Eight Clubby Nights: A Stadium Club Hanukkah (Night 1)

Hanukkah is early this year.

That's always the joke. It's either early or late; it's never on time. Although last year, December 12th, was basically the first time I can ever recall it feeling like it was on time.

So what better way to celebrate Hanukkah on the blog than to open a pack a night from a blaster of 2018 Topps Stadium Club? I've had it sitting around, unopened, since the middle of summer, and partway through the Postseason, it clicked that the eight packs inside would make a great theme this holiday season. It is definitely consistent with how Hanukkah is commonly celebrated, with one small gift being given on each of the eight nights. Packs of baseball cards were most definitely given to me during Hanukkahs long ago, and I specifically remember a pack of 1993 Score being one of them. Matchbox cars, small Lego sets, or maybe some Micro Machines were pretty common gifts on the other nights, but a pack of baseball cards is the perfect portion.

You just need to make sure you don't get them greasy from the potato latkes.

I could get really festive and do one card on the first night, two on the second, etc, but we don't have to take things that literally. It's five cards to a pack, so let's see what Kris Bryant is hiding behind the cellophane.

2018 Stadium Club #7 Alex Mejia (RC)

I'm not exactly sure what to expect. That's part of the fun of a pack, but I know next to nothing about Alex Mejia, who played 29 games with the Cardinals in 2017. He's got plenty of Triple-A experience by now, but being 27 with only a month in the Majors to show for it doesn't bode well for his future career.

According to the card back, his cousin is well-known Blue Jays hurler Marco Estrada, who did not get a card in 2018 Stadium Club. Mejia has one lone home run in his major league career, and the card is sure to mention it, which occurred on July 1st, 2017 against the Washington Nationals. It was the game winner, and may end up being the highlight of his career. He hit an absolutely dismal .109, so his Rookie Card may also be his sunset card.

Stats aside, with Stadium Club, we come for the photos, and this one of an elevated Mejia is a great one. I particularly like the symmetry of his bold "SS" position and the "66" in the oil company logo on the outfield wall.

2018 Stadium Club #43 Michael Fulmer

Ah, good. A player I have heard of.

Michael Fulmer, the 2016 AL Rookie of the Year and a 2017 All-Star, is respecting a longstanding tradition of superstitious pitchers stepping over the foul line on the way back to the dugout. Some walk normally, blatantly flying in the face of convention, but you know how pitchers can be. Fulmer seems to be taking a slightly abnormally long stride on this card, and it's exactly why I love this set. Most sets would show him in a close-up of his pitching motion, with his face and elbow wildly contorted. But there's more to a pitcher than his delivery, and Stadium Club's photo selection gives us just a little window into that, if you know what to look for.

That's the tradition you'll find in baseball. A player returning to the sidelines isn't just out for a stroll; it tells you a lot about how he plays the game. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, and I'm not terribly familiar with the Tigers these days, but I do know that on this card, Fullmer is respecting tradition.

Or at least not trying to tempt fate.

2018 Stadium Club #293 Jackie Bradley Jr.

And now we come to our first player who participated in the 2018 Postseason.

Well, maybe "participated" isn't quite the right word. The Braves and Rockies "participated". But Jackie Bradley Jr. finished up 2018 with a bang, winning MVP honors in the ALCS against the Astros, and of course helping Boston bring home their fourth championship of the millennium.

Time will tell if they can win past the 18th year of a century. But with JBJ and his fellow Killer Bs in Fenway's oddly-shaped outfield, they stand a good chance to keep terrorizing the Cardinals and the NL West. It's surely not the last time we'll see Bradley trotting around the bases in a sunny Fenway Park.

2018 Stadium Club Power Zone Red #PZ-KS Kyle Schwarber

Topps carried over the Power Zone insert set for another year. They toned it down a little bit from last year, and way down from 1995, instead giving us a nice bit of red foil and some synthetic motion blur. I think the starfield in the background is supposed to give us a sense of zipping through outer space at a high velocity, like looking at a cross-section of a Windows screensaver.

I can't remember a single card with red foil that I didn't like. It's definitely not overused, which is maybe why it's so welcome in my binders. And it certainly doesn't hurt that this red foil means it's a parallel.

Unlike Jackie Bradley Jr., Kyle Schwarber's season came to an end a bit earlier. He and his Cubbies lost two straight games in early October, losing the NL Central tiebreaker to the Brewers, and the NL Wild Card game to the Rockies. In those two home games, Schwarber was 0-3 with two strikeouts. When power hitters aren't on their game, strikeouts soon follow. It's a rule as old as the concept of a power hitter itself.

2018 Stadium Club #14 Daniel Murphy

As the first candles of Hanukkah drip and dwindle away, Daniel Murphy is our final card for tonight. It's a horizontal card, but I'm not sure the photo selection here quite warrants it. There's a lot of empty space on the left.

