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'

The Waiting is the Hardest Part

There is a lot of waiting involved in collecting cards. And even, multiple kinds of waiting. I am experiencing a whole bunch of them right, now.

The most routine wait in collecting is for the new Baseball Cards. I entered that wait yesterday, when I saw from a (fortunately) text headline that the 2024 Topps Baseball design has been released. I always try as hard as I can to avoid seeing that until I rip a pack of the cards, which is not always easy. So until I rip that pack, I have to be very much more careful about where I peek at online Baseball Card sites. And thus there will be a lot of waiting involved, until next month some time.

The 2nd most routine wait is the never-ending search for a not-so-new card you want for your collection. That’s just a permanent part of the collecting deal. Working on a project involving cards now > 10 years old involves a whole lot of waiting. Some of that waiting is about to end, but first, there will be more waiting.

The best way for me to work on that project is to send cards I don’t want to COMC to put them up for sale, and then use the proceeds to buy the cards I do want. But that involves a metric ton of waiting. First you send in the cards, but you have to wait a long time for them to be processed before you can put a price on them. Then, you have to wait for them to sell.

Now for me, always operating in cheapskate mode in an all-too-easily-becomes-expensive hobby, each year I add a whole lot more waiting to this whole process by only shopping during the Black Friday sale. The vast majority of the cards I want to buy aren’t going to sell to anyone else anyway, so I might as well wait till there is the best chance their price is reduced.

But after all that waiting, buying cards at the same time as oodles of other collectors means, you guessed it, more waiting. I really messed up this year by not requesting a shipment until well after dark on “Cyber Monday,” which put my shipping request at the end of a very long line.

So there has been a whole, whole lot of waiting involved in that package up there which I received yesterday, one which I was very, very glad to see. That package owes its existence to a bunch of collecting work I did an entire year ago, when I managed to get a package sent to COMC.

It had a lot of cards for my all-parallel set build of 2013 Topps Baseball:

That’s a lot of Sea Turtles.

That will make for a long enjoyable bit of binder page flipping and wantlist editing, very soon. Another big snowstorm is just firing up outside and the best thing to have for a snowstorm is some Baseball Cards, if you ask me.

If you squint, you just might be able to tell that some of those are not parallels. I have always been ever-so-slowly collecting the 2013 Topps Baseball photo variations as well. I took a serious plunge this year, when I picked up one of the, in my view, four most difficult (not just expensive) cards to acquire from the set. To give you at least one regulation Baseball Card to gaze upon in this post, here ‘tis:

This is a big step for me, because it kind of commits me to looking for the other most difficult cards, which I feel will be even more difficult to find or afford. (Those are the Gerrit Cole RC SSP, the Baby King George Card, and most especially the Teddy Kremmer card.)

Although this package sort of arrived at a very good spot in my life and cheered me up immensely, I have only partially been able to enjoy it, so far. I have been delightedly flipping through the contents and imagining all the holes it will fill in various collections, or new collections it will start. But I haven’t been able to start those delightful processes just yet. First, there will be a little more waiting.

That’s because I am on day 3 of my first experience having Covid. It seems like this will be a semi-routine part of our lives now, one I had managed to duck away from previously. Typing out this post is simple enough, but hauling binders off shelves and flipping through them and just generally moving around very much is more energy expenditure than I feel up for right now. My whole upper body feels like it got hit by a truck while simultaneously, I seem to be moving around in super slo-mo. The respiratory symptoms with this respiratory virus are barely evidencing themselves, but the bonus features with this are quite a doozy. At least the headaches of day 1 and day 2 are gone.

So, too sick to Baseball Card. Never thought I would experience that reality, but here I am. I know I am fortunate that this isn’t more serious, for me, or my loved ones. And I know the symptoms peak, and then taper off. So soon enough I will have my scanner in action, enabling some fun posts to share with you all.

Until then, there is still just a little bit more, waiting.

Re-Arranging / Checklist Rule #2

Happy New Year everyone! One of my favorite Baseball Card collecting things to do,  

though decidedly in second place to finding brand new Baseball Cards, is to flip through my card binders. One of my favorite such flips is of a small binder that holds a single set: 2014 Stadium Club.

GOAT

I can no longer recall if this was the first release in the product's "re-boot" after a hiatus of a little more than a decade or so. It might be it's first year back, or second, but that matters little. Nor do the particularities of the design, another matters little on this "full bleed" set that is all about the baseball photography. And usually, I don't even care for the design choices made for it, with it's seemingly permanent love affair with foil printing — which I like even less / dislike even more, with each passing year. These 2014 cards are one that improve greatly via scanner views. But that also, matters little. Squinting at tiny foil printing just isn't necessary for a Babe Ruth Baseball Card.

