Classic card of the week

Greg Harris, 1987 Sportsflics

I have good news and bad news. The good news? I found another hologram card. The bad news? There is no bad news.

Before video -- which was invented in 1996, I think -- pitchers could only look at their hologram baseball cards to notice flaws in their delivery. They would sit in the clubhouse with their pitching coach and turn the card every which way and make furious notes about any mechanical flaws. Unfortunately, they would then have to wait until next season’s batch of Sportsflics cards were released to see if they had made any improvements. Even more unfortunately, they would have to wait forever because Sportsflics cards were never released again after 1987 because they were deemed the worst and ugliest and most pointless cards ever produced ever in the history of anything in the world ever.

Luckily for Greg Harris, Sportsflics just confirmed what he already knew -- that Greg Harris was awesome. Perfect form, pitching in front of a packed house for the Texas Rangers, nice follow-through, and ready to field a ground ball back to the pitcher should the batter miraculously make contact. Life doesn’t get any better than what is portrayed in the above hologram. But Sportsflics didn’t just pride itself on mass-producing globs of unintelligible images -- they also provided some player background on the back. Let’s see what they have to say about Greg Harris:



Greg, who is ambidextrous and would love to pitch both ways in a game…

Wait. Hold up. Did I read that correctly? Can’t be. Gotta do more research. Only one person to ask about this -- Mr. Wikipedia. Yep, Greg Harris went pitched both ways.

I’m sorry, but did Sportsflics miss the boat here, or what? It seems to me that the only viable reason to even have a hologram baseball card would be to capture -- if the opportunity were to ever present itself -- a player pitching both right and left-handed. Mortimer Hologram created the hologram for this very reason. Instead, we are left with three images of Greg Harris -- an ambidextrous pitcher -- pitching right-handed.* I can only hope that someone was fired as a result of this.

I mean, do you have any IDEA how badass that is?! According to his Wiki page, Harris eventually did get the chance to pitch both ways in a game, and was successful in doing so. (I need to know if somebody had to run out from the dugout to hand him a different glove.) You should see what I look like when I try to throw a ball left-handed. It’s like I’ve just arrived on earth for the very first time, and somebody handed me a ball and told me to throw it. There is no smoothness of motion whatsoever. One time during a wiffle game a few years ago, I tried to throw a pitch left-handed and the next day I had to have eight Tommy John surgeries. I look like what Johnny Damon looks like when he throws left-handed. Anyhoo, Greg Harris is the best. The end.

Did you know?
Greg Harris was a stunt-double during the sword-fighting scenes of "The Princess Bride."

*You are going to have to take my word for it that this card features three images of a Greg Harris pitch delivery. Amazingly, this stupid card did not scan as well as I had hoped. Also, it is 13 inches thick and destroyed my scanner.