Yes, there are Blake Snell autographs in 2022 Topps.
No, this card is not one of them.
I am just going to find Blake Snell autographs that I do not own this year. I do not mind Snell being on the Padres, there are far worse places he could be pitching, but I am also interested in looping back to find a few old Rays autographs. The prices on some of his low-print, high-end Rays autographs have come way down over the past year.
With that being said, let me run out a Padres autograph from last year.
This is from the 2021 Topps Chrome Update set. I usually like the autographs out of the Chrome products, because they are usually on-card signatures. Well, this one is not. Kind of disappointing, but I guess not all that surprising that Topps would find a way to disappoint on a set that I enjoy.
Snell still had a large amount of Rays autographs last year with a few Padres autographs sprinkled into the mix. I think that every single Padres autograph released so far is a sticker autograph. Snell was traded to the Padres at the end of December 2020 just weeks before the first 2021 baseball cards were released. My guess is that he signed a bunch of Rays cards during the off-season for early Topps card products along with a bunch of stickers. Topps used the stickers in later releases for the Padres autographs.
Snell has always signed a ton of cards. I bet he gets some on-card Padres autographs this year.
Back of the card.
Man that is a crooked scan. I will do better on the next post.
It's the standard card back. Blake Snell got pulled with a shutout and 8 strikeouts in the fourth inning of his Padres debut. Almost sure there is some funny connection that Topps could have made to a certain World Series Game.
I am sure there will be other opportunities in the years to come.
The 1991 Major League All-Star game was in Toronto, Canada. It would be safe to assume that the 1991 Score All-Star FanFest Ray Lankford card was given out at that event. A Canadian Ray Lankford card that is not an O-Pee-Chee? No Tim Horton's logo? It's not written in both French and English?
Let's learn more, eh?
I bought my copy of the Lankford FanFest card from a local card shop roughly two decades ago while I was still living in St. Louis. The shop was in south St. Louis County. It was slightly disorganized. There were stacks of cards everywhere and you never quite knew what to expect. The store owner was his own person. Cool guy, but definitely lived by his own rules. The shop was a short drive from my school at the time, so it was a good afternoon stop from time to time.
This Lankford card was in a $0.50 bin, or something of the sort. Seemed like a cool card, not very expensive, and one that I did not own. I bought it. I was a little surprised that a young Ray Lankford made an All-Star FanFest set. Usually those types of products are filled with big names.
Here is the front of the card.
Score actually made the All-Star FanFest set focused on young players. After all, we were at the beginning of the prospect boom. The checklist had Ray Lankford, Hensley Meulens, and Chuck Knoblauch just to name a few. There are only 11 cards in the set, which I do not own. I was happy with just the Ray Lankford card. I like the picture that Score used with the Wrigley Field ivy in the background. I also love the double-ear-flapped helmet. The design around the borders looks very 1990s. It's dated, but I am sure that it had some strong appeal back in 1991.
Let's talk about the back of the card.
This is the painful part of this story.
I want to kick myself.
Notice the bottom of the card has a banner that identifies this as a card from the 1991 All-Star FanFest. Well, apparently Score used this set of cards as a promotional item at two other events. One of the events was The National Sports Card Collectors Convention, or "The National", which took place in Anaheim that year.
The third one?
Back to the store owner.
Every good baseball card store owner good stories about cards, or different items in their store. Beyond cards, this store was always filled with promotional items of all kinds. Many of them were oddball giveaway items from Cardinals games. Yes, he sold the bobbleheads, but we're talking about stuff like "Bud Light Bucket Hat Night" or "Tino Martinez Kids Shirt Day". At one point he had a pair of Jockey underwear autographed by Jim Palmer. I usually ignored all of that stuff.
The day I buy this card, he sees me pick out the FanFest card, and he goes on some long-winded story. It was about a guy he knows who worked at the Convention Center in St. Louis as a contracted janitorial service. I am all ears to hear where this is going about a janitorial service and baseball cards. Anyway, this guy he knew used to end up with items at the end of conventions and would just put them in his basement. All sorts of odds and ends. He was in the process of downgrading to a smaller home and had dropped off a box of Score baseball card sets from a candy convention.
The story ended with the sales pitch of....."Only $10 for the whole set"
There was a long pause. In my mind I was thinking.......
