The Never-Ending School Year and Retail Baseball Cards

My last school year ended midday on a Thursday afternoon last month. It was my last day at the school I have worked at for the past ten years. It was time for something different and new challenges. More importantly, something a little closer to my house. 

After moving a minivan load of books over to my new school, I went home to start my summer vacation. I was really tired at the end of the day, so I think I ended up going to bed around 9. A few hours later my alarm went off. I woke up, took a shower and got dressed, and drove into work. 

It was Friday. The first day of my new school year and my new school.  

My summer vacation was measured in hours this year rather than days or weeks. My last actual vacation day was on April 14th, which is a long time ago for someone who has worked the same schedule for the past 15 years. I teach for roughly nine weeks starting at the end of July and take three weeks off at the end. Multiply the schedule times four and you've got a complete school year.  

I am about to enter my fifth straight month of teaching with no significant break, which is a lot in my world. Even if you are on a traditional calendar, it's only four months between the beginning of the first day and Thanksgiving break.  

It has been a long time.    

There are a lot of little things I have been doing to cope with the extended workload. I have been trying to get more sleep, packing some good lunches, and getting extra fresh air. In addition, I have also been trying to be intentional about setting aside time to work on my baseball cards. Some of that time has been spent sorting out cards......

I am mostly trying to organize my single cards that are not attached to a set, or find the last few cards needed to complete some of the more recent near-sets that I have assembled. I have also been working on building a few new sets, and also opening up some retail packs. My most recent goal has been to complete the Topps Series 2 set.  It feels like a throwback to childhood when I bought a few packs of cards and spent a chunk of the spring and summer trying to assemble a complete set of Topps cards. 

I have been helped out along the way by a few Target gift cards which I received at the end of last year. It also doesn't hurt that my new school is located in the middle of a large retail area. Think of a large box store and there is probably one within five to ten minutes of my classroom.  

Here are two of the retail blaster boxes that I have picked up over the past few months.  

 

I thought I would share out a few of my favorite cards I picked up along the way.  

I had originally set out to collect Topps Series 2 with retail packs slowly over the first quarter of the year. I reached the goal in half a quarter, but was greatly aided by having two students at my previous school gift me retail blasters on the way out the door.  I used my gift certificates to buy two more Series 2 retail boxes. I have purchased one Topps Series 2 Blaster with my own money.  

Five boxes of Topps Series 2, one small COMC order, and I am done.  

My favorite card out of the base set is the Adam Wainwright and Yadier Molina combo card. 

They have only been playing together since 2006. Not sure why it took this long for Wainwright and Molina to appear on a baseball card together before this year. I know I am really bias, but I hate that there is a checklist on the back. 

Yes, Blake Snell is card 414, but give me some information about Yadier Molina and Adam Wainwright. If nothing else, just give me a photo of the Carlos Beltran strikeout at the end of the 2006 National League Championship Series.  

Moving on.

The Topps Series 2 boxes all come with a batting helmet card. They look a lot like the 2007 Sweet Spot autograph cards, but the helmet is made out of metal rather than plastic.  I pulled two different Cubs batting helmets.  

These are actually really nice for manufactured relics. There is a Goldschmidt and Arenado card in this set, so I am going to go ahead and add those to my Ebay watch list. They will be sitting there until I can find them for a few dollars.  

I also pulled a Joey Votto Home Field Advantage card.  

I love the plate of chili in the bottom corner. I don't eat chili, but it's the sort of local food reference that Topps should have put onto the Yadier Molina card. I needed some toasted raviolis or cans of mass-produced beer.  

More cards, but only the highlights.    

I bought a few packs of Donruss. Please, do not repeat my mistake. They are terrible, but I did get a Matt Manning autograph. If Matt Manning's arm does not fall off, I think he will be a good pitcher. Unfortunately, Matt Manning's arm is half-way off already.  

That's quite the signature.  

I also bought a few packs of Topps Gallery.  

This set is not nearly as good as it was in the 1990s, but I did land an autograph of Giants catching prospect Joey Bart. Pretty good pull for a retail pack of cards.  

Next up, a box of USA Baseball cards. I do not love the regular MLB cards of Panini, but ruining the USA Baseball card set is too far.  

Athlete Development Program?

National Team Development Program?  

What happened to the College National Team?  

According to the internet, the guy on the left is a freshman in high school. Not college, high school. Pretty wild having baseball cards, but not being able to drive.  The guy on the right is a senior in high school and committed to play college baseball at Alabama. At least he can drive himself to school.  

My two relic cards.

Yes, they are both in high school as well. 

