We were all looking forward to the anointment of the next Herb Washington this year. It seemed so simple....we'll see.
My time for blogging grows short again, as work will soon have me 150 miles from home, comfortably appointed in a big ole empty farmhouse, but without a scanner or my collection of Baseball Cards. Maaaaaayybeeee if I can ever get caught up on the joys of self-employment and filing taxes on my own, which means hours and hours of sorting receipts and horrible drudgery, I will celebrate and buy another scanner just for road use. But I doubt I will -ever- get 100% caught up on that dreary-ness.
Anyhow I do have a nice run of posts stockpiled for part ways into January and have been making tremendous progress on resolving stacks and stacks of Baseball Cards, which has been great. But one small stack of cards on the desk needs to be dissected...
Wait.
I'm showing you an actual "Pinch Runner" card?
2024 Heritage card #407 just says "Outfield" on it; everyone has had to deal with this annoying card -
That's the mini version; quite annoyingly, I still don't have the full-size version. But luckily, I have a very sweet stash of some of the Minis.
The odd appearance of "Pinch Runner" is present on all the parallels:
This also holds true on the other full-size Heritage parallels, and also in the parallel Minis.
First I want to mention that I quite like the #407 2024 Heritage card. The Pink&Yellow combo in the '75 design is a great one, and it perfectly complements the selected Taveras image with the pink palms and striping on his batting glove, plus a nice appearance by the Alternate Blue uniform (never to be known if Home or Away), with a perfect display of the Texas flag shoulder patch, all on a crisp, unique image. Also included as a free gift bonus is even a stylish signature from Taveras, one not pointlessly dropped into a dark portion of the image as on so many 2024 Heritage cards, with each one depositing the facsimile signature in exactly the same place, courtesy of software. But really all the way around, a bang-up Baseball Card.
I also like that an obscure Taveras Rookie Card seems to have foreshadowed his elevation to Baseball Card fame, some 3 years before -
I picked up that card completely by chance discovery in the Buck Box, and pretty much just because of the basically pretty 24 Heritage card. I have no idea what I will do with that card, though it too is a darn nice combo of pink&blue.
But tonights topic is - why was such a simple thing as printing a "Pinch Runner" card in Heritage all screwed up, causing endless confusion and also basically costing every Heritage set collector an extra $15 just to finish a set? I don't know for sure, but through the year 2024 I found some clues on some other cards that might inform on this, at least a little bit.
Also this seems like a good place to point out: Herb Washington is still alive. Thus there is a chance he could still appear in some "2024" Heritage, via an autographed card, in the High Numbers set, which is said to be still "on the way," in "first quarter, 2025." His "autos" would sell very well, I expect, and that's what a lot of people want when they purchase a box of Baseball Cards, particularly the most vocal ones. Me, I just want the Baseball Cards; I'm weird like that.
My first, and prime, suspicion about what might have happened is this card:
See - there's Leody Taveras running the bases, he must be real, real good at that. He even brings a sliding mitt with him when he bats, indicating he might routinely get the "sign" from the bench.
Another 2023 card maybe reinforces this a little:
Oh, I get it now. Taveras has to bunt his way on base; so he must be fast and then he must get used as a Pinch Runner a lot.
See how much you can figure out the game of Baseball just from Baseball Cards? It's easy.
So hurry, up, pick us a Pinch Runner and get these cards down to the printer already. Let's go get some stock tips from drunken traders enjoying Happy Hour down at the bar.
That doesn't explain why the regular card #407 says "Outfield" on the front though, and only the parallels say "Pinch Runner." Still a bit of a mystery to examine, but first I want to detour into another supposably key feature of Baseball Cards: accuracy.
There is a simple fact about Leody Taveras' play in the 2023 season, the one that should generate the results used on 2024 Baseball Cards.
In 2023, Leody Taveras was never used as a Pinch Runner, not even once.
As for stealing bases, he went 14-for-18, which does place him around 70th in MLB that year, for the "SB" stat. One could also tease out his exact ranking via consideration of the "CS" stat, and probably there is a website that already did that, if you can look more closely than me.
But in the 21st Century, it is easy to see who really was a Pinch Runner in 2023, courtesy of Baseball Reference, specifically at:
The final column on the right of Player Appearances is labelled "PR" for, of course, Pinch Running; clicking on it will cause all of the players in 2023 MLB to be sorted by how many times they were a Pinch Runner in a Major League Baseball game in the 2023 season.
Now it should be noted there will never be another Herb Washington in Major League Baseball. Err, well, there certainly -could- be, but in the Data Mining era every game outcome probability is taken so seriously that the concept of a team using a roster spot on a speedy player who can't hit and can't field is incredibly unlikely.
