I Love The 1990s Cardinals Part 50- 1992 Pacifc Cardinals 100th Anniversary Set

I am actually going to split this 1992 Cardinals 100th Anniversary set and make it two different posts.  Just a little primer.  The Cardinals issued a set of cards with Pacific that were sold at area McDonald's restaurants during that summer.  I believe the packs might have been a dollar, roughly in line with the cost of Upper Deck at the time, and can still be found around today.  The entire set is only 55 cards with a definite slant towards the modern players.

Just flipping through the cards is a little like the scene in The Wizard of Oz after the house lands in Oz and Dorthy walks out the front door into a world of color.

The first twenty cards are black and white.  The twenty-first card is Red Schoendienst, every card after with the exception of Enos Slaughter is in color.  Not sure why Pacific did not find a color photograph of Slaughter, or just move his card up in the set.  Small things.  

This is the front design of the card.  

and the back of the card.....

I like how the stats are split between the Cardinals and their career numbers.  Gives you a good idea about how much they actually played with the team.  There are players in the set who are truly great players from their time with the Cardinals, like Musial who played his entire career with the Cardinals.  Other players are in for short term contributions to really good teams.  

For example.....

 

Grover Cleveland Alexander appears in the set, but he only played on the Cardinals during the last four years of his career.  He spent 9 years with the Cubs and 8 years with the Phillies.  During his 8 years with the Phillies he won 190 games.  Do the math.  He won 30 games three years in row. No, he didn't start every other game, more like a four man rotation.  

Alexander's Cardinal heroics took place in the 1926 World Series where he helped the team win its first World Series title against a heavily favored Yankees team.  He led the Cardinals get back to the World Series again in 1928, although the Yankees got the better of things that year and took home the pennant.  

I wasn't around for the 1926 World Series, but his pitching must have been pretty impressive since it's half of his Hall of Fame plaque.  

I guess all of that is a good reason to give him a card in this set too.  

So, I am going to file the Alexander and Bottomley cards as background on the set and post a few other cards from the black and white section of the Cardinals 100th Anniversary set.  Next week, a few of the modern players.  

First, I am going with Dizzy Dean.  He was the pitching star of the Gashouse Gang teams in the 1930s, which won the 1934 World Series against the Tigers.  Dean is in the Hall of Fame, his number is retired by the Cardinals, and won the 1934 National League MVP.  He seems like he should be a big deal, but his career was actually really short.  In all, he pitched in 12 different season, but only six of them were full seasons.  

Still better than Jack Morris.  

He ended up going into broadcasting.  He was on the air for awhile, but he butchered the English language while speaking.  Poet Ogden Nash once included Dean in a poem about his favorite baseball players and gave a nod to his poor grammar:

From "Line-Up For Yesterday"

D is for Dean

The grammatical Diz,

When they asked, Who's the tops?

Said correctly, I is

Next.  

Hornsby was the first superstar player for the Cardinals.  He led the National League in batting seven different times and took home the 1925 MVP Award.  He played on the 1926 Cardinals team which captured the franchise's first World Series pennant.  It just so happened that he also was the manager of the 1926 Cardinals.  

I am almost certain that the picture on this card is some sort of arranged photo.  It's at least really odd that he is catching a baseball in front of another baseball game in the background if it's not a staged photgraph.  I am not sure about the photo stylings of the 1920s and 1930s though. 

The Big Cat played his first few season with the Cardinals, but ended up on the Giants and Yankees after returning home from World War 2.  When I was a kid my parents bought us a VCR when we moved to St. Louis, somewhere in the 1984 or 1985 range.  One of the movies we owned was a history of the Cardinals, which briefly mentioned Mize as the holder of the Cardinals single season home run record with 43.  Seemed pretty important and stuck out in my mind, because in the mid 1980s it was unimaginable that any Cardinals player was ever going to hit that many again.  

Interestingly, he's still in the top 10, sixth, on the single season home run leaders for the franchise.  The five seasons that have past his 43 home runs all belong to either Mark McGwire or Albert Pujols.  

Big Mac passed the Big Cat in July of 1998 to break the franchise record.  

McGwire's 1998 season is now obviously the new record.  Doubtful that anyone breaks it.  

I like this card because of the picture.  Choking up quite a bit there.  Huggins played in the aughts and teens for the Cardinals and Reds.  Love the Cardinals logo on the sleeve of his jersey too.  Jon Hamm, actor and Cardinals fan, frequently gets on television while wearing Cardinals hats.  This older Cardinals logo frequently appears.....

