More Archives Cards. Yes, Cardinals.

I have already covered all sorts of Cardinals autographs that I have picked up from this year's Archives set, but haven't really touched any non-Cardinals from the yearly Topps product.  So, I actually have recently ended up with a non-Cardinal.....and two other players with connections to the Cardinals.  The Archives autograph checklist was deep for the Cardinals this year, even if the former Cardinals players appear in other uniforms.  

Non-Cardinal first.  I liked this card because it was an Expo and......

I have always really enjoyed the design of the 1986 Topps cards.  I tend to like the Archives cards a little better when the player and card design match, Alou is a 1990s and 2000s player, but I was willing to overlook it here based on price and the fact that everyone digs finding Expos cards.  Alou was a nice player too, even if he spent a lot of his career successfully hitting baseballs off of Cardinals pitchers.  

Card back.   

Very nice.  Next up is a former Cardinals Rookie of the Year and owner of a cool unibrow....

Moon is probably best remembered for his years with the Dodgers, which took place in the late 1950s and early 1960s when the team first moved to the West Coast.  The Dodgers played briefly in the Los Angeles Coliseum while Dodger Stadium was being built.  It had unique dimensions which Moon took advantage of.....

by trying to hit the ball at the short left-field fence which also featured a high screen.  In 1959, Moon had 19 home runs, 11 triples, and 26 doubles.  Many of them involved that short porch in left.  While he was with the Cardinals, Moon won the 1954 Rookie of the Year Award with a .304 average, 12 home runs, 76 RBIs, and 18 steals.  

Card back.  

Last card.  Also a former Cardinals player.  

Tito Francona spent 6 years with the Indians and 3 years with the Braves.  The rest of his career was spent seven other teams which included the Cardinals, Orioles, Athletics, Phillies, Tigers, Brewers, and White Sox.  The Indians used him as a starter and he had a few nice years playing everyday.  In 1959, in 122 games, he hit .363/.414/.566 with 20 home runs.  After his time in Cleveland, he ended up in St. Louis where the Cardinals used him as a reserve corner outfielder and first baseman.  Basically the same things as Terry Francona as a player.  

Card back 

This card is the blue framed parallel, so we have the serial number on the back of the card.  Overall, very happy with my three new Archives cards.  

AAAALLLLLLOOOOOOUUUUUUU!!!!!

There have been a lot of Bowman posts on this space during the past few weeks.  I like minor league guys, Bowman is filled with minor league guys, seems like a natural fit.  Right?  However, I am actually more excited about a set of veteran player cards in this year's Bowman set than the rookie/young guys.  I have got all summer to pick up the young guys, well probably longer than that, there is not really a time deadline on completing a set.....

So, I mentioned a few posts back about my love of the Flashback insert set.  I landed a copy of the non-autographed Moises Alou card in my jumbo box and have been working on adding some of the other cards over the past week.  Let me catch you up with the latest additions.  First, I picked up another copy of a base card:

A few more will be showing up later in the week, or early next week.  However, the really big pick up in the past week has been this card........

I am going to add a few more of these Flashback autographs, but completing the entire set is going to be a definite challenge.  The hardest card is likely going to be the Frank Thomas card which is both hard to find and expensive in price.  Still, it's a small set and I would love to give it a run.

Friday 5: Top 5 Sets From 1996

I was in college at this point in my life and my interest in baseball cards at this point in my life was much more focused on the fun aspect, not necessarily the serious collecting aspect.  There was a card shop in the small Missouri town where I attended college, but it was not a great shopping experience by any means.  I did get some card shop time for a few months during the summer, but some of that time was spent chasing around a nine and seven year old I spent my summers mentoring during college.  

I shunned some of the high end stuff at this point in my life and went for packs of things that looked cool or unique.  Sure, there are some really nice cards in my collection from this year, but most of those cards were bought, or traded for, as singles and not pulled.  Looking back through my boxes of cards from this year, the emphasis was on new.......

