The local card shop scene in Raleigh is pretty weak. There is a card shop that is attached to a gas station in one of the far northern suburbs and there is also one that has been dying shopping mall, but actually just moved to within two miles of my house. Neither are great for different reasons. I am not going to hold my breath that it's going to be anything great in a new location.
About a year ago, I was in the dying mall to pick up a pair of extra slim pants for my son. I had been sorting out some cards at the time, needed a 5,000 count box for storage, so I stopped into the card shop while I was there. To my surprise, they had out this huge table of old boxes of cards. Not really their thing. As you can imagine, the mall card shop's biggest fault is their pricing, which has always been ridiculously high. The prices on the boxes weren't terrible all things considered, but the Emotion XL box was marked at $30. A quick search of Ebay listings told me that I had found the rare mall card shop bargain. Shocking.
I bought it.
These were really cool cards back in the day, so I was pretty excited to open this box of cards. I started opening up the packs and put a bunch of the cards up on my once award winning, now neglected, Instagram page.
I ended up with the complete set, but it was much more of a mixed bag than I remembered it to be. At some point, I stopped posting pictures of the cards. Yes, I finished up the set. I put the completed set in a box and shoved them into my card closet. I liken this set to an old record or CD that you bought at another point in your life. It was great music at the time, but you can't make it through the whole thing anymore.
Like the first half of Pearl Jam's Ten album, or almost every Nas album after Illmatic.
So, let's take a look at the set. Here is the base card.
Honestly, I love the full color picture and the last name and team name on the front. The odd frame corners are a little bit unnecessary, but it's not like they are ruining the card. The descriptive word is what has not aged well on these cards. Yes, it would have been awesome to see something like "'Roider" or "Juiced Up" on a Brady Anderson card, but Driving isn't actually all that bad.
You will see bad in a minute. Hold that thought.
Even the pictures on the back of the card are nice. The little sentence about the player at the top of the card is pretty fair. The stat line is small, but kudos for mixing in things like AB/HR and OBP% in the mid 1990s. The card stock is nice too for the mid 1990s.
THESE ARE TERRIBLE
Let's get these cards out of the way first. I went through all 200 cards in the set and picked out 4 that seemed really bad in retrospect. For more examples, some I disagree with, check out this SB Nation article which likens this set to "Gas Station Cologne".
"The Heat"??? What does this even mean? Bichette has a 130 point split difference between his home and road slugging percentage. He hit almost 300 career home runs, but less than 100 of them came on the road. I would have gone with something like "Altitude" or "Low Humidity" for his card.
Will Clark was a pretty intense guy, but this is just stupid. Couldn't we just get a card that says "Intense", or maybe someone could have used a thesaurus and found a synonym for the word intense. Personally, I would have done something to reference his tradition of drinking a post game beer.
Player nicknames aren't emotions. Dumb. This is post White Sox, so I would have gone with "Regressing" or maybe "Declining".
What's dumber than using a player nickname?
Using a state nickname. Luckily no Cardinals players have the phrase "ShowMe" stamped on the front of their cards.
THESE ARE NOT SO TERRIBLE
So, if you clicked on the link to the SB Nation article above, I am going to go against some of the cards that they ripped on in their write up of the Emotion set. I am not a SB Nation reader, so I was curious about the age of the author, considering he spent a large chunk of the article ripping the Cal Ripken card. We were born within a few years of each other, so I am going to dismiss age as a factor in his writing and just say it's ignorance in an otherwise humorous article.
I will give an equally long rant.
The word on the Cal Ripken word is "Class". I am not a Cal Ripken person and I rarely write anything about him on this blog. I agree with the SB Nation article's assertion that MLB went overboard with Cal Ripken during the mid 1990s. However, the obsession with Ripken was somewhat warranted and necessary.
Let's review:
1. Fans were irked with both the players and owners after the strike in 1994. Many of the angry fans had promised to stay away from the game. Baseball is the worst professional sport at selling its superstar players, but they went big on them when the games resumed in 1995 for once, Ripken was included for an important reason.
2. Ripken's run at Lou Gehrig's consecutive game streak was the first important event that came up after the strike ended. I am sure that if there was a player closing in on 3,000 hits, 500 home runs, or 300 wins, that would have been blown up too.
3. Playing more than 2,000 consecutive games is a legitimately impressive record. You have to be good enough to start. Good enough to maintain your starting job over other players. Healthy enough not to get injured over a 16 year period of time. It's part talent and part luck, but it's not a record anyone is going to touch anytime soon.
4. Tell me something bad that Cal Ripken did as a person while he was playing baseball? ((You can't))
With that being said, as a person who watched a lot of baseball in the 1990s, it's not a stretch to say that Ripken was an important part of bringing disgruntled fans back to the game. Yes, he was a good player. Yes he was classy. Ripken chasing Lou Gehrig during the 1995 season was an important hook that soothed a lot of bad feelings.
Some other good cards.
I am going to ignore the word "Precision", and instead focus on the fact that McGwire has a mullet in this picture. Any McGwire card from the mid 1990s where he has a mullet is an instant winner in my book. In fact, I am going to add that to my little note pad of future post ideas. McGwire mullet cards.
