Andre Dawson 1986 Topps

On June 4, 2016, I received the above card from the Baseball Card Bandit. That day, I wrote this on Facebook:

After about a week of hiding, the Baseball Card Bandit reappears with Hall of Famer and subject of an awkward rhyme: Awesome Andre Dawson. (Awesome and Dawson don't rhyme.)

Anyway, what the BBC doesn't know is that I witnessed Dawson's 400th homer in person as a young college lad. The Hawk and I are connected via round numbers.

For a long time, I’m not so sure if it’s true now, the mantra for every comic book writer was something to the effect of, this issue could be someone’s first issue, so you have to explain everything. This is why if you binge read a collection of comics from the 60s, 70s or 80s, it seems incredibly repetitive. Plots are retold, powers and secret identities are re-explained and things don’t seem to really get going until page 5 or 6. They didn’t want to lose readers.

The same mantra should have been uttered by baseball card photographers during those times too. Andre Dawson was an incredibly exciting player who happened to play in baseball Siberia: Montreal. It was dark, dreary and growing up an American League city, I didn’t get to see them play that much because the Expos were rarely on Saturday’s Game of the Week*.

** The wasn’t exactly true. Since there once was a high population of French Canadians that settled in my town, Amesbury’s cable company (this was before there were three or four national cable providers, most towns had their own little mom and pop operation so channels varied widely from town-to-town) had a Montreal station as part of its basic package. The entire channel was in French and not only did they show those terrible old Marvel Comics cartoons from the 1960s dubbed in French, but they also ran Canadiens games and once in a while, Expos games. I would never watch the games though, for some reason seeing the quality of the broadcast combined with the French language, freaked me out. I’d change the channel immediately. Other than that, I do remember in 1987 when the Expos were on NBC’s Saturday Game of the Week. Tim Raines was making his return to the Expos lineup after being held out of games for a month. Back then, if you were a free agent and didn’t sign with your team by mid-January (I think), you weren’t allowed to negotiate with your team until May 1. Which is a fucking insane rule, but with owner collusion (they all decided not to sign free agents) and this rule, Raines wasn’t able to rejoin the Expos until the beginning of May. The day he returned, he destroyed Mets pitching going 4-4 and hitting a grand slam in the top of the tenth inning. He was awesome.

Damn, that was a long detour. Anyway, the point was this baseball card sucks. It’s Dawson, without a hat in a blue practice jersey in front of a blue wall. He looks like a regular dude just sitting around. When I first pulled this card from a pack, I hated it. It’s boring and I never heard of him before, which meant that Andre Dawson must not have been very good. I was incredibly wrong. Dawson didn’t suck, he was actually incredibly good. I just didn’t get it then.

Like Raines, Dawson was part of that 1986-87 free agent class of players who were found by a court to be unlawfully colluded against. Aside from Raines, Red Sox catcher Rich Gedman was in the May 1 situation, and it seemed as if he never bounced back from not having a spring training that year. He was terrible in 1987, worse in 88 and was relegated to a backup for the rest of his career. As a two-time All Star in 1985 and 86, this was an ignominious way to end his career. But unlike Gedman and Raines, Dawson didn’t wait until May 1 to return to the Expos. Unlike fellow free agent, Jack Morris, he didn’t crawl back to his old club and accepted whatever pittance they gave him.

Dawson believed in himself and knew that he was getting screwed, so he did what he felt was best: he went to the Chicago Cubs and basically said, “I need to get off of the turf in Montreal (it completely destroyed his knees) and I want to play for the Cubs. Here is a blank contract, fill it in for what you think I’m worth and then we’ll renegotiate.” The Cubs were over a barrel here, on one hand the team felt that they had to be loyal to the rest of the owners but on the other hand, they were terrible and Dawson was practically giving himself to them. They settled on a $500,000 contract plus bonuses if he played well.

Dawson played out of his mind in 1987.  He led the National League in home runs with 49 and runs batted in with 137 (this is when people gave a shit about RBIs). Writers were so impressed that despite finishing in dead last place, Andre Dawson won the National League’s Most Valuable Player. And he only made $700,000. The following offseason, the Cubs signed him to a much better contract and all was right with the world. Aside from the homers, the one thing that I remember most about Dawson is when he got drilled in the face by Padres pitcher Eric Show. Sports Illustrated captured the picture and put it on that week's cover:

From what I remember Eric Show was a bit of a prick.  He hit Dawson on purpose because the Hawk had hit three homers in five at bats against San Diego. Seems like a good reason to break a guy's cheek bone. But according to Wikipedia, Show was busted using meth a few years later. So, there may have been a reasons for this. 

After his seasons in Chicago, he went to the Red Sox where he played on some truly terrible teams before ending up going home to his native Florida and playing out the string as a Marlin. By the time he played for those two organizations, he was in his late 30s. Age and injuries robbed these fans of seeing the vibrancy of a young Andre Dawson, instead he plodded along occasionally hitting a homer, trying to fight the inevitable one at bat at a time.

Andre Dawson had a fantastic career, he slugged over 400 homers, stole over 300 bases, and had a career OPS+ of 119. He ended up getting the call to the Hall of Fame in 2010 and he’s widely considered one of the all-time great outfielders. But there are always the questions of what if that plague him. What if he didn’t play in Montreal? What if he didn’t play 81 games on the turf of Olympic Stadium?

When he was younger, Andre Dawson was amazing. He could run, he could hit for power and average, he had a plus arm and was a tremendous defender. By playing in Montreal and especially on the “turf” (which seemed to be green-painted concrete) Dawson’s knees were brutalized. He was always hurt, or when he was “healthy” he spent hours icing his knees and legs to make sure that he was ready to go the next day.

Imagine if Dawson played his entire career in a big baseball mecca like New York or Chicago or Los Angeles? More people would know the Hawk and dopey kids in Amesbury, Massachusetts wouldn’t look at his baseball card and immediately assume that he stunk based only on a terrible photo.