5 Baseball Cards that Found Pop Culture Love

Don't blink -- and listen hard -- or you might miss something

Happy Terry Forster Day!

Say what? You don’t have Terry Forster Day on your calendar?

Well, you’d better whip out your Sharpie and duly note the occasion, lest you forget to celebrate one of David Letterman’s favorite targets again next year.

Which reminds me — here are five baseball cards to help celebrate players who unwittingly became part of popular culture, even beyond the diamond.

1985 Topps Hostess Atlanta Braves Terry Forster (#8)

We’ll start off with the man of the hour, Terry Forster, who turns 72 today. Happy birthday!

Back in 1985, Forster was coming off a slightly abbreviated 1984 that saw him drop to 25 relief appearances after racking up 56 in each of the previous two seasons. Still, he managed a 2-0 record with 5 saves and a tidy 2.70 ERA for the Braves.

The next summer, while Forster was in the midst of a 2.28-ERA showing, David Letterman infamously referred to the hurler as a “fat tub of goo,” and he kept the jabs coming on a regular basis.

Forster eventually appeared on the show, naturally eating a sandwich and trying to maintain his good humor.

So in the spirit of good humor, there really doesn’t seem to be any card quite as fitting of our big occasion as this Hostess card. Issued in packs of snack cakes throughout the south, this set showcased 22 Braves.

You gotta think Letterman has one of these Forster cards tucked away somewhere, you know, for old time’s sake.

1940 Play Ball John Rucker (#213)

John Rucker hit .293 as a rookie for the New York Giants in 1940, and he’d go on to hit .272 over a 6-year big league career.

But that extended stay in the Polo Grounds is probably not why Rucker’s Play Ball rookie card looks familiar to you — if it does at all. And if it doesn’t, you should probably rewind the clock a month or so and try to get back in the Christmas spirit.

A romp through the nostalgia fields with A Christmas Story should do the trick:

That’s Rucker, leading off for a couple of T206 cards, just a bunch of sugar plum fairies escorting Ralphie off to yuletide bliss.

Rucker’s in our collective (sub)consciousness forever, like it or not.

1960 Topps Ted Kluszewski (#505)

This is a fine enough baseball card, even if Big Klu looks more like 50 than 35, and even if he’s wearing some indecipherable hat. I mean, everybody knows this guy is a Reds legend. Nothing that came after really counts.

Well, except for Rain Man.

It’s a classic movie, of course, featuring some big stars who gave award-winning performances. But Big Klu is one of the unsung highlights of the film for my money.

Heck, Raymond even drops that moniker on an unsuspecting audience when his brother butchers Kluszewski’s name.

“Ted Kluszewski,” Raymond corrects. “'Big Klu.' First base. He played for Cincinnati. Traded for Dee Fondee, 1957.”

If a “google” hadn’t just been some unimaginably big number back in 1988, you can bet “Big Klu” would have been trending, even if folks spelled it “Big Clue” or something.

There really would have been no excuse for that, though, as the 1960 Topps Kluszewski made a bigger-than-life on-screen appearance in the movie, too:

1980 Burger King Jim Palmer (#7)

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, no baseball player was as much of a thorn in the side of most work-a-day husbands as Jim Palmer. Dude looked like Sam Malone before we knew who Ted Danson was, and he was a better ballplayer to boot.

And, though there were and are plenty of glamorous, beefcake-type ballplayers to go around, not many of them actually put the goods on display.

But thanks to Palmer’s profile in the game, he got lots of attention, and his looks kept that attention on him. So much so that Jockey eventually asked him to showcase more than just his face.

I have no idea what my mom thought of Jim Palmer, but I know she was sort of blushingly impressed by Joe Namath’s legs in pantyhose. And Broadway Joe makes Palmer look even more like a model.

I do know that my dad clenched his jaw and went sort of steely in the eyes whenever Palmer showed up on TV or, god forbid, in one of those underwear ads. The unspoken message was something like, “let him work 60 hours a week for 20 years and still look like that.”

So, as a nod to my dad, I’m picking this Palmer Burger King card, because the idea of Cakes eating a Whopper like an average Joe feels like a guilty pleasure. You can almost imagine him popping a dunlap over his tighty-whitey waistband after wolfing down a few.

And, plus, Palmer’s hair is to-die for here, even better than on his base Topps card from 1980. You just can’t hide genetics sometimes. Sorry, Dad.

1986 Fleer Rod Carew (#629)

Back in 1994, the Beastie Boys released their single “Sure Shot.” The lyrics are full of all sorts of imagery and references you may or may not get, depending on how old you are and what you were doing in the mid-1990s.

But the song surely befuddled some listeners with the line that insisted the narrator (singer, rapper, writer, etc.) was racking up “mad hits” like Rod Carew.

By that point, Carew had been retired for nearly eight years, baseball was rocketing toward its second Big Strike, and the Venn overlap of Beastie Boys fans and Angels fans probably wasn’t all that big.

So the reference might have been lost on a few listeners, who no doubt sang along phonetically after they’d heard the tune a couple times anyway.

But we’re baseball fans, and card collectors, so it’s easy for us to imagine that this 1986 Fleer Carew card might have served as inspiration for the Beastie Boys. It’s all about the hits, after all — 3000 of them!

For his part, Carew may have felt more 1986 Topps-ish (#400) the first time he heard the song (if he has).

“Did they just say my name?”

—

There have been dozens of baseball card appearances in movies and TV over the years, so this list could go on forever(ish).

But…

What are some of your favorite cultural references to baseball cards and/or players, especially ones that feel like they came out of left field (yes, I said it)?

I’d love to hear about them!

Until next time, I’ll be here in front of the tube, keeping my Fire Stick on fire scouring old sitcoms for some old Kellogg’s or Transogram cards. I’d even settle for some Broders.

Thanks for reading.

—Adam