These Are All Devil Rays Cards, But....

I am still working on some Durham Bulls sets.  The last two weeks, I have been working on putting together a group of cards from the 1975 Topps Mini set featuring the players who appeared for the Durham Bulls.  I am going to walk and chew gum at the same time, and work a little bit on another group of Durham Bulls cards from a little bit newer set.  

All the cards in this post come from the 2006 Topps 52 set.  I know, Topps overuses old card designs, but this set has a good group of players from the 2006 Bulls team, which was the first one that I got to watch after moving to Durham.  All of the players in this post are pictured in a Devil Rays uniform, but all of them played the majority of the season with the Bulls.  

I think Delmon Young was in Durham the shortest time in 2006, but that was mainly because he was suspended for a huge chunk of the season.  

Since this is a modern set, there are some different challenges from the 1975 Topps Mini set.  The base cards are easy to find, but several of the cards have a red and black backs, along with one card that has an action shot variation.  Each card also has three Chrome parallels with one numbered to 1952, another numbered to 552, and the final numbered to 52.  

There is also an insert card of Elijah Dukes and Delmon Young, along with an autograph of pitcher Brian Stokes, so I am adding those to my checklist, which I broken into pieces throughout the post.  There are roughly 30 cards here, but I am treating the base cards and parallels like they are smaller sets.  I have not really touched the 2007 Topps 52 product, outside of a few Cardinals autographs, so I am starting from 0.  

Here is my first group of cards, starting with the base cards with red backs.  These are the most common cards in the set.  

There are seven total red backs, so this groups gets me about half way through this checklist. 

Base Set Cards - Red Card Backs

#53 - Shawn Riggans 

#65 - Elijah Dukes 

#70 - Delmon Young 

#80 - Andy Sonnanstine 

#81 - Brian Stokes 

#95 - Elijah Dukes 

#114 - Juan Salas 

The black backs are the most common parallel.  There are a bunch of these that are cheap on COMC, but I am a little reluctant to buy them at the moment.  I love cheap, but I have heard from several people that waiting times on COMC orders are currently several months.  

I will find them somewhere else.  In the meantime, I found Elijah Dukes.  

Only 5 cards in the black back parallels.  

Base Set Cards - Black Card Backs

#53 - Shawn Riggans 

#70 - Delmon Young 

#73 - Andy Sonnanstine 

#81 - Brian Stokes 

#95 - Elijah Dukes 

Last up are the Chrome parallels.  I feel like I actually got off to a good start with these. Of the 30 cards mentioned at the top of the post to finish all of the 2006 Durham Bulls players, half are Chrome parallels.  I picked up a pair of cards serial numbered to 1952 a pair to 552, and one card numbered to 52.  

The 1952 serial numbers first.  

The cards numbered to 552.  

Finally, one last card that is numbered to 52.  

These five cards get me roughly through one-third of the Chrome cards.  I was most worried about finding the Delmon Young serial numbered to 52, but that is one card that I have on the way.  He was high on the prospect list when this set was released, and I was worried they may all have disappeared into people's collections.  

Chrome Parallels 

#47 - Delmon Young - 1952

#47 - Delmon Young - 552 

#47 - Delmon Young - 52

#59 - Shawn Riggans - 1952

#59 - Shawn Riggans - 552 

#59 - Shawn Riggans - 52

#65 - Elijah Dukes - 1952

#65 - Elijah Dukes - 552 

#65 - Elijah Dukes - 52

#80 - Andy Sonnanstine - 1952

#80 - Andy Sonnanstine - 552 

#80 - Andy Sonnanstine - 52

#86 - Brian Stokes - 1952

#86 - Brian Stokes - 552 

#86 - Brian Stokes - 52

I also picked up one of the two insert cards from the set.   The other being an autograph, more on that in a minute.   

