Bear With Me

I found more retail baseball cards this past weekend. 

I think we have officially moved past the pandemic retail card craze. 

The Target next to my house had physical fights over sports cards that required police intervention during the pandemic. They pulled them from the shelves and they have not returned.  

Fighting. Over. Cards. 

So, the cards from this post came from my local Wal-Mart, which is low on my list of places to shop. I recently wrote about the Wal-Mart that is halfway between the Duke and UNC campuses. The Wal-Mart near my house is interesting for different reasons. It's the cultural intersection of suburban-dwelling transplants and old farmers who can tell you what kind tobacco was grown in your neighborhood before it was developed.  

That's for a different post.  

Unfortunately, I bought a box of Donruss, but bear with me, it does get better at some point. 

I was intrigued since the last few packs of Panini cards I opened were not actually all that bad. Baseball card money is finite, so I am usually carefully and picky about what I buy and how much I spend. I should have looked up the cards online before I handed over money for these cards.  

Here is the basic design.  

There are a lot of cubes and rectangles with different depths. Maybe it's my ADD, but I feel like my eyes are drawn away from the picture of the player and onto the design of the card. Catchy designs are good, but not when they are overwhelming and busy.  

The back is the same.  

The write-up is terrible.  

It's hard to make an argument about someone being the best in baseball history when the stat involves getting hit by pitches. Do people at Donruss know how many times the Marlins have thrown at Ronald Acuna? I bet they account for at least half the total.  

There are other disappointing aspects to this year's Donruss set beyond the base cards. The Diamond Kings cards, long-time personal favorites, now feature a background that looks like a floral sofa pattern from some 1980s living room. 

The inspiration for the background of this Jose Ramirez card?  

There are plenty of other half-assed cards also appeared in the box.  

There is some sort of 1988 Donruss redux.  

Where is the rest of the border?

Why is half of it whited-out?  

Why is the colored pattern on the border on the adjacent corners from the original?  

GET. THE. LITTLE. DETAILS. RIGHT. 

I am not even a details person and it bothers me. 

 

I saved this for last.  

Donruss included some retired Hall of Famers on their checklist, but they could not just airbrush out the logos on their uniforms. They had to take it an extra step and add trim to their jerseys. The Brooks Robinson card leaves me speechless. Ozzie?  The red trim is terrible.  

At least Panini still includes the Rated Rookie cards in Donruss.  

I managed to pull Rated Rookie cards of Vidal Brujan and Juan Yepez. I am still not sure what the Rays are going to do with Brujan. He's played well with Durham this year, but he's played all over the field. I am not sure if they are trying to turn him into a super-utility type or the Rays just do not know what to do with him. Shortstop is obviously taken for the next decade. Yepez has been excellent for the Cardinals. One of the few players who has hit well.  

Then there is this.....

Rated Prospects?  

This feels like New Coke or M&Ms filled with pretzels.  

Okay, so bear with me for a few more cards.  

As bad as the base cards are in the 2022 Donruss set, the inserts are actually pretty nice.  

I pulled two Diamond Marvel cards. I am not a comic book collector, but I like the design here merging them with a baseball card. The cards have a nice finish too. Not sure if it comes through on the scan.  

The other pleasant surprise with 2022 Donruss was the quality of Stan Musial cards. 

Who saw that coming?  

For a card with the logos airbrushed off, this is really nice. I also like the choice of using a black and white photograph versus the red, gray, and black boxes around the edge of the card. Perhaps, Panini should have used black and white photos for more cards.  

The last card is just incredible.  

Growing up in St. Louis, I have spent my whole life listening to stories about Stan Musial. I am not sure that any of them made me think of Stan as being ferocious. What attributes does Stan share with a bear?  

I am not sure, but this is pretty awesome.  

A Giant Project Update #9

I am inching closer to completing my 1964 Topps Giants set. I have a few more cards to post today, including another one of the really tough short-print. I thought I would finish this set quickly, which is not happening, but at least I still have some momentum going in tracking down these cards.  