The player on the left is a sophomore in high school.  

The player on the right is a junior in high school and committed to play at UCLA in college.  

Still wild to think that Panini is making baseball cards of high school kids.  

In ten years, one of these guys is going to be working an office job and give out his Panini baseball cards rather than a business card. 

Did I mention that my new classroom has a view of a Walgreens?

It came in handy the one day. Horrible headache. I just walked across the street and picked up some Advil and a few packs of Gypsy Queen. Felt much better afterwards.  

Gypsy Queen was decent. Similar to Gallery, this product has seen better days. I pulled a Jose Devers autograph out of a pack. Any retail autograph is a win.  

That brings me to my last retail product, which is easily the best.  

This is from the 2021 Topps Chrome Anniversary set. Which was it released in the middle of 2022?  I don't know. Do we need another set that borrows the design from the 1952 Topps set? Yes, we do if this is what the cards are going to look like.  

Here are my shiny, wavy, and colored cards I pulled out of my box.  

This is where my post veers from a bunch of cards that I pulled out of retail packs and into a future project.  

I really like this set and had contemplated printing off a checklist and tracking down all the cards. However, it has 700 cards and feels like it would take a ton of time and money to assemble. Instead, I am going to track down some of the Cardinals and Durham Bulls players in the set.  

My first former Bulls player arrived in the mail a few days back...... 

The autographs are not exactly cheap, but there are only three Cardinals and three Rays autographs. Well, I am now down to two Rays autographs. I think that Dylan Carlson and Scott Rolen are the two most difficult and expensive.  

Anyway, that was a fun post on retail baseball cards. I still have a few more weeks until I get a few weeks off. Maybe there will be another retail baseball card post or two along the way.  

Set Appreciation Post #10 - 1995 Emotion XL

The local card shop scene in Raleigh is pretty weak.  There is a card shop that is attached to a gas station in one of the far northern suburbs and there is also one that has been dying shopping mall, but actually just moved to within two miles of my house.  Neither are great for different reasons.  I am not going to hold my breath that it's going to be anything great in a new location.  

About a year ago, I was in the dying mall to pick up a pair of extra slim pants for my son.  I had been sorting out some cards at the time, needed a 5,000 count box for storage, so I stopped into the card shop while I was there.  To my surprise, they had out this huge table of old boxes of cards.  Not really their thing.  As you can imagine, the mall card shop's biggest fault is their pricing, which has always been ridiculously high.  The prices on the boxes weren't terrible all things considered, but the Emotion XL box was marked at $30.  A quick search of Ebay listings told me that I had found the rare mall card shop bargain.  Shocking. 

I bought it.  

These were really cool cards back in the day, so I was pretty excited to open this box of cards.  I started opening up the packs and put a bunch of the cards up on my once award winning, now neglected,  Instagram page.  

I ended up with the complete set, but it was much more of a mixed bag than I remembered it to be.  At some point, I stopped posting pictures of the cards.  Yes, I finished up the set.  I put the completed set in a box and shoved them into my card closet.  I liken this set to an old record or CD that you bought at another point in your life.  It was great music at the time, but you can't make it through the whole thing anymore.  

Like the first half of Pearl Jam's Ten album, or almost every Nas album after Illmatic.  

So, let's take a look at the set.  Here is the base card.  

Honestly, I love the full color picture and the last name and team name on the front.  The odd frame corners are a little bit unnecessary, but it's not like they are ruining the card.  The descriptive word is what has not aged well on these cards.  Yes, it would have been awesome to see something like "'Roider" or "Juiced Up" on a Brady Anderson card, but Driving isn't actually all that bad. 

You will see bad in a minute.  Hold that thought.  

Even the pictures on the back of the card are nice.  The little sentence about the player at the top of the card is pretty fair.  The stat line is small, but kudos for mixing in things like AB/HR and OBP% in the mid 1990s.  The card stock is nice too for the mid 1990s. 

THESE ARE TERRIBLE 

Let's get these cards out of the way first.  I went through all 200 cards in the set and picked out 4 that seemed really bad in retrospect.  For more examples, some I disagree with, check out this SB Nation article which likens this set to "Gas Station Cologne".  

"The Heat"??? What does this even mean?  Bichette has a 130 point split difference between his home and road slugging percentage.  He hit almost 300 career home runs, but less than 100 of them came on the road.  I would have gone with something like "Altitude" or "Low Humidity" for his card.  

Will Clark was a pretty intense guy, but this is just stupid.  Couldn't we just get a card that says "Intense", or maybe someone could have used a thesaurus and found a synonym for the word intense.  Personally, I would have done something to reference his tradition of drinking a post game beer.  

