Things couldn't have been that bad. Could they? I will flip through some 1995 Cardinals cards, let's discuss. First card.....
1990s Cardinals team? Shortstop? Where is Ozzie? Batting .199/.282/.244 and just playing 44 games. Bascially, Ozzie's shoulder had fallen off at this point. Pretty sure this was his only 1995 highlight.
No problems, because they had Jose Oquendo on that team too.
Only he was terrible too, not because he was injured or anything. Just terrible. It was Jose's last year as a player, and with a slash line of .209/.316/.300, it's hard to say that he walking away at 31 was a bad idea. After all, Jose did go on to have a really good coaching career.
I know I can speak for 99.9% of all Cardinals fans when I say that we miss Jose Oquendo coaching third base. He understood that slow runners and outfielders with good arms were a bad combination. The current coaching staff does not.
Back to shortstops. No Ozzie, no Jose Oquendo, so that's when Joe Torre had to turn to Tripp Cromer. No other choice. Here's what Joe looked like in 1995.....
and the Tripp Cromer decision, along with a bunch of other choices between bad players and worse players, led to Torre being fired. It also led to the 1996 Joe Torre....
which seemed to work out fine for fine for him. As a Cardinals fan, we were just left with a few baseball cards of Tripp Cromer. A few of my favorites.....
The first Major League Tripp Cromer card in my collection is from the 1994 Topps set. I always liked the prospect cards in the Topps base sets, this was something different with the pixelated look around the player. It's like we are looking up Tripp Cromer on Yahoo with a Netscape browser....
The back of the card is kind of cool and has some neat Homer Cromer info......
Looks like he did very little to get promoted all the way up to Triple A. One partial season above .250, everything else below in the Minors with no power and no speed. I will admit that he looks like he had a good 1993 with the Louisville Redbirds in Triple A. I also did not know that D.T. was his brother. I do not know Burke or Brandon. D.T. had a bunch of baseball cards in the late 1990s with the A's and the Reds.
Two more Tripps. Next up is a cool little insert set from the 1994 Fleer set. Fleer went with the mega-sets in the mid to late 1990s, which also included some easy to find inserts. One of them featured prospects. The only two really good prospects in the set were Chipper Jones and Carlos Delgado, but there are other names in there that you'd recognize too like: Steve Trachsel, Darren Oliver, and Mike Lieberthal.
Here's what the Tripp Cromer card looks like.....
I like the old circular Cardinals logo in the background. I like the blue batting practice jersey. The Cardinals rarely wear any of their blue road hats anymore and the road blue batting practice jerseys have been gone since the late 1990s. Wrigley also always makes for a cool card background. Even when there is no ivy, the grandstand is nice too.
Last one from later in his Cardinals career and has a nice action shot.
This is from the 1996 Pacific Crown Collection set. This was from the days when Pacific was the Spanish language card set. In the Fleer card above, Wrigley does make a more appealing card background, but as a Cardinals fan who grew up with the cookie cutter version of Busch Stadium, it's easy to like this card. The blue walls, the team logos on the outfield walls, astroturf....is that Mabry standing in the background?
Here's a wider view of the wall and astroturf in the 1966-2005 version of Busch Stadium from the 1985 playoffs.
Kind of cool to have the Cardinals logo in the background of the Cromer card. The National League East teams were in left field and the Western teams were in right. Overall, just a really nice card.
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