I said I was done for the year after the last Blake Snell post, but thanks to the generosity of a fellow collector, I now have my 28th autograph of the year. Completely unexpected. I am very grateful for the extra card.
This is from the Topps Holiday Set. It's a retail product that is sold exclusively at Wal-Mart. The autographs in the set all look the same with a Christmas sweater type design in the background, a picture of the player wearing a Santa hat, and a chunk of the Santa hat from the photo.
It's a sticker autograph, which is fine in my book on retail exclusive products. You cannot be too picky if you are only spending $20 for a box of cards. I actually think that the sticker is fairly well blended in here. The busy background provides good cover for the edges of the sticker. The rectangular section with the sticker just looks a little duller.
Back of the card.
The back of the card has the standard "Congratulations" disclaimer. It also clarifies where the Santa hat came from on the front of the card. It would not have shocked me if the Santa hat was airbrushed onto Snell.
Last year I found my first Will Wilson card, which was out of the Leaf Perfect Game set from a few years back. It still amazes me that there are card companies that make baseball cards of kids in high school and college. This card was actually from Wilson's time in high school.
Wilson ended up playing at NC State in college and at some point was dubbed "The Mayor of King's Mountain". As far as I can tell the Pack Pride account on Twitter came up with the nickname.
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.
Wilson was drafted by the Angels in the first round last year, but was traded to the Giants recently. Hopefully they will give him some playing time. Regardless, Will Wilson has started to appear in some different card sets since he was drafted. A few are a little more than I am willing to pay at the moment, but I found a few nice cards at the right price.
The best part is that they are all NC State cards. They are also all Panini cards, which I do not always know the most about.
This is a sticker autograph. It would be sweet if the signature was on the card. Still looks really good. Prizm is a pretty nice Panini product. This is the first of two autographs that I found of Wilson in an NC State uniform.
This is the second.
This is another sticker autograph. The top of Wilson's signature is cut off on the top of the sticker, but I still like this card. Panini runs this "School Colors" insert across several sports. I have another "School Colors" card of Dennis Smith, who played basketball at NC State.
Similar ideas. Last card.
This is a regular base card of Wilson's from Prism. Good extra card that was inexpensive. More Will Wilson cards next week.
Chris Carpenter is in the Cardinals Hall of Fame and helped the team win the World Series in 2006 and 2011. I have a ton of Chris Carpenter cards in my collection. I really enjoy these cards.
However, we are not talking about that Chris Carpenter, we are talking about Cris Carpenter.
Cris Carpenter was a relief pitcher for the Cardinals during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Not surprisingly, there are not any baseball videos of the former pitcher anywhere on the internet. He still has a pretty good run of baseball cards from his time in the Majors. It's hard to say which card is his best, so I am going with a 1989 Topps Big.
Not to be mistaken with Topps Kids. Both sets were oversized products that popped up around this era. The cards are actually the size of the original Bowman cards, or if you are a more modern collector, they are the same size as the 1989 Bowman cards.
He was a first round draft pick in 1987 who was highly thought of by the Cardinals. Carpenter pitched at the University of Georgia, where he also played on the football team as the punter. There is video of this on the internet.......
Apparently he was really good.....
at both football and baseball.
He pitched a 4 hitter for the Cardinals in his second Major League start against the Cubs. That was really about all there was for Carpenter's career as a starting pitcher. He started a few games for the Cardinals in 1989, but was moved to the bullpen. Carpenter never started another game his entire career.
Carpenter played for the Cardinals until the 1992 season when they left him unprotected in the Expansion Draft for the Marlins and Rockies. The Marlins made Carpenter the 38th player picked in the Draft right in front of Vinny Castilla.
His last Cardinals card was a 1993 Fleer, which showed him in a Cardinals uniform, but with Marlins markings on the card.
A great song from 1989 is Living Coulor's Cult of Personality. One of the first CDs that I owned.
There are three weeks left in 2019. I have officially done enough with Blake Snell autographs. There are none left that are affordable, or that really interest me, so we are done after this post. It's been a good run, never thought I would get all the way to 27 autographs of one player in a year.
I made sure that the last Snell of the year was something good though. I ended up picking up one of the cards that I skipped earlier in the summer due to cost. There are expensive Snell autographs, but it seems that at some point they always come down a bit. At worst, if you are patient a copy of the card will fly under the radar on an Ebay auction. I have never set a ceiling on how much I will spend on a Snell autograph, but there are non-starters.
Most of the Buy It Nows and auctions when this card fist came out were over $30. That's a non-starter for this card. I did not pay it, and I ended up saving some money.
This is from Definitive, which is one of those Topps brands that all blends together in my world with things like Tribute an Museum Collection. I am sure there are others that I am not thinking about as a truck through a post at 5:30 on a Sunday morning. The cards are on thicker stock, have some sort of jersey or patch swatch, an have a low print run.
The backs of the cards are look the same too.
It's like a generic form letter that Topps attaches to all of the aforementioned card brands.
It has been a fun year of collecting Snell autographs, but I am definitely ready to move onto something else. I have started drafting my end of the year post, and I am definitely going to pass over repeating this sort of project again.
