A Venerable Old Card Part 61

I have been looking for a card for a Project Durham Bulls post the last few weeks.  It's a little different set of cards for me, more in the vintage football card department.  Not my usual.  I ended up finding the card, but along the way I found a few other cards of the former Durham Bulls player and manager.  Kind of excited about the whole thing and I learned something new along the way.

Let me introduce you to Clarence "Ace" Parker.  He was the star athlete at Duke University in the mid 1930s.  He played football, basketball, and baseball for the Blue Devils.  Football was his best sport.  In 1935 he was second team All-American.  In 1936 he was a consensus All-American and finished sixth in the Heisman Trophy voting.  

In 1937 Parker ended up playing baseball for the Philadelphia Athletics and football for the Brooklyn Dodgers.  His career in professional baseball was extremely short lived.  In two seasons, 1937 and 1938, he played roughly 100 games and batted just .179 with 2 home runs.  While his professional baseball career was less than notable, his professional football career landed him in the Professional Football Hall of Fame.  He played a total of 7 seasons in the NFL, missing 1941-1944 to serve in the Army, and was one of the best passers, runners, and punters in the league.  In 1940 he was the NFL MVP.  

So how does he get to the Durham Bulls?  

After he retired from professional football Parker joined the Chicago Cubs Piedmont League entry in Portsmouth, Virginia as a player.  He spent three years with the Baby Bears Minor League team before returning to Durham to become a player-manager for the Bulls, who were the Tigers Piedmont League team at that time.  He ended up spending 4 seasons with the Bulls before he got the head baseball coaching job at Duke.  

Now, the only baseball item I have really found of Parker are a few random baseballs and a Durham Bulls matchbook from the early 1950s.  I am not really sure how authentic the baseballs are and I am not really digging the whole match book thing.  Which has brought me to track down a football card of the former Durham Bulls manager.  

I found my autograph of Parker for my Durham Bulls post, but I actually ended up picking up an extra card through the whole thing.  I ended up trading with a life long Duke fan who lives locally, loves some of the older college athletes who played nearby, and has a pretty cool collection of some of these players. 

I ended up with this 1975 Fleer Immortal Roll Call card of Ace Parker as an extra.  

The card has a crease, but cannot really complain about free cards ever.   Since I am not really much of football card guy, I am not sure how much I can really tell you about this card outside of the year and manufacturer.   I am pretty sure that the picture is from his days in the NFL, but I am not certain as to what NFL team this would have been back in the 1930s or 1940s.  I have seen a few Duke things with him wearing number 7, but I think they are pictures that people just colored in blue.  Most of the Duke athletics pictures show him with a 34 jersey.  

Definitely a different type of card for my collection that made me step out of my comfort zone a bit to find and track down.  I cannot wait to share the Ace Parker autograph with everyone in the next week or two.  

A Venerable Old Card Part 59

I love chasing down oddball cards.  Over the years I have been really fortunate to find some really tough cards that were not only difficult to find, but were a little bit pricey.  My best oddball find of the past year has to be my Topps ProShooters Marbles which was a test issue Topps put out in 1997.  The marbles were sold somewhere in Canada and are a pretty tough find.  The last marble I needed for my collection, to complete my Cardinals team set, was Ray Lankford.  One of the 1990s Cardinals players whom I collect extensively.  

There are still a few hard oddball cards out there that I would love to add to my collection and I was lucky enough to land one of them a few weeks back.  I ended up with a Cardinals card out of the set, but I wasn't really going to be too choosy about the player out of the set.  I have just always liked the look of this set and just wanted a card that fit my collection.  I have a Nate Colbert card I picked up awhile ago....

Here's a look at the card out of the 1971 Topps Greatest Moments card of Cardinals Hall of Famer Lou Brock....

I have been trying to find one of these cards for a few years now.  They are not too difficult to find.  If you went on Ebay right now you'd likely be able to find several copies of the different cards in the set.  Some of the better Hall of Famers can be really tough, but it's not like these cards pop up once in a blue moon.  The difficult part of the Greatest Moments set has much more to do with the fact that they are condition sensitive and clean copies of the cards can be expensive at times.

I was willing to buy any of the Cardinals cards from the set or players connected to the Durham Bulls like Joe Morgan and Rusty Staub.  After much looking I ended up with Lou Brock.  Couldn't be happier about the card that I landed.

The only thing that was a little bit weird about this card is the picture on the front.  It celebrates Brock's 6th straight season of 50 stolen bases, which is a great accomplishment, but the picture is clearly not from the 1970 season.  Red Sox and Cardinals?  1970?  I don't think that happened.

There was no interleague play at that point and I had my doubts that this game was a Spring Training game.  Although both the Cardinals and Red both train in Florida.  The two teams did meet in the World Series in 1967, while it would have been four years old at the time this card was made, I was not going to put it past a card company to use an older picture.  Especially when it is a test issue.  I would guess the threshold for accuracy and detail might diminish a little bit.  Maybe?