I somewhat wish I owned a run of Stadium Club sets from every year since it came back. Maybe if I did I would have figured out the project I have been working on recently, way earlier. But Stadium Club is not generally a cheap set to acquire, more of a 'mid-tier' set than a 'low end' set. Ultimately I do enjoy assembling a 9 or 18-best-of page(s) from the different sets, a kind of permanent collecting activity whenever I stumble across discounted Stadium Club cards, one or more years after release. Or when I (rarely) summon up the energy to deliberately scroll through the cards from years needing anywhere from 1 to 7 more cards to complete a page — which is most of them.

In 2014 however, I did a (rare) smart thing in acquiring brand new Baseball Cards: I simply purchased a copy of the whole Stadium Club set, all at once, in a single box, all correctly sequentially collated by someone else. Oh how simple Baseball Card life would be if I could just do that more often. And, possibly/probably cheaper.

And it was very enjoyable to place it in binder pages, a long time ago, and also enjoyable to do it all over again less long ago, in order to cut down the space the pages take up by doubling it up to 18 cards per page, despite the nice inset photo on the back of each card. And like a dutiful collector of Baseball Cards, each time I kept all the cards in their sequential checklist order, because, well, at this point ... because, Why? I can no longer answer that question, or even explain why I would keep Baseball Picture Cards in some sort of random order made up at Topps HQ.

Baseball is played with a definite "line-up" at all times, the teams have officially defined rosters and the teams are always in order in the "standings" as well, but the order of the cards themselves in a set are almost always just totally random, with just an occasional checklist where all the cards from each team are in sequentially numbered order — one would think that lots and lots of collectors would prefer things that team orientated way, but that is the exception, not the general rule. Random, the cards must be. Why?

I think it has been this binder in particular which really moved along my interest in re-building my binders based on several things. Though when I first "bindered" it I even declared otherwise. Firstly, the far, far better visual appeal of pages of all horizontal cards, and all vertical cards. And, some other concerns. Let's take a look at the starting condition:

Page 1

6 verticals, 3 horizontals. Job one.

But even this first page in the set shows off odd things about checklist construction, such as a near instant Who Dat? problem and I don't mean the way it is virtually impossible to know which exact Boston Red Sock is individually named on the checklist. Rather my man Ricky Williams, err, uhh, I mean Jon Singleton, he of the GOAT RC Logo card in my collection. 

Son of GOAT RC Logo card

This Stadium Club RC fits his Baseball oeuvre just exactly perfectly, telling us there's 2 Outs so he won't be needing his glove now. Singleton actually returned to the Major Leagues this year after a lot of hard work on his part, which lead to a rehabilitation in the Mexican Leagues (oh how I wish those had Baseball Cards as I expect they would be ¡fantastico!), but in yet more just exactly perfectness he played for two different MLB clubs in the 2023 season and did not receive a new Baseball Card for his efforts; more's the pity. Maybe this particular RC foreshadowed the future ingeniously.

But this combo of Babe Ruth, GOAT, at card #3 in the set and Jon Singleton, 488 MLB career At Bats RC Logo GOAT right next to him at card #4 also illustrates a key reason I want to re-arrange this set. Now I do like finding Babe Ruth Baseball Cards in new products mostly featuring contemporary players; however later on the incongruities inherent in these checklists just create LOLs rather than awe, check out this cool new Babe Ruth Baseball Picture Card I found back in the year 2014. I hate to dis my guy here, but Singleton's card simply lessens the enjoyment of The Babe card right (almost) next door.

Let's check out some more of these cards for a little more context -

Page 2

Hey, there's The Babe again, with yet more all-wrong horizontal mixing. Although that is a fantastic Elvis Andrus card, an exciting player (named Elvis, how cool is that?) who had a very good MLB career, there is no possible way to connect him to Babe Ruth & Lou Gehrig. And we get a little more Who Dat? issue with the appearance of Matt Adams, who had a respectable but more Journeyman type career. While Andrus looks to have Triple in his eyes, Adams looks like he is the Outside Tackle setting up a Screen.

Now I do quite like Stadium Club's inclusion of Black & White Baseball Cards without making them a foolish parallel nor printing them in a special set of online-sales-only, $3.89/card, buy now or forever be locked out of /412 cards if you don't order in the next 39 hours, so, hurry. Black & White cards are nice, but that particular fine example loses a fair bit of gravity there when Elvis is rockin' his great solid color Road (or Home, one can never tell with those sneaky Texas unis) Alternate Uniform there right alongside. The Babe and Lou Gehrig didn't have those.

