Monday Morning Autograph - Albert Belle

 

Today's Autograph: 1999 SP Signature Albert Belle 

Why Do I Own This Card?

Albert was a pretty incredible player. His career was too short for him to make the Hall, or so it would seem, but he was a scary hitter. I remember him getting 50 home runs and 50 doubles in a season when I was in high school, I followed along that summer with the box scores. Been a fan every since. Sure, Albert had his faults, but he could absolute hit a baseball. I have other cool Albert Belle cards, there might be a bonus at the end of the post.  

P.S. - Remember that time he got hit by a pitch, but he didn't want the free base?

Back of The Card

Haiku About Albert Belle Running Over Fernando Vina with Video 

Ground ball to Vina

Albert Belle Runs Him Over 

Let's Get Some Water 

 

Bonus Card:

Black Diamond Belle

One of the best baseball villains of the 1990s was Indians/White Sox/Orioles outfielder Albert "Joey" Belle.  His career started with the Indians in the last 80s, when he was briefly known as Joey, and was an MVP candidate by his second full season in 1992 when he posted a .260/.320/.477 line with 34 home runs and 112 RBIs.  The next four seasons (1993-1997) saw Belle finish in the Top 10 in MVP voting and make the American League All-Star team.  Honestly, I have no idea how Belle did not win an MVP award during that time.  Actually, I know why he did not win, but still he was an awesome player.  

Starting in 1994 Belle was one of the best offensive forces in baseball.  People really underestimate his 1994 season when he posted a .357/.438/.714 with 36 home runs and 101 RBIs.  His OPS+ that season was 194, which is one of the Top 100 marks for a season in Major League Baseball.  He could have easily won an MVP, except Frank Thomas....who posted the 26th best season ever, measured by OPS+ with a .353/.487/.729 line with 38 home runs and 101 RBIs.  Is there a wrong answer?  Not really.  

In 1995, Belle posted a 50 home run season, when the number meant something, and also managed to get the hapless Indians franchise to the World Series.  MVP worthy?  Yes, probably so.  Here was the deal with Albert if you are not familiar.....

Really awesome hitter.....

Really not cool.  

So, needless to say a lot of Albert's antics failed to win him popularity contests, but he was really good in his prime.  After he left the Indians he landed with the White Sox for two good years before leaving for the Orioles.  He was still a good player on the Orioles, but a hip problem slowed him down and he ended up retiring after collecting a lot of money for not playing.  His last official season on the field was 2000, but he collected pay checks until 2003.  Which is probably a good reason why most Orioles fans are not big fans of the Albert Belle cards.......

I still like Albert and I like his cards, which is why I picked up this card recently.   This bat card is another early on bat relic card from Upper Deck out of their Black Diamond product.  Back when bat cards and jersey cards were actually pretty tough pulls.  I always really liked these cards, in terms of design, and have been able to find a bunch of them for my collection.  However, unlike some of the early Upper Deck relics some of these can be found dirt cheap depending on the variation of relic you find.  The rarer, and much more expensive versions of the Black Diamond relics, have multiple relic pieces, like this Chipper Jones. 

Throwback Month: 2001 Topps Fusion

I am doing a themed month for August.  Sounds pretty teacherly, but I will still post some cards that go against my theme.  This month I will be doing some posts about some of the older card sets in my collection which I will simple call Throwback Month.  I set pretty generic goals for my blog, but one of them was to spend more time talking about cards that are already in my collection.  I am going to set the bar for these posts at sets that are at least a decade old.  Should be a fun set of posts and I had a pretty good time planning these out and think they should bring back some good memories for my fellow thirties something collectors.

First up on my list for Throwback Month is a one-time release from Topps that came out during the 2001 baseball calendar year Topps Fusion.  The 2001 baseball card calendar was pretty eventful.  It was a good year for rookie cards with the release of the first Albert Pujols and Ichiro cards and also featured the first edition of the Topps Heritage set.  If you go back and try to find old wax to open from 2001 it can be pricey and difficult to find because almost every set had a Pujols or an Ichiro rookie many of which are short printed or serial numbered.  Then there are a few that have no Pujols and no Ichiro.  Fusion is one of them.

I always think of this set as sort of a greatest hits album for baseball cards.  The set does not really do anything new for baseball cards, but here it is in your collection.  How did it get here?  Don't you basically have all of these cards in other sets?  More a less yes, but they are still fun to see all in one place.  For the Fusion set Topps took several of it's brands: Stadium Club, Gallery, Bowman's Best,  Finest, and Gold Label and merged them all into one set.  The designs were changed slightly for their previously released designs, but you could definitely see the resemblance.

