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.  

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 #12 - 2000 Topps

It's the 2000 Topps set, but I am still hoping for a good post.  

Did that giveaway the ranking? 

I like making these posts, so a short checklist and boring design are not going to stop me from finding fun and interesting things to talk about.  

If you're a big fan of the 2000 Topps set, be a good sport or go to another blog.  

Base Set

The basic design is a boring gray frame with some sort of oddly shaped player name box at the bottom of the card.  If you squint your eyes you can see that there is also a player position just above the player name on the right side of the card.  

The photography in the set is the opposite of the Upper Deck and Stadium Club sets from this era.  It's a mix of boring portrait photographs, drab action photographs, and other pictures which have aged poorly.  I hated the McGwire "Gut Punch" celebration that was in vogue with the Cardinals in the late 1990s.  Did Jose Canseco own the rights to the forearm bash?  

After watching the unauthorized biography of the Bash Brothers on Netflix, I am guessing that the answer to this question is yes.  

I asked my 10-year-old son about what he thought was happening on the front of this card.  I stared at the front of it for a minute and told me the photo on the back of the card was better.  When I redirected him to the photo on the front, his responses were, "You tell me" and "Looking dumb".  

There you have it. 

Back of the card. 

This feels boring and uninspired too.  

Did some designer at Topps forget he/she was supposed to finish up the design for the 2000 Topps set and create it at the last moment possible?  I don't want to know the answer, just in case, this was actually seen as good at the time.  

The small checklist is also problematic for me.  I can always count on the Topps base set to give me a good 20-25 Cardinals players.  The 2000 Topps set gives me roughly a dozen.  The 1999 Cardinals were pretty bad, especially the pitching, but some name players got left off the checklist. Who are some of the 1999 Cardinals players that got cut out?  

It was Willie McGee's final season in the Majors. Yes, he was the fourth outfielder, but he did not get a card in the set.  It was Placido Polanco's first season in the Majors.  No rookie card.  Shawon Dunston was a key bench player who did not get a card.  The pitchers on the team are worse.  Jose Jimenez started almost 30 games, threw a no-hitter, and did not get a base card.  Kent Bottenfield won 18 games, no card.  Darren Oliver started 30 games, no base card.  Rickey Bottalico appeared in almost 70 games and lead the team in saves.  You know, no base card.  

Where Was Dwight Gooden in 1999?  

One of the most enjoyable parts of flipping through old baseball card sets is finding baseball players in weird uniforms.  Places where you may or may not remember them playing, or you are just trying to forget about them appearing there.  

There are some good ones in the 2000 set.  

First up, we've got Hideo Nomo on the Brewers.  

Yes, I remember him as a Brewer, but I try to block it out.  Hideo had some rough years and bounced around more than I care to remember during his career.  Always a Dodger in my mind.  

Next up, Tim Raines on the A's.  

Definitely a little odd.  He was only on the A's for 58 games in 1999.  Raines was a long-time Expo and White Sox.  I always think about the end of his career being as a bench player on the late 1990s Joe Torre Yankees teams, but he played for 4 different teams between 1999 and 2001, including a return to the Expos.  

Next.  

Yes, I remember Rickey Henderson on the Mets.  Rickey Henderson was seemingly on every Major League team between the mid-1990s and the early 2000s.  There were about three different times he was on the A's, two or three times he was on the Padres, the Angels, Red Sox, Dodgers, and Mariners.  Not in the correct order and I probably left out a team.  

This brings us to Dwight Gooden.  

What the hell is this all about?  

I remember Dwight Gooden on the Indians.  He had an ERA of 6.  He was in his mid-30s, it happens.  

The Astros?

He pitched one game for the Astros.

One game.  

Did I mention that Willie McGee was a pinch-hitter for the Cardinals in 1999 and did not get a single card in this set?  

This is an insert card that Topps made of him because he had a Topps All-Rookie Team card.  It's always easy to criticize a baseball card that was made 20 years ago, but considering where he was in his career, this was a terrible decision.  Find an old Mets photograph, put it on the same card design, and it's a really popular card.  That's the way we all remember Dwight Gooden, right?  He was a Met?  

Best Cardinals Card(s) 

The obvious answer is the Fernando Tatis highlight card from his two grand slam inning against the Dodgers, which is why I am not going to choose it.  I am actually going to pick two of them. Scanned side by side, so let me explain my choices.  

If you remember Joe McEwing, chances are that you would probably remember him best as a utility player for the Cardinals and Mets.  However, he had a great half a season with the Cardinals in 1999 where he the starting second baseman. During the first half of that season, he had a slash line of .305/.355/.418 with 4 home runs and 19 doubles.  In the second half of the year his slash line .223/.303/.362 with 5 home runs and 9 doubles.  He was a great story for half a season before he was a utility player for the better part of a decade.  

