The Trading Post #103: Dime Boxes (Part 1: Rockies)

Nick sent me cards again. Buckle up.

As you can see by the title, this one's another two-parter. Maybe I'm losing my edge when it comes to editing myself, but I'd rather chalk it up to all the amazing denizens of the Cardsphere sending piles and piles of amazing cardboard my way. And anyone that trades with Nick from Dime Boxes knows that he basically represents you by proxy at all the card shows and flea markets he attends. And that includes The National, which is where a lot of these came from, according to his handwritten note.

Honestly, sometimes I wonder if he does a better job at finding cards for my own collection than I do.

2017 Topps Five Tool #5T-29 Trevor Story

Lots of bloggers have been writing about the new Topps Fire product this week. I'll probably wait for that to hit the discount boxes, but this insert from 2017 Topps seems like it would fit right in. It's one of the busiest designs I can recall, with five action shots (take that, 1993 Flair!) against a background that looks like an illustration of the big bang.

1995 Fleer would be proud.

Story, and forty-nine other players in this insert set, is billed as a five-tool player, a well-rounded individual with power, contact, speed, fielding, and an arm. The selected photos seem to represent those five tools well, and the back mentions his amazing 10-homer start in his first month in the Big Leagues. He only stole eight bases in 2016, so in a lot of eras, that would be considered rather weak, but in this ever-changing game, swiping eight bags in a season out of thirteen tries is, well, decent. It's a very different game from when Rickey Henderson and Vince Coleman were lighting up the basepaths on a regular basis.

Just due to how the game has changed, Rickey Henderson's career stolen base record of 1,406 might prove to be as unbreakable as Cy Young's 511 wins and 749 complete games.

1998 Circa Thunder #295 Darryl Kile

We move from the big bang into the Dr. Who wormhole, where the late Darryl Kile is preparing to field a comebacker. I was very much out of the collecting scene in 1998, and have never paid much attention to the budget-priced Skybox brands. 1998 was right around when I discovered the soon-to-be-defunct AOL Instant Messenger (and consequently, girls), so chasing wacky sets like this was just not on my radar.

The blue scribbles on the right somehow detract from the overall design, but I do like the bold foil of Kile's last name in the upper left. This card gives me a grand total of three from this set in my entire collection. I managed to break the mesmerizing spell of the card front and flip it over, finding a bar graph of Kile's ERA throughout his career. There were some alarming spikes in the mid-1990s during his career in Houston, but that was nothing compared to what this newly-acquired Rockie would endure for his two seasons in Denver. The annual data points before he took the mound in a pre-humidor Coors Field look a lot better than if this card were printed in 2000.

1993 Fun Pack #175 Jerald Clark

This is a familiar photograph of outfielder Jerald Clark climbing the wall at Mile High Stadium, a slightly different angle of the play found on his 1994 Pinnacle card. Instead of a full-bleed shot, UD put the kid-friendly Fun Pack frame around it. It's a distinctive set, yes, but I opened packs of this as a kid, making it one of the longest-tenured sets in my collection.

Of course a set like this will have a cartoon on the back, along with a trivia question. The Q&A tells us that Clark's first career grand slam came on September 7th, 1992, off of none other than current Rockies manager Bud Black. The cartoon features Clark facing a field full of very Roald Dahl-esque ogres, clearly meant to represent the Giants.

Black is still in baseball, managing a young team to the postseason, but thanks to Bo's 1993 Studio series, I recently learned that Jerald Clark is now a realtor in the San Diego area, the city where he began his career.

1995 Pinnacle #54 Ellis Burks

Pinnacle managed to snap a very similar shot of Ellis Burks for their 1995 set, even including the ball in the frame, though I'm not sure Burks' leap had the height to snag it. It's clearly in a different stadium than Mile High, one with that infernal Astroturf stuff. And if you look very, very closely, you can even see the right hand of the left fielder running over to assist.