Murphy didn't remain with the Nationals all season, as pictured. He wore Cubbie blue in the final months of 2018, and had a better day than Schwarber in that all-important Wild Card game. He played about half a season, striking out just 40 times on his way to barely missing a .300 average. He hits home runs, but he challenged DJ LeMahieu for the NL batting crown in 2016, and the three-time All-Star has kept his strikeout count relatively low in this era of the three true outcomes.

There are still seven nights ahead of us, and there surely remain lots of surprises. We'll see if this turns out to be a good blaster at my side.

Rockin' Retro Group Break the First (Part 2: Athletics)

During the time between Part 1 and Part 2, my haul from Nachos Grande's newest group break arrived, including an awesome Andres Galarraga relic card. But his first Rockin' Retro Group Break has a part two to cover before we can get to that. See Part 1 for my hometown Rockies, and my random team this time around was another generally well-liked team, the Oakland (and Philadelphia) Athletics.

2017 Topps Gold Label Class 3 Black #13 Sonny Gray

My Rockies haul from 2017 Gold Label was a little more complete, but I did get this lone Sonny Gray card from Class 3. In fact, based on the final highlights, I ended up with two of only four Class 3 cards that were found in the entire break. The security stripe, as I called it last time, is a bit more legible, but the three different classes for pitcher cards are a little harder to tell apart. Position players get their three classes of cards in batting, fielding, and baserunning, but pitcher cards are split between the windup, delivery, and follow-through, making it a little tricky to tell which one you are holding.

As always, players are on the move. Sonny Gray was traded to the Yankees right at the 2017 trade deadline, and there are tons of trade rumors swirling around him this offseason. I'm sure Topps accepts it as an inevitability that these beautiful cards they design can be obsolete in a matter of weeks. Or maybe they just know they'll sell more.

1998 Bowman Chrome International #205 Miguel Tejada

Fresh off his debut in late 1997, Miguel Tejada appeared in 1998 Bowman Chrome, and this happens to be an International parallel. I'm no Bowman expert, but this appears to be just the second year this parallel set existed. The shiny front has a map of the Eastern half of the island of Hispaniola, with Tejada's head and cap obscuring Haiti. The card back is entirely in Spanish, taking a page from some early-1990s Pacific sets, as well as Topps' old Venezuelan cards.

Coincidentally, Tejada's middle infielder counterpart on the Rockies, Neifi Perez, was my featured card in Part 1. Perez, also from the Dominican Republic, has the English "SS" abbreviation for his position. Tejada, on the other hand, gets a "PC" in that spot, and I'm not quite sure what that means. I am even less an expert in Spanish than I am in Bowman. "Campo Corto" is the translation of shortstop, and those words are found on the back, but I'm not sure how you'd get "PC' from that.

2002 Fleer Triple Crown Batting Average Parallel #78 Eric Chavez /288

2002 Fleer Triple Crown was a richer vein than those first two sets, yielding a BA Parallel of Eric Chavez. "BA" refers to his batting average, meaning Fleer printed up 288 copies of this card, matching his statistic from 2001. Troy Tulowitzki's .340 batting average led to a similar card in 2015 Donruss, and Topps completely overdid the idea with Moments and Milestones, a set I had to dig deep into the memory banks to remember.

During that .288 season, Eric Chavez, and all his fellow American Leaguers, wore a commemorative patch on their right sleeves to mark the 100th season of play for the AL. Four teams, but not Oakland, had slightly different "Charter Member" versions of that patch, going all the way back to 1901. Ban Johnson, the founding executive of the AL, isn't named on the patch, but he's a prominent figure in the early episodes of Ken Burns' Baseball documentary series.

I don't know if all the BA parallels have green foil or if that's color-coded to Oakland. My 2002 Fleer pages are sparsely populated, especially when it comes to parallels, so I don't have much to compare it to.

That's not precisely true. I have quite a few 2002 Fleer cards. It's just that there were so many sets, and some of them are pretty underrepresented.

2002 Fleer Triple Crown #118 Mark Mulder

Back to the land of the base cards, here's Mark Mulder in that gorgeous emerald green jersey. Apparently he went 21-8 in 2001, just his second big league season, and finished second in Cy Young voting that year.

Mulder was also involved in an infamous trade in my Fantasy baseball league, a not-so-great move on my part when I was getting my feet wet back in 2005. I acquired Mulder, a briefly hot shortstop, and a few others, but the price was way too high.

Lesson learned.

2002 Fleer Triple Crown #134 Miguel Tejada

By the time the Moneyball season of 2002 rolled around, Miguel Tejada (played in the movie by former major leaguer Royce Clayton) was a rapidly-ascending star. In fact, he'd win the AL MVP that year. Even at a young age, he quickly became the best shortstop ever to play for the A's, but sadly lost four straight ALDS series as his only time in the Postseason.

The more I see of this Triple Crown set, the more I like it. Collectors have been complaining for years that backgrounds have become too blurry, but when you have the glossy foreground and matte background like this set, a nice bokeh effect really blends in well. I particularly like how the ball that Tejada is fielding is glossy, clearly part of the main attraction.

