Set Appreciation Post #19- 1995 Select Certified

 This week's Set Appreciation Post has a special guest, my six year-old daughter.  

She is a kindergartener who has some strong opinions on life and a love of art work.  Parts of our house are frequently converted into art galleries for whatever art she is working on at the moment. Her art does not always stay on paper though. Sometimes, it appears in other forms.  

For example, after returning home from a trip to Washington, D.C. this spring my computer was covered in sticky notes. Each sticky note was its own piece of art work, but it also somehow formed a larger work.  

The explanation would take several minutes and there would be no baseball cards in this post if I wrote everything she said about the sticky note art work.

She already has some opinions about my baseball cards.  

For example, according to her, my baseball card boxes are all pretty boring because they are plain white. She thinks that I should have the outside of the boxes match the baseball cards that are on the inside. At some point last year, she attempted to decorate the boxes for my autographed cards, which all have the letter "N" scribbled on the outside of them. She had bigger plans that her stopped. According to her, someone wrote on the cards inside the box, so she wrote the first letter of her name on the outside of the box.  

They match and she is willing to add more art to the outside of the boxes.  

I have not allowed her to continue to do her art work on my baseball card boxes, but that did not stop her from doing one final piece of art work on my box holding my copy of the 1995 Select Certified set. The cards are bright and shiny, so the box should match, right?  

Here is the top.  

Here is the front.  

Her median was 1990 Upper Deck team logo stickers.  

Let's talk about the cards. 

Each of us will provide a take on the 1995 Select Certified set.

Here is the basic design of the 1995 Select Certified cards.  

I really like the dark greyscale background behind the color photos, which is something different. I also like the card stock and texture. It's not exactly a thick paper stock, but definitely has a sturdy feel to the card. There is a glossy finish, which I think is interesting on a card that uses a greyscale background. 

My daughter does not like this design and wants to know why a brighter color like purple was not used in the background. She suggests a pattern that you could color in like a coloring book.  

That's actually not a bad idea.  

I love the breakdown of the stats by team on the back of the card. It's like the Bowman cards, but with more color and better graphics. Sure, you get less numbers, but you still get a good sense of how the player faired against each team. Bonds torched the Expos in 1994, which is saying something because they were easily the best team in the National League.  

My daughter likes that Barry Bonds is willing to wear earrings on his baseball card, but thinks at least one team should use a pony or hearts as their logo.  

My favorite card of a former Durham Bulls player in this set is Chipper Jones. His early cards are always fun, looks a little silly here with the huge swing. I will add that the number of former Bulls players in this set is fairly small and the other choices had rather blah looking pictures.

The card did not scan well, but Chipper is actually apart of the Rookie subset in Select Certified and the background of the card is half grey and half gold. That stamp does not exactly show a ton of creativity.  

My daughter also picked out this card for her favorite Durham Bulls player in the set, although her explanation started out with, "Have you ever ate lunch with boys at school?" and ended with "making farting noises".  It took her about two minutes to explain the whole thing, I will let your imagination fill in the middle of the conversation.  

My favorite Cardinals card in the set......

is Bernard Gilkey.  

Several of the Cardinals players are pictured in road uniforms, which are nice, but are also a gray uniform on a dark gray background. I do like the action shot on the front of this card, but also really like the way that the white home uniform with the red helmet and uniform accessories pop on the dark background.

My daughter did not pick a favorite Cardinals card, because "none of them are very nice looking" and added a "No, thank you" when I told her that she needed to pick a Cardinals card. Later in the post she does pick a former Cardinals player card for her favorite overall card from the set.  

Let me off-road a few other things I like about this set, but the little one rejoins the conversation.  

One of the best parts of Select Certified is the Gold Mirror parallels.  

I am generally not a parallel person, but this one is well done. There were a few Gold cards in every box, no serial numbers, and it's the only parallel that came in the product.  Over the years, I have put together the complete set of Cardinals and I am close to having all the former Durham Bulls players. Good looking set of cards.  

