Not the top tier with Maddux and Pedro during that 1997 season, but a very very good pitcher. Mind you he was only 25 and his numbers had been trending up to this point in his career prior to the injury. Could the first half of the 1997 season have been a complete fluke? Sure, but I tend to think that he was headed that direction. Not a stretch to say that the numbers put up by Alan Benes in 1997 were better than anything posted by Andy in his 14 years in the Majors.
The Cardinals drafted Alan Benes out of Creighton in the first round of the 1993 Draft. He was a pretty highly regarded draft pick and immediately made his way through the Minor Leagues.
He had baseball cards almost right away too. Like all mid 1990s prospects, he had a bunch of cards in Bowman products, but I actually liked his Upper Deck cards from that era better. Benes was in both the 1994 and 1995 Upper Deck base sets.
He was in the 1994 set as a Top Prospect.
A lot of these cards were draft picks from 1993, it might have been all, did not do that much homework on the checklist. When I think of these Upper Deck prospect cards, I always remember the Billy Wagner rookie. He was taken a few picks in front of Benes in that draft. The Benes card kind of sticks out because of the uniform. I was never quite sure where the good people at Upper Deck took this photo, but that Cardinals uniform is straight out of the 1980s.
It could be that this card was made at some sort of photo shoot, or if they took it while he playing for a Minor League team that wore the old polyester Cardinals uniforms. I found a Dmitri Young card from 1994 where he is playing for the St. Petersburg Cardinals.....
and wearing an old polyester style Cardinals uniform. Young played for the Cardinals A Ball team in 1993, Benes played there in the early parts of 1994. The Benes card is a high number, second series later release, so it would have given Upper Deck time to have taken the picture after the season started. I would lean that direction for the picture.
Benes was also in the 1995 Upper Deck set as a top prospect.
They use pictures of him in the polyester uniform again, even though he was in Double A and Triple A during the first parts of the 1995 season. He actually pitched a few games for the Cardinals towards the end of that season. I hate recycled pictures, and the effort on this card seems really low when you take into account that his 1995 Upper Deck Minor League card had an updated photo of Benes playing for the Arkansas Travelers. They would have been the Cardinals Double A team at that point.
I still like the blue background on the 1995 Upper Deck card. I always prefer to see what is actually happening in the picture when it's an action shot, but this backdrop seems like a good Upper Deck card design element from the mid 1990s.
Is this a game shot, or is he throwing in the bullpen? You will never know.
Before we get to the Major League cards of Benes, I would like to put up one more Minor League card of sorts. Upper Deck had some Arizona Fall League cards in their Collectors Choice product in 1996.....
which had an Alan Benes card. There are some other Arizona Fall League cards which have been floating around in more recent sets, but the Minor League players in that league now just wear their team's Major League uniform with a Fall League hat. I like these mid 1990s cards when the Fall League teams had there own uniforms.
Not sure when the unis switched over, but I am sure it was some cost saving move.
Benes did not have a ton of cards once he reached the Majors, mainly because he had a major shoulder injury towards the end of the 1997 season and was never quite the same pitcher after that year. I have it narrowed it down to three or four cards.
First up is my favorite card of Benes, which is 1997 Topps base card.
Speaking of recycled pictures, if you look up the other Alan Benes cards that Topps made in 1997 they are either this picture, or a photo that was taken from this moment in whatever game he is pitching in here. Why do I like this picture?
I like the background of the picture. It's a nice action shot too, but the Cardinals had spent the first half of the 1990s with an astroturf field and blue walls in Busch Stadium.
It's how Busch Stadium looked during my childhood through my years in high school. After the Rams played a few games there during the fall of 1995, the playing surface was changed over to grass and the outfield walls were painted green.
A few more classics from the mid 1990s....
The Emotion XL cards were always pretty cool cards. Sometimes I could clearly see why the cards had a certain emotion printed on the side, other times not. Alan Benes is excited? He looked this way.....
almost every time that he threw......
a pitch.
Good effort though and I still like these cards. You cannot get them all right, but I am just excited that a smaller set from the mid 1990s had a Cardinals player in it outside of Ray Lankford, Ron Gant, or Dennis Eckersley. Did not get many Alan Benes cards in these types of sets.
Next.
Another classic 1990s set. Still trying to figure out what the Crusades have to do with baseball cards, but the design is really nice. Sad story behind this card. A few years ago this guy with basically everyone of these Crusade cards, all of the color variations, was dumping them all on Ebay. I tried buying the Lankford red variation, a print run of just 25 cards, but the card ended at almost $200. I lost, but I won this Alan Benes card.
Last one.
Alan Benes does have an autographed card in the 1997 Donruss Signature set. It's not very hard to find and is also very affordable. For whatever reason, Benes signed all of his cards across his picture rather than the space for the autograph that was provided at the bottom of the card. There were not many players who missed the memo on where to sign these cards, but curiously three of them were on the Cardinals at some point during their career. Benes from above.
Edagr Renteria also signed his picture, as did Larry Walker.
Benes did pitch after sitting out the 1998 season recovering from his shoulder injury. Between 1999 and 2003 he only managed to pitch in roughly 60 games. He was on the Cardinals until the 2001 season when he became a free agent and signed with the Cubs. Benes would also pitch briefly with the Rangers and tried a comeback with the Cardinals in both 2004 and 2005. Neither was successful.
You can find an occasional Benes card from the later years of his career, but they are rather sparse,
although its nice that Topps made a few cards of a player who could have been great, minus the injuries, even though he did not ever live up to his potential.
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