Goals.

 Do I really want to review my goals from 2021?  

Not really.  I thought about skipping this post, but it is something that I traditionally write every year and I feel like it provides good closure. Honestly, I have really mixed feelings about my life as a card collector during the past year. Maybe writing a post will help out a bit.  

Let's get started.  

My first goal from last year was......

1. More Pre-1970s Durham Bulls Cards/Sets 

Flipping back through all my posts I made this year, I had a post about a missing Pat Darby card that I needed to finish off my collection of Durham Bulls cards from the 1975 Topps Mini set. I bought a copy of the Topps Mini card from someone on Sports Card Lots, but they accidentally sent me the regular full-sized copy of the card.  

I got the mini a few weeks later, shown below in a gigantic scan that makes the card appear not very mini.  It is mini. 

Not exactly pre-1970s, but it's pretty close.  

I searched through the rest of my posts for the year.  

There were not many, so it was not too difficult.  

Hmmm.

A week ago, I posted a new autographed card, from 2021 Archives, of Greg Luzinski.  "The Bull" appeared on the Durham Bulls in 1969.  That is a Durham Bulls player from pre-1970.  

 

That just about wraps up that first goal. How should I score that?  Is that 1 card, no cards?  As a teacher, how would I grade myself on this goal? Let's talk about that later in the post. 

2. A 1960s Set Project (Maybe Two) 

This one is going to be pretty good.  Yes, I worked on a 1960s set project. I bought and traded for a whole bunch of 1964 Topps Giants cards.  I am more than halfway done with the set. No, I did not finish the set project, but I got the Mickey Mantle card out of the way. That felt like a positive accomplishment.

 

I am going to ignore that part about a second set from the 1960s and rate this one as a positive. Again, I am not going to give myself a grade until the end of the post.  I have had fun working on this set and have really enjoyed looking at these cards and learning about the players. 

3. Find Another Former Bulls Player.....

I feel like I have actually found two new Durham Bulls players to collect, but also had a surprising twist with a former Durham Bulls player this year.  

My two new players were Luis Patino. He pitched for the Bulls during the 2021 season, but also made a few starts for the Rays. He's a nice pitcher, I figure he's likely to turn out pretty well. The Rays are good with young pitchers.  

 

I managed to find seven or eight of his autographs during the year along with a handful of base cards and serial numbered parallels. I have enjoyed collecting his cards, so I will likely continue to find more Patinos in 2022.  

 

I also spent time working on Jake Cronenworth cards. He was on the Durham Bulls in 2019, one of my favorite players from the team over the last few years. Cronenworth is a fun player to watch, very good hitter and he plays all over the field. Unfortunately, a lot of other people have also decided they like Jake Cronenworth. His cards have been a little more expensive than I would have anticipated and that has slowed me down a bit.  

I will still continue to collect his cards in 2022. Let's just hope some people lose interest in his cards.  Please, let's make Cronenworth more affordable in 2022. 

My last one is surprising.  

 

 

The Rays traded Blake Snell to the Padres in December of 2020. Naturally, half of Blake Snell's cards this year still showed him in a Rays uniform. Why? I don't know and I am not going to complain. 

4. Be More Consistent With Writing 

I use gifs a lot when I am teaching. They are fun and entertaining. I am going to summarize this goal using a gif.  

 The answer is no. 

How did I do? 

Let's be honest. It was not very pretty. There were many factors that I am not going to rehash in detail. I did not make many posts and they felt very random at times. Time and energy were certainly a major factor, along with drifting a bit as a collector.  I am going to move on from my 2021 goals and look forward to collecting in 2022.  

I will go ahead and set my goal for 2022.

1. Have fun collecting cards.  

That's it.  

I hope everyone has a great New Year!  See you in 2022. 

Random Ray - 2000 Topps HD

Topps HD was only made for a few years in the early 2000s. It was essentially an attempt to duplicate Stadium Club's photography with ultra-thick card stock. The base set cards were fine, but I originally got into this set for the autographs. The autographed cards were on acetate card stock. I am almost sure that this was the first acetate set that I really enjoyed. There are only four autographed cards in Topps HD.  I have the complete set.  

My favorite card.....

Rick Ankiel hitting back when Rick Ankiel was a pitcher. The other autographs are Adrian Gonzalez, Todd Helton, and Mark Quinn.  

