The contents of a trade with gcrl, who writes the lower-case cards as i see them, tells me that I need to do a better job of keeping my wish list up to date. I have a spreadsheet with a couple hundred cards that would be perfect for my Coors Field Frankenset, and no one knows what's on it but me. I did have a couple cards included on the wish list, as well as a few other wants on the usual Eight Men Out list, and gcrl hit them both with surgical precision.
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| 2000 Ultra #9 Mickey Morandini |
A lot of what ends up on my wish lists comes from what I see across the blog community. I don't know where I first saw this Mickey Morandini card, the first of two Eight Men Out needs that gcrl found for me, but it's perfect for this lifelong Rockies fan. If I had to make a guess, I may have originally seen it on Dime Boxes. It is a Cubs card with a double play, so it's right up Nick's alley.
I mainly remember second baseman Morandini with the Phillies, but he spent two years in the Windy City. Here, he's turning a double play over the head of Dante Bichette, who's sliding into second in Wrigley Field. It's a great photo for a set like Fleer Ultra, whose spirit still lives on in Stadium Club. Even the nameplate has the rainbow foil look used by some of the recent Stadium Club parallels.
Curiously, one of the other 2000 Ultra cards that has appeared on this blog also involves a double play. They make great action photos and you get the added bonus of a cameo.
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| 1994 Topps Gold #792 Dan Pasqua |
Speaking of cameos, the second Eight Men Out card also has another player invading the frame. This is another one of the Topps Gold cards that appeared only in the Gold parallel set, replacing the checklist cards found in the base set. I completed the six 1993 cards earlier this year, partially thanks to gcrl. Now, on to 1994! Topps used a tinier font on the 1994 checklists, allowing them to get it down to four cards instead of the prior six.
As with the checklist situation, the overall 1994 set was a little smaller than 1993, returning to the then-familiar 792 cards. White Sox first baseman Dan Pasqua got card #792, the very last player to displace a checklist in 1994. He's fielding a pickoff attempt as an Oakland Athletic dives back to first. I am certainly no expert on American Leaguers from the pre-interleague days, but given that I remember pretty much every random player that appeared in 1993 and 1994 Topps, I believe that's Mike Bordick, who wore #14 for the A's at that point.
Depending on how the expanded Postseason plays out, we're looking at a potential AL matchup. The Athletics are a strong team this year, and the White Sox just clinched a playoff spot for the first time in over a decade.
The card back for Pasqua tells us that he hit a lone triple in the 1993 season, and it broke up Danny Darwin's no-hitter in the 8th inning.
That's how you replace a checklist, folks.
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| 2014 Topps #111 Mark Ellis |
There went a quarter of my Eight Men Out list, but gcrl wasn't done there. He found two more cards from 2014 Topps that have a space reserved in my Coors Field Frankenset. First up is Mark Ellis, former second baseman for the Dodgers.
We're three-for-three on cameos so far, as Josh Rutledge appears in the lower right, sliding in with a view of the left field bleachers at Coors Field in the background. Mark Ellis is no stranger to this spot on the diamond, as he played half a season as a Rockie in 2011.
Also observe the improvement in batting helmet technology since the turn of the millennium.
The Dodgers, by the way, visited Denver for the final Rockies home series of 2020. I was at the final home game last year, and it's weird to think back to how normal that felt at the time. I thought I was just going to be away from the ballpark for one winter, not an entire year with at least another offseason yet to come, and that's the best-case scenario.
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| 2014 Topps #654 Jose Tabata |
Moving up the checklist to 2014 Topps Series 2, we arrive at one of the final cards that year. 2014 Topps was 661 cards, a significant decrease from the 792 I was used to seeing growing up. On card #654, we find Jose Tabata of the Pirates pointing, possibly appealing a check swing to the first base umpire.
I'm a bit less certain this is one is a Coors Field card, which I'm basing mainly on the purple color of the dugout roof. You can also see a Pirate in the third-base dugout, and that is indeed the Visitor's side at 20th and Blake. Usually you'll find more purple among the fans when it's a Coors Field card, but this remains my best guess.
We broke our streak of cameos, but I can still tie it in to Pasqua's card. One year after this card was printed, Jose Tabata gained notoriety for breaking up Max Scherzer's perfect game. Whether he was unavoidably hit by a pitch or leaned into it is a matter of debate, but either way, Tabata found himself as the only baserunner that day. Scherzer retired the next batter to preserve the no-hitter anyway, which is still a remarkable feat.
Interestingly, Jose Tabata, who appeared as a pinch hitter that day, played in his last Major League game less than a week later.
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| 2008 Topps Moments & Milestones Black #101-65 Brad Hawpe /25 |
That's all for the cards I specifically put on my wish list, but gcrl had a couple more tricks up his sleeve. It's been a few years since I've seen something from Topps Moments & Milestones, the unfathomably huge set that becomes unfathomably even huger when you factor in colored parallels.
In a nutshell, each card repeats itself for each counting statistic noted on the front. So Hawpe's card #101 has an example with his first hit, his second hit, his sixty-fifth hit as we see here, all the way up to his 150th hit. The base cards are serial numbered to 150 copies, and this Black parallel has a serial number of just 25. The Red parallels are a 1/1, meaning that Moments and Milestones flooded the market with nearly 13,000 "one-of-ones" when they made this set. They're pretty easy to find if you want one in your collection.
It's just a coincidence, by the way, that Hawpe's 150 hits in 2007 happen to match the base card's print run. Matching the print run to each player's stat total would have made Moments & Milestones at least a little more interesting, and Panini has done exactly that for some of their Donruss parallels.
It would be a tedious and near-impossible task to complete a set like this. I don't know of any collector who has even tried.
In case you're curious, Brad Hawpe's sixty-fifth hit of the pennant-winning 2007 season came on June 19th, a 3-1 win over the Yankees at Coors Field. This card does not tell you that, but it should.
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| 2018 Topps Legends in the Making #LTM-NA Nolan Arenado |
Finally, here's a set that's brand new to my collection, a 2018 insert set called Legends in the Making. Nolan Arenado is truly a worthy addition to a set like this, joining other superstars like Lindor, Freeman, McCutchen, and of course Trout. There are a few more players in the set who have largely established their legendary status by now, like Yadier Molina, Joey Votto, and Miguel Cabrera.
The set has an abstract look to it, reminding me of something like Topps Fire or one of the recent Diamond Kings inserts. In Series 1, Topps used an alphabet soup card number, but they remedied that in Series 2, including Charlie Blackmon at card #9.
The card back tells us that Arenado had 41 RBI in just twenty home games during 2017. Since the early 1950s, only Joe Carter and Mark McGwire turned in a similar performance in their home ballparks.
By the way, if you haven't seen the recent 30 for 30 episode on the McGwire/Sosa home run race, entitled Long Gone Summer, it's definitely worth checking out.
As the Rockies conclude their final home game of 2020, wrapping up a four-game set against the Dodgers by avoiding the sweep, I'll need to spend the next little while finding a couple new cards for my Eight Men Out list. The list of cards I've been given because of that list is becoming quite impressive, and gcrl has been a key contributor over the years.