He points to a cardboard box with a piece of paper taped to the front labeled "Candy Convention Cards $10". They were right next to all the late 1980s and early 1990s traded box sets, which were all $5 each.
Candy Convention Cards?
I did not budge and did not deviate from whatever pile of cards I was sifting through to look at the promotional items from some guys basement that he got cleaning up the Convention Center. The story about the convention center stuck though. It was definitely one of that owner's better stories and he was not even drinking beer in the store that day.
Two or three years later, I got on a big kick about tracking my Ray Lankford cards. I found a checklist and started crossing off cards and trying to find the ones I did not own. Most of the junk wax cards were checked off right away, but there were a few I was missing. One of them is a 1991 Score National Candy Wholesalers Convention card.
The National Candy Wholesalers Convention in 1991?
It was in St. Louis.
It was in St. Louis at the Convention Center.
They also had hockey cards with the same design as the baseball cards. This is not my Brett Hull card, but you can see the label on the bottom. It's slightly obscured by the COMC watermark.
I have not seen the Candy Convention Ray Lankford card in the wild. I have also promised myself to never pass up another set of cards that were leftover at the St. Louis Convention Center and picked up by someone who runs a janitorial service.
In the earlier 1990s, every card company wanted to appear as modern as possible. Foil, sparkles, glossy finish, cool and unique packaging. There was always something new.
In the late 1990s, several card companies decided to come full-circle and make retro baseball card sets. Later on, it got annoying, but that was after Topps was the only licensed card manufacturer. The bloat of retro was all on Topps.
What was retro about Upper Deck Retro?
The card stock was kind of retro. The cards were also sold in a lunch box. The cards also said "Retro" at the top next to the Upper Deck logo. In conclusion, the cards were not really all that retro.
Here is the Ray Lankford Upper Deck Retro card.
Pretty standard picture of Lankford batting. Is this another card of Ray with a picture that was taken in Shea Stadium? I am leaning towards yes. I would also like to take a minute to say something bad about a Cardinals road uniform. In 1998, the Cardinals took their uniform numbers off the front of their jerseys. They did not look good. The look was abandoned fairly quickly. I was happy.
Back of the card.
The back is fine.
You got a stat line, a name bar, a black and white Cardinals logo, and the little cartoon guy on the side of the card. The cartoon guy's name is "Student"? That's not very original. Not Upper Deck's best effort, but their later attempts at retro sets were a lot better.
I crossed the half-way point with the 1964 Topps Giants during my last update post back in January. I have been working on this set for awhile, but I have crossed off a lot of the short-prints and big names on the checklist. Over the past month, I have added another 4 cards from the set to my collection. All four of the new Topps Giants are Hall of Fame players, including the last pricy card I needed to find.
I am going to start off with Whitey Ford.
Not a huge Whitey Ford fan. He looks a little grizzled here. Wonder what Whitey and Mickey were up to the night before this photo was taken. Probably the morning this photo was taken too. In keeping with the other Topps Giants posts, here is the back of the card.
You ever look at the Hall of Fame stats at the bottom of player's Baseball Reference page? You know what left-handed pitcher had a better top 7 years of their career than Whitey Ford?
Mark Langston.
I am going to make a Mark Langston post one of these days.
On to the next one.
Yes, there are Cubs cards on the checklist. I actually waited to buy this Billy Williams card. When I first saw it, I was convinced that the copies were flawed due to the fuzzy quality of the picture. Nope, that's just the way this card was made. Disappointing given that Topps managed to put together 59 other decent pictures of the players in this set.
The back of the card has a nice write-up on Billy Williams. He was a younger player here. As mentioned in previous posts, Topps spent a lot of time talking about Minor League careers on the backs of the Giants cards. This Billy Williams card is particularly odd. The left-side of the card focuses on his first few seasons, there are two or three sentences about his time in the Texas League, and then it goes back to his career as a Major Leaguer.
Just give me a whole paragraph about the home run in the All-Star Game.
Another Cub.
Much better photograph on the Santo card. He looks really young here, although this photograph would likely have been taken in his third or fourth season. I really like the cream colored Cubs jersey here. They should wear these as throwbacks.
Back of the card.
The Texas League.
American Association.
The National League is not mentioned.