Here's the picture I found.....

Same picture right? Sure the picture is a few years old, but it's still a sweet looking card showing off the Cardinals Hall of Famer swiping a base.  Subject matter and card content matter match, I am a happy camper.  

A Venerable Old Card Part 58

I usually do these posts about cards from the 1980s or 1990s, but the next few of these posts are actually going to be true vintage cards.  As a Cardinals fan there is frankly little better than landing a cool Stan Musial baseball card.  Unfortunately, while Stan the Man was playing baseball he was not really all that interested in being on baseball cards.  There are kind of limited amount of cards that were produced during the prime years of his career.

The 1950s were especially sparse.  There are a few cards here and there, but not many.  I am happy to say that I have recently added one to my collection.

This is a 1952 Red Man Tobacco card of the Cardinals Hall of Famer.  If you are going to go for a 1950s Musial card these are both affordable and a nice looking card.  My copy is actually missing the tabs on the bottom of the card, but is otherwise in very good condition.  The tabbed cards look like this....

Really the tab has the player name and card number on them, but it also has the words "cut along this line".  Obviously most card collectors from the 1950s cut their cards from this set.  I am happy to have a Musial card from the 1950s regardless of whether it has the little tab thing or not.  

This Musial card is actually my second Red Man Tobacco Cardinals card.  Here is a look at my other Cardinals card, also without the bottom tab....

Love the coloration on this Eddie Stanky card.  The pink lines on the Cardinals card are something that looks more in line with a Turner Movie Classics artificially colored movie.  Red Man people with their pink Cardinals unis still look better than anything Ted Turner......

A Venerable Old Card Part 56

Joe McEwing might be the most popular Cardinals player who only spent a season with the team.  He was actually on the team for a few games in 1998 and then played the entire 1999 season in St. Louis.    His overall career numbers as a Cardinals player don't look all that impressive for a player as popular as "Super Joe".  Over 162 games with the birds on the bat McEwing his .272/.330/.392 with 9 home runs, 29 doubles, and 45 RBIs.   If you think of his time with the Cardinals being equal to roughly one season's worth of games, that stat line is kind of very ho hum.  

Yet, during the summer of 1999 some of the most popular baseball cards around St. Louis were anything with the Cardinals second baseman.  He might have even been on a few of those ridiculous Beckett Hot List things.  So hot right now, or back then....

One of my favorites was McEwing's 1999 Upper Deck Ultimate Victory card.  While many Cardinals fans were trying to chase down the baseball card of Rick Ankiel from the same set, McEwing came close to catching up to the hard throwing pitching prospect in terms of popularity during the first half of the summer.  That's saying a lot considering Ankiel was long regarded as a high ceiling prospect while McEwing was more of an organizational depth kind of player.  Here is a look at the Super Joe Ultimate Victory card.....

That shiny surface on the scanner though.  

Anyway, what made McEwing popular?  How did he end up as a utility player on the Mets?  So, first half of the 1999 season McEwing hit .305/.350/.418 with 4 home runs, 3 triples, and 19 doubles.  Second half of the year McEwing his .223/.303/.363 with 5 home runs, 1 triple, and 9 doubles.  Kind of a steep drop off.  At the end of the season, McEwing ended up getting traded to the Mets for Jesse Orosco. Orosco's Cardinals career lasted all of 6 games in 2000.  

McEwing ended up on the Mets for a few years and a stop over with the Royals.  While McEwing was a bench player for almost his entire career, his half a season made a lasting impression in St. Louis that has never quite gone away.   

While this card is no longer on any sort of published hot list, it's still kind of a cool old card to take out and look at every once in awhile.  More McEwing later this week.  

A Venerable Old Card Part 52

I am completely fascinated by the 1970s Kelloggs and Hostess cards.  I don't post many of the ones that come into my collection, but I always look for them in the cheapy bins at card shows, or if I am buying a card on Ebay and see one I can get with combined shipping I will go for it.  I recently made a non-Kelloggs card trade and ended up with a cool 1975 card as a freebie.  

Silent George.  

George is pretty cool in my book.  Played on the Cardinals in the early 1980s and was a big part of the 1982 Cardinals World Series team.  He was also traded for John Tudor who became one of my favorite mid-late 1980s Cardinals players.  I also went to college with one of George's kids who had the second most fumble recoveries in a season while playing at Southeast Missouri.  

I don't have many 1970s Hendrick cards, maybe something on the A's or Padres, but nothing on the Indians.  Not really one of my favorite teams, so they get skipped over often.  Anyway, I really like the 1975 Kelloggs cards, not sure if they are my favorite all-time design from that company, but they are high up there.  Which brings me to a throw-in to the throw-in.  

