The Italian God of Walks?

Can't say I've ever seen a League Leader card for Walks before. Well, at least not since I bought this card 12 years ago. And promptly forgot all about it.

Maybe this is one more reason the A's started building a team around OBP (On-Base Percentage) for the 2002 season, just after Giambi left to free agency. Of course, I only know that from the movie version of Moneyball. Haven't read the book yet, though I have been starting to lazily watch for a copy.

Speaking of Moneyball, I would think that movie would be an ideal toppic for a set of baseball cards. There is that one guy somehow involved with owning Topps who has a bit of Hollywood experience that you might have heard of that you would think could help with the right rights Topps would need. So many ways they could make cards referencing that movie.

Anyhow, was sorting some 2001 Topps doubles for a trade and found this one. I have about 3/4 of the set myself and will work on completing it later this year, so don't give your commons to the orphanage in Guadalajara just yet. Not my favorite set ever by any means. Dark color borders don't really appeal to me; in fact I think the scan looks better on my computer screen against a white backdrop than the real card does in my hand. They probably don't irritate as many people as bright color borders do, but they probably don't excite very many folks either.

And these cards are not aging well as the foil printing on the fronts (no foil on the reverse of the card, which is pictured above) blurs out increasingly over time on some cards, even in penny sleeves. Maybe they came in the packs that way, I can't remember. I probably just got pulled in for a year by the 50th Anniversary hoo-hahh. Actually, I do remember collecting in 2001 fairly well and have 4 different half-completed sets to show for it. I think I will just do a whole 2001: A Collecting Odyssey some other night.

But I like this League Leader card. I don't much care for the front of it. The National League lead jerk-face is on the other side of the card. I always liked his father so much more. How many cards feature two steroid players on one card? Oh, yeah, a whole bunch.

I have no idea if Topps has ever made a BB Leader card before or since. There is also a card for leading in Hits, and Slugging Percentage as well, another category I've never seen on a card. The two-sided approach is also unique (in my experience at least), with the National League Leader on the front and the American League guy on the back. It would have been more neat if whichever of the two led MLB would have been on the front. Of course the OCD collectors would probably complain about that though. Is it OCD for me to complain about the reverse?

Giambi is currently the active leader in walks across MLB, good for 33rd place All-Time. He is only the active leader because Jim Thome finally retired just last week. Betcha might've missed that news.

How does he compare to Youk? Pretty favorably. Youk's career has been much shorter and doesn't look like it will have much more length to it. But on the percentages about these things that get a little saber-ish, Giambi is much better at drawing the freebie, actually twice as good as league averages. Youkilis strolls down to first more than the average baseball player, but not quite as often as Giambi.

You know where to find all those numbers; way more numbers than can fit on a baseball card. Interestingly, Giambi led the league in walks in 2000 and onto this baseball card while only being intentionally walked 6 times. That jumped to 24 times in 2001.

Even more interestingly, Baseball Reference says Giambi led the American League in walks in the year 2000 with 137 walks. Topps says 134 here on my baseball card. I'd go with Baseball Reference. Though it is very unlike Topps to get a key stat wrong. But, then, it is very unlike Topps to put Walk stats on a card.

An Error Card. An Uncorrected Error Card I think. Woot woot, call the 90s!

Card backs could be tough to write in '14

So a while back I was wondering what Topps would do for this year's Melky Cabrera card, mostly figuring I would have to wait for Series Two.

Then my itch to find some sort of cardboard memento of last year's winning of the Triple Crown by a different Cabrera — one would think Topps would have been all over that...wtf? — led me to slowly start acquiring cards from this year's Heritage set. At least that one has great Leader cards, which is what I've been chasing. I do like Heritage, just not a great fan of all head shots, all the time. '64 is a nice spare design, with nice use of color; one of the better sets of the 60s, but there are other Heritage sets I have preferred / will prefer.

So along the way I eventually pulled this card:

[ huhh, a little off-kilter there Mr. Scanner. Apropos, methinks. ]

And as soon as I saw it I knew I would find out if my hunch that Topps would gloss over the whole PED topic on their glossy shiny happy baseball cards, possibly via just filling the back with Melky's complete professional statistics all the way back to the Instructional Leagues. Gee, no room left for comment.

But, I was wrong:

That salmon print can be tough to read, I know. The anonymous Topps scribe wrote:

"Melky signed with Toronto after a big, if abbreviated, year in San Francisco."

Topps could have gone any direction with this, due to their 21st century ability to change the font size any way it wants; Melky would have had 10 more lines of minor league stats, and the quiz question at the bottom isn't on every card. The card could have been created without any text comment at all, easily. So my fount of baseball knowledge somewhat rose to the occasion for me.

And say you're a National League fan and you're wondering if un-enhanced Melky is contributing to Toronto's implosion so far this season? I checked the website for you, since the baseball cards won't tell till next year. Melky's stats so far this year are right back to his career averages. Which aren't too bad actually - career .284 hitter, it says there in the salmon, if you squint hard enough. Good thing kids don't have to squint to read card backs, huh?

But I think, given tonight's news, that Topps might not be able to tip-toe around this subject in the future. What's that? Melky's return to the City By The Bay didn't go well? No, Melky did OK with that, going 2-for-4, though he flied-out in the 9th with a man on 1st and the Jays lost again. The home crowd, in baseball tradition, booed him steadily — I could hear that through Jon Miller's always steady-steady radio call, courtesy of the MLB At Bat app on my phone. I'm not gonna bother checking the interviews, etc., on that. That's why I like baseball cards, as you mostly get to skip endlessly repetitive sports clichés, since of course, baseball cards have their own special sets of those anyhow.

