Moyer was signed as a free agent in January of 1991 ahead of Spring Training. Entering that year, Moyer had a career record of 34-49, with an ERA of 4.51 in five season with the Cubs and Rangers. Not really great teams, so some of the numbers are a little understandable. However, his numbers with the Cardinals were just painful.
Moyer started eight games that year, all of them were in April or May. Four of those starts lasted less than three innings. The Cardinals sent him down to Triple A at the end of May. He went 1-7 with an ERA of almost 6 and a WHIP of almost 2. Cardinals manager Joe Torre described his talk with Moyer before demoting him to Triple A with the local press, "We don't win when you pitch".
Don't point your finger at the Cardinals run support.
The Cardinals released Moyer in October of 1991, and he had two job offers after being cut loose. The Cubs offered him a job working in their Minor League system as a pitcher coach, while the Tigers thought he could mentor their younger players.
Fortunately, that one season with the Cardinals got lost in shuffle, the Orioles took a chance on him and the rest is history.
Moyer ended up having a good career after he left the Cardinals, but the one year in St. Louis was the real low point of his career. Hard to believe that 20 years later he had 269 wins, almost 2,500 strikeouts, and almost 700 career games pitched.
I am sure that most people do not even remember him being in St. Louis for a summer. Well, two months. As a Cardinals fan, Moyer's dubious stint with the team was captured on cardboard twice. Both on Topps products. The majority of Moyer cards from 1991 featured him with the Rangers.
The two Cardinals cards were released after the Topps base set and the first series of the Upper Deck base set. While Topps would surely have airbrushed Moyer into a Cardinals uniform nowadays, they just switched his team on his cards as soon as they could.
Let's take a look at the two cards. First up....
is a card from the 1991 Stadium Club set. Not sure what kind of pitch he's throwing here, almost looks like a screwgie the way his hand is bent out, but it does not look good. Clearly a Spring Training card with the plain green wall in the background and the red batting practice jersey. This was the first year that Topps made a Stadium Club set. It was their answer to the Upper Deck set, collectors loved these cards. So many good looking cards in this product, I put together a Cardinals team set back in the day, not sure I was really all that excited about Moyer.
His other Cardinals card comes out of the 1991 Bowman set. Always been a favorite of mine.
Similar looking picture as the Stadium Club card, just switched the color of pants. Still looks like a Spring Training game. Really nothing very special, or noteworthy about this card. The 1991 Bowman set was not a great one for the Cardinals. Lots of different prospects appeared in this set, but the Cardinals had emptied the farm system at the end of 1990 to fill the holes that the Whiteyball Era players who left during free agency created. Cards of Bernard Gilkey, Ray Lankford, and other young stars on the team at that point were early cards, but not rookies. The veterans on the Cardinals, like Pedro Guerrero, were at the ends of their careers, not necessarily too exciting.
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