Collecting the Durham Bulls: Curt Casali

Casali is back with the Bulls to start off the 2015 season after losing out to Bobby Wilson for the Rays backup catching gig.  He spent 30 games in the Majors last year, but only produced a .167/.268.208 line with just 3 doubles and 3 RBIs.  Casali also played 70 games in the Minors last season including 46 games with the Durham Bulls.  He only hit .237/.335/.359 with the Bulls including 13 extra base hits.  I really think it might be a good thing that Casali is spending a little bit more time in the International League this year.

Casali will probably be the starting catcher for the Bulls to start the year, but the catching position is starting to get crowded for the Rays in the upper Minors.  The Bulls are also starting out the year with catcher Luke Maile on the team and highly regarded prospect Justin O'Conner is starting out in Double A with the Montgomery Biscuits.  It will be curious to see how the playing time works out this year with the catchers.

Cardwise Casali only has two cards.  They're both autographed.  The better of the two cards comes from last year's Bowman Platinum set.....

Not a really hard, nor expensive, card to find.  I picked one of these cards up at some point last year, and cannot remember the exact amount of money I paid for the card, but it was really cheap.  There are half of dozen of these cards on Ebay right now for less than $5 and several of them cost less than $3.  His other card is a little trickier.....

because I do not own one.  What is an Onyx Platinum Elite?  I am not sure.  For $2.99 I am tempted, and that may happen one day, if I can maybe get it down to $0.99.  Maybe.  In the meantime, I am stuck with just 50% of the Curt Casali cards out on the market.  Not a terrible feeling.

Collecting the Durham Bulls: Dylan Floro

Dylan Floro was the Rays 13th round draft pick out of Cal State Fullerton in 2012.  He had great numbers in the lower minors, but did not appear on any baseball cards until last summer when he reached Double A Montgomery where he proceeded to post the worst numbers of his career.  During the 2012 and 2013 seasons Floro played for a total of three Rays affiliates and went 4-1 2.40, 2-0, 1.61, and 9-2 1.81 in those three stops for a total record of 15-3.

Notice I did not post strikeout numbers for Floro.  He is primarily a roundball pitcher, and while he can get strikeouts, 232 in 346 minor league innings, it's clearly not what he is trying to do out there on the mound.  Last season in Montgomery Floro went 11-13 in 28 starts with an ERA of 3.48.   The bad news was that he gave up 209 hits in 178.2 innings.  The good news is that only 4 of those hits left the yard.  Give me a summer of Hak Ju Lee fielding his grounders and I like his chances to have a good year for the Bulls.

As I was saying at the beginning of the post, last summer was Floro's first year in baseball card sets.  He appeared in Bowman, Bowman Chrome, and Bowman Inception.  His Bowman card is in the prospects section of the set and offers not only his rookie card, but all of those color rainbow variations to boot.  I landed a copy of his flag card which has a California flag in the background.  Pretty sweet card, easy to find, and really inexpensive.

Floor's first autographs are in the Bowman Inception and Bowman Chrome products.....

The Chrome autograph is one of those that you can get off of Ebay for $0.99 if you sit and watch the auction at the last minute.  If you don't feel like doing that they are selling for $1.50 on COMC.  There are colored variations of this Chrome autograph, but they are also inexpensive considering how much other players cost.  For example, his blue autograph out of 150 can be found for less than $10.

His best autograph is in the Bowman Inception product.  Like all Bowman product you can find this card in a variety of different colors and print runs.  I just got the plain jane Inception autograph and spent about $3 in the process.  The gold parallel is currently listed on COMC for just $5 and the green card is just $8.  Not a very expensive player to collect at all.  

#MyCardMonday

Pretty simple choice for the #MyCardMonday pick this week.  It was good to sit down and end my weekend by watching the Cardinals and Cubs play on Sunday Night Baseball.  It's great to get that first win out of the way quickly and I was happy to see Adam Wainwright have a good outing.  This week's card comes from the 2007 Topps Finest set.  Wainwright does not have a ton of different autographs, almost all of them come from early in his career, but there is a good quantity of each autograph.  Meaning it's not too difficult to find copies of these cards.  This card has a nice write up on Wainwright's Game 7 strike out of Mets outfielder Carlos Beltran which put the Cardinals in the 2006 World Series.

Collecting the Durham Bulls: Corey Brown

This is an easy shopping list and pretty inexpensive.  Corey Brown has been around for awhile and has a fair number of cards for interested collectors.  His first cards were released almost immediately after the A's used a sandwich pick (59th overall) to take the outfielder out of Oklahoma State.  There were several different autographed cards to choose from.....