OK, OK, dear reader, I'll cut to The Chase (groan). I don't really want to Debbie Downer you away from incipient Puig mania (such a great baseball story), but I'll just say that I don't think Ryan Braun will get card #1 any more, or even card #8 either. And I think I will be sure to get Uecker's take on things tomorrow afternoon, that will be interesting. Sorry, I promised to make my point....it appears that the Biogenesis bomb just might finally go off.

What will Topps do? It will be interesting. We won't know, cuz in baseball cards, as in baseball, there's always next year.

Yeah, I read the backs

And the bon mot above is one of the better ones I have ever read on the back.

Melky was suspended on August 15th, 2012, so I'm thinking the Topps Update editor must have finished his (c'mon, don't you daydream that Erin Andrews actually does this?) work and had the cards off to the presses before that date. I'm sure they would have preferred a Do-Over on this card.

Personally, I wish Update would come out a fair amount earlier. I think it would sell better if it arrived with more time left in the regular season. I'm no expert on such matters. A release date of October 1st means many fans who's team isn't in the playoffs are probably buying football cards instead, methinks. I know Update is tied up with the All-Star game now, and the trading deadline of course.

But last year's Update set creates a question on this. The blockbuster Red Sox <> Dodgers trade was announced August 25, 2012. And Topps had time to create a few super-duper-short printed cards of the major stars in that trade. Perhaps those versions were created and printed during production and the special cards then hit the market a bit later in October; I don't know.

Probably an accidentally goofy statement on the back of the Melky Cabrera card wasn't high on the list of details to cover for the release of the set. I'm sure it is much more important to Topps to keep the amounts and distribution of their manufactured rarities just exactly perfect. But with the All-Star game on July 10, and the so-called trading "deadline" (don't ask me) on July 31st, and then a blockbuster trade on August 25th still kinda-sorta being able to make it into the Update set.....is Topps run by Europeans who just take the summer off?

It seems like when I was a kid, those wacky Traded cards came out in late summer, so you still had time to play with them, while baseball was still being played. Then you could take that card where you had crossed out one team's name and written in the player's new team and stick it in your bicycle spokes to give an already mangled card a properly mangled burial. The new Traded card set the record straight, and that was the one to keep. Who needs a card with the wrong team on it?

But there is one other remote possibility about that sentence - Topps has total faith in Melky. And some people do say that about PED's - they don't help you make contact with the ball. Maybe the greenies do though. More upper-body strength should get you more hits though, as your drives rip past the infielders faster than they used to. So perhaps Topps is declaring that Mr. Cabrera will spray the ball all over the Sky-Dome just as he did at the new Candlestick or whatever the heck they call the Giant's ball-field, and like he did at Kauffman Stadium too. But I doubt it. On both counts, if you are following closely here.

I'll be watching to see what they put on his 2013 cards, that's for sure. I'd wager that they avoid the whole thing by adding his minor league stats to his Series Two card, so there is no room for comment.

Whew. Oh where a sentence on the back of a baseball card can take me. To keep from getting too wordy yet again (I thought this would be a short post. That first sentence on the back of the card kinda just says it all, not that that stopped Me), let's look at the front of this card:

I actually love this card as a baseball card. It would make several of my Frankensets I like to look at - it's a Horizontal Card, There's A Baseball On My Baseball Card (with such good stop-motion photog action these days you can see the seams on a live pitch), and it's a Bunt Card. 

I think it might be the first Bunt Card I can recall actually — I will soon post another one to launch a quest for all the Bunt Cards I can find. 

And then Melky has a red bat. I can't recall where else I've seen a red bat. One other Giants card in the last 2 years I think, but I forget which. And since baseball cards are my main visual reference for the game, I really noticed this one. Now of course I discovered this card, like everyone else, with full knowledge of the partially comical Cabrera saga. But looking at the red bat on there, it makes you wonder a little.....is it a sign? Melky with red, trouble ahead? Dunno. And I haven't figured out what goofy name to use for a Frankenset full of colorful baseball gear - Hey, Look: My Bat Is RED won't work for the blue glove and pink bat I have discovered elsewhere in the world of Topps recently. Frankenset meme under construction here.

As for cards in the steroid era, I wonder if today's news on Topps remaining exclusive until 2020 will have any other details in the fine print. Not that we card collectors will ever be able to read those details, at least not until 2040 or so when Topps sells off it's copy of the contract perhaps.

But given the flap over even printing the name "Pete Rose" in tiny type on the back of a baseball card this year, it leads me to an obvious thought. If Topps is MLB and MLB is represented on Topps baseball cards, perhaps part of any PED suspension could include Topps. So a busted player would be dropped from certain sets via some mechanism.

I mean, PED's, and even non-performance enhancing drugs, are banned in part because of the poor & dangerous example they set for kids. Sometimes I think too many things in our country are set up that way in my opinion, but this is one I can agree with easily. What about the children? But I'm here to write about baseball cards, not Society.

So when the hypothetical young baseball card collector is building a set and there is no Melky Cabrera in it, even though the kid remembers him winning the All-Star Game MVP last year and he just saw him go 1-for-5 leading off for Toronto on the Saturday Game of the Week, the no-baseball-card-for-cheaters lesson hits home a little bit. If, in fact, kids still buy baseball cards, rather than just Comic Book Guys who like to hang out down at the Android's Dungeon and bitch bitch bitch about their cardboard master all day.

Just a random tangent my mind was led to by the back of a Topps baseball card. Where will these things lead me next?