If you don't dig the dark background of the base cards, these are a really nice option and they are generally not that expensive compared to the price of other popular 1990s parallels at the moment.  

Moving on.  

Select Certified is a small set with only 135 cards in the set. There were 28 Major League teams in 1995, so there are roughly 4 to 5 cards for each team. Small sets generally tend to stick to the big names on rosters and not stray into many subsets or special cards. Select Certified has a bit of both.  

The Dodgers got a special card for having three players win the Rookie of the Year in a row.  

Eddie Murray also got a special card for collecting his 3,000 hit in 1994.  

Always cool to see these kinds of cards to mark special accomplishments, especially on a small checklist like Select Certified. There are also Rookie Subset cards. I posted one at the top of the post with the Chipper Jones card, but the scan did not do a good job of showing the card.  

Here is another Rookie subset with a picture taken using my phone's camera.  

There are actually some pretty big names in the Rookie subset with Jeter and ARod. A few others including one later in the post.  The Jeter and ARod are not actually rookie cards, but still early cards that are fun to own. You can see the two-toned background a little better on photograph. 

Let's bring the little one back in to finish up the post and talk about our favorite cards.  

My daughter is up first with Mark McGwire.  

She picked this card, because Mark McGwire is the only player in the set with long hair.  

That's it, her whole reason for picking the card. I will add for context that her favorite Disney Princess is Rapunzel, and that she keeps her hair long and it must be styled everyday before she goes to school. I would like to see Mark McGwire rock some bubble braids.  

I went a little different direction for my favorite non-Cardinal, non-Durham Bulls card from this set.  I decided to pick the Hideo Nomo rookie card.  

  

Every year the baseball card world goes crazy of a certain player or two. In 1995, there was Nonomania. Everyone wanted a Hideo Nomo card and this was one of my favorites. A great card from the mid 1990s, I think if I made a list of the best cards from my time in high school, this card would be on the list.  

How does it rank on my list?  

It has been a hot minute since I have done a set appreciation post. The last set I added to my list was the 2001 Donruss set last November. The set was terrible. The 1995 Select Certified set is definitely not terrible. In fact, it's a pretty good set of baseball cards. 

Narrow it down.  Looking at the top half of the sets I have posted, I think it's better than Emotion XL (they are kind of similar though) and the 2017 Heritage Minor League set. Topps TEK feels like the right neighborhood.  I am actually going to give Select Certified the slight nod given its a set that you can actually complete, unlike Topps Tek's 8,100 card craziness.  

19. 2000 Pacific Paramount Update 

18. 2010 Topps USA Baseball  

17. 2001 Donruss 

16. 2000 Topps 

15. 2012 Bowman Platinum 

14. 2000 UD Ionix

13. Topps Lineage   

12. 2002 Bowman 

11. 1988 Donruss 

10. 1995 Emotion XL 

9. 2017 Topps Heritage Minor League

8. 1998 Topps TEK 

7. 1995 Select Certified 

6. 1986 Topps Mini League Leaders 

5. 2001 Fleer EX 

4. 1979 Kellogg's 

3. 1998 Metal Universe 

2. 2002 Topps Super Teams

1. 1983 Topps 

Set Appreciation Post #9 - 2000 Pacific Paramount Update

There was a 2000 Pacific Paramount Update set?  

Yes.  

Seems pretty random, right? 

Yes.  

Well, there was a lot of really weird stuff going on with this set. Let's check out a base card, which kicks off the weirdness of this set. Right off the bat, the first card seems a little bit off, if you collected Pacific cards around this time.  

Paramount Weird Fact #1- No Garrett Anderson?  What about Darin Erstad? 

 

 

Pacific sets were always set up with the teams arranged alphabetically by the city/state name of the team, with the players organized alphabetically by last name within the team set.  The Anaheim Angels were always the first team.  How many late 1990s or early 2000s Pacific sets had either Garrett Anderson or Darin Erstad as card #1?  

