Along the way I went to plenty of Cardinals games, watched plenty of ESPN highlights before school, and added a few baseball cards to the collection. A few.
Two of my newest cards are from the 2018 Topps Snapshots set and both feature a player from the 1990s. Both top prospects, but from opposite ends of the decade.
First up is John Olerud. His rookie cards came in 1990, pretty sure I once spent half an hour trying to trade for his Score card. I cannot go back and ask the middle school version of me why this card was so great, but here is a guess:
1. The guy was in the Minors for 5 minutes. Actually, it was not even that long, Olerud never played a game in the Minors until the very end of his career. It was an incredible accomplishment at the time.
2. He wore a batting helmet in the field, which had to be a first. Middle school me did not care about Dick Allen, or the fact that he actually wore a fielding helmet on defense before Olerud.
3. OF-P designation on Olerud's Score card had never been seen before.
4. The Blue Jays were a good 1990s team and I liked them more than A's at that time.
Welp, thirty years later I still kind of dig Olerud. I forgive him for playing for the late 1990s Mets since he was traded there and was off the team before 2000. He is not a Hall of Famer, but I always think of him and Will Clark as being sort of similar. Clark had more power, Olerud hit for a better average and played better defense.
Will Clark ended up on the Cardinals, Olerud did not. Here is the new card.....
Why wasn't this picture ever on a Topps card back in the early 1990s? Love the picture with the polyester Blue Jays uniform. The Snapshot cards are really simple designs, so the picture is really what stands out on the card. The bottom name border on these cards is a little odd. I picked up a David Eckstein card from this set awhile ago, and when I first looked at that blue border, I thought I had received a damaged card for about half a minute. Still gets when I look at these....
Last card comes from a player from the late 1990s. More important player in my sphere of baseball during this time in my life. Rick Ankiel was supposed to be the next ace pitcher in the Major Leagues. Sure, the Cardinals had Mark McGwire, but the prospect duo of Ankiel and J.D. Drew were like going to end up being Mickey Mantle and Steve Carlton. Well, probably.
I loved my 1999 Fleer Update Rick Ankiel card.
Both were good players, but nobody turned into Mickey Mantle or J.D. Drew. Drew was a good right fielder for the better part of a decade with the Cardinals, Braves, Dodgers, and Red Sox. Ankiel developed the yips, went down to the Minors as a pitchers, had Tommy John, made it back to the Majors as a pitcher, quit to become an outfielder, and made it all the way back up.
Here's the new Ankiel card.
There have been several Ankiel cards this year, but this might be my favorite. Most of the other Ankiel cards in Topps products this year have featured him as a hitter. While his career as an outfielder was much longer than his time as a pitcher, I liked Ankiel better as a pitcher. This is obviously a picture from early in his career, looks like a little kid.