5. Leaf Preferred- So, Leaf put out the Leaf Preferred set this summer and the cards generally looked like a rehash of lots of other Pinnacle/Leaf/Donruss sets from this era.  Blah design, 100-200 cards, and the usual assortment of players.  Not terribly exciting, but they did have these Leaf Steel cards in the set.....The Steel cards are really the star of the product and make this appear on my list.  Collectors got one Steel card per pack, some collectors might have been tempted to throw away the other five or six cards that came in packs.....Leaf did not produce a Steel card for every player in the base set, but there are 77 of the cards which is roughly half of the set.  At some point I owned all of these, but I am not sure where they have run off to in the year's since.  It appears that I have 63 of the 77....Hello SportsLots!! (maybe COMC).  If you do not own one of these Leaf Steel cards you are missing out on one of the true gems of the 90s.  

4. Topps Laser-  I remember buying a box of these and think that they were cooler than sliced bread.  Once you break them out of the packs and actually have to sort them the challenges begin.  They stick together and catch all kinds of things, but just take a step back and look at the cards.  Is there anything else in my collection that looks anything like this?  No.  Sure I have tons of die-cuts and cool shaped cardboard, but these were really unique cards.  I know a lot of collectors who start rolling eyes and look annoyed when you bring up Topps Laser cards.....Is it the ridiculous stat projections on the back of the Bright Spots inserts?  

Yes, they missed on the Jimmy Haynes projections, but they made a cool Jimmy Haynes cards.  Someone is happy about that.  Seriously, these boxes are still floating around out there and they are dirt cheap.  If you want a first hand brush with the coolness of baseball cards in the mid 90s this might be a good way to relive that experience.  

3.  Metal Universe- This is the third set on my list and the third product that was new to the baseball card world in 1996.  The difference between Metal Universe and the other two?  This set had a nice run for a few years that produced some really unique looking sets.  You've never seen Ken Griffey Jr. chasing a fly ball through (what appears to be) space?  Here's your chance.  This was a pretty simple and easy set to assemble.  All of the Metal Universe sets are cheap and easy to find.  This one has one of the simpler designs and textures, but was a really cool product at the time of it's release.   

2. SPx- We had several years of SP, but in 1996 Upper Deck introduced collectors to this brand new product.  One pack contained one holographic card.  The idea of only getting one card in a pack was a bit of bummer, but it looked cool.  The base cards look similar to the card pictured above, which is a Ken Griffey Jr. Commemorative, which is actually my favorite card in the product.  There were also two pretty nice autographs in the set.  The Griffey card above has an autographed version and this Piazza........

There are still inexpensive boxes of this floating around too, but if you like the looks of the cards, you can buy the base set cheap on Ebay and sink some dollars into finding the Piazza autograph.  It's easily his best autograph, in my opinion, and has gradually come down in price over the past decade after being sky high for years.

1.  Leaf Signature- One of the best sets from the 1990s and the best set from 1996.  There are years that I am willing to listen to some to debate, but not here.  This was one of the earliest per pack autograph sets out there, first mainstream one by a big card manufacturer, and it got a lot of the details right.  This product is really deep with lots of star power, but it also has plenty of autographs from a variety of different players.  Everyone who played that year seemed to sign for this product (slight exaggeration), but seriously there is something for everyone.  I have assembled the Cardinals set which features really nice 1990s players like Brian Jordan and Andy Benes, but also has signatures from dozens of other players on the team ranging from veteran backstop Tom Pagnozzi to veteran free agent pick ups like Mike Gallego and Rick Honeycutt, to young players like John Mabry who were just starting their career.   Really, I should probably just give this set it's own post one of these days and cannot give this set its full due in one paragraph.  This is a classic.  

2015 Bowman Inserts, Parallels, and Minis

Third and final Bowman post on the jumbo box of cards I opened up last week.  So far I have covered my autographs and the base, prospects, and prospects chrome sets.  I saved the inserts, parallels, and minis for last.  Let's start with the two basic insert sets..........

The Bowman Scouts Top 100 prospects returns for another year.  There are also autographed versions of these cards which have appeared in the past five or so Bowman products.  I have never assembled this complete insert set in previous years, but mainly just focus on picking up the Cardinals and Rays in the set.  I pulled an Alex Reyes, so that saves me one trade or purchase.....

These flashback cards from 1990 are my favorite thing about this post.  Oh, and there are autographed versions of these cards too.  The set features Moises Alou, as a Pirate, Juan Gonzalez, Marquis Grissom, and Frank Thomas.  I am a little bit disappointed that Tood Zeile was not included.   I am going to pick up the non-autographed versions of these cards at the least.  Marquis Grissom?  Moises Alou?  Might see an autograph of those two before the end of the summer......

