I am not an overtly, actively religious person. Most specifically and crucially, in the minds of many, I do not attend Church any more. But I did grow up attending regularly and I do try to apply the lessons I learned from that, routinely. I am talking about the Christian Church; classical Scandinavian & German Lutheran denominations in my family. I also enjoy reading thoughts from other religions occasionally.
Many years ago now, I put a pair of quarters in a "gumball" machine though one seemingly full of small plastic toys. These machines amuse me and always make my head turn while on the way out the doors of my local grocery store. That particular day, out popped a simple string necklace holding a small metal Cross, which was quite a surprise. Lacking any better idea of what to do with this new object I owned, I hung it from the rearview mirror in my truck, where it still hangs today. Every so often it brings the key expression "WWJD" to mind when I am thinking about some decision. And that, is a Good Thing.
No one has ever commented on that quite small Cross hanging in my truck. Most people would not associate my sarcastic, sometimes-swearing-like-a-sailor daily pitter-patter with most Christians. I do believe Jesus would be solidly in the "DGAF" camp on oh so many absurdities of daily life and trivialities like a cuss word or wearing "Sunday-go-to-meeting" attire to impress people. I am also quite sure Jesus would not collect Baseball Cards, and his instructions are pretty clear on that. Sorry, Jesus, I am not perfect.
Still, the Cross is not often seen in daily life these days, especially when compared to life in our previous century. And when this does happen in 3D, actual daily "offline" life, it can be a little striking at this point. Some time ago, I noticed this was particularly true on Baseball Cards.
The Card That Started It All
I bet you're not surprised it is a 2013 card. (Update)
On this Ryan Raburn card the Cross is exceptionally noticeable. Although it too is part of the general downward flow of the whole image. That's not a particularly great thing about this somewhat odd card, where it appears Raburn is giving props to Chief Wahoo for some reason. I would expect he was (initially) quite pleased to be playing in Cleveland, as the Detroit fans had turned on him quickly during a down year, after several quite productive ones. It can't be any fun to be a scuffling player on a team full of big Stars like the 2012 Tigers.
I did not set this card aside immediately upon finding it pack fresh in the fall of 2013. But I certainly didn't forget it. I unfortunately can't recall precisely which other Cross card may have finally made me think to start making a little pile of Cross cards. I suspect it may have been one (2012 Update Hanley Ramirez, wherein the Cross is quite difficult to pick out) that didn't get drafted for this page of cards, which I made from a best-9 effort with these.1990 Donruss
This card definitely makes me wonder when the first Cross was first seen on a Baseball Card. I would expect Topps may have been a bit reticent to depict one on a card, even decades ago when Christianity was a much larger religion in our country. It was considered a bit impolite, in my memory, to discuss one's religion, publicly, as there are many religions in our country. But somewhere in the vast oeuvre of Baseball Cards there has to be a First Card showing a Cross on it. This Benito Santiago card is the closest I can get to that card, for now.1992 Stadium Club
A primary thought I have about this card is that I know it will be difficult for me to find more cards like it; by that I mean cards from the 1990s and early 2000s. I used to see/obtain them on the regular via simple cheap "re-packs" of randomly assembled 20-ish year old cards. These no longer seem available to me, easily at least. Instead shelves are now offering endless formats of "Mystery Boxes" full of unsold packs only a few years old — I already saw most of those sets, so they don't interest me. I might go deliberately looking for a new fix of those older styles of repack product, via this ever helpful Internet deal we all stare at too much. Those wonderful cheap repacks are where I found this card, and probably the Santiago card too, as each set was previously represented in my younger days collection by just a few sample packs.
This Joe Slusarski card is #782 in that Stadium Club set. Could you imagine such a yuge SC set today? I certainly could, and it would somewhat be wonderful. It would also be not somewhat, but quite certainly, hella expensive. 92 SC also has that wonderful feature of depicting the player's Rookie Card on the back, in those ancient times when a player only had a single digit quantity, or really a single hand quantity, of Rookie Card cards. I would love to see that back-of-card feature return to a modern SC set, mostly to laugh at all the whining that would result if Topps were to anoint one Rookie Card card over another as the "official" Rookie Card card. Oh, the humanity.2014 Opening Day
Here, the in-action Cross is contributing to the upward flow of the image, which seems quite a bit more apropos than the image composition+cropping on the Raburn card.
2014 was one of those years where Topps printed the player name in the Topps Baseball set in foil, but printed the name in the Opening Day product in normal ink. Unfortunately, they used a light grey ink which is functional enough, but not nearly as functional as regular ole black ink would've been.2018 Update
This card is my most pleasing find, because although McCutchen might be wearing a Cross, it is instead seen elsewhere on his "work clothes" and is the only Baseball Card I have yet found with a Cross not on a necklace. There are likely other Cutch cards sharing this trait, but I don't expect to find one like this for another player, any time soon. I am also quite pleased where this card ends up by simply collating this page in chronological order.2018 Archives
This is actually one of 3 Lindor cards I have that reveal his Christian affinities, but picking just this one was an easy choice as the other two feature a less easily visible Cross. However those cards reveal the Cross by live game action / hustle, as with the Raburn and Prado cards. Knowing that this is a posed portait card with the Cross displayed illustrates Lindor's convictions much more strongly than more accidental glimpses.2019 Big League
I was a definite fan of the new Big League product when it debuted, but the sophomore effort disappointed me, despite the nifty use of wood grain in the design. How did Topps manage to make the term "dark pastels" necessary to describe it? Who does dark pastels? Plus the images are routinely rather dim on the cards, as if a large % of them were taken from games being played under imminent threat of a Rain Delay. It shoulda-beena-contender, but at least it did contribute a few cards to my collections, such as this one.2020 Opening Day
A pleasing card, despite its plain-ness. Or really, because of that. In an all-action, all-the-time set, "candid" cards are a big help in keeping things interesting. Which is something the normally grey paneled 2020 design needs help with in a big way. Color parallels were an even bigger help, that year.2021 Topps
I don't think this far too busy set design will ever really grow on me in the way Topps Baseball designs should, over time, like the 2017 design has, for example. But as always, every Topps Baseball Card design can be of secondary importance to the photo selected for the card. This basically happy Baseball Card is, natch, a nifty conclusion to these 9 cards. When I get around to putting my 2021 collecting efforts into a last-call-for-binder-page-slots, I will need to do something to memorialize the day the White Sox started the "all-Garcia" outfield. So maybe I will find more Leury Garcia cards with a Cross shown on them; we shall see.
Card Most On The Bubble: None of them, really. I might experiment with the even plainer, basic base version of the Vogelbach card as the Cross should be the bling, not the Baseball Card. Ditto for the Prado card as the Opening Day logo doesn't generally add much to the cards including it.
And this is not a final collection of Cross cards, by any means. I have the two additional Lindor cards, and the Hanley Ramirez card in-hand already. Also I expect these will both continue to be issued occasionally, and I hope to just find them at random on older cards, too. But that is much more difficult now without occasional $5 stacks of 100 random junk wax cards. Additionally with this theme I have no plans to scroll through the assemblages of every Baseball Card, ever, for a player I now know to be wearing a Cross, just to assemble quantities of them. That would be a bit humbling for these cards in particular and it might be wise to have more of these around when I am looking at tempting $300 cards. But I have mostly avoided doing that so far in these Nifty Nine collections, though will have to begin such a technique for a lot of them stalled at 7 or 8 cards. That should be fun, eventually.
For now however, I will simply let the Cross find me, as it has throughout my life.
The Result
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