So that's just some of the material I have to work with. Let's see how things turned out.

New Page 1

Ahh, now that is sooooo much better.

I quite like that the set now starts with that Matt Holliday card which I have always found to be a painterly-like Picture Card. And I am a bit pleased that I didn't end up attempting to start a Horizontal collection for Anthony Rizzo; I have a few of those going for other players. Assembling 9 Horizontals on a specific theme is not easy. But pulling them all from a mixed Horizontal/Vertical set is very easy.

Note also that those are in a sequential checklist order. Just, because, I guess. I am actually fine with the contemporary players, i.e. the ones that actually played Baseball against each other (that year), appearing in random order on a checklist. That's how Baseball Cards arrive in packs after all.

And you may notice the nice Black & White Ruth/Gehrig card is not included in the sequence. That will re-appear a little later in the project. These assemblages of 9 Horizontal Stadium Clubs are so nice, let's check out Page 2:

That's gotta be the happiest Mike Trout card I can recall. Don't see too many of those lately. Manny Machado is again Mr. Inscrutable while he is playing; that card is a like a re-run of his Rookie Card from a year earlier. And it sure seems like the Topps Setlist Constructor might have known I would be filing all the horizontals together with that fun look at the Giants' starting rotation there.

Regular 'ole vertical Baseball Cards are no slouches in Stadium Club either. How'd that go?

Ahh.

But....what happened to The Kid, who quite nicely lead-off this famously 1990s-associated product?

That is another bit of the Re-Arranging - I would rather see cards of players that played together, all together, on their binder pages. Mixing cards of players from different eras is a routine part of these re-booted Stadium Club checklists, but also happens in Archives and many insert checklists as well. I can't explain why I prefer this; it just seems more natural to look at Baseball Cards this way. For an effort like this I have gone with placing the cards by date of the players' debuts, so the baseball history kind of flows along on the page(s).

On these new arrangements you might notice that I have the Todd Helton and Roy Halladay cards still there with the 2014 players though each played their last game in 2013. That could become useful as I work through this project. 

The Clemens > Bo page is actually the 2nd page of 20th Century color veterans; page 1 is also great -

I thought about spotting Tom Seaver there in between the of-a-pair Schmidt and Murray cards just for the giggles but I think I will leave that one for my next re-arrangement of these some other cold crappy day outside in the distant future. The Ripken card also seems to possibly call out for some Sunset Card neighbors, like the Helton card back up there on the first Horizontals page, or the Mariano Rivera card deep in the unscanned Verticals of contemporary players. More, options.

And what happened to The Babe? Don't worry, he is in very, very good company:

There, no more young whippersnappers with their riotous color uniforms making Grandpa all upset in his non-technicolor memories. I quite like how the Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson photos complement each other, something which would be lost mixing them in with 2014 All-Stars and some Rookies no one can remember now.

That page was actually the very first one I assembled for this project, and it quickly reminded me of a key problem with placing a set of Baseball Cards in binder pages: I have yet to find a checklist that is perfectly divisible by 9. There in a pocket in the inner cover surface of the binder, I found this card, #200, hanging out in a penny sleeve all by itself -

Where have you gone?

Shazzzz-bot. Now I have 10 wonderful Black & White Baseball Cards. What to do?

I have a few options here. Being a Tigers collector, I have what feels like piles and piles of Ty Cobb and Al Kaline cards, from sets that I am not going to be placing in binder pages. (Topps: 1984 Tigers? Who Dat?) But, neither am I going to put those in a find-a-new-home-somehow-somewhere, else box, either. That Cobb card looks suspiciously familiar in that if I were to crack open the box of Tigers cards needing attention, I think I might see that picture again in there, possibly in a colorized version. And if I pull the Cobb card so I can put Joltin' Joe in there between The Babe and Bob Feller, I won't have quite the harmonious Ruth/Robinson duo in the middle of the page any more either. So maybe Al Kaline's many pages (yet to be built) might could use a B&W card. Hmmm. It's also not a terrible thing to leave Your Team's cards mixed in with the rest of MLB in a set, either. A Stadium Club "Team Set" is only going to be a handful of cards anyway and it is nice to see Your Team in every binder.

This all reveals a key problem with keeping a Complete Set while also generally always building Team &/or Player collections. Sometimes, the solution is simple: use a duplicate card, one in each particular binder page. But for this set, I have zero duplicates — a slight disadvantage of just purchasing a set, if you ask me.