The cheaper options on Brown cards come from Minor League sets like the Just Minors and Tristar products.  By cheaper I mean that you can find these cards easily for 2 to 3 dollars.  I like the Just card since he is pictured in his Oklahoma State uniform.  Brown also has an autograph in the 2007 Donruss Elite set.  Again, he is pictured in an Oklahoma State jersey.  His Tristar autograph features him on the Vancouver Canadians team.  It's better than having a blanked out card, but still I like the college baseball cards better.   Just personal opinion.  

Better option: Find a copy of Corey Brown's 2007 Bowman Chrome Autograph.  The card might cost you an extra dollar or fifty cents above the Just or Donruss autograph, but finding autographs out of the Bowman products is rarely a bad thing.  Brown's Bowman Chrome autograph is an on card signature and features a nice picture which does not really look airbrushed.  Is it?  Can't tell.  

Brown has one other Major League Baseball card release in the 2012 Topps Heritage set.  It's a prospect card featuring Brown as a member of the Nationals.  The card also features Michael Taylor, Adron Chambers, and Joe Benson.  Again, not hard to find and not expensive to buy.  This card usually costs less than fifty cents.  

Brown also has several different Minor League team issues.  He has been in the Minors since 2007 and has been in Triple A since 2010.  Much of his time has been spent with the Syracuse Chiefs, but last season was spent with the Pawtucket Red Sox.  Brown has made some brief appearances with the Nationals and Red Sox.  As a Tampa native I am sure Brown would be excited to get a chance to play for the Rays this season.  

Opening Day Mediocrity

I decided to take a test drive on the Periscope app and needed a test subject to try out.  I picked up two blasters ($9.99 each) from my local Target to use as my muse.  I am not sure I have opened more than a pack of Opening Day since 2000.  In my opinion, Opening Day is just a cheaply made rehash of the regular Topps set with a flashy flag bunting and logo on the card.  I will go ahead and walk that opinion back a little bit, but not all the way.

Essentially the base set of the Opening Day product is a rehash of the base Topps set.  Same pictures, but limited run of players.  Opening Day has been this way for years, but Topps has added a few other features to the product to improve the quality just a little bit.  I actually really like the look of the blue parallels out of the Opening Day set.  I think I said the same thing about the gold parallels in the regular set.

I like these and pulled a total of four of them out of my two Blaster boxes.  I feel like the blue border just gives the cards a little bit of a different look than the regular Opening Day cards.  The color gives it a little bit more distance from the regular Topps set.  On to the inserts.....

In past years Opening Day did not have any inserts.  I went through and looked at some of the older sets and it looks like the inserts have been in Opening Day for the last five or six years.  I guess the inserts include autographs and relic cards though I did not pull any of them.

The two most common insert sets in the Opening Day product are the Hit the Dirt and Stadium Scenes cards.  I like both inserts for the same reason: unique players.  I like Ian Kinsler, good player, but when do you see him get an insert card?  Next to never.  These Hit the Dirt inserts are pretty easy to track down and I picked up six of these cards in my packs.  Should be easy to finish off.  

The Stadium Scenes cards feature pictures by fans.  A lot of the cards seem to feature players signing autographs like the Sean Doolittle card above.  Again, there are some unique players in this set.  I saw Sean Doolittle play for UVa back in the day and have enjoyed following his career.  Cool to see him on an insert.  I also landed a Jordan Zimmerman and a cool card of Yasiel Puig and the Gateway Arch.

The rest of the insert cards seem kind of blah.  The mascot cards are back.....

Does the White Sox card even have a name?  Not sure about that.  I think Opening Day has done mascots for a few years now.  It seems that a lot of the chatter surrounding this set involves these mascot cards.  I am not sure why.  I guess it was cool once or twice, but maybe the well is running dry.

Same with the celebration cards.  Weren't these a variation in the regular Topps set?  meh and a yawn.

Last two insert sets look like copies of Upper Deck insert sets from the 2000s.

These look a lot like something out of the 2001 Upper Deck 1970s Baseball set, but that product is a lot cooler than Opening Day.  If you read the Night Owl Blog he always has posts about that set.

This looks like the holographic cards out of the 2004 Upper Deck Vintage set.  Again, the Upper Deck set is much better.

Overall this is a real hit or miss product.  I spent $20 on 22 packs, but would have probably been better served just buying one or two of the insert sets off of Ebay.  The base set is a not so nice rehash of the regular Topps base set and some of the insert sets have gotten a little long in the tooth and are missable.