The last card is the best card.
There is a little surface discoloration going horizontally across the card from the W on the Willie to the left border. The centering is not terrible, but I am happy to cross off the last really tough card left on the checklist. I am still missing the Roberto Clemente and Frank Robinson cards, but those are fairly reasonable compared to the Mantle, Koufax, and Mays.
A card back without any mention of the Minors.
Amazing.
I am now at 37 cards out of 60, closing in on the two-thirds mark. I am mainly down the common cards, but I am going to keep working on the bigger names on the checklist. Overall, I have four Hall of Famers left. I am going to try to knock those four players out next.
1 Gary Peters 2 Ken Johnson 3 Sandy Koufax SP 4 Bob Bailey 5 Milt Pappas 6 Ron Hunt 7 Whitey Ford 8 Roy McMillan 9 Rocky Colavito 10 Jim Bunning 11 Roberto Clemente 12 Al Kaline 13 Nellie Fox 14 Tony Gonzalez 15 Jim Gentile 16 Dean Chance 17 Dick Ellsworth 18 Jim Fregosi 19 Dick Groat 20 Chuck Hinton 21 Elston Howard 22 Dick Farrell 23 Albie Pearson 24 Frank Howard 25 Mickey Mantle 26 Joe Torre 27 Ed Brinkman 28 Bob Friend SP 29 Frank Robinson 30 Bill Freehan 31 Warren Spahn 32 Camilo Pascual 33 Pete Ward 34 Jim Maloney 35 Dave Wickersham 36 Johnny Callison 37 Juan Marichal 38 Harmon Killebrew 39 Luis Aparicio 40 Dick Radatz 41 Bob Gibson 42 Dick Stuart SP 43 Tommy Davis 44 Tony Oliva 45 Wayne Causey SP 46 Max Alvis 47 Galen Cisco SP 48 Carl Yastrzemski 49 Hank Aaron 50 Brooks Robinson 51 Willie Mays SP 52 Billy Williams 53 Juan Pizarro 54 Leon Wagner 55 Orlando Cepeda 56 Vada Pinson 57 Ken Boyer 58 Ron Santo 59 Johnny Romano 60 Bill Skowron SP
The first series of 2022 Topps cards will soon be released and many people will open their packs of cards and find copies of Topps Gold parallels. The modern version of the Topps parallel set has been around since 2001. I liked the cards when they brought them back, but they have been lost in the shuffle amongst the vast sea of all the other camo and colored parallels Topps stuffs into their packs. The serial numbers on the back of the cards scream "half-assed" as well.
I still like their appearance.
Now, if you want a good Topps Gold card, I suggest you go back and look at some of the early 1990s Topps sets. The Gold parallels started in 1992 with cards coming roughly one-per-box. By 1993, Topps was putting one Gold card in every pack, with a Black Gold card in every two boxes, or thereabouts. The name is a little suspect. Black Gold? That's oil, right?
The Topps Gold cards are not serial number or super rare, but they were fun to collect and had a better appearance and design than their modern equivalent. I am going to go with the Black Gold Ray Lankford card this week, as the design was used this past year for the Topps Archives set. I hate how much Topps reuses designs, but I still enjoyed these cards.
This was one of the Archives cards.
Topps did a good job of recreating of these cards.
On to the 1993 Topps Black Gold Ray Lankford card.
I love the contrast on these card with the solid black background and the gold design around the top and bottom. High contrast is always a good design element in my opinion. I wish that Topps had used a photograph with Ray in a home white uniform for more contrast, but it's also hard to go wrong with the 1990s Cardinals road uniforms. The Cardinals consistently wore the blue hats on the road at that time. The photos on the Black Gold cards were also different than the base cards. For the time, given that there were fewer card products, it was nice to get an extra picture of your favorite player.
This picture is the same as his Topps base card with the exception of the gold foil at the bottom and around the Topps logo at the top of the card.
Although, I am almost certain that the two photographs came from the same game, maybe even the same at-bat. The gray wristbands are sort of a giveaway here. Ray Lankford wore the same style wristbands throughout his career, but they were always red or blue. I almost wonder if this wasn't some sort of special event, like the current Mother's Day games where the players wear pink.
Back to the Black Gold and the back of the card.