And....wasn't there another cool Babe Ruth Black & White card on the original page 2 for this set?

There was. How'd that work out?

Not too good.

Now that will be a perfectly good looking triumvirate of classic mid-Century Baseball, eventually. But in the short run, this it-was-a-simple-plan bit of Baseball Card re-arranging has gotten complicated in a hurry. Those are the only 3 Horizontal B&W cards in 2014 Stadium Club.

For that dilemma I have a most excellent, simple solution, one no collector would disagree with:

More Baseball Cards

(mostly) 2018 Stadium Club

That is another page that lead to some of the conclusions I am now putting into practice here with 2014 SC; it was my first pass at selecting 9 favorites from miscellaneous purchases of '18 SC. All 9 cards I quite like, but not a binder page I quite like. That Nolan Ryan plus B&W? Nope. And I am really going to need to find another Horizontal Yankee Stadium card, somehow, somewhere.

Those Black & Whites plus the ones I have assembled here back in 2014 made me realize I just want to collect all (as in: all of them) B&W Stadium Club Baseball Cards. Problem solved. I don't know exactly how I will flow them along from one year's set to another, but that will be a pleasant chore for another day, probably not long after a fresh box of funzies arrives from COMC.

So that takes care of bindering the vintage photos in SC at least - a perpetually growing set of pages of them. This post is now making me start to regret not snagging a pair of $17 blasters of 2022 SC I saw on the shelves recently during another B1G1 50% off sale, which would have made the pair cost just $12.75 each. Bummer. Discounted Stadium Club cards never last long and I won't make that mistake again. But then it still will be cheaper to just cherry pick the singles I want from '22 SC. When will I ever learn?

This set might have helped show me The Way, however. Part of the reason I say that is the Rookie Card cards. How could I get this far into a post about a Complete Set and still have shown only one RC? The only cards people collect, right?

I did find some quite endearing Rookie Card cards in 2014 Stadium Club:

A classic Baseball Card, seemingly posed in an old-time dug-out, probably in Port St. Lucie. d'Arnaud has been a bit of a late bloomer, compared to the breathless chase of Rookie Card cards of 20 year old phenoms. A bit like his Mets RC team-mate in the set -

This Flores card is headed towards another fun page, made up of interesting Mets uniforms. I can't recall Mr. Met making such a great shoulder patch appearance on any other card, just yet at least. That goes back to the angst of holding a Complete Set together --- but also making fun side collections. This next card magnified that quite a bit as well:

This has to go with my Detroit Stars collection; I haven't pulled them all into their own little pile but I know there will be other Horizontals in there to assemble. Recently I pulled a brand new Phillies Baseball Card of Nicholas, which once again sends a definite Slugging-First player back to the field for his official Baseball Card appearances. Topps just can't help themselves with this guy.

For the most part, Rookie Card cards in Stadium Club aren't quite so why, why, Why? as in other, bigger sets. I think the lowest how-low-can-we-go in the RCs assembled here is around 200 At Bats, which is a far more sensible figure than the occasional 4 At Bat RC found in Topps Baseball sets. And not far short of half of the 2014 Stadium Club Rookie Card card class are still around the Major Leagues ten years later, which is a lot more than can be said for so many other checklists. These cards should not be overlooked, and I am fine with Rookie Card cards being on my checklists (I collect an entire binder of nothing but Topps Baseball RCs), as long as they are kept in their proper place, which is, all together -

Ultimately, Stadium Club Rookie Card cards shouldn't be overlooked. And, perhaps, placed directly into toploaders after opening the packages. CJ Cron, like ALL Rookie Card cards, still had Babe-esque potential back in the day of his sweet "That Mountain in Arizona" RC there, after all. However I probably should have placed this next card straight into The Vault:

This one has several upsides. It is a sweet reminder that Betts came up as a middle infielder, something that surprised many a baseball fan this past year. I was also pleasantly surprised to discover that this card is now worth about as much as what I paid for this entire Complete Set of Baseball Cards, which was $40. I like that card too much to ever sell it, but it is a cool thing to think that just this one Baseball Card made the other 199 cards kinda sorta free. The downside of this one is that I don't have more Complete Sets of Stadium Club.