Back to the base cards and Ray Lankford.  

This is the front of the Ray Lankford card from the 2000 Topps HD set. While it's not exactly Stadium Club, the photography on the front of this card is very nice.  I like how Topps did the design on the player name box on the side of the card.  

The box is discolored to standout, but if you look at the batting box lines and back of Lankford's card, it does not fully interrupt the action shot of Lankford. That astroturf looks terrible. I am glad there are not many astroturf fields left in the Majors.  

Back of the card.  

I like the back of this card for several reasons. I will start small and work my way up to larger items. First, I like that the player information box on the side mirrors the player name box on the front of the card in terms of shape, location, and orientation. The stat box is not really all that deep, but I like the white background with the black print. The stat box pops and the numbers are easy to read. The most obvious feature is the color photograph in the background. A little weird to see McGwire in the on-deck circle with Lankford batting. Usually McGwire hit third, Lankford hit fourth.  

Overall, this is a quality baseball card.

Sunday Night Procrastination

There are plenty of other things I could be doing at the moment. Most would be a better use of my time, but here I am writing about baseball cards and the whatnot. I have to work three days this week. I am not sure I am ready to teach tomorrow, but I am not going to worry about it at the moment.  

I spent the majority of my day doing chores around the house. I swept and mopped the floors, cleaned all three bathrooms in the house.  Cleaning is a good thing, most of the time.  That's a lot of productivity for a single day.  

I also took in the women's basketball game between NC State and Virginia. State is currently ranked second in the country.  

The Wolfpack ended up winning by 27 points.  Virginia is not very good.  

On to baseball card stuff.  

I have a huge stack of cards on my desk at the moment. There are so many cards that I could write about for this post, but I am going to stick with just one of them.  Mainly because it's already scanned and I have been procrastinating on the other cards.  Beyond scanning and school work, I have also been procrastinating on sorting too, which my wife files under baseball card cleaning. I am getting some side-eye about the amount of desk space my cards are taking up at the moment. 

I am going to put this card away after I write about it.  That's some productivity.  

Luis Patino spent a portion of the season in Durham, but eventually got called up by the Rays. He's signed a ton of autographs this year. I have not collected too many of them. The Rays got Patino in the Blake Snell trade with the Padres. His cards were fairly pricy at the beginning of the year, but they have gotten cheaper as the year has gone along. Nothing like a 21 year-old having an ERA of 4 to cool down the prices of his cards. I am sure you won't regret selling his cards cheap in four years. Keep sending them my way.  

Why this card?  I liked the appearance of this Stadium Club Chrome card. The finish did not show very well on the scan, but it's one of those shiny cards. The action shot on the front is just the sort of photography you'd expect on a Stadium Club card. I would also like to mention that Luis Patino has a great autograph. He's consistent too.  

Beyond the Luis Patino autograph, I also picked up an autographed baseball this week at work.  

One of the students in my class is Mackenzie Gore's cousin. She got him to autograph a baseball for me. 

It was fun writing this post. This was 10 minutes well spent.  

These Guys Are Actually Good?

I started collecting baseball cards in the early 1980s when I was in early elementary school. Some of my initial impressions of players from those cards lingered for a long time in my world.  At some point in late high school or early college, I realized that a lot of the "washed up, old guys" from those early 1980s sets were actually good players during the 1970s.  There were even a few lingering from the 1960s.  

As a baseball card collector, I have ended up circling back to collect cards of a few of these players.  This past week, I managed to snag two autographs from the 2021 Topps Archives set of players who appeared in 1983 card sets.  That was my first year opening packs and these two players seemed way past their prime. The six-year old version of me did not fully appreciate their skills for very likely superficial reasons.  

First up, Cardinals back-up catcher Gene Tenace.  

He was the Cardinals back-up catcher during the early 1980s.  Gene Tenace was a .230 hitter and managed a grand total of 12 home runs in the 2 seasons he played for the Cardinals.  Not exactly someone to be excited about pulling from a pack of cards.  I kind of ignored those 1970s seasons while he was playing for the A's.  

Some years later, I learned about the Gene Tenace from the 1970s.  He regularly hit 20 home runs a year?  Gene Tenace won the 1972 World Series MVP by hitting 4 home runs in a 7 game series against the Reds?  You're sure that wasn't Reggie Jackson?  