It's not easy to spot that among all the gold foil and the giant Cubs logo. Depending on how well the card is cut, it might not be visible at all.

2017 Topps Bunt Blue #132 Carlos Gonzalez

We'll cool things down a bit with a blue parallel from Topps Bunt, the regular version of which I got in a recent group break.

Not much else to say about this card, but I can see why the Rockies wanted to change their shade of purple. The blue tint makes CarGo's jersey look like it used to a few years ago, when the team's uniforms were a bit more bluish than they are now. Mainly the card is here to act like a stick of wintermint gum to offset the crazy colors and designs we just saw.

2017 Topps '87 Topps #87-122 Raimel Tapia

It's hard to believe we're 30 years removed from the famous 1987 Topps set. I've seen a card from this anniversary set before, but that one was from the All-Star subset. Raimel Tapia has yet to play in the Midsummer Classic, so he just gets the base card treatment. Unlike some other sets, the Rockies colors and logo fit quite well into the classic design. It's quite pleasing to see the "CR" logo and a nice shade of purple with the 1987 woodgrain design, unlike, say, watching Topps try to awkwardly squeeze "Diamondbacks" into the bottom banner of 1989 Topps.

The silver foil seal and Rookie Card logo notwithstanding, it's a familiar reuse of the design, right down to the greenish-yellow cardboard backs. Topps even continued the "On This Date" theme on the back, giving us actual events from 1987. Tapia's card references Greg Swindell's 15-strikeout complete game on May 10th, exactly thirty years before the birth of my nephew.

It's a coincidentally personal use of the 30th Anniversary seal, although it does remind me that fans of recent expansion clubs have largely been left out when it comes to the recent Topps Buyback sets. I've never seen one in person from any team, and fans like me, Daniel, Tim, and the mythical Marlins blogger might feel a bit abandoned by this buyback craze.

2017 Topps Archives #107 Carlos Gonzalez

1982 Topps also accepts the Rockies colors quite well, even if just a few fans in the seats behind the screen are there to see it. 2017 Archives did a very nice job, and I appreciate that Topps made the older sets actually feel like cardboard instead of the odd half-glossy feel they used to have.

Like Tapia's card above, the back is properly green and cardboard-y, and points out that Cargo hit several milestones in the 2016 season. He got to 200 homers, 200 doubles, 1,000 hits, and 2,000 total bases, all in the same year. If he sticks around Colorado he has a chance to challenge a career player like Todd Helton on the team leaderboards.

Except for doubles. Helton's keeping that one for a long time.

2016 Stadium Club #164 DJ LeMahieu

DJ LeMahieu and Todd Helton are tied with one batting title each, two of a gaggle of Rockies that have brought that award home, including Charlie Blackmon this year.

It used to be that Wrigley was the only park with brick behind the plate. Quite a few stadiums now do, or at least a faux brick, making it harder to pinpoint the stadium than it used to be. Even Minute Maid park in Houston, one of the two ALCS sites this year, has brick underneath the screen. However, theirs is done in a perfect grid rather than the usual overlap, which might be aesthetically pleasing but is structurally, well, deficient.

2017 Stadium Club Sepia #194 Andres Galarraga

The Stadium Club fun continues, this time with a lonely-looking Andres Galarraga on one of 2017's Sepia parallels. If you didn't know which position he played, you might think he was in the middle of a perfect game bid.

But he was not a pitcher, as we all know. He was a great slugger, and arguably the first real Rockies fan favorite. He was, after all, the first Rockie to appear in the All-Star Game. You could get him with a low-and-away slider with ease, but when he connected, "echoes of this slugger's hits can still be heard amid the Rocky Mountains". A wonderful bit of hyperbole from Topps, and one that plays to the embellished remnants of the Wild West you can still find in Denver.

