Set Appreciation Post #22 - 2001 Donruss Classics

Upper Deck had Century Legends and Fleer had Greats of the Game. Donruss Classics was not quite as good as either, but it's still had solid product. The largest fault being the inclusion of rookie cards on the checklist, but we will get into those details later in the post.  

Here is the base card design....

Lots of gray. I do not always love card designs that are overrun by neutral colors, but I really like the looks of these cards with the color photo offering contrast. I also like the Donruss Classics logo on the top of the card with the player name, jersey number, and player position on the front. It seems like a lot, but all the different design elements are well-placed and spaced out on the front. My only qualm is the team name being split across the top on both sides of the Classics logo.  

Very well done. Here is the back of the card.  

Nice write-up with easy-to-read stats and biographical information. I find it interesting that write-ups on these cards reference events from within the 2001 season even though they are a 2001 release. Not a usual practice in the baseball card biz, but really cool to see considering that the majority of baseball cards are released later in the season.  

Donruss Classics is a product supposedly focused on veteran and Hall of Fame players, but the base set also includes 50 rookie cards, which do not really seem to fit with this product. The rookie cards are serial numbered to 585 copies. Two biggest rookie cards are Pujols and Ichiro.  

This might seem silly to complain about a Pujols rookie, but Playoff/Donruss made a ton of different baseball card products during the 2001 calendar year. There were plenty of opportunities to make cards of Pujols and Ichiro, including them here seems off-brand. The inclusion of the rookie cards diminish the overall checklist of Donruss Classics. I understand that rookie cards can be all the craze, but the equivalent Upper Deck, Fleer, and Topps products to Donruss Classics all were able to do just fine without having a bunch of Triple A players in the set.  

Wait. 

There are even more cards on the checklist, but they actually fit the product.   

There are another 48 cards after the rookie cards that are "Legend" cards. The Legends cards came one per box, or one per two mini boxes. Yes, this had boxes inside of boxes. The Legends cards have a cult following. There are plenty people who love these cards and collect them. Actually fairly affordable if you can track down all 48 of them. They are serial numbered to 1,755 copies, but a few of them can be hard to find. I like the gold/sepia color on these cards. The player photos are a mix between black and white, sepia, and color depending on the age of the player. 

Good looking cards.  

So, let's do a few favorites.  

My favorite Cardinals cards are the Pujols shown above, along with the Rick Ankiel.  

I love the red and white home uniforms against the gray background of the card.  

Favorite former Durham Bulls player is Ryan Klesko with his lamb chop sideburns.  

 

My favorite odd card is Hideo Nomo on the Red Sox.......

Hideo Nomo played on the Red Sox???  

Apparently, Hideo Nomo was on four different teams in four years, but that included a no-hitter with the Red Sox. I remember him with the Mets and Brewers, not so much with the Tigers and Red Sox. I need to start using him when I play Immaculate Grid.  

There are also autographs.  

The Hall of Famers are one of the big highlights of Donruss Classics.  

The checklist for the autograph set is deep with good names and they are on-card autographs.    

There are also rookie autographs, but.......

They have ugly silver stickers and are players like Brandon Larson. 

Just stick with the old guys.  

One last thing. Let me tell you about the benches from the dugout in Three Rivers Stadium.

Playoff/Donruss bought one of them at some point in the late 1990s and used it to create a insert set.   

Roberto Clemente and Willie Stargell have cards in the set, which is cool, but Vlad Guerrero in Three Rivers Pack? I don't care if he hit two home runs in a game against the Pirates, this is a reach.  

So, how does Donruss Classics rate? 

Out of 5 Wool E. Bull's?  

Solid set, but not as good as its competitors.  

I Don't Care That These Are For Kids.......

The 2023 baseball cards feel a little slow. It's the middle of April and all we've got so far is Topps Series  1 and Bowman Heritage from 2 years ago. Maybe some delayed 2022 products too. Where is Topps Heritage and Bowman?  

Anyway, strep has been making its way through my house this week. I have avoided it so far, but I spent my Friday hanging out with my middle schooler who felt miserable. Lots of rest, fluids, and some amoxicillin and we are feeling better today. Still, I needed a little entertainment to keep myself going yesterday, so I picked up a few packs of Topps Big League.  

I don't care that Topps Big League is made for kids, it provided a little bit of entertainment on a long day at home with a sick kid. 

Here's what I pulled out of the packs.  

The base cards are missable, but I picked out my favorite three........  

This Molina card is actually a foil parallel, hard to tell from the scan, but it has a silver finish. I did not pull a Pujols base card, which was a little disappointing, but it's a 300 card set and I opened a Blaster box with roughly 100 cards.  

My two other favorites were former Durham Bull Blake Snell and current Durham Bull Jonathan Aranda.  

I am honestly surprised that Aranda has appeared in both 2023 Topps products. I think he's a Major League player, but he's not high up on the Rays prospect list and he is buried in Triple A at the moment.  

