Nifty Nine #6

Baseball Card to the rescue! Day 2 of a good ole-time Blizzard here, where the Great Lakes keep dumping snow that doesn't even appear on radar screens at times. I am feeling a little better during my first visit with humanity's newest endemic corona virus, enough to pull binders from shelves and stick completed pages in them, so for today's get-some-exercise project, I completed a page. Still on tap is a wonderful bit of placing cards in empty slots in the Sea Turtle project, probably tomorrow, but that won't appear via Blogger for many many weeks, most likely.

Today's project grew out of a collecting theme I enjoy of simply keeping the cards from players that have appeared on the most total teams in their career - guys who put the journey in journeyman, like Octavio Dotel or Edwin Jackson. That little project will make it over a certain finish line and onto a Nifty Nine binder page sometime in the coming weeks; it just supplied a certain theme to this little effort.

The Card That Started It All

I definitely would have never figured out this little assemblage if it wasn't for this card. As a brand new issue of my favorite recent Topps design, I had to acquire this. It is one of 3 representatives of 2013 in 70 card sets inserted in 2021 Topps Baseball S1, S2, & Update, one card per Topps design.

I had no particular knowledge of Jazz Chisholm when I first learned of these cards and for the most part, I don't much care for this particular Sea Turtle card. The Marlins are a team never happy in it's own skin with their constant uniform and iconography changes, so the 2013 design is changed/updated here, with the most recent team logo and seemingly a new "team color" of basic black, though perhaps it is just a dark blue. I somewhat doubt even the Marlins know whether it is blue or black. The result of the black graphics + photo selected with a black batting helmet and black (or blue?) uniform is like looking into a miniature black hole of a Baseball Card. The best thing I can say about this card is that I like the view of the Pine Tar on the bat. Yet if this bonus Jazz Rookie Card card had been placed on one of the other 69 Topps designs instead, I might have never started following this player, though another of his cards caught my eye a year later -

The Card That Started It All, Runner-Up

Art By: Jason Drumheller

This card appeared in 2022, the final year of Topps Gallery - where Topps just ditched the original all artwork concept of the set and just slapped photos onto cards, some of them those turrible, just turrible fake backdrop photos plaguing multiple Topps products of late. 

Except for this neat little "Modern Artists" insert checklist, which has a very interesting composition in that each card shares some fixed design elements, but each card is also different. I can't think of another checklist like it, and I am ever so slowly collecting it now. 

The Jazz Chisholm card seen here drew me in with the graphics and the nice dynamic inset photo of a Shortstop about to "range to his left" as much as Jazz' unique look; before deciding to go for the whole small "set" I thought this card could just anchor a fun page of cards for such a visually interesting player. 

It also has a fun basic write-up courtesy of Topps Card Back Writer: "The finish of Chisholm's swing is a thing of both ferocity and beauty. At contact, he keeps both hands on the handle while catapulting the barrel over his back shoulder so forcefully that it almost hits his backside. This full commitment to the cut helps Jazz produce elite exit velos despite his modest size."

I'm telling yas, someday these Baseball Cards are going to finally make me pay up for a year of MLB TV. If, I could just slow down a little on buying the Baseball Cards, I guess?

I like that Modern Artists card so much I will definitely 'clect a 2nd copy of it, for that set - & a Jazz Chisholm page. Which, will be separate from this one. I will probably end up with a 3rd Jazz page too, because I like his horizontal cards a lot also. While looking for candidates to help with the horizontals in particular, I realized something about all the Baseball Card options available for him. And, it being Black Friday weekend when I discovered this, it was the perfect time to pull a trigger and create a unique page of Baseball Cards. I think you'll figure it out as we go:

Topps "Living Set"

Art by: Mayumi Seto

This was a bittersweet but still happy purchase for me; it is my first card from this ongoing project which I basically admire a great deal. Once upon a time I even wrote Topps a letter and sent it to 1 Whitehall St., asking them to produce a new 1953 set, "the right way" - just like this, with true/original/new hand-made illustration work for each player. I would surely enjoy having an ongoing complete collection of this. Except of course, at $5 and well upwards for each and every card in the set, I know that will never ever happen in my life, and that's just kinda depressing. Someday I will make a curated page of just these and again be both happy to have them, and simultaneously bummed out a little. Not the emotions one wants from Baseball Cards.

1962 Topps / 2021 Archives 

Sometimes he's Jazz Chisholm, sometimes he's Jazz Chisholm Jr.

This card also has a great entry from Topps Card Back Writer: "Jazz announced himself to the Baseball world as a rookie by taking Jacob DeGrom deep. And it wasn't on just any pitch, but a 101-mph fastball so high in the zone that no pitch like it was ever previously hit for a Home Run."

"1965 Redux" / 2021 Series Two

1972 Topps / 2021 Heritage High Numbers

As classic as the '62 image, this one made me start wondering if I could make it across the goal line without a repeat. Card #665 by the way, that was close.

1980 Topps / 2021 Throwback Thursday

This one, along with the Living Set card, had to be more "deliberately" acquired - i.e. I had to explicitly purchase them for a few dollars more than a couple three quarters. But I love 1980 Topps. And hey, two different color compression sleeves and a two-tone glove — whaddya expect from a guy named "Jazz" anyway?

1986 Topps / 2021 Topps Series 2 insert

A great fielding shot, though again getting nervous about repeats wrecking the plan...

"1992 Redux" / 2021 Update

A "Tattooine" card just technically, but that is another small thing that caught my eye initially about Jazz Chisholm cards as I got this in a pack not long after his most traditional/regulation Rookie Card card -

2021 Topps

A great Rookie Card image, though I will never care for this design, which so routinely entangles itself in the image - the exact opposite of what graphic design added to photography is supposed to do, if you ask me. This is also a "Blowfish" card which are mostly famous on Shohei Ohtani cards, but probably an occasional other player, and could probably be collected that way, if you like to laugh at Baseball Cards.

The Result

So there you have it. 9 Rookie Card cards, 9 Topps designs, just one player.

Baseball always loves a power hitting middle Infielder, and Baseball Cards love Rookie Card cards, so perhaps this result was inevitable for a Topps anniversary year even though Chisholm was not one of what I call "The Five" - the RCs that get photo variations issued with the complete Factory Sets. Those players will be on every Topps checklist of the entire year in most cases.

Still I would doubt this could be achieved for a player in any year aside from 2021, which featured those 70 Years of Topps sets as well as 3 of the "Redux" inserts (52, 65, 92 - JC Jr. did not make the 52 checklist which appeared with S1). There might could probably be some other 2021 Rookies this would be possible with via those "Redux" checklists though I am not going to repeat this particular effort.

A kinda nutty factoid about these 9 cards is that I could have done this without using the 2021 card at all as there actually is a 1952 Topps style Jazz Chisholm Jr. Rookie Card card as well - in 2021 Topps Chrome Platinum: 10 Topps RC designs. However I decided to complete this without selecting from Chrome versions of cards, or the "Mojo" version of the 1986s, nor by using photo variations - there are still quite a few more Topps Baseball design JC Jr. RC cards than just these.

Let's hope this sublime example of Rookie Card card mania might generate a little good news for Jazz this year, i.e. that he can avoid the injury bug, play > 140 games, and makes lots more checklists. Cuz Rookie Card cards are cool and all, but they will be even cooler if they are just the front-end to a long career in Baseball Cards. Here's hopin'