I Love The 1990s Cardinals Part 53 - Dmitri Young

This is a nice post about Dmitri Young.  He has had sort of a bad rap amongst Cardinals fans for awhile, but I really do not see what people have against the guy.  The man collects baseball cards and at one point Dmitri also had one of the most incredible baseball card collections out there before he cashed out 2.5 million dollars.

The Roberto Clemente rookie in his hand sold $400K alone, which is ridiculous, but if he got someone to pay that much good for Dmitri.

A little bit longer post today for my 1990s Cardinals post.  I like Dmitri even if Cardinals do not like always like him.  

Back to baseball.  The Cardinals have finished in last place once over the last 70 or 80 years.  It has not happened much, but I am not in the mood to go look it up at the moment.  The one time it has happened in modern baseball times was in 1990.  Whitey Herzog quit in the middle of the year, so did Terry Pendleton.  The team even traded long time fixture Willie McGee to the A's to bolster their playoff run.  Hot mess.

The Cardinals had the fourth overall pick and used it on 17 year old Oxnard, California high schooler Dmitri Young.  He was on USA Today's All-American High School baseball team and had received a scholarship to baseball at Miami.

Dmitri had some big numbers at several of his stops along through the Cardinals Minor League system.  In his first full season in the Minors he hit .310 with 14 home runs and 36 doubles in A-Ball with the Springfield Cardinals.  Later, when he reached Triple A Louisville, he hit .333 with 15 home runs, 31 doubles, and even managed to swipe 16 bases.  Won the batting title.

Young was not without his controversies before reaching St. Louis.  Namely, he went after a fan in the stands while he was playing for the Arkansas Travelers, who were the Cardinals Double A team at the time of the incident.

From the Los Angeles Times:

Young spoke about this incident a few times during his career, while he would have handled the situation differently, it definitely hurt his relationship with the Cardinals and some fans in St. Louis.  I still collected a few of his Minor League cards.  Probably one of my first times every dealing with a product outside of the usual Major League Baseball products in the early 1990s was tracking down a few Dmitri Young cards  

I have a few favorites.  

I think the 1994 Upper Deck Minor League card is my favorite.  The most professional looking of all his Minor League cards in my opinion and I love the action shot.  Dmitri Young actually spent the majority of his time in the Minors playing third base and left field.  The Cardinals dabbled with him at first base in the Minors, but did not play him extensively at that position until his second stint at Triple A in 1996.  

I'm just throwing up this Classic Best card because the scan was handy, but Dmitri has a ton of these odd-ballish cards from 1991 and 1992.  He was in the lower Minors and on many of the cards it shows.  The Cardinals must have gone through some phase in the late 1990s where their Minor League teams all wore surplus polyester uniforms or repurposed shirseies from the team store.  

Didn't Pedro Guerrero retire sometime around 1991 or 1992?  

Would not shock me.  There are a few where Dmitri Young is just wearing a slugger bird logo shirt.  

The Cardinals ditched this logo in 1992, but it's all over their Minor League cards from that era.  Old man Busch was saving himself some money, also not putting anything on the team store on clearance.

Dmitri ended up getting called up by the Cardinals at the end of the 1996 season, just in time for the team's Postseason run.  They were not supposed to make the playoffs the first season that LaRussa managed the team, let alone get within a game of the World Series.  Dmitri did not contribute much during the final weeks of the season, nor during the first part of the National League playoffs.  However, he had a huge hit in Game 4 of the National League Championship Series to give the Cardinals a 3-1 lead in the Series against the defending World Series Champions.  

It was one of the few good moments from a frustrating National League Championship Series.  Card companies seemed to magically remember that Dmitri Young was around and was going to get playing time the following season.  Really the only season where he had a full slate of Cardinals cards turned out to be 1997.  

Best card.....

is from Collector's Choice because they gave him a highlights card for hitting that triple in the National League Championship Series.  The front picture is from the actual hit. The back of the card.....

very well done by Upper Deck.  

A few more.  Bowman gave him an autograph card.  He also had one in the Donruss Signature set, but the Bowman is a little bit nicer looking in my opinion....

It is also a little harder to find and will cost you $3 instead of $2.  That's without shipping.  A few more recognizable brands.  Donruss gave him a Rookie Diamond Kings.  Not the same as just a regular Diamond Kings card, but they were not making the Rated Rookie cards at this point.  

Almost all of the rest of the Dmitri Young cards from 1997 came from the Pinnacle brands.  I am pretty sure that had a photographer show up for infield/batting practice one day, and they came up with photos for every Dmitri Young card for the rest of that season.  

Pinnacle Inside......

Blue road practice jersey with a red turtleneck in Candlestick Park.  

Candlestick Park, Blue jersey, red turtleneck.  Look, Dmitri wears Nikes.  

New Pinnacle, was like New Coke in many ways, and apparently used recycled pictures that were just cropped a little differently the photos used for other card products.  

Cannot quite see his batting gloves in this picture.  

Finally a Fleer Ultra to close out 1997.  

Good picture of Dmitri playing first base, which is what he did most of the time during the 1997 until the end of July.  His first full season in the Majors was a disappointment.  He never did show any of the pop, nor drive in his swing that made him one of the better players in the Minor Leagues.  

The Cardinals needed offense and they ended up trading for A's first baseman Mark McGwire.  He was a free agent to be, but had spent the majority of his career playing for Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa and the front office was convinced they could sign him if they got him to play a few months in St. Louis.  

McGwire hit and ended up signing a contract with the Cardinals.  Dmitri Young was traded to the Reds for washed up reliever Jeff Brantley.  He still appeared on a few early 1998 releases as a member of the Cardinals.....