Topps put out their annual High Tek product a few weeks ago. There is not a ton there in the way of Cardinals and Durham Bulls cards. I picked up one former Durham Bulls cards last week, with a second one on the way. This is the Brandon Lowe autograph......
I won this Brandon Lowe autograph in an Ebay auction. More on the Cardinals cards in a minute, but I also ended up with a Carlos Carrasco autograph since nobody else was bidding on the card.
Notice that the Carrasco and Lowe have the same pattern on the background. Feels a little lazy considering that Topps usually has all sorts of different patterns on these cards. Sort of the whole theme of the set.
I saw Carrasco as a Phillies and Indians prospect when he was coming up through the Minors. Not sure that most people remember him being in the Cliff Lee trade.
The Cardinals checklist is not promising in this set. There is Rick Ankiel, but after that there are people like Paul DeJong. Likely going to take a hard pass on getting any Cardinals here.
Picked up one other Durham Bulls card last week in a trade. I actually sent another collector a bunch of cards to help with completing a set, this was the card I got in return.
A little more low tech than the Lowe and Carrasco cards above. Back of the card.
I love that the Durham Bulls appear both in the stat line, and in the highlight above the stat line with the blurb about Lolich throwing a no-hitter in the Carolina League. I have never been able to find out much about the no-no other than it happened. Regardless, happy to have a new Lolich card in the collection.
Garry Templeton was one of the best shortstops in the National League during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The switch-hitting shortstop led the league in triple three straight years, made two All-Star Games, and regularly stole 30 bases. In 1979, he had 211 hits for the season, which included more than 100 hits from each side of the plate. I am not sure how often that has been accomplished, but it seemed like a neat factoid to me.
Garry Templeton ended up getting traded to the Padres for Ozzie Smith. I am certain that few Cardinals fans really miss him. Yes, it's easy to forget about a player when you get a Hall of Famer in return, but there are other reasons that Templeton is forgettable player around St. Louis. More on that later in the post.
Anyway, my favorite baseball card of Templeton in a Cardinals uniform is his 1981 Kellogg's card.
The yellow borders have grown on me over the years. I picked up a few Kellogg's cards at some point 15 years ago, but I always skipped this year due to those borders. I think that the stars around the edges also busy up the card. Again, it's grown on me. I like the Kellogg's logo at the top of the card and the funky shape around the picture.
I used to always think that the picture was in Busch Stadium, but I spent some time looking at this picture a bit closer last week and changed my mind. Pictures on cards taken inside of 1980s and 1990s Busch Stadium are always a good selling point for me. Yes, there are red seats and there are openings around the top, but Templeton is wearing a red blue uniform. The middle deck also looks like it has seats, whereas Busch Stadium had a restaurant with glass windows.
My guess is that the picture on the card was actually taken in Riverfront Stadium. This photo is from the 1990s, but you can see the openings around the top of the stadium and the middle deck was a seating area.
I still like the picture regardless of the stadium.
Here is the back of the card.
I like the Tony The Tiger logo up in the top corner. The backs of the Kellogg's cards are always way too crowded for my taste. There is so much information here. The main thing that stands out for me is "The Franchise" line about half way down the back. Templeton was likely viewed as "The Franchise" during this time, but he had a little run in with the crowd at Busch Stadium one afternoon while playing the Giants.
From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
"Templeton, playing on a sore knee, struck out on Gary Lavelle's curveball in the dirt. The ball momentarily escaped catcher Milt May, perhaps unbeknownst to Templeton, who failed to run to first base. Fans booed and Templeton answered with a one-finger salute."
This picture of Templeton getting pulled into the dugout by Whitey Herzog is sort of a classic with Cardinals fans.
Anyway, you know the rest. Templeton was traded to the Padres for Ozzie Smith. Templeton was never the same. Ozzie learned how to hit. I need to do an Ozzie Smith card.
A good song from 1981 is David Bowie's Ashes to Ashes.....
I wrote a little bit a few weeks back about the disappearance of the nickname cards in the Triple Threads product. Always a highlight for me during the year, the absence of the nicknames has made me a little less likely to collect these cards. Just a refresher, but they looked like this:
So, after adding my Snell autograph, I went back and did a little work on a second player from Triple Threads trying to add a few cards of Padres pitcher Joey Lucchesi, or Joey Fuego to those who follow his career. I like the nickname. It's catchy. I am also not sure it's very apt considering he is a lot of deception mixed in with some breaking pitches.
I have followed Joey's career since he was at Southeast Missouri and have been collecting his cards since he was first drafted by the Padres. He's not a player I would have guessed to appear in Triple Threads, but I am not going to complain.
Here is the card.
Yep, no Joey Fuego. We have this gem instead. Why did Topps pick this phrase for his Triple Threads card?
There you go.
Chris Sale, Jordan Zimmerman, Clayton Kershaw, and Joey Lucchesi.
There are other Joey Lucchesi cards from Triple Threads. One is above average, so I might have to find that card. Maybe, maybe not.