Player nicknames aren't emotions.  Dumb.  This is post White Sox, so I would have gone with "Regressing" or maybe "Declining".  

What's dumber than using a player nickname?  

Using a state nickname.  Luckily no Cardinals players have the phrase "ShowMe" stamped on the front of their cards.  

THESE ARE NOT SO TERRIBLE

So, if you clicked on the link to the SB Nation article above, I am going to go against some of the cards that they ripped on in their write up of the Emotion set.  I am not a SB Nation reader, so I was curious about the age of the author, considering he spent a large chunk of the article ripping the Cal Ripken card.  We were born within a few years of each other, so I am going to dismiss age as a factor in his writing and just say it's ignorance in an otherwise humorous article.  

I will give an equally long rant.  

The word on the Cal Ripken word is "Class".  I am not a Cal Ripken person and I rarely write anything about him on this blog.  I agree with the SB Nation article's assertion that MLB went overboard with Cal Ripken during the mid 1990s.  However, the obsession with Ripken was somewhat warranted and necessary.  

Let's review: 

1. Fans were irked with both the players and owners after the strike in 1994.  Many of the angry fans had promised to stay away from the game.  Baseball is the worst professional sport at selling its superstar players, but they went big on them when the games resumed in 1995 for once,  Ripken was included for an important reason.    

2. Ripken's run at Lou Gehrig's consecutive game streak was the first important event that came up after the strike ended.  I am sure that if there was a player closing in on 3,000 hits, 500 home runs, or 300 wins, that would have been blown up too. 

3. Playing more than 2,000 consecutive games is a legitimately impressive record.  You have to be good enough to start.  Good enough to maintain your starting job over other players.  Healthy enough not to get injured over a 16 year period of time.  It's part talent and part luck, but it's not a record anyone is going to touch anytime soon. 

4. Tell me something bad that Cal Ripken did as a person while he was playing baseball?  ((You can't))

With that being said, as a person who watched a lot of baseball in the 1990s, it's not a stretch to say that Ripken was an important part of bringing disgruntled fans back to the game.  Yes, he was a good player.  Yes he was classy.  Ripken chasing Lou Gehrig during the 1995 season was an important hook that soothed a lot of bad feelings.  

Some other good cards.  

I am going to ignore the word "Precision", and instead focus on the fact that McGwire has a mullet in this picture.   Any McGwire card from the mid 1990s where he has a mullet is an instant winner in my book.  In fact, I am going to add that to my little note pad of future post ideas.  McGwire mullet cards.  

Manny Ramirez always had a great looking swing.  I love the look on his face in this card along with the word "Punishing" that is attached to his card.  I know he's a bit of a lightning rod, so I am not sure if/when he will get into the Hall.  Still a great player though.  

I saw this interview a few years back where someone was talking to Dennis Eckersley.  They brought up blown saves and I instantly thought he was going to start talking about the Kirk Gibson home run in the World Series.  Instead, he starts talking about this Manny Ramirez home run from 1995.  Eckersley threw him a fastball on the inside corner, catcher is not moving his glove in the clip, and Manny hit the ball halfway up the bleachers in Jacobs Field.  

Eckersley is smiling after the home run and says "Wow". 

Last one for the not so terrible section of this post.  

This card also gets torn apart on the SB Nation article, but considering Gwynn was one of the first players to use video to improve his hitting, I think it is a pretty fitting label.  Gwynn is a Hall of Famer based on his statistics, but he's also a very important innovator.  Where would baseball be today without him watching video?  I am sure someone else would have done the same thing at some point, but Gwynn turned video into a popular practice.  

The Best Cardinals Card 

I will go with a former player instead.  The Cardinals cards are decent, but none of them really stood out.  However, you don't get many relief pitchers wearing batting helmets on baseball cards.  Yet, here we are with 1986 National League Rookie of the Year Todd Worrell.  

The Todd Worrell card is also ripped apart in the SB Nation article, but I actually like this card as a Cardinals fan who knows something about his background.  He went to tiny little Biola College, which is apparently in the middle of Los Angeles and was founded by some Presbyterian pastor back in the early 1900s.  It's not an athletic powerhouse, but a Cardinals scout went to one of their games while in town to watch another player.  Worrell played outfield and catcher for the team, but occasionally pitched, mainly as a long reliever.  He threw in the mid 90s as a college position player who didn't really work with a pitching coach.  

Obviously, Worrell did not bat often as a back of the game reliever, but he did register a triple as one of his two Major League hits.  I am sure that players like Worrell, who have experience as a position player, take batting practice every so often.  

