falling for a new one

Art by Josh Trout

Recently, I started in to collecting a totally new, for me, set of baseball cards: Gallery.

This is the 3rd time-around for the "re-booted" product. In 2018, I tried just one pack; in 2017 I think I basically missed it's existence entirely as a devouring horde of locusts desperate for more Aaron Judge Rookie Cards kept my local baseball card shelves picked to the bone, routinely.

As you can probably tell from my Google Photo Profile, I take an interest in "Art," not just baseball cards. But what you can't tell is that I have only a passing interest in Art, really. I don't spend money on it or follow it all that closely; I just like what I like. I spend my money on baseball cards and follow those closely instead.

When Art and baseball cards intersect though, I generally check things out. I am still kinda surprised I never did try a sample pack of '17 Gallery; a regret, now, that I will return to later in this post. In 2018, I did check out a pack amidst an adventuresome White Halloween fall working season up near Lake Superior. I thumbed through the cards and put them in a little box and sometime later that winter, I sent off the "hits" - a Mookie Betts 'Heritage' insert and a couple Wood Canvas parallels, whatever those are/were. I think I received about 43¢ a card or some such figure for each of them, I forget. The rest of the base cards I just stuck in one of those to-be-?-later stacks of cards we all end up with.

This year, I tried another sample pack.

And I liked it much better. I quickly realized that when it comes to the intersection of Art and baseball cards, results are going to be extremely variable, based on one collector's response to the work of one artist. I also realized that I am not going to like every artist who creates baseball card Art, and probably not even every last creation they hand to Topps, and Topps hands to me.

But I definitely found enough things I like that I will be collecting most of this set. The 2019 cards featured artists I liked better than some who submitted for the 2018 set. I also liked the new card design quite a bit. The complete gold frame works much better than the 3-sided frame in the '18 set. The card edge is a more stately set of slightly raised parallel lines all around the outside of the gold frame, classier than the circular pattern on the '18 cards, though those gave a nice baseball bat-esque pattern one would see in tree rings. The classy gold script of the player's first and last names is a nice touch; I like the way it gives equal heft to the first and last name, rather than just the last name dominating the card as in '18. The whole design just cleanly emphasizes the artwork in the center of the card, with zero distractions, though some might be a touch distracted by a certain little red, white, & blue logo on many cards, as on the beautiful card you have already gazed upon at the top of this post.

The card stock is also quite nice. The clean white-ness of it and the whole design is just elegant. So elegant that my collecting effort took a little time to get going, as I wanted to treat these like Chrome cards - taking them straight from a pack, and into a penny sleeve, before sorting, etc. I wanted to touch them strictly as little as possible. But lately, my local baseball card distributor rep hasn't deigned to offer to sell me packs of penny sleeves for some several years running now. I'm not the type to just solve that problem by "just order some." Far too much PITA for a $1 product.

But penny sleeves finally returned and I have been able to assemble the results of buying a couple blasters and a few more hanger packs. Before we dive into checking out some cards from this new set I really like, I want to return to the '18 set for a moment. Last fall, I felt something felt a bit too familiar about this card:

Art by Kris Penix

But I couldn't place that feeling on it until I got home from the Superior country and get back to my completely buried baseball card desk, which helped me realize that 2018 Gallery card seemed familiar because -

Baseball: Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim Ian Kinsler (3) in action, fielding vs San Francisco Giants during spring training game at Tempe Diablo Stadium. Tempe, AZ 3/10/2018 CREDIT: Robert Beck (Photo by Robert Beck /Sports Illustrated via Getty Images) (Set Number: X161783 TK1 )

Which at first feels kind of cheap. But ultimately as I thought about this a little bit more - exactly how is an artist going to draw/sketch/paint a representation of a Major League Baseball player? The player isn't going to appear at their studio and patiently pose for the artist, after all; for that to happen, well, we wouldn't be able to afford the resulting cards.

So while pondering that question some I turned to Google. Which led me to this photo:

That's Mayumi Seto working on a new piece; the photo is from a brief interview with her in Becket Baseball, with far more details on the whole process, which can be found by clicking on this unfortunately pale looking text that means "link" in this iteration of Blogger.

I really like her work and will return to that once again yet later in this post.

Once I somewhat 'got over' knowing how Gallery cards are created (something a bit nicer than the famous Bismarck quote about laws & sausages), I began to be more drawn into my new Gallery cards.

After scrounging around for those pack left-overs from the '18 set, I noticed this card, and immediately loved it:

Art by John Giancaspro

First, it formed this image in my mind:

Clipped from still from movie "Swingers"

Which is Jon Favreau some 20-ish years ago now, in a great comedy I have always enjoyed. And that makes me chuckle; others may not see it, but now I want to see the movie again, and probably the movie "Made" once again as well.

That Soto 'art card' also did an amazing job of making the viewer think about real life in that Juan Soto has the same "how old is, he, really" questions swirling around him as Albert Pujols did when he was a rookie, as have a few other Latin American born players over the years.

So, good job 2018 Gallery, Topps, and artist John Giancaspro; that particular Juan Soto RC will be my go-to Soto card for many years to come and will probably lead me to create a 9 card player page for him over time. Though I must confess most other collectors don't care for the card and the way it ages him a little. Also I can note that one little $6 pack of 2018 Gallery also held a Rookie Card of some kid named Ronald Acuña - how many packs did you buy last year that held both Soto _and_ Acuña RCs?

Now with all that background out of the way, I can show off some of the many cards I like from 2019 Gallery, which quite quickly hooked me up with another entry for my nascent Juan Soto collection:

Art by Kevin Graham

I mean if ever there was a card that arrives with an automatic soundtrack, it would be this one, which clearly says: "I'll be back." I'm starting to like this Soto 'kid' more and more all the time. Thanks, Topps.

