Update on the Morrow

Well the first card of a set that one should blog about would normally be the first card in the first pack:

A solid, seemingly workman-like effort at first, this card grows on me some as I gaze upon it. 

Plus: nice flow of multiple diagonal lines.

Minus: the now standard cropping of the player above his knees. Letting us have a little more background context might have reinforced the lines, or possibly weakened them from this end result. We'll never know. At least all the floating torsos don't come with a set of storm clouds as the cult-like Inception cards did.

Plus: the lines all lead you to the baseball in Morrow's right hand. I like to see the baseball on my baseball cards.

Half-Minus: the Nike swoosh takes us a little roller-coaster ride and all that flowing has me a little woozy, though strangely still without any desire to own any Nike anything.

So yer average 2013 Sea Turtle. Let's check the back:

I didn't even find anything to mark-up with my digital pen. The Topps writer does an OK job of creating a "first pitcher in Club history" deal out of arbitrary stat limits; I think he could have been a little more generous and pointed out the dramatic improvement in Morrow's numbers in the 2012 season.

A bigger question is why Toronto's #2 starter at the beginning of the season wasn't in either Series 1 or 2 or Opening Day already. ?  Normally in Update we get lots of middle relievers, not seemingly solid starters. All those R.A. Dickey and Josh Johnson cards must have left poor Brandon swept under the rug at the Topps office.

Which is just as well as he unfortunately struggled with injuries in 2013; he didn't pitch at all after late May and thus inadvertently created a perfect situation for an Update card. Except for my aforementioned complaint of why a WHIP of 1.11 doesn't earn a card in the regular Series?

Ahhh, the mysteries of common baseball cards.

The next card has already been seen on 2 good blogs so far, and will probably have a nice future of popularity as bright as the nearly glowing infield grass:

I thought I'd do my own scan of it to help further show off that nice run of shadows there at the bottom. I'm thinking those will really pop on some of the various build-your-own-baseball-card options we have with all the parallels these days. There will be an obvious one I will want, but I think some of the other options might surprise the viewer. The /2013 Gold parallels can be a bit of a sleeper hit. Decisions, decisions.

And on that note I will sign out for the evening, for as much as I like typing up my ramblings on baseball cards with y'all, I like looking at brand new baseball cards even more...