5 Baseball Cards that Make You Reach for the Tweezers

Limit one brow per customer

Jack Clark turns 69 years old today. And, for all the images that come to mind when I think of Jack the Ripper, one overriding theme permeates them all — the monobrow.

So, to celebrate the birth of one of the great mercenary sluggers of my youth, here are five baseball cards that will make you reach for the tweezers.

1963 Topps Wally Moon (#279)

Moon is the Monarch of the Monobrow among baseball players, and this 1963 Topps beauty gives us a double shot of his unique style.

But Moon was more than just a pair of pretty eyes under a single pretty brow. He started with a bang, winning the 1954 National League Rookie of the Year Award over Ernie Banks and Hank Aaron (and Gene Conley). He ended up playing five years in St. Louis before a trade to the Dodgers in December of 1958 set him up for more fame in sunny southern California.

All in all, Moon made three All-Star appearances, won a Gold Glove in left field (1960), and helped the Dodgers win three World Series (1959, 1963, 1965).

He also set the diamond standard for facial hair above the cheeks.

1967 Topps Andy Etchebarren (#457)

If Moon hadn’t set the monobrow bar a baseball generation earlier, Etchebarren certainly could have ushered in a new era all on his own in the late 1960s and 1970s. There were other guys who sported the straight-across look during that period, too, of course. But Etchebarren had the advantage of visibility, courtesy of playing for some good-to-great Orioles teams.

You could latch on to any number of baseball cards featuring the Baltimore backstop, but this one’s cool because 1) it hails from the classic and beautiful 1967 Topps set and 2) Etchebarren looks pretty happy with himself and his on-face friend.

1981 Topps Jack Clark (#30)

Truth be told, when I think of Jack Clark baseball cards, the first ones that come to mind are the 1978 Topps twiggy version of the future slugger, the 1987 Topps classic where he looks like a Troll doll on the drop of a rollercoaster, and the 1976 Topps Keith Hernandez that is indistinguishable from an early Clark card, with a call forward to his 1980s Cardinals tenure.

Clark’s monobrow is visible on many of those cards, but not all of them. Sometimes, we only get a side view of his face. In others, we get a full-on look at his mug, but there’s good separation between the brows.

This card though?

It’s an all-timer when it comes to great monobrow shots. In fact, it’s so spectacular, and so above and beyond most other Clark cards in this regard, I suspect there may be some eye black involved.

But I don’t care. I’m willing to suspend my disbelief and just embrace its glory.

1984 Topps Tom Candiotti (#262)

I’ll admit that I never thought of Candiotti as being part of the Unibrow Universe until I read an offhand comment online sometime in the last one-to-ten years mentioning that he belonged.

I thought said commenter was full of it, but I had to see for myself. And what I found shook my understanding of cardboard eyebrows from my formative years.

Sure, this Candiotti rookie card may not be quite as weighed down by upper facial hair as your average garden variety Wally Moon card, but the mono is definitely there…twice. And if you look at other Cotton pasteboards through the years, you’ll see hints of it here and there.

Much as his knuckleball allowed Candiotti to be sneaky good for a lot of years despite not debuting in the majors until he was nearly 27, his subtle but solid monobrow adds a little something extra to his baseball cards.

1985 Donruss Diamond King Jose Cruz (#20)

Cruz is another player I don’t usually associate with a monobrow.

Iconic leg kick? You bet.

A guy I hated to see step into the box against my Reds? Undoubtedly.

But the single-brow look just never landed with me as a Cruz trademark. I went back and searched through my Cruz cards, and I don’t see much of a telltale on most of them. Many show him in his iconic batting stance, where we see just one side of his face, so that might play into it.

Others show him at some distance, and the resolution of 1970s and 1980s cards is not exactly HD. On some others, there might be a case to be made, but not a lead-pipe one.

This card, though? Cruz’s 1987 Donruss Diamond King? This is the card that sent me on my quest of examining Cruz cards in the first place. This is the card where Dick Perez made crystal clear his vision of Jose Cruz, a vision that includes an eagle flying out of the Cooperstown-could-be’s forehead.

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There are plenty of other players we could add to our roster, too. Tom Phoebus, Max Alvis, and Sammy Stewart come to mind.

And in the non-mono-just-iconic-brow division, we have men like George Foster, Bill Buckner (though he bridged sometimes), and Josh Satin.

And, yeah, I suspect some of the players above who I don’t think had monobrows probably actually did but took some extra care to obfuscate that fact.

Anyway…

Which baseball eyebrows are your favorite? It’s a heavy (or at least hairy) subject that demands some careful thought. And plenty of voices — it’s easy to miss a worthy candidate here and there.

Thanks for reading.

—Adam