 

The answer is almost all of them.  

Pacific put out 12 different baseball card products in 2000.  Nine of the sets had either Anderson or Erstad as card #1.  Pacific Prism had Erstad, no Garrett Anderson card, but they included Jeff DeVanon (you may not know him for good reason) who had the first card.  I rolled my eyes too.  Vanguard had Troy Glaus as the first card, but only two Angels cards in the set.  

 

Same with the 1998 and 1999 Pacific cards, only Jim Edmonds was still on the team, and before Erstad alphabetically.  

Beyond Jeff DeVanon and Troy Glaus, there was also this Adam Kennedy card in the 2000 Pacific Paramount Update set, which was the first card in the Paramount Update set. 

Weird Paramount Fact #2 - The set was sold through the J.C. Penny Christmas catalog and limited to a print run of just 12,500.  I certainly did not get this set from the J.C. Penny Christmas catalog.  Instead, I got it from a local card shop in St. Louis whose owner ordered the sets for his store out of the J.C. Penny Christmas catalog, because it was loaded with Cardinals players.  

Here are a few.  

Here are three of them.  There is another Cardinals card later in the post.  

Gene Stechschulte is actually a pretty interesting player.  He did not have a very long career, playing three seasons all with the Cardinals in the late 1990s and early 2000s as a middle reliever.  I believe he had some arm or shoulder injuries.  What he is really famous for was hitting a home run in his first at-bat on the first pitch he saw. 

 

 

The Diamondbacks were winning this game 15-1 when Stechschulte hit the home run.  LaRussa put him into the game to pinch hit for the pitcher Mike James.  Stechschulte never threw a pitch in this game, but the Cardinals did use Bobby Bonilla for the ninth.

 

Weird Paramount Fact #3 - I own two copies of this set.  I bought one back in 2000, but also ended up with one a few years ago when a co-worker gave me some of his old baseball cards.   Pacific was a solid card manufacturer.  I cannot remember them ever have major issues with quality control.  However, for some reason there are odd sticker pieces that are attached to random cards in both my copies of the set.  

Again, weird for Pacific to have quality control issues.  

What is even going on here?  

The green striped piece on the Bret Boone card actually looks the same/similar to the bottom border of the card.  Only it's clearly a sticker if you could be here to touch it yourself.  Why is there a giant white sticker over Mike Lamb's head?  We will never know.  

 

If there were actually any rookie cards worth owning in this set, there were would likely be tons of annoying "Ebay 1/1" listing with random stickers all over the cards.  

 

Weird Paramount Fact #4- There are 100 cards on the checklist, but I swear at least 50 of the players in this set were not traded or signed as free agents during the year.  Lots of cards like......

.....Chipper Jones on the Braves.  

 

There is also a Derek Jeter on the Yankees, Tony Gwynn on the Padres, Cal Ripken on the Orioles, Barry Bonds on the Giants (free agent signing in 1993), Scott Rolen on the Phillies (traded in the future), Mark McGwire on the Cardinals (traded 3 years earlier), and Mike Piazza on the Mets (traded two years earlier).  

It feels like someone at Pacific said. "Lets make an Update set!".  A bunch of people sat down and started making a checklist. 

 

"Who got traded or signed as a free agent in 2000?  Ken Griffey, Jim Edmonds, and Juan Gonzalez."

 

They probably wrote down a few players who were rookies, a few free agent signings, and they were still 70 cards short of a set.  

"Meh, let's throw in an ARod card." 

This has to be the all-time record holder for traded/update set with the most players who were never traded, nor signed as a free agent during the calendar year.  

 

Weird, But It's Just The Uniform 

 

One of the best parts of getting out an old update set is looking through the cards to find players you know, on teams you don't remember they were on.  Like all old update sets, I found two players who were in unusual places in 2000.   

