Rockin' Retro Group Break the First (Part 2: Athletics)

During the time between Part 1 and Part 2, my haul from Nachos Grande's newest group break arrived, including an awesome Andres Galarraga relic card. But his first Rockin' Retro Group Break has a part two to cover before we can get to that. See Part 1 for my hometown Rockies, and my random team this time around was another generally well-liked team, the Oakland (and Philadelphia) Athletics.

2017 Topps Gold Label Class 3 Black #13 Sonny Gray

My Rockies haul from 2017 Gold Label was a little more complete, but I did get this lone Sonny Gray card from Class 3. In fact, based on the final highlights, I ended up with two of only four Class 3 cards that were found in the entire break. The security stripe, as I called it last time, is a bit more legible, but the three different classes for pitcher cards are a little harder to tell apart. Position players get their three classes of cards in batting, fielding, and baserunning, but pitcher cards are split between the windup, delivery, and follow-through, making it a little tricky to tell which one you are holding.

As always, players are on the move. Sonny Gray was traded to the Yankees right at the 2017 trade deadline, and there are tons of trade rumors swirling around him this offseason. I'm sure Topps accepts it as an inevitability that these beautiful cards they design can be obsolete in a matter of weeks. Or maybe they just know they'll sell more.

1998 Bowman Chrome International #205 Miguel Tejada

Fresh off his debut in late 1997, Miguel Tejada appeared in 1998 Bowman Chrome, and this happens to be an International parallel. I'm no Bowman expert, but this appears to be just the second year this parallel set existed. The shiny front has a map of the Eastern half of the island of Hispaniola, with Tejada's head and cap obscuring Haiti. The card back is entirely in Spanish, taking a page from some early-1990s Pacific sets, as well as Topps' old Venezuelan cards.

Coincidentally, Tejada's middle infielder counterpart on the Rockies, Neifi Perez, was my featured card in Part 1. Perez, also from the Dominican Republic, has the English "SS" abbreviation for his position. Tejada, on the other hand, gets a "PC" in that spot, and I'm not quite sure what that means. I am even less an expert in Spanish than I am in Bowman. "Campo Corto" is the translation of shortstop, and those words are found on the back, but I'm not sure how you'd get "PC' from that.

2002 Fleer Triple Crown Batting Average Parallel #78 Eric Chavez /288

2002 Fleer Triple Crown was a richer vein than those first two sets, yielding a BA Parallel of Eric Chavez. "BA" refers to his batting average, meaning Fleer printed up 288 copies of this card, matching his statistic from 2001. Troy Tulowitzki's .340 batting average led to a similar card in 2015 Donruss, and Topps completely overdid the idea with Moments and Milestones, a set I had to dig deep into the memory banks to remember.

During that .288 season, Eric Chavez, and all his fellow American Leaguers, wore a commemorative patch on their right sleeves to mark the 100th season of play for the AL. Four teams, but not Oakland, had slightly different "Charter Member" versions of that patch, going all the way back to 1901. Ban Johnson, the founding executive of the AL, isn't named on the patch, but he's a prominent figure in the early episodes of Ken Burns' Baseball documentary series.

I don't know if all the BA parallels have green foil or if that's color-coded to Oakland. My 2002 Fleer pages are sparsely populated, especially when it comes to parallels, so I don't have much to compare it to.

That's not precisely true. I have quite a few 2002 Fleer cards. It's just that there were so many sets, and some of them are pretty underrepresented.

2002 Fleer Triple Crown #118 Mark Mulder

Back to the land of the base cards, here's Mark Mulder in that gorgeous emerald green jersey. Apparently he went 21-8 in 2001, just his second big league season, and finished second in Cy Young voting that year.

Mulder was also involved in an infamous trade in my Fantasy baseball league, a not-so-great move on my part when I was getting my feet wet back in 2005. I acquired Mulder, a briefly hot shortstop, and a few others, but the price was way too high.

Lesson learned.

2002 Fleer Triple Crown #134 Miguel Tejada

By the time the Moneyball season of 2002 rolled around, Miguel Tejada (played in the movie by former major leaguer Royce Clayton) was a rapidly-ascending star. In fact, he'd win the AL MVP that year. Even at a young age, he quickly became the best shortstop ever to play for the A's, but sadly lost four straight ALDS series as his only time in the Postseason.