2002 Fleer Triple Crown #86 Ramon Hernandez

The way this card is cropped doesn't show the ball that Ramon Hernandez is presumably about to catch, but his full array of catcher's gear comes across in a lovely shade of green. I've long gone on record as liking green cards, and between Hernandez and Mulder, this is the set that might make me start looking for more A's cards for my collection.

The card back isn't quite as special, and I'm not a fan of conflicting horizontal and vertical orientations. Most of the card back is horizontal, but Fleer stuck the copyright notice and such on the right hand side, reading bottom-up. It's an awkward look. But the usual quick paragraph is there, and it tells us that Hernandez caught a whopping 143 games in 2001, not even one game off a week.

That pace slowed a lot in his later career, although he did spend the 2012 season as a Rockie. This is his first appearance on Infield Fly Rule, and it's not even in a Rockies uniform. That might be a first.

2012 Panini Cooperstown #120 Rickey Henderson

The Athletics have been around in one form or another since 1901, and have played in three different cities across America. That of course means they have quite the delegation in Cooperstown, unlike the Rockies, where I had to resort to a card of an umpire to even mention this Panini set in Part 1.

Rickey Henderson played for a lot of teams in his long career, but most people remember him with Oakland. He played 14 seasons with them, spread out across four separate stints. This being an unlicensed set, it's hard to tell which team he's on here, but it appears to be Oakland, matching his Hall of Fame plaque. The single season of stats that Panini gives us on the back are from his MVP 1990 season, the year before he'd break Lou Brock's record, which he would further demolish by almost 500 more SBs.

A few other fun facts about Rickey. We all know he's the all-time stolen base leader, with 1,406. He's also the all-time leader in runs scored, which goes to show just how valuable SBs really are. He isn't really known for it, but he had a terrific eye, leading the Majors in unintentional walks, with over 2,000. He's also a member of the 3,000-hit club. And finally, one of my favorite sports stats that shows you what a competitor he is, Rickey is the all-time leader in times caught stealing.

So when you add all that up, we can calculate a few things. In all his plate appearances, Rickey Henderson stole a base in over 10% of them. There are surely a few in which he stole second and third on his same trip around the bases, but that's a staggering rate. And if you want to take it a step further, if you add his extra-base hits into the mix, Rickey Henderson was in scoring position (or better) in about 17% of all his plate appearances. Give or take, he made it to at least second base a sixth of the time, solely by virtue of his bat, eye, and speed. And that doesn't even count the times a subsequent batter pushed him along.

Bottom line, he's one of the best players to ever grace the sport of baseball.

2012 Panini Cooperstown #8 Connie Mack

So far, this post has focused on the Athletics' time in Oakland, but they got their start in Philadelphia at the turn of the 20th century, and also had a forgettable midcentury stopover in Kansas City. This card of legendary manager Connie Mack is why I qualified the A's home city at the beginning of this post. He was the team's only manager for nearly a half-century, from their founding in 1901 all the way until 1950, the year in which Vin Scully took over broadcasting duties for the Dodgers.

In other words, until 2017, there was an unbroken line of baseball legacy from Connie Mack to Vin Scully going back to 1901. You can push that back to 1886 if you don't count the brief hiatus between Mack's playing and managerial careers.

So yes, this dapper gentleman is in the Hall of Fame. And he does make one wonder why baseball managers suit up in white performance gear as opposed to a suit and tie. It is slightly comical, seeing sharply dressed guys like Joel Quenneville and Gregg Popovich in contrast to, say, Bob Melvin in a green cap and white uniform. But take Earl Weaver, whose legendary tirades maybe wouldn't have been quite as awesome if he were worrying about dirtying up his leather dress shoes.

All I know is that a guy named Cornelius McGillicuddy wearing a bowler hat is basically the last guy I would want to mess with.

2012 Panini Cooperstown #154 Home Run Baker SP

I admit, I need to brush up on my deadball-era Hall of Famers. For someone whose nickname is also the highest-profile statistic in baseball, you'd think I'd have heard of him before. Before he became short-printed Home Run Baker, he was just Frank, but then he joined a young Athletics franchise. In 1909, he tied the AL record for triples by a rookie, with 19, a record that still stands today. And he led the American League in home runs for four straight seasons, 1911-1914. He hit 42 home runs in that span, one less than second-place J.D. Martinez hit for the Red Sox this year.

Baker wasn't even the first player to lead the home runs category in four straight years. He wasn't even the first Athletic to do it. His teammate Harry Davis did precisely the same thing, though with 38 home runs, from 1904-1907. Yet Home Run Baker got the nickname. With all the power hitters we've seen over the decades, from Babe Ruth to Ken Griffey, Jr., the guy who is in the Hall of Fame with "Home Run" in quotes on his plaque is a guy who hit 96 in his career.

