2002 Baseball Cards Part 2

Part 2 of my review of 2002 baseball cards.

Fleer Genuine
100 cards. The cards have refractive foil highlights. I bought a couple of packs of this at $5 a pop.

Hot Prospects
80 cards. Roger Clemens wasn't exactly a Hot Prospect in 2002, but neither are the players on the other 5 cards from the set that I have. This card is out of order alphabetically because Beckett originally listed it as Fleer Hot Prospect and that's how I still have it in my database.

Fleer Maximum
200 cards. This is actually a subset called Maximum Impact.

Fleer Platinum
250 Cards. For a few years Fleer produced this set which took it's designs from various 1980's vintage Fleer sets.

Fleer Premium
200 cards. Are you getting tired of Fleer yet?

Fleer Showcase
125 cards. The edges of the card were embossed to make them like a frame.

Fleer Tradition
500 cards. Even though Fleer published a Fleer set, they still published a Fleer Tradition set. These were thick cards on brown card stock. There was also an Update set with another 400 cards.

Fleer Triple Crown
270 cards. I have this Chipper card and 3 Astros.

Greats of the Game
100 cards. A pretty nice set featuring, you guessed it, the greats of the game.

Leaf
A 150-card set produced by Donruss.

Leaf Certified
150 cards. Certified? By whom as what?

Leaf Rookies and Stars
400 cards. I have only this one card. Which I got from another blogger.

SP Authentic
90 cards. Finally some Upper Deck produced cards. There are plenty more.

SP Legendary Cuts
90 Cards. I think I got this in a repack.

SPx
90 cards. The draw of this set is the number of short printed cards and relics. I bought 2 packs, got nothing good.

Stadium Club
100 cards. I bought a whole box of this and am only missing 3 cards.

Studio
200 cards. A long produced Donruss set. Very patriotic this year.

Sweet Spot
90 cards. Relics and short prints in every box but boxes are expensive. I bought this a Jeff Bagwell on eBay.

Sweet Spot Classic
90 cards of classically great players. I bought one pack and got lucky.

Topps
718 cards. Known as the brown set. One of my favorite Topps sets. I bought a box of both series. There is also a chrome parallel set and an update set with another 275 cards.

Topps 206
260 cards. One of my favorite sets of the 2000s. I think this set started the whole early 1900's retro craze in baseball card design.

Topps American Pie
150 cards. This set is as American as apple pie.

Topps Archives
200 cards. This set featured reprints of many different years of Topps. There was also a refractive Topps Archives Reserve parallel set.

We're almost done with 2002 base cards. This has been so much fun I may also make a post of the 2002 relic cards I have.

Song of the Week - Star Trekkin' by The Firm

Sometimes iTunes throws up a song and I just have to go with it.

2002 Baseball Cards Part 1

2002 wasn't really all that long ago but in the world of baseball cards it belongs to another epoch. Today, there is basically only one major baseball card producer - Topps. Upper Deck tried but failed. By my count there were less than 20 major sets produced in 2010.

In 2002, there were 4 major producers, Donruss, Fleer, Topps and Upper Deck. This is down from the card producing frenzy years of the mid to late '90s but they managed to release over 80 major sets.

I've not been posting much lately. I think I've been suffering from PBSS (post baseball stress syndrome) caused by the Phillies exiting the playoffs early. So I thought I'd make up for it with this major 3-part post. I'm mostly going to show you the cards, and mostly Phillies if I have them. I don't have a card from every set produced in 2002, but I do have most.

Absolute Memorabilia150 card base set. Gold foil and dufex finish.

Bowman
A 440-card base set, following the usual Bowman practice of the day of rookies in blue and veteran players in red. There was also a parallel chrome set.

Bowman Draft Picks
A 165-card set. The only way to tell them from regular Bowman is that the numbers start with BP. As with Bowman, there was a parallel chrome set,

Bowman's Best
A 90-card set. This is the only card I have from the set.

Bowman Heritage
A 439-card set. I only have a handful.

Diamond Kings
A 150-card set with more parallel cards than you can imagine. This was the first year that Donruss produced Diamond Kings as a stand-alone set.

Donruss
220 cards. I only have a few Phillies and Astros. Not my favorite set of 2002.

Donruss Rookies
50 cards. These look much like the rookie subset from the regular Donruss set.

Donruss Best of Fan Club
200 cards. Fan Club used to be a subset in Donruss. This year it became 2 stand alone sets. This one has a dufex finish.

Donruss Classics
100 cards.

Donruss Elite
100 cards. Yet another dufex set. I really don't care much for these.

Donruss Fan Club
300 cards. I guess Best of Fan Club is a parallel of this set with fewer cards.

Donruss Originals
425 cards. Donruss' attempt to mimic Bowman and Topps Heritage. There were 4-5 1980's vintage designs in this set.