The back of the card has no stats. Usually I am a big fan of numbers, but for insert cards I am willing to forgo the statistics. Topps can not get enough of mentioning the fact that Ray Lankford played football at a junior college and rushed for 1,000 yards in a season. I am certain that if you took every Ray Lankford card ever produced by Topps, you would run across that fact at least a dozen times.
The highlight for me is the mention of Ray Lankford's cycle. Have I ever mentioned the fact that I got to see the Ray Lankford cycle game in-person?
Probably the same number of times that Topps mentioned Ray Lankford ran for 1,000 yards playing football at a junior college.
The Olympics are starting this weekend, I doubt that I will watch very much. Maybe not at all. At one point in my life, I loved watching the Olympics. Over the past decade, I have watched less and less of the events. My loss of interest stems from the continued use of professional athletes in the games and the overly dramatic telecasts. I just want to see people swimming fast, not everyone has to have a backstory.
"Ryan Held was a well-off middle class kid from Springfield, Illinois. He got a scholarship offer to attend NC State where he met his future wife. They don't agree about their pizza toppings. Mike Tirico has more about what this couple does when they order pizza....."
Changing topics. I am going to write about Ben Sheets for a few minutes.
Yes, the Brewers pitcher.
The topic might seem really odd for my blog, but I promise you it's a relevant current topic with the start of the Olympics.
If you do not remember Ben Sheets, or do not know who he is, he pitched for the Milwaukee Brewers in the early 2000s. He was a good pitcher on a lot of not-so-great Brewers teams. Above-average pitcher, innings-eater who won his fair share of games while striking out a bunch of people. Sheets had a bunch of arm injuries late in his career and ended up pitching briefly for the A's and Braves for one season each.
I care deeply about Ben Sheets and have a pretty healthy collection of his cards. I have never really written about him in this space. I guess if you really, really pay attention on Twitter, you might have seen me harangue some USA Baseball types about him.
Yes, there will be baseball cards in this rant about Ben Sheets.
Ben Sheets has several USA Baseball cards.
Have you ever seen one?
Unfortunately, there have not been any made since 2013 when Panini included him in a few different products. It's criminal that he's not in every USA Baseball card product. The fact that Ben Sheets has not had an Olympic related card in almost a decade goes to show how little card companies research the players on checklists.
Some of you already know all about Ben Sheets and the Olympics. Here is another card. Keep reading anyway for the rant part of the post.
Ben Sheets was in the 2000 Summer Olympics on the USA Baseball team. The roster was made up of Minor League players. A few were serious prospects, but the majority of the team consisted of older players who had lingered in the upper levels of the Minors. Ernie Young was one of the players. Go look him up.
The team was managed by Tommy Lasorda. After losing out on the Gold Medal at the previous two Olympic games, the expectations for this team were really low. Sheets was selected for the team. At the time, Sheets was a high-end prospect in the Brewers system. He was a great college player at the University of Louisiana-Monroe and was drafted in the first round by the Brewers in 1999.
Sheets essentially jumped from college to the Majors in a season. There are not many Minor League cards of him. This is the only one in my collection. I know there are others out there, just have never tracked them down.
The Cuban National Team was the clear favorite to win the Gold Medal in baseball at the 2000 Olympics. They had a roster full of professional players. Yes, the USA Baseball team players were technically professional players, but the Cuban team was filled with players who would have likely been in the Majors had Cuba not been closed off at that time.
The two teams played in the preliminary round-robin and the Cubans beat the US team 6-1. Apparently the game was more lop-sided than the score indicates. However, the US team reached the medal round. After squeaking past a tough semi-final game against South Korea. the squad made the Gold Medal game against Cuba. A Cuban Gold Medal was all but a forgone conclusion. The team had won 21 straight Olympic baseball games entering 2000, including the Gold Medal games in both the 1992 Barcelona and 1996 Atlanta games.
Enter Ben Sheets.
Sheets was a Double-A pitcher throwing against a Major League roster. All Sheets did was pitch a complete game, three-hit shoutout. No Cuban baserunner ever got past second base. It was a great performance. In the modern world of the Olympic Games with professional athletes taking over, this is as close as we are likely going to come to having another great upset in a team sport.
At the time of this game, Sheets was very popular and got a few baseball cards out of this pitching performance. Upper Deck included him in several different end-of-year products.
