The Trading Post #152: Card Hemorrhage (Part 1: Rockies)

Last October, I wrote ten posts in a single month. I doubt I'll be able to pull that off this year, even though there are a zillion playoff games on. The Rockies are in none of them, so I'll have to find some former Rockies to root for, guys like DJ LeMahieu and Tyler Matzek. Coincidentally, that's the matchup I predicted in Collector's Crack's annual contest, Yankees vs. Braves. 

But while the Rockies may not have made it to the 2020 Postseason, I still have Rockies cards to get me through the month of October, and beyond. This batch came from Jay at Card Hemorrhage, which fell victim to the diminished capabilities of the USPS. They eventually arrived safely, but far later than either of us hoped for.

1996 Upper Deck #320 Dante Bichette

It was worth the wait, because it included a great mix of old and new, starting with 1996 Upper Deck in all its coppery goodness. UD gave us a very Collector's Choice-esque photo of Dante Bichette, showing him involved in a cell phone conversation on a comically huge mobile phone. It's a museum piece by now, probably an early Motorola model.

I'm also noticing the "BICHETTE" lettering on the embossed label on his batting helmet, as well as the screen behind him that appears to be more like flimsy chicken wire than proper chain-link. Maybe this is a Spring Training photo, because it doesn't look like MLB was rolling in dough at the time.

I've seen 1996 Upper Deck a time or two, but I never really noticed the tiny baseball player outline in each corner of the copper foil. It blends in almost to the point of camouflage, but pops a little better on the scan. The card back is also pretty coppery, but lacks any foil other than the UD hologram. The photo on the back is almost a "Tatooine" photo, showing Bichette preparing to round third and casting a late-afternoon shadow in his stride. There's just the tiniest sliver of outfield grass to interfere with the photo.

1996 Upper Deck #320 Dante Bichette (Reverse)

I'm pretty sure that tiny baseball player icon above the hologram is the same image that UD put on the copper foil. It's cards like these that always make me an advocate for turning your cards over.

2017 Topps Heritage #169 Chad Bettis

This card marks the second consecutive appearance for Chad Bettis, this time on 2017 Topps Heritage. Clearly I like this set, because I've shown it in at least five different posts. I own only two real 1968 Topps cards, but the Nolan Ryan/Jerry Koosman rookie card has been on the top of my want list since early in my collecting days. The burlap set never rises to the top of the countdowns, but I'm confident in saying I like this one better than most do.

Obviously, this card doesn't discuss anything beyond Bettis's 2016 season, which was a pretty good one. This card was on the shelves as Bettis was fighting cancer in 2017, as I mentioned last time. I'm very glad to know that his Rockies career didn't end there.

There's a fun trivia question on the back of the '68s, and that's no different for 2017 Heritage. This one asks us who became the single-season Rockies leader in stolen bases, setting the mark in 2008. The mark still stands by far, and it was Willy Taveras with, appropriately enough, sixty-eight.

2018 Topps All Star Game Silver #688 Tony Wolters

The 2020 Rockies roster will round out the remainder of this post, starting with catcher Tony Wolters. You recognize the 2018 "waterslide" set by now, but this one has a special silver foil stamp on it, commemorating the 2018 All Star Game in Washington, D.C. Wolters has yet to earn a trip to the Midsummer Classic, so this isn't just for him. It's a parallel set that Topps released in factory set form, including this silver stamp on every card.

2018, you might remember, is the year that Bryce Harper won the Home Run Derby in front of his then-home crowd.

This card is a very tricky one to date due to how blurry the out-of-town scoreboard at Coors is in this photo, but I'll take a stab at it. I'm going to have to guess the top game is the Chicago Cubs at Milwaukee Brewers, in the 9th inning. The Cubs have 7 runs, that I'm confident in. The Brewers, 8? 3? 0? Hard to say. But we do have a candidate, April 9th, 2017. The Cubs beat the Brewers 7-4, but Milwaukee scored one run in the bottom of the 9th, so maybe that's a 3 and the final run hadn't scored yet. If I have the right day, the Dodgers were visiting the Rockies, an encouraging development that the Rockies were at home that day. Opening weekend, in fact.

What about Wolters? Well, in the bottom of the 5th that day, Wolters drew a walk to lead off the inning. He advanced to third on a Charlie Blackmon single, eventually scoring his second of three runs in a 10-6 loss. This photo sure looks like "advancing to third" to me, and the timing is about right, since games in Mountain Time run about 3-4 innings behind games in Central time. 

I'm not exceptionally confident in dating this to April 9th, 2017, but given such a blurry background, it's as good a guess as I could make.