This set ends (well, at least of the 2014 players) on an excellent note with another card that was just forlornly hanging out in the binder's inner sleeve -

Hypnotic

I always love this First Baseman card trope. This card appeared to me after nicely filling up 4 pages of Vertical cards of 2014 Major League Baseball players, with no slots left over. To do that I had selected one for a Player Collection which needs a bit of help to reach the finish line:

Which is needed for one of those player collections started up after pulling a pretty cool card, in this case an on-card auto in the all-illustrated National Chicle set which both has minimal resale value and is just too nice of a card and signature to not keep anyway. You'll see it here, some day.

So after all this page re-assembly and delightful like-likes-like harmony, the end result is more ragged than I am going to scan for you. I have a couple Horizontal RCs not placed, 3 Horizontal 2014 MLBers stranded, and a half-dozen or so Horizontal and Vertical 90s/00s Stars still needing some page-mates, somehow, somewhere, someday. Maybe some of those will end up like the Ryan Braun card, which is now perfectly hidden between 2 other cards in this binder, helping maintain Complete Set integrity while not bothering to remind me of a lack of integrity amidst a great set of Baseball Cards. Or maybe possibly launching yet another Theme collection, of Sunset/Farewell images, might help free up just enough page slots to get this probably a bit overthought project over the finish line — Topps didn't have all these thematic worries when they issued these cards and their checklist finished with just 2 extra cards, quite unlike my sequencing now.

Along the way over the past week I discovered a possibly hidden photo selection theme in this set that I will be watching out for, now, going forward. That might someday also help with a few of those ragged edges to 9 card page harmony. The discovery was of some Absolutely Fabulous Fans -

I feel like I should absolutely know who is the guy with the on-point street cred Dodgers fan look there in the front row. It can't be cheap to sit there and the Dodgers generally have the most famous fans. But I just can't place him - except in my Baseball Card binder.

This next one I have a dim memory of a remark or two when this set was new:

Most Beautiful Hair, 2014 Stadium Club

Ultimately Stadium Club cards are almost too good to keep all together when one collects Teams, Players, and Themes, like I do, so about a half-dozen of these are leaving Complete Set behind and moving along the bookshelf somewhere else. One type of card I like to collect together features Wrigley Field's famous Ivy, so I have always enjoyed this last card in particular. But I also enjoy Andre Dawson cards, so, I guess, I will just need another copy to enjoy, twice -

Or, thrice?

Merry Christmas, to Me

And - You! Merry Christmas everyone, thanks for stopping by.

The Holidays are a great thing for me and one of the great things is a nice (eventual) surplus of Free Time, which for me sometimes means: Baseball Cards. The perpetual To Do list is at a somewhat low point right now so I can hang out with y'all some this afternoon.

This was a pretty good year at the Base. After almost 20 years of being 100% Self-Employed, I took a job with my #1 customer over the last decade or so. I have been kidding my friends that in the long run, I will finally be able to work only 40 hours a week. But in the short run, time requirements went way up as I am still wrapping up some previously agreed upon jobs with my customers, which will have positive benefits for us, meaning my new employer, in the future. All while prioritizing their needs. I am now a full time Seed Collector (woody plants only), and without seeds, my employer doesn't have a product. Meanwhile, seeds don't just sit around and wait for you to come get them. They fly away, or get eaten. The result was basically zero time to attend to the stacks of cards on my desk.

But a wonderful other result is a better income that I can discretionarily apply to, you guessed it: Baseball Cards. And as a result I had a wonderful Mail Day just 2 days ago, a bit surprisingly given the shipping season. Maybe with so much material moving as packages, one still arriving with the little envelopes in old time "snail mail" is actually a bit more fleet of foot these days, I guess. We'll get to the wonderful new card in just a bit...it is not the card at the top of this post.

The problem began at the very genesis of my thought to create an "all-parallel" set of 2013 Topps. That flowed from backing off from an original thought of attempting to collect a set of the "Blue Sparkle" / "Wrapper Redemption" cards. (Sadly, my own attempt at receiving some by sending in wrappers Back in The Day was sunk by mailing them too late, sigh, work.) I quickly realized that I just wasn't that into the "Blue Team" Blue Sparkle cards, like this one:

Even though I am quite amused by players in the background of the various "Sparkle" parallels, as on this card - "Beam up the Catcher, Scotty, I don't think he's gonna make it." A pity the Umps didn't really sparkle; must be Klingons or something.

But given the 2013 Topps design, a blue-on-blue-card just washes out the key "Team Color" design element. The Blue Team Blue Sparkles just don't offer much, especially compared to all the other possible color combinations.