The back of the card has the more standard pitcher photos.  I like the one in the background with him finishing his pitch.  Worrell was really tall and had this great downward motion with a low finish at the end of his delivery. 

It's not as cool as the Bob Gibson follow through, but I always thought Worrell looked different.  Max Scherzer does something really similar to this too.  

Best Durham Bulls Player

I am going to ignore the word "Cool" and just focus on the fact that this card has a sweet photo of Braves first baseman Fred McGriff.  He had not actually been on the Durham Bulls at this point in his career.  He did not appear on the Bulls until the end of his career while trying to work his way back up to the Majors with the Rays in 2004.  

McGriff ended up making to Tampa. 

That's cool.   

His career was done by the middle of July in 2004.  

That's not cool.  

Best Non-Cardinal/Non-Durham Bull 

in 1995, what was the best reason to buy some Emotion XL cards? Before Strasburg, Bryce Harper, Kris Bryant, Wander Franco, and whatever other uber prospects who were overvalued by baseball card collectors, there was Hideo Nomo.  People were crazy for his cards.  Non-mania might have been worse to some degree because he was actually pitching in the Majors at the same time people were going crazy over his cards.  I didn't go out of my way to find them, but I still ended up with a few from random sets.  

The "Twisting" tag seems a little weak, maybe "Effectively Wild" would have been better.  I like the picture on the front.  It gives you a little insight into Nomo's pitching motion, but the back is really good.  

Love the picture on the left with Nomo's back.  That's not a side view, that's likely from behind the plate.  

I don't love the description of Nomo's throwing motion as herky jerky.  He paused at two different spots during his delivery.  Lots of pitchers have used a pause mid wind-up to throw off the timing of hitters.  Currently, both Johnny Cueto and Marcus Stroman use a pause.  I believe Marichal used one back in the day.  

How Does It Compare?  

I love the photos.  I like Emotion brand concept on some of the cards, but others do not work for various reasons.  Some of the cards did not age well, others were just not very well thought out, which goes with the gist of the SB Nation article, if you read it.  

Good card stock and photos count for something, but not enough to crack the top half of the sets that I have featured on my Set Appreciation Posts.  

10. 2000 Pacific Paramount Update 

9. 2010 Topps USA Baseball  

8. 2000 UD Ionix 

7. 1995 Emotion XL 

6. 2017 Topps Heritage Minor League

5. 1986 Topps Mini League Leaders 

4. 2001 Fleer EX 

3. 1979 Kellogg's 

2. 2002 Topps Super Teams

1. 1983 Topps 

A 10 Minute Break

It's the end of the school year, and there was so much to do last week.  The hardest part was going into my classroom, packing up my stuff for the end of the year, and also having to pack up all of my students' materials.  Luckily, I had taken down most of the things that were hanging on the walls of my room, and my students have bins with the majority of their materials inside.  Made it a little easier to organize.  No desks. 

Yes, my classroom was in a trailer this year. 

This afternoon I am finishing up my report cards, and doing all sorts of paperwork.  I am not a huge fan of paperwork, but everyone has to do it.  I am jumping through the hoop, but needed to take a few minutes to do something else.

Let me share a few cards that I picked up this week.  Small additions, but happy with each of these cards. 

 My first card is a Bowman's Best autographed card of Yankees prospect T.J. Sikkema.  He's one of my sleeper prospects.  I have never seen him pitch in person, but he played at Mizzou in college and had an ERA under 2 pitching in the SEC his junior year.  That's really good, and it's in a really tough college league.  The Yankees picked him at the end of the first round last year, and he made four starts in A Ball before the end of the summer.  His ERA was under 1 in A Ball, and he averaged more than a strikeout an inning. 

This was a $3 card. 

Next. 

I like this Bowman card of White Sox prospect Andrew Vaughn.  The 1989 Bowman design caught my eye.  I saw him play while he was in college at Cal.  Vaughn played at least one year for USA Baseball, maybe it was two.  The scratches are on the sleeve.  

Next.  

I have already posted a few Brandon Lowe cards in the last two or three weeks.  This is from Topps Tribute.  Nice card, thick card stock.  

Next.  

I was not a big fan of Will Clark back in the 1980s, but Clark ended up on the Cardinals at the end of his career.  He played great.  The Cardinals made it to the National League Championship Series that season.  I have long since forgiven Will for being upset about Jose Oquendo kicking him in the crotch for sliding hard into second base.  

Anyway, this is a really nice card.  I am not collecting all of the 1985 Topps reprints, but I am trying to find most of the players connected to the Cardinals or Durham Bulls.  

