Mom Goes to the Card Show

While I was busy digging through the vintage bin, my mom, who accompanied me to this particular card show earlier this year, surreptitiously took a stab at selecting a few singles for me. I know she reads my blog, and by now she surely has a pretty good idea of what would fit in my collection. The surprise stack of cards that were wrapped for my birthday alongside the vintage beauties I picked out really hit the mark. Just see for yourself.

2002 Topps All-World Team #AW-5 Larry Walker

Larry Walker is one of the best to ever wear a Rockies uniform, thanks to his MVP and near-Triple Crown season in 1997, a slew of batting titles, and even a few Gold Gloves. This card, however, highlights that performance not as a Rockie, but as a Canadian. Topps' All-World Team insert set from 2002 contains 25 players from all around the globe. The USA, Canada, Japan, Korea, Venezuela, Panama, and plenty more. Larry Walker holds the career record among Canadians for Home Runs, RBIs, and more, but fellow Canuck Joey Votto is making his mark and keeps getting mentioned as the best player not named Mike Trout.

In case you were wondering, yes, this surprisingly thick card mentions hockey. It also has lots of gold foil all over the front, about what you'd expect for an early-millennium insert card. Topps used an all-caps font on the back that is slightly difficult to read, but the world maps found in the background and in the globe are rather interesting. The globe primarily shows the Indian Ocean, flanked by Africa and the Arabian Peninsula on the left...er, West side of the card, and bits of Australia and Southeast Asia to the East. The background shows quite a bit more, and you can tell they're using the projection that makes Greenland and the Arctic areas of Canada look about as big as Africa.

2014 Topps Museum Collection Momentous Material Jumbo Relics #MMJR-CA Chris Archer /50 (MEM)

Following that, we have the Mercator projection example of a relic card. I promise I won't get further into cartography here, but this this is huge. Frankly, I'd expect nothing less from Topps Museum Collection. This giant swatch steals the show, but hiding off to the right is a serial number, #10 of just 50 printed. This is probably the first relic card I have of a Ray, and it makes sense that it would be Chris Archer. I've been running into him a lot this year.

There's an $8 price tag on the back of this one, but it probably came out of one of the discount relic boxes that most dealers put out on their table. 2 for $5 or something like that.

2002 Fleer Premium On Base! Game Used #11 Todd Helton /100 (MEM)

In fact, it was probably purchased with this Todd Helton relic, the easiest player to find at any Denver-area card show. The serial number is much less noticeable on this one, as it appears on the back in black, blending in with the rest of the printing.

Fleer was putting out some very boring white sets in their later years, but they jazzed up this Fleer Premium card by adding a piece of a base, a first in my collection. The vast majority of my relic collection is made up of uniform swatches, with a handful of wooden bat slivers and the occasional baseball leather. But to have a piece of an actual base is certainly unique, and Fleer even states that this is from an official game at Coors Field. You might think it was smoother, like the back of a golf glove, but it's actually more like the soft rubber grip on a kitchen utensil.

Amazingly, in all that white space, Fleer somehow forgot to add a card number. Beckett says it's number 11 in the 30-card memorabilia set, so we'll go with that. The aforementioned serial number is out of 100 copies, but even the base version of this is limited. In keeping with the "On Base!" theme, the insert cards without relics were given a print run equal to the player's 2001 on-base percentage. At least in the base set, the higher the card number, the higher the print run. Helton is on the upper end of that with 432 base card copies, topping out at 515 with none other than on-base machine Barry Bonds.

2013 Bowman Platinum Prospect Autographs Green Refractors #BPAP-WS Will Swanner /399 (AU)

Maybe my mom has a preference for negative space in the cards she picks out. Bowman Platinum left plenty of space for then-prospect Will Swanner to sign in blue Sharpie without even covering up the /399 serial number. It's not quite as empty as a specific Jeff Francis card in my collection, but the autograph is clearly the star of the show here, even with that green background behind the photo.

As we all know, Bowman is a prospecting set. But for every Stephen Strasburg, you have a flotilla of players that never get the big call-up, even during September when rosters expand. Swanner was billed as a power-hitting catcher, but he topped out at the Double-A level. He hit 17 homers in 2015 for the New Britain Rock Cats, and progressed up to Triple-A Albuquerque in 2016. There, in just ten games, he managed one homer on a .194 batting average, was sent back down the farm system, and was released in June of 2016. That's the last line on his stats page, so it looks like his baseball career is over. The Rockies are pretty well set on catchers these days anyway, having just traded for Jonathan Lucroy, and with young guys like Tom Murphy and Tony Wolters looking promising.

2013 Topps Update Franchise Forerunners #FF-9 Rickey Henderson / Yoenis Cespedes

Mom must know I like green cards. This one makes me wonder why I don't collect more Oakland A's cards, so I'll have to give that some thought. But she picked an insert card from 2013 Topps Update's Franchise Forerunners set, one of the few that year that didn't hit us over the head with the "Chase" theme. All ten cards are combo cards, with this one showing the all-time stolen base leader Rickey Henderson taking a lead, pictured below the now-Met Yoenis Cespedes.

If he's now a Met, you might be thinking that means he's had some injury problems this season. And you'd be correct. Cespedes recently injured his (other) hamstring, the same injury that kept him out for the first couple months of 2017. And as I write this, I'm reading the ticker on MLB Network all about Michael Conforto, who injured his shoulder on a swing (yes, really) late last month. Both Conforto and Cespedes will miss the rest of the Mets season.

2013 Select Skills #SK39 Ozzie Smith

Just because you can't use logos doesn't mean you can't make a card shiny. Select was relaunched for a one-year run in 2013, making us all remember the mid-range set that Pinnacle put out year after year in the 1990s. I don't remember it ever being quite this shiny, but I'll take it. The "Skills" word at the top indicates this is another insert card, which is from a rather huge 45-card set. We get a zoomed-in version of the same photo on the back, along with a well-written paragraph describing Smith's unmistakable flair in the field, and that he "always recorded outs in style."

Even without calling him The Wizard or mentioning his signature backflip, Panini put out a great card of Ozzie Smith.

1994 Flair #36 Frank Thomas

Finally, the only main set card in this stack is also the oldest. Frank Thomas was a cardboard god in 1994, strike or no. And his card from a premium brand like Flair probably could have paid for lunch. The stats on the back are a little hard to read since they're superimposed over another full-bleed photo of Thomas in his pinstripes, but it's clear enough to spot his 41 home runs in 1993, along with an average that was well over .300 for each year thus far in the big leagues. He had a few down years, but his lifetime average just squeaked over the line at .301. Fleer doesn't list it as the batting average but rather the percentage, abbreviated "Pct." We can all assume that's the batting average, as there's nothing like an on-base percentage, slugging percentage, or fielding percentage included, let alone a modern Sabermetrics stat like OPS or BABIP.

Obviously, Thomas's initial is given the royal treatment, framed in a gold banner like medieval heraldry. Hard to miss that. In my early collecting days, I found more 1993 Flair than 1994, but the overall theme is more or less the same. 1994 gave us more gold foil and a bit less soft focus. This might be found in the discount bin today, but it still has a little essence left of the prestige it carried during the tail end of the baseball card boom.

This was an awesome surprise to receive as a gift earlier in the year, and I think any non-collector would be hard-pressed to do a better job at picking seven assorted cards for someone else's collection. Well done, Mom, and thanks.