1997 Sports Illustrated #57 Scott Brosius SIV

Back to modern times, if there's one thing I've learned about 1997 Sports Illustrated, it's that there are a lot of subsets. SI was not missing the boat in the early days of the Information Superhighway (I wish we still called it that), giving us a vaguely computer-themed subset called SIber Vision. It looks a little like the Nintendo logo, with a bright red starburst design in the background and some circuit board 90-degree angles.

1997 would be Scott Brosius' final year in Oakland, as he ended up being The Player To Be Named Later in a trade they made with the Yankees for pitcher Kenny Rogers. Brosius, an average utility player, would go on to become a key member of the Yankees' dynasty in the late 1990s and early 2000s, even winning World Series MVP honors in 1998, his first year as a Yankee. This card had it right in saying, "Brosius seems to improve as a hitter each season he's in the majors."

The card also mentions his college career at Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon. That happens to also be the location of the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum, which airplane fans might recognize as the home of Howard Hughes' famous boondoggle, the H-4 "Spruce Goose". It remains the largest aircraft by wingspan that has ever flown, but those who saw The Aviator know that it only flew once.

1997 Sports Illustrated #175 Mark McGwire / Will Clark CC

Yet another subset from '97 SI gives us a miniature reproduction of actual SI magazine covers. This one shows sluggers Will Clark and Mark McGwire preparing for their third major league season in 1988. Little did they know they would square off in the World Series the very next year, with Oakland coming out on top.

I like this idea a lot. We all know that SI photos make for great baseball cards, but they really are kind of cute when scaled down to this size. And in case you were wondering, 6-seed Kansas did indeed complete the upset during March Madness in 1988, defeating top-seed Oklahoma 83-79.

2010 Upper Deck #365 Brad Ziegler

That about does it for the main attraction, as the 1998 Gold Label and Donruss Optic wells ran dry, but there are always a couple extras to be found when Nachos Grande sends out a shipment. It's almost like getting a free repack with your group break winnings. Many of us have seen 2010 Upper Deck in repacks, and the several shades of green on this card look great. Not much is said about Upper Deck anymore, besides the vague lamentation of "I wish Topps didn't have a monopoly". But their final couple sets were pretty great, in my opinion.

There is a ton of blank white space on the back of this card, however. It's too bad that Brad Ziegler, back with Arizona for a second time before announcing his retirement last month, didn't get to fill out Upper Deck card backs any further past this. And I find it a little strange that UD squeezed the submariner's scouting report into the small brown area on the left, leaving lots of open space on the rest of the card.

1987 Topps #311 Rickey Henderson TBC

We'll close today's post with Stolen Base Henderson, gracing the front of Topps' look back to 1982, a mere five years before the iconic 1987 woodgrain set was released. There's a little reproduction of Rickey's 1982 Topps card on the front, and lots of fun 1982 tidbits on the back, such as Larry Parrish's three grand slams in one week, Salome Barojas' five-save MLB debut (whom Night Owl coincidentally just wrote about), Rollie Fingers' 300th save, and of course Rickey Henderson's 130 stolen bases.

It is nice to have another team to delve into once in a while. Even though I'm an avid Rockies fan, there's only so much that's happened in the last 25 years. Given the opportunity to dig back to 1901, there's plenty of history that remains untold. I've uncovered a lot in 250 posts, but there's plenty more to come.

Rockin' Retro Group Break the First (Part 1: Rockies)

Seeing as how Nachos Grande shipped my haul from his current group break today, it's probably a good idea for me to look at the retro cards he sent last time. I haven't blogged since the World Series ended, and then some, so I haven't offered my congratulations to the Red Sox for winning their fourth championship of the millennium, nor have I expressed condolences for the loss of Willie McCovey. May he and Stan Lee rest in peace.

Will I ever be caught up again? Time will tell. In the meantime, prepare to start seeing a lot of Topps Gold Label in these parts.

2017 Topps Gold Label Class 1 #15 David Dahl (RC)

David Dahl, who wisely scheduled his recent wedding for after the postseason (just in case), gives us our first look at the recently resurrected Topps Gold Label. After the success of Stadium Club's rebirth, Topps decided to dig into the archives for more ideas. Unfortunately, they brought the idea of a fractured set along with the name. I've never been thrilled with the concept, but at least there is some actual structure to all the variants, as opposed to the purely random variant chaos they've been giving us in flagship for a long time.

In a nod to the early Gold Label sets, the baseball fundamental depicted in the primary photo helps you identify which of three "classes" the card is in. A photo of a position player fielding indicates you're holding a Class 1 card. There's also an unbelievably faint vertical banner (almost like a security strip) on the left side of the card. Even under a magnifying glass, the light has to be just perfect to even glimpse it.

2017 Topps Gold Label Class 2 #15 David Dahl (RC)

Class 2 for a position player is a batting photo, which is slightly redundant, since the secondary picture already shows Dahl at the plate. Fortunately, the security strip is a touch easier to read, especially in the spot where it overlaps Dahl's uniform. The back is identical in both classes, and it mentions the record-tying 17-game hitting streak that he opened his career with. Dahl has a Gypsy Queen Allen & Ginter card that alludes to this as well, but Gold Label tells us that he shares this record with a Cincinnati Red named Chuck Aleno, who set the mark back in 1941.