Last card.   

At times, I am bothered by the mash-up of older players and modern baseball cards.  Al Kaline is well done on this Triple Threads card.  This was in the package with the Will Clark card.  I always appreciate a free baseball card, especially one this nice.  

Friday Five: Top 5 1980s Fleer Sets

We have worn the Durham Bulls and Cardinals out during the past few months, so I am going to go back to the whole baseball card thing for awhile.  You know, I started this blog as a baseball card blog, but wander off to food and Wes Anderson movies.  Back to my roots for the next few months on my weekly Friday Five posts.  This week I am focused on the 1980s Fleer products.  After carefully looking through all the Fleer sets produced in the 1980s, including Update sets, I have picked out the best of the best based on design, cool base set cards, and important rookies cards.

Sets are in numerical order by year.  Cue the music....

1982 Fleer 

This was the second Fleer set issued in the 1980s behind the error filled 1981 set.  The design was really simple with the white border, colored band, and player information in that oval thing at the bottom center of the card.  If you flip through the base set there are lots of good early eighties players in here: Nolan Ryan, Ozzie Smith, Reggie Jackson, etc.  The Brad Mills card is actually my favorite card out of the base set.  The set is really made by the most important rookie card in the product.

Not the best of the Cal Ripken rookie cards, but there are not really any bad ones.  Easily the best card in this set and the only reason that this set makes this list.  Hate to play you that way Brad Mills, but it's true.  If you do not own this set it worth it for the Ripken card alone.   If you own the Ripken card, but not the rest of the rest...Well, there's Brad Mills.  

1983 Fleer 

This was the first year that I collected cards and my first pack of baseball cards.  My first card was a Jim Smith.  The base set is pretty similar to the 1982 set in terms of photography, but the design of the card was changed up a bit.  The grey bordered cards were a little something different at the time and I still cannot recall many sets with just a grey border outside of this and the 1970 Topps.  Seriously, nothing too cool about most of the base set, but there were three pretty important rookie cards in this product......

All Hall of Famers.  My favorite of the group is the Sandberg card.  Love that blue pinstriped Cubs uniform.  This set is really affordable considering that it has three Hall of Fame rookie cards.  The cost of buying the whole set is not going to be too much more than buying three nice copies of the important rookie cards in the set.   

1984 Fleer Update

The only Update set on my list and one of the absolute best sets of the 1980s.  The cards are actually somewhat difficult to find and the set has two monster rookie in it.  My favorite card in the base set is the Pete Rose Expos card.  The all-time hits leader was briefly on the Expos during the 1984 season in between his stint with the Phillies and second go around with the Reds.  The two best cards belong to Roger Clemens and Kirby Puckett.  

Both players are in the Hall of Fame and these are their only 1984 issued cards.  Both have several rookie cards in 1985 products that are also considered rookie issues, but these are the top of the food pyramid as far as 1980s rookie cards in Fleer products.  Yes, I would put these two above the Ripken rookie card.  Finding this set is much more of a challenge than the other sets on my list and will cost considerably more money. 

1987 Fleer

The 1987 Fleer set should only be bought if you want some rookie cards of some pretty good baseball players.  There is Will Clark, Barry Larkin, Barry Bonds, and Rafael Palmeiro.  The rest of the 1987 Fleer set is rather boring.  The blue card design is pretty cool, but again it all comes down to the big rookie cards in this set.  

I am not going to get in too deep on the whole steroids thing right now, but there is a lot of Hall of Fame caliber talent in this set given how cheap it is on sites like Ebay.  If you can track down a copy the Tiffany version of this set looks really nice and rarely costs more than $30 and comes in a nice tin.  The high gloss finish is well worth the extra money.  

1989 Fleer

If I had to pick out just one base set from the 1980s Fleer products this would be it.  The design leaves a little bit to be desired, but in my opinion it offers one of the best base cards of the decade and an underrated rookie card too.  The Ripken card is one of the more iconic modern baseball cards for all the wrong reasons.  This is the unedited version of the card, but some of the edits are rare and extremely pricey.  The two rookie cards worth owning.......

The Griffey rookie card is nice and is underrated in someways, but the real prize here is the Randy Johnson rookie card which is underrated in almost everyday imaginable.  Similar to the Ripken card there are different variations of the Johnson card because of a Marlboro cigarette sign over his right shoulder.  Some cards the sign is visible, others it is blocked out by different colored boxes.  Like most things 1980s Fleer the Johnson card is not too expensive and is not too difficult to track down either.