When Lonnie Smith Was an "Average" Star
...and when Donruss put him in Hall of Fame company
Note: When you click on links to various merchants in this newsletter and make a purchase, this can result in this newsletter earning a commission. Affiliate programs and affiliations include, but are not limited to, the eBay Partner Network and Amazon Associates.
1984 Donruss Champions Lonnie Smith (#23) - Card of the Day
(affiliate link)
Howdy, and welcome to Day 2 of our ad hoc “Hall of Fame Cards Where You Least Expect Them” series to celebrate Hall of Fame announcement week. Hall of Fame announcement day in this case, since we’ll find out tonight who, if anyone, will be joining Jeff Kent on the Cooperstown dais this summer.
In the meantime, I bet you didn’t expect to find a solo Lonnie Smith card among the “hidden Hall of Fame” pasteboards, right? Right?
So what gives? Did Smith find his way onto some HOF ballot no one knew about? Did he get a special invite from Abner Doubleday himself? Or Alexander Cartwright? Or maybe Stephen C. Clark?
Nah, all Smith did was string together a run of star-level seasons to begin his career, a run that’s been mostly forgotten today but that caught Donruss’ attention back in 1984.
That summer, collectors got to revel in three different 1984 Donruss Lonnie Smith baseball cards.
There was his base Donruss card at #231 in the revamped 1984 set.
There was the “Runnin’ Reds” card at #625 that featured Smith, Ozzie Smith, David Green, and Willie McGee. I’m still miffed about this one — with a name like that, it should have featured Eddie Milner, Gary Redus, Cesar Cedeño, and, for a little levity, Alan Knicely.
Now, you might have expected that we’d stop with “Runnin’ Reds” here, thanks to its Ozzie appearance, and call it a day. But, nah, that’s too obvious.
Instead, we turn to the Lonnie Smith card you see above, #23 in the 1984 Donruss Champions set. This was a pretty fun issue, if you ask me, and it was rife with baseball lessons.
In case you don’t remember…
Similar to the Donruss Action All-Stars issues of the era, Champions were oversized at 3 1/3” x 5” each, sold in cellophane packs of five cards plus three Duke Snider puzzle pieces for 35 cents.
There were 60 cards in the set, broken into subsets around statistical categories:
Season Home Runs
Career Home Runs
Season Batting Average
Career Batting Average
Career Hits
Career Victories
Career Strikeouts
MVPs
World Series stars
All-Star Game heroes
An all-timer led off each category, with record-holders featured where it made sense (Babe Ruth for season home runs, for example) and luminaries for the more subjective categories (e.g., Frank Robinson as the MVP front man).
Within each category, a handful of current leaders or achievers followed the leader.
So what does all this have to do with Lonnie Smith and his connection to the Hall of Fame?
Well, entering 1984, Smith’s batting line stood at .316 with 21 home runs and 503 hits across parts of six major league seasons. From 1980 through 1983, he hit .339, .324, .307, and .321 while playing mostly fulltime for the Phillies and Cardinals.
That .316 mark put him in good company among then-current players, and Donruss lumped him in with Rod Carew, Bill Madlock, Cecil Cooper, and Ken Griffey Sr. in the “Career Batting Average” category. They all followed the lead of Rogers Hornsby and his .358 career average.
To show you just how great the current player in question was — or how far he had to go — Donruss did a line-by-line comparison on the back of each card.
Here’s Smith v. Hornsby:
(affiliate link)
(In case you’re wondering where Ty Cobb and George Brett are in this category, well, they landed elsewhere — Cobb as the all-time career hits leader, and Brett under Ted Williams in the “Season Batting Average” bucket.)
As you can see, it was a long way from left field at Busch Stadium to a plaque in Cooperstown, and Smith sputtered along the way. His average dropped to .250 in 1984, and he wouldn’t see .300 again until a monster season in 1989 with the Braves.
Smith had a strong case for winning the National League MVP that season, but Atlanta was a terrible, last-place baseball team, and you didn’t win hardware on a bad team in the 1980s unless you hit gobs of home runs.
Smith played through 1994, when he finished up with the Orioles at age 38. He also finished up with much stronger career numbers than you might remember, with a batting line of .288/.371/.420 with 98 home runs, 533 RBI, 370 stolen bases, and 909 runs scored.
Not Hall of Fame numbers, but good for 38.5 WAR, MVP votes in three different seasons, and a direct cardboard comparison to Cooperstown royalty that will live forever.
1976 Topps Rogers Hornsby a Cardboard History Lesson
Hornsby made another modern-day wax pack cameo in 1976 as part of Topps’ The Sporting News All-Time All-Stars subset.
I don’t know how collectors at the time felt about pulling a black-and-white among their groovy 1970s colors, but it was pretty cool to stumble across this card and its brethren several years later.
Read more about the 1976 Topps Hornsby right here.
The Card that Always Makes Us Smile…
Down to the Last Pitch
Lonnie Smith was on hand for one of the most dramatic World Series ever, as the Minnesota Twins came back from a 3-games-to-1 deficit to win the 1991 Fall Classic.
Actually, Smith was more than “on hand” — he smacked a home run in each of the Braves’ victories. He also singled twice and drew a walk in Game 7 but struck out against Jack Morris for the second out in the tenth inning of Atlanta’s 1-0 loss.
Tim Wendel’s 300-page tome, The Last Pitch, recounts all the agony and glory of that amazing Series
(affiliate link)
Like these stories and want to support them? Now you can contribute any amount you like via PayPal:
… or Buy Me a Coffee:
