Andriese was originally drafted by the Padres in the 2011 Draft, but was traded to the Rays during January of 2014, along with Logan Forsythe and Brad Boxberger, in exchange for Alex Torres and Jesse Hahn. Pretty good trade for the Rays. Andriese started out his time in the Rays Minor League system with the Durham Bulls. He played the entire 2014 season with the team going 11-8 with a 3.77 ERA and 129 strikeouts in 162.1 innings. His 2015 season was split between Durham and Tampa, 2016 he had a brief appearance with the Bulls, but spent almost the entire season with the Rays. Andriese has been an end of rotation starter with the Rays. With the rotation getting a little crowded this year I am guessing he might be a bullpen arm this year. Last year he pitched 10 games out the the bullpen.
Card-
Andriese does not have a ton of autographs, so I am happy to be able to post a card of him for this series of threads, but it's not like I had a ton of choices. Yes, it's a Topps base autograph that are a dime a dozen and super cheap. The card actually has a featured stat on the side that is from the Minor Leagues, but it's from his time in Lake Elsinore. Can't win them all.
A picture of Andriese pitching against the Charlotte Knights from 2014. He's the shadowy player on the mound. Is that Matt Davidson batting?
I opened a little bit of Topps Update last weekend and walked away with an obscene number of throwbacks. There were other cards in the boxes outside of the all of those cool 60s and 70s Topps cards. For this week's Friday Five I am going to work a little bit with the base set cards from the Update set. I tried to go through and pick out just the five coolest cards from the set, but that proved a fairly tough task. So, instead I am going with five cool things I found in my two boxes of Update using five(ish) cards.
5. Former Durham Bulls in the Majors
The ultimate goal of a minor league team is to graduate players to the Major Leagues. Even if they do not end up playing for the Rays in the long term, it is still cool to watch a baseball game and see somebody in there from the Bulls. This year's Topps Update set offered several Durham Bulls, but since this post is using five(ish) cards I am going to limit this section of my blog post to exactly five cards.
First, there are the normal Minor League types who get called up to the Majors and make the team. Mahtook was a high draft pick by the Rays out of LSU and Andriese was in the Brad Boxberger/Logan Forsythe trade with the Padres. Both players had been with the Bulls before this season and had proven their worth to the Rays.
Then there are a few former Durham Bulls who are good stories. Joey Butler was a career Minor Leaguer who started the year out in Durham, but spent the majority of the summer with the Rays playing well in his first extended stay in the Majors. Sometimes players like Butler can fly under the radar in the Update sets, great to see Topps get him a card.
Stephen Vogt has an All-Star card in the set. He was kind of a forgotten player with the Rays and ended up being more or less dumped in a conditional trade to the A's. Awesome to see him get a little recognition for his good play this year with a trip to the All-Star game.
and then there is this card. Yes, Travis Shaw is a nice looking prospect for the Red Sox, but Allan Dykstra is also on the card. Last summer he won the Triple A All-Star Game home run derby in Durham. He signed a minor league deal with the Rays, spent time in the Majors during April, but was released in the middle of the summer. He still has the championship belt.....
4. Former Cardinals on the All-Star Team
It was great to see Albert Pujols regain some of his power this summer, although his slash line was down across the board, and make the American League All-Star team. Shelby Miller was a really good story this year. Sure, his win-loss record was something terrible, but he still pitched well for the Braves and seems to be an important part of the team's future.
3. Current Cardinals All-Stars
I really liked these cards in the Update set. Not every team has a card like this, but I liked the idea of having a team like card show the All-Star Game representatives. Not sure why they did not just make this a straight team card instead of assigning it to a player, this is a Trevor Rosenthal card, but I still like it. These guys all got booed......
2. Jason Heyward on the Cardinals
I'm not sure if the Cardinals are going to sign Heyward. I have enjoyed watching him play this year, but this card could be just about the last wearing a Cardinals uniform, or this could be the start of a long run of cards with him in Cardinal red.