Now I know a lot of people like team color parallels; for example-

Overall still an enjoyable concept on scores of other Baseball Card designs, but on 2013 Topps, a bit not so much. The same thing happens with the Blue Team Emerald parallels such as the card at the top of this post; on those, the effect is more pronounced in-hand and in indoor, less-than-sunlit conditions; scanning a blue team Emerald improves the situation at least a little.

So right from the start of creating the all-parallel set of 2013 Topps, I ruled out certain color combinations, such as no "Red Team" Target Red parallels, as well as the ones shown above, and a few others, some more absolutist than others I must confess.

This can make for pretty tricky binder pages to complete — my color combo rules for the set are used on a one page basis. These painted-myself-into-corner rules are a huge problem on one page in particular:

Gah! 7 Blue Team cards.

Sticking to the construction rules, the Blue Team cards have the fewest possible choices to pick from. Target Red, Topps Gold, Pink, Factory Set Orange are the four best; easy choices. Topps Black and ToysRUs Purple are less desirable (not much "pop" contrast) but still necessary sometimes as there are more than a few pages with 5 Blue Team cards. The blue "Sea Turtle" pattern is the most common, used for 12 teams.

What's going on with the Sea Turtle blog linked all around you? That one is in the shop for a re-build. But it shall return; it is essentially my own little book about the 2013 Topps set and I very much look forward to working on it, someday, when I do work only 40 hours a week.

So, 7 Blue Team cards, uggh. What to do? A ToysRUs Purple or Topps Black looks best with a team color icon that is not blue, such as the Justin Heyward card here. That takes care of one slot, 6 to go. The 4 usual go-to patterns, check. But, still 2 cards left!

Some very rare options exist: the "Silver Slate" parallel that came mixed in with the "Blue Sparkle" wrapper redemption packages; those were printed in an edition of /10. Not fun to track down, but not impossible. A deeper problem is: very boring. The Sea Turtle pattern becomes a foil with no more Team Color, on a thick grey cardboard frame. I had a few of the cards from a trade and initially used them on a few pages for variety, but since the point of the project is Full Color, a monochromatic parallel eliminating color seemed kind of pointless. Still it seems best to include at least one representative of the type in the project, and this is the perfect page for that.

However, I need 7 acceptable combos on this page. Irresistible Force vs. Immovable Object! I have not attempted to purchase cards for this page yet, beyond designating the Heath Bell card for Blue Sparkle and the Jon Jay card as a WalMart Blue. That's because there is one remaining solution: the Platinum:

I never thought this would happen. I was hoping to find any one of 7 1/1 Platinums of 2013 Topps Series One, and I had never seen one for sale, ever. If I had started this project in the actual year of 2013, I might have had a chance, I thought.

Instead I just always let this page languish in my way convoluted "want list" for this project. That one is also in the shop for a thorough tear-down as several dozen new parallel Sea Turtles are due to arrive soon, courtesy of the COMC Black Friday sale, so don't bother clicking on that link right now.

Well over a year ago now, the above card appeared for sale on eBay. Hooray!

Nope. It was listed with a price about a full TWELVE TIMES what I estimated the card would sell for if allowed to "let it ride" via auction, though I was prepared to, maybe, go to about 2x that guesstimate, and I was very nervous about that desire and what I would do, if I could.

Trying to make realistic offers to the seller became pointless. Every offer would be met by a counter-offer; one reason I don't wish to collect even "two digit" Baseball Cards is I just want to buy cards, not endlessly haggle over them. And then in the end, ultimately haggling with yourself — a routine part of "collecting," of course, but I would rather be content with just collecting worthless Baseball Cards, which arrive much more free of inner conflict.

Finally the seller gave up, and simply offered the card for about 3x my view of a likely auction price. How many Yonder Alonso Player Collectors are there in the world? Probably, none.

But given the odds of ever seeing another one of those particular other 6 2013 Topps Baseball Platinum 1/1 parallels, which are very, very near to zero, I pulled the trigger. I am both happy, and a bit disappointed, in that I paid for something to own at a price I could never possibly attain for the same object, ever again, which is not the norm with purchasing Baseball Cards that are actually worth money, unless you are "prospecting," a gambling activity I don't partake in. 

I will, however, thoroughly enjoy this one, a bit more so once it is freed from it's plastic grading prison, but most especially once it anchors down a beautiful page of all-colors 2013 Topps Baseball. 

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!

Warming up to the Rookie Debut

 

Sometimes when collecting Baseball Cards, my feelings about this or that type of card can begin to change. This has happened to me now with the Rookie Debut cards, a concept used by several manufacturers and in different ways across decades now, but is one most commonly thought of as part of each year's Update set.