 

Rickey Henderson started to the 2000 season with the Mets, but was released and signed with the Mariners in the middle of the season.  He was 41, played 92 games, and managed to steal 31 bases.  Not bad.  I actually kind of remember him being on the Mariners, but it's not like I stayed up and watched a lot of Mariners games.  He was there, I did not watch very often. 

Nomo on the Tigers looks a little strange too.  I always think of him as a Dodger, but he played a lot of other places in between his two stints in LA.  I remembered the Mets and Brewers, but I went and looked him up on Baseball Reference.  The Dodgers traded him to the Mets in 1998, and he went back to the Dodgers in 2001.  In between he appeared, or was on the roster of the Mets, Cubs, Brewers, Phillies, Tigers, and Red Sox.  

Nomo threw a no-hitter on the Red Sox?  

Best Cardinals Player Who Deserved To Be In A Traded Set  

 

Jim Edmonds.  

 

Edmonds was traded to the Cardinals during Spring Training of 2000.  He was scheduled to be a free agent at the end of the season.  The late 1990s/early 2000s Cardinals were good at trading for pending free agents and getting them to sign before they hit the market.  They did this same thing with McGwire and Scott Rolen. 

Best Durham Bulls Player Who Deserved To Be In A Traded Set  

I am going to put two different Bulls players in this section.  I will go with one Minor Leaguer who was promoted to the Majors, along with one Major League who changed teams.  I will do the Major Leaguer first.  

 

 

Klesko appeared for the 1990 Durham Bulls.  After a long run with the Braves, Klesko was traded to the Padres for Reggie Sanders and Wally Joyner.  Love the facial hair.  I believe this was a homecoming of sorts for Klesko, who spent almost all of the second half of his career with the Padres.  Not a Hall of Famer, but a very good hitter. 

 

The former Durham Bulls player who appeared in the set as a Minor League call up was Jeff Sparks.  

 

 

He did not have a really long Major League career.  He only pitched in 23 games between the 1999 and 2000 seasons.  According to his Wikipedia page, his career highlight was a save against the Yankees at the end of the 1999 season.  His Wikipedia page says that he makes YouTube videos with former Dodgers reliever Mike Marshall. 

 

It's true.  

The Bulls get a mention on the back of the Jeff Sparks card.  

Best Player(s) Who Deserved To Be In A Traded Set 

I decided to balance this section with a traded/free agent player and a young player who got called up during the 2000 season.  Veteran player first.  

 

 Seemed like an easy answer.  

 

The rookie card.  Perhaps the only decent rookie card in the entire set.  

 

 Two time Cy Young Award winner in the American League.  His career was really shortened by injuries, but he was Hall of Fame quality when he wasn't hanging out on the disabled list.  He almost had that no-hitter the one time.  

 

 

How Does It Compare?  

 

The design isn't great.  I am not sure all of the weird and quirky aspects of the set are really all that positive.  While I love many things about Pacific Baseball Cards from this era, this is not one of their better efforts.  Where are the parallels?  Where are the interesting die-cut cards?  Paramount Update will occupy the 9th spot for the moment.  

 

Better set next week.  I will go with something a little older too. 

 

9. 2000 Pacific Paramount Update 

8. 2010 Topps USA Baseball  

7. 2000 UD Ionix 

6. 2017 Topps Heritage Minor League

5. 1986 Topps Mini League Leaders 

4. 2001 Fleer EX 

3.1979 Kellogg's 

2. 2002 Topps Super Teams

1. 1983 Topps 

They're Here.

I shared a Kent Merker card from an old Durham Bulls set earlier in the week.  It was from the 1997 BellSouth Bulls to Braves set, which I have been trying to track down forever with little luck.  For whatever reason, someone listed half the set on Ebay earlier in the week.  I made an offer, it got accepted, and now the cards are here.  Definitely some positive feedback for shipping.  

I am pretty excited.  

There are a few cards here that are duplicates, but there are also cards here that I have never even seen before the Ebay listing, like Chipper Jones.  