On to the parallels.  You remember this weekend when I made a post about tracking down a rainbow of Oscar Taveras?  I said it, but then in the course of working on this post I remembered why I hate the whole idea of rainbows.  I pulled five different colored parallels out of one jumbo box and I am sure there are another two or three that I am missing.  Not to mention things like printing plates.  The Jake Lamb is out of 150, two are out of 250, one is out of 500, and the sparkly one in the top left handed corner is not serial numbered.  Honestly, I like that one the best......

The minis are nice.  I like the minis.  If the parallels were all in miniature version I would probably like them a lot more.  The Rodon in the middle was a welcome pull and shows the base design of the mini set.  I also pulled a Piscotty which is flipped over to show the back.  Each team has five minis, their five best prospects, which are also included in the set.  So, in other words, not necessarily the team's five best prospects, just the five best prospects from that team featured in Bowman.  The Berrios is blue and serial numbered to 250.  There are probably four other colored versions of that card....

You can tell I may not be the biggest fan of the colored/rainbow parallels, but hey those 1990 throwbacks.....Have a great day.  

Friday Five: Best 5 Sets From 1990

The last couple of Friday Five posts were focused on 1980s cards, but it starts to get a little bit more complicated after that decade.  The 90s brought in a boom of new products, some good and some not so good, which makes it harder to break down sets by brand.  I could have continued that same line of posts and just used the base sets for Fleer, Donruss, Upper Deck, and Topps, but there are all sorts of complications even within that.  

So, instead I am going to spend my Friday's during this baseball season counting down the best five sets from each year.  And by best five I am not speaking of value, although it's a consideration, same with design, player selection, and all sorts of other factors.  Basically, I am looking through boxes of cards for the year and pulling out cards from five sets I really like....Deal with it.  

The card sets are ranked in order from least liked to best liked.  1990 there were still a reasonable number of cards sets.  Besides the five sets listed below I also considered: Fleer Update, Topps Traded, Score, Score Rookie/Traded, and Donruss The Rookies.  Your consolation trophy is in the mail....

 5.  Donruss- This card design is a mixture of Eddie Van Halen's guitar and one of those Jasper Johns drizzle paintings.  You won't see Donruss on this list for a while after this one, because in my opinion, the products went drastically down hill after this one.  The 1990 Donruss set still had a similar feel to the 1988 plaids and the 1989 black borders.  It was the largest Donruss set up to that point, over 700 cards, but still kept a lot of the trademark Donruss features like the Diamond Kings and Rated Rookies subsets.  There were also a ton of minor errors in this set, which people swore were going to be worth something in 1990, but are actually not worth much of anything today.

Can we also talk about the smell of the cards?  There are people that swear by certain smells in certain sets.  I am not really too sensitive to the smells that come out of packs of cards, but for some reason this set hits my sense of smell.  It always has.   Don't think that I ran around huffing Scotch Guard or something as a middle schooler, but if you blindfolded me and asked me to identify a 1990 Donruss card I would know the smell anywhere.  Not a bad smell, not good, it's just there....

4. Fleer- Not as interesting design wise as the Donruss set, but there are a bunch of different things I like about the Fleer set.  First, there are a bunch of good rookies in the set.  All of these sets actually have them: Sosa, Thomas, Larry Walker, and Juan Gonzalez.  Others are unique to Fleer, like the Moises Alou rookie.....

The set also had some of the staples of 1980s Fleer sets like the SuperStar cards.  The Players of the Decade inset set is also a really nice touch in this set.  Throw in the fact that Fleer did a little better job of editing their set and I put it just ahead of the Donruss set.  

3. Topps- I like the design.  Seriously, this seems like a take or leave kind of year.  This set has a bunch of the usual 1990 rookie cards, Frank Thomas and Sammy Sosa, but also has a few other really cool things going for it too.  The set has the normal 792 cards you would expect to see out of this era of Topps set, but the best part of this set is the Nolan Ryan subset....

There is one Ryan card for each of the teams that he played for over his career.  This set is really inexpensive and probably worth it for the Nolan Ryan cards alone.  I am pretty sure this is the cheapest Topps set you can possibly find....

