There are only about 10,000 people in Kings Mountain, North Carolina, so I am going to give a few little facts about the town. A quick map shows where it is in comparison to the cities you may know in central North Carolina.....
It's really not all that far from Charlotte. When I first heard of the town, I assumed it was somewhere out in the western parts of the state. I assumed that nobody really lived in the town. Not really accurate.
The town is also really important to our country's history. It was the location of a battle during the Revolutionary War. The British had won most of the battles in the southern colonies before the Battle of Kings Mountain. The fight ended up being a win for the colonists.
President Theodore Roosevelt actually mentioned The Battle of Kings Mountain in his book The Winning of The West:
"This brilliant victory marked the turning point of the American Revolution"
There are also a few baseball players from the small town of Kings Mountain. Otto Briggs played in the Negro Leagues during the teens, twenties, and thirties. Jake Early, a catcher for the Senators and Browns during the 1930s and 1940s also hailed from Kings Mountain. He was one of the best defensive catchers from his era.
No more major war turning battles have taken place in Kings Mountain in recent years. People wise, there has been a country singer, I don't listen to country music, and an actress from some daytime soap opera. There is also another pretty good baseball player, who is currently starring for the NC State baseball team.....
Will Wilson is the team's current shortstop and one of the better players in the ACC. He was named the All-ACC First Team shortstop for this season and made the Collegiate Baseball's All-American Second Team.
Wilson's success in Raleigh has earned him the nickname "The Mayor of Kings Mountain"
The Mayor of Kings Mountain, Will Wilson, singles as the UNC LF misreads the ball. Run scores. Bases loaded with no outs in T5. Pack, 3-0.
This tweet from the NC State fan site Pack Pride is the first time I have found him mentioned as "The Mayor of Kings Mountain". All the of tweets and social media posts prior to the one embedded above appear to be about the actual mayor of Kings Mountain.
Luckily, we are also living in a day and age where high school kids have baseball cards. Will Wilson managed to get into two different sets. I am still trying to find a copy of his USA Baseball card, which was in a Panini set, but I have been able to find his Perfect Game card.....
I am not a huge fan of Leaf cards, but this is one of their nicer products. I believe these are their only baseball cards that do not have all of the logos airbrushed off the pictures. The base cards are really nice too, I will have to try to find one of Wilson.
Wilson will likely also end up on the USA Baseball College National team this summer. Hopefully. That should net him a few more Panini autographs and maybe a few other nice cards until he ends up in the Major League Draft. Wherever Wilson ends up as a professional, hopefully his nickname will stick with him.
I started writing in this space at some point during the Spring of 2012. One of the better young players I collected at that time was Rays pitcher Jeremy Hellickson. He had been through Durham just a few years earlier and had also won the American League Rookie of The Year in 2011. It was a good time to collect his cards, he was in everything. No shortage of Hellickson cards to chase down and post.
I should do a "Where Are They" post about players I wrote about five years ago. I am going to file that idea away for later. Back to Hellickson. I collected his stuff.
This is a ticket from his first win.
At some point Hellickson's shoulder fell off, he ended up back in Durham for awhile on injury rehab, and eventually the Rays traded him to the Diamondbacks for a couple of young players. When the trade first happened, I ventured out and found a token autograph of outfielder Justin Williams, one of the players the Rays got back in the trade.
Pretty nice autograph from Bowman Sterling. There are some horrendous sticker autographs in this set, but this Williams autograph has a nice on card signature. Very nice card, but that was three and half years ago. What has happened since then? Jeremy Hellickson has been on the Diamondbacks, Phillies, Orioles, and Nationals, while Justin Williams has gone from A Ball all the way up to Triple A. I have not really written anything about him, nor have I done much with his cards.
I had the chance to get a good look at Williams a few weeks ago. Pretty impressive outfielder.
He's still only 22, and this is his first experience in Triple A, so I would guess he's with the Bulls the entire 2018 season. Given how the Rays run things, I would guess he's in Durham for some time in 2019 too. Which gives me a little bit of time to work on some Justin Williams baseball cards.
Surprisingly, he does not have a lot of cards. Topps made a few of him when he was first drafted by the Diamondbacks in 2013 and 2014, and his first full season with the Rays in 2015. After a two year lull, Topps did put him in 2018 Bowman, but I am a sane person and have not touched that craziness.
