I Love The 1990s Cardinals Part 67 - Cliff Politte

Politte's Cardinals career only lasted eight games, but he is someone who still comes up from time to time amongst the team's fans.  Cliff Politte was a local player who attended Vianney High School in suburban St. Louis, and later at Jefferson College, which is just south of St. Louis County.  Eventually he ended up being selected by the Cardinals in the 54th round of the 1995 MLB Draft.

He pitched in the Cardinals minor league in 1996 and 1997 appearing for two different A Ball teams, and the Double A Arkansas Travelers.  The Cardinals ended up starting Politte out in St. Louis to begin the 1998 season.  He won his first start at the Major League level on the second game of the season against the Dodgers.  After a few starts though, Major League hitters caught up to Politte and he was sent back down to the Minors.

A few cards from Politte's time in the Minors.

I usually hold out the best card(s) for the end of the post.  However, with Politte his best card was one of his firsts.  He signed in the 1997 Bowman set, also appeared in the base set.  Obviously this is the better card.  This is not the most common autographed card in the world, not always the cheapest either for a player who had a short career.  I know that there are Bowman autographs that are tougher than others, I would have to imagine that this card is one of those that is short printed.  

Second best card from his time in the Minors.......

has to be his 1998 Bowman, or Bowman Chrome.  The International variation is a must since the card shows Politte as a Cardinal, but also shows his hometown on the map in the background of the card.  Always a little nice when the hometown and the player's team line up.  Bowman also made these cards in 1997, but they had a national flag in the background instead of the map.  Still a nice looking card, I give it a mention, but not a scan.

On to the Major League cards.

Politte has one of those prospect cards in the 1998 Topps set.  He appears with Braden Looper, who was also a short lived Cardinals prospect.  The Cardinals traded him to the Marlins for Edgar Renteria.  Looper returned back to the Cardinals later in his career.  

So, after returning to the Minors for the second half of the 1998 season, Politte struggled a bit.  At the end of the season, he traded to the Phillies.  The first paragraph from this UPI wire story is a gem....

Obviously Politte ended up being the prospect the Cardinals sent to the Phillies.  Garrett Stephenson, who had squabbled with Curt Schilling in Philadelphia was the "marginal major-league prospect" that was sent to the Cardinals.  

Politte still popped up in a few baseball card sets in 1999.  Not many, but he did get one final appearance as a Cardinal in the Upper Deck Black Diamond set.  

Politte is also in the Metal Universe set wearing a Cardinals uniform, but the markings and logos on the card are of the Phillies.  

As far as the rest of Politte's career, he played a few seasons with the Phillies before heading over to the Blue Jays.  They converted him over to a relief pitcher, which gave his baseball career a little bit of life.  Eventually he ended up on the White Sox for a few seasons, including 2005.  

Politte appeared in 4 games during the White Sox run to the World Series title, including three against the Astros in the World Series.  His 2006 was rough and led to Politte being released mid way through the season.  In 2007, he tried to come back with the Indians.  In 2008, he tried a comeback with the Cardinals.  Politte ended up pitching a handful of games in Memphis, but never made it back to St. Louis.  

Cardinals From COMC Part 2

A few more random Cardinals cards from my latest COMC run.  I made my first post about this batch of cards last week, which were all filling various holes in my collection, whether they be apart of a complete set, team set, or just cool card of a favorite Cardinals player.  A few more cards in this post, which is more heavy with veteran players.

The cards in this post span a decade, from 1997 through 2007, so I am going to post them in sequential order by year.  First up.....

Three Cardinals cards out of the Pinnacle Totally Certified set.  The set ran off of colored parallels, with each color having a different print run.  This is still a really popular set, a sure fire favorite of collectors from the late 1990s.  I already have the complete run of Lankford's out of this set, along with one or two different colors from the three players shown above.  I should probably try to assemble a complete set of these cards, but for the moment I am sticking with putting together the Cardinals cards.  These are three sharp looking cards.  

Next up, a card from a set that I am trying to put together.  I have a ton of 1997 Topps and Topps Chrome cards.  The base sets are both complete and I am deep on several of the insert sets.  Working on finishing out those missing cards, I actually got some non-Cardinals cards in this lot, but Andy Benes was the only Cardinals insert that I was missing.

This Eckersley is here for the same reasons as the Andy Benes card, but it's from the 1998 Topps set.  This scan really mangled his hat for some reason.  Looks like one of those old man baseball hats with the rope looking piece going between the bill and body of the hat.  Eck is old on this card, but not that old.  Plus, nobody with hair like Eckersley would ever wear a hat like that, way too cool.  

This Cliff Politte card is a spillover from the first post.  I had several of the Cardinals from the 1998 Leaf Stars & Rookie set in that post, but somehow I missed this card.  My bad.  

This is a set that I own,  Always liked the Black Diamond sets.  I have several of the parallels from the Cardinals players, just trying to finish out the team set of parallel cards.  I will have to double check my accounting, but I believe this is the last card I was missing.  

Non-Cardinal card of a former Cardinals player, Preston Wilson was on the 2006 World Series winning team.  Not specifically collecting Preston Wilson, never minded him as a player and I like him on television, but I actually really liked the Fleer Mystique set back when it came out.  I have the base set assembled, but I am missing a few of the short printed rookie cards which are all serial numbered.  

