30-Day Baseball Card Challenge Day 4

Day 4: A rookie card of one of your favorite players.

The obvious card here would be Mike Schmidt's rookie card but this would be the answer for several of the days, so I'm gonna hold it for now.

Besides the Phillies, my favorite team is the Astros and my favorite Astro (from even before I moved to Houston) is Jeff Bagwell, finally elected to the Hall of Fame.

1991 Stadium Club Members Only #11

Hall of Fame Inductee Jeff Bagwell Cards

Jeff Bagwell finally got nominated for the Baseball Hall of Fame this year. I've already made one post recently about him, and I've got enough Bagwell cards (536) to do several more. With this post I want to show some recently acquired Bagwell cards.

I was idly searching for Bagwell cards on eBay the other week and came across an offer for 30 different Bagwell cards for $10.75 (including shipping). The seller was nice enough to actually list the cards he was offering and I saw that I needed 27 of them. Most were 1990s inserts and parallels.  Here are my favorites.

1992 Score 100 Rising Stars #35

 24-year-old Bagwell looks like he just ran in off the high school playing field on this card.

1993 Topps Inaugural Rockies #227

Topps put out an entire parallel set to honor the new Rockies and another for the Marlins inaugural season. I believe these were only available as boxed sets. I had one other from the Rockies set but I've never seen one from the Marlins set. Pretty rare, I'd say.

1994 Pinnacle Power Surge #16

Not only a Bagwell card I didn't have but an insert set I didn't know about. This goes right into the reference books.

1994 Stadium Club Golden Rainbow #108

1994 saw a sharp rise in parallel sets. And this was how it was often done, putting foil on the front, or if the card already had foil, putting different foil. These weren't particularly hard to get in packs of 1994 Stadium Club.

1994 Upper Deck Electric Diamond #480

I always like this parallel. My recollection is that it was a tough pull in 1994 Upper Deck.

1995 Fleer Update Headliners #1

I have several cards from this insert but never noticed the text on the story from "The Fleer Times" behind the photograph on the front. It's describing a Phillies game where Tony Longmire hit a pinch hit home run to win a game over the Cardinals. Since Tony Longmire only hit 3 home runs in 1995 it probably wouldn't be too hard to find what game it was. I looked at the other cards I have and they all have the same background.

1995 Ultra Hitting Machines #1

1995 Ultra Hitting Machines Gold Medallion #1

I had the Frank Thomas version of the base card. Now I have the Gold Medallion version as well.

1996 Collector's Choice Crash The Game #19

Pretty extravagant finish for a contest card.

1998 Leaf Fractal Foundations #149

Leaf had a pretty complicated system of parallel cards in 1998.

1999 Sp Authentic Home Run Chronicles

1998, of course, was the year of the Home Run. I only have a few of these cards and find them unattractive. Lots of gold foil nonsense on the front. Since the card mentions a specific home run on a specific date, you'd think that maybe the photo would be of the player hitting that home run. Not in this case since the Astros were at home and Bagwell is in an away uniform.

2002 UD Superstars Keys to the City

This is an insert in a 2002 multi-sport set that I never heard of. 

Repack Bang or Bust Part 4

It's time to open up another repack and see if I got a bang for my money or just a bust.  This is one of the Fairfield plastic boxes with 250 loose cards and a couple of packs. All together that's about 265 cards working out to about 4 cents/card.

My baseball card collecting mantra is "If it's a card I don't have, then I need it". I judge a repack like this on two criteria, how many cards did I need, and what was the quality of the cards. This box was not too bad on the number of cards I needed as I pulled 110 cards from it I didn't have. Normally I'm happy if I'm near 50%. On the other hand, I got some good (in my opinion) stuff in it. I'll give this a:

1981 Topps #193

The Mad Serbian. This card almost made the whole box worth it.

1982 Topps #342

A good player from a good set.

1987 Topps #564

I don't get excited seeing 1987 Topps in a repack since I have the entire set. One hazard of early Topps cards is gum stains. I think this may be the worst gum stain I ever saw. It not only ruined the back of the card but the front as well.

1990 Star #98

Nothing special here except he's a player I never heard of. I like to look guys like this up on baseball-reference.com. Scruggs appeared in 6 games, getting 6 at bats in April 1991. He had no hits or walks but managed to score a run as a pinch runner.

1992 Topps #430

I'm guessing that Sax is going into a slide at second. Look at where the ball is relation to Sax. Sailing into center field.

1993 Ted Williams #96

Let's get excited about a checklist. I only have 30 cards from this 160 card set and I didn't have a checklist. This goes into the reference books.

1994 Leaf #221

I have over 500 Jeff Bagwell cards, but I didn't have this one, and I like this year of Leaf as well. Like many glossy cards from this era, the card shows some damage from being stuck to other cards.

1996 Collector's Choice

Another card for the reference books. 1996 Collector's Choice was a 730-card set with a lot of subsets. I didn't have any of the postseason cards from the set.

1996 Finest #139

Does anybody remember the great peel or not to peel debate of the mid-1990s? My advice, peel 'em.

1997 Pinnacle Certified #30

Another card with a peel. This is only the second card I've ever seen from this product. I have a red mirror parallel of a Phillies rookie I got in a trade a few years ago. This is one of those cards that are impossible to scan. It's basically a mirror on the front. And get a load of the pinwheel o' stats on the back.

2002 Topps 206 #45

Here's a set I wish I had bought more of when new. Hobby boxes of this product are going on eBay for $146.

2002 Upper Deck #92

What a mess. Upper Deck MVP was produced from 1999 to 2005 and I didn't like any of them. Especially this year. you can get 2 hobby boxes of this product on eBay for about $25.

2003 Fleer Splendid Splinters #29

In the early 2000s, Fleer produced a bewildering number of sets. 

Jeff Bagwell - Hall of Fame (Finally)

I suppose I won't be the only person posting Jeff Bagwell cards today. I have 508 Bagwell cards in my collection. Here is a card from each year of his career.

The other two inductees, Tim Raines and Ivan Rodriguez, are also favorite players of mine so I'll give them the same treatment over the next few days.

1991 Upper Deck #702

 

Three pretty good players, but only on Hall of Famer.

1992 Donruss Diamond Kings

1993 Finest #11

1994 Upper Deck Mantle's Long Shots #1

1995 Emotion N-Tense #1

1996 Score Titanic Taters #9

1997 Fleer Zone #1

1998 Flair Showcase Row 3 #38

1999 Upper Deck Encore FX Gold #45

 

2000 Stadium Club #167

2001 SP Game Bat Edition Piece of History

2002 Leaf Certified Skills Blue #20

2003 Ultra Photo Effex #19

2004 Upper Deck R-Class Jersey

2005 Topps Rookie Cup #77

And one extra: 2006 Topps Chrome Black Refractor #88