But I am jumping the story just a touch. I also became intrigued by 2019 Gallery via a blog post @ the Mint Condition blog; just a basic box break post, though of one of the large $80 boxes I am still only dreaming about purchasing. I can't thank Jordan enough for posting that, as it piqued my interest in this set because of the "1965 Heritage" inserts shown in the post. 1965?, I thought. I like those cards. I could see quite enjoying some hand-drawn versions. I never did finish the 2014 Heritage set after all, as no matter how much I enjoy the graphic design of the set, the endlessly repetitive photos Topps dumps into a Heritage product always end up boring me out of completing it. Although I have never made a serious attempt at collecting any original set re-created in Heritage, my memories of the originals are that the variety factor was several times higher in them than in the Heritage versions.

Now, I finally have 4 of these cards to judge, in-hand:

Art by Louise Draper

The Votto is my favorite; another 2 (McCutchen, Benintendi) are a little 'on the bubble' for me and the Altuve needs to go somewhere else, pronto. Which reminds me of another key point - these cards don't necessarily come off well in scans. To really judge them, one should consider them in 3D real life, not via what you might see on any computer screen. Ultimately with these "65s" I think they will be a little hit or miss with me and I will likely just stick to whichever 9 I like best that I can manage to acquire the easiest.

That '65 Votto has a perfectly authentic 1965 card back too, quite well done. As I start to get into the meat of any baseball card set, the base cards, I should demonstrate a sample card back:

composition by unknown Topps baseball card miner

Not much to write home about here, but functional enough. Month-by-month stats aren't unknown on the backs of baseball cards, but aren't that common any more. Only sometimes are those very illustrative of just what happened the previous season.

As I have been collecting these I have been liking that Alonso RC more and more all the time. I don't think it will lead to an Alonso PC page for me; so many of his cards so far are way too same-same. But that gaze up, up, and away following the Home Run ball and off into the future up there at the top of the post - that's a Rookie Card to remember, in my opinion.

That's probably because I have realized I am drawn to the work of that artist - Josh Trout - more than the other contributors. I received the following card in an early pack:

Art by Josh Trout

It proceeded to spend a fair bit of time as a display card keeping me company looking back at me from the card desk, which probably explains some of the chipping now present in the gold frame, as I didn't yet have those penny sleeves I always run out of. But I'm not worried about pulling a duplicate eventually, another I'll-get-back-to-that.

That card spent some time in this little doo-hickey, which I can definitely recommend as a handy card desk accessory:

I like the little not-gizmo so much for use with baseball cards that I want to buy a couple more (business card holders, a buck or two at any office supply store).

Here is another fine horizontal card in the set:

Art by Josh Trout

and another -

Art by Josh Trout

I was particularly pleased to pull this one:

Art by Josh Trout

Seeing as how Willie is the 'cover player' for this set, though this image is not the one used on the wrappers and boxes. Still I think it illustrates how much Topps likes Josh Trout's work, to give him this checklist assignment; he is new to the roster of Gallery artists this year.

Those last 2 cards, with the 'Masters' & 'Apprentices' tagline, are an unfortunate part of this set: Short Prints. I'm not sure I will ever finish this set, and that is disappointing. I have obtained 5 so far in-hand, but the SP checklist is 50 cards long.

They fall 1 per blaster, or 1:3 hanger packs. So either way, a collector is going to spend about $20 just to get one Short Print. If one were to attempt to build this set via regular old collect 'em, trade 'em strategies that Topps has been advising me to pursue for my whole life, the base set (150 cards) would be completed many times over as one chased these Short Prints, and the total cost to obtain 50 of them would be about $1,000! & some would be dups :(

That is just not going to happen, for this collector. Of course in the 21st century we don't have to buy our cards only straight off the shelf at full retail; other options are easier than ever. I do have a few of these already waiting for me at COMC, but I'm still not sure I will end up completing the Short Prints. I definitely will pick up all of the Josh Trout SPs, and a few select others; that is probably realistically affordable for me. Though I often accept this economic limitation on collecting dreams, it is not one I am ever happy about, & here, there is no particularly good reason I can afford 150 of these somewhat premium baseball cards, but not a different 50 of them.

Of course, that is how baseball cards work now. Everyone really wants $20 bills in their packs of cards as much as they want new baseball cards. So this product is as loaded with random gimcrack as every other Topps product, though with a notable exception of no "relics."

Fortunately, I have been able to get in to the gimcrack, too, and one such piece was another from the artist I am chasing the most:

Art by Josh Trout

The autograph checklist in this product is long and diverse, though features the dreaded 'sticker autos'  that I am not so particular about. Still, I think changing this set to on-card autos would really start to make for some hot little single baseball cards - imagine that Alonso card way up there now,  as an RC on-card auto. However I think the premium card stock wouldn't really support shipping the cards back and forth to the players as easily as some other sets might. And then if you really want that Alonso card signed by Pete Alonso, Topps will probably soon oblige you by issuing a copy in the Archives Signature Series.

I was happy to pull this one in particular as it will fit in with collecting this by artist as much as checklist, it has a uni # inscription, and now I have a random Rookie Cardinal Pitcher to follow a little more closely; Hudson could well be yet another gem uncovered in "The Cardinal Way" minor league system that just keeps churning out relieable MLB starters, so unlike my favorite team's system, which mostly seems to churn out DFA candidates.

My other only real "hit" so far is this card -

Art by John Giancaspro

This is the orange parallel #/'d to /25. These cards work perfectly on their own; parallels add very little to them and I expect on some a colored frame would actually detract from the experience. But everyone wants "value" in their packs, so "value" has to be created.