This year I pulled that nice representative of the genre shown above, and I was pretty happy to see it. But that was because this card will be part of my collection of "Detroit Stars" cards showing players wearing that uniform, formerly used in the Negro Leagues. Detroit does this annually and this routinely shows up on Tigers cards. Riley Greene will probably be the starting Center Fielder in my eventual Detroit Stars All-Stars selection that you may see right here, some day. Like all of my Baseball Card projects, it is a very slow motion project. But that card moved it along a little bit.

That was the 4th Tigers RD card of the last few years, after they only had 2 players appear on them in the 2010s. Ten years, two players; 14 years, six players. Yes, Tigers Rookies have been that non-remarkable; so non-remarkable that they received a lot of high draft picks and thus Rookies with enough potential to merit a Rookie Debut card eventually did start to appear for, My Team.

All that was just one reason I have never been particularly interested in these cards. Recently, I came across a page of these I assembled ten years ago now:

That's from 2012 Update, a set I bought a whole lot of though I no longer remember/understand why. Probably just because I could buy it regularly at 40% off, the next year. But at the time it went into binder pages, I made a lot of side collections that definitely started my thought to just collect cards in bunches of 9 — a single binder page. You sharpies probably recognize that 1 card is missing from that year's mélange:

Now that's a fun card thanks to the image selected, though its moxie is lessened some by its use on several other Bryce Harper Rookie Card cards in 2012. It was also a bit of an "It" card at the time, iirc, because of the weird way Topps handled creating Bryce Harper Rookie Card cards, by inserting a card in packs of Series Two as a deliberate Short Print, as well as placing it in Factory Sets of the Topps Baseball set that year, in 2 versions, though neither of those are the card shown above. Confused yet? Maybe that card explains why I have pert near 3 complete sets of 2012 Topps Update, but then I am easily confused sometimes.

In short, it was hard to simply "pull" a nice Rookie Card card of an exciting Rookie that year, by simply purchasing a pack of Baseball Cards, until Update came out with that there Rookie Debut Rookie Card card. Which has now become a $25 card, so that card just made the rare journey from a binder page to a toploader, as I am no longer deeming 2012 Topps Update quite worth the shelf space in its full 330 card edition.

Now while you are daydreaming about the status of potentially having a Bryce Harper Rookie Card card that is actually worth actual money in your collection, you have already forgotten all about those other 9 cards in the 10 card Rookie Debut checklist in that set. Even though 2 or perhaps 3 of those Pitchers Pitching cards are for players still pitching in the Major Leagues, none of those cards are particularly remarkable or memorable, particularly when mixed in several hundred other action image Baseball Cards.

And as it turned out, that was the last time I ever assembled a year's complete class of Rookie Debut cards, or even specially saved any of them aside from lucky pulls of parallels of really good players' RDs. 

A few years later, I did stumble across one of these cards that is far and away the best Rookie Debut card I have ever seen -

I have long doubted I would ever see a Rookie Debut card this good ever again. A fresh young Boston Red Sock, making his Major League Debut in the very heart of the Evil Empire. Maybe even as he emerged from the dugout to take the field for the very first time in the bottom of the first inning — that is how I always imagine this one. The gravity of this in the life of young Mookie Betts is clearly captured in the photograph; this is also one of my favorite horizontal cards of the 2010s.

But that card always felt like one of those exceptions that proves the rule: Rookie Debut cards are usually boring. See above, outside of that dynamic Bryce Harper base running card.

If only I could be certain that the image on a Rookie Debut card was from a rookie's debut game, on every Rookie Debut card. That, would be cool.

This year, there has been a big development in this genre of Baseball Cards, initiated by the new owners of Topps. That would be the official Rookie Debut patch:

These weren't placed on rookie's uniforms so viewers at home could tell which player was the rookie debuting that day. They were put there to become a valuable piece of sports memorabilia: a Baseball Card.

These patches are given to Topps after each game for use in a specially constructed card including the whole patch. One card, per player, a 1/1 in Baseball Card lingo of course.

I believe the concept has an origin in one of the sports for which Panini issues cards, not sure, don't care. The whole idea of the ego stroking involved in owning a 2.5" x 3.5" piece of memorabilia that no one else can have or enjoy, only - Me, me, me, it's mine, all mine, Not Yours! — is just not how I enjoy Life. It's just an alien psychological concept, to ME.

