The Trading Post #139: Big Shep's Cards (Part 3: Other Brands)

I promised Pacific, so here's some Pacific.

1999 Pacific Omega #157 Robin Ventura

Compared to 1998, Pacific didn't change the design much for the Omega brand in 1999. The major difference is that there are no baseball seams separating the various design elements. A less major change is that the area on the right now uses the left photograph in shiny form, rather than the central action shot as in 1998. It's still pretty hard to see but the scanner picks it up reasonably well.

In short, this is definitely a Pacific card.

What it's not is a Rockies card. There were White Sox in my two previous posts covering a shipment from Big Shep's Cards, and I chalked it up to the similar uniforms worn by the Rockies and White Sox. I don't have an explanation for why Robin Ventura as a Met ended up in this package, other than that he began his career with the White Sox. Famously so, in fact, as he was with Chicago when that infamous brawl with Nolan Ryan took place.

2002 Upper Deck Victory #93 Jeff Cirillo

Not-quite-Rockies-cards have been a theme these past few posts. Just last time, when talking about Jeff Cirillo's Fleer Premium card, I pointed out how it was a true Rockies card, unlike his card in the follow up set the next year. For such a briefly-tenured Rockie, he actually ended up with some pretty great cards. But it didn't last long, as he was traded to the Seattle Mariners after just two seasons, part of the trade that sent Brian Fuentes to the Rockies.

Upper Deck noted this transaction in the 2002 release of their no-frills Victory set, a 660-card beast unencumbered by things like relics, autographs, and even insert sets. The photography isn't quite as good, but the set kept the spirit of Collector's Choice alive for a few more years beyond 1999.

The card back clearly lists Cirillo as a Mariner, and mentions his 11-game hitting streak as a Rockie toward the end of the 2001 season, a post-9/11 homestand during which I saw two games. We all had other things on our mind at that time, and I hadn't given much thought to Jeff Cirillo's hitting streak. In the September 29th game, the penultimate home game of the year and a classic 14-12 pre-humidor Coors Field slugfest, I recall Denny Neagle hitting a grand slam, and my sister dropping her Dippin' Dots spoon down to the level below us.

The card back mentions that Cirillo had a trio of three-hit games during that stretch. That was one of them. The game I saw a few days prior on September 26th was another, which was one of Tony Gwynn's final games.

1993 Donruss #790 Jerald Clark

Speaking of Gwynn, expansion draftee Jerald Clark got to play with him for several years before becoming an inaugural Rockie. 1993 Donruss included lots of Rockies and Marlins in their Series 2 release, just like Topps, but didn't have a chance to actually obtain photos of any expansion players in their new uniforms. They used the retro Rockies logo before it underwent slight revisions, which I've written about before. Basically, the colors on the upper arch were changed from purple-on-gray to gray-on-black, and the baseball's motion lines were lengthened.

1993 Topps didn't do much with official team logos, except for the back of the Rockies and Marlins dual-player prospect cards. There's a tiny team logo in the upper right, which is a weird mash-up of the longer motion lines but the old color scheme. Have a look:

1993 Topps #537 Jason Hutchins (RC) / Ryan Turner (Reverse)

Ryan Turner, by the way, is the first Rockie to appear on a baseball card, sneaking into both 1992 Upper Deck and 1992 Bowman.

Getting back to Jerald Clark, sharing the outfield with an all-time great like Gwynn must have been a fantastic experience. Clark never got to go to an All-Star game, although his team hosted the Midsummer Classic in 1992, documented by a large home plate-themed patch on his left sleeve. Flip the card over and you'll get an even better look at it.

That game was held at what was then known as Jack Murphy Stadium, the home of the Padres from their inception in 1969 until the beautiful Petco Park opened until 2004, just the fourth Major League stadium I've had a chance to visit. During the tech boom of the late 1990s, The Murph, as it's still locally known, was renamed Qualcomm Stadium, and remained the home of the San Diego Chargers until they moved northward to Los Angeles in 2017. Qualcomm Stadium was also the place where the Broncos finally won a Super Bowl, XXXII in early 1998. It remains standing, and is the home of the SDSU Aztecs, who once played a basketball game atop the deck of the USS Midway.

