It's Not That I Am Against Sets......

There have been a whole bunch of 2019 sets that have been released this year starting with Topps Series 1 way back in January or February.

I think I have a Stadium Club set put together.  Otherwise, I just have a bunch of random 2019 cards from a whole bunch of different sets.  Way back at the beginning of the year I thought I would try to put together a couple of small sets.  Have I done that?  

No.  

It's not that I am against sets, it's just that the majority that Topps is putting out at this point do not really hold my interest.  Rather mediocre.  

What to do?  

I am going to try to put together a pair of small Upper Deck insert sets from the early 1990s.  One from the 1992 Upper Deck Minor League set, and the other from the 1993 Upper Deck base set. Different years, different products, but I have always felt like these two insert sets are clones of each other.  

Minor League set first....

This is from the Top Prospects Holograms set.  There are 9 cards, but I only have two of them.  One being the Dmitri Young shown above as a member of the Springfield Cardinals.  The other belongs to Chipper Jones, which is a Durham Bulls card.  The other 7 cards in the set shouldn't be too hard to find.

I already have the red cards. 

TP1 Midre Cummings

TP2 Cliff Floyd

TP3 Chipper Jones

TP4 Mike Kelly

TP5 David McCarty

TP6 Frank Rodriguez

TP7 Brien Taylor

TP8 Rondell White

TP9 Dmitri Young

North Carolina native Brien Taylor card seems like he might be the hardest card left to find.  There is not one on COMC at the moment, so I will have to find one from some place different, I do not always like buying single cards like this off of Ebay.  Might have to go do a SportsLots order, something.    

On to the 1993 Upper Deck set.  If you collected at the time, I bet you can guess the insert set....

This is from the Then & Now set.  There is an older player of the picture in color with the hologram showing a new picture.  There are 18 cards in all.  There are actually a few cards in this set that I am not big on, but the rest of the cards more than make up for it.  

These are the cards I do not like.....

The retired players in the set have a goofy picture of the player wearing an Upper Deck shirt of some sort in the hologram picture rather than an older image.  Why doesn't this Reggie Jackson have a picture of him on the Angels, or his last season with the A's?  Would have made for a better set, but it's only a few cards that fit into this category.  

I am missing roughly half the set.  I already have the red cards. 

TN1 Wade Boggs

TN2 George Brett

TN3 Rickey Henderson

TN4 Cal Ripken, Jr.

TN5 Nolan Ryan

TN6 Ryne Sandberg

TN7 Ozzie Smith

TN8 Darryl Strawberry

TN9 Dave Winfield

TN10 Dennis Eckersley

TN11 Tony Gwynn

TN12 Howard Johnson

TN13 Don Mattingly

TN14 Eddie Murray

TN15 Robin Yount

TN16 Reggie Jackson

TN17 Mickey Mantle

TN18 Willie Mays

I think I can have these two small sets put together by the end of September.  Go team.  

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.  

A Prospect and A Hall Of Famer

I recently had a chance to pick up a really nice looking card of Cardinals pitching prospect Alex Reyes.  Two years ago he was one of the better pitching prospects in the game, but had an elbow injury and missed last season.  Reyes is going to miss the first month or two of the 2018 season, but he should be back at some point late in May, or early in June.  

Alex Reyes is one of those prospects that has tons and tons of baseball cards.  There were a lot of cards made of him last year, this year has been a little slower.  Card companies have moved on to other prospects, but their are still some nice cards of Reyes floating around.  I recently was able to pick up a really sharp looking Reyes card from a regular trading partner.  

A look at the card......

  

Five Star is a really high end product with some really nice features, but luckily the prospect cards in the set are really affordable.  This card from the 2017 edition has an excellent design.  I like the dark grey in the background combined with the bright color picture of Reyes, and the signature in silver pen.  I know that this card does not have the lowest serial number of the colored cards that are in Five Star, but in my opinion this is probably the best looking looking of those parallels.  

Nothing like an orange Cardinals card.  

Reyes was a tremendous talent before he injured his elbow.  Hopefully he can bounce back and regain his form from the end of the 2016 season when the Cardinals used him down the stretch.  

I also managed to pick up another Cardinals card while I was trading for the Reyes card.  Not quite who you would think of when I say Hall of Famer and Cardinal in the same sentence.  It was still an attractive, nice looking card, and it was a really affordable card.  

This is from the Postseason version of the Topps Archives Signature product.  I am not quite sure why Topps made a regular season and a Postseason version of this product last year.  Although, if you were going to pick a good moment in Dennis Eckersley's brief career as a Cardinal, the 1996 Postseason is a good place to look.  