Dynamic Duos 

DD5 - Delmon Young/Elijah Dukes 

Base Set Cards - Action Variations

#70 - Delmon Young 

Topps 52 Signatures 

#BS - Brian Stokes 

After one post, I am at 10 out of 30 cards.  I do not think this is going to be very difficult to put together, but I am worried about whether the Brian Stokes autograph exists.  It's why I said there were roughly 30 cards in the set.  The Stokes was an exchange card, but it's not clear that he ever actually signed them.  I cannot find a single copy of the card anywhere on the internet.  However, Stokes was generally a really good signer during the mid 2000s.  He appeared in tons of different baseball card sets.  It's also hard for me to imagine he didn't sign them, since he autographed everything else around this time.  

4th Post In A Week

I am on a roll.  

When I last left you, I was telling all about all the cheap Durham Bulls cards that I found over the summer.  Lots of old players from the 70s, 80s, and 90s, but there were also a few more recent players mixed in as well.  Tonight, I thought I'd share a few cards of two players who were on the Bulls roughly 10-15 years ago.  

First, one quick card from 2020.  Also a former Durham Bulls player, which is why I am putting this card in the post.  

Another Kirby Yates card.  I believe he was in another one of the four posts that I made in the past week.  Some of these Topps brands are really running together these days in terms of appearance and design.  Card from an expensive box with a sticker autograph.  

Someone was probably really irked that they spent $300 and they walked away with a Kirby Yates card that I bought for $7.99 on Ebay.   

Onto some older players from the Durham Bulls.  

First up is Elijah Dukes.  Don't go look him up.  There is nothing there that you want to see.  I was excited to find these cards this summer.  Here is my quick run down on Elijah.  

The first year I lived in Durham for baseball season was 2006.  I actually moved to North Carolina in 2005, but missed out on baseball season.  The 2006 Bulls team was loaded was talent.  You might know Delmon Young, B.J. Upton, Ben Zobrist, Jason Hammel, Edwin Jackson, and James Shields.  The International League MVP Kevin Witt was also on the team.  Elijah Dukes was just as good as anyone else in that group.  Baseball America considered him a Top 100 Prospect.  

He was fast and could hit for power.  A star football player in high school who was learning to play baseball, and did some pretty incredible stuff at times.  

Elijah had some off the field issues and was eventually traded to the Nationals.  In Washington, he ran himself out of the league with a bunch of other off the field incidents.  Sadly, Elijah is still fighting the war so to speak.  

I still remember him as a tremendous talent.  I loved collecting his cards the first year or two he was in the league, and found two this summer that I did not own.  

This is a Finest Rookie Redemption card.  Always a nice group of prospects included in these cards, sometimes they do not pan out though.   The 2007 was hit or miss.  Ryan Braun, Justin Upton, and Tim Lincecum are in there.  So are Elijah Dukes and Akinori Iwamura.  

Last Elijah Dukes card is from the 10th Anniversary set of Allen & Ginter that came out in 2015.  There were buybacks of old cards that were stamped with the words "10th Anniversary Issue".  Nice looking cards.  I found a copy of Elijah's 2007 rookie.  

Final Durham Bulls player for this post.  

Desmond Jennings was a Top 20 prospect.  He was a great Triple A player, solid Major League player.  In the Minors he walked almost as much as he struck out, and never more than 80 Ks in a Minor League season.  While he was playing on the Rays, he struck out more than 100 times every full season in the Majors, and only walked more than 50 times once.  

Sometimes players don't work out they way you think.  Injuries finished off his career.  

I enjoyed his time in Durham, collecting his cards, and was missing this card from the 2011 Triple A All-Star Game.  It took place in Salt Lake City.  Probably why I did not get the set.  

I love the back of this card.  You don't get many Minor League cards with colored backs.  

Last card, same picture as the previous one.  

This is from the International League Top Prospects set.  Same card manufacturer as the card above.  Guess they saved some money on pictures.  That red striped shirt in the background makes it really obvious.  

Nice little write up on the back of the card about Desmond Jennings.  

Maybe the Durham Bulls players from the 1960s and 1970s in my next post.  

