Gold Medal Club (Part 1: Base)

Despite all the chaos and disruption around us, one thing remains constant. 

I still love Stadium Club.

Thanks to Target's recent policy of taking baseball cards out of their stores, I've actually been able to grab a couple products from their website at regular pricing. One of those was a blaster of 2021 Topps Stadium Club, and it's worthy of at least a podium finish in the 2021 Set of the Year race.

2021 Stadium Club #57 Ronald Acuña Jr.

As usual, the set is full of baseball's brightest young stars, including the Venezuelan sensation Ronald Acuña, Jr. He was having a great season until about a month ago, when he suffered a season-ending knee injury. Sadly, that also meant he had to miss out on playing in the All-Star Game, though he did attend.

When he's not on the field, he's usually enjoying his time off it. His dreadlocks and #13 chain are on full display in this borderless photo. Obviously, the picture was shot through the screen, which detracts slightly, but getting such a candid shot of Acuña that's different from so many other action shots is refreshing.

About a half-century ago, action photos first started appearing in baseball card sets. That artform has advanced so dramatically that us collectors take special notice when a card doesn't have one. Almost every card in the Topps flagship set is an ultra-sharp closeup of a player batting, pitching, fielding, diving, leaping, etc.... Just hanging around on the sidelines has become a rare sight.

2021 Stadium Club #172 Vladimir Guerrero Jr.

Not that perfectly-cropped action photos are boring. Far from it. I think we just like more variety. A set like Stadium Club needs shots of the All-Star Game MVP snagging a ball in his blue glove as much as any other. And that's not even what Vladimir Guerrero Jr. does best. He is second on the home run leaderboard for 2021, just three behind Shohei Ohtani.

2021 Stadium Club #241 Joey Bart (RC)

As young as they are, both Acuña and Guerrero have some service time under their belts by now. But there are lots of fresh rookies in the Stadium Club checklist, like Joey Bart of the Giants. Ostensibly the eventual replacement for Buster Posey, the former Georgia Tech Yellow Jacket is ranked #15 on the list of top MLB prospects. He got a little playing time in 2020 while Posey opted out of the season, but he's appeared just twice in 2021.

In any case, whether they're rookies or veterans, photos of catchers in full gear are great every time. Design-wise in 2021 Stadium Club, there is little to distract from the photo. There's just a little black banner in the lower left with the player's name in silver foil and the color-coded team abbreviation. The Stadium Club logo is in the upper right, and the Rookie Card logo in the lower right. That's about it, which makes the Nike Swoosh stand out that much more.

And clearly he's a catcher, even though this design doesn't explicitly tell us the player's position.

2021 Stadium Club #41 Ian Happ

The ivy wall at Wrigley Field also always looks good on cards, and here's Ian Happ tracking down a daytime fly ball for the Cubbies. The friendly confines have stood for well over a century, but Ian Happ's surroundings have changed dramatically in the past couple weeks. He's now part of a drastically different Cubs team, with stars Rizzo, Bryant, Kimbrel, Báez, and others traded to a variety of contending teams for a massive haul of prospects. Most of them, you'll recall, were part of that magical championship team in 2016.

We'll see what happens with the Cubs and their new prospects in 2026 or so, but the Cubs front office had to make sure that their fans were still intimately acquainted with heartbreak.

2021 Stadium Club #205 Kyle Lewis

It's only fitting that I get to blog about my favorite set on National Baseball Card Day. Of the many synthetic holidays that now fill the calendar, it's one of my favorites, right up there with International Chicken Wing Day, National Potato Chip Day, World Whisky Day, and of course Look For Circles Day.

And I found one, right behind 2020 AL Rookie of the Year Kyle Lewis.

In all seriousness, this is an excellent photo. It would require a lot of patience to get a snapshot of an outfielder right in front of his team's logo. It's definitely a shot the photographer prepared for. And if you look closely, you can see just how perfect the pocket is on Lewis's glove. The only way this could be any better is if the ball were in frame.

2021 Stadium Club #185 Kirby Puckett

Moving on from the current young players, we come to the retired legends that populate the Stadium Club checklist. It's been a while since I pulled a Kirby Puckett card out of a pack. And because players like Puckett built such a solid career, it's easy for us to forget that they were once young players with a promising but uncertain future. We've loved watching Acuña these past few years, but that ACL injury definitely puts a question mark or two out there.

When I first started watching baseball in 1993, the Twins were wearing pinstripes and had moved away from the "TC" lettering, so this photo is certainly from early in Puckett's career, maybe even from his rookie year of 1984.