Eck pitched in a total of 6 games that year in the NLDS and NLCS for a Cardinals team that came within a game of the World Series.  He totaled 7 innings in those 6 games, did not give up a run, and struck out 6 batters.  Easily his best moment, since the back of the baseball card stats for the regular season with the Cardinals were not up to the standards he set while he was pitching with the A's and others.  

Considering these cards come one to a box, which cost somewhere between $40 and $50, I was more than happy to find a Cardinals card from the set for a fraction of the cost.  The scratches on the scan are all on the case and the card is serial numbered, but the numbering is in a weird spot next to Eck's cleat on the right side of the card.  

I Love The 1990s Cardinals Part 11- Dennis Eckersley

If you really like Dennis Eckerlsey this might hurt just a little bit.  I have no problem with Eck being in the Hall of Fame and can say that he was truly a great pitcher throughout most of his career.  As a person who grew up in the 1980s/1990s I remember him best as a starting pitcher for the Cubs and a relief pitcher for the A's.

Those A's teams were always entertaining and won a lot of games, even if they only managed to win a single World Series.

Eck was brought over to the Cardinals before the 1996 season along with half a dozen other former A's players.  It wasn't one of his better efforts, but it sort of all got swept under the rug.  The Cardinals ended up making the National League Championship Series that season and Eck saved 30 games.  He was good when it counted....

but the next season was a different story.  The Cardinals were not very good in 1997 and Eckersley was part of the problem.  The fans, often portrayed as "the best", booed Eckersley after he blew saves.  The Cardinal years were basically the end of his career.  Eckersley returned to the Red Sox for a season in 1998, but he was not their closer.  

Lets talk about Eckersley cards.  First up, why have card companies made baseball cards of Eckersley as a Cardinals player since he retired?  I'd love to own a nice Eckersley card with him on the A's, Indians, Red Sox, maybe even the Cubs.  The Cardinals?  

Say it ain't so.  Let's look at some 1997 Cardinals Eckersley cards.  I am going to go with three different cards for this post. 

First up is a 1997 Bowman card.  I have posted other cards from this set in other posts in this series.  More or less, I love the black border on these cards.  I know these are not the best Bowman cards from this decade, but I just love the way that these cards look.  Plus, I love the picture of Eck on this card.  One eye closed and his hair blowing in the wind.  Sweet picture.  

This is a really good picture too.  The Flair Showcase cards were high gloss, great card stock, and high end for the late 1990s.  I really like the contrast on these cards with the color picture in the front and the black and white picture in the background.  

This is another favorite from 1997.  The first year that Skybox issued the EX product.  It didn't have too long of a run, but there are a lot of 1990s cards collectors who love these translucent cards.  The sky in the background with the purple and pink frame are an unusual combination, but they work.  I also like the picture of Eckersley pointing.  That was sort of his signature move at the end of a game.  

Six Pack of Stadium Club Part 3

Third night of cool Stadium Club cards.  I am going with nineties players who appeared in the set tonight.  I spent most of the decade in high school and college which afforded me the opportunity to watch a ton of baseball.  Not all of these players are necessarily great Hall of Famers, but they were still all really fun players to watch.  Here's tonight's six cards......

#285 Tony Gwynn - Padres

Gwynn starred for the Padres over two decades.  He had some great years during the nineties including a run at .400 in 1994.  It's great to see a card of Gwynn in with some of the other great players in this set.  There is something nice about seeing a picture of Mr. Padre with a bat in his hands.  

#54 Bip Roberts - Padres

Back in 1996 Score printed a base card featuring Padres utility player Bip Roberts wearing a sombrero.  It's hard to say a card of a baseball player wearing a sombrero is iconic, but I will go ahead and say:  The 1996 Score Bip Roberts is an iconic baseball card.  Cool to see a little bit different view of the Bipster and his sombrero.  

#93 Andy Van Slyke - Pirates 

Van Slyke came up as a Cardinal, but his best years were spent on the good Pirates teams of the late 1980s and early 1990s.  I liked Van Slyke.  He played a good center field, had some speed, and a little bit of pop.  The Pirates kept Van Slyke while allowing Barry Bonds, Bobby Bonilla, and Doug Drabek walk in free agency.  

#82 Deion Sanders - Braves 

There were three two sport stars during the 90s: Bo Jackson, Deion, and Brian Jordan.  I always thought of Bo Jackson and Brian Jordan as two sport stars who gave up football over time and became full time baseball players.  Deion kind of went the other way.  He spent time at the beginning of his career with the Yankees and Braves while starring for the Falcons as a football player.  Later in his career he became less and less of a factor in the baseball diamond.  Towards the end of the 1990s he was basically out of baseball.  I always remember Deion for speed.  I love this card of him running.  Ummm, he's got a hole in pants.  

