Baseball card stories from Brent Mayne

Brent Mayne caught for fifteen years in the major leagues, mostly for the Kansas City Royals. Since his retirement, he has become a successful catching instructor with his own website, brentmayne.com, and is author of the popular book The Art of Catching. He kindly shared some great baseball card stories with me.

"I don't have any real favorite cards of myself. Maybe the first one, my rookie Topps or Score cards just because they were my first. I do have a couple cards I don't like though, mostly because I don't like the way I look in them. (I sound like a girl, huh?)

I used to collect cards up until my soph or junior year of high school. Then I just stopped. I think I pawned a good many of them to buy fishing rods or guitars or surfboards. I did have a pretty decent collection of cards going deep into the mid fifties Ted Williams, Mantle, Clemente, etc cards.

My best baseball card story deals with the one below. It's a card of me getting angry at umpire Terry Craft. I can't recall what the disagreement was all about, but I remember Terry coming up to me the next year begging me for a bunch of the cards. He wanted to have them as HIS baseball card! In reality, I guess it's just as much his as it is mine."

Thanks! This game was August 1, 1992 against Oakland (the only day game at KC that year in which Mayne caught and Craft was a base umpire) and it was a wild one - five batters were hit by pitches and two Royals pitchers, Hipolito Pichardo and Steve Shifflett, were ejected. This picture was presumably taken after one of the ejections. KC won despite the ejections, 8-4, in part due to Mayne's two runs scored.