I Love The 1990s Cardinals Part 33 - J.D. Drew

The NCAA Baseball tournament is firing up this week, so I thought it would be a good week to cover one of the all-time great college baseball players who also happened to be a member of the 1998 and 1999 Cardinals teams.  His career with the Cardinals actually extended a few years into the early 2000s, but for the sake of these 1990s themed posts, I am going to mainly focus on his time with the team during those two seasons.

Prior to playing professional baseball, J.D. was one of the greatest college baseball players ever.  He won awards, he won championships, he set records that still stand today.  Having listened to a few Florida State fans talk about his playing days in Tallahassee, I am not sure that I can sum up his college career, do it justice, and not make it a stand alone blog post.  I leave you with this.....

Maybe some day Panini will get off their duff and make a card of J.D. in his college uniform.  Seems like a shame that he does not have a card in his college uniform.  I know a few Florida State people who would be more than interested in getting a copy of the card.  

Drew entered the 1997 MLB Draft considered one of the best players at the top of the draft.  His agent Scott Boras told teams that Drew would not sign for a dime less than $10 million dollars.  The Phillies selected Drew second overall and then offered him $2.6 million dollars to sign.  He refused the offer and spent the summer playing for the St. Paul Saints in the Northern Independent League.  He re-entered the 1998 MLB Draft and was selected by the Cardinals with the fifth overall pick.  They paid him $7 million dollars and he signed.  

The incident made him less than popular with Phillies fans throughout his time in the Majors.  

I think there were some battery and beer bottle throwing incidents along the way too, but I try to keep things PG around these parts.  

It took Drew part of a summer to advance all the way through the Cardinals Minor League system.  He made his debut with the team on September 8, 1998.  It was the same night that Mark McGwire hit his 62nd home run of the season, breaking the single season home run record.  

As a Ray Lankford fan, it should be pointed out that this game was won by the Cardinals, who sealed the victory after the Cubs pitched around Mark McGwire and then gave up back to back home runs to Ray Lankford (3 run) and Ron Gant (solo).  

By the end of the 1998 season, had played in 14 games and made 41 plate appearances.  He made the most of it, hitting .417/.463/.972 with 5 home runs, and 13 RBIs.  Not a bad little line for a two week cup of coffee.  

The baseball card world was already a little Cardinal crazy with Mark McGwire at that time.  The arrival of J.D. Drew sort of sent some people over the edge.  He was not quite Mickey Mantle, but the way that some people went after his baseball cards, you'd swear he was a slam dunk Hall of Famer.  Yes, people literally walked around comparing him to Mickey Mantle.  His first cards started popping up in the fall of 1998.  

My favorite was his 1998 Fleer Update card.  

This was a really simply designed card, but I really liked the edge to edge picture.  The card back also has also full color photo.  

You could only get the card by buying the complete Update set, which was not horribly expensive in the grand scheme of things, but finding one could be a challenge.  Maybe, I just went to college in the middle of nowhere with a really terrible card shop.  Drew also had cards in Leaf Stars & Rookie, Donruss Signature, and a whole bunch of different Minor League products.  

Drew's cards are obviously really easy, and inexpensive, at this point.  I know that those other two cards are also considered rookie cards, but the Fleer Update is the best of the bunch.  As a Cardinals collector, this card is borderline iconic as a modern must have card from that era.  

His 1999 cards were also really popular for much of that calendar year despite the fact that it was literally the worst full season of his Major League career.  In many circles, the expectations for Drew were still through the roof.  It was one of those moments in my collecting career where I had serious doubts that a certain segment of the baseball card collecting population actually watch the games and follow the sport.  

I am going to narrow the bloat of cards from 1999 down to my two favorites.  

First up.  