2016 Topps Walmart Holiday Snowflake #HMW181 Nolan Arenado

October in Colorado usually means one thing. The first snow of the season. Sometimes it's a little earlier, occasionally (and more commonly, in recent years) it's later. But Monday brought a few inches to the Denver area. A lot of the trees weren't ready for it, and a lot of branches met a gruesome end. The tree out by the mailbox building collapsed entirely. It reminds you why deciduous trees are a bit less common here than evergreens, at least when not artificially planted.

Fitting, then, that one of last year's Holiday Snowflake cards made its way to me. The last time I saw one of these, I couldn't help but tie it into the crazy weather patterns we see in Colorado. And all that snow I mentioned earlier, which would have caused scheduling issues if the NLDS had taken place in Denver? It pretty much all melted days ago.

I appreciate when bloggers send me these Wal-Mart exclusives. It keeps me from having to enter one, but I'm still on the hunt for a Marketside pizza card.

Nolan Arenado looked just a bit more fallible playing third base this year, but there's still a chance he'll earn his fifth straight Gold Glove. We'll probably find out when one of the next snowstorms hits.

1996 Fleer #366 Curt Leskanic

Bruce Ruffin held onto the closer role in 1996, going against Fleer's prediction that it might be taken over by Curt Leskanic. Curt appeared in a league-leading 76 games during the strike-shortened 1995 season, and he had an ERA befitting a Rockies pitcher of the time.

All that can be found on the back of this matte-finish card, which Fleer became known for during the two years following the infamous 1995 set. One thing I noticed is that they actually gave us fractions for the number of innings pitched, as in "130 ⅓", as opposed to the "130.1" that Topps and most others use. On the decimal side of that number, that's a base-three counting system, a real-world look into math that's a bit more advanced.

I would have found math class infinitely more interesting if it were centered around baseball. One of the few moments I remember from 9th grade algebra is when we used some basic trigonometry to determine if the pitcher's mound is in the exact center of a baseball diamond (it's not). I did finally start grasping math pretty well in 12th grade, but there were some tough years in middle school.

"If two pitchers earn a decision in 25 games a season, and one wins 33% more games than the other, what will their final records be?

Tell me that's not a better way to teach math.

1998 Pacific Online #237 Pedro Astacio

Just a couple posts after Pedro Astacio made his first appearance on this blog, here's his second, this time from Pacific Online, perhaps the most cult-classic set of the late 1990s. You might be happy to know that bigleaguers.com now redirects to the current MLBPA site, but I can't find individual player pages.

The card back mentions Pedro's first start of 1998, in which he earned a win against Arizona. Many of you might recall that 1998 was the Diamondbacks' inaugural season, so that particular game was actually just the third-ever for the young franchise. It took the Diamondbacks six games to get their first win. They didn't get to enjoy the very early success the Rockies had in their home opener. I'll tip my hat to this card for informing me that the Diamondbacks lost their first-ever game and series sweep to the Rockies, a fact that had escaped my attention until now.

2017 Topps Allen & Ginter Hot Box Foil #65 Kyle Freeland (RC)

The story for much of the Rockies' 2017 season was their stellar young starters, like Antonio Senzatela, German Marquez, and Kyle Freeland, a Denver native that nearly pitched a no-hitter the day before the All-Star Break.

Nick was kind enough to give me my first look at 2017 Allen & Ginter, which has a distinctive antique photo frame design, with the usual splashes of watercolor as a background. The backs look about the same as always, but this card is a Foil parallel, found only in what Topps calls "Hot Boxes". Apparently, if you find a hot box, all the base cards inside it have this vaguely shiny finish, which Nick found three of for me.

I'm not sure how I feel about having such a modern touch on a set that is supposed to be so retro. It's 19th-century retro, not 1965 retro. But it's understated enough, and gives collectors something else to chase. We need more of those, right? At least it will not be confused for a late-1990s card.

2017 Topps Allen & Ginter Mini A&G Back #234 Charlie Blackmon

Batting champion Charlie Blackmon appears on this mini card, a parallel type that is more familiar to longtime collectors of A&G. I never focused much on card back variations, but this has one, and it's termed the A&G Back. It doesn't have any of his stats, but rather an A&G logo that would not be out of place on the back of a dollar bill. Back to the front, his beard looks a bit more well-managed than usual, but the overall design looks a bit more squished when translated to the mini size than in past years.