Here's a look at the different sets within the set:

Bowman's Best 

Topps Gallery 

Stadium Club 

Gold Label 

Finest

I would have collected any of these sets by themselves and I really overlooked the fact that this set was just a rehash of a bunch of different brands.  In fact, all five brands were released again during the 2001 baseball card calendar.  I actually like some of the designs used in the Fusion set better than the regularly released set.  My only real fault with this set is the fact that Topps included a bunch of rookie cards in this release (Mike Jacobs and Marco Scutaro are the notable names) and placed all of the rookie cards in the Gold Label brand.  Even in 2001 most of the rookie cards were in Bowman products and the Fusion set would have done well to place them with the appropriate brand.  While Gold Label is not around today, it was always a small set with veteran players.

Fusion also had some really nice autographs too.  Like any set there are naturally a few duds.  Jason Hart, Phil Wilson, and Tony Alvarez are all "prospects" who signed for the set, but never quite made it anywhere.  There are also some solid veteran players like Jason Marquis (He has a nice autograph) DerreK Lee, Geoff Jenkins, and Barry Zito.  Then there are some really good autographs.  Several Chipper Jones, A-Rod, Josh Hamilton, Todd Helton, and Warren Spahn to name a few.  The Spahn autograph is shaky, but it's an on card autograph.  My favorite is the Helton...

There are also relics in the set, including some nice looking dual relics, but I never really got into them.  Overall, this is a really nice set from 2001 and is one of the more affordable sets from that calendar year due to the absence of Pujols and Ichiro.  Wax boxes of this product can be found at reasonable prices or you can piece together the set through lots and singles and not spend a fortune.  Yes, this is a rehash in many ways, but it's well done.  

Odd Ray Lankford

Sometimes I have a hard time figuring out some of the things that Topps puts for sale on the Topps Vault auctions.  It's fun to look at and obviously some of the stuff on there is cool to scout out.  I'd like to buy one of those Topps Player Contracts and hang it on the wall of my man cave, but there are also plenty of odds and ends too.  I am always amazed at the number of proof items they have up for auction.  Slides of players, sample photos, sample cards, blank back proofs, blank front proofs.  With all of those rough drafts and edits flying around you would think that Topps would make a few less errors.  

I actually already own a few cool proof cards, which might be worthy of a post at some point soon, and recently saw a proof which I could not pass up for less than $5 delivered.  

1999 Topps Gallery Ray Lankford Private Player Issue Proof 

The proof card is some sort of pre-production card used by Topps for something.  I am not exactly sure what their process for making a set of cards is these days, but this card is in there somewhere.  There are some slight differences between this card and the regular issue 1999 Topps Gallery Ray Lankford card.  First, this proof card is actually of the Players Private Issue card, not the base model of the card.  Notice the inscription in the top left-hand corner of the card showing it to be a Private Player Issue.  The Private Player Issue cards were a parallel to the base set which generally ran at one per box with a print run of 250 per card.  Here's a look at a copy of an Albert Belle Private Player Issue:

1999 Topps Gallery Albert Belle Private Players Issue 

The Lankford card and Belle card are nearly identical including the Private Player Issue script in the top left-hand corner of the card.  However, as mentioned before, there are two slight differences between the regular issue and proof issues of these cards.  

First up is the difference in size.  As you can tell, the Lankford card is both taller and wider than the Albert Belle card.  It looks like a huge difference in this picture, and is noticeable when handling the card, but for the sake of storage the proof card does fit inside a regular top loader.  My other proofs, I swear I will put them in a post this week, were big enough to frame and hang on the wall.  

The second difference is in the serial numbers on the back of the card.  The standard issue Belle Private Players Issue features the usual serial number written on the lefthand side of the card with the print run at 250 cards.  The Lankford card however is a proof which means that it is likely a one of a kind card and features.....

Absolutely no serial numbers.  The box for the serial number is on the card if you look carefully.  Very happy with my new Lankford addition.  Though a little bit of an oddball card a really cool and unique find from one of my favorite players.  More proofs and Topps Vault stuff later this week.  

1998 Donruss Preferred Title Waves Albert Belle

The Donruss Preferred set was a high end product that ran during 1998, 1997 too,  that reminded me a lot of the Fleer Showcase, or Topps Finest,  products of the same era.  High end, glossy cards with several different "tiers" of players that collectors could put together to make a set.  Some of the high end sets from that era focused primarily on the base set and left collectors a little short on the inserts.  However, a few products offered quality beyond the base set, but sometimes at long odds.