Low quantity of cards, so I started all the way back with his first Bowman card from 2013.....
his Bowman Draft Chrome autograph. Yes, I have been really hard on the Bowman Draft sets in the past, especially the 2013 set. I believe that I did a post, it's somewhere around here, about how this is one of the worst airbrushed sets ever. The airbrushing on this Williams card is not great by any means, the D-Backs script on his jersey is pretty suspect. So small and really straight. The batting helmet is the same style worn by the high school kids in the Perfect Game All-American program and the stripe on his pants clearly does not match with the Diamondbacks uniform.
So, now that all of that is out of the way, I really think this is likely the toughest autograph of Williams to find, and I love that it has an on-card signature. Interestingly, the Sterling and Draft cards were put out roughly within the same time period, late 2013, and Williams signature seems to have changed during that time. Not markedly different, but outside of the letter "J" there are a lot of little changes.
Back of the card.
Always some interesting facts on the backs of the Bowman Draft cards. Some are standard fare, like his choice of college if he had gone that route, while others are always a little bit more interesting. Really thought it was cool that he used a wood bat during his senior year of school.
The NCAA Baseball tournament is firing up this week, so I thought it would be a good week to cover one of the all-time great college baseball players who also happened to be a member of the 1998 and 1999 Cardinals teams. His career with the Cardinals actually extended a few years into the early 2000s, but for the sake of these 1990s themed posts, I am going to mainly focus on his time with the team during those two seasons.
Prior to playing professional baseball, J.D. was one of the greatest college baseball players ever. He won awards, he won championships, he set records that still stand today. Having listened to a few Florida State fans talk about his playing days in Tallahassee, I am not sure that I can sum up his college career, do it justice, and not make it a stand alone blog post. I leave you with this.....
Maybe some day Panini will get off their duff and make a card of J.D. in his college uniform. Seems like a shame that he does not have a card in his college uniform. I know a few Florida State people who would be more than interested in getting a copy of the card.
Drew entered the 1997 MLB Draft considered one of the best players at the top of the draft. His agent Scott Boras told teams that Drew would not sign for a dime less than $10 million dollars. The Phillies selected Drew second overall and then offered him $2.6 million dollars to sign. He refused the offer and spent the summer playing for the St. Paul Saints in the Northern Independent League. He re-entered the 1998 MLB Draft and was selected by the Cardinals with the fifth overall pick. They paid him $7 million dollars and he signed.
The incident made him less than popular with Phillies fans throughout his time in the Majors.
I think there were some battery and beer bottle throwing incidents along the way too, but I try to keep things PG around these parts.
It took Drew part of a summer to advance all the way through the Cardinals Minor League system. He made his debut with the team on September 8, 1998. It was the same night that Mark McGwire hit his 62nd home run of the season, breaking the single season home run record.
As a Ray Lankford fan, it should be pointed out that this game was won by the Cardinals, who sealed the victory after the Cubs pitched around Mark McGwire and then gave up back to back home runs to Ray Lankford (3 run) and Ron Gant (solo).
By the end of the 1998 season, had played in 14 games and made 41 plate appearances. He made the most of it, hitting .417/.463/.972 with 5 home runs, and 13 RBIs. Not a bad little line for a two week cup of coffee.
The baseball card world was already a little Cardinal crazy with Mark McGwire at that time. The arrival of J.D. Drew sort of sent some people over the edge. He was not quite Mickey Mantle, but the way that some people went after his baseball cards, you'd swear he was a slam dunk Hall of Famer. Yes, people literally walked around comparing him to Mickey Mantle. His first cards started popping up in the fall of 1998.
My favorite was his 1998 Fleer Update card.
This was a really simply designed card, but I really liked the edge to edge picture. The card back also has also full color photo.
You could only get the card by buying the complete Update set, which was not horribly expensive in the grand scheme of things, but finding one could be a challenge. Maybe, I just went to college in the middle of nowhere with a really terrible card shop. Drew also had cards in Leaf Stars & Rookie, Donruss Signature, and a whole bunch of different Minor League products.
Drew's cards are obviously really easy, and inexpensive, at this point. I know that those other two cards are also considered rookie cards, but the Fleer Update is the best of the bunch. As a Cardinals collector, this card is borderline iconic as a modern must have card from that era.
His 1999 cards were also really popular for much of that calendar year despite the fact that it was literally the worst full season of his Major League career. In many circles, the expectations for Drew were still through the roof. It was one of those moments in my collecting career where I had serious doubts that a certain segment of the baseball card collecting population actually watch the games and follow the sport.
I am going to narrow the bloat of cards from 1999 down to my two favorites.
First up.