2017 Topps Chrome #137 Antonio Senzatela (RC)

No such luck with Antonio Senzatela's card; it's just a plain outfield wall. But we get Chrome to make up for it. This is most likely a Spring Training photo, as the logo on his cap isn't the usual interlocking "CR". This is a more recent logo used only in the Cactus League, which keeps the mountain and baseball portion of the Rockies team logo, omitting the lettering above and below.

Senzatela has been a regular in the Rockies rotation for four seasons by now, but it looks like this is his Infield Fly Rule debut. He turned in a .500 record a couple times, but he's won more than he's lost, and that's no small feat as a Rockies pitcher.

One more win and he'll tie that legendary Rockies reliever, Steve Reed, who has slipped into a tie for 13th on the all-time Rockies Wins leaderboard.

2020 Donruss Holo Pink #46 Sam Hilliard RR

Also making his Infield Fly Rule debut is Sam Hilliard, a left-handed outfielder who has played a small part in the 2019 and 2020 seasons. He has 63 career games so far, and I'm not sure whether he's made enough of an impact to stick around in the big leagues. His bWAR in the abbreviated 2020 season was right at 0.0. He might have a tough time keeping a spot once Ian Desmond returns in 2021, assuming things are safe enough to hold a complete season next year.

This is my first look at 2020 Donruss, and I can certainly see the similarities to 1991 Donruss, right down to the Rated Rookie logo. Of course, twenty-nine years later we have about twenty-nine colored border parallels that 1991 didn't have, and this is the Holo Pink one, probably. Apparently there's something called a Baby Shark parallel(?). I'd like to see what that looks like just out of sheer curiosity. 

2020 Topps #293 Wade Davis

Our final card in part 1 is Wade Davis's 2020 Topps issue, which happens to the the first time the 2020 Topps base design has made it onto this blog. I've been spending all year catching up on trades, and it just didn't seem right to put a random 2020 Series 1 value pack ahead of all these awesome trades you've been seeing throughout 2020.

I still have a couple other trades to cover, from The Collector and Topps Cards that Never Were. I've had them here for a long time. They were so chock-full of awesomeness (and just, a lot of cards) that I haven't found a way to properly showcase those. I will, though. Mark my words.

Anyway, back to Wade Davis, who is no longer a Rockie. He finished with 43 saves in 2018, a Rockies single-season record. It looked for a while that this ultra-high-dollar signing was going to pay off, but instead the wheels started to come off in 2019. He was injured early on in the 2020 season, and was released by the team in late September. There have been many disappointing Rockies pitchers, but I can't recall any of them who grew to be so hated by the fans as Davis. It's unfortunate.

I'll have more to say on the 2020 design in a future post, but I will say it has a lot of angles. I think that much is obvious.

Thanks to Jay for the trade, and keep an eye out for a Stadium Club-heavy part 2.

 

Antique Mall Mystery Pack: Marlins

That trip to the antique mall last year keeps on providing fresh material, and I haven't even opened two of the Mystery Packs yet, though I know they're for the Twins and the Expos. But for this round, we'll be taking a look at the Rockies' expansion counterpart, the Florida Marlins.

Yes, they're now called the Miami Marlins, partially because they haven't been the only team in Florida for close to twenty seasons, and partially because marketing got involved and decided they were in need of a re-brand. But all these cards are from the "Florida" era, and most from when their primary color was turquoise.

1994 Donruss Special Edition #5 Gary Sheffield

We see that color a little bit in their road uniforms, but there's more gold than turquoise on this card, thanks to baseball card trends of the time. Donruss wasn't quite fully on board with gold parallels, so this Special Edition set only had a hundred cards, fifty from each of the two series. Which is just as well, since the card number on the back is also done up in gold foil, making the it pretty tough to read. Hand-collating 660 of these would involve plenty of squinting.

It depends on the light, but sometimes these Special Edition cards look a little more copper than gold. But the giant Donruss logo provides plenty of area for the gold to look shiny and rainbowy. But more on copper later.

1994 Topps #20 Bryan Harvey

A common theme of these packs has been lots of 1994 Topps, and while this isn't quite the glamour shot we saw for a Giant, it's definitely a posed studio photo, along with some cartoony motion blur. Most of the card brands got into double or triple exposures and motion blur, but the flame thing that's happening here doesn't really reflect what it would actually look like if they did a long exposure.

1994 Topps #370 Benito Santiago

But there were plenty of great action photos in 1994 Topps, like this card of Benito Santiago, listed here as "Benny". I do recall various announcers referring to him by that nickname, but I heard his given name of "Benito" much more frequently. Maybe it's just one of those cases of Topps deciding what they wanted his name to be, sort of like their 1960s "Bob" Clemente cards.