Dmitri seemed like a guy who needed a change of scenery early on with the Cardinals.  Not usually the way things go in St. Louis.  Add in the fact that the Cardinals got hosed on the trade by an in division rival, and I think that has added to some of the negativity around the legacy of Dmitri Young according to Cardinals fans.  

In a curious twist to the Cardinals trading him to the Reds during the 1997 off-season, he was actually selected by the Devil Rays during the expansion draft and traded back to the Reds.  He did not have many cards in 1998.  However, his first season in Cincinnati was a huge success that made him a regular in sets for most of his playing career.  

Dmitri played four years for the Reds and never hit less than .300 and had an on-base percentage of .353 during that four year span.  

He also spent five years with the Tigers and managed to still hit even though he was frequently the only quality bat in their lineup.  In 2003, he made the American League All-Star team, almost hit 30 home runs, and had a .909 OPS.  The Tigers lost 119 games.  It was statistically his best season as a professional player.  

He ended his career by playing the Nationals during the 2007 and 2008 seasons.  Dmitri was only 34 years old when he retired from baseball.  During his last two seasons with the Nationals he hit .310/.382/.469 and even made the National League All-Star team in 2007.  He became a fan favorite of sorts with the Nationals, who were in their early days in Washington.  Dmitri Young had talked about trying to make a comeback at one point, but he stayed retired.  

Very nice career overall.  I have always been convinced that if he stayed in St. Louis, he would have never had the career that he had playing for the Reds and Tigers.  While Cardinals fans can grade Dmitri Young rather harshly at times, but there are much worse things that can happen with high draft picks than having a 13 year career with a few All-Star Game appearances.  

A Venerable Old Card Part 53

At some point this fall a co-worker of mine had asked me about trying to track down a few Alvin Morman cards.  He works somewhere in these parts I guess, so I ventured into my card closet searching for something belonging to the former Major League reliever.  I managed to track down a few cards, but along the way I found a mess of Upper Deck Minors sets from the early and mid 1990s which were all jumbled into two 800 count boxes with little rhyme or reason.

The Alvin Morman card from the 1994 Upper Deck Minors set is pretty sweet.....

but this card is not the main topic of my post for the evening.

I have had a lot of other baseball card projects that came before sorting out those two boxes, but I eventually got around to them a few weeks back.  In sorting out the boxes of Upper Deck Minors I was able to piece together almost the entire run of sets that UD put out with Minor Leaguers.  There are lots of good former Major Leaguers in those sets and plenty of other good prospect names which didn't quite make it.  Just like any Minor League product.

There was one card in those two boxes which really stood out as I was sorting which belonged to a Durham Bulls player.  I didn't even remember Upper Deck putting hologram cards into the Minors products, but they were in the box..  This was my favorite......

It's hard to get the hologram picture on the scans of these Upper Deck cards, but it comes through enough that you can tell its Chipper running back on a pop up.  I really like the picture in the foreground with the dark batting helmet and the Texas Tan belt.  The Bulls ditched both of these in favor of blue at some point in the mid 1990s.  There are plenty of Chipper Jones cards in a Bulls uniform, but this one has a totally different appearance than the other handful of cards featuring the future Hall of Famer during his time in Durham.  

These Prospect Holograms were in the 1992  Upper Deck Minors set, and while they never made another appearance in the product, I think that they were probably an influence on Upper Deck's 1993  Then & Now Hologram cards.  

These were some of my favorite early 1990s insert cards.  They don't necessarily have the value, or popularity as cards like the Donruss Elite inserts, but I love the look of these cards.  Now that I know there are Minor League hologram cards I will have to find some more of these cards.  

A Venerable Old Card Part 7

There were some really cool Minor League sets that were put out during the 1990s.  There were still Bowman cards, but they were pretty much the same as today with Minor League players wearing Major League uniforms.  Still, other brands of cards actually had pictures of Minor Leaguers in Minor League uniforms.  There are a lot of minor card companies, like Classic, that put out some of these sets, but some of the best cards actually came from Upper Deck.

Just like the Pro Debut set, or Heritage Minor Leagues set does the job to day for Minor League collectors, the Upper Deck Minor League sets were there 1990s equivalent.  I'd liken the Upper Deck sets more towards the Pro Debut set just simply based on the fact that Upper Deck used the same design for their Minor League set each year as they did for their regular base set.

Like all things that are in a Minor League set, there are plenty of duds in these sets.  Guys who never made it to the Majors, but they still have a baseball card.  Still cool I imagine if you had a Minor League team to follow when these sets were put out.  I was still living in St. Louis at the time, so I was really into collecting the Cardinals and whoever appealed to me at the moment.  I did not really touch the Minor League set until I moved to North Carolina and got into watch some of the local teams.

I like flipping back through the sets to find Major Leaguers.   There are some Durham Bulls in there too, but one of my favorite players from these sets resides with the Cardinals.  The team had drafted this kid out of high school with the fourth overall selection in the 1991 draft.  He was supposed to be one of the next stars for the Cardinals.  Here's his 1994 Upper Deck Minors card.....

Dmitri never really stuck around with the Cardinals.  He had a great 1996 in the Minors, got called up at the end of the season, and had a big hit in the Postseason.  Dmitri kind of disappeared in 1997 and ended up getting traded at the end of the season when the Cardinals picked up Mark McGwire from the A's.  Da Meat Hook went on to have a solid, not spectacular, baseball career.  More importantly, Dmitri is also a pretty big baseball card collector.  Had a few nice cards back in the day before he auctioned them off.