I did like getting my share of the "value" for similar reasons as with the Dakota Hudson autograph - I learned about an interesting new Rookie. Reynolds is still under the radar for most, perhaps largely because he fell just a few At Bats short of being 'qualified' to appear on MLB leader boards for hitting stats. A 3.9 WAR rookie campaign is pretty darn good; I always remember with young outfielders now that Christian Yelich had just a league average-ish OPS for his first 3 years in the majors. Yet another card it would be silly to sell for just a couple bucks now vs. selling for just a couple bucks five years from now if Reynolds turns out to be merely Very Good.

As you start collecting these cards, sometimes each artist's work becomes quickly recognizable; other times the name on the back surprises when you flip the card over:

Art by Dan Bergren

I thought that would be another Josh Trout card, based on the similar background as the Alonso card. I have yet to see an online resource grouping the cards by artist name rather than player name.

Bergren has supplied artwork to all 3 years of the new Gallery; in the 2019 set he also does the artwork for the Hall of Fame inserts:

Art by Dan Bergren

That card will be a nice addition to my still small Christy Mathewson collection; I might finish out this insert set as well but am still undecided until I see a few more of them, but probably so. I will not be completing the Masterpiece inserts or the Master & Apprentice duals. I have yet to pull one of the 'Impressionists' inserts but look forward to seeing one.

I also know that none of the artists will bat 1.000 with my personal appreciation of these cards, just as every set has photos that just fall flat no matter how much you might like the set design.

Art by Josh Trout

One card that particularly didn't connect with me was one for a player for whom I hope to assemble 9 nifty baseball cards, who is by all accounts one of the happier young players in MLB:

Art by John Giancaspro

Now if Astudillo goes on to become a long-tenured star in MLB (seems a little improbable), perhaps a Rookie Card showing this much gravitas will become a nice piece of his baseball card oeuvre, as it were. But from what I hear about Willians on broadcasts, this card just doesn't match up though otherwise it is an excellent piece of realistic artwork and my expectations here probably have more to do with the source photo selection. A little more unfortunate is that this is card #1 in the set.

Another unfortunate result is the following card

Art by Todd Aaron Smith

This card just doesn't say "Nicholas Castellanos" to me even though that is what the text on it says; I have been looking at Castellanos cards for a pretty long time. What is a bit of a downer in particular for Cubs and/or Castellanos fans is that this looks to be the only Topps card featuring Nick on the Cubs as they declined to put one in Series One with all the other players on expired contracts now wearing new uniforms in real life, but not in Series One. Fortunately, they did come through with a Cubs issue in the Bowman Heritage set, as discovered on the Wrigley Field Roster Jenga blog.

Now we only sometimes will know which photograph a particular artist is re-creating. Perhaps, they are using photos from the future, as it were:

Art by Carlos Cabaleiro

Amaze your friends by predicting the appearance of the semi-regular baseball card trope of Scherzer casually flipping a baseball in the air on his soon-to-be-released 2020 Heritage baseball card:

A little taste, for ya. 

Which reminds me of a definite dream of mine as the 1970s, err, the 2020s start to roll along — more MLB stadiums on my MLB baseball cards, like this one:

Art by John Giancaspro

I mean if an artist hired by Topps can go the extra mile to put a real MLB Stadium in the background of a hand constructed card, surely one of their photogs can shoot a few players inside an MLB stadium, too? A kid can dream, right?

A bit of bad news around this one for fans of amusing baseball cards, however - Hammer was DFA'd recently and will now have to, yes, hammer his way back into MLB as an NRI player just like all the other couple dozen NRIs in every Spring Training camp as I type this one. Good luck, J.D.

One thing that surprised me about these cards was how much the background might make the card:

Art by Carlos Cabaleiro

That one is probably an example of the it's-better-in-3D-reality. It will 'make the team' as I binder these cards up, somehow, some day.

Now perhaps that artist reads the Night Owl Cards blog:

Art by Carlos Cabaleiro

Or at least, maybe his Topps assignment editor does.

One of the pleasant discoveries for me in my discovery of how pleased these cards make me is that back in the 2017 Gallery set, a primary artist featured was Mayumi Seto, as seen in this blog post many hours of your life ago now. I really like her work that I have seen in the Topps Living Set, but I also know I will be lucky to assemble just a single binder page of 9 cards from it, eventually. Collecting a large set of baseball cards at $5 per, or more, is just not a viable deal for me, as with the Short Prints in this set. I so hoped for such a solid take on doing up a new version of the 1953 set that once upon a time I sent a letter to 1 Whitehall St. New York, NY, politely requesting that Topps do up the 1953 set once again, and do it right, with warm analog, artwork, rather than the cold digital crap they have placed on the 1953 design several times now in the 21st Century. Be careful what you wish for.

So I was quite pleased to discover that I can collect a nice portion of Seto's work by traveling back in time and picking up some 2017 Gallery, which is slowly rising to the top of my baseball card To Do list. I was also quite pleased to discover this card in a pack this year:

Art by Mayumi Seto

It was especially nice that this one isn't a Short Print, as seems to be the case with her few contributions to the 2018 Gallery set. (Still hoping to discover an artist based checklist for all 3 years of this re-boot). I love the reflections illustrated into the batting helmet here, but I am not really a Gary Sanchez fan. I do hope that one of the 50 cards made into 'box toppers' in this release might be a Seto card, but I have only seen about half of those online so far, so I have yet to pick one of those to chase. I definitely don't particularly want to put a sweet drawing of The Kraken sticking his tongue out at me, up on my bookshelf with another great box topper from 2011 Lineage.

Nevertheless I have about 40% of this set still to discover; there is lots and lots of it still on the shelves where I live and I am hoping at good chances to pick up more of it at 40% off. So there yet could be some more Art by one of my favorite new artists appearing on my card desk, like this last example of half-pointless gimcrack in the set, the blaster-only (fake) 'Artist Proof' stamped cards:

Art by Mayumi Seto

Anti-Collecting

OK, 1st: I am very Pro-Collecting.