1941 was a good year for hitting streaks.

2017 Topps Gold Label Class 3 #3 Trevor Story

I don't have a clue on the relative scarcity between the three classes, but I managed to obtain an example from each of them. Trevor Story on the basepaths signifies Class 3, confirmed by an even more visible security stripe. Story's been around for a while, so he doesn't get that nifty gold foil RC logo that David Dahl has, but there's still plenty of gold to go around, including the Topps logo in the upper right, which uses a logo I've never seen before. Seeing a capital "T" like that is just strange.

Story is a great all-around player, though he does strike out at an alarming rate. Still, he's excellent at the plate, and he now has a Silver Slugger award for his efforts, joining fellow Rockies Nolan Arenado and German Marquez in that award class.

1998 Topps Gold Label Class 1 #77 Dante Bichette

Brand-new sets of Gold Label aren't exactly "retro", but the inaugural 1998 set is. True to form, Dante Bichette's fielding pose identifies this as a Class 1 card, even though it's unlabeled. There's much more of a relief on this original set, especially the stamped logo, which contains the proper Topps font. It's delightfully thick and solid, and appears to be acetate, though it isn't transparent anywhere. The only slight gripe I have is that Bichette is wearing home and away jerseys on his two photos, but I'm splitting hairs. It's awesome that Nachos Grande found unopened boxes of these retro sets.

2016 Donruss Optic #9 Carlos Gonzalez DK

Shiny, too! Did I say shiny? It comes in the form of Donruss Optic, the quasi-Chrome set, and this time it's the normal white border, unlike the purple-bordered variety I once received from Highly Subjective and Completely Arbitrary, which I had slightly mislabeled until two minutes ago. Same painted look, same shiny finish, same unreadable kerning on the card back.

Seeing this in the normal white border makes me appreciate the colored borders even more. Purple is such a bold color, unique in baseball, that the base card almost seems like a different set. It looks more metallic, somehow more serious and weighty than with a fun purple border. I don't dislike it; it just has this visual sense that it could have been carved from an ingot of silver.

1998 Bowman Chrome #53 Neifi Perez

1998 Bowman Chrome is an under-represented set in my collection, which will become a theme throughout this post. Before this, I only had six cards from the set. I can at least fill one side of a page now, and Perez will be up toward the top. Under the right light, the Chrome finish makes Perez' uniform lettering, Jackie Robinson patch, batting glove, and shoes really pop. I don't recall most Chrome cards looking like that. Usually the player's outline is more prominent, but it's a really eye-catching look, almost like there are little jewels in the card.

Design-wise, it's a Bowman set that I can vaguely place within a 5-year window, but it looks very similar to 1999 Bowman. As with many years, the accent colors maintain the red/blue distinction between veterans and rookies. Todd Helton's card this year was a blue card; that's how retro we're talking here. And the card back is typical of Bowman, with a single year of stats and a scouting report. We're told about Perez' performance on June 26th, 1997, a win over the Giants in which he "participated" in five double plays. Knowing Perez' tendencies, I checked the box score to ensure he didn't "participate" by grounding into one. Luckily, his team had the ball (as the defense, weird, I know) during each of those five.

I wasn't really collecting in 1997. In fact, '97 was one of just two seasons in which I didn't go to a game at all. The other was 2000, which happened to coincide with the rise of a now-defunct online instant messaging program.

2002 Fleer Triple Crown #131 Larry Walker

2002 Triple Crown, the next retro set, is quite unfamiliar. Before this break, which massively expanded my hoard of this set, I had one single, lonely card in the bottom portion of a 2002 Fleer page. Too bad, because it's really a nice set, probably my favorite so far in this break. The three silver bars on both top and bottom look vaguely like something Pacific would have done. I don't think they ever did the whole selective glossy thing, where the player is glossy but the background is matte. It's nice to touch, one of those sets I can't resist touching perhaps a bit more than I should. Any lenticular card is like that in the extreme, of course, and my collection of 1994 Sportflics was a little mistreated by my 10-year old self and my fingernails.

Fleer didn't seem to make the trek to Denver in 2001 to snap their photos, since almost all the Rockies in this set are in their away uniforms. Confusingly, that involved pinstripes at the time, but Larry Walker is clearly sliding into third in front of a Cardinal (?) who is definitely considered to be part of the background.

2002 Fleer Triple Crown #107 Ben Petrick

Same goes for the tall Giants player behind Ben Petrick, who is flinging away his glossy catcher's mask. The cause of that is a bit unclear. It's likely a foul, but it could have been an extremely wild pitch that took an odd bounce or three. I don't recognize the Giant on this card, nor can I find anything out about the blue ribbon on his jersey. All I know for sure is that it's in SBC Park, a place where many Rockies were photographed for Fleer's multitude of 2002 sets.

