Big Hurt and Sweet Baby Ray

I have settled back into being in North Carolina and finally have a little bit of time to write about a few of the items I picked up over break.  While I traveled back to Missouri I did not have a chance to go to any card shops while I was there.  There was a plan to go to a card shop, but...well.  Anyway, I picked up two really nice items during my travels.  

Let's start with the first item which came from my brother in-law who gave me a sweet Ray Lankford Starting Lineup.  I actually have a bunch of these hanging out in my man room, but cannot remember the last time I got a new one.  At some point in the late 90s/early 2000s they were basically run over by MacFarlane figurines.  

I have one Ray Lankford Starting Lineup from 1993 where he is sliding head first into a base, but did not realize that they actually put out three different figurines for my favorite Cardinals outfielder.  He also had a figurine made in 1998 too.  The 1995 figurine shows Lankford wearing a home Cardinals uniform and batting left-handed, but there is one curiosity with this piece.

Despite wearing a home uniform Lankford is wearing a blue road batting helmet on the figurine.  I know that MacFarlane Figurines have different variations, but I do not remember Starting Lineups ever having any variations.  I did a little bit of looking into the figurine, and SLUs in general, but cannot find any mention of variations with the different player figurines.  

In this case, it seems like it was just an oversight on the part of SLU.  There are a few other figurines where the company missed a little bit on the uniform or some particular aspect of the figurine.  I actually like the change on this figurine.  While the Cardinals traditionally wear their blue hats on the road, with the exception of the blue Bird on the Bat hat on home Sunday games starting in 1998, they used to wear blue hats all of the time before 1964 when the team introduced their home red hats.  They looked something like this:

  

The backs of the Starting Lineup boxes were always really cool too.  They always showed some of the other figurines in the set for the year, but never all of them.  I searched around and found some cool names in the 1995 set like Andujar Cedeno and Dave Nilson.  There is also a Darren Daulton, but he's not being trucked over by Ray.

Next up is a cool Frank Thomas bobblehead my brother sent me for Christmas.  This was a stadium giveaway that the White Sox did in conjunction with his induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame.  I like that they put him in the home white uniform and love the look on the face of the bobble.  The bottom picture shows the backside of the Big Hurt bobblehead.  Overall, the White Sox did a good job job with this bobblehead.  Pretty accurate look for Frank Thomas from the facial expressions to the uniform to the batting stance.