The Trading Post #170: The Angels, In Order

Due to inclement weather in our nation's capital, the Rockies have been rained out Friday night. But that's okay, because I still have a game to watch while writing this quick three-card post. The Colorado Avalanche were in St. Louis tonight for a Game 6 against the Blues, advancing to their first Conference Finals since 2002. 

Hockey isn't always at the top of my list of sports, but it's a fast-paced sport that is a delight to watch. It's a good contrast to the chess match that is baseball. Don't count on me getting hugely into hockey cards, though. Baseball remains the #1 sport in my heart.

It's amazing that the MLB season is already a quarter over. It feels like just yesterday when I went to Opening Day. That much of the season has zipped by since my last post. It's been about that long since I claimed three cards from a generous giveaway run by Tom over at The Angels, In Order. He hasn't been particularly active lately, nor have I, but he did pop up long enough to spread some cheer through the blog community.

2013 Topps Making Their Mark #MM-1 Yoenis Céspedes

The first of my three picks is this insert from 2013 Topps, showing the not-quite-retired Yoenis Céspedes. The Cuban-born outfielder hasn't played in the Majors since 2020, when he appeared in eight games during the shortened season before deciding to opt-out. He put together a solid career, mainly for the Mets and A's, and also won the Home Run Derby in two consecutive contests, putting him among Ken Griffey, Jr. and Pete Alonso as the only ones to accomplish that feat.

Long before sending exhibition-game moonshots into the midsummer night, Céspedes hit his first major league home run in early 2012, giving Topps plenty of material for the Making Their Mark insert set. Céspedes's first Major League home run actually happened in Tokyo, facing off against the Seattle Mariners during an overseas opener. It was officially part of the 2012 regular season, a tradition the teams repeated in 2019.

I haven't seen this insert set in years, but it was familiar enough for me to easily recognize it and give myself a chance to open the 2013 binder again. I haven't done that in a while.

2017 Honus Bonus Fantasy Baseball #52 Ryon Healy

Another green-colored selection was my first-ever Honus Bonus card. Among the oddest of all recent oddballs, this product briefly made a splash (maybe more of a gentle ripple) in 2017, never to be heard from again. The 500-card unlicensed set made the rounds back then, and still pops up from time to time on the more oddball-focused blogs around here.

If you're interested, there are some extremely affordable Honus Bonus 1/1s on eBay right now. I'm content to have just one example of this oddball in my collection, if only as a curiosity.

The green borders are about the only splash of color on this whole card, and that's the only clue that Ryon Healy was playing for the A's at the time. You have to flip the card over to check the team, which of course just says "Oakland", given the unlicensed nature of this set. The card back also has a small selection of 2016 stats, his uniform number which we clearly see on the front, and his position. The stats line omits hits, but we are given at-bats and batting average, leaving us to do the math ourselves. They did include his stolen base total (zero), as well as his OPS.

It's a strange one.

Also on the card back is a barcode and a scratch-off section, meant for playing Honus Bonus Fantasy Baseball online. The URL is long-dead, although there are some fossilized fragments remaining at archive.org.

Speaking of all this green, the Rockies unveiled their City Connect uniforms today, set to debut on-field on June 4th against the Braves. The mostly-green uniforms are patterned after the retro Colorado license plates, which were mostly green with white lettering. Even the typeface is the same. There are other Colorado-themed elements, such as the GPS coordinates of Coors Field, a double black diamond meant to represent a ski slope sign, and a few purple accents scattered throughout.

In fact, in taking a closer look, the yellow patch containing the GPS coordinates and the diamonds looks a bit like the annual stickers that go on the corner of a license plate.

I can't wait to see it appear on a card.

1998 Topps Stars Gold #58 Masato Yoshii /2299

Rolling things back to the late-'90s, our final collectible is a parallel of Masato Yoshii's Topps Stars card, serial numbered to 2,299. That print run identifies this as the Gold parallel. So does the gold lettering, of course. Even the regular base cards are serial numbered to 9,799, making these on the scarce side.

As you can see, Yoshii's first team in North America was the New York Mets, where he stayed for two seasons. Following that stint, he joined the Colorado Rockies for one season, becoming the first Japanese-born player to suit up for the Rockies.

The card back has a five-star player rating system for a variety of metrics, from the easily measurable "Velocity" to the highly intangible "Savvy". He rates two and five stars in those categories, respectively. Below that is a trivia question, asking us which Met was the team's first Rookie of the Year in 1967. We have to check the next card in the checklist to find the answer, but in case you're not one of the fewer than 10,000 owners of card #59 (I am not), I'll tell you that the answer is Tom Seaver.

The trivia answer that carries over from card #57 is "Fernando Valenzuela in 1981", which was obviously asking about that year's Rookie of the Year Dodger. Card #57 is Hideo Nomo, cleanly tying it all together. I don't have that card either, but maybe Night Owl has it hiding somewhere and can confirm for us.

Thanks to Tom for the giveaway and enjoy the next three-quarters of the MLB season!

Shiny Object!

​Unsurprisingly, given the universal allure of shiny objects, the first box I finished opening from last week's shopping spree was a blaster of 2013 Topps Chrome, containing 32 cards.

2013 Topps Chrome #96 Yoenis Cespedes

Cadillacs and Buicks of the 1950s led us all to equate chrome with a silver color. I'm glad to see that the borders of 2013 Chrome match that bias, as several previous years used yet another white border. Even in their flagship set, Topps has only given us a non-white border once in the last decade, so I welcome the variety.

Incidentally, I don't believe Topps has ever done a flagship set with full-bleed photos. Upper Deck gave that a whirl 20 years ago, and I'd say it's long overdue. Or at least put a player photo on the back again. It's almost like Upper Deck never existed.

But I digress. Back to the blaster. One of the eight packs was a plain, unmarked silver foil, clearly calling attention to itself as the "bonus pack". Inside were four of these purple refractors.

2013 Topps Chrome Purple Refractors #154 Nick Franklin

Though it would have been ideal to find a Rockie in this pack (or anywhere in the blaster), despite the purple not being quite the Rockies' shade, they're pretty cards and the group of four will stand out in a binder.

Speaking of binders, one of the two insert cards was of the die-cut variety, from the same set that Nick at Dime Boxes wrote about last week, in fact. His post pointed out how challenging it can be to place these into a standard 9-pocket page.

2013 Topps Chrome Chrome Connections Die Cuts #CC-AB Adrian Beltre

I have to agree, though this card certainly is...different. And fragile. Sure, it's on thick Chrome card stock, but that is an awful lot of corners that could get dinged. I bet that using a couple of standard cards as a "sandwich" then removing them once they're in the page would help save that exotic die cut design.

The other insert was significantly less fragile.

2013 Topps Chrome 1972 Chrome #72C-AP Albert Pujols

The psychedelic, disco-era 1972 design it's one of just a handful from the '70s that I can identify at a single glance. All the white borders and horizontal chevrons found during that decade just blend together.

Looking ahead, 2014 Chrome was released quite recently. I'm sure it'll be a while before those start showing up in the clearance section. But at least they're silver.