2021 Stadium Club #116 Greg Maddux

More difficult to place in time is this clubhouse celebration photo of Greg Maddux. He's clearly wearing a shirt that says the Braves were National League Champions, but that happened numerous times throughout the '90s, both before and after Maddux's arrival in 1993. The Yankees won more World Series that decade, but the Braves had a longer streak of reaching the Postseason. 

Greg Maddux, one of the greatest control pitchers of all-time, was there for most of it, and his Braves came away with the ultimate prize in 1995. As the card back tells us, he had a 2.84 ERA throughout the 1995 Postseason, part of which came in the NLDS against the Rockies.

2021 Stadium Club #262 Frank Thomas

Of these retired stars, Maddux is mostly out of the spotlight, and sadly Puckett is no longer with us, but Frank Thomas is still well-known to current baseball fans, as he's part of the Fox broadcast crew. David Ortiz is usually the one who is up to the most mischief at the postgame desk, but Thomas is a commanding presence.

Once upon a time, he was known as The Big Hurt, and he was as big a name as they came in the early '90s. The two-time MVP was a fearsome hitter, and it appears that he is using an actual piece of rebar to warm up in the on-deck circle. Apparently, he used this throughout his career, and it allegedly came from the demolished Old Comiskey Park.

If he could actually swing this thing, I'd love to see how far he could hit a baseball with it. 

2021 Stadium Club #123 George Brett

George Brett appeared in this blaster too. His career wrapped up in 1993 along with Nolan Ryan's, so I didn't end up seeing any of it. Neither Brett nor Ryan made the All-Star team or the Postseason in 1993, and that was before Interleague play, so all I knew of them was from their legendary status, and in the case of Nolan Ryan, that orange and blue Pacific set.

On the card back, there's only a single line of stats for his career totals. Active players got another stat line for their 2020 season, but these retired players just have their gigantic numbers jockeying for position on the vertical card back. Brett's 10,349 at bats. Thomas's 4,550 total bases. Maddux's 999 career walks (!). Only the greats can stick around long enough to get that high up the leaderboards.

2021 Stadium Club #51 Willie Mays

As impressive as those numbers are, a few players have true numbers that are even higher. Late last year, the Negro Leagues were elevated to Major League status, so that means some players, like Willie Mays, actually have statistics that aren't really what we thought they were. The card back says that Mays had 1,903 RBI, but thanks to six more that we know about during his 1948 season with the Birmingham Black Barons, that total is now 1,909 as per Baseball-Reference.

It remains to be seen what Topps will do with Negro League stats in future years on cards of Mays and Monte Irvin and Elston Howard and so many more, whether their traditional National League and American League stats will be used for the totals on card backs, or whether we start to see a more complete representation of what actually happened in their careers.

I'm also curious to see whether we'll start seeing more cards of players whose careers ended before Jackie Robinson debuted for the Brooklyn Dodgers. It's been a while since I've pulled a Kirby Puckett card, yes, but I most definitely have never pulled a Martín Dihigo card. I'd like to see Topps change that.

2021 Stadium Club #184 Jackie Robinson

Our final card today is Jackie Robinson's, one that I've seen frequently on the blogs this summer. Lots of bloggers have pointed out that this photo was colorized incorrectly, as the Dodgers have never worn red numbers on the back of their uniforms. The small numbers on the front are red, but the backs have always been blue. I wish Topps would just use the original black-and-white photos like they did in earlier releases of Stadium Club.

As the Tokyo Olympics draw to a close, I wanted to share a fun fact about the Robinson family and the Olympics. Due to World War II, Jackie never got a chance to compete in the Olympic games, though he was certainly talented enough. He was a multi-sport star at UCLA, and excelled in Track & Field. So did his older brother, Mack. 

Surely you know about Jesse Owens, who famously won four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. One of those races was the 200m, which Owens won in 20.7 seconds, setting what was then a world record. 

Just a few tenths behind and winning the silver medal was Mack Robinson.

We'll never know what Jackie might have done in the 1940 or 1944 Olympics, had they occurred as planned. But we'll remember for all time what he did for baseball, and what his legacy is still doing for baseball. It's just worth remembering that to a degree, he was following in his brother's footsteps.

A Less Exclusive Club

I've been adding to my vintage collection a bit lately, but don't for a moment think that I'm abandoning current cards.

Stadium Club's resurrection is back in force for a second year, and now available in convenient pack form at your local big box retailer. Last year, the high rollers in this hobby didn't think it stacked up to the overpriced insanity of Museum Collection and the like, so Topps must have figured that it wasn't quite appropriate as a hobby-store-only product.

So I tossed a pack into my red handbasket and ended up with a dozen cards of full-bleed awesomeness.

2015 Stadium Club #12 Giancarlo Stanton

They feel a little thicker than last year, and the subtle lightening under the nameplate reminds me a bit of Flair. And the top-notch photography just can't be beat. I can't quite tell who's behind the plate, absorbing pitches as Stanton bides his time to crush a monster home run. But it's a great example of an all-dirt "Tatooine" card, and we get a pretty good look at how the batters box and infield can be watered differently.

Stanton seems surprisingly forward in the batter's box, and if he tried to swing here, he definitely checked it.

2015 Stadium Club #88 Chris Davis

There were quite a few horizontal cards in this pack, but the vertical ones are typically more plentiful anytime there's a mixture. That holds true for 2015 Stadium Club, and let's be honest, Chris Davis' forearm is pretty much the focal point here. The steroid era may be over, but it still takes plenty of strength to lead the Majors in home runs. Of course, that happens the year after I picked him in fantasy baseball.

2015 Stadium Club #136 Reggie Jackson

I do enjoy seeing retired legends appear in the base set (as long as it's not in flagship), and Reggie rounds out a trio of HR-hitting stars. Though Davis and Stanton are both quite young, they have a long way to go before they match Jackson's 563 career dingers.

Jackson is probably most well-known among casual fans for his performance in the 1977 World Series, but as this card points out, he had quite a successful run in Oakland before donning the pinstripes.

2015 Stadium Club #35 Ryne Sandberg

Sandberg, on the other hand, was a Cubbie almost his entire career, at least until he returned to Philadelphia to manage the team that drafted him. I've seen this card on many blogs, and it's a favorite of mine, too. The sharpness of modern printing does blow me away from time to time, as the texture of Ryno's jersey and the stains on his hat almost pop off the cardboard.

2015 Stadium Club Legends Die Cut #LDC-04 Willie Mays

If you remember the hobby box of 2014 Stadium Club I bought, then you'll recall that I pulled a Willie Mays insert from one of the mini-boxes that year too. Between the card above, last year's Field Access card, and a serial-numbered rarity from Topps High Tek, I've been having awesome luck pulling Mays cards the past year or so.

Die-cut cards are hit or miss for me. Topps Chrome has been going way overboard in recent years, but this Mays is just about my speed. And the color-coding across this insert set is great, especially this copper-colored Giants card.

2015 Stadium Club #13 Ernie Banks

It's not every day that President Obama drapes a Presidential Medal of Freedom around your neck. Like Mays and of course Jackie Robinson, Banks was one of the first African-American players in the MLB. Despite the obvious challenges that remain in this country, a baseball card depicting America's first black president awarding a medal to an early black baseball player many years his senior is a positive and inspirational image, reminding us of how far we've come, yet also how far we have to go.

Other than the obvious Sammy Sosa, Banks is second all-time in Cubs home runs, so his baseball career is nothing to sneeze at, either. Unfortunately for both him and Ryno, neither ever competed in a World Series, but after the recent passing of Mr. Banks, this would be the perfect year for the Cubs to change that.

My First Group Break

I was recently involved in my first-ever group break, which was hosted by Nachos Grande. He does these quite frequently; he's already on his second this year. The one previous was a jumbo case of 2015 Topps Series 1, which I was not involved in. This post is actually from his final group break of 2014, where he opened some Topps High Tek and Stadium Club. I didn't see too many posts from other bloggers about their winnings, but that may be because I ended up with one of the hits from a fairly small selection of high-end cards.

For the uninitiated, a group break works like this: a couple dozen or so people pool their money and buy several boxes, or perhaps a case, and divide up the cards by team. Anyone who anted up gets all the cards of their chosen team(s), or perhaps a random team; there are lots of ways to do it.

Anyway, I'll get to that in a bit, but part of this group break also included a bunch of assorted cards from your team that had nothing to do with the fancy new boxes of high-end Topps. That means that much of this shipment looked a lot like a trade package, and I'm sure that Nachos Grande was able to clear out lots of extras.

Gold was the name of the game in the mid-1990s, and even the "filler" cards didn't disappoint.

1998 Bowman's Best #4 Dante Bichette

I never saw any of the Bowman's Best cards when they were released. I'm sure I acquired a few here and there in the early 2000s, but I never really got a good look at this brand until they made it an insert set it in recent Bowman releases.

They're quite thick, maybe even a little more so than Topps Finest. And I think I finally found the right scanner settings to get a somewhat accurate representation of a shiny card.

1994 SP #165 Ellis Burks

Upper Deck didn't miss an opportunity to put the "Super Premium" in "SP", because all that brass-colored foil on the right side wasn't enough. Even the little Upper Deck hologram on the back is gold on these SP cards, as opposed to the usual silver.

If I never ran across Bowman's Best in their early years, then I definitely never saw the first few Upper Deck SP sets. They just weren't in my budget as a young collector, although I could probably have stretched if I really wanted to. But at $75 for a box of eight cards, Topps High Tek would have been completely out of my price range. Even now, taking my chances in a group break really only made sense because I knew there would be lots of other goodies included.

Goodies like awesome photography on UD Collector's Choice.

1997 Collector's Choice #321 Bruce Ruffin

I'm not sure how well a Bic ballpoint pen will do when used to sign a baseball, but it beats no signature at all if the Rockies' closer is giving out autographs under a partly cloudy sky.

Based on that black jersey and the relatively small light fixture in the background, I'm guessing that this was taken during Spring Training. The players are a lot more accessible during the preseason, and most of the autograph collectors I know have had much of their success while visiting Arizona or Florida in the month of March.

Speaking of Spring Training, we're just a few games in, and as I write this, my TV is tuned to live baseball for the first time in many months! Nothing like a ballgame to get me in the card-blogging spirit.

I don't have any autographs from Spring Training, but I have managed to snag a few at Coors Field over the years.

1996 Stadium Club #377 Kevin Ritz

Kevin Ritz spent a few years in the Rockies' rotation, and he signed my hat before a game. He probably wasn't on the mound that day, as starters have plenty of time to kill during game time except every fifth day.

This card shows Ritz pitching in an away stadium, as neither Coors Field nor Mile High Stadium employed the use of Astroturf, thankfully. That stuff was just hideous. It was in quite a few parks before the recent round of new ballpark construction, even in outdoor stadiums with relatively mild climates, like St. Louis and Philadelphia. Only Toronto and Tampa Bay still have artificial surfaces, and those are both indoor stadiums.

Pretty much every time I get a random stack of cards from about 1997 to 2005, there's a card from a set I've never seen before. And I'm not talking about insert sets; that's how many base sets were out there until Fleer, Pacific, Pinnacle, and Donruss all fell on hard times.

2002 Fleer Maximum #17 Todd Helton

Fleer Maximum. New to me. Unfortunately, this card is a bit beat up. It probably fell victim to being stuck to the card on top of it, which has a tendency to take out tiny bits of the glossy coating when you peel them apart. It might just be generally fragile and was thumbed through too many times in a discount box, but it looks to me like this was sealed in a pack and left to cook in someone's garage for too long before it was liberated.

Jeff Baker's 2003 Studio card fared quite a bit better, which is fortunate, because this is just about the best Coors Field backdrop that's ever appeared on a card.

2003 Studio #123 Jeff Baker

That's a great example of a summertime Colorado sunset, just before the Giants faced off with the Rockies in Denver. If you look closely, Andres Galarraga and John Vander Wal, both former Rockies, are back to back in the San Francisco lineup.

There's lots in this photo to document the earlier iterations of Coors Field. That Bank One sign is no more, as that bank was acquired by Chase not long after this card was printed. The left field scoreboard is also in its original layout, where all the lights were an amber color. They've since replaced it with a full-color high definition screen. Longtime readers know how I love little details, and there's another one to point out. The bat that Baker is holding has "17" written on the knob, indicating that he swiped one of Todd Helton's bats for this photo op.

1998 Leaf #76 Dante Bichette

I have no reason to believe that Dante Bichette isn't using his own bat in this photograph, but one thing I noticed about this Leaf card is that prominent "50th Anniversary" seal.

The 1948 Leaf set is considered to be the first set in the modern collecting era, at least according to Beckett. 1998 happened to be fifty years after that set was released, but calling it an "anniversary" seems like a huge stretch to me. Until the mid-'80s when the Leaf brand was basically a Canadian Donruss parallel set, and 1990 when they took it upmarket with a high-end set, the brand was pretty much nonexistent for decades following that seminal 1948 release. Far be it from me to admonish the use of gold foil on a late-1990s card, but using the word "anniversary" implies a lot more continuity than a decades-long gap between releases.

Munnatawket Custom #62 Carlos Gonzalez

As is common with shipments from Nachos Grande, he included a card from the custom Munnatawket Mini set, and this one was of a Rockie, no less. I only have a handful of these, but it's a small set and trading is a great way to find a few more. I've written about these before, and now that I have both CarGo and Tulo, I probably have all the Rockies from this small set. And Spider-Man.

Anyway, this has pretty much been a trade post so far, so let's get to the actual cards from the break! The slot I purchased in this break contained not only the Rockies, but also the San Francisco Giants. There were a handful of assorted Giants cards like the above, but I hit some new ones in the break itself.

2014 Stadium Club #64 Tim Lincecum

I'm slowly finding more cards from 2014 Stadium Club, including Tim Lincecum experimenting with facial hair. As the back of this card notes, he's chopped off the long hair he was known for, but still has "electric" stuff on the mound. The only way this card could be better is if it were the "electric foil" parallel.

But the headliner of this break were the Topps High Tek cards. Topps saw fit to resurrect this brand from the late-'90s, which are printed on clear acetate instead of cardboard, and have a wide variety of possible background patterns. Unlike the earlier sets that had up to 80 possible backgrounds (making for an 8000+ card set), they scaled that back significantly in 2014, offering only twelve patterns, six for each league. You could call this a "fractured set", which are pretty much impossible to explain in a reasonably-sized paragraph.

The luck of the draw meant I ended up with two of the sixteen Topps High Tek cards in the group break. The same held true for the collectors who had the Braves, Dodgers, Yankees, Brewers, and White Sox. That's rather unfortunate collation for a group break, as all the rest of the team slots walked away with only four cards. Such are the risks with these high-end products that contain only a few cards per box.

Based on the patterns guide, it looks like these two boxes yielded the more common patterns, and that held true for my two as well.

2014 Topps High Tek Net #HT-TT Troy Tulowitzki

This Tulo card has the National League's "Net" pattern. As usual in these small sets, the only two Rockies to be found are he and Carlos Gonzalez. The plastic is fairly flexible, but it's probably pretty hard to actually crease it. This type of plastic instead tends to turn white when bent too much. None of the cards has a numeric card number; instead they use the frustrating alphabet soup of the set name and player's initials. Trying to actually build a fractured set without card or pattern numbers would be a pure nightmare.

Still, these are pretty cool cards, and my second win from the break is an awesome one!

2014 Topps High Tek Spiral Bricks Clouds Diffractor #HT-WMA Willie Mays /25

Like Stadium Club, Topps High Tek contains a mixture of current and retired players. That's a "clouds diffractor" parallel of the Say Hey Kid, numbered to 25. The acetate pattern is the National League's "Spiral Bricks" pattern, one of the more common patterns. The diffractor pattern isn't visible in the scan, but it looks more like bubbles than clouds. The break got a pretty even mix of current and retired players, and I'm happy with one of each.

I definitely got lucky with this one. It was my first experience both with a group break and packs of high-end baseball cards. The group break idea I am sold on, and I really have to hand it to Nachos Grande for putting these together. After all, we do have a pretty small community, and it seems like he struggles a bit filling breaks. I appreciate the effort he puts in, and I'm sure it's not the last one I'll participate in.

Fun Fact: baseballs float.

Things have not been pretty for the Colorado Rockies lately. At this moment, the Rangers are one game behind in the race for 2014's Worst MLB Record. They're dangerously close to losing 100 games for the first time in club history.

When the season has sunk to depths that low, you have to start looking at small miracles to distract yourself from the constant losses.

For example, my first-ever foul ball souvenir would definitely qualify, which I snagged last Friday on Star Wars night at Coors Field!


Incidentally, this ball came off the bat of Christian Yelich on a 2-1 count with runners on first and second and two outs in the top of the 7th.

2014 Topps #358 Christian Yelich

Thanks for the foul ball, Christian!

Though the Marlins trounced the Rockies 13-5, I finally have an indisputable piece of game-used memorabilia, which feels way more special than any relic card I've ever purchased. Except maybe that Willie Mays one.

2002 Topps Archives Reserve Uniform Relics #WM Willie Mays 62 (MEM)

Back to small miracles. Justin Morneau was able to break up Madison Bumgarner's bid at a perfect game in the 8th inning on Tuesday, which was pretty close to being the first no-hitter/perfect game I watched on live TV. It saved the Rockies from being on the business end of a second no-hitter this year, but I would have been just as happy witnessing history.

The following night, Rockies outfielder Corey Dickerson set a milestone with the 100th "Splash Hit" home run in AT&T Park history. It was a beauty, made all the more impressive by the skill with which a fan literally fished it out of the water.

2013 Bowman Draft #35 Corey Dickerson RC

Even after all those years of 'roid-monster Barry Bonds launching home runs into San Francisco's McCovey Cove, it ends up being a Rockie with the distinction of the century mark.

The 2014 Rockies gave us a great April and May, followed by a disastrous summer, concluding with spoiling the fun for the San Francisco Giants. Another textbook Rockies season.