We are nearly at the end of the 2022 baseball season and there have been very few new Albert Pujols cards in a Cardinals uniform outside of a bunch of Topps Now issues. I know he signed late in Spring Training, but it feels like there have been far more Dodgers cards of Pujols made than Cardinals cards. Granted, I have not done much with the Topps Now cards, I do appreciate that they were made, and will probably buy a bunch of them at some point down the line.
In the meantime, I will hope that Topps catches up with some of their late in the year product releases.
Topps Update has several Pujols cards in a Cardinals uniform and I am going to pick his base card for my once-a-blue-moon-when-I-blog Pujols post.
This year's Topps design is decent. I don't love that you can barely read the player position in the lower right corner of the card, but the rest of the design elements are decent enough. I love the photo on the front of this card with Albert tipping his hat to the crowd. After looking around on the internet for a few minutes, I am almost certain that this photograph was taken at Busch Stadium during the Cardinals Home Opener.
Well done, Topps.
Back of the card.
No write-up or blurb needed, just two decades worth of numbers.
Score was always a pretty solid baseball card set. You were going to get a decent design with a reasonably priced product. Of all the sets that went away when Pinnacle went bankrupt, Score is one of the sets that I miss the most.
The older Score sets have generally aged well and I really enjoy flipping back through and looking at the cards. For my Random Ray post this week, I picked out his card from the 1995 Score set after looking through it for a few minutes last week.
Here is the card.
This is the only Score set from the 1990s that I did not complete at the time of its release. My set still has a few missing cards. Not sure the high school version of me liked the tan and green color scheme on these cards. The design is a little weird with the green and brown design around the border and blueish name plate.
Whatever you think of the design, the picture is great. Love the action shot of Ray Lankford running the bases. Road uniforms are always a bonus. This is in old Candlestick Park with the huge retired numbers on the wall in the outfield. The number 27 belongs to.......
Back of the card.
On-base percentage in 1995?
Besides being ahead on Moneyball stats, the card back has a nice write up, and the portrait picture on the side is quality. As much as you may not like the tan color on the front of the card, it provides a nice contrast with the black ink on the stats area on the back of the card.
Overall, this is an underrated 1990s card. Not the typical Score card from the 1990s, but this set has done well with time. Might have to go finish off my set on Sport Lots.
Troppo is a term sometimes used by Australians to refer to someone who is behaving in a crazy manner.
See video clip of Australian politician below for further context.
I am using the slang term "Troppo" with this post, because I am talking about Rays third base prospect Curtis Mead, who is Australian. Mead spent a chunk of his 2022 season playing locally with the Durham Bulls. Obviously the reason I am interested in his baseball cards.
Curtis Mead is a nice player who appears in many of the rankings produced by publication who keep track of such things. People who collect baseball cards have read these rankings and are currently paying some large amounts of money for Curtis Mead autographs.
I have seen Curtis Mead play a few times in person, but have no interest in paying $125 for his Bowman Chrome autograph. Zero.
Curtis is good and all, but I could just go buy a Stan Musial autograph if I was going to sink $125 into baseball cards this afternoon. That price has gone done over the summer too. Considering this was the only Curtis Mead autograph floating around the majority of the summer, I was a little sad.
No Curtis Mead autograph for me.
Recently, I was reading on Cardboard Connections (I infrequently write for them too), that Curtis Mead was included in the 2022 Pro Debut autograph checklist.
I was counting on being able to afford a Curtis Mead autograph out of Pro Debut, but the prices have been something unexpected. In a good way though. This card cost me less than $10.
Yes, it's a sticker autograph.
No, I do not care in this case.
It's a Durham Bulls autograph.
Back of the card and we can see that Curtis Mead actually started his professional career with the National League Champion (They are playing right now) Philadelphia Phillies. Mead was traded to the Rays for Christopher Sanchez.
So much has happened over the past month and a half. Unfortunately, most of it involves me working, which nobody really wants to hear about. I am just going to skip ahead to the part where I talk about baseball cards and pretend that I still do this on a regular basis.
I still have the time to purchase baseball cards, just not write about the baseball cards. I have narrowed this post down to 4 cards. There are some large stacks of cards sitting around my house at the moment and it's not because my wife repainted and refurnished my baseball card room in a day while I was at work.
The stacks of cards are out of the frame, but I am actually going to make a post about the state and condition of my card room at the moment assuming I don't disappear for another six weeks.
As I was saying, picking out just 4 cards was a bit of an accomplishment.
The first three are all from the 2021 Topps Chrome Anniversary set. Two former Durham Bulls players and a backup catcher for the Cardinals.
First, former Durham Bulls player Greg Luzinski. Great power hitter and a great signature too.
Next up is Cardinals backup catcher Gene Tenace. Earlier in his career he was not a backup for the Oakland A's. Tenace was the 1972 World Series MVP. I do not have a Padres autograph of Tenace, but he was also a starting catcher in San Diego. In 1980, Gene Tenace hit .222, but walked 30 more times than he struck out and had an on-base percentage of .399.
Amazing.
Last up on the Topps Chrome cards is former Durham Bulls player and current Minnesota Twins manager, Rocco Baldelli. The green Rays jerseys were horrible.
Last card is a Paul Goldschmidt autograph.
He's been on the Cardinals a few years now, but I rarely buy any of his cards and I never post them when I do. Nothing too special, just usually cool looking parallels or base cards from when he played with the Diamondbacks. Nothing this nice.
I am trying to only use base cards on my Random Ray posts, but for today I am going to use an insert card. I stumbled across a stack of these 1994 MVP Contender cards a few days ago and felt the need to reminisce in a blog post. These were really popular back in the mid 1990s and were inserted at just 1 per box and limited to just 10,000 copies. Those numbers sounded super scarce back in the day.