#95 Rob Dibble - Reds 

Dibble is an interesting choice for a Stadium Club appearance.  I know he has made a few appearances in some Topps products recently, but thought this card was cool.  Dibble was a classic end of game closer from yesteryear.  Huge leg kick with a really big fastball.  My best memory of Dibble?  Giving up the fourth home run to Mark Whitten during this game.....

#226 Dennis Eckersley - Athletics 

This card is just awesome.  

My Top 50 Players On Cardboard #46-Dennis Eckersley

My Top 50 Players On Cardboard
#46
Dennis Eckersley


1976 Topps Dennis Eckersley RC

Hobby Impact-
The Eck really came into his own as a player, and in the baseball card hobby, when Tony LaRussa signed him as a relief pitcher with the Oakland A's.  Eckersley was surrounded by several hobby favorites during his time in Oakland, which certainly helped his hobby value, but he earned a lot of the interest in his cards through his great performance on the field.  In fact, if you look at the run of good Oakland teams from 1988 through 1992, Eckersley is the real standout pitcher on the team.  

While his cards had taken a dive during the mid 80s, they had a bit of a revival and are now pretty popular.  Add in the fact that Eck has always been a good signer with a great signature and you've got a good chance to be pretty popular within the hobby.  While his cards are not necessarily always really high in value, it's not hard to find collectors who are interested in adding a few nice Eckersley cards to their collections.  


2005 Prime Patches Dennis Eckersley Triple Jersey/Autograph

If you are looking for an inexpensive copy, easily found for less than $20, I suggest looking around at some of his 2005 Donruss/Playoff products which featured him as a Cardinal or Cub.  Not the finest stops in his career which is certainly reflected in the price of the cards.  I will say though, that the Cardinals cards in the Prime Patches set feature some nice multiple relic and patch cards.  

On The Field Impact-
Eckersley started off his career with the Indians and later moved to the Red Sox as a dominate starting pitcher.  He compiled really good numbers as a starter, but his career tailed off after moving to the Cubs in the 80s.  Needless to say, there were a few off the field issues around this time with Eckersley.

In the great tradition of LaRussa/Dave Duncan reclamation projects, the A's signed Eckersley, and moved him to the bullpen.  Eckersley became a control pitcher who threw the ball outside and became one of the most dominating relief pitchers in the Majors from the late 80s through the mid 90s.  1992 was his best year when he won the Cy Young and the MVP while leading the A's to a playoff appearance.  



My favorite Eckersley stat factoid comes from his 1989 and 1990 seasons where he walked less than five people each season while appearing in more than 60 games.  In fact, during those two seasons he walked seven batters combined, one intentionally, while striking out 128 batters.  Pretty impressive control.  


Favorite Card-
Easy.  The 1989 Topps Mini.  


1989 Topps Mini Dennis Eckersley 

Eckersley played for more than twenty years and this follow through is what I remember best about him as a pitcher.  He also squinted one eye when he was pitching, had that funny leg kick, and would always touch his hair before throwing a pitch.  For whatever reason, maybe it's just me, this card is what Dennis Eckersley looks like.  If you were looking for a 1A for best Eckersley card you should find a copy of his 2013 Topps Tribute autograph.  A's uniform, mullet, autograph.  Near perfection.  

More Trade Highlights

I put a little sneak peek up for today's blog on my Facebook and Twitter page last night.  The last two post on my blog, the Shelby Miller and Matt Kemp card, were from the same trade.  Today's blog entry is some more highlights from that same trade.  After almost thirty years of collecting, and a few hundred thousand cards, I am trying to sacrifice some of the quantity from my base card collection for some quality in other areas.  The Kemp, Miller, and an Ozzie Smith card were the primary cards that I was targeting in this trade, but ended up with some other really nice pieces.  Today, I will start with the Ozzie.

2007 UD Premier Ozzie Smith Patch Card 

My other highlight card was a 2011 Bowman Platinum Jeremy Hellickson jersey/autograph.  The card is serial numbered out of 99 and took a lot of convincing to get it into the trade.  I have a few other Hellickson autographs, but did not have a copy of this card in my collection.  

2011 Bowman Platinum Jeremy Hellickson Jersey/Autograph 98/99

The rest of the cards in the trade were icing on the cake.  I got a couple of autographs, a few cool relic cards, and a plate as a throw in to make the trade complete.  Here are some highlights:

1997 Upper Deck Rey Ordonez Game Jersey Relic

2011 Topps Finest Michael Pineda Dual Jersey Autograph 

2009 Topps Tribute Prince Fielder Triple Jersey

2003 Topps Chrome Dennis Eckersley Record Breakers Jersey

2009 Upper Deck USA Baseball Triple Jersey Kolten Wong

2011 Bowman Platinum Brandon Guyer Autograph 

2008 Topps Opening Day Ryan Garko Plate 1/1