The back of Petrick's card mentions another catcher whose name I haven't heard in years, Jason Kendall. Apparently, Jason's father, Fred, an ex-MLBer himself, served as a coach on the Rockies at the time.

2002 Fleer Triple Crown #251 Todd Helton PS

Fleer Triple Crown (not to be confused with the longer-lived Donruss Triple Play), included a few subsets at the end of the checklist. Pace Setters was one of them, and in addition to a little extra silver foil, the card took the opportunity to recount Helton's already stellar statistics both at the plate and in the field. Helton earned three Gold Gloves in his career, and if the Platinum Glove had existed at that time, he might have been in the running for that, too. Helton had numerous years under his belt by the time Yadier Molina reached the Bigs, and that's who has been winning most of the NL Platinum Gloves since its debut in 2011.

Nolan got it this year, though.

If Coors is such a hitter's park, then standout defenders playing there had better be getting that kind of recognition.

2012 Panini Cooperstown #97 Al Barlick

Things got a little weird after '02 Triple Crown. I'm fairly certain that I have an umpire or two in my Conlon Collection cards, but they're extremely rare. Topps has even gone so far as to edit umpires entirely out of photographs. But just look at Al Barlick's "You're Out!" call. If I were the batter, I would do everything humanly possible to make sure I got on base. Maybe even lean into a four-seam fastball.

He had a 27-season career as an ump, taking off a few years to serve in the Coast Guard during WWII. He earned "the utmost respect" from players, and he looks a bit more docile, if stern, on the card back. He became a member of Cooperstown in 1989, and since he's not wearing an official team logo, his forehead isn't oddly cropped out like many cards in the Panini Cooperstown set.

Barlick is one of just ten umpires in the Hall of Fame, and I doubt we'll be seeing anyone new enter the Hall anytime soon. Jim Joyce perhaps, but if Joe West makes it into the Hall before a Rockie does, I'm going to continue my fandom under protest.

1997 Sports Illustrated #27 Jamey Wright

Our final set is 1997 Sports Illustrated, a co-branded set released by Fleer. It's another set I only had a single card from, so this is mostly new to me. I wasn't really sure what to expect, but a grainy, sepia-toned headshot was probably not it. It's part of the Fresh Faces subset, documenting the early years of journeyman pitcher Jamey Wright's career. His longest tenure was with the Rockies, but after that, he spent time on nine other teams. Despite that, his only postseason appearance came in 2013 with the Rays as his career was drawing to a close.

Young Rockies pitchers held a lot more promise in 1997 than in later years, although that reputation is finally changing. But case in point, Fleer basically tells us on the back of this card that Roger Bailey, whose career would be over after 1997, had better stuff that Wright.

1997 Sports Illustrated #109 Vinny Castilla

Position players have always had an easier time at Coors Field than pitchers, and Castilla is so nonchalant that he's comfortable blowing a bubble as he jogs after a popup, batting gloves casually flopping out of his back pocket.

This is a player at ease.

The full-bleed photography found in this set is appealing, which is to be expected. Unfortunately, Sports Illustrated no longer has any photographers on their full-time payroll. I'm sure it saves money, but it erodes their brand if anyone else can pay to license the same photograph. That 1991 Topps set we all love so much had SI to thank for a lot of those images. And in a world where Topps has exclusivity, sports photographers don't have it easy.

1997 Sports Illustrated Great Shots #13 V.Castilla/A.Galarraga

The final bit of strangeness comes with this 5x7 folding photograph of who we're told is Andres Galarraga and Vinny Castilla. It's a 1997 set, but the player on the left really does not look like Vinny to me. He might be quite a bit younger, but I'm not 100% sure on identity here. And we can't see much of Galarraga's face at all, as he's clearly attending to something in his eye.

It's an odd picture on an odd card. The back is blank, and there's no card number, but the cropping works well to fit the fold of the paper. Each player is definitely on his own side.

This is a really great selection for a group break. It's nice to get the latest and greatest cards since it saves me a trip to Target, but to unearth these old gems really makes things different and reminds us how things have changed.

When I started today, Jason Kendall was not a a name I thought I'd hear.

That about wraps up the Rockies (and umpires, because there are no Rockies in the Hall yet). Part 2 will feature the Athletics.

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.

The Case Hit Group Break (Part 1: Rockies)

I keep signing up for group breaks, including Nachos Grande's upcoming break, so it's only right that this blog gets its money's worth for all the PayPal transactions I've been doing. Over the summer, Trevor at Bump and Run Football Card Blog ran a break for 2018 Stadium Club, 2018 Topps Series 2, and 2018 Diamond Kings, as well as the usual handful of extras that make it in to many shipments. I had these sitting on my side table for months, and it turns out that I did quite well!

Stadium Club is always a favorite, and I have a blaster sitting on my coffee table that I've yet to open. That's definitely more due to busyness than patience, but I'll get to it someday. If I wait another couple months I might just give myself a nightly Hanukkah gift out of that blaster. You know, because the celebration is for the holy oil lasting seven nights plus one extra night.