I'm happy to report that I recently found some Ultra-Pro pages designed for these tobacco-sized cards. And by "found", I mean "ordered on Amazon Prime". They're 15 cards to a page, so the next time I do a complete run through my binders, I'll be able to store these better, rather than using pages designed to fit 1975 Topps minis, whose pockets are still too big.

2017 Topps Allen & Ginter What a Day #WAD52 David Dahl

I didn't realize it at the time, but the day I saw Ichiro get his 3,000th hit, David Dahl had a record-tying rookie hitting streak in the works. Nor did I realize it the next day, when I was at Coors Field again to see the Texas Rangers play. Dahl had hits in both those games, on his way to a 17-game hitting streak, tying the record for the most to begin an MLB career.

This Allen & Ginter insert card picked August 6th, 2016 to profile, a day on which he had three hits, one of which was a triple, and he scored each time he got on base. Not only that, but the Rockies won that day, unlike the following two days in which I was in attendance. That win got the 2016 Rockies to 55-55, the last time they would be at .500 all season. Like this year, they still finished in third place in the NL West, but had several teams above them in the Wild Card race.

2016 Donruss Optic #56 Tom Murphy RR (RC)

As usual, objects in scanner may be shinier than they appear.

Donruss Optic is Panini's entry into the Topps Chrome market segment. It finds its way to me once in a while, and while I don't normally associate Donruss with shiny cards, that Rated Rookie logo feels right at home. It shows up on the back too, underneath Tom Murphy's paragraph, which calls him simultaneously "superb behind the dish" and can "pack a powerful swing".

Tom Murphy hasn't turned out quite like the Rockies have liked. He has three seasons of September call-ups under his belt, but hasn't really made much of a splash. If the Rockies re-sign Jonathan Lucroy as their primary catcher, Murphy's days in the Rockies organization may be numbered.

2016 Bowman Chrome AFL Fall Stars #AFL-RT Raimel Tapia

An insert set about the Arizona Fall League is perfect for Bowman. The 2017 campaign is underway right now, in case the Postseason isn't enough to keep an eye on, or if you're not interested in the remaining teams. Tapia would be a worthy inclusion in the 5-Tool insert set, as this card tells us he led the 2015 Salt River Rafters in hits, tied for the team lead in runs, and even swiped a few bases.

He's only 23, but he may present some tough questions for the Rockies, like what to do with another star outfielder. Obviously Blackmon patrols the expansive prairie in center field at Coors, CarGo gets on the highlight reel regularly in right, and Gerardo Parra is a talented player in left when he's not splitting time with Ian Desmond, who's already learning a new position since Story and Reynolds have their respective positions locked up. And with Greg Holland hitting the free agent market, there's more of a need in the bullpen than in the outfield.

2014 Bowman Platinum Chrome Prospects Purple Refractors #BPCP12 Jonathan Gray

But the starting rotation seems pretty good by now, led by Jon Gray, even if his pitching performance in the Wild Card game dug too big a hole for the Rockies to climb out of. This purple masterpiece was printed when Gray was very much just a prospect. Bowman Platinum does purple refractors particularly well, a colored parallel that is practically tailor-made for the Rockies.

Gray wears a slightly different uniform number as a regular member of the Rockies, #55, and has let his hair grow much longer, as is so clearly the trend in MLB right now.

I wonder if collectors in thirty or forty years will look back on today's cards of guys like Gray, or Blackmon, or Justin Turner, or Dallas Keuchel, or Jayson Werth, and stare back in amazement the way we do now at Oscar Gamble's and Jose Cardenal's cards.

Either way, I'm sure Nick will still be unearthing gems far into the future, regardless of future hairstyles. And don't forget, there's a part two to all this.

Thanks Nick!