But some of my smaller collections are not compiled, often ever so slowly, because I love the cards involved. Sometimes, I want a baseball card that I can attach to some facet of the history of the game — & sometimes, that can be a facet I definitely don't like.

Recently, a few cards that arrived in a package from the Night Owl fit this profile. He didn't know this when he sent them; he picked them out because he knew I collected certain cards, not that some of those certain cards would fit in one of my few "Anti" collections. I was very glad to receive them.

I almost titled this one "A Disturbance in the Force" because the cards were probably sent a day or so before I posted for the first time in quite a long while, seeking trading partners for the 2019 Archives set. They then arrived a day or two later, with a nice little pile of 2019 Archives cards included, several of which made my Tigers Best-of-2019 post a few days ago. They also came at a great time to be absorbing new cards as work things were kind of like the ole Sid Vicious quote from when someone asked him why he liked to bang his head against a brick wall for seemingly no reason: "Because it feels so good when I stop."

So, yeah, lately my 3.5 x 2.5 cardboard heroes have been an extra handy refuge from the ridiculousness of contracting for a government agency full of, well, nothing to do with baseball cards.

Maybe there would be a more deft way to work gov't employee misadventures into the subject of this first card if I pondered it long enough, but let's get on with the show. I like Manager cards:

Now today would be perhaps a better day to illustrate this collection with an AJ Hinch card, something I still want to acquire to go with this one, rather than the other random Manager cards I stumble across.

For my Managers collection, I don't really care what card it is - a real Manager card the likes of which haven't been created by Topps in several years now, or any card from their playing days, or even a prospect card, like this one. I don't think I have ever had a Manager's prospect card, because until just recently, prospect cards for crusty old baseball Managers weren't an old enough concept. Nowadays, we have shifty young baseball Managers.

I had not thought to assemble a special page of Houston Asterisks cards, though I guess if an AJ Hinch card turns up, and I have a few random Carlos Beltran cards that don't fit anywhere, and I have this Alex Cora card now ... maybe I will assemble such a page now that I think about it. I have been routinely dumping any random Alex Bregman minor 'pulls' I pull for a while now but he still falls out of my packs all the time anyway; I also have some nifty shiny stuff from 2011 Update for Jose Altuve that has probably totally crashed in value now. So, maybe some of those cards will need a home too I guess.

As for my thoughts on the whole scandal, they are incomplete. The big press event today at the opening of Spring Training was rather anti-climactic, in my opinion. I think like many controversial things in baseball, only time will tell. A lot more of the real story will come in the future, though probably a little faster in the everyone's-a-publisher Social Media Age than it would have in the 20th Century, when we wouldn't hear much about it all until a few key people retired and maybe wrote a book. 

I think the rather wooden and trite things coming from the mouths of the Houston stars still trace back to the "everybody else was doing it" defense that Beltran has pointed back to some. That is a slippery slope in human affairs; it is far easier to do something wrong when you first convince yourself that other people are doing it too. The next thought is "They made me do it." 

What all was happening around the League at the time perhaps remains to be seen. The report on what the Red Sox (and the guy pictured above) were up to in the 2018 season is still in the breathless media @BoringSpringTraining future. I figure that might crash the value of my randomly (packs, man, all the Trout packs I could find) assembled stash of JD Martinez Rookie Cards, including some more shiny goodness.

All that be as it may, or all that as may it be, I now have a baseball card to connect me to Alex Cora, a person who is now far more permanently a part of baseball history than he was six months ago.

Now Night Owl's package had the seeds of another Anti-Collection in it too, but these aren't the funnest of topics so let's check out the fun cards he sent, like this one:

From way downtown!

I haven't blogged about my totally random Octavio Dotel collection in many years. It is not one I go out and work on all that purposely. I discussed it once in a post called Bring Me The Arm of Octavio Dotel, cuz sometimes I think you could carefully photoshop his right arm onto an Andre Dawson card and it might kinda fit. The above card certainly gives that impression. I also wanted his cards because he held the record for playing for the most teams in MLB:

Maybe I should just build a collection of his cards from around the AL Central. But then if I do that, I would probably have to do the same for Joakim Soria, and he always just looked shifty to me. I like Octavio quite a bit better, even though his record has been broken by Edwin Jackson now. I will probably collect his cards right along with Dotel's, but with a simple focus for each: I want a binder page of one player, in 9 different uniforms. 

Jackson even appeared seemingly out of nowhere in Detroit (for a 2nd stint as a Tiger, or 3rd, I forget) starting last August, and kind of refuses to announce his retirement right now despite putting up an ERA > 9 with the Tigers for the 2 months. Not surprisingly, no baseball cards resulted. Also not surprisingly, Topps actually did manage to create a few cards for him over the last two years, but since one was a limited Topps Now card and the other was a fairly rare insert in 2019 Big League (I pulled the Ohtani card instead, which is both more valuable, but wanted less, by me at least), Jackson's final 2 cards are hella expensive, from my perspective, considering that very very few people actually want them to celebrate the career of Edwin Jackson. So it goes in this crazy hobby.

Another card the Night Owl sent nicely ticked off an entry on my long neglected Want List over to your right. I did just update it. Way back in 2013, I decided to attempt my first "Master Set." I am still attempting it, but I am in no rush. The COMC card cemetery-warehouse will hold the cards I need in it forever and ever, amen, until I get around to rescuing one of the 19 copies of each still available.

I decided to primarily finish off this set in the "foil" versions because I liked seeing all the Hall of Famers on a bit of shiny for a change. I also appreciated that this design didn't waste so much space where the priceless Relic was supposed to go (in that little area where the cap logo can be seen) as on so many other after-thought insert sets. This one scanned particularly nice:

I liked adding this card to my collection so much I figured I should share the back of it with you too, as it has the perfect baseball detail ending:

Now that is a great insert card. It perfectly celebrates a bit of baseball history in a nicely themed insert set.