The more I see of this Triple Crown set, the more I like it. Collectors have been complaining for years that backgrounds have become too blurry, but when you have the glossy foreground and matte background like this set, a nice bokeh effect really blends in well. I particularly like how the ball that Tejada is fielding is glossy, clearly part of the main attraction.

2002 Fleer Triple Crown #86 Ramon Hernandez

The way this card is cropped doesn't show the ball that Ramon Hernandez is presumably about to catch, but his full array of catcher's gear comes across in a lovely shade of green. I've long gone on record as liking green cards, and between Hernandez and Mulder, this is the set that might make me start looking for more A's cards for my collection.

The card back isn't quite as special, and I'm not a fan of conflicting horizontal and vertical orientations. Most of the card back is horizontal, but Fleer stuck the copyright notice and such on the right hand side, reading bottom-up. It's an awkward look. But the usual quick paragraph is there, and it tells us that Hernandez caught a whopping 143 games in 2001, not even one game off a week.

That pace slowed a lot in his later career, although he did spend the 2012 season as a Rockie. This is his first appearance on Infield Fly Rule, and it's not even in a Rockies uniform. That might be a first.

2012 Panini Cooperstown #120 Rickey Henderson

The Athletics have been around in one form or another since 1901, and have played in three different cities across America. That of course means they have quite the delegation in Cooperstown, unlike the Rockies, where I had to resort to a card of an umpire to even mention this Panini set in Part 1.

Rickey Henderson played for a lot of teams in his long career, but most people remember him with Oakland. He played 14 seasons with them, spread out across four separate stints. This being an unlicensed set, it's hard to tell which team he's on here, but it appears to be Oakland, matching his Hall of Fame plaque. The single season of stats that Panini gives us on the back are from his MVP 1990 season, the year before he'd break Lou Brock's record, which he would further demolish by almost 500 more SBs.

A few other fun facts about Rickey. We all know he's the all-time stolen base leader, with 1,406. He's also the all-time leader in runs scored, which goes to show just how valuable SBs really are. He isn't really known for it, but he had a terrific eye, leading the Majors in unintentional walks, with over 2,000. He's also a member of the 3,000-hit club. And finally, one of my favorite sports stats that shows you what a competitor he is, Rickey is the all-time leader in times caught stealing.

So when you add all that up, we can calculate a few things. In all his plate appearances, Rickey Henderson stole a base in over 10% of them. There are surely a few in which he stole second and third on his same trip around the bases, but that's a staggering rate. And if you want to take it a step further, if you add his extra-base hits into the mix, Rickey Henderson was in scoring position (or better) in about 17% of all his plate appearances. Give or take, he made it to at least second base a sixth of the time, solely by virtue of his bat, eye, and speed. And that doesn't even count the times a subsequent batter pushed him along.

Bottom line, he's one of the best players to ever grace the sport of baseball.

2012 Panini Cooperstown #8 Connie Mack

So far, this post has focused on the Athletics' time in Oakland, but they got their start in Philadelphia at the turn of the 20th century, and also had a forgettable midcentury stopover in Kansas City. This card of legendary manager Connie Mack is why I qualified the A's home city at the beginning of this post. He was the team's only manager for nearly a half-century, from their founding in 1901 all the way until 1950, the year in which Vin Scully took over broadcasting duties for the Dodgers.

In other words, until 2017, there was an unbroken line of baseball legacy from Connie Mack to Vin Scully going back to 1901. You can push that back to 1886 if you don't count the brief hiatus between Mack's playing and managerial careers.

So yes, this dapper gentleman is in the Hall of Fame. And he does make one wonder why baseball managers suit up in white performance gear as opposed to a suit and tie. It is slightly comical, seeing sharply dressed guys like Joel Quenneville and Gregg Popovich in contrast to, say, Bob Melvin in a green cap and white uniform. But take Earl Weaver, whose legendary tirades maybe wouldn't have been quite as awesome if he were worrying about dirtying up his leather dress shoes.

All I know is that a guy named Cornelius McGillicuddy wearing a bowler hat is basically the last guy I would want to mess with.