I've never run one myself, but it seems to be quite difficult to sell all 30 teams, so most breaks these days seem to be good for two team slots, a selected team and a random team. It should be no surprise which team I selected, and the all-powerful randomizer chose the Pittsburgh Pirates as my second team. I'll be splitting those up into two posts, starting with the team that was most recently swept in the playoffs.

2018 Stadium Club #6 Carlos Gonzalez

This year's Stadium Club design isn't necessarily my favorite. Lots of bloggers haven't liked the lettering of the position being so large, and it is a bit more imposing than the faint outline of the team name. This year's set reminds me a bit of 2006 Upper Deck, but let's be honest, there are only so many things you can do with a minimalist full-bleed design.

Carlos Gonzalez, the Rockies right fielder, can frequently be seen laying out like this to make a catch. I've seen it in person more than once and it's exhilarating to watch. Here, he's doing it on the road, but I can't quite tell which stadium this is. There's an extremely faint outline around the ball, making me wonder if this is an effect of HDR photography. I took a couple photos of my cousin juggling last month, and the HDR software in the iPhone left an outline some distance above the ball itself. It was much more pronounced, so maybe a fancy DSLR and a $4,000 telephoto lens will minimize that effect.

2018 Stadium Club #204 Charlie Blackmon

These come in horizontal alignment, too. We never seem to call it "portrait" or "landscape" in this hobby like we do on our computer screens, just plain old "vertical" and "horizontal".

The photos are pin-sharp, as usual, letting us see pretty much every strand of hair in Charlie Blackmon's beard. And mullet. And even on his forearm. Once you look past that, you can see the well-liked Rockies spring training logo, as well as a prominent bat doughnut as Charlie warms up.

It's pretty difficult to color-code a design like this, but Topps managed to subtly do so on the back. It's a vertical back, and the background is meant to look like you're looking down on the field from the seats in the upper deck. Those seats are color-coded, and they're purple on Rockies cards, yellow on Pirates cards. Those don't actually match the real seats at the ballparks (Coors Field seats are dark green), but it's a clever way to group each team. The upper portion of the back even reminds me of 1993 Fleer Ultra.

2018 Stadium Club Red Foil #290 Nolan Arenado

Colored parallels are still found in Stadium Club, and I ended up with a couple of these. I'm not sure on the relative scarcity of these Red Foils, but they stand out pretty well, maybe a bit more so than in past years. Nolan's uniform number looks ever so slightly odd near the large position letters, but this is a great card which shows the five-time Gold Glover doing what he does best. He might be the best third baseman in the game. "An apparent consensus has been reached" on that. The card says so.

2018 Stadium Club Photographer's Proof #98 Jon Gray

We'll rotate 90 degrees and enhance on this card of Jon Gray. He's had some trouble handling the pressure of the high-leverage games he's appeared in, but I think he'll be a fixture of the Rockies rotation for some time to come. He's certainly good enough to appear in a small-ish set like Stadium Club, which apparently has a new type of parallel, Photographer's Proof.

I honestly had no idea what I had on my hands this whole summer, but this is an amazing pull! It's a 1:2 case hit, or 1:512 packs. It's not serial numbered, but if it's anything like those Members Only parallels, there are probably less than ten copies. A glance at eBay seems to put the print run at just seven.

Design-wise, it seems to be a replacement for the Contact Sheet insert set, using the filmstrip theme on one edge of the card. Trevor kindly put this in a penny sleeve, and I'm amazed at how lucky this pull is! That's why we do group breaks, I guess.

2018 Topps #668 Tyler Anderson

I got shut out of Rockies in the Diamond Kings box, but that's fine. That Gray card will make up for a lot. There were a few Pirates in the box, so at least I got a look at the design. It wasn't advertised up front, but Trevor also added in a blaster of 2018 Topps Series 2, and a few base cards went into my pile. I just finished sorting the factory set, but it's nice to have a few extras here and there.

Tyler Anderson was a regular member of the Rockies' rotation, earning a record of 7-9 this season. I saw him pitch a time or two at Coors this year, and he started NLDS Game 2. He did his best to keep the Rockies in the series, as did most of the pitching, but the offense just didn't get the job done.

I haven't kept up too closely with the 2018 releases. at least not beyond what I see on the blogs. The waterslide set is one I might have a little trouble remembering in a few years.

2017 Topps Bunt Blue #22 Jeff Hoffman

On his 2017 Bunt card, and by extension the Blue parallel, Topps predicted that Jeff Hoffman would "almost certainly" be a member of the Rockies' rotation, but that seems not to be panning out. The key return from the Troy Tulowitzki trade had a rocky six games in the majors during 2018, is currently playing in a High-A league, and didn't make the 40-man roster during September callups. Luckily for the Rockies, they have a few other young stars like Kyle Freeland and German Marquez to hold things down.

