream Battery, the one that never quite materialized, lives forever in collections across (at least) two nations.

Something to think about as you dig into your morning cereal today, and something to celebrate as we reflect on the skinny everyman who took the game by storm in 1985 — and in odd-numbered years for the next decade or so.

Because Bret William Saberhagen was born on April 11, 1964.

1984 Topps Traded Bret Saberhagen Almost Slid by Us

When Saberhagen took off in 1985, it wasn’t just his current-year cards that climbed aboard the hobby rocket ship. Indeed, thanks to his full rookie season in 1984, Sabes appeared in both the Fleer Update and Topps Traded sets that fall, several months before most of us were paying attention.

Those cards, too, became hobby darlings as Saberhagen climbed to stardom in 1985. Read all about it right here.

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