It started out as a quick thank you message for the cards I had originally traded for along with the Hendrick.  I made note to say something nice about the Kelloggs Hendrick card since I really enjoy those cards.  That prompted my trading partner to mention the fact that they had a cool Kelloggs oddball, also a 1975, which I would really enjoy.  

A few days later in the mail I received a white envelope with this card inside......

What is it?  It's another 1975 Kellogg's card.  This one is from the American Presidents sets.  I did not know such a thing even existed.  Kind of good timing considering that my son has been really into Presidents for the last few months.  We have books, pictures, look at coins to see what President is on them, etc, etc....

Anything with Presidents is cool, so I will have to stash away Franklin Pierce and see if he wants to put this card in with all of his other stuff.  Although, if you know anything about Franklin Pierce he was arguably one of the worst Presidents........

ever.  He had a sad start to his Presidency and then lived the rest of his life in sort of an alcohol induced stupor.  

A Venerable Old Card Part 51

I am not a Yankees fan.  I am not going to make some post claiming that Derek Jeter is the greatest shortstop of all-time, nor the greatest modern shortstop.  Still he has been really important to the baseball card hobby and I felt I could take a few minutes to give him a little love on the night the Yankees retire his number 2.  Specifically I wanted to take a few minutes to talk about my favorite Derek Jeter rookie card.

I really liked the Stadium Club cards back in the early 1990s.  Upper Deck was probably my favorite of the glossy "premium" cards from that era, but Stadium Club was not far behind.  At the time the Stadium Club Murphy and Stadium Club Dome sets were released they were some what of an oddity.  A boxed set in a plastic stadium.  The guy at my local card shop at the time thought that they were pretty ridiculous.  I don't remember the conversation when I picked up the Murphy set, but I got a long talk about how the Dome set was "gimmicky" with filled with "senior photos in their mom's backyard" when I bought a copy during college.

I somewhat agreed with him.  I actually don't have my box for either one of the sets.  I broke them both and at some point tossed the box.  Given the number of singles from the set floating around I don't feel too bad being without the boxes.

This is what it looked like....thank you Ebay.....

The Jeter card didn't feature him wearing a cool high school or American Legion uniform like Shawn Green.....

or making an fashion statement straight out of a Bell Biv DeVoe video like Ozzie Timmons.....

It's still easily my favorite Jeter rookie card and probably my top overall Jeter card in my collection.  Not that I go out of my way for his baseball cards, but I feel like this card is one of the most iconic 1990s baseball cards.  It's not the Griffey rookie card, but if I made a list I would have it in my top 10.  

A Venerable Old Card Part 50

Laster this afternoon I am going to make the trek from my house to downtown Durham to watch the first Bulls game of the season at the Durham Bulls Athletic Park.  I usually make it to Opening Night for the Durham Bulls, but have missed a few over the years.  Last year's Opening Night was cold and it rained through the first few innings, still a fun night though.  

My most memorable Opening Night with the Durham Bulls took place in 2006 when top prospect B.J. Upton hit a walk off grand slam against the Toledo Mud Hens.  I have looked high and low for video, or photographic proof of the home run, and have only found a grainy video from the Durham Bulls MySpace page.  

BJ Upton's Grand Slam on Opening Night from Durham Bulls on Myspace.

Got to love MySpace.  

The home run propelled me into giving B.J. Upton cards a spot in my collection.  Even to this day I still dabble a little bit with his cards as long as I can find them on the cheap.  Sometimes you run into people who insist that his cards were pretty valuable in the past, so they still have quite a bit of value today.  

No.  

One of the greatest of all B.J. Upton rookie cards is his 2002 Upper Deck Prospect Premiers card.  These were really popular in the early 2000s and ran for several years.  At the time of their release, several of the rookie autographs in these sets were quite pricy including the Upton card.  B.J., or Melvin as he is now known, never quite panned out, and his cards have become very affordable.  

I am not sure what this card cost at its peak, but today it can be yours for a few dollars....

There are some great names in this set if you ever feel like reliving the "top" prospects from this era.  Khalil Greene, Prince Fielder, Jeremy Hermida, Jeff Francis, and Zach Greinke are some of the highlights.  Some of those are actually cool....

The Upton card, the other card in the set do too, has one of those weird Upper Deck signed index card looking things.  I like to think of it as the forerunner to the sticker autograph, but I think it actually looks a lot better than some foiling sticker with a bunch of holograms in the background.   

Overall, a great card.  Frankly, it's hard to believe that this is now 15 years old.  I feel old now.  

A Venerable Old Card Part 49

I have done a few posts recently with 1990 Upper Deck cards, including a post on Mark Langston as an Expo, and the dilemma of how to finish off the junk wax set in the most economical route.  In the later post about finishing off the set I made mention of buying two really cheap boxes of 1990 Upper Deck.  I had a blast opening the boxes, so I picked out a card to talk about tonight and will be doing a post later in the week to talk about how I did in terms of closing out the set.

This week's card is a cool prospect from 1990......

