Last week I premiered my TSR custom design for 2013, and J.T. of The Writer’s Journey said he’d like to see some Reds. I’m always willing to suck up to a reader, so I did up a couple this past weekend.
There is no great significance to my choice of subjects; it really came down to photos which worked well with my card design.
…Of course, if you’re making a card of a Red, you can do a lot worse than featuring Johnny Cueto…
I couldn’t resist making this Dusty Baker card…
Dusty is here for two reasons: First to emphasize that Managers have their place in 2013 TSR, but mainly because I really like this photo. I’ve never been able to pull off this level of coolness… No matter what I do, I can’t ditch my generally nerdy demeanor.
If you’d like for me to suck up to you and make a custom of your favorite team or player, just leave me a comment and I’ll see what I can do.
I recently pulled a 2012 Bronson Arroyo out of a pack, which reminded me that I haven’t done an Arroyo Photo Cliché post in a while. Topps was kind enough to give us a leg kick.
I’ve also got two other cards I ran across while organizing…
2006 Allen & Ginter is a portrait… How boring.
2005 Topps Total is a non-leg-kick action shot. Even more boring.
I’ve had this card since I was a kid. In a collection full of 1970’s cards, it was one of the few 1960’s cards I had.
At the time, I thought of Fred Whitfield as “really old”, but it wasn’t until I grew up and looked back on it that I realized that it wasn’t so much about his age as much as how he seemed like he was from another era. The ballplayers I was familiar with were very hairy guys… Long hair, big afros, sideburns, moustache, or some combination of the above. This stern-looking guy with the close-cropped hair and the zippered vest…well, he was not of this Earth.
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This Miguel Tejada card has personal significance, but not in a good way. For sets like Heritage where I bust plenty of wax but don’t try to complete it, I had several criteria I used to make up wantlists after I was done ripping wax. This Tejada was a short print that was on my want list because even though he’s pictured with the A’s, he’d played for the Orioles. Tejada’s a relatively big name and a former Oriole, but I don’t like him and don’t think much of him, and that resulted in a huge case of buyer’s remorse as soon as I pulled this sucker out of the box from COMC. True, I only spent a couple of bucks of COMC credit for it, but it bugs me a little that I could’ve gotten something more enjoyable, even a handful of commons. It was this card that caused me to change my wantlist criteria for Heritage to “Mets, Orioles and players I like”.
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Back in the spring I bought a complete set of 1988 Big Baseball (shelled out all of $5 for it and probably paid too much). I pulled out the cards I wanted, and put the rest in a box headed out the door for parts unknown. This is one of the cards I kept, solely because I like it.
Cory Snyder trying to turn two, Kevin Seitzer trying to stop him, cavernous Cleveland Municipal Stadium as the backdrop, undoubtedly filled with hundreds of screaming fans…
Today is Don Gullett’s birthday. Gullett was a very good pitcher in the 1970’s who – and there’s no insult intended here – wasn’t quite as good as I’d remembered.
Gullett pitched for the “Big Red Machine” Reds and the Yankees from 1970 to 1978, twice lead the league in winning percentage, pitched in three World Series, got Cy Young votes in two seasons, signed a 6-year contract with the Yankees late in 1976, had 100 career wins & a .686 career winning percentage, had a winning record in 8 of his 9 seasons and – because I know most of you will appreciate this – every one of his Topps cards from 1973 to 1980 had a number which ended in either 5 or 0.
Given all that, when I started researching his career I was surprised to find that he’d never won 20 games, had never been named to an All-Star team, never lead the league in anything other than winning percentage, and only pitched 9 Major League seasons because shoulder injuries resulted in his never pitching past the age of 27.
At any rate, his career is nothing to scoff at. He finished his career with a 109-50 record, a 3.11 ERA, and in 1971 he no-hit the Cubs for 7.1 innings.
…and he got two million of George Steinbrenner’s dollars.
Earlier this week I was idly sorting through a box of oversized “I don’t know how to properly store this” stuff, and I ran across my Topps Magazine cards, still in sheet form but long since divorced from the magazines they came in.
I think I subscribed to the first 4 issues of Topps Magazine, but decided that it wasn’t exciting enough for me to re-up… Despite the inclusion of special cards which manage the difficult feat of being uglier than the 1990 Topps design.
While I was looking at this particular set of cards, I couldn’t help but notice that the Jim Palmer photo looked familiar…
…and that’s when I realized it might be from the same photo shoot as this past Sunday’s Hostess Card Of The Week:
Although the Topps Magazine card is a bit washed out, both photos were taken in Yankee Stadium on a partly sunny day, both have the Brut cologne ad on the left, and in both photos Jim Palmer’s hair has an unintended flip on his right.
I don’t have a real point to this, other than “Heyyyyyyyy, lookathis!” Having two similar Jim Palmer photos in the same week was nothing I’d planned, I’m nowhere near that organized… it’s just a serendipitous occurrence (and 25 cents goes in the “Big Word” jar).
Getting back to the 1990 Topps Magazine cards, these are pretty much what you’d expect from 1990 baseball cards. On the first half of the sheet, we’ve got four ubiquitous-for-1990 faces in Bo (Overhyped 2-sport player) Jackson, Nolan Ryan (who had just reached 5000 K’s), Will “The Thrill” Clark and Robin Yount, the AL MVP of the previous season.
The second half of the sheet features the two 1990 Hall Of Fame inductees in Joe Morgan and Jim Palmer, as well as two players who’d been drafted in 1989 and made their Major League debuts that September. Ben McDonald was the first overall draft pick, and went on to have a decent career with the Orioles and Brewers.
John Olerud played for 17 years for a number of teams and had a couple of exceptional seasons where he batted .363 and .354. He’s also notable in that he’s one of those players who went straight to the Major Leagues without making any minor league stops. In fact, he didn’t play in the minors until he did a brief stint with AAA Pawtucket at the end of his career, in what seems to have been an audition for the Red Sox.