One of his first 1999 cards was in the Pacific Private Stock set.  This actually came out really early in the card calendar.  Since the Topps base set used to come out right after Thanksgiving in the late 1990s, this might have even been out before the end of 1998.  Regardless, it was a favorite set of mine from that year, I miss the Pacific brand, and one of the earliest Drew cards I remember owning.  If you do not own any of these cards, they are not hard to find in boxes and packs, the quality of the cards is excellent.  Nice stock, although they stick together in the packs now after they have been in there for 20 years.  

Last.  

I think this came out later in the summer and people were crazy about it while J.D. Drew was batting .240.  It took me several years to actually get a copy of this card.  I refused to pay whatever ridiculous price this cost back in 1999.  The other autographed card in this set, Gabe Kapler, was even pretty pricey.  I should have gone back and found an old Beckett and scanned the price listings for this set.  

As for the rest of J.D. Drew's career, I am not sure that he is ever going to receive the due that he probably deserves.  He's not a Hall of Famer, but he still had a very good career.  The Cardinals ended up trading to the Braves at the end of the 2003 season.  The trade netted the team Jason Marquis and Ray King, who were both contributors on the 2004 National League Championship team, but the real prize was Double A pitcher Adam Wainwright.  

The Braves got one really good year of Drew, while the Cardinals got a few Cy Young worthy seasons out of Wainwright and a World Series winner in 2006.  Drew eventually ended up in Boston after the Red Sox finally helped him cash in with a large contract.  He got 5 years and 70 million dollars out of Boston, not sure that Sox fans really loved Drew, but he hit .360 in the American League Championship Series that year against the Indians, and .300 against the Rockies in the World Series.  

#MyCardMonday

I picked up this J.D. Drew card sometime during August of 1999 after I started my first "real" job as a fifth grade teacher outside of St. Louis.  New jobs are a good reason to celebrate and new baseball cards are always a really good way to celebrate victories in life.  I really liked the 1999 SPx set, tons of McGwire cards, and it also had two autographs in the base set.

One of the autographs belonged to Tigers prospect Gabe Kapler, while the other belonged to Cardinals uber prospect J.D. Drew.  The luster had started to wear off of J.D. Drew's uber prospect status after a sluggish 1999 season, most of which had been played by the time this product had been released, but I still loved the card and had to have it in my collection.

There are 1999 copies of this J.D. Drew card, and the price has gone down significantly since the product was released, but it is still a favorite for many collectors.  Especially those of us who were around opening packs of cards back in the 1990s.

Here's to new beginnings......

New T.J.

I am always a little bit reluctant to buy cards from overseas sellers on Ebay, but I saw this really cool T.J. Warren card a few weeks back and decided that it was worth the risk given that the card was selling for less than $5.  If you have never bought from an overseas seller on Ebay, the tracking options for the packages can be limited, and the shipping can be a little bit slow.  This card took me just over three weeks to land in my mailbox.....

I do not dabble outside of baseball cards often, but I have really enjoyed picking up a few T.J. Warren cards over the past year since he left N.C. State for the NBA.  Warren was the ACC Player of the Year two year back, and was also one of the leading scorers in college basketball, but was slowed by injuries and limited playing time with the Suns during his first year in the NBA.  He had a great summer league this year and I am looking forward to checking out his lines in the box scores once basketball season starts back up again in a few weeks.

Almost all of the T.J. Warren cards that I have added to my collection have featured the forward wearing his NC State uni, but I would imagine that more and more of his cards will be of the Suns variety in the near future.  In the meantime, there are a few more nice Wolfpack autographs of T.J's that I would love to add to the collection.

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.  

Commemorative Coolness

I hope you have enjoyed some of the older cards I have posted on here during the past few weeks.  I set a goal of posting more cards that were already in my collection when this year started.  It's been a busy past 30 days for me at work and I feel like I have had limited opportunity to post new cards.  The cards in my post tonight are two of my favorite older autographs in my collection and I consider sort of prized possessions.