At the time the 1990 Upper Deck set dropped Eric Anthony was one of the top prospects in the game.  Checking in with Baseball America, they had him ranked as the 8th best prospect entering the 1990 season.  He ranked behind Steve Avery, Ben McDonald, John Olerud, Juan Gonzalez, Sandy Alomar Jr., Kiki Jones (who?), and Todd Zeile.  Some of those players ended up having pretty good careers.  While Eric Anthony ranked behind a few other big name prospects on the field, he was pretty popular in the world of middle school baseball card collectors.  

Ken Griffey Jr. cards ruled the hallways of my middle school.  Mark McGwire and Cal Ripken types were also pretty popular, but Eric Anthony cards were probably in that neighborhood for at least a year.  Without much Major League experience much of his hype was driven by his Minor League performance.

In the two seasons leading up to his Major League debut Anthony had hit 29 home runs with Asheville in 1988 and a combined 31 in 1989 between Columbus, Tucson, and the Astros.   At the time of Anthony's debut the team had a young Craig Biggio and would pick up Bagwell in a trade with the Red Sox, yet neither one seemed to touch Anthony's star in the early 1990s.  

Fans raved about his talent.  Check out the back of this Upper Deck card.....

home runs, strong throwing arm, Triple Crowns....Sounds like a pretty good prospect.  Add in the fact that Anthony was an impressive player to watch in person.  His power was incredible and there were a lot of no doubt home runs in those early years of his career.  

In the end Anthony's career did not live up to the hype.  He played a total of nine seasons with the Astros, Mariners, Reds, Rockies, and Dodgers.  He started two seasons with the Astros in 1992 and 1993, but the rest of his time in the Majors was spent as a fourth outfielder.  At the end of his career he had 78 home runs with a .231/.305/.397 slash line.  

A Venerable Old Card Part 48

I am basing a post off another episode of the Wax Ecstatic podcast.  It's one of my favorite ways to entertain myself while I am out running or walking at night, or driving to work in the morning.  I know a bunch of other bloggers have giving the podcast a shout out in posts, or follow along with its Twitter feed.  If you haven't checked out Wax Ecstatic yet click on the links and give it a chance.

This week's episode of the podcast talked about Minor League cards which are near and dear to me.  Most of the Minor League cards that I have talked about over the years have focused team issued sets.  This podcast episode spent a lot of time talking about some of the Minor League card issues that were available nationwide in the early 1990s.

One of the sets that got a little love in the podcast was the 1991 Line Drive Minor League set which is one of my favorite Minor League sets.  I have actually picked these cards in more recent years just for fun since the boxes are out there for next to nothing.  As a 1990s baseball fan there are so many great names in these sets.  One of my favorites in the Line Drive set is former Cardinals outfielder, also a former NFL defensive back with the Atlanta Falcons, Brian Jordan.  

Jordan played for the Cardinals during some lean years in the early 1990s.  The Cardinals actually paid him at some point not to play football anymore and he quickly became one of my favorites.  Not Ray Lankford favorite, but easily top two or three players after Ray.  I have a few really nice Jordan cards floating around the collection, but I really enjoyed finding a Louisville Cardinals card of him.  I have a bunch of 1980s Cardinals Minor League sets, but I mainly bought those for the Lankford cards.  I didn't really do anything with Cardinals Minor League cards again until the late 1990s when the team drafted J.D. Drew.  

Best part about the Jordan Louisville Cardinals card is the fact that I actually got to watch Jordan play for the Louisville Cardinals one summer on a family vacation.  I cannot remember where we were actually going for vacation, maybe D.C.?, but we stopped for the night in Louisville and checked out a Redbirds game.  

There were a couple Louisville Redbirds on the roster who ended up with the Cardinals, but Jordan was easily the best player on this roster.  Jordan became a full time player for the Cardinals in 1995 and had his best years during the 1996 and 1998 seasons.  If you look at his career stats, 1998 was his career best year, but it was hard to ignore his contributions to the 1996 team which came within a game of the World Series.  

Best memory of that year was his series clinching home run off of Trevor Hoffman in Game 3 of the National League Division Series which ended up being the series clinching hit....

He also had a huge home run in Game 4 of the NLCS that year against the Braves.  Greg McMichael had a rough game between a Dmitri Young triple (seriously) and this Jordan home run.   

Even if the card isn't fancy, nor shiny, it still brings back some good memories of one of my favorite 1990s Cardinals players.  

A Venerable Old Card Part 47

A year ago I picked up a cool book about the Carolina League while I was on a field trip with my students at Old Salem which was a Moravian settlement that later turned into part of modern day Winston-Salem.  The book has gotten me interested in some of the older Carolina League players including some of the Durham Bulls players from the 40s, 50s, and 60s.  I have spent time talking about some of the superstars from those Bulls teams in past posts over the years, but haven't really gotten into some of the other players.  

