Random Topps Card of the Day: 1989 Topps #774 Ron Oester

Thanks to the Topps Card Randomizer, introducing the Random Topps Card of the Day for Saturday, June 21, 2014:

• Official Card Set Name and Card Number: 1989 Topps #774.
• Player Name, position, team: Ron Oester, second baseman, Cincinnati Reds.
• Major League Debut: September 10, 1978.
• Last Line of Statistics: 1982 stats (Reds): 151 G, 549 AB, 63 R, 143 H, 19 2B, 4 3B, 9 HR, 47 RBI, 5 SB, .359 SLG, 35 BB, 82 SO, .260 AVG.
• Any special information about player: Drafted by the Reds #9th, June 1974. Bats: both. Throws: right.
• Number of regular Topps Cards (includes regular and traded cards only): 11. This is his tenth Topps card.
• Blurb on the back: "Ron enjoyed a 21-game hitting streak in 1984."
• Commentary: It's hard to believe, but it's been 25 years since the 1989 season of baseball card collecting was turned upside-down by the introduction of a fifth card company. From 1981 through 1987, Topps, Donruss, and Fleer were vying for people's Hobby dollars. In 1988, Score, with it's colored card backs, joined the fray. And then, 1989 happened. Upper Deck launched their first card product, and the Hobby, for better or worse, has never been the same since. Now it's 2014, all of the other companies are either gone entirely or are still making baseball cards, but on a lesser scale. In he meantime, Topps is using the 1989 design as one of the four featured "sets" for it's Topps Archives product, and then of course, the eponymous set has die-cut, mini card versions of the 1989 design (imagine if you took your 1989 Topps cards and then cut them along the colored borders, and voila!) as inserts. Too bad Topps couldn't figure out how to center the player's names within the colored team name in Archives. It looks goofy to see the names beginning all the way on the left and then have so much empty space on the right. Ronald John Oester's 1983 Topps card was previously featured as Random Card back on May 10, 2013, and I remember blabbing on about imagining if teams consisted of players who actually lived in the city? It seemed like every native Cincinnatian wound up playing for the Reds at one point in their lives or another. And second baseman Oester was no exception. He wound up playing his entire career for his home-town team, and in 1989, Oester hit for a .246 average with 1 home run, drove in 14 runs, and played nearly flawless defense at both second and short. In his last season in the majors, Oester and the Reds shocked the world by beating the heavily favored Athletics in the World Series.
• Lo-Hi Beckett value: $0.01-$0.05.
• How many cards of this player do I own?: 14.

Tomorrow is Retro Sunday, the one day of the week that we feature a card from 1951-1975. The card we will feature tomorrow is: 1959 Topps #490. Come back at 1:00 PM CST to see who (or what) it is.

Sincerely,

JayBee Anama