As I was cracking the right binder open for it, I decided to re-visit the set and see how Topps did with it as a whole, compared to the above gem. I will complete it eventually and enjoy absorbing the best cards in it, like the above. The other week or so I was pissing and moaning about Topps adding Fernando Tatis Jr. to the "Greatest Players" inserts in 2019 Topps Baseball. But that was not some new Rookie Card mania development:

Bundy was a Hot Rookie back in 2013 when these cards were inserted in packs of Topps Baseball. As a recent first round pick, collectors were impatient to get their hands on their newest retirement plan portfolio. Of course back then, the cards weren't so handily identified with the RC logo outside of the base cards, though it was starting to sneak on to some 'other' cards, like the '71 minis in 2013 Update.

But Topps would do whatever it had to do to make more Hot Rookie cards; this Bundy insert would include an autographed version. What did it have to do for an extra young Rookie to Chase History?

Yup in the same set where I learned that Nolan Ryan's 5,000th Strikeout victim was Rickey Henderson, I learned that Dylan Bundy didn't give up a run in his first 30 innings in class A level Minor League play.

It's that type of thing that leads me to collect just 9 cards from a Topps effort sometimes.

Ahh well, that was a detour from the wonderful package of cards in the mail. It also held several of these:

Most of the rest were posted the other day, but I am glad to include this one. Red+Blue makes for a great '75 card, mostly pleasing to look at. But it does remind me of something really dumb I wrote on here when I first discovered these cards: "it seems like Topps skipped using any kind of weird filter to recreate weird old analog photo and printing technology like they have done on some recent retro releases."

That has got to be the Most Wrong thing I have ever written on this blog.

Even on this simplistic, yet incredibly repetitive back-ground for a Tigers card, Topps deployed one of the worst filters I have seen since the "Raccoon Eyes" filter that obliterated card after card in their most recent attempt at re-creating 1960 style cards in 2017 Archives (which now that I think about it, includes a perfectly horrible Alex Bregman card to pair with that Alex Cora card at the top of this post). 

As for the background on the Greene card seen here, that is something Topps has been using for a good 15 years or so. The Tigers players are walked outside to some certain spot at their Spring Training complex in Lakeland (soon to happen again, this year) and asked to stand in front of this lush Florida vegetation, kind of seen behind Greene there. Some years, it kind of looks like a jungle. And the player standing in front of it is a Tiger. Knock me down with a hammer already. Ironically, if they hadn't used the crazy time filter they went with for these in-authentic takes on 1975, it might have been a nice double visual pun to put Greene in front of all that green. Sigh.

Fortunately, not all of the '75s in this year's Archives had that distracting faded background -

Now I hope you were paying attention to the previous card, so all the exciting artificial scarcity of this card gets you so excited you will want to whip out your wallet and buy some. Err, actually, I hope you will forget that silly notion completely.

What is different about this card? It is a parallel. What kind? The purple baseball parallel? Possibly. I have no idea how Topps may have tried to name these. The card also has a black image boundary/frame, rather than a white one. For many collectors, the key detail is actually on the back: 008/175. If it had been 006/175, I probably would have sent it back to Greg, because some nuttier collector than me would want to pay him extra for the super cool Uni # copy of this parallel.

But as it is, I was actually quite happy to receive this card, as I knew there would be parallels of the '75 style cards and really really wanted to see how that turned out. There would of course be a super easy way to make a parallel of a 1975 style Topps baseball card, given the colorful design. It wouldn't be totally historical however, as 1970s Topps didn't fool with such shenanigans.

May as it be, this card will also have a permanent home in my collection, on a binder page still under construction: Parallels Gone Bad.

Here is another one of it's future page-mates, also an All Time Great Face of the Franchise Hall of Famer like good 'ole Al:

Hmmm, what _could_ have been done for this card with a teeny tiny bit of thought and effort?

I think this particular Anti-Collection won't lack for contestants, sadly. Even one of the more iconic Topps parallels of all-time, the /#'d to the current year Golds, will supply a couple cards:

I call that one the Shards of Glass parallel. Looks painful.

And yes, I did just write "a couple", but I am going to wrap this one up and leave you deep in anticipation of all those bad parallels I will show you some day, but I think even for Anti-Collections like that one, the blog can do without re-living the 2018 Urinal Cake Golds more than is absolutely necessary.

I guess sometimes baseball cards results are like baseball results. Pitchers Balk, Hitters collapse on the ground after an epic 3rd Strike, and Fielders drop lazy pop-ups. And those still make the high, err, lowlight reels, just like the cards in my Anti-Collections.

Nifty Nine #2

...or, "When Nine is Enough"

Quite often, I like a set of cards quite a bit - but I have a lack of time/space/money/desire to actually complete it.

The Topps Chrome retail Pink parallels are one of my more perfect examples of this.

I am not the biggest fan of Topps Chrome. But I like pink baseball cards. I think it is some primal / subliminal urge that connects baseball cards to the color pink, because, Yeah, I Chewed the Gum.

So most years, I like to buy a few retail hanger packs of Chrome; the ones with a 4 card pack of Pinks.

I was reminded of this today when I figgered to pick up a single pack of 2020 Series One to read for awhile this evening to get re-acquainted with 14 Major League baseball players and where their careers are sitting now just as the Pitchers & Catchers are all busy answering questions about the Houston Asterisks.

Alas, was not to be - buying a pack that is. Last Friday, the local retail baseball card god, err, distributor rep, 'serviced' my local Big Box store and set out a full display 2020 Topps S1 via one of those cardboard tray box thingies, completely full of blasters and hanger boxes and with heaping helpin's of extras of those piled on top. Just above it was a full peg of perhaps 2 dozen blister packs holding one pack and 2 purple parallels.