2.  Upper Deck- I am a huge fan of the Upper Deck set.  It was still pretty much alone in being a high end set in 1990 and it's not all that different from the 1989 set.  Same card stock, similar elements in the design, but it just missed out on the rookie cards.  I am not sure I can really fault Upper Deck for the fact that Ray Lankford and Sammy Sosa did not pan out quite the same way as Ken Griffey Jr.  Believe me, I would love it if Ray Lankford had that sort of card value.  The backs of the cards are really awesome too.....

The design was honestly pretty simple and photography was really nice.  Not a lot of frills and extras here, but you do get a lot of really nice baseball cards.  Again, like the Topps set, the Upper Deck set is extremely cheap and inexpensive to pick up.  I have thought about picking up a couple of cheap boxes off of Ebay and opening them up just for fun.  Perhaps......

1.  Leaf- Notice on the Upper Deck write up I said that it was almost the only premier baseball card product released in 1990.  Donruss created this product to directly compete with Upper Deck that summer.  Foil packaging, better card stock, and color photos on the front and back.  Leaf was supposed to be the rival of Upper Deck and it actually did one better than that.  If I was going to tell you to buy one set from the 1990 set this would be the one.  While the rookies in the set are essentially the same names as the other 1990s products, Walker, Thomas, and Sammy Sosa, the cards out of this set have been far more popular and desired by collectors.  Easily the best set from 1990.

30 Year Top 50: 1991 Donruss

#22-Many of the cards featured on my countdown over the past few months have featured card sets with great autographed or relic based inserts.  My set this evening features one of the first and most innovative insert sets, which I credit with the boom of insert cards and sets, during the mid 90s running through current card releases.  Looking back at this set twenty-one years after its release, the idea of a "limited" print run insert set of 10,000 cards, or in the case of the super-short printed Nolan Ryan 7,500, is pretty laughable.  However, this was the first "premium" insert set featured in a baseball card set and was the forerunner of almost every insert set released since.

1991 Donruss John Kruk

A quick glance at the 1991 Donruss set will leave most collectors completely unimpressed.  The card design is clearly a concoction of late 80s or early 90s fame and there are few cards worth seeking out as singles in the base set.  My best plus for the base set cards is that they are fun, inexpensive wax to open.  If you have young collectors in your house these boxes sell for under $10 and can be a great way to share some of the baseball cards of yesteryear.  

1991 Donruss Moises Alou

One of my favorite things about the old Donruss cards was the backgrounds.  I am not entirely sure why, but many of the National League teams' cards were photographed in Busch Stadium II.  Check out this Moises Alou card.  You can clearly see the arches in the back which were located at the top of the stadium.  Always thought that was cool.  They did have a cool odor too.  On to the real business.

1991 Donruss Elite Series Andre Dawson

The 1991 Donruss set was the first appearance of the Donruss Elite Series, or what would late spin off into the Donruss Elite set.  The cards were short-printed at only 10,000 copies of each.  The Nolan Ryan card, as previously mentioned, had a print run of only 7,500.  The cards were extremely popular at the time of their release and have continued to be a popular set of cards to chase down today.  A quick glance at the completed item list on Ebay will show that they can sell for as little as a few dollars for a Matt Williams, to the mid 200s for a graded Ken Griffey Jr. card.  

1991 Donruss Elite Series Barry Bonds 

While this set was released over twenty years ago, I haven't added many of these cards to my collection.  The two cards on my blog tonight are the only pieces of this set that I own.  I really do like them and remember them fondly, but often don't think about seeking them out or asking about them when I am trading.  At this point, collecting the remainder of this set would probably be a job for Ebay.  I will get to work...someday.  

Like the 1991 Donruss Set?  Not in my Top 50 countdown is the....There were two directions I could go here.  I could post about one of the new spin off sets that came out of the 1991 Donruss Elite set.  For example, I always loved the 2002 set.  However, I am going with another Donruss set from the 90s.  The 1990 Donruss set.  

1990 Donruss Diamond Kings Dave Stewart

The 1990 Donruss set was simply awesome.  Even to this day, I love going back through this set and looking at the cards.  There are so many cool players from my childhood and I love the design.  When I open up one of my boxes of cards the red edges of the 1990 Donruss cards immediately stand out.  Just like the 1991 set, the 1990 set has no stand out rookie cards, or cool veteran cards that are must have for your collection.  They are just fun cards to flip through.  

1990 Donruss Todd Zeile

I think that this Todd Zeile card might have been the hot rookie card when this set was first released.  That should tell you all you need to know about the quality of cards and players in the set.