Much more important as a manager.  He worked as the Cardinals skipper for a few seasons before moving on to the Yankees where he won three pennants and coached some guys named Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth.  

Two more.  

Another Gashouse Gang player.  He spent most of his career with the Giants, but ended up on the Cardinals at the end of his career as a player/manager.  Later, he became a member of the Hall of Fame's Veterans Committee where he elected a bunch of his friends to the Hall of Fame.  Bill James has written a few different pieces on the damage that Frisch did to the Hall.  Many of the friends do not belong.  For example, Chick Hafey long time Cardinals and Reds outfielder was put into the Hall by the Veterans Committee under Frisch, but his WAR and Peak7 WAR are in line with Greg Vaughn and B.J. Surhoff.  

Last one.  

Marty Marion was a defensive whiz in the 1940s.  He played on three different World Series teams with the Cardinals in 1942, 1944, and 1946.  He actually won the 1944 National League MVP in 1944.  His offensive numbers were not that great, not to mention that Stan Musial hit .347 that season.  Kind of cool that a defense first player won an MVP award.  Sure people today would flip out.  If there had been Gold Gloves in the 1940s, he likely would have had a few.  

Looking at the stadium in the background, this has to be a Spring Training photo.  Maybe the 1940s version of photo day.  More of these cards next week.  

A Great Little Card....Cards.

The Cardinals won their first World Series in 1926 when they met up with the Yankees in the World Series.  The Fall Classic lasted seven games and ended when Babe Ruth tried to steal second base down a single run in the ninth inning.  The Cardinals actually had a Hall of Famer on the mound at the end of the game in the person of pitcher Pete Alexander.

The story is best told by Ronald Reagan and Doris Day.....  

What happened to the ending?  Some sort of artistic license or something with Alexander striking out the last batter.  I am not sure there is an actual video of the caught stealing.

As a card collector I have spent a lot of time and money trying to track down cards of all the Hall of Famers on the Cardinals.  The obvious ones like Stan Musial and Bob Gibson of long since been taken care of, but I also try to collect the players who were just passing through St. Louis.  

Some of them were good during there stop over, like Orlando Cepeda.........

who won a World Series with the Cardinals in 1967 and a National League pennant in 1968.  I recently was able to track down an autograph of Cha Cha wearing the birds on the bat.

There were also some less than memorable Hall of Famers who have made a stop in the Lou.  One from my time watching the Cardinals was Dennis Eckersley who followed LaRussa over to the Cardinals in the mid 1990s.  Eck had his moments with the Cardinals.......

but the Cardinals years were not kind to the Hall of Fame pitcher.  I still found a cool autograph of him as from his time in St. Louis. 

Which brings me back to Old Pete Alexander.  There are some pretty pricy cards of the Hall of Famer out there floating around on the internet, but he was really just a Cardinal for a few years.  He had the famous save in the last game of the 1926 World Series and then pitched three more seasons for Cardinals, all over 40 years of age.  Really Alexander's Hall of Fame years took place with the Phillies in the teens and the Cubs in the early 1920s.  Which translate into some sort of compromise in terms of a Pete Alexander baseball card.  

I found a good one from the 1960s.  

The scan is large, but this is actually a mini.  The card is out of the 1963 Bazooka All-Time Greats set.  These cards are their set, not a part of the regular Bazooka cards, but they were also given out a little bit differently than the normal Bazooka card.  Like many other baseball cards connected to food products, the Bazooka cards came attached to the box.  The greats cards were actually placed inside the boxes of gum at the rate of 1 card per 5 boxes.  

The cards tend to look a little bit nicer than some of the other Bazooka cards from that era.  So, I found my Alexander card and I could have walked away a happy card collector, but did you know that there is an actual Cardinals card in the set?  Not a Phillies player who played for the Cardinals....

Cardinals player.  The Alexander card is a little bit nicer in terms of condition.  I am not sure if all of the Bazooka cards from this set had variations, but apparently the Hornsby cards came with a light and a dark (like the Alexander card) backgrounds.  Not sure if there is any price difference either, but neither card was very expensive.  

A Trade With Big D

I recently had a chance to sit down with Jimmy, from the card shop previously known as Big D's, to trade a few baseball cards.  Even though Big D's is not open Jimmy still takes care of all the old store customers with boxes and still looks out for cool single cards for our collections.  He had been putting together a pile of cards for me over the summer and I was happy to sit down, look at the cards, and help him add a few nice cards to his collection.  