1994 Score #197 Danny Sheaffer

Everyone was in their proper uniforms and logos when the 1994 sets hit shelves, but we aren't quite done with San Diego yet. Just a year after they hosted the All-Star Game (and long before the mustard yellow and brown of 2016), the Padres celebrated their 25th Anniversary with another patch, which we can see on the sleeve of a sliding Guillermo Velasquez, who is making a cameo on Danny Sheaffer's card.

Velasquez played part of two seasons with the Padres, mainly off the bench. He appeared in relatively few games, allowing me to pinpoint this photo with complete confidence. It happened on August 8th, 1993 in the bottom of the 4th. Velasquez walked with two outs, advanced to second on a Mo Sanford balk, then was thrown out at home while testing the arm of Dante Bichette, who cleanly fielded a hit by Archi Cianfrocco and fired the ball back in to Sheaffer. That series of events allowed Score to snap a great action shot for the 1994 set, and gave Danny Sheaffer his Infield Fly Rule debut.

This is the first three-part post to appear in The Trading Post theme, and it's covered all the major brands that operated in the baseball card world during the Rockies' existence. Score isn't the most stellar representative of Pinnacle Brands, but it certainly counts and gave us better sets than a lot of people give them credit for.

1998 Score Rookie/Traded #RT78 Vinny Castilla

Years later, in 1998, Score was still snapping some fun photographs shortly before their bankruptcy. Mario wrote an excellent post about the fall of Pinnacle a few days ago, which chronicles a dark period in card collecting. That insolvency also meant the end of the Score brand as we knew it, a real shame.

This Vinny Castilla card looks a lot like a normal 1998 Score card, but the inverted blacks and grays (just like the old Rockies logo!) signify this is actually from the 1998 Rookie/Traded set, even though Castilla was neither a rookie nor traded. The card back has the lengthy write-up typical of Score, which mentions how well he hit lefties in 1997, and the statistics offered a very early hint at the Sabermetrics movement, including columns for Total Bases, On Base Percentage, and Slugging Percentage. They were still in the realm of traditional statistics, but were at least digging a little more deeply than just the usual stats found on baseball cards for decades.

This card would fit well into many mini-collections, thanks to Castilla being shown signing autographs. Even under magnification, I can't tell what set he is signing, but if I had to venture a guess, I think it's one of those perforated sheets of kid-oriented police safety cards. You know, the oddballs that have a color photo on one side and things like "Don't Do Drugs" and "Never Swim Alone" on the back, that sort of thing. I'm pretty sure I had a set like that when I was a kid, but it's likely one of the few parts of my collection that hasn't survived the years.

Not that I am spending a lot of time swimming with no lifeguard on duty anyway, no siree, not me.

1997 Collector's Choice Teams #CR Colorado Rockies Logo CL

You knew it was coming. We have arrived at the shiny section of the post.

Part of this stack included a large quantity of 1997 Collector's Choice. I see that set in trade packages often. However, flipping these over greeted me with some unusual card numbers. "CR 2", "CR 10", and so on. Clearly, they were from a team set, and this shiny card with a fully-fledged Rockies logo on the front is actually the team checklist. Not counting this one, there are thirteen cards, and it includes all the big Blake Street Bomber names of the day. Larry Walker, Vinny Castilla, Dante Bichette, and more. The card says that the 1996 Rockies were the first-ever team with both 200 home runs and 200 stolen bases, as well as a mention of the game in which they put up an 11-spot on July 12th against the Padres.

I have a vague recollection of that game. I wasn't there, but I remember watching a couple wild ones before going away to Boy Scout camp for a week that summer.