Can I bring up the most annoying base card?  

Topps airbrushed a bunch of the players who were traded or switched teams with free agency this offseason.  Several are really bad, but Andrew McCutchen is easily the worst. It's really obvious that the photo on this card was airbrushed.  

Remember when Andrew McCutchen was on the Pirates for 9 years at the beginning of his career? You're telling me that Topps could not have used one of those photos?  I would rather see a dated photo than one where he in on the Brewers and Topps airbrushed him into a Pirates uniform.  

The insert cards are much more kid-friendly.

We've got graffiti name tag.  

Babe Ruth and graffiti. Peanut butter and jelly.  

I did pull an Albert Pujols card. Nice looking insert.    

Yes, it's a video game reference, which seems kid-friendly, but most current kids also think 8-bit games are really lame. My fifth graders talk about NBA 2K. I talk about NBA 96. They don't care about Reggie Miller or Charles Barkley. Not truly kid-friendly. Really, this card appeals to the average Topps customer. Middle-aged, white guy who collects cards and owned a Nintendo, Sega, or PlayStation at some point between elementary school and college.  

I am more of a 16-bit guy.  

These are "Fun Box" inserts.  

These two cards made me think that this insert set was somehow an ode to ballpark food or Lunchables, Ballpark food is okay, Lunchables are gross. I ended up with a few other Fun Box cards that had different backgrounds without the food.  

These feel like leftover Topps Project 2020 or Project 70 leftover cards. The Alonso card with the cartoon is goofy, but I like the Willie Mays with the swirled colors. Might be amongst my favorite cards out of these Big League packs. I guess someone at Topps was not able to quite pull this insert set together, but something decent came out of the effort.  

There are also City Slickers inserts, which are just advertisements for the Nike City Connect jerseys, which are available now at your team's store or at Nike dot com. There are a lot of base cards with City Connect jerseys as well including several Rockies players, which is why I included C.J. Cron in the scan.  

Although, those Rockies jerseys feel like an advertisement for the Colorado DMV.  

Don't forget to renew your license plates.  

Last two cards are the best two cards.  

I love the mascot cards.  

These are just incredible cards. I don't think I have a Rally Monkey card in my collection and that Fredbird card is one of the better ones out there.  There is no Opening Day set this year, so these are going to have to tide everyone over on mascot cards for the year.  

Art Deco Garbage*

I am not a big fan of the 2010 National Chicle set.  I know plenty of collectors who love the set.  I know a lot of collectors who hate it.  It has always been really low on my list.  There have been plenty of painting/sketch/art sets produced over the last two decades that it's not really hard to find a few favorites.  I spent a chunk of the past year working on one of the Topps Gallery Heritage sets.....

which is one of the best art sets in my opinion.  Plenty of others that I could post here too.  There are some decent art cards in the National Chicle set, if you pick and chose single cards, you can find some winners.  Sort of.  One of my favorite Cardinals cards.....

the painting of Brock is nice, but is that a Venezuelan flag in the background?  Cool if this were a Dave Concepcion card.  Miguel Cabrera is also an acceptable player for a Venezuelan flag background.  

Beyond the odd touches, again Lou Brock with a Venezuelan flag, my reasons for not liking the National Chicle set are pretty short.  Mainly, I despise the revisionist cards in this product where players are drawn into other uniforms.  I couldn't find my Lou Gehrig soul patch card, but there are still other really bad cards to show as examples.

As a Cardinals fan, this one is downright terrible.......

Pujols as a Brown?  Sigh.  So many things are wrong with this card.  There are worse though, with this Babe Ruth card being the crown jewel of awful in this set.  

I guess Babe Ruth was at least on the Braves for a season at the very end of his career.  Better than Pujols as a Brown considering he has no connection to the Orioles or Browns.  If you are going to make a Babe Ruth card on the Braves, then why is he still standing in Yankee Stadium?  

The wrist bands half way up the forearms, turtleneck looking thing.  This is a Chipper Jones card with a Babe Ruth head with the facade of Yankee Stadium in the background.  

These cards are sort of like the revisionist history quotes that people post all over the internet.  One of my biggest pet peeves in life.  I hate made up history.....

Abe said this in a movie.  Right?  

So, what card could possibly make me want to touch such a terrible set?

Imagine that Topps made a card in this set, of a younger player at the time, whose card had a pleasing background that matched the team's color scheme.  Picture that this same card actually pictured the player in their uniform, not of another nearby team, or some other weird connection to the past or future.

The card is also autographed and I am willing to overlook the rest of the set for this card.....

It's not a rookie autograph, rookie card, or anything overly special, but it's just a nice card with a good player's autograph.  Bumgarner has been a really good player to this point in his career, a few World Series, a whole bunch of home runs, and a lot of snot rockets.  

                                    

I actually had this card a few years ago, traded it to a Giants fan, and I sort of regretted it a short time later.  I have a few other nice Bumgarner autographs, so at the time it did not feel like much of a loss.  The Giants have had a rough last year and I feel like there have been a few more nice cards of Bumgarner floating around and they seem to have come down a bit too.  