1. Rookie Cards
The best part of buying Update sets is the rookie cards. I liked the Joey Gallo and Kris Bryant cards the best. I swear that's Joey Gallo in all of that Gatorade. Pretty cool card. The Bryant card is a little simpler, but it's always nice to see a card with Wrigley Field in the background.
Last week I showed off the autographs that came out of my jumbo box. This week I am onto the base set and some parallels later in the week. For now I am sticking with the base set......
The organization and design of the 2015 base set is pretty much the same it has been for the better part of a decade. There is a base set with 200, the first 150 cards featuring established Major League players. The design is what is...it looks like a Bowman set.
The backs of the cards are typical of Bowman too. I know I do not do backs of cards often, but Bowman has a distinctive card back. The little charts, graphs, and diagrams at the bottom (what us teacher folk call text features) have changed over the years, but the three sections of text have not.....
The back half of the base set, consisting of the last 50 cards, consist of young Major League players/Major League ready prospects. Players like Jorge Soler, Joc Pederson, and Javier Baez make up this part of the Bowman set. While the quantity of players in this category included in the Bowman base set has changed from year to year, they have been included in with the veterans for almost a decade now....
The Bowman packs also feature cards in the Prospects and Prospects Chrome sets. Each of the sets is a total of 150 cards and features the same players in each set with the same card number in each of the sets. The design for the Prospects and Prospects Chrome sets is the same as the base set, but the numbering on the backs of the cards features the BP, for Bowman Prospects, and BCP for the Chrome Prospects. There are definitely some good players in this year's set......
This Willy Adames is in the Bowman Prospects set. Notice the 1st Bowman logo up in the top right hand corner of the card. I am not going to go through the Bowman Prospects set in this post and tell you everyone that I like and do not like, but I do think this set has the potential to be a pretty deep set in the long term. There is not a Bryce Harper, Strasburg, Kris Bryant mega prospect in the set, but the number of potentially good prospects in the set is still pretty impressive. Adames is one of the prospects in this set that I am high on. Over the summer I will round out the set, pick up some autographs and share a few more names from this set.....
Rodon might be one of the bigger names in this set. This is from the Bowman Chrome portion of the prospects set. He actually is scheduled to make his first start of the year this afternoon, I am typing this on Saturday afternoon, and he is clearly going to be a contributor to the White Sox this year.
Overall this set is everything that collectors should expect out of Bowman. I think there is good player selection within the prospects portion of the set. I like this set and look forward to picking up some up the rest of the cards I need to finish out the base set, prospects set, and chrome set. Of course there will be more autographs too. Before we leave......
Big shout out to Bowman for putting Durham Bulls pitcher, and Rays prospect Matt Andriese in the set. He does not have a ton of cards, not the most popular prospect in the game, but the guy works hard. Fun player to watch if you are looking for a good player to collect in this set.....
Matt Andriese is a newcomer to the Rays organization after being sent over by the Padres as part of the Alex Torres trade this off season. Last year Andriese spent a chunk of the season is Double A and also dabbled a little bit in Triple A in the Pacific Coast League. He's not highly rated in any of the major prospect publications despite being a third round pick of the Padres. Honestly, after watching him last night I kind of think that much of the return on the Torres trade was Logan Forthyse and minor league depth. Andriese has a low 90s fastball and a decent breaking ball, but I do not see him having an impact at the next level.
Matt Andriese does have a few baseball cards. In fact I made fun of his Topps Heritage Minor Leaguers card last year because the San Antonio Missions have some terrifically terrible uniforms. Nothing against Andriese. His two primary baseball cards are a Donruss Elite autograph which features him as a Padres draft pick out of UC-Riverside and the card in last year's Topps Heritage Minor League set. He does have an autograph in the Heritage Minor League set.
There is that Missions logo again. I picked this card up shortly after the trade with the Padres and I think it might have cost me $2. Maybe. There are also all the different refractors and color variations that come with a Heritage set and all of these can easily be found on both Ebay and COMC. Andriese seems like the type of player who always does well with the Rays, so $2 for an autograph is a small price to pay for a player that the Rays might be able to do something with. Maybe.