2004 Upper Deck Power Up #74 Preston Wilson

Caricature cards have never been my favorite. The subset from 1993 Score is as good as it needs to be. They look cartoony enough to be sort of fun, but they're not my cup of tea.

So when Upper Deck comes along and comically enlarges a player's head on a photograph, the results are downright terrifying. This card looks like a genetic lab experiment gone wrong. right down to the radioactive green sludge on the background. There's also a 9-character code on the right side, presumably for some type of online game. Confusingly, I happen to have another copy of this card in my collection already, and the code is exactly the same, so I have no idea what's going on here.

Preston Wilson did have quite a few RBI by the 2003 All-Star break, if you can read the strange font, that is. At least there's a shiny area.

1999 SP Top Prospects #103 Ben Petrick

On a much more serious note, MLB has its sights set on contracting Minor League Baseball. Night Owl wrote a great post about the minors last week, and if you're on Twitter, you're surely no stranger to the recent debate. I'll say what I'd say about any multi-billion dollar organization who isn't paying employees a living wage. Share the wealth. If Scott Boras can line up almost a billion dollars in the space of a week for a half-dozen or so of his top guys, then surely there's funding to ensure that playing professional baseball is a suitable career path, even if you don't make the Majors.

Remember that time Andrew McCutchen's paystub was leaked? Here's the Minor League equivalent.

Anyway, as far as this card goes, it's a sturdy, black-and-gold beauty from SP Top Prospects, showing Ben Petrick as a member of the New Haven Ravens, once a Rockies Double-A affiliate. They have since moved to become the New Hampshire Fisher Cats. Flip the card over and you'll see that Petrick began his Single-A career with Salem, then known as the Avalanche. They're still in Salem, now called the Salem Red Sox.

Maybe Petrick was just that good of a prospect before he ran into health issues, but it seems like I have more minor league cards of Petrick than anyone.

1995 SP Silver #15 Juan Acevedo

A few years prior, Juan Acevedo made it into the main release of Upper Deck's SP brand. This die-cut is actually the Silver parallel from the Premier Prospects subset. He had yet to reach the big leagues, but UD still has him pictured in a real Rockies road uniform, certainly from the same photo shoot as his base 1995 Upper Deck card.

As a bonus, the card back has a photo of him bunting! It's another mini-collection hit!

1994 Upper Deck #270 Andres Galarraga HFA

We just went through quite a few Upper Deck cards without seeing any copper, and now that we're seeing the 1994 base set, we finally get some, although it's ink instead of foil. I don't think I've ever shown it on the blog, but this might be my most commonly-seen card in all of 1994 Upper Deck. I've seen base versions of it numerous times, but Shep managed to find the Electric Diamond parallel for me, printed near the dimensions of Mile High Stadium, roughly where I sat for most of my trips to the defunct ballpark.

What we're seeing is the Home Field Advantage subset from 1994 Upper Deck, featuring Andres Galarraga. This subset wrapped up Series 1 with National League teams, and continued in Series 2 with the American League teams. On the back, there are plenty of fun facts about the stadium, including the obvious difference between the left- and right-field distances down the line, the fact that fly balls travel farther, and even a brief mention of Coors Field.

We're told that at the time, the Rockies were one of eight teams to share a home with an NFL team. Now, following the conclusion of the Oakland A's season, there are no more shared stadiums across baseball and football, as the Raiders are moving to Las Vegas.

In addition to all that, there are also home and road splits for both Galarraga and the Rockies as a whole. They crammed a lot in on the back, partially because the front is pretty sparse. Go find the base card and you won't even see that sparkly Electric Diamond text.

2001 Upper Deck MVP #323 Ron Gant

2002 Upper Deck MVP is one of my favorite black-bordered sets ever. 2001 had a bit more gray in there, actually quite similar to 1998 Score. There's a little bit of silver foil, too. Other than the MVP logo itself, it's done up in tasteful thin silver lines. Less is more with a design like this.