In 1996 Upper Deck issued the SPx set.  The SPx brand had been a football and basketball brand prior to the 1996 year, but the baseball line followed a similar concept as the basketball and football lines.  The cards had a simple die cut design with a hologram picture covering the majority of the card.  The baseball version contained one card per pack with a limited few insert sets and parallel sets also included.  Two of the insert cards were a commemorative card of both Ken Griffey and Mike Piazza.  Each card also had an autographed parallel.

I loved the look of these cards and made both autographs a high priority a few years back.  Both look really good in my collection.

My copy of the Griffey autograph is fading a bit, but I keep it stashed away and rarely take it out of it's spot.  I would consider looking for another copy of the card, but many of the other copies are starting to look just like mine.  The Piazza autograph has held up well almost 20 years later.  Both cards can be found for around $100, but the Griffey has started to fluctuate in price based on the condition of the autograph.  One completed sale on Ebay recently sagged below $70, but the 'graph was badly faded.  Nice copies of the Griffey can still push $200.

Buy Local!

I live in one of the "cool" metro areas.  Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill-better known as the Triangle-always makes all of those really trendy city lists.  Best places to live, most PhDs per 100,000, sunshine, colleges, pine trees, schools.  Lots to love about living in North Carolina.  Be a trendy, hip, cool city means we have lots of cool things about buying local products, making local products, local business, local, local, local.  Lots of signs like this:

Or perhaps if you live in Durham you might see a sign like this: 

and Raleigh of course has their own cool Buy Local sign too.  Everyone in North Carolina is stuck on local, but I am wondering how its possible for me as a consumer of baseball cards to buy local.  There is one decent card shop in all of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill which is far far away from my house.  The card shop which is closer to my house is not so great.  In fact, I stopped there this weekend to buy a few boxes and remembered quickly why I do not buy cards from them.  

With card shops being difficult to reach, I have been working hard to develop a few connections around Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, Burlington, and a few other locales where I can trade and buy baseball cards.  This week I successfully bought a few cards from a local collector stepping out of the hobby.  Guy has some really good pictures too.  

I ended up with four new cards for my collection:

1999 Bowman's Best Scott Rolen Autograph 

First up is a pair of Scott Rolen autographs.  Both cards are from his time with the Phillies, but the autographs are on-card and very clean and clear.  Rolen was a pretty prolific signer as a Phillie, but he dropped off as a Cardinals, and never signed as a Red.  I think there might be a token Blue Jays autograph.  

2000 SPX Scott Rolen Autograph 

The 2000 SPX set was a really cool set.  Lots of autographs including rookies.  Rolen is not a rookie in this set, but the veteran autographs in this set include Canseco, Ivan Rodriguez, Jeter, Manny Ramirez.  Again, really good set. 

2005 Playoff Absolute Rafael Furcal Jersey/Bat/Autograph 

It's hard to believe that this guy is still on the Cardinals roster.  If only he were playing instead of Pete Kozma.  Furcal was a key contributor to the 2011 World Championship Cardinals team which makes his cards desirable for my collection.  Furcal has been a pretty big signer during his career, but this card is limited to just 50.  The card, just like the SPx Rolen, hails from a cool set.  Unfortunately the 2005 set was the final year of this brand.  

2002 SPx Winning Materials Frank Thomas/Magglio Ordonez Dual Jersey

I also picked up one non-Cardinals card.  I really like the dual jersey, multiple relic cards that Upper Deck used in the Winning Materials cards.  This was a pretty long running set for Upper Deck and they almost always made a Winning Materials set.  I did not actually see this card before buying it, but I saw several other prints and liked that most of the Thomas swatches had a pinstripe.  I went for it and got lucky.

Despite not having a local card shop I am going to keep working on buying from local sellers.  It might be a little bit difficult to do at times, but there are plenty of cool baseball cards floating around North Carolina.  It just happens that many of them are not in card shops.  

30 Year Top 50: 1996 SPX

#45- This was the only card set I could put on this list from 1996.  Not one of my favorite years, but this was my favorite set from that year.  This set was really popular when it was released and was starkly simple compared to some of the later releases of SPX Upper Deck would issue during the late 90s.  The set was a 60 card set with two commemorative cards, a Mike Piazza and Ken Griffey Jr., and two autographed cards, a Mike Piazza and Ken Griffey Jr., one parallel set, and an insert set of 10 cards.