1998 Donruss Preferred Title Waves Albert Belle

Odds were never given on the Title Waves cards when the cards were released because the cards are all serial numbered to different amounts.  In the case of my Albert Belle, the card is numbered to 1995 since the card recognizes his American League Home Run title in 1995.  While the exact odds of pulling a Title Waves card was never released, the cards can be in pretty high demand at times depending on the player.  I picked this card up last week in a small trade and have considered adding this insert set as my second set I am trying to complete for the year.  I am currently working on the 1998 Topps Tek set too.  This Albert Belle gives me a total of 23 out of the 30 cards in this set which would leave me with seven to find.  However, after checking a few secondary sites I can only find one of the cards I need to complete the set and it is probably a little bit more than I wish to spend.  I will sleep on it for a few days and consider putting this up to finish.  In the meantime, I am happy to give this sweet Albert Belle card a new home.  

  

  

30 Year Top 50: 1999 SP Signature Edition

#35-This release represented Upper Deck's first venture into the world of a huge autograph focused set.  By the time 1999 rolled around, the hobby had already seen the release of the 1996 Leaf Signature Series and the 1997 and 1998 releases of the Donruss Signature Series.  Since Donruss was bankrupt by the end of 1998 I am guessing that Upper Deck was trying to fill the void.

The packs for the 1999 SP Signature Edition were $20 and only available at Hobby Shops.  Each contained three cards.  Two base cards and one autographed card.  Now, there were some really nice cards in this set that are really cool and worth owning.  However, in a mega-autograph set there are also plenty of cards that are painful to see inside a pack of $20 cards.

One of my big pluses in owning cards from this set is the design.  The autographs are all on card and the card themselves feature a white background which showed the blue ink autographs very well.  As far as the autographs go I break them into three categories.  Lets take a look at a few cards from the set using a few Orioles.  Just picked a team.

1999 SP Signature Edition Ivan Coffie

1. Common Cards- Every mega-autograph set has tons of filler cards like this Ivan Coffie.  It stinks to buy a per pack autograph, spend good money, and pull a card that sells on Ebay for $2 on a really good day.  I often look at the common cards in mega-autograph sets from this perspective:  Collect your favorite team and fill in your autograph collection.  For example, one of my favorite Cardinals teams was the 1996 National League Central Champions.  It was LaRussa's first year, Ray Lankford and several other personal favorites were on the team, and they came within a game of the World Series.  It was also the same year the Leaf Signature set was released and I was able to get a lot of the team in the set with a certified autograph.  They won't all fit in the picture, but here's a sampling.  

1996 Leaf Signature Cardinals Autographs: John Mabry, Tom Pagnozzi, Mike Gallego, and Gary Gaetti

Love the Gary Gaetti card the most out of this lot.  

1999 SP Signature Edition Albert Belle Autograph

2.  Current Stars- In 1999 Albert Belle was fading at the end of his career.  His cards were still pretty desirable and held their value pretty well at the time.  Even to this day his cards have a bit of following and are never super cheap.  If you scour the internet and local card shops you will find that Albert Belle has a few autographs floating around out there.  Especially recent autographs.  At the time of this product release however there were very few floating around.  If you wanted an Albert Belle autograph, this was your best bet.  Most mega-autograph sets have a few cards like this.  Ron Gant is another big one from this set with a similar story.  

1999 SP Signature Edition Frank Robinson Autograph

3.  Hall of Famers-My third category is what most people want to find in their one per autograph packs, but the odds are always difficult on these cards.  Looking at my Frank Robinson, it is probably one of the cheaper Hall of Fame autographs in this set.  In fact, some people would argue that a card like Frank barely covers the cost of the pack on a good day on Ebay.  I disagree.  While it is probably just in the $20 range, covering the pack cost, the cards in the 1999 SP Signature Edition are on card.  For my collection I would much rather own a slightly less expensive on card autograph then a limited print number, high end, sticker autograph.   

Like the 1999 SP Signature Edition?  Not in my 30 Year Top 50 is the By The Letter insert in SP Authentic sets.  If you have been following my countdown you'll notice that the Not in the Top 50 and the in the Top 50 set are often tied together somehow.  Today, I am straying a little bit.  Upper Deck has released some other uber-autograph sets, but this thread is supposed to be about the highlights.  

I could have easily focused this section on one of the Ultimate Signature sets, but the By The Letter Autographs deserve a little bit of love.  I miss them so very much and while Topps has duplicated them into their own creation:

2010 Topps Finest Buster Posey Letter Patch Autograph

They aren't quite the same as the original Upper Deck product.  The By The Letter Autograph concept started in the 2006 SP Authentic set.  The cards were an instant smash hit.  The concept of course was to collect all the letter patches of a player to spell out their name.  Here's how they started out:

2006 SP Authentic Matt Holliday By The Letter Autograph

Over the next several years the cards changed very little in concept and design, but still offered collectors a cool product to chase every year.  Whether you were collecting players from your favorite team:

2009 SP Authentic By The Letter David Freese Autograph

Or you just ran into a cool inexpensive card of an average player.  