Jose Jimenez pitched a no-hitter for the Cardinals against the Diamondbacks in 2000.  Bud Smith would pitch one the next year, making him the last Cardinals pitcher to do so, but the Jimenez no-no was much more memorable.  

First, he out-pitched Randy Johnson winning a 1-0 game.  Second, he ended up starting against the Diamondbacks a week later and pitched a two-hitter.  The Diamondbacks did not get a hit until the fifth inning.  

This is the only Jose Jimenez card in the set.  

Best Durham Bulls Card 

Shout out to Javy Lopez for this photo looking pained running to first base.  

If I were Javy Lopez, I would never speak to anyone at Topps again after they made this card.  

The best Durham Bulls card in the 2000 Topps set belongs to former pitching coach Kyle Snyder.  

He went to one of the blue North Carolina colleges (powder blue), so that's a negative.  He also used to give my son baseballs every time we went to a Durham Bulls game, so that's a positive.  No, seriously he is a really good coach who did great work with the Bulls and is doing the same thing with the Rays.  

Year 2000 Set, 1990s Style

Peroxide was really popular in the late 1990s.  It's an inexpensive way to make yourself blonde.  There were people who looked good with blonde hair, then there was Todd Jones.....

A closer look at Todd Jones with blonde hair.  

This was not a good idea and I am certain that Todd Jones is not the real Slim Shady.  

Although I could see him being at Burger King circling the parking lot, something about onion rings.  Go look up the song lyrics.  

I was also on the lookout for Turn Ahead the Clock uniforms, but I could only find one card.  It's not even a very good picture.  Really disappointed. 

The Turn Ahead The Clock uniform appears on the Gary DiSarcina card.    

If you are not familiar with the Turn Ahead The Clock promotion in Major League Baseball during the 1999 season, I suggest you use the Google Image search to find pictures of some truly terrible uniforms.  Short sleeves, large logos, and odd color schemes.  

 

Apparently, the Mets are moving to Mercury. 

Best Non-Cardinal Card(s) 

Topps does so many reprints these days, along with borrowed designs from past sets to make current year cards.  If I created a list of grievances of modern baseball cards, like the last 10 years, that would definitely be on the list.  

Topps did do a pretty good job with reprints in their late 1990s base set releases.  Typically they choose one great player from the 1950s, 60s, or 70s and reprinted their entire run of Topps cards both on regular card stock and Chrome card stock.  If I recall correctly, they used Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Roberto Clemente, Nolan Ryan, and Hank Aaron.  

Aaron was the last player to get this treatment, as 2001 was the start of both Topps Heritage and Archives.  

Here is one of the cards.....

 

Here is why I liked these cards.  I appreciate Hank Aaron and recognize the fact that he is one of the all-time greats of the game.  Would I like to own some more Hank Aaron cards?  Yes.  Am I going to spend the money to buy a bunch of 1950s and 1960s Aaron cards?  No.  I still love looking at his cards though and can do that by looking through my 2000 Topps set.  It might be the only reason I have looked through this box of cards during the past 10 years.  

How Does It Compare?

It's not in last place on my list, but it's just really hard to get past the fact that the set is boring.  The 2000 set is not the worst Topps base set during my lifetime, but it's definitely in the bottom 5.  There just is not a lot here to love.  

The last time I did one of these was two months ago with the 1988 Donruss set.  It's not as good as that set, so my ranking decision came down to this set and the 2000 UD Ionix set.  Sad to say this about a Topps base set, but I am putting it below that Upper Deck release. 

12. 2000 Pacific Paramount Update 

11. 2010 Topps USA Baseball  

10. 2000 Topps 

9. 2000 UD Ionix  

9. 1988 Donruss 

8. 1995 Emotion XL 

7. 2017 Topps Heritage Minor League

6. 1998 Topps TEK 

5. 1986 Topps Mini League Leaders 

4. 2001 Fleer EX 

3. 1979 Kellogg's 

2. 2002 Topps Super Teams

1. 1983 Topps 

The bottom two are going to be really hard to knock out of those places.  

Set Appreciation Post #10 - 1995 Emotion XL

The local card shop scene in Raleigh is pretty weak.  There is a card shop that is attached to a gas station in one of the far northern suburbs and there is also one that has been dying shopping mall, but actually just moved to within two miles of my house.  Neither are great for different reasons.  I am not going to hold my breath that it's going to be anything great in a new location.  