This is a double-debut post, as Ron Gant is joining Danny Sheaffer as members of the Infield Fly Rule club. I definitely remember Sheaffer, but Ron Gant as a Rockie is a lot fuzzier in my mind. He played here for less than sixty games in 2001. I remember him much more clearly as a Brave.

Upper Deck made a prediction on this card, expecting him to reach the 300-homer mark in 2001. When the Rockies traded him in July, he had precisely 300 home runs, adding two more on with Oakland to close the season. His career ended two years later, finishing up with 321, just two less than this card number.

I'm sure he wasn't chasing his card number.

If you celebrate it, enjoy your Hanukkah, which begins tonight. Otherwise, have a great Christmas or any other holiday you choose. Thanks for reading!

Infield Fly Rule Booster Club

Even though I'm a member of the #Supertraders group, I have long had plenty of people close to me looking out for my love of baseball. My girlfriend is at the top of that list, spotting lots of collectibles and other baseball-related things for me over the past couple years. Like tickets to Star Wars night. And books. And art prints. And lapel pins.

Not to mention putting up with all the cards coming into the house. The significant other of a baseball card collector has quite a bit to contend with, but at least I'm not into restoring British roadsters from the 1960s or something.

That pin, by the way, commemorates the Rockies' first-ever home run in their new home of Coors Field. The Mets hit a couple home runs earlier that night, but Dante Bichette had the one we all remember, a walk-off shot in the 14th inning.

I was in fifth grade at the time, and I was sent to bed long before the game wrapped up. But I couldn't go to sleep knowing this epic game was still going on. So I stayed up, quietly tuned my little clock radio to 850 on the AM dial, and listened to the entire rest of the game in the dark, including Bichette's game winner.

It was the perfect crime.

Until I blew my cover the next morning. My dad woke me up for school, informed me that the Rockies had won it with a home run, and I groggily said "What? Oh yeah!"

Oops.

But no trouble; now it's just a fond memory. And an indication that good things happen when you stay up late. That was far from the first time, anyway. I'd often listen to the late innings on that clock radio, even going so far as to find and hold the baseball card of whoever was at the plate for the Rockies, hoping my dedicated young fandom would help send the Rockies into the Win column. Sometimes it worked! Either way, I'd even stay up for the highlights.

Anyway, as I arrived at school the morning after Bichette's homer, and we were all taking our chairs down off the top of our desks, my teacher said "Mr. Kaningher, I have two words for you." He struck a batting pose and said loudly, "Dante. Bichette!"

And now I have the pin.

2014 Topps Allen & Ginter #210 Anthony Bourdain

In addition to Beethoven's card from 2009 A&G, my girlfriend included a second card as part of that Valentine's Day gift, Anthony Bourdain's card from 2014 Allen & Ginter looks more or less the same throughout the years, but they do find some pretty interesting characters for the non-sports segment of the set.

If you're not familiar with Anthony Bourdain, he's a well-known celebrity chef, but he'd be the first to tell you that his skills in the kitchen don't hold a candle to some of his buddies like Eric Ripert. Some years ago, he wrote a book called Kitchen Confidential, half autobiography, half exposé of the restaurant industry. Since then, he's written more books, appeared as a guest judge on Top Chef, and even had a cameo in The Big Short, analogizing three-day old fish to the various derivatives cooked up by the investment banks that tanked the economy.

In the past ten years, he's become quite a well-known journalist, graduating from various travel shows on the Food Network and Travel Channel to CNN, exploring mysterious and controversial places like Lebanon, Iran, and Congo. Even here at home, he shines a light on real problems, like unemployment in Detroit and drug addiction in Massachusetts. He isn't just smacking his lips over clam chowder anymore.

So now I have his card in my collection.

If you've been coming here a while, you've probably noticed that I finally have a proper logo. Scroll up if you missed it. That came from my girlfriend too. She's got some graphic design chops and whipped that up for me a few nights ago, thanks to a font pack she found. She's been doing design for her food blog, where she's running a series on hunger in America and Colorado. If you're so inclined, head over there. You might be surprised by what you read.