Our Old Friend ETopps

Topps has had a few different products that have been sold directly to their customers this year.  Finest, Throwback Thursdays, Ginter X, and ToppsNow were all sold somewhere on their website to mixed reviews.  At times the quality of the cards has been poor, biased selection, terrible packaging on the cards they mail out, and a widely held feeling that Topps should not be in the business of selling directly to customers.

Back in the day Topps actually did dabble in direct sales to customers.  They did some different things with The Pit which is some sort of stock market for sports cards and they also had eTopps.  The latter worked a lot like Topps Now.

Cards were available for a limited amount of time online, customers could buy the cards, and then either keep them in a portfolio or pay a little extra to have them mailed out.  Some of them were even based on specific events during the season, such as the top vote getters in the All-Star Game, or Postseason games.

I have a few eTopps cards from the early 2000s, but I mainly just picked them up if they featured Albert Pujols.  I also had them mailed out, but I really abandoned that scene at some point in the mid 2000s.

I guess I could go back and fill in the Cardinals cards that I missed from that era, but I am not sure it's a real priority.  In the meantime, I picked up a copy of a former Durham Bulls who was featured in the 2007 set on a 1985 style card.  Basically cost me a whole lot of nothing, so I couldn't pass it up...

Elijah Dukes was on the Durham Bulls around the time that I first moved to North Carolina a little more than 10 years ago.  Tremendously talented player, but he had a lot of off the field issues which eventually caught up with him and basically ended his baseball career.  

I collected Elijah Dukes cards a few years back before he had run himself out of the league and had some really cool parallels of him out of sets like Finest and Triple Threads.  I missed this one back in the day, happy to add it to my collection. 

30 Year Top 50: Topps Triple Threads

#34-This post is going to be slightly different than the other posts that I have made for my Top 50 countdown.  I came up with the idea of doing this countdown leading into my 30th year in baseball card collecting this summer and put thought and consideration into where to rank all the different card sets that I have brought into my life since the summer of 1983.  The Triple Threads brand started in 2006 and is still currently running.  Every summer I eagerly await the release of Triple Threads and cannot wait to pick out a handful of really cool cards to add to my collection.  In many ways, the Triple Threads set is a top 10 on my personal list, but looking at the big picture and taking into account important rookies, design, etc, etc this is where it falls.  Note that I did not attach a year.  I do have a few I like more than others, but not a clear cut favorite.  Let me walk you through why I love this product:

2006 Triple Threads
I was initially really excited about the release of Triple Threads in 2006.  I rushed up to a card shop, which is no longer with us, in Durham to buy a pack.  Quickly spotting the product behind the counter I bought a pack of the high end product and immediately remembered my rule about high end wax.

2006 Topps Triple Threads Dan Johnson Dual Jersey/Autograph

Starring me back in this face was this Dan Johnson card.  Of course, he ended up playing for the Durham Bulls and won the International League MVP, so I would have ended up with the card in my collection anyway.  Right?  Disappointed, I did not open another pack of Triple Threads the rest of the year.  Since that time I have traded for a few.

2007 Triple Threads

My second venture into Triple Threads went much better.  I opened approximately zero packs of product, but worked the secondary market very hard to come up with a few gems for my collection.  My favorite:

My first Triple Threads card with a patch piece was a Shawn Riggans with two jersey pieces, a piece of green patch from the old Devil Rays unis, and an autograph.  I found it cheap in an Ebay auction and picked out the card since Riggans was having a great season for the Durham Bulls.  Riggans struggled in the majors and now out of baseball.  Still a cool card and turned the corner for me on this product. 

2007 Topps Triple Threads Shawn Riggans Dual Jersey/Patch/Autograph

2008 Triple Threads 

We all have misses in life and the 2008 Triple Threads set was a miss for me.  I didn't have many players I was excited to collect out of this set and the players I did collect, well....