2006 SPX Jeff Bagwell

The cards were all holographic.  Base cards, Inserts, and Autographs.  One of the real challenges of collecting this set was the fact that the cards on came one per pack, with a $3.50 per pack price, 24 packs a box meant it took a few boxes to put this set together.  The insert set, Bound for Glory, was seeded at one per box, but the Piazza and Griffey commemorative cards were seated at one out of three boxes for Griffey and one out of four boxes for Piazza.  Never quite sure if I bought the odds on the Piazza and Griffey cards.  I've opened a few boxes of this products over the years and I always seem to end up with one.  Hmmm.

1996 SPX Bound For Glory Cal Ripken Jr.

1996 SPX Ken Griffey Jr. Commemorative Card

                                      

Which brings us at last to the reason most people went after the cards in this set: the autographs.  The 1996 SPX set was released at a time when autographs had long, long odds, and the card companies didn't put a bunch of scrubby players on the autograph checklist to purposely lower the odds.  This set had only two autographs, but they will both be in the Hall of Fame shortly, and the odds for both autographs was set at 1:2000.  So, I went through a few boxes in 1996, put together my set, and did not  get a single Griffey or Piazza autograph.  Which lead me to having to track one down.

Now, I am not often a fan of Beckett pricing.  They tend to be arbitrary and lean heavily towards the large hobby shops and not the collectors.  Notice we have few shops now a days.  So, one such victim of the ever-shrinking list of card shops was not far from my house in West Saint Louis County.  They had both a Piazza and Griffey autograph.  For years, the two cards set in their cabinet with a really high price tag on both.  Beckett.  

Finally, the card shop high ended itself out of existence and I had a choice to make between which card to add.  Now, Griffey has signed in every Upper Deck baseball release between 1996 and 2011.  There are thousands and thousands of Griffey autographs.  Piazza, not so much.  Plus, this was Piazza's first certified autograph and I consider it the real prize of all the Mike Piazza autographs.  Not really much of a debate.

1996 SPX Mike Piazza Tribute Autograph

Like the 1996 SPX Set?  Not in my Top 50 is the 1998 SPX Finite Set.  This was Upper Deck's 1998 version of the SPX line, but it had some cheese metal plaques on the card.  Also, all the cards were serial numbered, hence the term Finite.  Don't worry if you like the cards, the word finite was used liberally with 1990's card releases.  Basically, the set was broken down into different subsets.  Each subset had a different stated print run.  The lowest, or most finite, was the Heroes of the Game and the Cornerstone subsets, which ran at the rather Finite print run of only 2000.  The commons and various other print runs ran between the Finite amounts of 9,000 and 5,000.  Finite to the max.   There were also parallels which were less Finite.  Below is a Spectrum Parallel of a Ray Lankford Common with a Finite Print Run of 2,500.  You can find them for $1.00 or less on Ebay, COMC, or your local card shop.

1998 SPX Finite Ray Lankford

At the time of its release some of the rookie cards were actually pretty tough to find along with some of the parallels.  I've only once been threatened at a card show (I was also once threatened by an elderly women at a Wendy's in West Virginia for wearing a Duke shirt) over a card and it was from this set.  The card show was at the Cape Girardeau Mall in 1999 and the dealer, who owned the local card shop, had a cool Manny Ramirez parallel from this set with the super Finite print run of 3,500.  He asked for $30.  I asked for $15.  All 5'2 of him told me he'd beat my ass and call mall security.  I laughed.  I tripped over a crate behind his table.  I also bought the card off of Ebay last year for $0.50.  

1998 SPX Finite Manny Ramirez

The set was actually rather challenging to assemble in terms of time, but the cards are all out there if the your desire a display of Upper Deck's late 90s Finite printing.