Here are my newest cards:

Starting off small, but I needed this card for my Heritage High Numbers.  This was one of the cards I most eager to add to my collection from this product.  Honestly, if I had not touched High Numbers at all I still would have gone after this great looking Mahtook rookie card.  Mahtook spent last year with the Durham Bulls and this year going back and forth between the Bulls and Rays.  Snorting Bull favorite for sure and a cool looking card.  

Next up is a Kolten Wong Museum Collection autograph.  I have other version of this Wong autograph, but not the double jersey piece.  I really like the look of these cards, nice card, cool autograph.  

Another Durham Bulls favorite with this Blue Bowman Chrome Hak Ju Lee autograph.  The card is numbered to 150 and is a variation of this card I did not have in my collection yet.  and the final card......

This gem is from the 2004 Playoff Prime Cut set.  The scan does not really do the card justice.  This was a high product that had tons of relics and autographs from Hall of Famers.  Not just the garden variety either, but a lot of players from the 20s, 30s, and 40s who do not have a lot of relic cards.  Hornsby was the first superstar player in the history of the Cardinals and there are not a ton of relics of him floating around.  He has had a few in some Panini products the last year too, but there are not many in nice looking products like the 2004 Prime Cuts set.  Definitely a great card to add to the collection.  

Friday Five: Top 5 Cardinals Shortstops

5.  Rogers Hornsby

Hornsby appeared on the second base list too and most Cardinals fans associate Rajah with that position, but he actually started his Cardinals career as a shortstop appearing in games there in 1915, 1916, 1917, 1918, and 1919.  He was the team's primary shortstop during the 1917 and 1918 seasons.  Overall he played almost 400 career games, almost all of them early in his career at short.  Hornsby's first few seasons in the bigs were not his best years, but they certainly make him apart of this list.  In 1917 he hit .327/.385/.484 with a National League leading OPS+ of 169.  Hornsby also lead the NL with 19 triples that season.  The following season, in 1918, Hornsby had one of his worst offensive seasons of his career when he only hit .281/.349/.416 with 5 homers, 11 triples, 19 doubles, and an OPS+ of only 137.  That OPS+ number would have been the team high on the 2014 Cardinals.  Hornsby spent only 37 games at short in 1919 and would never play the position with any regularity beyond that year.  While his stay at shortstop was brief, Hornsby certainly made his mark while playing the position.

4. Marty Marion

Marion played shortstop for 13 years in the Majors, all of them were as a Cardinal.  During those 13 years the man dubbed "The Octopus" would help the Cardinals win the 1942, 1944, and 1946 World Series pennants mainly through his contributions as a defensive whiz in the middle infield.  His final offensive numbers were .263/.323/.345 with only 36 career home runs.  His defensive numbers are much more impressive.  Between 1941 and 1949 he finished either 1st or 2nd in the National League in dWAR.  His worst career dWAR occurred in 1950 when he only finished 6th.  Overall he his 16th all-time in the stats ranking.  Although he is behind several shortstops in career dWAR Marion had a much shorter career than almost all of them.  For example, Omar Vizquel has a career dWAR of 28.5, compared to 25.0 for Marion, but played 11 more seasons.  Marion lead the National League shortstops several times in both putouts and assists and ranks just inside the top 50 for putouts all-time and just outside the top 50 for assists.

3.  Garry Templeton

Templeton was the Cardinals everyday shortstop from the middle of the 1976 season through the end of the 1981 season when he was traded by Cardinals General Manager Whitey Herzog to the San Diego Padres for Ozzie Smith.  At the time of the trade, most baseball folks and Cardinals fans thought that Herzog was just dumping Templeton off the team.  Yes, the Mother's Day thing....While Garry was a Cardinal he was a very good shortstop making 2 National League All-Star teams, leading the league in triples three times, and in hits in 1979.  Templeton, a switch hitter, posted a .305/.325/.418 line during his six seasons for the Cardinals.  His 1979 season was probably his best year when he went .314/.331/.458 with 9 home runs, 19 triples, 32 doubles, 26 steals, and again lead the National League in hits with 211.  Templeton became the first switch hitter in baseball history to collect 200 hits with at least 100 hits from each side of the plate.  Willie Wilson match the feat in 1980 for the Royals.  People might have called him Garry Tempertantrum in St Louis, but he could hit.