I am actually a little disappointed by the printing around the serial numbers on this card.  They looked scratched, or something happened to them.  I looked at a few other cards that I have from this set, none of them.  I am going to overlook the scratching for the moment, maybe I will go back later and get a different copy.  

I am not a big fan of the Donruss Fan Club set.  It was a pretty cheap box back in 2002 and the cards seemed somewhat repetitive from the Donruss base set.  If you cut off the words Fan Club, this feels like the runner up design for the Donruss base set.  I do like So Taguchi however, so this was sort of a necessary evil.  2002 had a lot of serial numbered rookie cards, at the time I skipped a ton of them. Slight case of fatigue from chasing down Pujols rookie cards from the previous year combined with the fact that Taguchi spent his first year with the Cardinals in Triple A.  

So turned it around and eventually became a pretty useful player for the Cardinals in the mid 2000s.  He hit an important playoff home run off of Billy Wagner in the 2006 NLCS and also was always brutally honest about the mosquito problems at Busch Stadium.  

It's a serial numbered Ray Lankford, and it's not a difficult one to find.  This is not already in my collection?  Well, it was, but child #2 somehow get her hands on this card.  I still have it, but it's in pretty poor condition at this point.  

Two more.  

I did work on the 2005 Upper Deck Reflections set back in the day, but did not touch the 2004 product.  Both were generally the standard mid 2000s Upper Deck product, but the 2005 set had some really distinctive dual signature cards.  The 2004 set was rather boring autograph wise, mainly just a few rookies, not sure any of them are really highly sought after, or worth much.  

Back to the card.  I liked Renteria a lot in the mid 2000s, but I really slowed down on collecting his cards once he left the Cardinals for the Red Sox at the end of the 2004 season.  There are quite a few serial numbered cards from his later years in St. Louis that I just never took the time to find, they are all very affordable now.  

I really like the looks of this card.  An obvious Upper Deck card.  

Last one.  I did not touch the 2007 Topps Rookie 52 set.  Seemed repetitive.  I think I have an Edward Muijica autograph, since he was on the Cardinals, but that's about it.  Did you know that it has a Jim Edmonds card in it?  I didn't either, now I own one.  

So What High School Did You Go To?

One of the worst things about living in St. Louis is the St. Louis question: So what high school did you go to?  It's a loaded question meant to categorize you and give the person asking a little insight into whether they should feel like they are a little bit better than you, or if they should drop the topic and discuss their love of Anheuser-Busch products, the Cardinals, or provel cheese (not provolone).

Someone conducted a poll about the St. Louis question with people who lived in St. Louis....

These results are annoying.

So, I got a new baseball card of a former Cardinals player last week who is from St. Louis.  No, it's not David Freese or Ryan Howard.  Freese and Howard both went to the same high school, I'd guess it's probably better than the high school that I went to since it's a little bit newer and Robert Archibald, Scottish basketball legend and former Memphis Grizzly, went to that school too....

In contrast, the high school I attended produced the poker player who wears the fossil sunglasses.

It's also not Yogi Berra.  He went to another high school that David Freese and Ryan Howard did not attend.  Off the top of my head, I did not know what high school Yogi Berra went to in St. Louis, other than he's from St. Louis.   I looked it up and it turns out that Joe Garagiola also went to that high school.  Also Francis Slay, who has been mayor of St. Louis forever.

Pretty big St. Louis baseball names, but they are not Cliff Politte.  If you don't know if Cliff Politte is here is my two sentence career synopsis:

Cliff Politte attended Hillsboro College in beautiful Hillsboro, Missouri before transferring to the University of Memphis where he was drafted by his hometown St. Louis Cardinals in the 54th round of the 1995 draft.  He debuted with the Cardinals in 1998 and played nine seasons in the Majors with the Cardinals, Phillies, Blue Jays, and White Sox.

Cliff Politte high school factoid: He went to the same high school as NFL quarterback Trent Green.  I am not sure if they knew each other, but I am sure that at least a few thousand people around the city attended class with both of them at the same time.  Wink.  

More important than the fact that Politte went to a high school named after a catholic saint who is the patron saint of other catholic priests, is the fact that he had an autograph in the 1998 Bowman set.  I actually did not know about this card until a few weeks ago when I saw a copy in a Cardinals the phot album of a Cardinals baseball card collector.  

It took me a few days to track down the card, there were a few floating around for $15-$20, but I landed one for a fraction of that with a little patience.  I was actually surprised that Politte made it on to an autographed card with the Cardinals.  Yes, he's a hometown guy, but his career stat line with the Cardinals is rather thin.

Cliff played a total of 8 games with the Cardinals in 1998, went 2-3 with an ERA over 6.  At the end of the 1998 season he was packaged up with headaches Ron Gant and Jeff Brantley in exchange for Garrett Stephenson and Ricky Bottalico.  Nothing to see with that trade.

He spent a few years with the Phillies, but his career really saw it's high mark when he went to the Blue Jays and started working out of the bullpen.  He played two years for the Jays and appeared in more than 50 games each year before joining the White Sox for three years.

In 2005 he worked as the setup man for Bobby Jenks including Game 4 of the 2005 World Series which has to be the highlight of his career.

Notice I went the whole post and never mentioned a single high school by name, please only make vague references to your high school if you are going to leave a comment.....