Manny Ramirez always had a great looking swing. I love the look on his face in this card along with the word "Punishing" that is attached to his card. I know he's a bit of a lightning rod, so I am not sure if/when he will get into the Hall. Still a great player though.
I saw this interview a few years back where someone was talking to Dennis Eckersley. They brought up blown saves and I instantly thought he was going to start talking about the Kirk Gibson home run in the World Series. Instead, he starts talking about this Manny Ramirez home run from 1995. Eckersley threw him a fastball on the inside corner, catcher is not moving his glove in the clip, and Manny hit the ball halfway up the bleachers in Jacobs Field.
Eckersley is smiling after the home run and says "Wow".
Last one for the not so terrible section of this post.
This card also gets torn apart on the SB Nation article, but considering Gwynn was one of the first players to use video to improve his hitting, I think it is a pretty fitting label. Gwynn is a Hall of Famer based on his statistics, but he's also a very important innovator. Where would baseball be today without him watching video? I am sure someone else would have done the same thing at some point, but Gwynn turned video into a popular practice.
The Best Cardinals Card
I will go with a former player instead. The Cardinals cards are decent, but none of them really stood out. However, you don't get many relief pitchers wearing batting helmets on baseball cards. Yet, here we are with 1986 National League Rookie of the Year Todd Worrell.
The Todd Worrell card is also ripped apart in the SB Nation article, but I actually like this card as a Cardinals fan who knows something about his background. He went to tiny little Biola College, which is apparently in the middle of Los Angeles and was founded by some Presbyterian pastor back in the early 1900s. It's not an athletic powerhouse, but a Cardinals scout went to one of their games while in town to watch another player. Worrell played outfield and catcher for the team, but occasionally pitched, mainly as a long reliever. He threw in the mid 90s as a college position player who didn't really work with a pitching coach.
Obviously, Worrell did not bat often as a back of the game reliever, but he did register a triple as one of his two Major League hits. I am sure that players like Worrell, who have experience as a position player, take batting practice every so often.
The back of the card has the more standard pitcher photos. I like the one in the background with him finishing his pitch. Worrell was really tall and had this great downward motion with a low finish at the end of his delivery.
It's not as cool as the Bob Gibson follow through, but I always thought Worrell looked different. Max Scherzer does something really similar to this too.
Best Durham Bulls Player
I am going to ignore the word "Cool" and just focus on the fact that this card has a sweet photo of Braves first baseman Fred McGriff. He had not actually been on the Durham Bulls at this point in his career. He did not appear on the Bulls until the end of his career while trying to work his way back up to the Majors with the Rays in 2004.
McGriff ended up making to Tampa.
That's cool.
His career was done by the middle of July in 2004.
That's not cool.
Best Non-Cardinal/Non-Durham Bull
in 1995, what was the best reason to buy some Emotion XL cards? Before Strasburg, Bryce Harper, Kris Bryant, Wander Franco, and whatever other uber prospects who were overvalued by baseball card collectors, there was Hideo Nomo. People were crazy for his cards. Non-mania might have been worse to some degree because he was actually pitching in the Majors at the same time people were going crazy over his cards. I didn't go out of my way to find them, but I still ended up with a few from random sets.
The "Twisting" tag seems a little weak, maybe "Effectively Wild" would have been better. I like the picture on the front. It gives you a little insight into Nomo's pitching motion, but the back is really good.
Love the picture on the left with Nomo's back. That's not a side view, that's likely from behind the plate.
I don't love the description of Nomo's throwing motion as herky jerky. He paused at two different spots during his delivery. Lots of pitchers have used a pause mid wind-up to throw off the timing of hitters. Currently, both Johnny Cueto and Marcus Stroman use a pause. I believe Marichal used one back in the day.
How Does It Compare?
I love the photos. I like Emotion brand concept on some of the cards, but others do not work for various reasons. Some of the cards did not age well, others were just not very well thought out, which goes with the gist of the SB Nation article, if you read it.
Good card stock and photos count for something, but not enough to crack the top half of the sets that I have featured on my Set Appreciation Posts.
"I liken this set to an old record or CD that you bought at another point in your life. It was great music at the time, but you can't make it through the whole thing anymore."... I find this sort of thing happening to me more and more in recent years. And it's applying with all kinds of stuff, not just cards and music. I really hope that it isn't one of those things that's normal with getting older, because I am not liking it one bit!
ReplyDeleteThere was a really good interview a few years back with some different 1990s/early 2000s musicians and several of them talked about this phenomenon. One of the people they interviewed was Brandon Boyd from Incubus. To summarize, he cannot make it through several of their early albums and they never play those songs live anymore. It stinks to listen to old music and not get anything from it, but must really stink when you're the person who created it.
DeleteSweet product. I have a complete set I purchased years ago, but no way I could pass up that box for $30. I'd put it with my unopened Emotion basketball and hockey boxes.
ReplyDeleteI did not know there was a hockey and basketball version of these sets. I might have to go look through those cards for a few people.
DeleteSome interesting cards here. The Ripken is one of the few in my collection. Thanks for linking the SB nation article. I'll have to read that after I catch up on blogs.
ReplyDeleteManny Ramirez was an awesome hitter when his head was screwed on straight. It's too bad his antics overshadowed his talent.
Manny did a lot of stupid stuff while he was playing. Loved watching him though, great hitter.
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