2.  Edgar Renteria 

Edgar had a few big moments during his career that helped teams win World Series trophies.  Unfortunately none of those moments happened while playing for the Cardinals.  Still Edgar's best year's were probably spent in St. Louis.  The Cardinals traded for the 22 year old shortstop following the 1998 season.  Renter would spend six years playing shortstop for the Cardinals before leaving to play for the Red Sox in 2005.  During his six years in St. Louis Edgar posted a .290/.347/420 mark with 71 home runs, 207 doubles, and 148 stolen bases.  As a 90s Cardinals guy it's really easy to over look Edgar's contributions to the team, but with second base serving as a revolving door for the last decade, Renteria solidified the middle infield for some good Cardinals playoff teams.  His best year as a Cardinal was 2003 when he hit .330/.394/.480 with 13 home runs, 47 doubles, 34 steals, and won both a Gold Glove and a Silver Slugger.  It's hard to get the final out of the 2004 World Series out of my head sometimes, but Edgar was a really good player and the Cardinals got almost all of his prime years.

1.  Ozzie Smith 

One of the real no brainers on these lists that I have been making the past couple of weeks.  the Cardinals traded for Ozzie Smith after the 1981 season and he immediately helped the team win the 1982 World Series against the Brewers.  During his 15 year career in St. Louis The Wizard of Oz helped the team to two other National League pennants and was also part of the 1996 team which made it to the National League Championship Series against the Braves.  In many ways Ozzie's career reminds me a lot of Yadier Molina.  Both players started their careers as defense first impact players.  Both players became offensively skilled players later in their careers.  Ozzie had a .231/.295/.278 line for the Padres during his four years in San Diego.  His first few seasons in St. Louis were slightly better, but starting in the mid 80s Ozzie started to crank up his production.  He ended his career with almost 2500 hits, 400 doubles, and 580 stolen bases.  The Wizard also won 13 Gold Gloves and is the career leader in all sorts of defensive statistics.  dWAR, assists, and Total Run Zone just to name a few.  He left as the career leader in double plays turned too, but Omar Vizquel and his five extra seasons passed Ozzie by at some point.  JAWS rates Ozzie Smith as the 8th best shortstop of all-time just behind Ernie Banks, but ahead of Alan Trammell, Derek Jeter, and Barry Larkin.  We can't have a post about Ozzie's awesomeness without a video of a diving catch, or this...

Manu Excellence

Topps has been issuing manupatches for the past five years.  While they weren't necassarily the first company to use manupatches in their products, they have continued to evolve the products throughout the years.  Topps started off in 2008 when they issued an All-Star Patch for the members of the National and American League teams.  While the cards didn't really look like a patch, they were still really fun to collect.

2008 Topps Matt Holliday National League All-Star Patch

2008 Topps Justin Verlander American League All-Star Patch

Note the bottom corner of the Holliday Patch card differs from the Verlander patch.  The World Series logo was added to the bottom of his card since the Rockies appeared in the World Series in the fall of 2007.  Kind of unique.  Topps also issued a set of Red Sox patches commemorating their 2007 World Series Championship.  

2008 Topps Jason Varitek World Series Patch

Topps continued their venture into manupatches in 2009.  They issued two forms of patches that year in the form of letter patches and All-Star and Postseason patches.  The manupatches took on more of a patch appearance.  The letter patch sets were very similar to the By The Letter set that Upper Deck used in their SP Authentic releases.  The Topps letter patches, unsigned, featured many great Hall of Famers.  I worked on putting together a few of these sets for some different Cardinals players and Browns Hall of Famer George Sisler.  

2009 Topps Legendary Letters Commemorative Patch Rogers Hornsby

The All-Star and Postseason Patches were also pretty cool and continued into the 2010 Topps releases. I enjoyed the 2010 All-Star and Postseason patches a little bit more than the 2009 version.  The 2009 manupatches had a strong focus on the All-Star games.  For example, Topps did issue a Postseason patch for the Cardinals in 2009 that featured Stan Musial's 1942 appearance in the World Series.  The Cardinals All-Star Patch release in 2009 actually featured Frank Robinson as an Oriole and not a Cardinals player.  

The 2010 manupatches aligned the players and teams to a specific event that was likely memorable for for fans.  Willie Stargell was decked out in an all yellow Pirates polyester jersey with a 70s inspired 1979 Word Series patch.  Where there Cubs cards?  My two favorite Postseason patches were the Evan Longoria 2009 American League Championship Series patch and the 1982 World Series Patch of Ozzie Smith.  

