1987 Fleer Cliff Johnson #231

1987 Fleer Cliff Johnson, card number 231. He looks like a friendly walrus, doesn't he?

Back of Cliff Johnson's 1987 Fleer card.

Bill James wrote of Cliff Johnson in the 2001 edition of his Historical Baseball Abstract that if someone would have made Johnson a DH/first baseman from the very beginning of his career, he would have hit 500 home runs. That might be stretching it, but James’ estimation says something about Johnson’s prodigious power. 

The first Cliff Johnson baseball card I remember getting was his 1975 Topps card. Unbeknownst to me, it was his rookie card. I found it, as I found so many of the baseball cards from my childhood, rooting through the 1970’s commons at Shinder’s. If you didn’t grow up in the Twin Cities, let me explain Shinder’s to you. It was a store that sold newspapers, magazines, comic books, baseball cards, and other collectibles. (And they had an “adult” section in the back of the store!) Shinder’s had several locations throughout the Twin Cities, but the one I frequented most was the Richfield location off of 70^th Street and France Avenue. (Technically off of Hazelton Road, but 70^th was the other cross street.) I spent many, many hours there as a youngster in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. My Dad could at least buy tobacco for his pipe there, but I’m pretty sure it drove my Mom batty to wait as I examined the huge stack of cards and tried to remember if I already had a 1977 Bob Forsch or not. 

I liked the bright colors of the 1975 Topps set, and I was always partial to crazy uniforms, which means there are a fair amount of Houston Astros cards from the 1970’s and 1980’s in my collection. So, I purchased Cliff Johnson’s 1975 card, for 10 cents or however much it was, and took it home with me. Eventually I wanted to transfer Cliff’s card from the plastic sleeve it was in to a sleeve in a binder. Shinder’s put tape over the top of the sleeves their cards came in, which I would cut off with a scissors. Usually no problem, but there wasn’t much room in this sleeve between the top of the card and the tape, so I tried to cut the side of the sleeve. Big mistake. I ended up trimming the side of Cliff’s card pretty badly. (I’m happy I didn’t know it was his rookie card at the time!) Oops. 

So that was my introduction to Cliff Johnson, and he gradually became a familiar presence to me in the commons box at Shinder’s. Johnson also played just long enough to make it into all three of the 1987 baseball card sets. As anyone who grew up in the 1980’s will tell you, 1987 was the year that baseball cards achieved perfection, with the iconic Topps woodgrains, the awesome blue Fleers, and the Donruss that had baseballs in the middle of the card borders. (I’m being perhaps a little sarcastic about the perfection of 1987 baseball cards, but for a lot of folks in my generation, these sets were the ones that really started us on our collecting adventures.) 

Johnson’s 1987 Fleer card is a pretty great one. I really enjoy the 1980’s cards where you get a triple dose of the team logo-on the hat, the jersey, and the card itself. I love that Blue Jays logo, and I’m happy they’ve gone back to a very similar variation of it, after ditching it for much of the decade of the 2000’s. It’s just a classic, perfect logo. It tells you all the information you need to know: there’s a Blue Jay, they play baseball, and the maple leaf tells you they’re Canadian. 

Cliff Johnson was one of those players who took a long time to find his way in baseball. It wasn’t his fault; it was more like teams couldn’t figure out what to do with him. Johnson only exceeded 400 plate appearances in four of his seasons in the majors, and the first time wasn’t until 1980, his age 32 season. He still put up four seasons of 20+ home runs and ended up with 196 longballs for his career.

When Johnson was with the New York Yankees in 1979, he famously got into a locker room fight with closer Goose Gossage. Gossage ended up with a sprained thumb and missed almost three months of the season. Not surprisingly, Johnson was traded to the Cleveland Indians before Gossage came back from his injury. 

The 1987 Fleers offered some interesting information on the back of the cards. Hitters were classified as “dead pull hitters,” whatever that was, “singles hitters,” “spray hitters,” which we all knew was just another term for “singles hitters,” and “power hitters.” Cliff Johnson was a power hitter. You had to respect that, since power hitter was clearly the best of the four categories Fleer had delineated. With his mustache and grin on this card, Johnson looked like a friendly walrus. On the cards where he’s not smiling, he looks like a grumpy walrus, and not someone you’d like to get into a locker room tussle with. He’s also listed as 6’4” on his baseball cards, another good reason to stay away from the walrus if he looks grumpy. 

By the time the 1987 baseball cards were released, Cliff Johnson’s career had come to an end. He was granted free agency after the 1986 season ended, but no one signed him. I wonder if he might have been a victim of the collusion scandal of the mid 1980’s that saw owners conspiring to keep free agent signings to a minimum. Of course, it might have simply been that Johnson was a 39-year-old DH/pinch hitter, and no one was interested in signing him for 1987. As a power hitter who walked frequently, Cliff Johnson would fit well in baseball in 2019. Hopefully teams now would know where to play him.