Tonight I am venturing out beyond Joe Morgan and Rusty Staub to the time the Bulls were a Detroit Tigers affiliate.  That was from 1948 through 1961, some good players came through town.  One of the better players to venture through during the later years of the Bulls affiliation with the Tigers was a former inmate at the Ohio State Reformatory.  

Its where Shawshank Redemption was filmed, I know you read my blog for the movie factoids.....

So, in 1959 after getting out on parole Gates Brown landed a contract with the Tigers.  Brown had several teams interested in signing him, but landed in Detroit because of the short right field in Tiger Stadium.  A year later he ended up with the Durham Bulls where he hit .324/.408/.519 with 33 stolen bases, 15 home runs, 3 triples, and 33 doubles.  

By 1963, Gates Brown made the Tigers roster and served as a fourth outfielder off the bench.  He was an excellent pinch hitter.  His best year by far was 1968 when he hit .370/.442/.685 and helped the Tigers win the World Series against my Cardinals.  

As a Bulls fan I decided to find a Gates Brown card for my collection.  He doesn't have any an autographs, so I figured I would go for the 1968 Topps card of the Tigers outfielder....

Love that burlap bag look on this set.  This is also the design for this year's Heritage set.  Truth be told, burlap bags are for potatoes, not for baseball cards.  While it's not my favorite old Topps design there are plenty of great cards in the 1968 set that the aesthetics get overlooked a bit.  While the Gates Brown card is no Nolan Ryan rookie card, still a sweet card for Durham Bulls fans.  

A Venerable Old Card Part 46

It's February and I live in North Carolina.  Not only do I live in North Carolina, but I can drive thirty minutes from my house and be on the campuses of three schools that have won a combined 12 National Championships in basketball.  Yet, I am not really feeling the whole basketball thing right now.  My team is having a disastrous season with no chance of making the NCAA tournament, although they could win the ACC Tournament, but that is just not going to happen.....

I have started to dig deep into the card collection.  Namely, I have been sorting out all sorts of late 1980s and 1990s baseball card sets.  The whole decade of the 1990s, not really just the later parts.  It's amazing how many cards I amassed during this time.  There are sets that I thought were surely complete in my collection, but after further review they are missing cards.  There are other sets that are complete and after sorting out the boxes of cards I have found that I have several copies of certain sets.  

The most ridiculous thing that I found in this sorting was the fact that I owned something like 30 copies of a certain Edgar Renteria card.  I have no idea how all of these cards got into my collection.  I hate these types of Ebay listing and avoid them like the plague.....

Hate it, hate it, hate it.  What does someone do with 50 copies of one card?  I give cards away to kids at work and I also wallpaper the door of my classroom with duplicate baseball cards.....

If you have never figured out what I do for a living, here it is......

So, what card do I have 30 copies of?  This card is cool, but not 30 copies cool....

I am a huge fan of this set, so my first thought is that I might have opened that many packs of these cards back when I was in college.  However, after checking out the rest of the box that I had this card in, I have one other complete set of Skybox EX-2001 cards, but I do not have more than 5 of any other card.  Seems doubtful that I pulled these out of packs, even with some sort of odd poor packaging, not buying it.  

At this point I have I have moved on from where these came from and shifted to what should happen to this stack of Edgar cards. One thought is to re-wallpaper my door with baseball cards using Edgar.  Currently it is covered in basketball players who are having a bad season...

revisit the first paragraph of this post to review my thoughts on the matter....

I am not sure if 30 cards is enough Edgars to cover the space on the door.  Thinking of someway to also feature the back of the card as well as the front of the card.....

Pretty sure that my co-workers and students would love to check out Edgar's stats from 1997 while walking through my door.  The Marlins did win the World Series that year and Edgar did have a walk off Series winning hit.  Perhaps I could fit a small video screen into one of the windows on my door to provide this video......

playing on a loop.  Would it be distracting?  Yes.  Would everyone stop and stare at the door?  Yes.  At this point I am going to get a roll of Scotch tape, my stack of Skybox EX Edgar cards I try to do something cool with them.  I will let you know how it turns out, maybe it will work, or maybe I will just hand each one of my students an Edgar card and tell them to use it as a backmark.  After all, these cards are plastic....kind of old school too to use baseball cards as bookmarks.  

A Venerable Old Card Part 43

I have really been digging the Wax Ecstatic Podcast lately.  My daughter takes good naps when I bundle her up and push her around for a couple of miles in her stroller.  I enjoy the exercise and the fresh air, but I also download an episode or two of the podcast to keep me entertained along the way...

So far the podcast has covered most of the major baseball card releases from the 1980s and the early parts of the 1990s.  The most recent podcast covered the 1992 Upper Deck set and focused on the Frank Thomas base card.  All the talk about sets from my childhood has sent me back into the older sections of my collection to dig through all my favorite junk wax era cards.  