2008 Topps Triple Threads Elijah Dukes Triple Bat/Autograph

I think I also picked up a few Jo Jo Reyes cards, Melky Cabrera, and a few other infamous characters.  I did pick up a good selection of Matt Holliday relic cards from this set after the Rockies run to the World Series.  This was the first year that I really went after the relics cards along with the autographs.  More recently, I landed a nice Dimaggio relic piece in a trade.  

2008 Topps Triple Threads Joe DiMaggio Six Piece Relic

2008 Topps Triple Threads Matt Holliday Six Piece Relic

2009 Triple Threads

I have two favorites in my collection from the 2009 set and would rank this set in a three way tie for the lead in the best Triple Threads sets.  My favorite card I picked up in 2009 which is a Ryan Braun patch/autograph.  This card has patch pieces from his Futures Game relics, the red/black/yellow pieces along with a thicker piece of black or navy patch.  I also love the word: HAMMER on the card.  If I ranked all of my Triple Threads cards against each other this would finish in the top 5.  

2009 Topps Triple Threads Ryan Braun Triple Patch/Autograph

My second card I picked up a few years ago after watching Nolan Reimold play for the Norfolk Tides. Sometimes I get a feeling about a player I watch in the minors and was fairly impressed by Reimold.  I found this card on Ebay really cheap and figured I would, at worst, have a really cool looking cards.  Reimold is looking like a regular though, so I think I did well with this card.  I love the orange jersey pieces and the yellow/red/black patch piece like the Braun. 

2009 Topps Triple Threads Autograph

2010 Triple Threads

I loved the 2010 release of Triple Threads.  If I had to narrow the Triple Threads sets down to the best, this would be another among my favorites.  The best part of the 2010 release was the inclusion of on-card autographs.  In someways, it gives this release a slight nod over the 2009 set, except the more standard looking Triple Threads cards were still sticker autographs.  My favorite two on card autographs were Andrew McCutchen and Howie Kendrick.  The McCutchen was my first McCutchen autograph and the Kendrick card is just signed really cool.  I've always like Howie's signature and I like how he just wrote over the whole card.  

2010 Topps Triple Threads Andrew McCutchen Jersey/Autograph

2010 Topps Triple Threads Howie Kendrick Jersey/Autograph 

The regular Triple Threads cards were still cool, but again, Topps used sticker autographs.  My favorite has to be Zorilla.  Ben Zobrist.  Again a personal Top 5 Triple Threads card. 

2010 Topps Triple Threads Seven Piece Relic/Autograph

2011 Triple Threads

The 2011 release was similar to the 2010 release in many ways and again, I would consider this to be among the three best Triple Threads sets along with the 2009 and 2010.  The veteran cards were generally sticker autographs.  My favorite is my Miguel Cabrera autograph, which I also collected all of the similar relic cards.  

2011 Topps Triple Threads 13 Piece Relic/Autograph

The young star players in the set were on card autographs like the 2010 release, but I felt the design of the 2011 cards was a little truer to the set.  

2011 Topps Triple Threads Jaime Garcia Triple Jersey/Autograph

The real drawback to this set, in my opinion, is the veteran cards with a single piece of jersey or patch.  If you are going to use sticker autographs the only reason to duck the design of the Cabrera card above is to cheapen the product.  I love the Matt Holliday card below, but I would have gladly tried to find a copy with multiple relic pieces in the regular Triple Threads format.

2011 Triple Threads Matt Holliday Patch/Autograph

2012 Triple Threads

I feel like the set has taken a little step back this year.  Still a really cool product and I own several really nice cards from the set, but the player selection is a little lacking in my opinion and there are several cards which are repeats from previous years.  Also, similar to the 2011 is the pattern on the autographs. Veterans are on stickers, younger players are on card, and there are single jersey autographs that are also stickers.  My two favorites from 2012:

2012 Topps Triple Threads David Freese Autograph

 2012 Topps Triple Threads Lance Lynn Jersey/Autograph

If you like the follow up I do on card sets not in my Top 50 be sure to check back tomorrow for a special piece I am putting together on a few sets released over the past few years similar to the Triple Threads releases.