This Danny Tartabull Will Rev(co) Up Your Collection

And maybe send you searching for "Seinfeld" reruns

1988 Topps Revco Danny Tartabull (#26) - Card of the Day

Carlos Gonzalez is on the Hall of Fame ballot for the first time in 2025, and he’s a better candidate to receive no votes than to receive the 75% of votes necessary for election.

That’s not to say CarGo wasn’t an excellent player. After all, in a 12-year career, he hit .285 with 234 home runs and 785 RBI, mostly for the Colorado Rockies. He also stole 122 bases, won three Gold Gloves, and picked up three All-Star nods.

But with just 1432 hits and 24.4 hits, not to mention the stigma that still clings to hitters who spent half their time in Coors Field, it’s just not a sterling HOF resume.

For evidence of that, consider the eighth-most similar batter to Gonzalez, according to Baseball Reference’s Similarity Scores.

From 1984 through 1996, Danny Tartabull was one of the most feared sluggers in the game. In that span, he slugged 262 home runs, drove in 925, and hit .273.

Tartabull’s journey to the big leagues started when the Reds picked him in the third round of the 1980 draft. After three years in Cincy’s minor league system, the Mariners drafted him away in January 1983 as a free agent compensation pick.

By then, Tartabull had already demonstrated a tantalizing combination of power and speed, attributes that continued to mature with the Mariners. He made his big league debut with Seattle in September 1984, sipped another cup of coffee with the M’s in 1985, and then stuck with the big team in 1986.

In the midst of all that, the card companies bit on Tartabull’s future, with Donruss taking the plunge first, making him a Rated Rookie in their black-bordered 1985 set. By the end of 1986, his cardboard was everywhere.

That summer, Tartabull hit 25 home runs and drove in 96 while hitting .270 for Seattle, exciting results for sure, but sort of lost in the glare of Wally Joyner and Jose Canseco.

In December, the Mariners traded Tartabull and Rick Luecken to the Royals in exchange for Scott Bankhead, Mike Kingery, and Steve Shields, setting the stage for Tartabull’s best seasons.

In 1987, Tartabull hit .309 with 34 home runs and 101 RBI, good enough for some down-ballot MVP consideration. That made him a must-have for collectors, and card companies started looking for ways to squeeze him into as many sets, subsets, and extracurricular sets as possible.

For example, Topps included him in their 1988 Revco League Leaders 33-card boxed set, even though he didn’t really lead the league in anything in 1987. Well, OK, he sort of did.

It’s right there on the back of his card:

Tartabull led the American League in Game-Winning RBI, with Canseco, Carlton Fisk, and Robin Yount, finishing second.

Tartabull never again matched the 158 games he played that summer, but he continued to put up double-digit homer numbers in K.C. even while he battled various injuries. He headed into free agency for the first time fresh off a .316, 31 HR, 100 RBI platform season in 1991 that made him irresistible to the Yankees ahead of his age-29 campaign.

After signing a shiny new contract with the Bombers, Tartabull continued to mash when healthy — he hit 25, 31, and 19 home runs but played in just 365 games the next three summers, thanks to injuries and the 1994 strike. Along the way, he also gained some notoriety in pop culture thanks to a couple of cameos on Seinfeld.

The Yanks traded Tartabull to the A’s in July of 1995 for Jason Beverlin and Ruben Sierra, and Oakland flipped him to the White Sox that winter for Charles Poe and Andrew Lorraine.

After being limited to 83 games the first of those two years, Tartabull rebounded to .254, 27 HR, and 101 RBI over 132 games in 1996. He signed as a free agent with the Phillies that offseason but appeared in just three early-season games before hanging up his spikes.

Overall, Tartabull hit .273 with 262 home runs and 925 RBI in the big leagues, amassing 23.3 WAR. In his one shot at the Hall of Fame ballot in 2003, he received just one vote.

Will Carlos Gonzalez garner even that much support? We’ll soon find out, but us oldsters can at least thank him for giving us another chance to remember the once-sparkling careers of men like Danny Tartabull.