This weekend I spent a little bit of time working on sorting out my 1990 Upper Deck set.  I know it's not as good as the 1989 set, but it was the first Upper Deck set that I actually tried to put together.  The 1989 set was more of a dalliance, a few packs in hopes of Ken Griffey Jr. 

I knew that I wanted to pick out a 1990 Upper Deck card for my weekly Monday Venerable Old post, but it took me awhile to narrow the field down.  In fact, I ended up searching through my scorecards too just to see what players I saw around that time.  Since I lived in St. Louis, and the early 1990s Cardinals teams were pretty bad, I was really looking for some cool player on another team.  

Here is who I came up with.......

Mark Langston.

If you know of Mark Langston on the Expos it's probably because of the Randy Johnson trade.  I knew of Randy Johnson in 1989, but they traded him for Mark Langston.  He spent the first years of his careers on the Mariners, who were terrible, and all he did was strike out a ton of batters every year.  My house had a subscription to the Post Dispatch and I liked that League Leader section underneath the standings.  I was really there to check out Vince Coleman's stolen base totals most days, make sure Raines and Juan Samuel weren't going to catch him, but I also perused the other players and stats on there....

Langston struck out 204 in 1984, 245 in 1986, 262 in 1987, and 235 in 1988.  He did not pitch a full season in 1985, but he basically had 1,000 strikeouts in a little more than 4 seasons with the Mariners.  He was a huge get for the Expos at the time and I went to one of his first games as an Expo.

Langston did not disappoint....

pitching a shutout against the Cardinals and Jose DeLeon.  

The 1989 Expos ended up finishing 4th in the National League East behind the Cubs, Mets, and Cardinals, but it had nothing to do with Langston who was excellent in his brief time north of the border.  Stats were nice....

with an ERA just above 2, almost a strikeout per inning, and a WAR of almost 5 in just 24 starts.  Also good for an ERA+ of 148.  After the season Langston left for the Angels, where he pitched for 8 years before short stints with the Padres and Angels.  

I actually ran into Langston 8 years later on my 21st birthday when I drove to St. Louis from college to see a Cardinals/Padres game.  It's the third home run on the video, just 20 seconds in....

A Venerable Old Card Part 41

The Cardinals had a rough year in 1990.  There were several players who had nice seasons.  Willie McGee won the National League batting title and Vince Coleman stole 77 bases to lead the National League for his sixth straight season in that category.  Ozzie Smith was still a force on defense.  Pedro Guerrero, many forget he ended his career with the Cardinals, had a decent season just not a lot of power left in his bat.

Hall of Fame manager Whitey Herzog quit his manager's post in the middle of the year, was briefly replaced by Red Schoendienst, who eventually gave way for a permanent manager in the person of Joe Torre.  The vets lost playing time in favor of young players like Ray Lankford, Geronimo Pena, Bernard Gilkey, Felix Jose, and Todd Zeile.

Lankford turned out to be the best of that group, but Zeile was actually a much more highly regarded prospect.  Hard to believe, but Zeile was actually ranked as a Top 10 prospect entering the 1990 season by Baseball America.

Kiki Jones?

The Cardinals actually had four players on the Top 100 with Zeile, Lankford (19), John Ericks (32), and Brian Jordan (98).  By the end of the year the team ended up with Felix Jose (54) who was in the Willie McGee trade with the A's.

Zeile was a big deal with Cardinals fans when he first came up at the end of the 1989 season and there were some pretty high hopes for him after he took over the starting catchers job in 1990.  The Cardinals even let Tony Pena walk to give him the starting catcher's job.

As a baseball card loving middle schooler there living in St. Louis Zeile cards were really popular.  There are a bunch of them, but his 1990 Topps cards had to be the most popular.  I pulled my first copy out of a pack of cards from the Webster Groves Ben Franklin.....

Love the Future Stars label at the bottom of the card.  This card was not as cool as a Ken Griffey Jr. card, but was probably easily the most popular current Cardinals card at this point in time.  For a team that was really lacking star power, Zeile offered hope.  Plus, as a card collector, it's always nice when one of those really good players is on your team.  Makes opening the packs of cards a little bit more fun.  

This is my actual original Zeile card which had one glaring problem, which is why I know this is the original card.....

The faded back was a crusher at the time I pulled this card.  Sure, the back is a little off center too, but the faded ink always really pissed me off.  Luckily the angry feeling did not last too long.  That and the card is worth about $0.02.  I am pretty sure that there are five of these in my card closet.  

Ultimately Zeile became sort of a scapegoat for Cardinals fans in the mid 1990s.  He never hit for the power that was promised, he was moved from catcher to third to first, and had some pretty rough years.  Eventually he was traded to the Cubs in the middle of 1995 and then wandered the league for the better part of a decade playing for the Phillies, Orioles, Dodgers, Marlins, Rangers, Mets, Rockies, Yankees, and Expos.  