2010 Topps Ozzie Smith 1982 World Series Patch

2010 Topps Evan Longoria 2008 ALCS Patch

Topps also release a set of hat patches in 2010, but I wasn't a huge fan of the set.  Some of the logos followed the traditional hat logos, but some of them mimicked the holiday hats that the Major League teams wear on Memorial Day, 4th of July, and Labor Day.  Pretty ridiculous when you team up a modern tradition with a player like Mickey Mantle, Frank Robinson, or many other retired greats from a previous era.  

The 2010 Topps Update featured manu-bat barrels.  Really cool.  Topps also offered variations on the barrels with limited print runs.  Plain wood barrels were numbered to 99, black to 25, and pink to 1.  Excellent concept from Topps to give the patches a bit of a break.  

2010 Topps Update Alfonso Soriano ManuBat Card 

Topps returned to the patches in 2011 and went with a retro theme picking out cool logos from the past and pairing them with a current player on the franchise.  There were many cool patches issued throughout the set and were really fun to collect not only across a favorite team, but also remembering some of the cool logos in other teams pasts.  Thought about going with the Mariners pitchfork, but here are two equally cool examples:

2011 Topps Evan Longoria 1998 Tampa Bay Devil Rays Patch

2011 Topps Andrew McCutchen 1984 Pittsburgh Pirates Patch

This year Topps went manucrazy for some baseball history.  They started out with three manu-products in their initial Topps base products.  First, they had player patches that featured the last names of Hall of Famers stitched in cursive across an older piece of fabric.  These reminded somewhat of the 2008 manupatches, because they were patches in name only.  Not really very patch like at all.  Not their best effort, but just a warm-up for the manu-excellence that would follow.  

2012 Topps Historic Stitches Bob Gibson Patch 

The other two manu-products followed closer to the bat barrel products issued in the 2010 Update set.  They took a piece of baseball and turned it into a cool product.  For example, the second product in the initial Topps base releases this year was a set of Retired Rings.  This set featured some of the all-time greats of the game with a cool piece of ring with the player's retired jersey number on the ring.  Topps also issued a similar set of patches in their retail boxes, but the reitred number was stitched and not displayed on a ring.  I love the rings, but the retail numbers are also excellent.

2012 Topps Commemorative Retired Number Patch Stan Musial

2012 Topps Retired Rings Stan Musial

Topps also issued an excellent set of World Series pins in their base set this year.  Assuming your team has won a World Series in recent years, then they likely have at least one card in this set.  The pins are metal and generally follow the same design pattern across the different eras of players shown on the cards.  For example, the 1967 Cardinals pin on the Bob Gibson card is nearly identical to the Albert Pujols pin for the 2006 World Championship team.  It would be cool if the pins were somehow unique, but this manu-concept was another excellent collectible for fans.  

2012 Topps Bob Gibson 1967 World Series Pin

Which brings us to the end and in my opinion the best manu-product Topps has issued over the past five years.  I really enjoyed tracking down these two cards from the 2012 Topps Update set featuring Ozzie Smith and Stan Musial.  The cards hail from the Gold Hall of Fame Plaque Set.

2012 Topps Update Stan Musial Gold Hall of Fame Plaque

2012 Topps Update Ozzie Smith Gold Hall of Fame Plaque

I have had a stand alone blog post for a Sandy Koufax autograph, but never a manupatch.  However, these cards might be worthy of such a distinction.  I have been impressed by how much Topps has been able to evolve the manupatch cards over the past five years and think that this latest effort is by far their best effort.  Definitely worthy of a tip of the cap to Topps for producing a quality product and continuing to innovate the manupatches.  Looking forward to what the 2013 releases bring.  

  

Trades From The Last Week

Still catching up a bit from last week.  These four cards came in last week and I did not give them their proper dues here on my blog.  The Ryan and Hornsby cards are from one trade and the two Cardinals cards are from a different trade.  Overall, four quality additions to the collection, but I was most excited about the Carpenter and Hornsby.

2012 Topps Tribute Champions Materials Chris Carpenter

2011 Topps 60 Relics Matt Holliday Bat Card

2003 Topps Record Breakers Rogers Hornsby Bat

2003 Topps Record Breakers Nolan Ryan Jersey