Here is a look at the set. 

The checklist has the 9 players included in this half of the set, but also a brief description about the player selection.  One thing that I really like about the Bulls to Braves set was that they included players who great while they were in Durham.  It would be really easy, especially with a long running Minor League team, to just throw together 10 players who were good in the Majors.  Love that we get cards of Dennis Burlingame and Melvin Nieves who made their mark with the Bulls for various reasons.   

Player cards.  

Good career with the Braves and Padres.  Ryan Klesko had cool sideburns and liked surfing.  

Avery was toast as a Major League player when this set was released.  The Braves had let him walk as a free agent where he ended up signed with the Red Sox.  If you talk to people who watched the Bulls in the 1980s and 1990s, he was apparently absolutely incredible in the Minors.  Scary that he was 18, fresh out of high school, and was that dominate right away.  How do you lose 4 games with an ERA of 1.45?  I know the answer, I am just saying. 

Burlingame is sort of a local legend with the Opening Day perfect game.  He was on the same team as Steve Avery, only his ERA was even lower at 0.50 in 11 starts.  He was a top 50 prospect as a teenager, but as the card says, his career was ruined by injuries.  

Turned out to be a pretty good player.  

Hit 300 home runs, and was not happy that the Oakland A's had a soda machine that changed players $1 for can of Coke.  

Maybe skip this one if you're a Padres fan.  

Melvin had a career year in 1992, which included time with the Bulls.  I have run into the occasional Padres fan who will use unkind words about Melvin, but I have met more Braves fans who are really grateful that he played so well in A Ball.  As the card states, Melvin was traded for Fred McGriff.  Melvin made it to the Majors, played a few years with the Padres, Tigers, and Reds.  

Another really good Major League player.  He killed my Cardinals during the 1996 NLCS.  They could not get him out.  He hit .542 with 7 extra base hits (2 home runs, 5 doubles) in 7 games.  

Second time this week I have posted a copy of this card.  Great Minor Leaguer, solid Major Leaguer.  

Good Minor Leaguer.  Decent outfielder for the Pirates during the 1990s.  Although, Harry Carey once compared an Al Martin home run against the Cubs to Babe Ruth hitting home runs.  There is even video. 

Set Appreciation Post #4 - 2001 Fleer EX

Basic Design 

The EX sets were some of my favorite products in the late 1990s.  Good designs.  Innovative product.  There wasn't much not to love about the first two designs that Skybox used for this product. 

The 1998 set is my favorite of the two.  I will have to do a write up on this set one week down the road.   

The 1999 EX set is also very good, but a notch down from the original in my opinion.  

Same basic formula and format for both the 1998 and 1999 sets.  Transparent plastic cards with a raised photo of the player.  Unfortunately, someone at Skybox went and did something really dumb the year after.  They changed the product in 2000.  

It was terrible.  

The card stock was thin and the front of the cards were actually stickers that placed on the cardboard.  Over time the adhesive lost its stick, and you had these catastrophes.  Note the peeling at the bottom of the card.  

I had some really low expectations for the 2001 E-X set when it came out.  In fact, when it was first released I did not touch it until I saw someone else open a pack.  The cards were re-branded to Fleer and the were much better quality.  Thick card stock (The 100 card base set fits nicely into a 300 count box) and the printing was directly on the card were good repairs from the 2000 set.    

The base has some of the same design elements as the 1998 and 1999 sets, minus the transparent plastic section on the side.  While the design shifted back towards the first two sets, the player picture is not raised on the card like the originals.  

Here is the back of the card.  

The stats are a little weird.  The players performance against their division is included on the back, along with the playoff teams from their League and Interleague play. The bottom features some really generic stat line of their best game of the 2000 season.  

I think that they could have made the backs a little more streamlined and simple.  It would have worked just fine in this set. 

Best Former Durham Player 

The answer is Chipper Jones.  