A Venerable Old Card Part 38

In June of 1998 the Cardinals made Florida State outfielder J.D. Drew their first round pick.  The guy had been drafted by the Phillies the previous summer, but refused to sign because the team would not give him some ridiculous amount of money to sign.  He re-entered the draft and he fell to the Cardinals with the fifth pick behind Pat Burrell, Mark Mulder, Corey Patterson, and Jeff Austin.  It took Drew half of a summer to blow through the Cardinals Minor League system and reach the Majors.

Drew was supposed to be the next Micky Mantle or something like that.  In 36 at bats with the Cardinals in 1998 he had a slash line of .417/.463/.972 with 5 home runs, a triple, and 3 doubles.  The hype heading into the 1999 season was unreal.  Drew also started to appear on baseball cards during the fall of 1998.  They were slightly crazy.

There were several popular cards, but my favorite was his 1998 Fleer Update.

Loved the 1990s Fleer cards.  Borderless, nice pictures, etc.  The Fleer Update set was only sold as a complete set.  I bought my first copy of the set at some point during the fall of 1998 at a small card show at the mall in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.  It was kind of a small pathetic show, but it was really about all that little town had in the way of decent baseball cards.  There was a card shop in the town, but the owner was an ass.  I don't remember how much I paid for the set at the time, but I am pretty sure it's way more than what it sells for now.....

Shipping costs more than the set....

Anyway, I was pretty sure that J.D. Drew was going to be awesome so at some point that fall I decided to try to find another copy of the set.  Probably not a great idea around St. Louis since half of the collectors in town wanted a copy of the set and I am sure most of the card shops in the area added a little bit extra onto the price.

Here's a look at the back of the card before I tell you what became of my two 1998 Fleer Update sets....

I have always loved the backs of the 1998 Fleer cards.  Stats and the little bio line is cool, but I like the jersey background and color picture of the player on the side.  Nice touch.  

So, out of the two sets I originally owned, I trade one to a junior high kid I used to mentor in the summers back in college.  He had a few cool Ray Lankford cards, so what equals a bunch of quarter box cards?  A set filled with quarter box cards.  The second set, maybe the first, stayed in my collection and is still there today.  At some point about ten years ago, I decided to open the box.  Usually a huge sealed set no no, but at this point it's not like the set is ever going to be worth anything.  

While J.D. Drew just went on to be a decent right fielder who made a few fan bases angry, he was never Mickey Mantle.  Might as well take the cards out and enjoy looking at them.  

A Venerable Old Card Part 31

I have a few big boxes of parallel cards that I have assembled over the years.  A few days back I worked on sorting out some of the cards from box.  Some of the cards belong in that rare column, but many of them are cards that have hundreds, if not thousands, of print run copies.  Rather than leave a bunch of $2 cards in their own box I am sorting them into the sets from which they came.  Kind of a cool thing to do and fun to see some cool cards from the 1990s and early 2000s, even if they don't have a ton of monetary value, they have been fun to look through.

One of the odder sets of cards that seem to be floating around my box are the expansion team versions of the Cardinals cards from 1993 and 1998.  I have odd players from both years, but have the Marlins, Rockies, Diamondbacks, and Devil Rays versions of the Ray Lankford card because it's Ray Lankford.  

Here the Lankford Devil Rays card which is my Venerable Old Card for the week.....

The Devil Rays and Diamondbacks cards were available in factory sets, but there are tons of these singles floating around on sites like Ebay and COMC.  Again, these are not expensive making them a cool find if you happen to collect a 1990s player.  

A Venerable Old Card Part 29

I have a cool card this week that combines my love of the Durham Bulls with the Montreal Expos and a Topps oddball issue from the early 1970s.  Let's break that down into pieces.  Rusty Staub appeared for the Durham Bulls during the 1962 season and took home the Carolina League MVP that season.  In his first season playing professional baseball Le Grand Orange posted a .293/.429/.483 line with 23 home runs, 20 doubles, and 93 RBIs.  It was such a good season that Staub was brought up by the Colt 45s the very next season.  

Staub had a handful of good seasons in Houston, but his career took off after the team traded him to the expansion Expos in 1969.  He only played four seasons north of the border, but posted OPS+ of 166, 139, 148, and 137 during his time there.  Or think about it this way, Kris Bryant has played two seasons and has OPS+ of 135 and 149.  Staub was that good while with the Expos.  

His career seemed to trail off after his time with the Expos ended, he was still a solid player for awhile closing out his career with the Mets in the mid 1980s.  

As for the card itself, the 1970 Topps Super set is a pretty affordable considering the fact that Staub has some other oddball cards from that era that are quite pricy....

like his Topps Greatest Moments card which is ridiculously expensive.  I'd love to find one of these for my collection, but this is way too much for a Rusty Staub card.....

The Topps Super cards are much more affordable and can easily be had for less than $10.  There are a lot of these that are actually just a dollar or two, but I spent a little bit more to get a nicer copy.  The edges of the cards are rounded, but there are all kinds of crinkles, dings, and dents that show up on these cards.  