First up.  

Roy McMillan looks really old in this picture, but he is only 34. I figured he was going to be 40.  However, he was at the end of his career.  If you have ever seen some of his other cards, much like Sparky Anderson, he just always looked old. McMillan was a long time Reds and Braves shortstop, one of the really great defensive players of the 1950s.  He made a few All-Star Games and also won a few Gold Gloves.  Not much of a hitter.  

The back of the card focuses on his standout defense. Many of these cards skew off onto player's Minor League careers, but the writer did a great job with this McMillan card to keep the focus on his fielding.  I like the action picture on the back. I wish I knew who the players was sliding into second base.  

Next up is Red Sox first baseman, Dick Stuart. This is a short-printed card in the set, but I did not think it was too tough to find.  

Dick Stuart could hit.  Dick Stuart could not field.  It's the best summation I can come up with for his career.  During his prime years with the Pirates and Red Sox, he hit 30 to 40 home runs per year. He also led all first baseman in errors almost every year he played. Red Sox pitcher Dick Raditz once suggested that he get a vanity license plate for his car that read "E-3".  

The back of the card starts out by mentioning a three home run game he had for the 1960 World Champion Pirates team. The author does manages to squeeze in a line about his Minor League career, which again is done throughout the set. That last line on the back is something. I am sure many pitchers on the Pirates and Red Sox would strongly disagree with that statement.  

Next up is a pretty good card.  

I like this portrait photo of Brooks Robinson, but it would have been nice to get something where he is fielding or standing with his glove. Although, he actually was a decent hitter at this point in his career.  Plus, the picture on the back of the card more than makes up for the photo on the front.  

Now, this is a great staged fielding photo. Outstanding. The write-up does not involve his Minor League career. Nice card, but let's get to the best card in the post.  

I will let the card do the talking here.  

The centering is off slightly going left-to-right and top-to-bottom, but the rest of the card is fairly clean. 

The back is a little yellow too, but this was a really tough card.

I know I stated in an earlier post that I thought the Mantle was going to be the biggest challenge in completing this set, but I think I completely underestimated this Koufax card. Again, it is short-printed and seems to be the toughest out of that group of cards.  

With the 4 new cards, I now have 33 out of the 60 cards needed to finish the set. I have two short-printed cards remaining with one of them being Willie Mays.  I am going to try to knock out a lot of the common cards over the next two months. More updates to come....

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

Jubilant Cards

In my hunt for a few new Durham Bulls cards last fall, I ran across a Johnny Vander Meer card that was out of the 1976 Laughlin Diamond Jubilee set.  I did not know much about the cards when I found it, just really liked the looks of the card.  

Robert Laughlin made all sorts of cards during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.  Most of his sets are drawings or cartoons.  I actually found another Laughlin card in my collection after picking up the Vander Meer.  I am not sure when I got this card exactly, but it was probably in the last couple of years.  

This is from the 1971 Laughlin World Series set.  I am sure I own this card because of Jack Coombs, who was the long time baseball coach at Duke. Their on-campus baseball stadium is named after him.  His cards are quite pricey, so I only own oddballs of him that are typically inexpensive.  

So, back to the Jubilee cards.  I liked the Vander Meer card enough that I have been watching a few of these on Ebay, COMC, and a few other places.  I actually ended up picking up two of the cards last week.  It's only a 32 card set, so maybe this will be a project that I take on for the summer.  

This is one of the cards I was most interested in finding from the set.  

This is the only Cardinals card in the set.  Seems like in the 100 years of the National League there would be some other notable accomplishment by a Cardinals player that would be worthy of a card, but this was a recent event at the time this set was made.  I get it.  

This was my second card.  Pretty cool drawing of Brooks Robinson diving to stop a ball.  I did a little research to see if this is a specific event, or just the way that Laughlin choose to draw Brooks Robinson.  The answer is.......

The correct answer is Game 5 of the 1970 World Series against the Reds.  

I like both of these cards, and am looking forward to finding the other 29 cards that I have left to complete this set.