There are also several 2001 Topps cards that show him wearing a "United States" jersey, but those pictures are actually from the 2000 All-Star Futures Game. The format of the Futures Game has always been the American players versus the International players. For the 2000 game, the US team wore these very Olympic looking uniforms.
Further, Topps did not have a license to produce USA Baseball cards in the early 2000s. That production license was held by Upper Deck. I am sure that it was not an accident that Topps used this photo.
Also, while it is not clear on the Topps Finest card above, Sheets is wearing a Milwaukee Brewers hat in the picture. Doubtful that you'd be allowed to wear that in the Olympics. There were plenty of other prospects in these sets who also appeared at the Futures Game, but managed to be photographed in their regular uniforms.
Paging Barry Zito.
So we are to the rant part of the post. (Deep breath)
Sheets performance against a heavily-favorite Cuban baseball team in the 2000 Gold Medal game was the best performance by a member of a US Olympic team sport in modern history outside of the 1980 hockey game against the Soviet Union. Although, the "Miracle on Ice" game was actually in the semi-finals, not the Gold Medal game. I am also excluding sports where competitors can win individual events and medals.
THIS WAS A GREAT PERFORMANCE.
No matter though, nobody is paying attention to Ben Sheets. He's an average Major League pitcher. Ben is retired and has probably returned to Louisiana where he sitting around doing who knows what.
You know what Ben Sheets hasn't done since he won a Gold Medal? Well, he has barely been acknowledged or recognized for a great performance during an Olympic Gold Medal Game.
Do you know what USA Hockey has done to recognize the members of the 1980 "Miracle on Ice" team?
+The team and all of its members are in the US Hockey Hall of Fame.
+The team lit the Olympic flame at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City
+The rights to the story were sold to Disney and made into a movie.
Those were the three items I found by Google Searching the team, reading just the little snippet on the first link, and not actually clicking on it to read any further detail.
Ben Sheets?
Surely he has some sort of recognition somewhere by USA Baseball. Somewhere there is a plaque or a spot for him in a Hall of Fame or his number is retired? The answer to those questions:
No, there is not a plaque. I have looked for one at the USA Baseball facility. It's not there.
Yes, there is a USA Olympic Hall of Fame, but Sheets has not been inducted.
Yes, USA Baseball has retired jersey numbers, but not Sheets. These are the retired numbers at USA Baseball. All of them have a plaque in the stadium.
Before I start yelling, I am fine with Stephen Reich having his number retired. This is not about Stephen Reich.
Now for the yelling part of the rant.
MARK MCGWIRE HAS HIS NUMBER RETIRED!!!
MARK FLIPPING MCGWIRE.
He was not even the best first baseman on the 1984 Olympic team.
Why is Will Clark's number not retired? He out hit McGwire by almost 40 points with 10 more home runs and nearly 20 more RBIs. Look at Bobby Witt. He had an ERA under 1. I'd say Scott Bankhead, but he went to UNC. Plus, Bobby Witt was signing autographs at USA Baseball once and eye-rolled me for mentioning that he played for the Cardinals.
He was old and not very good. Still gave me the autograph though.
Let me continue besmirching Mark McGwire as an Olympian.
Baseball was a demonstration sport in the 1984 Olympics, these guys were not even playing for a Gold Medal. Further, if they had been playing for a Gold Medal, they lost to Japan in what would have been the Gold Medal Game.
You know who did win a Gold Medal in the Olympics and pitched his ass off in the Gold Medal Game?
Ben Sheets.
I think Ben Sheets is in the first row, closest to the camera. He's not holding his flowers.
Can Ben Sheets have his number retired?
I have tweeted at USA Baseball. They have ignored me.
Can Ben Sheets get a USA Baseball baseball card?
It's been nearly a decade since he's appeared in one of their sets. Kris Bryant has more than 80 USA Baseball cards during that time. Kris Bryant also has 0 Olympic Gold Medals. Two years ago, Roger Clemens got a USA Baseball card. He appeared in zero Olympic Games and has 0 Gold Medals.
During the next week, if you are watching the Olympics, take a few minutes to mute Kenny Albert's backstory about the hard-knock life hockey players who went to Harvard, and look into Ben Sheet's 2000 Olympic performance.
