A favorite card of a favorite player

Peter at Baseball Every Night is holding a contest where he wants bloggers to write a post about their favorite card of their favorite player. I found this to be a really tough challenge. I am not a person to generally have "favorites". This made me think about the question, "What is my favorite baseball card?" I had never asked myself that before and I really don't have an answer. I couldn't even tell you what my favorite set is. There are things I like about all of my cards.

Favorite player is a little easier, but even then there are several contenders. I've posted a lot of Don Mattingly cards lately and didn't want to go back to that well. Mike Pagliarulo was my favorite when I was a kid but no single card of his jumped out at me. Later on Alfonso Soriano was the first (and last) player I was excited enough by to purchase a shirt with his name and number on the back. (Never again - a few weeks after buying that shirt the Yankees traded him to Texas for A-Rod.)

I have another favorite player, though, and was able to think of a good card for him. In 1995, the first postseason Yankees team in my memory, there were three players who were absolute must-sees every time they stepped to the plate. One was Don Mattingly. One was Peter's guy, Darryl Strawberry. And the third was Ruben Sierra, who had a dynamic swing and was a huge power threat and gave the team a big lift that year. And a card immediately came to mind for him. Summit was a short-lived Pinnacle set that had really beautiful foil parallels. I have two cards from the 1996 foil set, one is Bernie Williams (another favorite) and one is this great Sierra card: