The Case Hit Group Break (Part 2: Pirates)

A nice bonus in most group breaks is an extra, random team in addition to your selected team. I picked the Rockies, no surprises there. And I believe I have the Mets in Nachos Grande's current break, but in Trevor's midsummer break at Bump and Run Football Card Blog, I ended up with the Pirates. No problems with that; in fact if I had to rank favorite teams, they'd probably be up in the top ten or twelve. They usually have some pretty interesting characters, and a rich but often overlooked history going all the way back to Honus Wagner. My Topps Opening Day blaster in 2017 was filled with Pirates, and I had fun with that post.

2018 Stadium Club #255 Gregory Polanco

Gregory Polanco also seems to be having plenty of fun on his 2018 Stadium Club card, flashing a couple peace signs at the camera. This is a view few of us get, a shot looking up the dugout steps that's usually reserved for players. The piercing gaze of cameras look down the dugout regularly, and sometimes even into the clubhouse tunnel, but very rarely out onto the field from this perspective. The full-bleed design lets us see the stadium lights turned on against a rapidly approaching dusk.

A fun fact on the back tells us that Polanco was the first-ever opening day DH for the Pirates, meaning they must have opened the 2017 season on the road for an interleague game. Sure enough, they opened last year in Fenway Park, and took a loss to this year's AL pennant winners.

2018 Stadium Club Black Foil #226 Starling Marte

A more commonly-seen view of the dugout greets us on Starling Marte's card, which is a Black Foil parallel. It doesn't pop quite as well as the Red Foil variety, but it's nice to get a look at the various colors to be found in 2018 Stadium Club.

I can't say I know much about Polanco or Marte, but they're both from the Dominican Republic. Santo Domingo, to be exact, which is the birthplace of a slew of famous ballplayers, including David Ortiz, Pedro Martinez, Albert Pujols, Jose Bautista, and many, many others. It's a pretty small country, but they've sent a significant share of famous ballplayers to the MLB.

2018 Diamond Kings #18 Paul Waner

Same goes for the state of Oklahoma. Hailing from that midwestern state are Johnny Bench, Mickey Mantle, Joe Carter, Willie Stargell, and Paul Waner, a Hall of Famer and the 1927 NL MVP. The Pirates won the pennant that year, but ended up with the misfortune of facing the 1927 Yankees, arguably the best baseball team of all time. It was the only postseason appearance of Waner's career, and his Pirates were swept by those invincible Yankees.

Those of you who read my previous post will notice that this is a new design, as I didn't get any Rockies from the box of 2018 Diamond Kings. That was more than offset by a case hit of Jon Gray (also from Oklahoma), but the box gave up a few treasures for the Pirates stack. The set has that same playing card finish I've pointed out in past years, and a similar oil painting look as you've seen before.

The white-on-yellow text is a touch hard to read, but the back of the card tells us that Waner made the most of growing up on a farm. He honed his craft learning to hit corncobs with a stick, which apparently makes hitting a nice sphere with a thick bat a walk in the park. Of course, being in the Hall of Fame often leads a team to retire your number, and if you look closely on Marte's card, you'll see Waner's #11 on the facade of the third deck, just to the right of Marte's cap.

2018 Diamond Kings Brown Frame #13 Lloyd Waner

The Pirates also brought Paul's younger brother Lloyd aboard, and they played together throughout the 1930s. Lloyd is also in the Hall of Fame, but didn't have quite the high performance as his older brother. And the Pirates #10 is still in circulation, currently worn by Jordy Mercer.

Diamond Kings yielded a hit for me, balancing out the lack of my preferred team. This is a framed border parallel, the Brown version, which is numbered to just 49 copies. It's most likely a bit more plentiful than a Photographer's Proof in 2018 Stadium Club, but 49 is pretty darn scarce.

I'm sure the Waner family back home in Oklahoma was delighted to have a couple pro ballplayers bringing home the bacon during the 1930s while the topsoil was blowing away in the midst of severe drought.

2018 Diamond Kings #19 Roberto Clemente

Moving a bit further down the Pirates timeline, we come to the great Roberto Clemente, Hall of Famer, MVP, 15-time All-Star, and two-time World Series champion. He's also in the 3,000 hit club with Paul Waner.

As this is an unlicensed set, there can't be any MLB logos, but somehow that's a bit less noticeable on older photos. The blocky yellow "P" is pretty conspicuously absent from Clemente's batting helmet, the kind without ear flaps. But on the Waner cards, It's not clear how much image editing Panini had to do.

2015 Topps Chrome #126 Gregory Polanco

Gregory Polanco makes another appearance, but he's all business this time around, and with a degree more shininess. I don't hear much talk about Topps Chrome anymore, which maybe has something to do with the lack of borders in Topps flagship. But I'll always take a shiny card.

I'm always partial to cards that show special patches on the player's sleeves. I kind of got hooked on that mini collection while hunting for cards for Highly Subjective and Completely Arbitrary. In 2014, the Pirates wore a #4 patch, memorializing Ralph Kiner. Kiner, yet another Hall of Famer, led the NL in home runs for his first seven years. He only played ten seasons, retiring at just 32 due to a back injury. He stayed involved with baseball for the rest of his life, getting into broadcasting in the early 1960s, and he was the voice of the Mets right up until his death in 2014.

2018 Topps #591 Daniel Nava

Game 7 of the NLCS is drawing to a close as I write this, so I'll wrap things up with one for my Coors Field Frankenset, newly released onto the market by Topps this year. This happens to be a zero-year card, because while Daniel Nava is technically part of the Pirates organization, he hasn't appeared in a Major League game with them, let alone one at Coors Field. He's bounced around the big leagues since he left Boston in 2015, and it remains to be seen when his next appearance will be.

That looks like Bud Black in the Rockies dugout, occupying his usual spot on the top step. That would place this card in 2017 when Nava was a Phillie, narrowing this down to early August 2017 in an entirely different uniform.

This has been my most prolific month of blogging since April, and it feels good to be writing again and giving proper thanks to the great members of the Cardsphere. Thanks for sticking around, and enjoy the World Series! I'll be trying to figure out which team I can tolerate more.

Antique Mall Mystery Pack: Pirates

For the next iteration of my Antique Mall Mystery Pack theme, I'm continuing to focus on teams that made it to the 2015 Postseason.

1998 Fleer Tradition #218 Shawon Dunston

Unlike the Mets, however, the Pirates were ousted by the Cubs in the National League Wild Card game. They're the subject of the next team bag I opened from a recent trip to the Brass Armadillo antique mall in Denver. There are still plenty more to come, but for now, lets look at this Fleer-heavy pack of the NL Central's first runner-up.

Shawon Dunston leads it off, a player who spent most of his career on the Cubbies, but who came over to Pittsburgh for a short 18 game stop toward the later part of his career. This is from that brief time in 1997, which we can tell by the Jackie Robinson 50th Anniversary patch on his right sleeve. This Fleer design is always tough for me to place precisely, but that patch helped out quite a bit.

1995 Fleer #477 Mark Dewey

1995 Fleer, on the other hand, is so distinctive it can probably be seen from space. The NL Central design is a bit more tame than the NL East design we saw on the Mets. If the rest of these packs have a 1995 Fleer card or two, this should be a fun journey.

2000 Fleer Tradition #187 Bruce Aven

As little as I know about middle reliever Mark Dewey, I know even less about Bruce Aven. I'd honestly never heard of him prior to pulling this card. Fleer brands got pretty strange around this time, as they started calling their flagship product "Fleer Tradition" in 1998, as we can see on Dunston's card at the top of this post.

That only lasted two years, as they shifted the Tradition brand over to a retro style in 2000, and didn't even market a flagship "Fleer" set for most of the rest of their existence. They were clearly going for the look of 1954 Topps with this set, which will become clear soon enough.

2001 Upper Deck Vintage #318 Pittsburgh Pirates CL

UD was on the vintage bandwagon not long after, as was Topps with their Heritage brand. This team checklist from Upper Deck Vintage is full of disembodied heads, but the variety of hats, batting helmets, logos, and even a hatless player I've never heard of make this card somewhat disjointed.

2003 Topps #458 Josh Fogg

There, that's more like it! No wonder I keep coming back to Topps as my favorite brand. I thought I knew the 2003 design pretty well, but it wasn't until I scanned this card that I noticed that the upper right corner of the photo is rounded. Overall, this is a great color-coded set, and I've always liked the black and yellow of the Pirates. Fogg even spent some time as a Rockie, and was part of that magical 2007 playoff team. His career didn't last much beyond that, but he holds a place in Rockies history.

1994 Topps Archives 1954 Gold #87  Roy Face

1994 Topps Archives 1954 Gold #213  John Fitzpatrick CO

Speaking of history, how about a couple one-per-pack Gold parallels from one of my favorite reprint sets, Topps Archives 1954?

These aren't perfect reproductions, as the original 1954 cards didn't have a white border on top, and the dimensions were slightly larger (think 1989 Bowman). But with a large, full-color painted headshot, small action black-and-white photograph, facsimile signature, team logo, and the team name and spelled-out position toward the top underneath the player's name in all caps, it's plain that Fleer did barely more than change the font for their 2000 Tradition product.

And I thought 1997 Donruss ripped off 1996 Leaf.

Blatant plagiarism aside, there was one more surprise in this pack.

1972 Topps #180 Dock Ellis IA

This is by far the oldest card I've pulled from this shopping trip, and it's from Topps' iconic 1972 "psychedelic gravestone" set. Dock Ellis, of course, is the pitcher who threw a no-hitter while on LSD (the same substance that may have inspired 1995 Fleer). I haven't seen it yet, but there's a documentary about the feat, whose movie poster is clearly based off of 1972 Topps.

Though the Pirates may not have progressed in this year's Postseason, the franchise has a long and colorful history from Honus Wagner to Andrew McCutchen, with some Dock Ellis and Barry Bonds in between.

Up next: the Toronto Blue Jays.