Not exactly a rare insert after all and these sell for roughly $1 on COMC and Ebay.
I am going to go ahead and post the more exclusive "Gold" copy of the card, which is even more limited at only 5,000 copies. It's so limited that it will cost you an extra $0.50 to buy it. The Gold copies were actually a redemption card that you could get by mailing Leaf two of the regular MVP cards.
This feels so exclusive.
I like the overall design of the card with the National League logo in the back, done in greyscale, with a color photo of Lankford over the top. Maybe I am partial to the red, but I think the bright colors on the uniform actually help this card have a little more pop with the higher contrast. I also have a copy of the Andres Galarraga card from this same insert set, which is a good looking card, but lacks the color contrast with the black and purple Rockies uniform.
Still a nice card, but you can compare the contrast between the two cards. Andres Galarraga was also briefly a Cardinal in the early 1990s.
I am not always huge on large text, but I actually do not mind the large MVP text on the side of the card.
The back is a little thrown together with the National League logo tying together the two sides of the card. I like the gold letters on the top and side with the black and gray backgrounds. Good color contrast. I also like the effort on putting a full player photo on the back. It feels like the just threw it on there. The write up on the bottom of the card is nice making a connection between Ray's 1994 season and Lou Brock's 1967 season.
Small detail. I like the MLB logo that Leaf used on the side of the card. This is the logo that the players wore on their uniforms during the 1994 season.
It seems like it was just last month when the 2022 Blake Snell Autograph Count was only at 2. Hardly any of the newly added Snell signatures are from this current year. I am having good success in finding autographs from his time in Tampa with low prints runs. These cards were either too expensive at the time of their release, or I just never found one due to print run limitations.
I do not know why I do not have a copy of this 2019 Triple Threads card of Snell that I found last week. I used to love this product, but have really gone away from it over the last few years. I have been down on sticker autographs, down on relic cards, and the little sayings on the card have gotten weird at times.
This card seemed too nice to pass up.
This Triple Threads autograph has a really low print-run at just 9 and it was an auction on Ebay. I really did not think I was going to win it, but here we are. I like the different colored patches on the front with the white piece, striped piece, and solid blue piece.
The "Early Honors" phrase is explained on the back of the card.
Neat little factoid about Blake Snell.
I have seen this stat before. Interestingly, Shane Bieber of the Indians/Gaurdians also won a Cy Young Award in 2020 prior to turning 25 in 2020. The feat has also been accomplished several times in the National League over the past 40 years, with Clayton Kershaw, Dwight Gooden, and Fernando Valenzuela all winning before 25 and Corbin Burnes coming close at 26.
"The Relics Contained On This Card Are Not From Any Specific Game, Event, or Season"
Just reminded me of why I do not really care for relic cards.
Remember that time NC State got eliminated from the College World Series in the middle of the night two years ago?
Yes, it was because of COVID.
No, don't leave a comment about COVID below.
Anyway, my Wolfpack reached the College World Series and was in a position to win the National Championship thanks to the efforts of pitcher, Sam Highfill who pitched a shut out against Vanderbilt opposite Rangers first-round pick, Jack Leiter.
Highfill is from Apex, North Carolina, is best known for its abundance of trains and its cheesy water tower. It's also the town where I happen to live, just a few blocks from both the train tracks and the water tower. Both are walkable from my house.
The water tower has some art work on it and is stamped with the words, "The Peak of Good Living" and is located smack dab in the middle of the town. Nobody who lives in Apex is actually from Apex, but local legend has it that the water tower was built first and the town filled in around it.
Seems plausible.
Back to baseball. I am not going to rehash the whole reason as to why NC State was sent home from the College World Series at 2 in the morning, but the community rallied around Highfill and the mayor of the town started lighting up the water tower red at night.
Here is the famous/infamous water tower. Note the railroad crossing sign in the foreground.
While half of that College World Series team is now playing in the Minors, since Highfill was only a freshman, he is still in college at NC State. He missed most of this past season, but did manage did manage to appear last summer in a few games for the USA Baseball National College team.
The inclusion of Sam Highfill cards is part of the reason I have been opening packs of the USA Baseball cards. Unfortunately, there have been no sightings of good Sam Highfill cards. A few base cards, but nothing too exciting.
The town of Apex gets a nod at the bottom of the back of the card on the right side. I like the green frame around the edge of the card and the green box used on the back as well. More on the use of the color green later in the post.
I just bought a pair of his autographs from Ebay from less than $10. Highfill is a well-thought of college pitcher, but I am not sure he's high on the board for the MLB Draft. Not quite the same energy level as when Carlos Rodon was at NC State.
First up, the base autograph. Yes, it's a sticker autograph, which is a bit of a bummer. It is also the autograph of a college kid that cost less than $5. Panini has started using on-card autographs for the college players in Donruss Elite, so I thought they might change the USA Baseball cards too. Guess not. Do you think that USA Baseball has to pay the college kids for autographs now that they have NIL rights?
Just curious.
Hopefully Sam got paid some money for signing these cards.
Notice that Panini went away from the green for this card with only the green bar at the bottom for the team name and another at the top as part of the design around the card brand logo.
Next up, is a relic/autograph card.
I like this card much better than the first one. The USA Baseball set has a lot of green included on the packaging this year, as the primary color of both the packs and boxes. Plus, green also shows up on the border and backs of the base cards. Feels like a good move, especially considering that their facility is very green with all of the trees around the field. Green is a prominent color.
I wish Panini had used the green background on the base autograph as well. The green on this card also has a star pattern, which actually lightens up the background quite a bit in places. They should have gone simple here and just used the dark color. No matter, it's still a much better looking card than the first Highfill autograph, but both are welcome additions to the collection.