2008 SP Authentic By The Letter Edwin Encarnacion Autograph 

The By The Letter Autographs are a set that I strongly considered bundling together and putting on my countdown. 

30 Year Top 50: 1999 Pacific Crown Royale

Number 47-It's hard to make a list of great card sets from the past thirty years and not include some Pacific cards on the list somewhere.  Pacific started out as an oddball brand, run by card tycoon Mike Cramer.  My first run in with Pacific happened in 1992 when they released the 100th Anniversary Team set for the Cardinals.  The packs were sold at McDonald's and were really popular that summer.  The sets can still be found in fine card shops throughout the Midwest and on Ebay.

1992 Pacific Cardinals 100th Anniversary Stan Musial 

The height of Pacific's run came in the late 90s and was followed by a quick demise, baseball wise, in 2001.  I really enjoyed the Pacific brand of cards and busted a lot of their wax boxes in 1998, 1999, and 2000.  Like many baseball card companies of the late 1990's, some of their products were repetitive and   overproduced.  However, there were some real gems too.  One of my hardest decisions in putting together a list of card products from the past thirty years was sorting out the Pacific products.

At one point, I thought about scanning the internet for old boxes of Pacific cards, finding a whole bunch of them, and spending a day busting old wax boxes to relive the experience.  However, I voted against it, my wife is thankful in advance, and just spent a little bit of time looking back through my old Pacific sets.  I choose this set of several others including 1998 Pacific Omega, any release of Paramount, Pacific Revolution, and the 1999 Private Stock release.  The base sets were nice, but not as good as the non-flagship releases and I never really dug Aurora or Crown Collection too much.  Invincible were cool too, but you only got one translucent card per pack.  

1999 Pacific Crown Royale Mark McGwire

1999 Pacific Crown Royale Manny Ramirez

So, what makes the 1999 Crown Royale set better than the rest of the other late 90s Pacific releases?  The best reason I can give is the use of die cut cards.  Thirteen years after this set was released we have all seen plenty of die-cut cards in our life, but this was an earlier attempt by a card company to use die-cuts in a base set and they look really nice.  

Pacific had always used die cuts in it's sets from the Cramer's Choice inserts to the inclusion of Christmas Ornament shaped cards in it's base set release.  The Crown Royale set took it to another level though.  The were much more serious looking than a Christmas Ornament insert and much easier to find then the Cramer's Choice Die Cuts which almost always had the longest odds of all the Pacific inserts.  

2001 Pacific Christmas Ornaments Todd Helton

1997 Pacific Cramer's Choice Albert Belle

Crown Royale also featured a few insert sets which were the hallmark of Pacific products.  Most weren't too difficult to run across and putting together a master set wasn't ridiculously difficult to accomplish.  The other big plus I give the Crown Royale product is the parallel sets.  There were a total of two.  How many parallel sets are in Topps products now?  I am not sure, but the Printing Plates are 1/1 even though there are probably four of each player per set.  Pacific issued an Opening Day parallel, which ran across all Pacific products, and a Limited which was numbered to 99 and inserted at one per box and a half.  

1999 Pacific Crown Royale Ray Lankford Limited 

Boxes of Crown Royale can be found, but they aren't plentiful or cheap.  The single cards can be found around, but they tend to be a little pricier than normal late 90's base cards.  They look like inserts and sometimes they sell and trade like inserts too. 

Like the 1999 Pacific Crown Royale set?  Not in my Top 50 of the Past 30 years is the 1996 Topps Laser set.  Topps went through an experimental phase in the mid 90s with die-cuts and shaped cards.  Topps Embossed is another set that could fit here, but still not as cool as the Laser release.  

1996 Topps Laser Pedro Martinez 

Topps Laser was only produced in 1996 and was released in two different series.  There were a couple different patterns used for the base set cards, but they were all die cut.  The cards were a little bit wild and really hard to keep in mint condition.  Even pack fresh cards had knicks and dings.  There weren't any really great rookies in the set, but the Bright Spots insert sets ranks high on my personal list of cool looking inserts.  The Bright Spots cards all featured young and upcoming stars with a really cool looking card background.  

1996 Topps Laser Bright Spots Derek Jeter

 I am not a huge Jeter fan, but this card and the Hideo Nomo in the set are my personal favorites.  Really tough to find and tougher to find in mint condition.  On a comical side note the cards featured projected stats for the 2010.  Jeter's aren't bad, but the card for one Jimmy Haynes is hilarious.  Check out the wins and strikeouts.  Guess they missed.  

1996 Topps Laser Bright Spots Jimmy Haynes