Project Durham Bulls #56 - Dennis Burlingame

1989 & 1990 Durham Bulls 

Background- 

The Braves selected Burlingame in the 5th Round of the 1987 Major League Baseball Draft.  While he was in the lower Minors, Burlingame was a serious pitching prospect, ranking as high as 50th with Baseball America.  In 1989, he appeared for the Durham Bulls in 11 games, went a perfect 4-0, and had an ERA of 0.50.  On Opening Day in 1989 Burlingame threw a perfect game against the Fredrick Keys, which was apart of a double header where Steve Avery hurled a two hitter in the second game.  Not quite Johnny Vander Meer, but close.  It is said to be the only perfect game ever thrown on Opening Day, not sure if that is true.  

Burlingame missed a chunk of the 1989 and 1990 seasons with arm troubles.  He pitched the second half of 1990 with the Bulls, but was not the same pitcher.  Still good enough to make it up to Triple A with the Braves in 1993 before his career came to a halt.  

Card- 

This looks like a pretty run of the mill Minor League card from the 1990s, but the 1997 Bulls to Braves set is one of the toughest sets of the Durham Bulls out there.  I am missing Durham Bulls sets that are out there in my collection, but I have at least seen the cards.  I have passed on them because of price, or lost auctions.  The Bulls to Braves set?  I think I have only seen half of the cards in the set, and they are expensive.  

I am still not even entirely sure how the cards were sold. or given out.  

Here is the back of the card, which gives a short bio on the former Braves Minor Leaguer.  

I have posted some really good cards on this thread of Durham Bulls players, this might be one of my modern favorites.  Really great card.  

A Venerable Old Card Part 53

At some point this fall a co-worker of mine had asked me about trying to track down a few Alvin Morman cards.  He works somewhere in these parts I guess, so I ventured into my card closet searching for something belonging to the former Major League reliever.  I managed to track down a few cards, but along the way I found a mess of Upper Deck Minors sets from the early and mid 1990s which were all jumbled into two 800 count boxes with little rhyme or reason.

The Alvin Morman card from the 1994 Upper Deck Minors set is pretty sweet.....

but this card is not the main topic of my post for the evening.

I have had a lot of other baseball card projects that came before sorting out those two boxes, but I eventually got around to them a few weeks back.  In sorting out the boxes of Upper Deck Minors I was able to piece together almost the entire run of sets that UD put out with Minor Leaguers.  There are lots of good former Major Leaguers in those sets and plenty of other good prospect names which didn't quite make it.  Just like any Minor League product.

There was one card in those two boxes which really stood out as I was sorting which belonged to a Durham Bulls player.  I didn't even remember Upper Deck putting hologram cards into the Minors products, but they were in the box..  This was my favorite......

It's hard to get the hologram picture on the scans of these Upper Deck cards, but it comes through enough that you can tell its Chipper running back on a pop up.  I really like the picture in the foreground with the dark batting helmet and the Texas Tan belt.  The Bulls ditched both of these in favor of blue at some point in the mid 1990s.  There are plenty of Chipper Jones cards in a Bulls uniform, but this one has a totally different appearance than the other handful of cards featuring the future Hall of Famer during his time in Durham.  

These Prospect Holograms were in the 1992  Upper Deck Minors set, and while they never made another appearance in the product, I think that they were probably an influence on Upper Deck's 1993  Then & Now Hologram cards.  

These were some of my favorite early 1990s insert cards.  They don't necessarily have the value, or popularity as cards like the Donruss Elite inserts, but I love the look of these cards.  Now that I know there are Minor League hologram cards I will have to find some more of these cards.  

A Venerable Old Card Part 1

Switching up the format on some of my posts starting this week.  I had been using #MyCardMonday to feature a card that was already in my collection.  I generally collect modern cards, but sometimes I like to get away from that just a little bit.  Those posts tended to focus on players from the last twenty years.   Have I ever really put anything older on here?  Not really.  So, I am going to change my Monday posts up to feature some older cards.  I am going to try to stick with cards that are at least 25 years old.  Here's the first edition.......

I became a Durham Bulls fan 10 years ago.  Over time I have evolved as a collector of the team.  At first, I collected the Durham Bulls players I saw in person.  I generally found their cards in Bowman products, but also could find them in Topps and Upper Deck sets the longer they stayed in the Majors.  I also collected the team sets that the team sold in the store.  Every year I would buy one.  I have even found older Bulls teams sets for sale in the team's store.  My latest undertaking is to find cards of the team from the 1980s and 1990s.  

Sometimes I can find the older sets, but other times I have to settle for the single cards.  Recently I ended up with a 1981 TCMA Brad Komminsk card.  Some collectors may remember Komminsk as a fourth outfielder type who bounced around the Majors in the 1980s.  He mainly played for the Braves, but made appearance with a few other teams as well.  

So, what's the deal the Komminsk card?  He actually put together one of the better seasons in the history of the Durham Bulls in 1981.  His .322/.458/.606 line with 33 homers, 27 doubles, and 35 steals made Komminsk the easy choice for the Carolina League MVP that year.  I am not sure there have been many seasons, in the long history of the Durham Bulls, that have been as good as Komminsk's 1981 year.  While the card was cheap, and many might not associate the words Brad Komminsk and good player together, he was a great player for one summer in the minors.