The Trading Post #145: A Penny Sleeve for your Thoughts

It's not often when the Rockies are in first place in mid-August.

Asterisk.

As the weekend series against Texas opens, one of my many pending stacks of incoming cards caught my eye. There are only two cards here, but the gold-foil-to-card ratio was about as high as it can possibly be for a single PWE. This one came from Jon at A Penny Sleeve for your Thoughts, who just introduced me to the world of buybacks.

2011 Topps #230 Aaron Cook (2017 Rediscover Topps Gold)

Yes, after all these years of Topps doing buybacks and stamping cards, this is the very first one to enter my collection. Beckett doesn't list these at all, and there's nothing on the card other than the "Rediscover Topps" lettering to signify that this is anything but a normal 2011 Topps card. I don't even know the best way to caption it. And because there's no Beckett info on it, I had to turn to Google to figure out that this is from the 2017 series of buybacks. Apparently, that's the year when we were all encouraged to rediscover Topps.

I'm not sure exactly why we need to rediscover the 2011 design, of all years. Thanks to the stratospherically-priced Mike Trout rookie card (not to mention the rookie card of red-hot Charlie Blackmon) it's probably one of the best-known designs Topps has done in twenty years. And I certainly hope Topps didn't spoil any real Trout rookie with one of these stamps.

According to my research, there were five foil varieties to be found among 2017 buybacks, starting with the usual low-grade and most common bronze, ascending up the Olympic medal colors to this mid-range gold, and topping off with the rarest blue and red varieties. I'm not sure how well the silver would look when placed on a design that already uses a healthy dose of silver foil, but the gold does stand out quite nicely.

No word on whether there will be a meta buyback-of-buybacks at some distant point in the future. Who knows, it could eventually look like the annually-deposited layers of stickers that end up on the license plate of an old car.

As far as the underlying card itself, I like the 2011 design. It's clean, certainly far less busy than the recently-unveiled 2021 design. By the way, Jo Adell was the featured player on the 2021 design preview, and the guy had a rough week. In addition to giving the world its first glimpse of 2021 Topps, which was not all that well-received, he also committed a Canseco-style error that converted a fly ball into a home run.

Even though he's the career Rockies leader in innings pitched and several other categories, Aaron Cook is a rare bird around here. I can't help but notice that he wore #28, the number now worn by Nolan Arenado. In fact, I pointed this exact fact out once before when I saw an Aaron Cook card.

2000 Pacific Prism Holographic Gold #48 Pedro Astacio /480

Another pitcher toward the top of the Rockies career leaderboards is Pedro Astacio. He was the team's strikeout leader for a long time, and while two pitchers have since passed him on that statistic, he remains the team leader in complete games. Based on how important the bullpen has grown in today's game, he might never lose that record.

One other interesting statistical note. No other Rockie has hit more batters than Astacio, but he's nowhere to be found on the wild pitch leaderboard. Maybe it's an indication that hitters just crowded the plate against him, but the combination of those two statistics tell me that his control was right where he wanted it. Same goes for Jamey Wright, who's among the top-20 all-time of batters hit, and half that list consists of guys who played in the 19th century.

On to the card, which has to be one of the shiniest, most gold cards in my whole collection. The pattern glitters like a rainbow in a dozen different directions, and it looks great. I love cards like this, I really do. They're mesmerizing. So mesmerizing that I didn't even notice the serial number in the lower right until months after I opened this PWE. This Holographic Gold has a print run of 480, sort of a strange number. Strange, I thought, until I saw the print runs of some of the other color varieties of this card. 448, 916, 565, and even a couple prime numbers in 61 and 691.

The baseball card world lost such richness when Pacific went under.

And unlike the Topps buyback, in which I had no idea what year the stamp was from, Pacific leaves no doubt about their sets. This is 2000 Pacific Prism, card #48. It's right there on the card back, and we can thank Pacific for being among the first to add that collector-friendly feature.

It's rare for me to finish writing a post before first pitch. Granted, I don't usually do two-card posts, but I usually end up writing until at least the sixth or seventh inning. Scanning will take a little longer, but with just two cards, I don't have to worry much about whether my scanner will auto-crop each card on the first try or on the seventh.

Thanks, Jon, for these great gold cards and for giving me a glimpse at the strange world of Topps buybacks!