Maybe the closest we could have gotten was the now ended career of Billy Hamilton, who did get picked up on a couple rosters with an eye to being a Pinch Runner during expanded rosters in September and possibly October. He would have made for a perfect Herb Washington tribute card, but his last game was in May, 2023 so that just couldn't work out.
Given the modern easy access to every baseball event statistic, Topps certainly could have made the Pinch Runner card using an actual Pinch Runner in 2023. Here are a few of their options, starting with a player who tied for 2nd in the stat at 14, and actually is in the 2024 Heritage set -
Sharing the lead at 15 PR insertions are 3 players:
That's Chavis' final card now, it appears; he did not play in MLB in 2024 and thus an accurate call @ Topps.
Hey, look, another sliding mitt. Caballero appeared in 104 Games in 2023, not enough to make a regular Heritage checklist when it has to have about 100 Rookie Card cards included in it first. Yes, a full 20% of the checklist = RC now.
And one more sliding mitt, a good photo choice for a serious threat on the basepaths. Despite making it into 69 games in 2023, that is Dairon Blanco's First Topps Card, which finally appeared in 2024 Update. He only has one other card so far, in one of the Chrome Platinum releases complete with the RC logo making it his One True Rookie Card (truly a rarity in 21st century Baseball Cards), but nobody ever knows what year those Platinum Chrome cards actually represent. It is nice to see the irony of a speedster sporting uniform #44 though.
Blanco, by the way, lead all of MLB in 2024 with 42 Pinch Running appearances, more than double the 2nd place player in the stat. The Leody Taveras stat for "PR" in 2024 was just, 2.
So real Pinch Runners do exist in MLB, though not in an exactly-like-Herb-Washington way; it is pretty interesting that the rules tweaks and new base size created a fair bit more Pinch Running in 2024.
But I believe there was yet more happening in the 2024 Heritage set that could have made things turn out differently. And, perhaps, some other certain path was planned before things went haywire, for who knows what reason.
As it turns out, "Herb Washington" is included in 2024 Heritage - on a card back -
It is of course a stinging bummer that these card backs are far easier to read after they have been scanned. I still struggle to believe how not-seriously Topps treated the Heritage brand this year, for one of the most popular sets in Topps' history.
This card clearly indicates that the whole concept of a Herb Washington tribute was on the mind of whomever was assigned to 2024 Heritage, probably some 13-14 months ago as I write, a bit more so than the parallels does, or the strangeness revolving around card #407, and card #82.
That is the Heritage card for a player who has been following me around some this year; this was my 1st card in my 2nd pack of 2024 Topps Baseball:
,
,which was also my First Card in the one blaster of 2024 Topps Chrome that I tried out. (The Neon didn't really need Chrome-ing, it appeared to me; though I did hit the Judge base card so the blaster was only a $15 experiment later, instead of $35).
Jose Rodriguez made the 2024 Topps Baseball checklist there right in prime time Series One, on the strength of a pretty notable Major League Baseball career previously, in terms of just who gets a Baseball Card, and who doesn't. That's because that career consists of appearing in exactly one game in the 2023 season.
Now as things have played out, I believe he appears in 4 products with 4 different total images even with repeats in 2 pairs of products, plus one Bowman card and no shortage of Panini & Leaf cards available to commemorate this career. And I almost forgot one other card appearance, in 2024 Topps Chrome Update, where he had exactly one card. Not just one checklist spot, but just, one card. That was his 1/1 "Rookie Debut Patch" card, which sold for around $1,500, iirc. That sounded incredible until my friendly LCS owner pointed out that it is widely speculated that the players themselves tend to buy up those cards when they appear for sale.
This is moderately likely to be Jose Rodriguez' only year of appearances on Topps cards, which is because in the first few days of the 2024 season, the White Sox sold his contract to the Phillies. Upside: that was a decision by Dave Dombrowski. Downside: when the 2024 White Sox are selling your contract for cash, well...
But the more serious fact about Jose Rodriguez was that in mid-summer 2024, he had not cracked the Phillies Major League roster; rather he was suspended by MLB for a full year for violating the No Gambling rules. At only 23 years old as I write, losing a year of participation in Pro Ball isn't necessarily an automatic end to a career, but there is certainly no shortage of mid-20s players as good and many better in MLB systems.
And what happened in Jose Rodriguez' one and only one game in Major League Baseball? He was inserted into a game on June 20, 2023 at "The Rate," wherein he did not get an At Bat, but he did score a Run in Major League Baseball. He also played Second Base, not SS, for one complete, 3 outs inning. Just one, though that is one more than Herb Washington.
Thus the entirety of his offensive body-of-work in the Bigs was --
-- as a Pinch Runner.
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