These cards finally did appear several weeks ago now, in packs of 2023 Topps Chrome Update. The card for Anthony Volpe, the new Yankees Shortstop every Yankees fan hopes will be the next Captain, like every player they try at the position, commanded a $100,000 "bounty" offer for whoever pulled it. As I so often do, I mostly just wondered if anyone would bother assembling a set of Topps Chrome Update and place it into binder pages to enjoy forever and ever. Probably someone has, but I doubt very many collectors have done it.

Despite all these lottery ticket shenanigans that involve throwing lots of Baseball Cards straight into the trash, I was pretty intrigued by this whole concept because I thought it gave Topps a nifty opportunity to liven up this weird little sub-genre of Baseball Cards called the Rookie Debut card: they could use a picture of the rookie wearing the special debut patch, and put it on his Rookie Debut card. That, would be cool.

So I was definitely looking forward to seeing if Topps could figure out this seemingly obvious possibility when I purchased some boring old 2023 Topps Baseball Update, which didn't have six figure lottery winning cards inside. I'm just not into the 2023 Topps design enough to want Chrome versions of it.

And, there it was:

A picture of Anthony Volpe, taken at the very first MLB game he ever played in, as confirmed by that patch there on his right shoulder:

Now that, is cool. Even though I always root against the Yankees, and have no desire to "collect" this card by keeping it in some special place like a binder page, and suspect that Volpe will ultimately disappoint a majority of Baseball Card collectors by just being a decently good everyday Shortstop for several years, which is very boring, in Baseball Cards. Topps used this concept to their, and our, advantage, outside of just using it to sell extra boxes of lottery tickets, err, 2023 Topps Chrome Update.

I was soon checking every Rookie Debut card I pulled to see if this would continue. 

This card is clearly intended to complement the Volpe card, with a rarely-seen-on-cards image from the pre-game National Anthem. There was a run of these cards in Opening Day, I think it was, about a decade ago; I would not at all be surprised to see Topps recycle it and am perhaps a little more surprised that the idea is taking so long to repeat. Expect it to be used on a hard-to-pull insert for collectors to "chase." I won't be one of them.

The Casas card may or may not be from his first game in September of 2022, though I suppose I could check the Getty database to find out. Which I don't really want to do — I want Topps to confirm this for me by using a picture showing that MLB Debut patch. But for Triston Casas, that isn't possible since there were no such patches used in 2022.

So, I kept looking -

yup, there it is:

This is an especially good Rookie Debut card again because of the image selected, even though it is not the most flattering look at newly minted MLB player Edouard Julien. Topps Card Back Writer comes through here, perfectly: "Julien caught an early-morning flight from Triple-A Indianapolis to Minnesota on April 12, 2023, arriving in time to start a matinee against the White Sox."

Cool. I don't know what I am going to do with that card, because I don't collect Minnesota Twins cards nor desire to own a complete set of 2023 Topps Update. But I definitely won't forget that Red Eye card and eventually I will pull more Edouard Julien Baseball Cards and I will be carefully checking them to see how his career turns out. I have no memory of him from the Tigers playing the Twins this year, but that's why I collect Baseball Cards.

I only managed to find one more example of the MLB Debut patch appearing on a Rookie Debut card -

A player I have been looking forward to seeing on Baseball Cards; I presume his regular Rookie Card card is in Update too. His card in 2023 Big League is best forgotten.

There could be more of these perfectly matched images on this year's Rookie Debut cards, I don't know yet. I probably won't be buying any more Update though I now occasionally see recent blasters for prices below $20, so I might get the urge to open a little more of it, on the down cheap/low, later on.

Finding these examples of this cool new wrinkle in Rookie Debut cards might even make me assemble a page of these, once again. I think there are usually far more than 10 of these in an average Update set these days; I just don't pay that much attention. If it could turn out that 9 of the RD cards show off the little patch, yeah, that would be great.

And along the way to pondering all these players playing in their first Major League game, I started wondering — what if Topps has been using images from the debut game on the Rookie Debut cards, all along? I still wouldn't get that excited about the debut of some other team's pitching prospect, surely destined to eventually be a failed starter and then a middle reliever seen on Baseball Cards a whole once every 5 years. 

But, just in case, I had to get a little un-lazy and do a check-in on just what uniform Riley Greene was wearing the day of his Major League Debut, 17 months ago. And there it was:

DETROIT, MI - JUNE 18: Riley Greene #31 of the Detroit Tigers bats during his Major League debut game against the Texas Rangers at Comerica Park on June 18, 2022 in Detroit, Michigan. The Tigers defeated the Rangers 14-7. The Tigers are wearing throwback uniforms honoring the Negro League Detroit Stars. (Photo by Mark Cunningham/MLB Photos via Getty Images)

Cool.