I feel like that is going to be the answer whenever I write about a 1990s or 2000s set on my Set Appreciation posts.  I have done four of these Set Appreciation Posts, and the answer has been Chipper Jones twice.  

Shall we look at the back?  

The Cardinals did a pretty good job of keeping Chipper in check during the 2000 season.  Although, the 1 home run he hit against the Cardinals was a game winner off of Mike Timlin.  

I might have to select my best Durham Bulls card on the picture after this post, which means that 50% of these posts will still have a Chipper Jones card.  

Favorite Cardinals Card(s) 

One of the best parts of writing these set posts is that it gives me a chance to dig through my card closet and find some cool cards that I have not shared yet.  It forces me to look in boxes where I normally do not venture.  

Two months ago, I spent an hour digging through my 2001 sets pulling out Albert Pujols rookies for this post.  I thought I had them all, but I missed this one.  Find this missing one also led me to look in another box, where I found another.  That's two new Albert Pujols rookie cards from writing this post.  

This was really a no-brainer once I saw it in the box.  However, there is also another Cardinals rookie card in this set that is a little bit of an early 2000s cult classic.  I am going to split the best Cardinals card between Albert Pujols, and the guy below.  

Meet long-time Triple A catcher Keith McDonald. 

The Cardinals called him up in early July 2000 to backup catcher Mike Matheny while Eli Marrero was on the disabled list for a short stint.  His first at bat came towards the end of a July 4th blowout against the Reds.  He hit a home run.  

Plenty of players hit home runs in their first at-bat.  Not anything too extraordinary, right?  McDonald also managed to hit a home run the next night in his first at-bat to become the second Major League player to hit a home run in his first two at-bats.  The other was outfielder Bob Nieman, who actually played a few seasons with the Cardinals in the early 1960s.  

To make the story even more bizarre, McDonald ends up getting a few pinch hitting opportunities over the next week, but he doesn't get any hits.  Last weekend he was in the Majors in 2000, he gets to pinch hit late in a game and hits a home run.  Three hits while he was up, all home runs.  The Cardinals send McDonald back down to the Minors, but call him up in 2001 for a few games.  Bounces around in the Minors a few more years, never gets called up.  Never gets another hit in the Majors.   

Keith McDonald is the only Major League player to have one than one home run, but no other types of hits.  He has an autographed card in this set too, but I do not own it.  Yet.  

Favorite Non-Cardinals Cards 

These were fairly easy choices this week.  

First up is Vladimir Guerrero.  

If you ever watched Vladimir Guerrero in person, you know that pitchers really had to work hard to walk him.  He was not going up there to take a bunch of pitches.  The crazy thing was that he hit balls most players would take, and hit them hard.  

The ball actually looks like it's at his knee in this picture, but his swing looks really odd here.  Bet this ended up being a hit. A few years back, someone made a mash-up video of 50 Cent's first pitch for the Mets and Vladimir Guerrero hitting a double.  The 50 Cent first pitch missed home plate by 10 feet, it's always on those terrible first pitch blooper videos.  

I also have another favorite rookie card in this set, but I own the autographed copy of this one.....

Juan Pierre was always a fun player to watch.  One of the last players, might be the last, to wear his fielding hat underneath his batting helmet.  Always one of my favorites.  In some ways, Juan Pierre was a 2000s player who probably would have fit in well with the 1980s Cardinals.  

How Does It Rank?  

The 2001 Fleer EX is much better than Ionix, but not nearly as good as the Super Teams set.  I spent a few minutes thinking about this in comparison to the 1986 Topps Mini League Leaders.  I like the Mini League Leader set, but this has some nicer bells and whistles.  Also Keith McDonald.  I am going to place this set second on my list.  

4. 2000 U.D. Ionix 

3. 1986 Topps Mini League Leaders 

2. 2001 Fleer EX 

1. 2002 Topps Super Teams 

That's a lot of early 2000s sets.  I am going to do something from the 70s next week.