Friday Five: Best 5 Sets From 1990

The last couple of Friday Five posts were focused on 1980s cards, but it starts to get a little bit more complicated after that decade.  The 90s brought in a boom of new products, some good and some not so good, which makes it harder to break down sets by brand.  I could have continued that same line of posts and just used the base sets for Fleer, Donruss, Upper Deck, and Topps, but there are all sorts of complications even within that.  

So, instead I am going to spend my Friday's during this baseball season counting down the best five sets from each year.  And by best five I am not speaking of value, although it's a consideration, same with design, player selection, and all sorts of other factors.  Basically, I am looking through boxes of cards for the year and pulling out cards from five sets I really like....Deal with it.  

The card sets are ranked in order from least liked to best liked.  1990 there were still a reasonable number of cards sets.  Besides the five sets listed below I also considered: Fleer Update, Topps Traded, Score, Score Rookie/Traded, and Donruss The Rookies.  Your consolation trophy is in the mail....

 5.  Donruss- This card design is a mixture of Eddie Van Halen's guitar and one of those Jasper Johns drizzle paintings.  You won't see Donruss on this list for a while after this one, because in my opinion, the products went drastically down hill after this one.  The 1990 Donruss set still had a similar feel to the 1988 plaids and the 1989 black borders.  It was the largest Donruss set up to that point, over 700 cards, but still kept a lot of the trademark Donruss features like the Diamond Kings and Rated Rookies subsets.  There were also a ton of minor errors in this set, which people swore were going to be worth something in 1990, but are actually not worth much of anything today.

Can we also talk about the smell of the cards?  There are people that swear by certain smells in certain sets.  I am not really too sensitive to the smells that come out of packs of cards, but for some reason this set hits my sense of smell.  It always has.   Don't think that I ran around huffing Scotch Guard or something as a middle schooler, but if you blindfolded me and asked me to identify a 1990 Donruss card I would know the smell anywhere.  Not a bad smell, not good, it's just there....

4. Fleer- Not as interesting design wise as the Donruss set, but there are a bunch of different things I like about the Fleer set.  First, there are a bunch of good rookies in the set.  All of these sets actually have them: Sosa, Thomas, Larry Walker, and Juan Gonzalez.  Others are unique to Fleer, like the Moises Alou rookie.....

The set also had some of the staples of 1980s Fleer sets like the SuperStar cards.  The Players of the Decade inset set is also a really nice touch in this set.  Throw in the fact that Fleer did a little better job of editing their set and I put it just ahead of the Donruss set.  

3. Topps- I like the design.  Seriously, this seems like a take or leave kind of year.  This set has a bunch of the usual 1990 rookie cards, Frank Thomas and Sammy Sosa, but also has a few other really cool things going for it too.  The set has the normal 792 cards you would expect to see out of this era of Topps set, but the best part of this set is the Nolan Ryan subset....

There is one Ryan card for each of the teams that he played for over his career.  This set is really inexpensive and probably worth it for the Nolan Ryan cards alone.  I am pretty sure this is the cheapest Topps set you can possibly find....

2.  Upper Deck- I am a huge fan of the Upper Deck set.  It was still pretty much alone in being a high end set in 1990 and it's not all that different from the 1989 set.  Same card stock, similar elements in the design, but it just missed out on the rookie cards.  I am not sure I can really fault Upper Deck for the fact that Ray Lankford and Sammy Sosa did not pan out quite the same way as Ken Griffey Jr.  Believe me, I would love it if Ray Lankford had that sort of card value.  The backs of the cards are really awesome too.....

The design was honestly pretty simple and photography was really nice.  Not a lot of frills and extras here, but you do get a lot of really nice baseball cards.  Again, like the Topps set, the Upper Deck set is extremely cheap and inexpensive to pick up.  I have thought about picking up a couple of cheap boxes off of Ebay and opening them up just for fun.  Perhaps......

1.  Leaf- Notice on the Upper Deck write up I said that it was almost the only premier baseball card product released in 1990.  Donruss created this product to directly compete with Upper Deck that summer.  Foil packaging, better card stock, and color photos on the front and back.  Leaf was supposed to be the rival of Upper Deck and it actually did one better than that.  If I was going to tell you to buy one set from the 1990 set this would be the one.  While the rookies in the set are essentially the same names as the other 1990s products, Walker, Thomas, and Sammy Sosa, the cards out of this set have been far more popular and desired by collectors.  Easily the best set from 1990.

Back to the DAP

Back in January I made a trip to the original Durham Athletic Park to look around the outside of the stadium.  I vowed to take in a game at the stadium this year and fulfilled my promise yesterday when I attended the NC Central/Virginia State baseball game.  I was really interested to see the inside of the stadium and to see how the park played during an actual game.  It was really cool.