One of his first 1999 cards was in the Pacific Private Stock set. This actually came out really early in the card calendar. Since the Topps base set used to come out right after Thanksgiving in the late 1990s, this might have even been out before the end of 1998. Regardless, it was a favorite set of mine from that year, I miss the Pacific brand, and one of the earliest Drew cards I remember owning. If you do not own any of these cards, they are not hard to find in boxes and packs, the quality of the cards is excellent. Nice stock, although they stick together in the packs now after they have been in there for 20 years.
Last.
I think this came out later in the summer and people were crazy about it while J.D. Drew was batting .240. It took me several years to actually get a copy of this card. I refused to pay whatever ridiculous price this cost back in 1999. The other autographed card in this set, Gabe Kapler, was even pretty pricey. I should have gone back and found an old Beckett and scanned the price listings for this set.
As for the rest of J.D. Drew's career, I am not sure that he is ever going to receive the due that he probably deserves. He's not a Hall of Famer, but he still had a very good career. The Cardinals ended up trading to the Braves at the end of the 2003 season. The trade netted the team Jason Marquis and Ray King, who were both contributors on the 2004 National League Championship team, but the real prize was Double A pitcher Adam Wainwright.
The Braves got one really good year of Drew, while the Cardinals got a few Cy Young worthy seasons out of Wainwright and a World Series winner in 2006. Drew eventually ended up in Boston after the Red Sox finally helped him cash in with a large contract. He got 5 years and 70 million dollars out of Boston, not sure that Sox fans really loved Drew, but he hit .360 in the American League Championship Series that year against the Indians, and .300 against the Rockies in the World Series.
I am always amazed that card companies still make relic cards. In the span of 20 years we have gone from collectors knocking themselves over to own a small inch sized piece of Tony Gwynn's jersey fixed on the front of an Upper Deck card, to having to sort through dozens of Mark Grudzielanek game used bat cards to find the decent cards in the dollar bins at card shows.
The old ones are still great cards in my opinion.
Mass produced, problems with the relics actually being authentic, companies putting "event" used jerseys on cards, etc. There are dozens of reasons that people stopped collecting relic cards, but I am surprised that the little square and circular pieces have not just completely gone away. There will likely always be a place for the premium patch pieces companies use for high end products, but the small piece relics are basically irrelevant.
I have seen a few products in recent years that have gone to using authentication stickers on relics. Not sure how popular I would say the cards were, the ones in my collection are there strictly because they were also autographed.
Doubtful I would have a Dallas Keuchel relic card just because.
Welp. I was purchasing a Jim Edmonds card off of Ebay, just because who wouldn't want to own a card of Jimmy Ballgame wearing some awesome 1990s pinstriped Angels uniform.
I owned one of these hats in college, definitely a go to hat in the collection. I always check out sellers other items when I am after a card. Why pay for shipping multiple times? That's when I ended up with a relic card of Evan Longoria.
The authentication sticker, which tiny, is almost as big as relic swatch. This card is out of Tribute, which is a nice product, but I see no reason why this won't be in dollar bins soon. The one redeeming quality about the card happened when I typed the number into the MLB Authentication page.....
The relic comes from a 2016 game between the Rays and Yankees, which did not end very well for the Rays.......
However, this is a Longoria relic, and he did have a hit in the game.....
so at least the relic is not from a game where he just sat on the bench. Until next year relic cards.....
I am not a big fan of the 2010 National Chicle set. I know plenty of collectors who love the set. I know a lot of collectors who hate it. It has always been really low on my list. There have been plenty of painting/sketch/art sets produced over the last two decades that it's not really hard to find a few favorites. I spent a chunk of the past year working on one of the Topps Gallery Heritage sets.....
which is one of the best art sets in my opinion. Plenty of others that I could post here too. There are some decent art cards in the National Chicle set, if you pick and chose single cards, you can find some winners. Sort of. One of my favorite Cardinals cards.....
the painting of Brock is nice, but is that a Venezuelan flag in the background? Cool if this were a Dave Concepcion card. Miguel Cabrera is also an acceptable player for a Venezuelan flag background.
Beyond the odd touches, again Lou Brock with a Venezuelan flag, my reasons for not liking the National Chicle set are pretty short. Mainly, I despise the revisionist cards in this product where players are drawn into other uniforms. I couldn't find my Lou Gehrig soul patch card, but there are still other really bad cards to show as examples.
As a Cardinals fan, this one is downright terrible.......
Pujols as a Brown? Sigh. So many things are wrong with this card. There are worse though, with this Babe Ruth card being the crown jewel of awful in this set.
I guess Babe Ruth was at least on the Braves for a season at the very end of his career. Better than Pujols as a Brown considering he has no connection to the Orioles or Browns. If you are going to make a Babe Ruth card on the Braves, then why is he still standing in Yankee Stadium?