It turns out that before he was an old guy and the back-up catcher for the Cardinals, Gene Tenace was a good player.  It's true.  All of it.  There are other things that I really appreciate about his career beyond winning a World Series MVP and being a back-up catcher on the Cardinals. 

+Gene Tenace regularly walked more than he struck out.  

+Gene Tenace 1060 career hits and 984 career walks. 

+Baseball Reference has him rated as the 13th best catcher of all-time ahead of Roy Campanella, Buster Posey, and Yadier Molina. 

+Amongst modern catchers, Tenace has the second highest OPS (on-base percentage and slugging percentage) amongst modern catchers.  He's ahead of Johnny Bench, but behind Mike Piazza.  

He was a really good player.  Here is my latest Gene Tenace card.  

I am still waiting for Topps to make a card of him as a back-up catcher for the Cardinals.  

Next player.  

Those polyester White Sox softball uniforms were not kind to Greg Luzinski. "The Bull" was still a good player with the White Sox, but he was definitely a player ignored while I was collecting in the 1980s.  I think Luzinski was my first run-in with a professional athlete who did not look the part.  I first started to appreciate Greg Luzinski when I moved to North Carolina roughly 15 years ago and started reading up on the Durham Bulls.  

He was a member of the 1969 Raleigh-Durham Phillies, which was a renamed version of the Durham Bulls.  It was a really dumb idea to rename the team briefly, but it was not as bad as the team splitting half of its games between Durham and Raleigh.  Despite a lot of bad off-the-field decisions by the Phillies, the team absolutely bludgeoned the rest of the Carolina League.  It's arguable one of the better teams in the history of the franchise.  

The team led the league in almost every team offensive category and almost every team pitching category.  Many of the players on the team also were league leaders in individual categories. Luzinksi was an 18 year-old fresh out of high school and hit 31 home runs and drove in 92 runs.  

I have posted a bunch of Luzinski cards here over the years.  Been a fan for awhile.  

Love the 1960 Topps design on this card and Luzinski has a great signature.  

Overall, I am happy to add these two cards to my collection and I am glad that I learned a little bit more about these two players who were "old and washed up" when I first started collecting cards.  

A Finest Moment

Ozzie Smith is in the Hall of Fame because of his great defense. Rightfully, there are a ton of cards that highlight his Gold Gloves and acrobatics in the field. However, there does seem to be one offensive highlight that appears on Ozzie's cards almost on an annual basis. One of the greatest Postseason home runs in the history of the Cardinals franchise.  

Great call by the late, great Jack Buck too.  

In sorting out some cards the other week, I noticed that I had not really done much with the Cardinals Hall of Famers this year. Last year, I found a Bob Gibson rookie card. I didn't need anything that big, but it does not quite seem like a full year of collecting baseball cards without a good card of Stan Musial, Gibson, Lou Brock, or Ozzie Smith. I went ahead and found my good Cardinals card last week.  

I love the picture on the front of this card.  It's what caught my attention. Every Cardinals fan knows this picture of Ozzie batting left-handed in a 1980s Cardinals polyester uniform. It is indeed a "Finest Moment".  

I was also impressed with the back of the card.  

Topps usually skimps on the back of the card. They actually did a little bit of research and a decent write up here. They left out the fact that it was Ozzie's first home run as a left-handed batter during his career.  Ozzie was a switch-hitter. However, the first sentence bringing up his whopping career home run total of 29 did a good job of giving the reader of how rarely Ozzie hit a home run. 

2021 Blake Snell Autograph Count: 5

Blake Snell has an autograph in the 2021 Topps Traded set. Considering he was traded from the Rays to the Padres, it is not really surprising that Snell ended up on the checklist. I was just really surprised when I finally saw the card. After all, the purpose of the Traded set is to show new players called up to the Majors and established players in new uniforms.  

Blake Snell on the Padres, right?   

Wrong. 

I am not going to complain about getting a few more Blake Snell cards in a Rays uniform.  It makes you wonder how far in advance Topps makes some of these cards.  I like the borrowed 1986 Topps design and the faux color scheme that they made for the Rays.  I like the action photo of Snell pitching on the front of the card.  

Card back.  

The back has the standard "Congratulations" message on the back.  It looks a little odd and out of place considering that Topps duplicated the player information and card number boxes from the 1986 Topps set at the top of the card.  Can we get some player stats?