1996 Seattle Mariners Interstitial: Baseball Cards Photographed by Randy Johnson

I never got much into baseball cards as a kid. We always had them around because there was a card shop down the street and my brother and I liked to wander down there and buy a pack to put in the spokes of our bicycles. It was the junk wax era, it was fine.

Most of my collection was bought during high school, when I was ridiculously obsessed with anything Mariners related. I’d walk from school over to the original DJ’s Sportscards location and buy up all the cheap Mariners cards. I remember selecting an Alvin Davis and DJ asked me if I remembered the guy who played first base before him. I had to tell him that I was 2 when Alvin Davis won the Rookie of the Year. It was the first time I grasped the power of youths to make adults feel old. DJ’s has since needed more space and moved to the location of the old Renton Department of Licensing. It’s strange to browse cards in the same place you took your driving test, but I guess feeling old comes full circle in weird ways.

Due to a relative's age and age-related ailments, my husband recently came into a large collection of cards; huge bins upon huge bins are currently stacked in our dining room. Despite the circumstances around their arrival, it has been really fun to slowly go through the cards. It will surprise no one that I like the old stuff the best, and there are cards going back to the 1950s. I've found that I don’t have much affinity for the “good” cards; I much prefer the cards of the “remember some guys” guys, the cards collected from cereal boxes and other random places, and anything with a fun twist.

Which brings us to some delightful cards with a fun Mariners twist.

As you may remember from Part 3 of the 1996 Mariners, Randy Johnson was photographing players for a special card set for Pinnacle, filling his time while he was unable to pitch with a back injury. He had long been a photographer, and studied photojournalism while he played baseball at the University of Southern California. In Seattle, he became friends with a number of musicians in the Seattle music scene and was frequently out photographing concerts.

In fact, his photography was part of what made him my first favorite player. My dad brought back a few baseball magazines for me from a trip back east in the early 90s. One of them had a profile of Randy Johnson. It featured an old picture he’d taken, one of his favorites, of a car nose down in a dumpster. He said he was walking around with his camera, saw the car, and had to take a picture. This was incredibly cool to me, so that, along with the wild and scary way he pitched, forever endeared him to me.

It sounds like the agreement with Pinnacle was in place before his injury and Randy had planned to work on his side hustle on the days he wasn't pitching, taking pictures of opposing players in their home stadiums while the Mariners were on the road. But, until he was able to travel, he settled for shooting Kingdome visitors. Randy said that the opposing players were excited to pose for him, although he wondered, "Maybe they'll think they have to or I'll remember when they come to the plate against me."1 The plan was to shoot 40 players and Pinnacle would decide which photos and cards to include in the set.

Before I wrote Part 3, I spent a lot of time scouring the internet for the cards he photographed, hoping the set actually happened. I didn’t find the right combination of search terms to bring those forward among all the other Randy Johnson baseball cards. But when I put the request to Bluesky after Part 3 was posted, I was rewarded when someone else tracked them down. Thank you to Matt Black for pointing me in the right direction!

As he began the project, Randy shared the visions he had for a few of the cards2 and I was excited to see that many of them came to fruition. They were released by Pinnacle the following year, in 1997, in a 15-card set called “Pitcher Perfect”.

He said he was going to shoot Alex Rodriguez reading a “Superboy” comic book, and he sure did:

Even better, Rodriguez was a huge fan of Cal Ripken Jr. Alex had Cal’s poster in his room growing up and looked to Cal as his baseball inspiration. To match the “Superboy” card, Randy obviously had to give Cal a “Superman” comic:

To top it off, he shot them reading their comics together:

He also mentioned having Edgar Martinez carrying around a golf bag filled with bats. He ended up with Edgar working on a bat:

He also photographed Ken Griffey Jr., exactly matching the vision he shared:

There are some standard pictures of sluggers posing with their bats. Mo Vaughn stands in the Kingdome dugout, gazing toward the Kingdome batter’s box where he was sure to destroy a Mariner pitcher. Mark McGwire grins, holding both ends of his bat in the Oakland Coliseum. Ivan Rodriguez half crouches in his catcher’s gear while holding a bat, symbolic of the many ways he attacked the American League. Frank Thomas is shot from below, emphasizing how intimidating he was to opposing pitchers.

Then, I got to Will Clark, posing with foot up on the stairs of the Texas dugout wearing a cowboy hat and boots:

And Chili Davis breaking a bat over his knee and roaring!

But the best card of all was Tim Salmon. He poses in uniform in front of the B-roll of every nationally-televised Seattle sporting event, the salmon stalls at the Pike Place Market, and holds a salmon in his glove:

Perfect.

I’d love to see the outtakes because the whole set is really great. It’s fun to get a photographer and cards that carry a sense of humor and whimsy. I think Randy Johnson's sense of humor isn't appreciated enough, and it is fully showcased in these cards.

I'm trying to resist the call of collecting more baseball cards. There are plenty for a lifetime inside my house already. But when you run into a set like this, how can you resist?

Notes

1. "Doubles by Martinez Start to Get Monotonous." The Seattle Times, May 30, 1996: D5.
2. LaRue, Larry. "Mariners Update: Johnson Focuses In On Other Passion." The News Tribune, May 30, 1996: C5.