I love the entrance to the stadium.  I imagined it to be much bigger from the movie, but it's entry way is really unique with the round tower out in front of the stadium.  I had explored most of the outside of the stadium on my January trip and got to the game a few minutes early to check out the inside of the DAP.  However, there was not a lot of spaces to really explore.

This is the view fans have when they walk through the entrance to the seating area of the Durham Athletic Park.  The space is really simple, but in a good way.  There aren't cup holders or fancy gimmicks in the seats of this park, which was built in 1940.  Instead fans can find a simple set of benches and seats which offered a nice shaded view of the field.  The entire grandstand is protected by a netting, which is probably a good thing since you are really close to the field.

In my opinion, the two most unique features of the stadium are the outfield configuration in right field and the design of the grandstand.  Let's start with the grandstand.  In the movie Bull Durham, most people are familiar with the green and gold pattern of the grandstand at the Durham Athletic Park.

I looked around for older pictures of the stadium, and while the color of the wall has changed several times over the years, the unique pattern and design of the grandstand remains the same.  Currently it is painted a rust color with a goldfish, yellow color framing the rectangular patterns.

You will notice in the background behind Kevin Costner the on-deck circles are kind of in the distance and in the middle of nowhere.  The dugouts are down the line a bit, similar to Fenway, and the players tend to stand in their own places and call it the on deck circle.  NC Central outfielder Eric Kimber drifted way down the line and was standing really close to home plate while waiting his turn to bat.

The insides of the dugout also look a little bit limited in space.  Both teams seemed to use the top of the dugout as a storage area for gloves, helmets, baseballs, and bottles.

Also notice that the radio both behind home plate.  Looks a little bit like Dodger Stadium before they remodeled it, but the Durham Athletic Park is actually older than that stadium.  Which brings us to right field.  The fence down the right field line is only 290 feet.  The wall down the line is taller and the power alley is not labeled, but it is clearly the place to hit the ball in the stadium.  Here's what the right field corner looks like now.....

and who could forget this scene from Bull Durham which shows what the right field area looked like while the Durham Bulls were using the park.....

The stadium is built into a city block and the buildings in the movie are clearly the same.  In fact, I think that the only thing that has really changed in the space is that the wall has gone from billboards to some sort of chain linked fence.  NC Central actually took advantage of the short porch to right during the game and connected for two home runs.  

So, let's get to the game.  Both of these teams play in the MAEC, which is Division I.  Central has a newer baseball program, but I was really impressed by the team.  I did a little bit of pre-scouting and had a few players I was watching for in the game.  I missed one of the pitchers, but was impressed by everyone else I got to see.....

Let's start with Christian Triplett.  He did not have a hit in this game, and has had some bad luck this year with hits falling, but I like the way he played.  Here's his first at-bat....

Christian Triplett 1st at bat for #NCCU baseball

A video posted by The Snorting Bull (@thesnortingbull) on Apr 1, 2015 at 1:27pm PDT

The junior was one of the team's top offensive producer last season leading the team in home runs and was amongst the leaders in RBIs.  The numbers are not quite there at the plate this year for the junior first baseman, but I think he has some potential.  He's a big target at first base and moves well on defense.  

I also enjoyed watching lead off hitter Eric Kimber.  He has great patience at the plate and clearly understands his role as a lead off hitter is to get on base.  He is leading NC Central's regular players with a .383 OBP and drew 3 walks which lead to 2 runs during this game.  He also stole a base and played some good defense out in right field.  Here he is in the second drawing a walk.  

Eric Kimber 2nd at bat draws a walk. #nccubaseball

A video posted by The Snorting Bull (@thesnortingbull) on Apr 1, 2015 at 1:40pm PDT

The third and finally player I enjoyed watching was junior pitcher Cameron Scalzo.  He ended up going 7 innings and gave up 1 run, five hits, and struck out six batters.  Here's a look at the tall right hander throwing pitcher......

Central won this game fairly easily.  Scalzo gave up an early run, but was backed up by two six run frames.  In the second inning the Eagles posted their first six spot after a Virginia State error allowed several extra base runners.  The big blow in the inning came from catcher Conrad Kovalcik who took advantage of the short right field porch to blast a three run home run.  NC Central added another 6 in the bottom of the 7th to go up 14-1 which ended up being the final score.  

Overall, it was a fun afternoon of baseball.  The quality of play was much better than I expected and the atmosphere of a college team playing in the old Durham Athletic Park is really awesome.  If you live in central North Carolina and are looking for an inexpensive (their games are free) and entertaining activity this is great entertainment.  The Eagles still have several more home games left this season including games against in state schools like UNC-Wilmington and Campbell.  I will definitely be back for another game before the season ends.