About a year ago, I was in the dying mall to pick up a pair of extra slim pants for my son.  I had been sorting out some cards at the time, needed a 5,000 count box for storage, so I stopped into the card shop while I was there.  To my surprise, they had out this huge table of old boxes of cards.  Not really their thing.  As you can imagine, the mall card shop's biggest fault is their pricing, which has always been ridiculously high.  The prices on the boxes weren't terrible all things considered, but the Emotion XL box was marked at $30.  A quick search of Ebay listings told me that I had found the rare mall card shop bargain.  Shocking. 

I bought it.  

These were really cool cards back in the day, so I was pretty excited to open this box of cards.  I started opening up the packs and put a bunch of the cards up on my once award winning, now neglected,  Instagram page.  

I ended up with the complete set, but it was much more of a mixed bag than I remembered it to be.  At some point, I stopped posting pictures of the cards.  Yes, I finished up the set.  I put the completed set in a box and shoved them into my card closet.  I liken this set to an old record or CD that you bought at another point in your life.  It was great music at the time, but you can't make it through the whole thing anymore.  

Like the first half of Pearl Jam's Ten album, or almost every Nas album after Illmatic.  

So, let's take a look at the set.  Here is the base card.  

Honestly, I love the full color picture and the last name and team name on the front.  The odd frame corners are a little bit unnecessary, but it's not like they are ruining the card.  The descriptive word is what has not aged well on these cards.  Yes, it would have been awesome to see something like "'Roider" or "Juiced Up" on a Brady Anderson card, but Driving isn't actually all that bad. 

You will see bad in a minute.  Hold that thought.  

Even the pictures on the back of the card are nice.  The little sentence about the player at the top of the card is pretty fair.  The stat line is small, but kudos for mixing in things like AB/HR and OBP% in the mid 1990s.  The card stock is nice too for the mid 1990s. 

THESE ARE TERRIBLE 

Let's get these cards out of the way first.  I went through all 200 cards in the set and picked out 4 that seemed really bad in retrospect.  For more examples, some I disagree with, check out this SB Nation article which likens this set to "Gas Station Cologne".  

"The Heat"??? What does this even mean?  Bichette has a 130 point split difference between his home and road slugging percentage.  He hit almost 300 career home runs, but less than 100 of them came on the road.  I would have gone with something like "Altitude" or "Low Humidity" for his card.  

Will Clark was a pretty intense guy, but this is just stupid.  Couldn't we just get a card that says "Intense", or maybe someone could have used a thesaurus and found a synonym for the word intense.  Personally, I would have done something to reference his tradition of drinking a post game beer.  

Player nicknames aren't emotions.  Dumb.  This is post White Sox, so I would have gone with "Regressing" or maybe "Declining".  

What's dumber than using a player nickname?  

Using a state nickname.  Luckily no Cardinals players have the phrase "ShowMe" stamped on the front of their cards.  

THESE ARE NOT SO TERRIBLE

So, if you clicked on the link to the SB Nation article above, I am going to go against some of the cards that they ripped on in their write up of the Emotion set.  I am not a SB Nation reader, so I was curious about the age of the author, considering he spent a large chunk of the article ripping the Cal Ripken card.  We were born within a few years of each other, so I am going to dismiss age as a factor in his writing and just say it's ignorance in an otherwise humorous article.  

I will give an equally long rant.  

The word on the Cal Ripken word is "Class".  I am not a Cal Ripken person and I rarely write anything about him on this blog.  I agree with the SB Nation article's assertion that MLB went overboard with Cal Ripken during the mid 1990s.  However, the obsession with Ripken was somewhat warranted and necessary.  

Let's review: 

1. Fans were irked with both the players and owners after the strike in 1994.  Many of the angry fans had promised to stay away from the game.  Baseball is the worst professional sport at selling its superstar players, but they went big on them when the games resumed in 1995 for once,  Ripken was included for an important reason.    

2. Ripken's run at Lou Gehrig's consecutive game streak was the first important event that came up after the strike ended.  I am sure that if there was a player closing in on 3,000 hits, 500 home runs, or 300 wins, that would have been blown up too. 

3. Playing more than 2,000 consecutive games is a legitimately impressive record.  You have to be good enough to start.  Good enough to maintain your starting job over other players.  Healthy enough not to get injured over a 16 year period of time.  It's part talent and part luck, but it's not a record anyone is going to touch anytime soon. 

4. Tell me something bad that Cal Ripken did as a person while he was playing baseball?  ((You can't))

With that being said, as a person who watched a lot of baseball in the 1990s, it's not a stretch to say that Ripken was an important part of bringing disgruntled fans back to the game.  Yes, he was a good player.  Yes he was classy.  Ripken chasing Lou Gehrig during the 1995 season was an important hook that soothed a lot of bad feelings.  

