30-Day Baseball Card Challenge Day 4

Day 4: A rookie card of one of your favorite players.

The obvious card here would be Mike Schmidt's rookie card but this would be the answer for several of the days, so I'm gonna hold it for now.

Besides the Phillies, my favorite team is the Astros and my favorite Astro (from even before I moved to Houston) is Jeff Bagwell, finally elected to the Hall of Fame.

1991 Stadium Club Members Only #11

Hall of Fame Inductee Jeff Bagwell Cards

Jeff Bagwell finally got nominated for the Baseball Hall of Fame this year. I've already made one post recently about him, and I've got enough Bagwell cards (536) to do several more. With this post I want to show some recently acquired Bagwell cards.

I was idly searching for Bagwell cards on eBay the other week and came across an offer for 30 different Bagwell cards for $10.75 (including shipping). The seller was nice enough to actually list the cards he was offering and I saw that I needed 27 of them. Most were 1990s inserts and parallels.  Here are my favorites.

1992 Score 100 Rising Stars #35

 24-year-old Bagwell looks like he just ran in off the high school playing field on this card.

1993 Topps Inaugural Rockies #227

Topps put out an entire parallel set to honor the new Rockies and another for the Marlins inaugural season. I believe these were only available as boxed sets. I had one other from the Rockies set but I've never seen one from the Marlins set. Pretty rare, I'd say.

1994 Pinnacle Power Surge #16

Not only a Bagwell card I didn't have but an insert set I didn't know about. This goes right into the reference books.

1994 Stadium Club Golden Rainbow #108

1994 saw a sharp rise in parallel sets. And this was how it was often done, putting foil on the front, or if the card already had foil, putting different foil. These weren't particularly hard to get in packs of 1994 Stadium Club.

1994 Upper Deck Electric Diamond #480

I always like this parallel. My recollection is that it was a tough pull in 1994 Upper Deck.

1995 Fleer Update Headliners #1

I have several cards from this insert but never noticed the text on the story from "The Fleer Times" behind the photograph on the front. It's describing a Phillies game where Tony Longmire hit a pinch hit home run to win a game over the Cardinals. Since Tony Longmire only hit 3 home runs in 1995 it probably wouldn't be too hard to find what game it was. I looked at the other cards I have and they all have the same background.

1995 Ultra Hitting Machines #1

1995 Ultra Hitting Machines Gold Medallion #1

I had the Frank Thomas version of the base card. Now I have the Gold Medallion version as well.

1996 Collector's Choice Crash The Game #19

Pretty extravagant finish for a contest card.

1998 Leaf Fractal Foundations #149

Leaf had a pretty complicated system of parallel cards in 1998.

1999 Sp Authentic Home Run Chronicles

1998, of course, was the year of the Home Run. I only have a few of these cards and find them unattractive. Lots of gold foil nonsense on the front. Since the card mentions a specific home run on a specific date, you'd think that maybe the photo would be of the player hitting that home run. Not in this case since the Astros were at home and Bagwell is in an away uniform.

2002 UD Superstars Keys to the City

This is an insert in a 2002 multi-sport set that I never heard of. 

1990s - Last Men Standing

According to the Astros TV broadcast team, there are only 3 current players in the majors who started their career in the 1990s. I checked as far as seeing that each actually is on a major league roster but if there are more, I don't know.

Bartolo Colon 1997 Fleer #561

Colon made his debut on April 4, 1997 against the Angels. He pitched 5 innings in a Cleveland loss but he wasn't involved in the decision. After a 19-year career (he didn't play in 2010), Colon currently has a 233-162 career win-loss record and is signed with the Braves for $12.5M. He is the active career leader in wins, innings pitched, games started, home runs given up, hits, loses, earned runs, batters faced, and errors committed. 

Carlos Beltran 1999 Topps Gallery #136

1999 Upper Deck #287

Beltran made his debut with the Royals against the A's on 9/14/99. He had 1 AB, got a hit and a walk and scored 2 runs. In Beltran's 19-year career, he's hit 429 home runs, has a career .281 average, and is a 9-time All-Star. He's appeared in 55 post-season games with an average of .323 and 16 home runs. He's currently signed with the Astros for $16M.

Adrian Beltre 1999 Stadium Club #162

Beltre made is debut on 6/24/98 with the Dodgers agains the Angels. He went 2 for 5 with an RBI. He has similar career totals as Beltran. He's hit 445 home runs with a career BA of .286 and he's a 4-time All-Star. He's in the next to last year of an 8-year, $132M contract with the Rangers. He doesn't seem to be slowing down much, hitting .300 with 32 home runs last year.

Trade with The Angels, In Order

A couple of weeks ago I got an email from Tom over at The Angels, In Order requesting access to my 1990's Phillies Google docs spreadsheet. The result? 23 Phillies cards for me, and, for Tom, some cards off his want list.  Here are the highlights (thanks Tom).

1990 Fleer League Leaders #21 Ricky Jordan

Fleer produced a lot of these 44-card boxed sets in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They were mostly distributed in chain drugstores and the like. I don't remember ever seeing them for sale. Ricky Jordan was one of a number of projected great Phillies from that period who never amounted to much.

1992 Stadium Club Dome #100 John Kruk

The last Phillie I needed from this set.

1992 Upper Deck Minors #68 Tyler Green

There were a lot of Phillies in this set. Even with the 4 that Tom sent, I still need 6 more.

1993 Toys R Us #18 Dave Hollins

Another set I've never seen before. It's a 100-card set I presume was sold as a boxed set. I'd have bought it if I'd ever seen it. My kids were little in 1993 and I spent enough time in the store.

1994 Fleer Excel #246 Scott Rolen

A very nice, very early Scott Rolen card. A nice looking minor league set. Glossy front and back with a little gold foil on the front.

1996 Collector's Choice Silver 

1996 Ultra #519 Lenny Dykstra

Tom set 3 cards from this set. I actually had the Gold Medallion version of this card where the background is all gold. Without the background it wasn't clear what Dykstra was doing in this photo.

1998 Pinnacle Mint #30 Scott Rolen

The only Phillie in this set. I only had a couple of card and coins from 1998 Pinnacle Mint but I didn't have any of the matched coins and card. In an earlier trade with Tom (in 2011) he had sent me this:

1998 Pinnacle Mint Bronze #30 Scott Rolen