Don't forget that cameo of current Mets coach Tim Teufel. You can't quite tell what the outcome of this play was, but thankfully we can date this card! The Marlins visited San Diego (Santiago's previous team) twice in 1993, and a quick look through the box scores leads us to June 6th, 1993, about a week before I attended my first-ever Major League game. The Marlins won that one, helped out by an outfield assist from Jeff Conine on this exact play. So though it doesn't quite look it, Santiago got his guy!

1994 Topps Gold #161 Darrell Whitmore

Darrell Whitmore had a short, three-season career with the Marlins, and I don't really recognize his name other than from his various inaugural Marlins cards. But this is the Topps Gold parallel, which I'll be able to add to a sizable stack of these one-per-pack cards, a good chunk of which I got on eBay several years ago.

1993 Leaf #384 Charlie Hough

Charlie Hough was definitely past his prime by the time the Marlins signed him, as he built just a 14-25 record in his final two seasons. The Marlins employed a strategy similar to the Rockies, as Colorado signed Bryn Smith in 1993 to wrap up his long career. Smith in purple and Hough in turquoise must look extremely odd to most collectors, but since I found so many of their cards in my first year of collecting, they don't look that unfamiliar to me.

Flip this card over and you'll see the same gold rainbow foil on the team logo that Leaf/Donruss used the following year on those Donruss Special Edition cards. The premium brands always get the cool stuff a little earlier. Sometimes decades earlier, as 2016 Topps is finally losing the borders and going with full-bleed printing.

25 years coming on that one.

1993 Pinnacle #562 Cris Carpenter

This is probably our best look yet at the retina-searing colors of the early Florida Marlins, especially against the black borders of 1993 Pinnacle. It even has the Expansion Draft logo, just like the Rockies cards you've seen before. And that means this Marlins card has a tiny bonus Rockies logo, which more than makes up for a little bit of damage on the left side of the card.

Cris Carpenter might sound like a familiar name, but this is not the same Chris Carpenter who won the Cy Young Award for the Cardinals in 2005. Different guy entirely, although both played for the Cardinals, confusingly.

2002 Upper Deck MVP #226 Brad Penny

As in the Mets pack, this black-and-copper 2002 Upper Deck MVP remains one of my favorites. It's always nice to see some specialty sets like this in a 50-cent pack filled mostly with overproduction cards. I guess that's the magic of antiquing.

The color coding works really well with this design, and I've found that the black background is pretty sturdy, unlike say, 1994 Score, or 1993 Pinnacle. Or 1971 Topps, for that matter.

1996 Upper Deck #339 Al Leiter

Upper Deck was still pushing the copper envelope in 1996, and it's in a bold bar at the bottom of every base card in this and the following year's set (other than the numerous subset cards, of course). They hadn't quite thought to tone it down until a few years had gone by for that 2002 MVP design. This is a fairly boring photo of Al Leiter, but 1996 was the year he pitched the first-ever no-hitter for the young Florida Marlins, which happened to be the first no-hitter pitched against the Colorado Rockies. Interesting and unlikely trivia fact, isn't it? Both expansion teams had their first taste of a no-hitter while facing each other.

1996 Upper Deck #338 Pat Rapp

Pat Rapp never threw a no-hitter; in fact he only had one winning season his whole career. But we can all appreciate a card of a pitcher at the plate, right? As with most pitchers, it looks like unfamiliar territory for him. His uniform number is 48, but the bat he is using is marked #11, the number of fellow pitcher Chris Hammond. Maybe he was just trying to break out of a slump by switching out the lumber.

1998 Ultra #295 Todd Zeile

But copper is Upper Deck's color, not the Marlins'. Fortunately, the raised green lettering found on other 1998 Ultra cards happens to match well with the Marlins' colors. even if it is obscuring the catcher in this photo, Tom Pagnozzi of the Cardinals. Though Walt Weiss beat him to it, Zeile was one of dozens of players to play for both the Marlins and the Rockies, but that was still a few years off when this card was printed, as was his two-inning pitching career.

2000 Upper Deck Hitter's Club #77 Julio Ramirez HS

I have never heard of Julio Ramirez, who "Hit The Show" in 1999, but didn't play in 2000. Nor have I heard of Upper Deck Hitter's Club, a small 90-card set entirely devoid of pitchers. It has a little bit of mint green foil, an unusual but pleasing color for a card. But that's what cards were like around the turn of the millennium. You can spend a couple decades building a collection and never know of the existence of a set like this.

Who knows what I'll unearth in the next Mystery Pack?