Today, all gone. Rookie Card mania seems to be ramping up again - I have never seen anything like this in my humble little burg of some 8,000 souls. But the something-for-nothing urge hardwired into human brains is probably as strong as ever when it comes to baseball cards.

I was actually fairly content with the discovery; I suspect it will make my local distributor rep tighten up on some things, and be more willing to bring my town more product. And it's not like anyone is ever going to run out of 2020 Series One baseball cards to the point that I can't even buy any more.

But that is precisely what happened to me in 2017, when I wanted to check out some Chrome and pick up some of those tasty looking Pink baseball cards. Aaron Judge mania had hit and Topps was unprepared.

Will baseball cards get scarce this year? I doubt it. Whoever dropped some $400+ on retail baseball cards in my town in the last 6 days is highly unlikely to recoup their investment, and most people who try such a thing via off-the-shelf purchases don't stay with that kind of gambling problem for long. Sure, perhaps individual, true collectors like me slowly wiped out the supply, but I somewhat doubt that. Normally, I can count how many packages of whatever set and pack format have moved since the last time I was at the store, without even really trying.

Last year, my local rep didn't even bother bringing Topps Chrome to my store, or if they did, the local retail ripper investor cleaned it all out as with this first stocking of 2020 S1, and the rep never bothered to re-stock. But in all the other little towns around me where I like to vary my grocery shopping in case the rep decided to drop off some more discounted fat packs of 2009 O-Pee-Chee, well, there is almost the same amount of Topps Chrome on the shelves there as there probably was last August.

So some 6 months from now, I think I will be OK on my own urge to buy a $10 lottery ticket, hoping to scratch off something like this:

or this

So I did OK. Although I did not hit any of the key "Big 4" RCs tacked on to the end of the Chrome checklist this year, because Rookies. I actually think all 4 of those Rookies are headed towards being merely Very Good baseball players, gasp! The whole "he's too old to reach the Hall of Fame" calculus surrounding Rookies really turns me off more and more each passing year. I just like the baseball cards that I like, but I can in no way afford to ignore what other people might like about the cards I end up with.

And thus those are already in toploaders because they will be sold, possibly sooner rather than later as the whisper campaign (shortage of MLB top 10 hitting stats = sucks) has already started up around Ronald Acuña. Although those are some extra tasty 'pulls' from 19 TC, I will be perfectly content with my plain-ole regular Topps Baseball cards of those.

I also like Topps Chrome because it does seem to offer a decent chance at an on-card autograph on a player's Major League Rookie Card, not their Bowman photo-shopped card. In 2018, I pulled an Andrew Stevenson autograph, ho-hum, but I also pulled a Pink copy of an Acuña RC that shows him post-swing with 'bat down' but of course is not the "Bat Down" RC from S2 now worth a couple thousand dollars already. (I think my humble Pink RC could already net me fifty bucks though). 

As with so many MLB Rookies Andrew Stevenson seems, so far, a bit unlikely to truly become an MLB All-Star. But then Christian Yelich hit for a league average OPS his first 3 years in Miami, so you just never know on these things. I have little reason to sell Stevenson's auto for a couple three bucks right now.

This year, I managed to pull another RC auto:

I did get what I wanted from what turned out to be 6 of these lottery tickets in several ways, including having the autograph of a young baseball player who has managed 43 At Bats in his first two MLB campaigns and is as "on the bubble" as any of thousands of other extremely good baseball players are as they gather in Florida and Arizona the next several days. (Ciuffo is a 'non-roster invite' with the Rangers now).

But at the end of the collecting effort, which this post kinda officially represents as I will no longer have a chance to encounter a hanger pack of 2019 Topps Chrome in the store now that 2020 cards are arriving, what I will enjoy the most from the 24 Pinks I was able to consider, in-hand, is this nice simple binder page of pleasingly pink baseball cards:

Ladies & Gentlemen, Your 2019 Topps Tigers

Last year, I was quite surprised to discover that the Detroit Tigers only had 15 cards in the 2018 Topps Baseball set, i.e. the main set of Series 1 + Series 2. And only one RC! How does _that_ even happen in a Topps Baseball set these days? Texas Rangers 2020 Series One you say?

So I eventually wrote up a post to investigate this sad state of affairs, and concluded that Topps was just about perfectly correct in their checklist decisions for the sad sack club in Detroit these days.

But the experience did make me want to do these calculations again; particularly as in 2019, Detroit couldn't even manage to win 63 games to avoid 100 losses (you can only lower your expectational standards but so far in this situation), and indeed finished a definitive 30th out of 30 teams in Major League Baseball this year @ 47-114.

For results like this, perhaps 15 cards would be actually generous on the part of Topps.

In 2019, I am, all things considered, happy to report that Topps issued 22 Detroit Tigers cards in the Topps Baseball set of Series 1 + Series 2, a far more comforting total and much closer to an actually complete roster. Cards in Update went down to only 6 however. Now if only the Tigs could have lived up to Topps' expectations here, after that generous promotion from the checklist cellar. As it turned out, the 2019 Texas Rangers only got 20 cards, and then 2020 Series One happened. Which, somehow doesn't surprise me either, as Texas and Detroit are both regularly graced with card #666 by their best friends back in Brooklyn.

OK, Ok, let's get to some cards already, seein' as how I forgot to put one at the top of the post like a normal blogger does.

Best Multiple Tiger Card

ROAR!

I like how this card acknowledges current reality in Detroit by kinda telling you - come on down and walk right on in, no lines! 

Also, I suspect that the pictured announcer there is a young Ernie Harwell, but I can't be sure. I have always wanted to pull a Ernie Harwell card from a pack of baseball cards, so maybe I just did.