Could not pass this one by.  The asterisk?  

*While the National Chicle set is generally art deco garbage in my opinion, this card is an art deco gem,

It's Seemed Like Small Change, But...

A post on San Jose Fuji's page last month sent me scrambling through some of my boxes to look for some of those coin cards that Topps seems to put out every year.  I am not sure what year, or set, that Topps started making the coin cards, but the Currency set from the 2003 Topps Gallery product has to be one of the earliest.

After seeing the Sasaki card on Fuji's blog, I knew that I had a few of these Currency cards hanging out somewhere, and that these might be worthy of a project.  I found a big handful of the cards including....

Musial, Willie McCovey, and even a Jackie Robinson.  There are a few others that I didn't list.  I like this Vladimir Guerrero, so this is the card I went with for my post.  That Centavo is sweet.  Seemed like a good start.  I also had a few things coming in from COMC, so I picked up another two cards on the cheap.

I picked up a Kaz Sasaki card with a Yen.....

and a Rodrigo Lopez with a Centavo.  This is a Centavo of the Mexican variety.  

After looking around on COMC, the most expensive card that I found was a copy of the Musial, which I already own.  Most expensive card checked off, the whole idea of making this set into a project was seeming like a really good idea.  

and then I did something that I usually do at the beginning of setting out on a project.  Check Ebay and looking at a checklist.  I have been using COMC a lot lately, staying away from Ebay, so the search results on Ebay were a little bit disappointing.  Namely......

a $60 Babe Ruth card.  Also there is a.......

$75 Lou Gehrig card too. 

Damn Yankees.  

When the odds are sayin' you'll never win

That's when the grin should start

Pretty doubtful my wife will be grinning if I spend $135 on two Yankees cards with coins.  Welp, I have a few nice coin cards out of the whole thing, but this is not going to be a project.  

Unexpected Snow Day Find

I have lost count of how many snow days we have had here in Raleigh this school year.  I was not sure whether to post Snow Day 9 or Snow Day 10 as my Facebook status this morning, so I put them both down.  I had a great extra day off hanging out with my three year old and also got to spend some time sorting more cards from 2002.  This afternoon I stumbled upon a set which I had total forgotten about until I started pulling out the cards from my various team boxes.  This evening I present the 2002 Fleer Fall Classics Set:

 

In sorting out my 2002 sets I have found that several of the sets look like they could have been another product from that same brand.  Almost as if the card company had two design ideas for a card product, rejected one, and then still made a set out of the losing card design.  In so many ways the Fall Classics set looks like a failed design concept for the Greats of the Game line.  In fact, this design is really pretty close to the 2005 Greats of the Game set.  The cards in Fall Classics however do focus on the great players from postseason play and not necessarily the greats of the game.  Two separate groups of people.  Still there are plenty of big names in the set: 

 

There are two features of this set which I really like and made it an enjoyable set to spend half an hour of my afternoon flipping through.  First, the backs of the cards post the players postseason statistics for their career.  Not unheard of with baseball cards, but certainly gives you a different view of some players.  Here's a look at the back of the Bambino.  

 

  The other cool thing, as previously mentioned, is the fact that Fleer put in players who were good postseason performers.  There are plenty of players who have been able to find a few moments during the postseason to play their best games and sometimes the kind of slip through the cracks.  Many baseball fans can tell you plenty about the World Series rings won by greats like Babe Ruth and Stan Musial, but they had plenty of help along the way.  So, I decided while I was flipping through the set to pick out three good, but not great players, who have made a big impact on the postseason during my lifetime (Please not they had to have a card in the set-Big Papi is not in the set)

Depending who you ask, Trammell could be considered great, so I am putting him third on my list.  He only appeared in the postseason twice in 1984 and 1987.  The 1984 team won the World Series and was perhaps on the most dominate teams of the past thirty years.  Basically the Tigers lead the American League from Game 1 through Game 162 and then bludgeoned the Royals and Padres to win the World Series.  Trammell hit .364 in the ALCS and then batted .400 in the World Series winning the MVP.  

At times Porter was a great player, but there were a lot of distractions around Darrell's career.  Go read up, I am not rehashing it.  Porter had several appearances during his career in postseason play with the Royals and Cardinals.  However, he played a key role in the Cardinals winning the 1982 series against the Brewers and took home the World Series MVP.  Kind of cool to see him recognized on cardboard for his great postseason play.  

Last one.  I could have gone Gibson here, but basically the two biggest postseason home runs hit during my lifetime belonged to Kirk Gibson and Joe Carter.  The Gibson one was cool, but it was at the end of the first game.  Joe Carter's walked off a series.  That has not happened too often.  So, you've probably seen it a few hundred times, but it never gets old. Great call on the play too...

"Touch 'em all Joe you'll never hit a bigger home run in your life"