5 Baseball Cards 'Sentenced' to Silliness

What's in a name, if not a subject and predicate?

In case you missed the big news, Pat Combs turns 57 today. So, you know, happy birthday, Pat Combs.

But hearing his name, and having my addled brain, always makes me want to answer, “Does he?”

Because Pat Combs belongs to that long-standing, well-esteemed, and imminently silly fraternity of “Baseball Players Who Are Sentences.”

Here are a few of the very, very many who have joined their ranks over the years, illustrted via baseball cards, naturally.

1989 Bowman Pat Combs (#398)

By all rights, Combs should have appeared on his cards with no hat on. But I couldn’t find one to, uh, fit the bill.

This one shows part of this hair, at least. Maybe enough to warrant combing.

It’s a nifty, if oversize card, too, capturing Combs at the start of his four-year run with Phillies.

Sadly, he made his last appearance in the bigs in 1992. The next year’s team turned out to be a pretty interesting crew who probably went through their share of combs, if not Combs.

1956 Topps Virgil Trucks (#117)

Befitting the pitcher he was, most of Trucks’ baseball cards show him standing on the mound or pose-pitching at various locations around the ballpark.

The action shot on this one shows Trucks about to catch a ball that headshot-Truck has just expelled from his ear.

Trucks is also taking a step toward said ball, maybe even running. If you squint and suspend your disbelief, you might even come to the conclusion that he’s Trucking across the diamond.

And, once Trucks hung up his spikes following a long All-Star career, mostly with the Tigers, Truck kept right on Trucking through life — coaching until 1974 and living to the ripe old age of 95.

1951 Bowman Matt Batts (#129)

This card told the truth back in the day, though it didn’t tell the whole truth.

Sure, Batts batted quite a few times over the course of his 10-year major league career, coming to the plate 1772 times. He did OK, too, batting .269 with 26 home runs and 219 RBI, plus 95 doubles and 11 triples.

But Batts’ real stock in trade was backup catching, as evidenced by his longish tenure but modest number of games played (546) and his never having appeared at any other position — though he did pinch hit a fair bit and even pinch ran once.

No word on whether his original middle name was Catchesand.

1987 Donruss Bruce Fields (#47)

Fields played only parts of three seasons in the bigs, so he doesn’t appear on a lot of cards.

This Rated Rookie is easily the most recognizable of those and kept many collectors (i.e., me) holding out hope that he’d break out.

He never really did, topping out at 39 games played for the Mariners in 1988, when he hit his only home run.

Of course, the grand flaw in this otherwise dandy card is that it lies to us, at least according to the picture and the sentence on the card front.

1976 Topps Davey Lopes Record Breaker (#4)

At 5’9” and 170 pounds, Lopes didn’t do much actual loping on the diamond. That’s more Dave Winfield and Darryl Strawberry territory.

But Lopes did flat-out run, to the tune of 557 stolen bases, and some records like the one on this card.

So “lopes” is at least in the right family of verbs for Lopes, and Topps gave us a glimpse of the Dodgers second baseman in his element.

Plus a cameo from Mets second baseman Felix Millan (I think) — a 2B two-fer!

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There are so many more of these names-as-sentence guys that I could probably write a whole post using nothing but a string of proper nouns.

How much more silly could it be than this missive, right?

I’ll leave you with a quick tale of one of my baseball idols growing up, as it was told to me circa 1989: Pete Rose Andy Burns.

And no, it doesn’t matter that Burns didn’t exist until 1990. You really need some work on that “suspend your disbelief” bit.

Thanks for reading.

—Adam