On the surface, it seems like an odd choice for me to be a
Brien Taylor super-collector. First off, he was a Yankee – among my most
despised of teams. Second off, why bother? He topped out at AA and is remember
mostly as one of the biggest flops in Major League history.
To the second point, the latter sentence informs the former.
As for the Yankees thing, well, that only makes his story all the more
interesting. In fact, I’d say that Taylor is easily among the most fascinating
ballplayers of my lifetime, with a rise and fall that has few parallels. And
for the card collector of my age – turning ten years old as Taylor-mania
overtook the card world in 1992 – his cardboard carries an sense of import that
can only be realized by those who lived through that era.
Brien Taylor was nearly a perfect fit for carddom in the
early 1990s. The rookie card craze of the 1980s had led to major changes in how
card-makers approached their products. Upper Deck had the foresight to open
their debut set in 1989 with a string of rookie cards – a significant symbolic
move in a time when rookies were still mostly limited to the high numbers. That same year, in a rare bold move, Topps introduced the “#1 Draft Pick”
subset, a series of ten top picks featured on Major League cards in their
amateur uniforms. When Jim Abbott became that year’s stud rookie, Topps’ gambit
proved worthwhile and the company issued ten more #1 Draft Pick cards in 1990.
Score, in their 1990 release, topped Topps by issuing 22 first round draft
cards and Upper Deck included a card of top pick Ben McDonald in their base
set.
For 1991, Upper Deck featured a number of top picks in their
base set as well, including future Hall of Famer Chipper Jones. Bowman was also
into the draft picks game by now and collectors had shown themselves very eager
to invest in players well before they had been able to prove themselves as
professionals.
And into this enter Brien Taylor, a dirt-poor North
Carolina lefty who remains to this day one of the greatest amateur pitchers of
all-time. And enter the New York Yankees, the most decorated team in MLB
history, who had just puked up a 67-95 1990 season that landed them the first
pick in the 1991 amateur draft. With Taylor the consensus for the top
choice, it was a match made for maximum hype. Before he’d even signed his pro
contract, he was being billed as the Next Great Yankee. When he held out for a
record contract, the hype meter blew apart.
Topps – just 11 years removed from having exclusive domain
on baseball cards – was by 1992 in an ultra-competive marketplace. They’d
finally ditched their grey card stock and introduced the first-ever
parallel set in Topps Gold. And they would score a major coup in signing Taylor
to a unprecedented exclusive contract, giving them the sole right to produce
Major League cards of Taylor while he was still a minor leaguer. Just months
after he signed with the Yankees, Topps announced that an autographed card of
Taylor would be included in their ToppsGold factory sets, which immediately
became brisk sellers at their $350 wholesale price. Dealers sold them to the collecting at $500
and could hardly keep in stock.
Taylor already had cards out on the market at this time,
being included in a few late-year Classic sets in 1991. He had even signed
about 5,000 cards for classic for insertion into random packs, a concept that
was only a few years old at the time. In 1992, the Wall Street Journal reported
that Score Board, Classic’s parent company, had paid Taylor $250,000 for
the right to produce his 1991 cards. But many collectors, even those who has
accepted Topps/Score/Upper Deck draft cards as legit rookies, were bit wary of
Classic, who showed Taylor in his high school uni, or a blank jersey top, or
even in street clothes. They wanted the REAL THING. And before the 1992
baseball season even started, Taylor’s Topps card – which was the first Topps
draft card to show a player in his MLB uniform – was selling for $5. A Stadium
Club card issued in a collector’s set early that year was selling for twice
that. And his signed ToppsGold cards were selling for hundreds.
So this was what was all around me as a ten-year-collector,
hopelessly unable to afford any Taylor cards and not lucky enough to hit one in
a pack. On the field, Taylor showed a lot of promise, fanning 187 batters in
191 innings at class A Fort Lauderdale with 2.57 ERA. But he had been burdened
– especially in the card world where investors were expecting to make a
fast killing on his cards – with hype that could only be realized by opening the
1993 season in pinstripes. Instead, he opened the year at AA and stayed there
all season. He pitched well, especially for a 21-year-old, but Dwight Gooden
already had a Cy Young and a World Series title at 21. The hype faded, his card
prices sank, and – overwhelmed with product for a AA pitcher who was supposed to
be the exclusive property of Topps (Fleer, Classic, and Upper Deck were all
permitted to issue minor league cards of Taylor), collectors began to lose
interest.
Then, in December 1993, Taylor got into what must be the
most infamous trailer park brawl in pro sport history. While the details on the
case are still unclear, Taylor got into a fight defending his brother and blew
out his shoulder in the melee. He missed the entire 1994 season, then lingered
at A-ball for four more years before the Yankees released him. In those
seasons he never had an ERA lower than 6.08 and never threw more than 40
innings.
After a flurry of 1994 releases, Taylor’s only 1995 card was
in the Bowman set. It shows him smiling in shorts and the classic Yankees
jersey he seemingly only wore for photo shoots. The man who had driven the
trading card market to the pages of the Wall Street Journal just three years
prior would appear on just one card, a 1996 Norwich Navigators’ team-issue. He
looks tired in the portrait photo.
I started this Taylor collection without even realizing it,
a few years ago, when I picked up one of his signed 1991 Classic cards for a
dollar on eBay. I just couldn’t resist, knowing what that card would have meant
to me as a kid of 10. This past year, bored of the latest rookie hype, I again
went on eBay and scored one of the storied ToppsGold autographs. I paid about $4
for it. The buyer mailed me three of them. When I contacted him to see if this had
been a mistake, he said it was not, telling me that he just wanted to get rid
of them.
This was when I realized I had to go all the way on Brien
Taylor. He is one of the few prominent players of the last 25 years who has an
achievable number of cards in his overall library. Per the Trading Card
Database, they are 106 different Taylor cards. The hardest to find will the
minor league team issues and the spate of unlicensed weirdo cards – a trend
whose peak seemed to match Taylor’s. There have been no retrospective cards or
reissues in the years since his glum Norwich issue. No one seems to want to
revisit his time in Yankees history. Taylor has personally mostly maintained
his privacy since leaving the game. He’s done few interviews and has made news
only when with his legal troubles. He did three years in prison for his role in
a cocaine-trafficking scheme (he was facing 40), and hasn’t been heard much of
since his release, save for MLB draft time when people run down the biggest
busts in draft history.
I currently have 37 Brien Taylor cards in my collection,
with another ten soon to arrive in the mail. This gets me nearly to the half
way point in a Taylor MASTER COLLECTION. And I think I’ll have fun trying to
track down the rest. It’ll make a good binder to page through whenever I get a
flustered with the thousand moving pieces that seem to make up my collection.
As Thomas Gray once wrote, “The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”