Anyway, I've had other family members help out on the baseball front too, including my parents. Let's be honest; when I was a kid, pretty much all of my collection came from presents they bought me, or money I saved from my allowance. I rode my bike to Wal-Mart now and again for packs (and Micro Machines), but trips to the LCS, card shows, and autograph signings could only happen when my parents took the time to drive me around.

I had a trading partner or two in my neighborhood, and a classmate gave me a zipper-top bag full of 1992 Topps in 5th grade, but without my parents, I couldn't have gotten started in this hobby.

My sister's in on it too. Just in time for the first month of baseball season, the folks over at BarkBox put together a baseball-themed shipment as part of their monthly subscription box of dog toys and treats. While my pets currently consist of the residents of a five-gallon fishtank, my sister and her husband have an adorable pup, framed by one of the BarkBox items.

How clever is that? Obviously they're inspired by the 1965 Topps design, and the "statistics" they came up with are really quite accurate, even for a single day. I tagged along for a trip to the dog park last week, and 41 sounds about right. Zoey can't get enough of bolting after tennis balls, especially ones launched extra-far by a Chuck-It. She runs like she was launched from a cannon, and she'd make an excellent center fielder. She's more into chasing bunnies than squirrels, and as I've been told, the "almost" doesn't apply.

She's a little out of focus, making me wish it were possible to stop down the aperture on an iPhone, but it fits right in with the theme around here. I've seen this elsewhere in the Cardsphere, too.

Even outside my immediate family, I have some great people in my life who are happy to indulge my hobby and my preferred sport. That's pretty much how I ended up with a World Series ticket back in 2007, thanks to my boss at the time. One of my coworkers gave me a couple hundred cards from 1991 and 1992 Topps a couple months ago. And I have a pair of Rockies tickets on my desk right now that were given to me by my girlfriend's sister, so I know I'll be seeing a day game toward the end of May.

I'm unbelievably fortunate to have all these people in my life. And though it's easy to forget, I have been fortunate in many more ways since before I could remember. Growing up, the basics like food, clothing, transportation, medical care, were essentially a given. What my girlfriend's been writing about hunger and the millions of Americans affected by it just didn't affect me growing up. That meant my parents had plenty left over to afford things like computers and cell phones (long before most people had computers and cell phones), plus toys like Legos and baseball cards, or Beanie Babies and art supplies for my sister, etc.... Not to mention money for college.

So while we weren't a "giant bow on top of a new Lexus" family, we were always a "plenty of food on the table" family. That's what privilege looks like. Again, its easy to forget. Easy to assume that's how it is for everyone. But it's not.

And while I have no brilliant ideas for solving world hunger, I can at least spread some of the baseball card love around.

Recently, I spent an afternoon going through my duplicates and putting together a two-row box for donation to Big Brothers Big Sisters. We've probably all seen (or own) the same base cards a dozen times over, and probably have piles of duplicates that we don't know what to do with. The Dodger bloggers might have a different situation, but I seem to have become the de facto Rockies Guy in the Cardsphere, meaning I don't really have a place to trade the extras. And there's certainly not much of a market to sell them. So why not donate?

Even if it's just the thrift store, or an organization like BBBS or Boys & Girls Clubs, I encourage you to take a look at your collection and see if anyone in your area would be interested in a donation. Seeing a photo of the recipient holding that two-row box with a beaming smile on his face is a great reminder that there are plenty of cards to go around, that little kids still like baseball, and that I can do something to help.

Rather than lament how "there are no kids in this hobby anymore," help get some kids started, because I'd bet everyone in this community has the ability to do so. Yes, maybe a lot of kids are choosing to play Minecraft instead, but it could also be that their parents need to put $2.99 toward a sack of potatoes rather than a trip to the card aisle.

Because you never know. A baseball card in the hands of a kid staying up late for the end of a ballgame could be the difference between winning and losing.