Right next to that blaster of Stadium Club, I have an unopened blaster of Topps Big League, the low-end replacement for Bunt. The mobile app is still active, but I haven't kept up with it regularly for a few years. These Blue parallels were nice, though. Sort of a poor man's printing plate. Beyond the headliners of the break itself, it and the rest of these cards were a nice bonus.

2018 Topps Opening Day At The Ballpark #ODB-COR Colorado Rockies

I'm not terribly broken-hearted about the demise of Bunt. But if Opening Day inserts are gone, Topps and I are going to have a problem. They're continually the best in my book, and they certainly have me eagerly awaiting the next home opener.

This 2018 card shows the home opener from 2017, which was Bud Black's first home game with the Rockies. He's facing the field for his first national anthem ceremony at Coors Field, and little did he know that he'd lead the team to a Wild Card spot two years in a row. In fact, that Wild Card game against the Cubs a couple weeks ago was the first Postseason win that Black ever led a team to, despite over a decade of managerial experience, mostly with the Padres. Before that, the last win he was a part of in the Postseason was Game 7 of the 1985 World Series as a member of the Royals. It's amazing that you can spend over thirty years in the sport between Postseason wins.

I'm sure when Matt Holliday rejoined the Rockies this summer, he and Bud Black had a chat about the 2007 Tiebreaker game. Black, you see, was in his first year managing the Padres when Holliday may or may not have touched home plate.

The Rockies rarely begin the season at home, and that will be the case in 2019, too. They'll face the Dodgers on Friday, April 5th, after a road trip against both Florida teams. They'll be the first to see the new Marlins logo, rumored to debut next month. It's probably best they start on the road, as early spring snowstorms are quite common around here. And the city has embraced the Friday afternoon party we can always count on.

1994 Topps Gold #186 Marcus Moore

Following Mike Munoz in the Obscure Rockies Relief Pitchers category (which you used to actually find in a base set) is Marcus Moore, who appeared in 56 games as a Rockie during their Mile High Stadium years. He was traded to the Reds in 1995, but didn't suit up for them until '96. He earned two saves in 23 games for Cincinnati, then that was it for his career.

I remember the name, and I remember this card, as I remember most from 1994 Topps. I assume we have decided to call it "The Home Plate Set", but it will always be my first factory set to me. This is probably a photo from spring training, as the Rockies never wore black jerseys during the regular season for many years. Ballplayers still wore stirrups back then, and you can spot a little "CR" logo on his left ankle.

And of course, it's a Topps Gold parallel, perhaps my favorite parallel set of all time.

1994 Pacific #191 Pedro Castellano

How about another Rockie I've never shown on the blog before? We'll turn to Pacific for this one, that quirky brand which existed in that weird space between being an oddball and a major producer. Appropriately for this Venezuelan utility player, part of this card is in Spanish, as Pacific frequently used on their cards. Sort of a Latin American equivalent of O-Pee-Chee.

Pacific used gold foil for this 1994 set, which pretty much everyone was doing at the time. Pacific also took a shot at making their own version of the Topps Rookie Cup, a rather flat-looking trophy in the lower right. He's listed as a "1994 Rookie", but didn't actually play during the 1994 season. His career spanned 51 games from 1993-1996, mostly during that inaugural year.

1994 Pacific #205 Armando Reynoso

Armando Reynoso, a member of the Mexican Baseball Hall of Fame, had a card in the same 1994 Pacific set. Mr. Pickoff is in the legendary Wrigley Field on this card, and you can just make out the basket below the foul pole. Reynoso pitched in the Windy City twice in 1993, but judging by the ivy, it looks more like early spring than mid summer, so I will date this one to May 5th, 1993, Cinco de Mayo. Reynoso took the loss in a quick afternoon game, just two hours and eighteen minutes.

I've seen this set numerous times, but I only now noticed the marble-like color-coded design at the bottom, very similar to what Score Select looked like in 1995. 1993 Fleer Ultra had that look too, but Pacific was way more of an innovator than anyone gives them credit for.

1994 Pacific Silver Prisms #20 Andres Galarraga

Our final card was printed before the advent of serial numbers or a set label on the back, but from what I've read, there was a print run of 8,000 cards. Quite scarce for 1994. The Big Cat appears before a triangular Silver Prism background; there is also a circular background variety.

If you flip it over, you'll find a big purple diamond, as well as a few highlights of Galarraga's 1993 campaign, such as his league-leading .370 batting average, totals for Hits, Doubles, and Home Runs, and a mention that he was the 1993 NL Comeback Player of the Year. It's not an award that has nearly as much prestige as the Rookie of the Year, but apparently it's been awarded in each league since 1965. Galarraga was the only Rockie to earn it until Greg Holland did so last year.

Trevor did an awesome job for me on this break! I feel quite bad that it's taken so long for me to finally put up a post, and I haven't even gotten to the Pirates yet. No case hits in there, but we will get a look at some old-time Hall of Famers and that 2018 Diamond Kings set.