Eight Clubby Nights: A Stadium Club Hanukkah (Night 1)

Hanukkah is early this year.

That's always the joke. It's either early or late; it's never on time. Although last year, December 12th, was basically the first time I can ever recall it feeling like it was on time.

So what better way to celebrate Hanukkah on the blog than to open a pack a night from a blaster of 2018 Topps Stadium Club? I've had it sitting around, unopened, since the middle of summer, and partway through the Postseason, it clicked that the eight packs inside would make a great theme this holiday season. It is definitely consistent with how Hanukkah is commonly celebrated, with one small gift being given on each of the eight nights. Packs of baseball cards were most definitely given to me during Hanukkahs long ago, and I specifically remember a pack of 1993 Score being one of them. Matchbox cars, small Lego sets, or maybe some Micro Machines were pretty common gifts on the other nights, but a pack of baseball cards is the perfect portion.

You just need to make sure you don't get them greasy from the potato latkes.

I could get really festive and do one card on the first night, two on the second, etc, but we don't have to take things that literally. It's five cards to a pack, so let's see what Kris Bryant is hiding behind the cellophane.

2018 Stadium Club #7 Alex Mejia (RC)

I'm not exactly sure what to expect. That's part of the fun of a pack, but I know next to nothing about Alex Mejia, who played 29 games with the Cardinals in 2017. He's got plenty of Triple-A experience by now, but being 27 with only a month in the Majors to show for it doesn't bode well for his future career.

According to the card back, his cousin is well-known Blue Jays hurler Marco Estrada, who did not get a card in 2018 Stadium Club. Mejia has one lone home run in his major league career, and the card is sure to mention it, which occurred on July 1st, 2017 against the Washington Nationals. It was the game winner, and may end up being the highlight of his career. He hit an absolutely dismal .109, so his Rookie Card may also be his sunset card.

Stats aside, with Stadium Club, we come for the photos, and this one of an elevated Mejia is a great one. I particularly like the symmetry of his bold "SS" position and the "66" in the oil company logo on the outfield wall.

2018 Stadium Club #43 Michael Fulmer

Ah, good. A player I have heard of.

Michael Fulmer, the 2016 AL Rookie of the Year and a 2017 All-Star, is respecting a longstanding tradition of superstitious pitchers stepping over the foul line on the way back to the dugout. Some walk normally, blatantly flying in the face of convention, but you know how pitchers can be. Fulmer seems to be taking a slightly abnormally long stride on this card, and it's exactly why I love this set. Most sets would show him in a close-up of his pitching motion, with his face and elbow wildly contorted. But there's more to a pitcher than his delivery, and Stadium Club's photo selection gives us just a little window into that, if you know what to look for.

That's the tradition you'll find in baseball. A player returning to the sidelines isn't just out for a stroll; it tells you a lot about how he plays the game. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, and I'm not terribly familiar with the Tigers these days, but I do know that on this card, Fullmer is respecting tradition.

Or at least not trying to tempt fate.

2018 Stadium Club #293 Jackie Bradley Jr.

And now we come to our first player who participated in the 2018 Postseason.

Well, maybe "participated" isn't quite the right word. The Braves and Rockies "participated". But Jackie Bradley Jr. finished up 2018 with a bang, winning MVP honors in the ALCS against the Astros, and of course helping Boston bring home their fourth championship of the millennium.

Time will tell if they can win past the 18th year of a century. But with JBJ and his fellow Killer Bs in Fenway's oddly-shaped outfield, they stand a good chance to keep terrorizing the Cardinals and the NL West. It's surely not the last time we'll see Bradley trotting around the bases in a sunny Fenway Park.

2018 Stadium Club Power Zone Red #PZ-KS Kyle Schwarber

Topps carried over the Power Zone insert set for another year. They toned it down a little bit from last year, and way down from 1995, instead giving us a nice bit of red foil and some synthetic motion blur. I think the starfield in the background is supposed to give us a sense of zipping through outer space at a high velocity, like looking at a cross-section of a Windows screensaver.

I can't remember a single card with red foil that I didn't like. It's definitely not overused, which is maybe why it's so welcome in my binders. And it certainly doesn't hurt that this red foil means it's a parallel.

Unlike Jackie Bradley Jr., Kyle Schwarber's season came to an end a bit earlier. He and his Cubbies lost two straight games in early October, losing the NL Central tiebreaker to the Brewers, and the NL Wild Card game to the Rockies. In those two home games, Schwarber was 0-3 with two strikeouts. When power hitters aren't on their game, strikeouts soon follow. It's a rule as old as the concept of a power hitter itself.

2018 Stadium Club #14 Daniel Murphy

As the first candles of Hanukkah drip and dwindle away, Daniel Murphy is our final card for tonight. It's a horizontal card, but I'm not sure the photo selection here quite warrants it. There's a lot of empty space on the left.

Murphy didn't remain with the Nationals all season, as pictured. He wore Cubbie blue in the final months of 2018, and had a better day than Schwarber in that all-important Wild Card game. He played about half a season, striking out just 40 times on his way to barely missing a .300 average. He hits home runs, but he challenged DJ LeMahieu for the NL batting crown in 2016, and the three-time All-Star has kept his strikeout count relatively low in this era of the three true outcomes.

There are still seven nights ahead of us, and there surely remain lots of surprises. We'll see if this turns out to be a good blaster at my side.