The Card that Cast a Cooperstown Shadow Over Moose Haas

It stretched out for 35 years, from Milwaukee to baseball's Valhalla

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1984 Topps Brewers Team Leaders (#726) - Card of the Day

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Everyone knows the worst sort of baseball card to pull from a 1980s wax pack was a checklist. Now, I’ve heard some revisionists these days claim otherwise, saying they were stoked to land a checklist so they knew what was in the set or some such pablum, but…

Color me skeptical. Or downright cynical. I suspect those same collectors will soon offer up a stack of their vaunted checklist cards for one of my Dion James Rated Rookies..

Ain’t gonna happen, bub.

But checklist cards weren’t the only pulls that frustrated yesterkids. In rough order of badness, starting with the baddest (and not in the Leroy Brown sense) and working our way to slightly less bad, we had:

• Checklist cards

• Team cards

• Manager cards

• Team leader cards

• League leader cards

• Obscure record-breaker cards

• Obscure All-Star cards

Some of those might seem a bit unfair, but how many Greg Minton record-breakers or Jeffrey Leonard All-Star cards does a kid really need? (Of course, looking back, there is some don’t-call-me-Jeff intrigue wrapped up in Leonard’s 1985 Topps AS card.)

Don’t worry about stuff like game cards or puzzle pieces or logo stickers — they were fillers and didn’t take the place of “real” cards. No harm, no foul, just mild annoyance.

Now, even among the turd categories in our list above, sometimes you could strike gold, or at least, like, tin. A Mickey Mantle head at the top of a checklist, a Tim Raines/Rickey Henderson stolen base leaders card, a Yogi Berra manager card.

And sometimes, you could strike gold but wouldn’t know it for years…decades, maybe.

The 1983 Topps ERA leaders card at #707 was a yawner coming out for the pack, for example. As good as they were at their craft, nobody except maybe their mothers wanted to pull a Rick Sutcliffe/Steve Rogers combo card.

And even the moms probably cut the other guy out of the picture.

That card took on a bit more hobby swagger, even if temporarily, when the Red Baron turned into a supersized Sandy Koufax for three-plus months with the 1984 Cubs after a June trade.

Team leader cards were even more dreaded as wax pack fodder than were league leaders. Unless you were a Braves fan, were you really celebrating Claudell Washington and Rick Mahler as the best Atlanta had to offer in 1981 (courtesy of their 1982 Topps card at #126)?

But team leader cards did offer up a lottery ticket of sorts, another chance to capture a Hall of Famer in cardboard before anyone else knew or cared.

It was okay to pull a Nolan Ryan card in 1984, for example, but he was still several years out from becoming the hobby phenomenon that would help shape the market in the 1990s. Even in that Olympic summer, the year after he and Steve Carlton and Gaylord Perry broke Walter Johnson’s all-time strikeout record, many/most fans and collectors considered Ryan to be one-dimensional and an iffy Hall of Fame candidate.

An iffy HOF candidate who was almost finished in the big leagues, to boot.

Add it all up, and card #66 in the 1984 Topps set featuring Ryan and Jose Cruz as Astros team leaders got semistar treatment at best. It wasn’t unusual to find it collecting dust wherever commons gathered.

That card is still not a hobby superstar by any means, but it ended up in top-loaders, display cases, and graded slabs along with all the other Nolans once The Ryan Express really got rolling late in the decade.

As it turns out, those 1984 Topps team leader cards were hiding an even more esoteric diamond in the rough, a card that held onto its secrets for more than 35 years. And it almost didn’t exist at all, at least not in its final form, the form that matters.

See…

After winning the American League East for the first time in 1982, and nearly taking the World Series from the Cardinals, the Brewers were technically winners again in 1983.

But by the morning of September 18, they were 12 games out in the East, stuck in fifth place and a whisper away from official elimination. This, despite a solid 79-69 record.

That same morning, 1982 American League MVP Robin Yount woke up with a .296 batting average. It was a far cry from Yount’s .331 mark, and well behind catcher Ted Simmons’ team-leading .310.

For that matter, Yount also trailed Cecil Cooper, who checked in at .302.

Milwaukee then lost their next two games in walk-off fashion to cap a ten-game losing streak and check out of the playoff race. Meanwhile, Yount went 4-for-9 to lift his average to .299, Simmons went 5-for-10 to land at .312, and Cooper dropped an 0-for-9 to sink to .297.

From there, Yount kept his foot on the gas over the next two weeks, while Simmons floundered and Cooper rebounded with a couple of multi-hit games.

As the Brewers entered their tilt with the Tigers in Detroit on September 30, Yount was batting .307, Simmons came in at .309, and Cooper had recovered to .301.

In that game at Tiger Stadium, Yount went 2-for-4, Simmons went 1-for-4, and Cooper also went 1-for-4.

That left Yount and Simmons tied at the top of the Brewers’ batting chart, both with .308 seasonal averages, while Cooper brought up the rear at .301.

Ah, but Yount and Simmons weren’t really tied…

Simmons finished the game with 185 hits in 600 at-bats, while Yount went to the clubhouse at 178-for-578. That put Simmons up by percentage points, .30833 to .30796.

As it turned out, neither man would play in either of the Brewers’ final two games, which gave Cooper at least a theoretical shot at catching them. He gave it darn good go, too, collecting seven hits in his final ten at-bats to end up at 203-for-661 — that’s a .30711 batting average.

If either Cooper or Yount had seen one more of their bloops or line drives fall in for a hit, or if they had beat out one more throw at first, they would have won the 1983 Brewers’ batting crown.

If Yount had won, the 1984 Topps Brewers leaders card featuring him and Moose Haas (3.27 ERA in 1983) would have been at least mildly popular right off the bat.

If Cooper had won, well, the card would have been about as popular as the real card was…and we’d still be waiting for something to change its fate.

But here in the real world, Ted Simmons ended up as the Brewers’ leading batter in 1983, and while collectors yawned — maybe groaned — at that card you see up top back when it was new, it got a puff of new life in December of 2019.

That’s when the Veterans Committee surprised the baseball world by electing Simba to the Hall of Fame. There was a mini run on all his cards, even the obscure and dreaded ones like the 1984 Topps Brewers leaders card.

Truth be told, that card can be had on the cheap most of the time these days — still or again — though nice graded copies do carry a bit of weight.

Valuable or not, though, it’s priceless as a stealth Hall of Fame card we never saw coming, even as we pushed it aside to get to the next rookie in the pack.

1975 Hostess Ted Simmons Had Some Things to Say

Simmons may have tiptoed from the afterthought bin to the Hall of Fame on his 1984 Topps Brewers leaders card, but his 1975 Hostess issue was no wallflower.

Check out what that card was trying to tell us right here.

The Baseball Card You Dreaded Pulling…

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The National Baseball Hall of Fame Collection

You probably wouldn’t be surprised, exactly, to find pictures of HOF memorabilia in a book called The National Baseball Hall of Fame Collection, right?

Right.

But that’s OK, even here in our “stealth” week, because this is a fun book that profiles more than 175 Hall of Famers and regales us with all sorts of tickets, scorecards, contracts, and other legendary artifacts.

No doubt that you’ll pick up some new tidbits every time you read through it.

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