Most Accurate Tiger Card

A frown, a bit of side eye - Castellanos was already "not feeling it" at Photo Day in Lakeland, some 50 weeks ago as I write this one. A pity, as I always like pink baseball cards.

As usual, current GM Al Avila had been unable to trade away one of his few chips during the off-season, when, you know, that chip still had at least a year of team control left and theoretically would bring back a better return than waiting till the contract only had 2 months left. Which is how Avila has traded everyone else not named Justin Verlander, who he only half-traded and half-used to purchase surplus prospects from Houston by paying half of JV's salary down there.

Castellanos was probably showing signs of discontent in the 2018 season, when he also could have been traded. But then most writing about him focused on his last-in-league defense, something even Topps seemed to mock over the years. In interviews as the difficult 2019 season grinded towards the trade deadline, Castellanos also began to echo some of the league wide complaints about the owners possibly colluding to hold down salaries, after a contentious Free Agent period ahead of the '19 season, and began to complain that those evil sabermetricians were being mean to him with their fancy new stat #s. 

That last point I found a little ironic, since 'advanced' stats tend to help a player like Castellanos, who has been a really good hitter playing at home in basically a Pitcher's ballpark for his whole career. But that is just a help for his offensive stats. By July of 2019, Casty was among the AL leaders in Doubles, though not most other standard hitting stats such as OPS, which seemed to fit him, again based on how his home ball park plays every day. Eventually, his boss was able to pull the trigger on trading him to Chicago and he basically went on a great growth spurt from that shop-worn, but sometimes accurate cliché: "a change of scenery." Recently, he signed a four year, $64 Million deal with Cincinnati, so I think we might see him smiling on his 2020 Photo Day card when it comes out later this year.

Punniest Tiger Card

This is probably the punniest baseball card of the year, actually, and I should have put it in my total 2019 post.

After 'Nick' carefully convinces everyone he officially wants to be called "Nicholas" now, Player's Weekend rolls around and out he trots out with his 'old' name on the back of his jersey, and what looks like a new prosthetic foot, too. I actually need multiple copies of this card as I like the Big League series of Nickname cards quite a bit and will build that little checklist, and I also always set aside bubble gum cards.

Best Tiger Hitter

A totally perfect 2.000 OPS for this budding young slugger, err, what? Sadly I missed those 2 glorious, and only, At Bats vs the New York Mets, where Soto went 2-for-2. I might have to YouTube that excitement, if I can.

Soto does remind me of a possible piece of good news out of the Tigers camp this year. Many fans of the game these days bemoan the owners of their favorite losing team, ascribing all the losses to an unwillingness to pay high enough salaries to build a winning club. I think that is not really true, and I don't fault the Tigers for not signing Gerritt Cole this past Hot Stove season. To build a winning club in MLB these days, you need a combination of smart draft picks that pay off (read any list of 1st round picks any year to see the odds on those), and some smart international signings, & then you can start putting the icing on top with some smart Free Agent signings, if you have a good young core developed from those draft picks and international scouting.

Gregory Soto was signed by the Tigers outside of the regular draft out of the Dominican Republic in 2012 and while it partly remains to be seen how his MLB career might turn out, his Steamer/ZIPS/common sense projections for the 2020 season aren't all that great. But the reason he, and this baseball card, remind me of brighter days is some news from back in July, when it was announced that Detroit had given 16 year old Cuban Roberto Campos a $3 Million signing bonus. We won't see him in Detroit until 2024 or so and he could become the next Rusney Castillo or Bruce Rondon, but at least it was evidence that the Tigers are trying, and trying hard, in the international teenage baseball player arena, which should be one of Avila's great strengths given his Cuban heritage. We shall see.

Now, I must do a little honest reporting here and reveal that the best Tigers hitter actually was Nicholas Castellanos, who bounced the ball around the spacious Comerica Park enough to put up a not super exciting .790 OPS before he was traded to Chicago. And that is as good as the offensive news got in Detroit; our next best hitter was, not surprisingly, our own version of Albert Pujols but with bad knees instead of bad feet - Miggy, who put up a .744 OPS while mostly hitting Singles this year.

The really bad news? The OPS for all of Major League Baseball in 2019 was .758. In this case, Topps didn't rub it in too bad and of the positional players in 2019 Topps Baseball, they printed 7 Fielding cards, 4 Base Running cards, and only 3 cards of a Detroit Tiger with a bat in their hands, which is probably a team record for positional players in a Topps Baseball set.

Biggest Tiger Card

Topps and Al Kaline, I have little left to say. An Al Kaline card will probably be included in the next post on this blog, too. I am sure I will have something to say about it, then.

Favorite New Tiger Card

I have always wanted a Detroit Tigers George Kell baseball card. I especially like that on this one, probably by random chance, Kell appears on what is about as close as you can get to the 2 Tigers "team colors," although orange just barely appears on a long-running road uniform style similar, but later, than this one.

Kell played for several teams in his career but became closely associated with the Tigers in his post-playing days as one of their regular TV announcers for many decades, much of that along with his fellow Hall of Famer on the card posted just above this one.

This card, like many a good baseball card, makes me particularly wistful for the past, a past where I could come inside, turn on a TV set, and watch a baseball game called by Kell and Kaline, all for just the price of that TV set that was good to go for a good 10 years or so. Now, the best baseball players are expected to earn more than $10,000 per pitch they will throw (Gerrit Cole's new contract), and a decently large portion of the fan base heartily supports that idea. But all that money has to come from somewhere and most specifically, is has to come from me. And you. I feel that the end point of the always rising player contracts (Will Mookie Betts become the first Half Billion Dollar Player next December? Click here to find out...) will be individual pay-per-view pricing of every single game and possibly even paid admission to get into the TV lounge of yer average little bar down on the corner, which will inevitably increasingly just not participate in showing MLB games to the public, as an ever increasing portion of hotel rooms I stay in no longer offer that one sports channel that does show live Major League Baseball. But for $130 a year, I can watch MLB on a tiny little "phone" wherever I go, as long as I don't go too close to the town where the game I want to watch is actually being played. Then I have to pay someone else some other pile of money. I miss you, George Kell.