Olerud’s card is interesting in that it lists him as both a first baseman and a pitcher, even though I can’t find any evidence of him having pitched in the pros… although he did pitch in college
Last weekend I was jonesing to buy something other than 2012 packs, but the “local” card shop is 25 miles away and the next card show within a 2-hour drive is in… oh, let’s see… April.
I’d read some decent comments about these 100-card repacks, so I figured I’d give it a shot.
I’ve got to say, I was pleased with the surprisingly decent payoff. Don’t get me wrong, this was the biggest “hit” in the repack (and the reason I bought this particular repack):
…but there were a number of cards which I would’ve gladly bought from a dime or quarter box, so I certainly can’t complain.
As you’d expect, there was a fair amount of junk wax, especially late 1980’s Topps and Donruss… but as it worked out, I ended up needing a few of the junk wax cards for sets that I collected at the time, but never quite completed, including The Earl Of Baltimore:
There were also 2-year-old Topps Update cards (also needed)…
…some “premium junk wax”… And I never stop thinking that it was a mistake to put the ‘tail’ underlining the team name in the 1990′s. I doesn’t register much on the grand scale of uniform mistakes, but it looked wrong then, and it looks wrong now.
I also got a needed “junk insert”.
It sounds stupid, but the inclusion of one sole Topps Total card made me very happy… I’m foolish enough to try to complete the 4-year run of Total (2002 down, 3 more to go), and I don’t run across Total very often in my travels, so it was cool to get a card I wanted, even if it’s just for Juan Castro.
What surprised me most is that I didn’t get many of the “filler sets” that so often clog these repacks, like Upper Deck X or Documentary.
I also got an unopened pack of 1988 Score, another set which I never quite completed. I’ll open this pack in another post.
For the $4 spent, I could’ve bought a pack of Chrowman Bome and gotten absolutely nothing I wanted, or picked up yet another tedious “heroes beating the snot out of other heroes” issue of Marvel’s Avengers. I think I did pretty damn good in terms of entertainment and filling my needs.
At this point, I’d like to wish a happy Thanksgiving to all; I hope that everybody gets to spend a relaxing and enjoyable day with their family and friends.
There’s so much to love about this card… The obvious non-game situation, the photo tilted so that Shea seems about to slip into Flushing Bay, the name-on-back stretching from one armpit to the other.
In 1979, the year this Hostess card is from, Dave won a Gold Glove and was an All-Star, batting .281 and getting 84 RBI while playing shortstop. The Reds went 90-71 and won the NL West, but got swept in the NLCS by the “We Are Family” Pirates.
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It’s Sunday, and time for Weigh-In #40
Numbers for this week:
Cards coming into the house: 25
Cards leaving the house: 0
Cards entering the collection: 54
Cards leaving the collection: 0
Cards moving from inbound to outbound without entering the collection: 21
To date:
Net change in the collection: 28
Net change to the # of cards in the house: -9,247
Total # of cards which have left the house: 12,810
Number of cards tracked in my Access database: 1,773
In 1974, Topps didn’t use a cup… That is to say, they didn’t use the golden “All-Star Rookie” cups on the cards which feature members of Topps 1973 All-Star Rookie team. Since Topps didn’t honor those players, I will. Today we’ll be looking at the third baseman on that team.
This is Dan Driessen’s rookie card. Driessen was a key member of The Big Red Machine of the 1970’s, and would also play for the Expos, Giants, Cardinals and Astros in a career which stretched from 1973 to 1987. He would also be the first National League DH during the 1976 World Series against the Yankees, the first World Series to use the Designated Hitter.
In 1973, Dan batted .301 with 4 homers and 47 RBI, and tied for third in NL Rookie of the Year voting. He played 35 games at first that year, and in 1975 he’d move to first full time, which allowed Pete Rose to move from left to third.
Although in 1973 Driessen played 87 games at third and 35 games at first, Baseball Digest made him the first baseman on their rookie all-star team. I couldn’t find any definitive reasons for this, but I strongly think it’s because they wanted their third baseman to be this guy on the right… Ron Cey batted .245 with 15 homers and 80 RBI in 1973, and I hear he’s got a few fans in the Sportscard blogosphere…
For those who aren’t Cey fans, his rookie card is not the 1973 “Rookie Third Basemen” card he shares with Mike Schmidt and John Hilton, but instead the 1972 high-numbered card he shares with Ben Oglivie and the S.F. Giants’ Bernie Williams.
Next time, on an all-new “Without A Cup”: One of the coolest cards in the 1974 set
After 371 posts about Allen & Ginter this week (data verified by the American Fabricated Information Institute), people are clamoring for posts about 1973 Topps (according to findings by the Ersatz Media Research Group).
I’ve been working on my 1973 set – just a handful of cards left, I hope to finish it off at the National – and I’d like to share a pair of semi-recent acquisitions. You can call them #12 and #11 on my countdown to completion (except I have no idea where they fall. Just go with it).
Johnny Bench is about to catch a foul ball in front of a couple of Giants on the bench (safe to say it’s Candlestick Park? You tell me, I suck at this.)
Willie McCovey seems to be fouling off a ball at a home game in Candlestick. I don’t know if we’d be able to figure out who the catcher is… Looks like a Reds uniform… Sideburns… last name starts with “B”… Hey, it’s Johnny Bench!
I don’t think there’s enough here to make any conclusions, but I can’t help but wonder if both photos had been taken at the same game. Who knows, maybe Johnny Bench’s card shows him catching a McCovey foul ball.
I’ve had this card since I was a kid. In a collection full of 1970’s cards, it was one of the few 1960’s cards I had.