The wrist bands half way up the forearms, turtleneck looking thing. This is a Chipper Jones card with a Babe Ruth head with the facade of Yankee Stadium in the background.
These cards are sort of like the revisionist history quotes that people post all over the internet. One of my biggest pet peeves in life. I hate made up history.....
Abe said this in a movie. Right?
So, what card could possibly make me want to touch such a terrible set?
Imagine that Topps made a card in this set, of a younger player at the time, whose card had a pleasing background that matched the team's color scheme. Picture that this same card actually pictured the player in their uniform, not of another nearby team, or some other weird connection to the past or future.
The card is also autographed and I am willing to overlook the rest of the set for this card.....
It's not a rookie autograph, rookie card, or anything overly special, but it's just a nice card with a good player's autograph. Bumgarner has been a really good player to this point in his career, a few World Series, a whole bunch of home runs, and a lot of snot rockets.
I actually had this card a few years ago, traded it to a Giants fan, and I sort of regretted it a short time later. I have a few other nice Bumgarner autographs, so at the time it did not feel like much of a loss. The Giants have had a rough last year and I feel like there have been a few more nice cards of Bumgarner floating around and they seem to have come down a bit too.
Could not pass this one by. The asterisk?
*While the National Chicle set is generally art deco garbage in my opinion, this card is an art deco gem,
The Braves drafted Justice out of high school in the 4th round of the 1985 MLB Draft. Justice played for the Bulls during his first full season in professional baseball. Durham was one of two stops for the outfielder that summer, along with Sumter in the South Atlantic League. Justice made the Majors at the end of the 1989 season, but maintained his rookie status heading into the 1990 season. He ended up hitting .282/.373/.535 with 28 home runs, and 78 RBIs during that season. The performance was good enough to win the Rookie of Year Award in the National League. Justice would go on to spend 14 seasons in the Majors playing for the Braves, Indians, Yankees, and A's. He ended his career with more than 1,500 hits, more than 300 home runs, and more than 1,000 RBIs. Beyond his Rookie of The Year Award in 1990, Justice also took home the American League Championship Series MVP for his performance against the Mariners while playing for the Yankees. He retired from baseball in 2002, but since he played with the A's that season, he managed to get into the movie Moneyball....
Well, not really David Justice. Just some guy playing David Justice. We're cool.
Card-
Justice has had a lot of different autographs over the years, several from his playing years, and several since he retired. I actually have an autograph of him from the 2004 Topps base set, it's from the World Series insert set, so I wanted something a little bit different. At the same time, I also really wanted an autograph of Justice on the Braves. I know he was a good player in Cleveland, New York, and Oakland, but I best remember him in Atlanta. Plus, the Braves were the parent club of the Durham Bulls at that point in history. I was really happy to run across a Topps Tribute card of him on the cheap. This set has been in my last three posts, all about Durham Bulls players, like I found a huge bundle of them on Ebay. They did not sell for much. He's got a great signature too. Happy to add this to the stack of Durham Bulls cards.
I am not a huge fan of the Evan Longoria trade. I know that he is getting up there in age, I know that he has declined the last few years, but still there is value in having a face to your franchise. There has never been a player who has done as much for the Rays. He got them to their first, and only, World Series appearance. Many of the franchises best moments in the brief history of the Rays happened with Longoria on the field.
There is no turning back though. As a baseball card collector, I will still collect Longoria cards. He is still one of my favorite Rays/Durham Bulls players. His trade has also provided the opportunity to add a few other promising players to my list of cards that I need to find. The easiest of the Minor Leaguers in the trade to find is infielder Christian Arroyo.
Arroyo is ranked in several of those Top 100 prospect lists.
He also had a stint with the Giants last season. Arroyo basically skipped Triple A. Considering his level of performance in the Majors, I am guessing the Rays will probably leave him in Durham for a good chunk of time this year. Plus, he is still only 23.
I'm going to stay positive and be bullish on Arroyo's future with the Rays.
I have even started a small Arroyo collection. Very small. It's two autographed cards at this point.
First up is a very busy Gypsy Queen autograph. There is so much stuff on the front of these cards. Still amazed at how they squeezed it all on there. Arroyo has a really simple autograph. Not sure I am really digging the C and an A with a some sort of line as his last name. Maybe too simplistic, but at least it's not a scribble.
Last one. This is from Topps Tribute. Nice product, I am sure that some case breaker or someone who spent a few hundred dollars on this box was probably pissed to see a Christian Arroyo card. The signature on both cards is pretty consistent. Not sure I love the blue trim on a Giants card.