Donruss Super Estrellas
150 cards. Looking for the Hispanic market after the demise of Pacific.

E-X
100 cards printed on plastic.

Finest
100 cards. I don't buy much Finest. Of this year I only have this and the Jeff Bagwell card.

Flair
100 cards.

Fleer
540 cards. In 1998, Fleer started calling their main set Fleer Tradition. This is the first set just called Fleer since then.

Fleer Authentix
150 cards. Before going out of business, Fleer produced a bewildering array of sets.

Fleer Box Office
125 cards. All I have are some Phillies and Astros.

Fleer Focus Jersey Edition
225 cards. Fleer had been producing Fleer Focus for a few years. This year they added "Jersey Edition" to the name of the set for no decipherable reason.

That's all for today. The next post will pick up with Fleer Genuine.

Thursday Night at the Movies - The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest

This is the movie version of the third book of the Millennium Trilogy, written by the late Stieg Larsson. The other two books were called The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire. Although the books were published between 2005 and 2007, they were slow to arrive here. The translation of Hornet's Nest didn't appear in the US until 2009 when I read about it in the local paper book review section. The local library had the first book on CD (narrated by the great Simon Vance). It was pretty good. Set in Sweden, it tells the story of disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist (who writes for and partly owns Millennium magazine). He retreats to the frozen Swedish countryside to investigate a 30-year old murder. It also tells the story of Lisbeth Salander, a troubled 26-year-old who has been in and out of institutions all her life. When we first meet her she is working as a researcher for a security firm. Troubled she may be but she is a skilled researcher and a consummate computer hacker. Eventually, the stories of Blonkvist and Salander intersect, and she helps him solve the mystery and incidentally, saves his life.
A few months ago, the first movie (in Swedish with English subtitles) appeared on cable. The movie did a great job of putting on film a long and complicated story. Salander is a difficult character. Sexually abused for much of her life, she refuses to play the victim. She gets even with her tormentors in violent ways, which is one of the reasons she is now a person under guardianship, not trusted to take care of herself as an adult should.

The second book (and movie) is more exciting than the first, as Salander gets unjustly charged with the murder of three people, a journalist and his girlfriend who are working for Blomkvist on a story for Millennium and her guardian. The story also becomes more convoluted as we start to learn about the shadowy government conspiracy which is at the heart of her institutionalization.

The third book hasn't yet shown up in the library but my daughter (who also loves the series) and I decided to go see the movie anyway. We were pretty happy with it. Many questions are answered and maybe Salander gets justice in the end.

Larsson had planned more books in the series, which is apparent by the end of the third movie but he died in 2007, actually prior to the release of the third book. The fourth book is apparently written but Larsson's estate has refused to publish it. The series has been an enormous success, selling some 27 million copies.

I'd recommend seeing all three films, in order. The first of the series is more or less a complete story, but 2 and 3 are very tied together. You might have trouble finding the third movie in theaters, it was only playing in one theater in Houston.

Song of the Week - Crucifixion by Phil Ochs

A nice understated performance of a great song.

1997 SP Inside Info

I've been working on filling in the numerous holes in my 1990s Phillies collection. While looking for the 1997 SP Phillies team set I came across an auction for this card. Not even knowing what it was I bought it because the price was right.Lots of foil printing and a pretty attractive card. It's also pretty thick, about as thick as three normal cards.
And it's got a full foil printed photo on the back as well. But wait, there's more...
The card has an insert that pulls out revealing player information. Hence the name "Inside Info". I've got lots of cards and have seen a lot of gimmicks, but this is one I'd not seen before. As gimmicks go, it's pretty good although once you've got the card in a penny sleeve or an album page, the pull out is kind of worthless since you can't get at it.
And you'll be wanting to protect this card. Beckett lists this card with the dreaded "CONDITION SENSITIVE SET" warning. and you can see along the back edge where the pull out comes out is nicked up. It's pretty much like that all around the back of the card. On the front of the card, the foil sort of wraps around the edge giving it some protection. I can image that the pull out is susceptible to bending as it doesn't slide in very smoothly.

Phorgotten Phillie Phile - Jeff Jackson

You can be phorgiven if you don't remember Jeff Jackson since, despite being the Phillies #1 draft pick (4th overall pick) in 1989, he didn't play a single game in the majors. This is probably his first card, a 1990 Bowman.He also appeared in the 1991 Bowman set, in a photo that looks remarkably like it was taken at the same time as the 1990 Bowman card.
Although he never played at the major league level, he does hold two distinctions. One, he is one of the 6 players picked ahead of Frank Thomas in the 1989 draft. Can you name the other 5?
His other distinction is the player wearing the most garish shirt on a baseball card.

The other 5 were Ben McDonald (quite the hobby rage at the time), Tyler Houston (picked by the Braves but who ended up with the Phillies), Roger Salkied, Donald Harris and Paul Coleman (who also never played in the majors).