Ask most baseball fans these days what a WHIP is, and they’ll instant blurt out it’s the ratio of walks and hits per innings pitched. But in 2001, before the major boon in fantasy baseball, apparently few people knew what it was, and Fleer set out to tell us.  

Take a look at this 2001 Fleer Platinum Randy Johnson card. It’s a “Chart Toppers” subset that honors the leaders in certain categories. And here Johnson is being honored for leading the National League in WHIP.  

One problem though: Fleer never actually tells us what Randy’s WHIP was. On the reverse of the card they give us the top five NL pitchers in the category and tell us how many walks Randy gave up in 2001, yet no where to be found is the actual ratio.   Shame on Fleer.

For the record, Randy led the league with a 1.01 WHIP. Which is crazy good. Unless of course you compare that to his 2004 line in which he compiled a mere 0.90 WHIP over 245 innings. Damn, that’s insane.

This entry was posted on October 13, 2008 at 11:15 am and is filed under Card of the Day with tags Arizona Diamond Backs, baseball, baseball cards, Card of the Day, cards, crazy good, Fleer, Hall of fame, league leader, pitchers, Randy Johnson, sports, stats, WHIP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.