2012 Panini Cooperstown #154 Home Run Baker SP

I admit, I need to brush up on my deadball-era Hall of Famers. For someone whose nickname is also the highest-profile statistic in baseball, you'd think I'd have heard of him before. Before he became short-printed Home Run Baker, he was just Frank, but then he joined a young Athletics franchise. In 1909, he tied the AL record for triples by a rookie, with 19, a record that still stands today. And he led the American League in home runs for four straight seasons, 1911-1914. He hit 42 home runs in that span, one less than second-place J.D. Martinez hit for the Red Sox this year.

Baker wasn't even the first player to lead the home runs category in four straight years. He wasn't even the first Athletic to do it. His teammate Harry Davis did precisely the same thing, though with 38 home runs, from 1904-1907. Yet Home Run Baker got the nickname. With all the power hitters we've seen over the decades, from Babe Ruth to Ken Griffey, Jr., the guy who is in the Hall of Fame with "Home Run" in quotes on his plaque is a guy who hit 96 in his career.

1997 Sports Illustrated #57 Scott Brosius SIV

Back to modern times, if there's one thing I've learned about 1997 Sports Illustrated, it's that there are a lot of subsets. SI was not missing the boat in the early days of the Information Superhighway (I wish we still called it that), giving us a vaguely computer-themed subset called SIber Vision. It looks a little like the Nintendo logo, with a bright red starburst design in the background and some circuit board 90-degree angles.

1997 would be Scott Brosius' final year in Oakland, as he ended up being The Player To Be Named Later in a trade they made with the Yankees for pitcher Kenny Rogers. Brosius, an average utility player, would go on to become a key member of the Yankees' dynasty in the late 1990s and early 2000s, even winning World Series MVP honors in 1998, his first year as a Yankee. This card had it right in saying, "Brosius seems to improve as a hitter each season he's in the majors."

The card also mentions his college career at Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon. That happens to also be the location of the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum, which airplane fans might recognize as the home of Howard Hughes' famous boondoggle, the H-4 "Spruce Goose". It remains the largest aircraft by wingspan that has ever flown, but those who saw The Aviator know that it only flew once.

1997 Sports Illustrated #175 Mark McGwire / Will Clark CC

Yet another subset from '97 SI gives us a miniature reproduction of actual SI magazine covers. This one shows sluggers Will Clark and Mark McGwire preparing for their third major league season in 1988. Little did they know they would square off in the World Series the very next year, with Oakland coming out on top.

I like this idea a lot. We all know that SI photos make for great baseball cards, but they really are kind of cute when scaled down to this size. And in case you were wondering, 6-seed Kansas did indeed complete the upset during March Madness in 1988, defeating top-seed Oklahoma 83-79.

2010 Upper Deck #365 Brad Ziegler

That about does it for the main attraction, as the 1998 Gold Label and Donruss Optic wells ran dry, but there are always a couple extras to be found when Nachos Grande sends out a shipment. It's almost like getting a free repack with your group break winnings. Many of us have seen 2010 Upper Deck in repacks, and the several shades of green on this card look great. Not much is said about Upper Deck anymore, besides the vague lamentation of "I wish Topps didn't have a monopoly". But their final couple sets were pretty great, in my opinion.

There is a ton of blank white space on the back of this card, however. It's too bad that Brad Ziegler, back with Arizona for a second time before announcing his retirement last month, didn't get to fill out Upper Deck card backs any further past this. And I find it a little strange that UD squeezed the submariner's scouting report into the small brown area on the left, leaving lots of open space on the rest of the card.

1987 Topps #311 Rickey Henderson TBC

We'll close today's post with Stolen Base Henderson, gracing the front of Topps' look back to 1982, a mere five years before the iconic 1987 woodgrain set was released. There's a little reproduction of Rickey's 1982 Topps card on the front, and lots of fun 1982 tidbits on the back, such as Larry Parrish's three grand slams in one week, Salome Barojas' five-save MLB debut (whom Night Owl coincidentally just wrote about), Rollie Fingers' 300th save, and of course Rickey Henderson's 130 stolen bases.

It is nice to have another team to delve into once in a while. Even though I'm an avid Rockies fan, there's only so much that's happened in the last 25 years. Given the opportunity to dig back to 1901, there's plenty of history that remains untold. I've uncovered a lot in 250 posts, but there's plenty more to come.