Some other good cards.  

I am going to ignore the word "Precision", and instead focus on the fact that McGwire has a mullet in this picture.   Any McGwire card from the mid 1990s where he has a mullet is an instant winner in my book.  In fact, I am going to add that to my little note pad of future post ideas.  McGwire mullet cards.  

Manny Ramirez always had a great looking swing.  I love the look on his face in this card along with the word "Punishing" that is attached to his card.  I know he's a bit of a lightning rod, so I am not sure if/when he will get into the Hall.  Still a great player though.  

I saw this interview a few years back where someone was talking to Dennis Eckersley.  They brought up blown saves and I instantly thought he was going to start talking about the Kirk Gibson home run in the World Series.  Instead, he starts talking about this Manny Ramirez home run from 1995.  Eckersley threw him a fastball on the inside corner, catcher is not moving his glove in the clip, and Manny hit the ball halfway up the bleachers in Jacobs Field.  

Eckersley is smiling after the home run and says "Wow". 

Last one for the not so terrible section of this post.  

This card also gets torn apart on the SB Nation article, but considering Gwynn was one of the first players to use video to improve his hitting, I think it is a pretty fitting label.  Gwynn is a Hall of Famer based on his statistics, but he's also a very important innovator.  Where would baseball be today without him watching video?  I am sure someone else would have done the same thing at some point, but Gwynn turned video into a popular practice.  

The Best Cardinals Card 

I will go with a former player instead.  The Cardinals cards are decent, but none of them really stood out.  However, you don't get many relief pitchers wearing batting helmets on baseball cards.  Yet, here we are with 1986 National League Rookie of the Year Todd Worrell.  

The Todd Worrell card is also ripped apart in the SB Nation article, but I actually like this card as a Cardinals fan who knows something about his background.  He went to tiny little Biola College, which is apparently in the middle of Los Angeles and was founded by some Presbyterian pastor back in the early 1900s.  It's not an athletic powerhouse, but a Cardinals scout went to one of their games while in town to watch another player.  Worrell played outfield and catcher for the team, but occasionally pitched, mainly as a long reliever.  He threw in the mid 90s as a college position player who didn't really work with a pitching coach.  

Obviously, Worrell did not bat often as a back of the game reliever, but he did register a triple as one of his two Major League hits.  I am sure that players like Worrell, who have experience as a position player, take batting practice every so often.  

The back of the card has the more standard pitcher photos.  I like the one in the background with him finishing his pitch.  Worrell was really tall and had this great downward motion with a low finish at the end of his delivery. 

It's not as cool as the Bob Gibson follow through, but I always thought Worrell looked different.  Max Scherzer does something really similar to this too.  

Best Durham Bulls Player

I am going to ignore the word "Cool" and just focus on the fact that this card has a sweet photo of Braves first baseman Fred McGriff.  He had not actually been on the Durham Bulls at this point in his career.  He did not appear on the Bulls until the end of his career while trying to work his way back up to the Majors with the Rays in 2004.  

McGriff ended up making to Tampa. 

That's cool.   

His career was done by the middle of July in 2004.  

That's not cool.  

Best Non-Cardinal/Non-Durham Bull 

in 1995, what was the best reason to buy some Emotion XL cards? Before Strasburg, Bryce Harper, Kris Bryant, Wander Franco, and whatever other uber prospects who were overvalued by baseball card collectors, there was Hideo Nomo.  People were crazy for his cards.  Non-mania might have been worse to some degree because he was actually pitching in the Majors at the same time people were going crazy over his cards.  I didn't go out of my way to find them, but I still ended up with a few from random sets.  

The "Twisting" tag seems a little weak, maybe "Effectively Wild" would have been better.  I like the picture on the front.  It gives you a little insight into Nomo's pitching motion, but the back is really good.  

Love the picture on the left with Nomo's back.  That's not a side view, that's likely from behind the plate.  

I don't love the description of Nomo's throwing motion as herky jerky.  He paused at two different spots during his delivery.  Lots of pitchers have used a pause mid wind-up to throw off the timing of hitters.  Currently, both Johnny Cueto and Marcus Stroman use a pause.  I believe Marichal used one back in the day.  

How Does It Compare?  

I love the photos.  I like Emotion brand concept on some of the cards, but others do not work for various reasons.  Some of the cards did not age well, others were just not very well thought out, which goes with the gist of the SB Nation article, if you read it.  

Good card stock and photos count for something, but not enough to crack the top half of the sets that I have featured on my Set Appreciation Posts.  

10. 2000 Pacific Paramount Update 

9. 2010 Topps USA Baseball  

8. 2000 UD Ionix 

7. 1995 Emotion XL 

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