Sorry for the black little detour there; this card arrived recently in a care package from the Night Owl and it included many other carefully chosen cards, some of which I look forward to sharing with you in another themed post I will put together soon. But best of all, it included lots of Tigers cards...

Best New Tiger Uniform Discovery

This was pretty cool to see. The main Tigers logo on their caps and their baseball cards is called "The Olde English D." Then maybe this one is a new D, back in Cobb's day? I can't recall ever seeing this plain block D on a Tiger uniform before, though I by no means try and collect > 100 year old Tigers ephemera. Probably, this has been on a Ty Cobb card previous to this one; now I will be watching.

I would even go so far as to hope that Topps might just simply re-use this photo on a whole 'nother Ty Cobb baseball card, which seems likely, as they make almost as many Ty Cobb baseball cards as Al Kaline baseball cards. That would free the D from a little necessary graphical imposition by the wonderful 1975 Topps baseball there, which I can hardly get mad at.

2nd Best New Tiger Uniform Discovery

This photo is from a very special Throwback uniform series in September, 2018, when the Tigers celebrated the 50th anniversary of their 1968 World Series victory. Since their home uniform is still the same today, they wore their road uniform style from '68 for the occasion, even though they were playing at home (conveniently enough, vs. the Cardinals). 

Now I haven't exactly been dogmatic about tracking down all 2019 Topps Tigers baseball cards in all of the various 'low end' products I can afford to collect, so I don't know if any other cards feature this uniform. But I pretty much doubt it, as Tigers players aren't exactly putting up numbers worthy of checklist spots in sets of baseball cards. Shane Greene was the Tigers token All-Star this year, which explains his inclusion in Big League, but most Tigers good enough to make a 400 card checklist probably won't be a Tiger for long and indeed Greene was also traded away at the deadline like Castellanos. (I agree with both moves, actually, though I continue to think Avila should pull the trigger on that basic idea in the winter, not in the summer.)

Best Photo Composition on a Tiger Card

Just about very line on this card draws your eye right back to the baseball Candelario is about to fire across the diamond and when you combine that with the frame-breaking glove, I would say this is probably the best Detroit Tigers Baseball Card of 2019. The 'Opening Day Blue' frame of this particular copy nicely jazzes it up, too. This card, like the Kell and Cobb cards, arrived from the Owl's lair full of baseball card binders; we'll see the rest of those soon.

Rarest Tiger Card

Holy Smokes! A Detroit Tigers insert in a pack of Topps Baseball cards. When this card fell out of a pack of Archives I could hardly believe it. I did find one Cabrera insert in the 150th Anniv. "Greatest Player" series and I know the usual trio of Miggy, Kaline, and Cobb graced a few other insert checklists, particularly any built around printing one card for all 30 teams in MLB which require a Face of the Franchise like those 3. (Yes, I need the actual Faces of the Franchise Detroit card from Series 2). So to see any other random 2019 Detroit Tiger on an actual insert...wonders never cease.

Most Exciting Tiger Card

oh, wait

Topps has always liked Josh Harrison, if memory serves. I think one of his cards will be a Psychedelic Card of the Year some day, though one never knows when those will bubble up to the surface of the pile of cards to bloggle about.

Clearly though, Josh Harrison played the game hard. I wish I could have seen more of his efforts for the Tigers, but since he basically lost his battle with the undefeated heavyweight champion known as Father Time this year, he was rarely on base whenever I rarely got to see the Tigers on a TV this year. And it seems unlikely that he will make another MLB club, though the Phillies are going to let him give it one more try on those infamous 'back fields' down in Florida a couple weeks from now. As the Tigers will be doing once again with his regular long-time double play partner back in Pittsburgh, Jordy Mercer, who Topps seems to have almost forgotten now.

But as I was saying, Topps likes Josh Harrison...

So close, Topps, so close

I'm not sure how Topps managed to make a card featuring 2 teams that both play outdoors so completely dark. Actually, Harrison is wearing the road uni here, so this photo was taken in Chicago and as is normally the case, the source photo is not difficult to track down:

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS - APRIL 26: Josh Harrison #1 of the Detroit Tigers leaps over Tim Anderson #7 of the Chicago White Sox after trying to turn a double play in the 5th inning at Guaranteed Rate Field on April 26, 2019 in Chicago, Illinois. (Photo by Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images)

How that turned into a such a squinter (my scanner actually lightens it up a fair bit) during the baseball card production process I don't really understand. I think if the card had appeared in the 2018 set somehow it would look fairly different. So though I will miss many features of the 2019 "White Pages" set, as I call it, the darkness, darkness, don't be my pillow of a card here and there, well that I won't miss. Topps Baseball cards shot at night haven't been this odd in the past; I think that as with the 2016 'Smoke & Mirrors' set, applying so much effect around the edges of the image brings in certain other graphical / digital problems that baseball cards just don't need. Design a nice looking frame, drop it over great baseball photo - how hard can it be?

And probably by the time the Update cards were being composed around August or so, the Topps composition team may have been struggling a little to come up with nice things to say about a struggling team like the Tigers and a struggling player like Harrison. It was wonderful of them to create this card, don't get me wrong, but "Parallel Poise" reads like it's from a gymnastics checklist. And this is one more basically great baseball photo that I absolutely don't want to see a 'parallel' of, despite the card's invitation to do so. Sigh.

Time For Another Accurate Tiger Card

Dammit Jim, I'm a Topps Tigers fan, not a Panini clectin' Yankees fan! Now let's try and Win 63 games this year and make a few more checklists this time!