Overall, I am happy to have a cool card of an older Durham Bulls player on a cool old card.  The whole Expos thing isn't bad either.  

A Venerable Old Card Part 27

1989 was a good summer to be a Cubs fan.  The team led by Don Zimmer ended a four year run of alternating Mets and Cardinals division crowns which started in 1985 when both teams won over 100 games.  The Cubs had won the division in 1984, come within a game of the World Series, but missed out.  The Cubs took a few years to rebuild jettisoning players like Dennis Eckersley, Steve Trout, Leon Durham, Gary Matthews, and Ron Cey.

The team kept Ryne Sandberg through it all, added 1987 NL MVP Andre Dawson from the Expos, and added a good core of homegrown young players.  Daytime watchers of Cubs games on WGN were treated to the stylings of Mark Grace, Jerome Walton, Dwight Smith, Joe Girardi, Mitch Williams, and Greg Maddux.  

The Cubs won 93 games that summer leaving the Mets 6 games behind and the Cardinals 7 games behind.  The team ran into the Giants in the National League Championship Series and promptly lost 4 games to 1, but the future seemed bright for the Cubs.  

One of the brighter young stars on the 1989 Cubs was NL Rookie of the Year Winner Jerome Walton.  Amongst kids in middle school who collected baseball cards he was awesome, second on the food chain behind the Ken Griffey Jr. Upper Deck card.  

My favorite Jerome Walton card was his 1989 Topps Traded card.  Most of the summer was spent in search of his Fleer card, but that was left in the dust once the traded set came out later in the year.  I have a few of these cards in my collection.  The 6th grade version of me was stock piling them for whatever reason.  

I still love this card.  The 1989 Topps set is absolutely worthless and can be bought in bulk for next to nothing, but I still flip through these a few times a year.  Topps used this design a year or two ago for the mini insert set in the packs of base cards.  I was a little peeved that they cut off the white border, but I still collected them.  

I am curious what this card actually sold for in hobby stores back in 1989.  As a middle school kid, my valuation of the card was something like this: No I won't trade Will Clark, Bo Jackson, or Jose Canseco for Jerome Walton, but I would give you a Bobby Bonilla or Wally Joyner.  Don't knock late 1980s Wally Joyner.  

I spent a few minutes actually looking up what Jerome Walton did to win the Rookie of the Year Award in 1989.  Why didn't Dwight Smith win the award that year?  Clearly not really into looking too much into the stats back then.....

Plus, Dwight Smith sung the National Anthem a few times before Cubs games.  Greg Harris looks like a pretty solid choice too and Andy Benes only played two months and his WAR wasn't far behind Jerome's.  Perhaps all of the middle school kids in St Louis County should have been all over this card instead....

A Venerable Old Card Part 26

"I KNOW IT WAS YOU WILSON.  YOU BROKE MY HEART.  YOU BROKE MY HEART!"   -Michael Corleone 

I was doing a little straightening out with a few boxes this past week when I  ran into a few old Bowman autographs from the early 2000s.  Amongst the stack of graphs were a few of the 2002 Bowman Futures Game signed jerseys.  These were really sweet cards back in the day, with some good prospect names from the time, but the cards have generally aged poorly.  

A few years back when Ryan Ludwick was on the Cardinals I had scooped up quite a few of these cards.  The signatures on the cards have rubbed off due to the finish on the front of the cards.  A few of my other Bowman autographs from this set have faired a little better including the signature of one time Durham Bull Wilson Betemit.  

The two loops at the end of his signature has had a little fading, but this is a pretty nice card still.  The backs of these cards are also pretty nice looking.  Topps used the format they had used on the relic cards in the Topps HD set in 2001 which featured clear backings letting the front and back of the relic been seen.  Kind of a cool look that Topps stopped using sometime after the mid 2000s....

I bought this card before Wilson Betemit was on the Bulls and the card has remained in my collection for that reason.  Although, somewhat reluctantly.  While he was in Durham in 2014, Betemit served as the teams utility player.  Wilson also managed to secure a spot in the Triple A All-Star Game which was played at the Durham Bulls Athletic Park that summer.   Over the course of the season Wilson Betemit ended up pacing the Bulls in home runs and lead them to within a game of the International League Championship.  

So, what was wrong with Wilson's time as a Bulls player?  This.  

Always a little disappointing to see players with your favorite teams end their seasons with a suspension.  In the case of Wilson, it was also pretty much the end of his career at the age of 32.  Even if he had failed to reach the Majors again, there are plenty of veterans who hang out in Triple A and do quite well.  Wilson could have made a nice Dan Johnson type of player for a few years, but I guess not.  

If I have a Kip Wells card because he was on the Cardinals, I suppose I can have a Wilson Betemit card because he was on the Durham Bulls.