Ernie Banks R. I. P.

They will be playing a double header at the Elysian Fields later today.

2001 Topps HD Images of Excellence

2006 Topps Heritage Flashbacks

2009 Upper Deck Goudey

2010 Topps Turkey Red

2013 Upper Deck Goodwin Champions

2014 Topps Allen & Ginter The Pastime's Pastime

Gum/wax Stains

Remember gum stains on Topps cards? I'm sure you younger players don't.

I started my collecting career with 1985 Topps. There's nothing special about this Gorman Thomas card, except for the stain on the back. Although my overactive imagination makes me believe that I can detect a faint aroma of 30-year-old gum on the back of this card, the stain is most likely due to wax from the wrapper. It's more than just a stain, there is actually a waxy feel to the stain.

Why did Topps package cards in waxed paper anyway?

Pedro Guerrero Donruss MVPs Cards

I pulled these cards from a repack I'm working on. I didn't have either of them. Donruss MVPs was an insert set found in Donruss for several years.

1988 Donruss Bonus MVP's #16

This was the last year for Guerrero with the Dodgers. He'd been with them since 1978. In August 1988 he was traded to the Cardinals for John Tudor. He would spend the rest of his career, to 1992, with the Cardinals.

1990 Donruss Bonus MVP's #6

I remember Guerrero as a good player. He had a career batting average of .300, hit 215 home runs and was a 5-time All-Star. Not a Hall of Fame guy but a guy you'd want on your team.

I always like looking up players I'm not real familiar with on Wikipedia. Here's what I learned. In 1999, he was arrested for trying to buy 33 pounds of cocaine from an undercover agent. He was eventually acquited when his attorney showed that Guerrero's IQ of 70 meant that he couldn't understand that he'd made a deal to buy cocaine. An IQ of 70 means "borderline intellectually disabled".

In 2011, Guerrero got back into baseball as a minor league hitting instructor, and since then has managed several minor league Mexican teams. Just how intelligent do you have to be to manage a baseball team?

2012 Topps Gypsy Queen - Ichiro

In 2012, Topps Gypsy Queen had short-printed variations of some of the cards in the base set. I managed to put together about 2/3 of the set from rack packs and blaster boxes. And I pulled several of the variations. I recently got a pack of 2012 Gypsy Queen in a Fairfield repack. In the pack were both versions of the Ichiro card, back-to-back in the pack. Since I didn't have either card, I'm pretty pleased.

This is the regular card.

This is the short-print variation.

Thanks to Cardboard Connection for a visual guide to the short-prints.

Cards Featuring Pitchers Fielding

This is a post I've been meaning to make for awhile.

How many fielding plays does a pitcher make in an average game?  I have no idea, maybe 2 or 3. How many fielding plays are made in a game? Again, I don't know but I imagine that the average is around 40. You figure there are 27 outs, but some of those would be strikeouts. Then you have hits and errors, each one would be a fielding play. Pickoff attempts by the pitcher and the catcher. Throws by the pitcher to first, and wild pitches and passed balls. I'll show some stats below that suggest that between 5-8% of the batters faced end up with a fielding chance for the pitcher. Some, guys who throw a lot of ground balls will have more. Pitchers who get a lot a fly ball outs will have less.

How many baseball cards do you own that feature a pitcher fielding? My rough estimate, based on how many pitcher cards I have scanned and how many of those feature the pitcher fielding, is 0.2%. So pretty rare.  I just pulled one from a repack so I thought I'd show some of the one's I have.  I called this Part 1 because I have enough for at least 2 posts.

1989 Score #281 Roger McDowell

This is the card I just pulled. Roger faced 4,517 batters in his career and had 395 fielding chances. That works out to 8.8% of the batters he faced. He had a career fielding percentage of .939 with 24 errors over 12 years.

1991 Topps #454 Kevin Appier

Kevin's getting set for a grounder back to the mound. Watch out for that bad bounce. Appier faced 10,958 batters in his career and had 493 fielding chances (4.5%). His fielding percentage was .973 with 12 errors. Was he a better fielder than McDowell? I guess so.

1991 Topps #644 Chuck Crim

 I love cards featuring fielding plays with the ball in the frame somewhere. Crim had a much shorter career than either McDowell or Appier. In 8 years he faced 2,969 batters with 167 fielding chances (5.6%). He had a career fielding percentage of .934 with 11 errors. Here's a play he at least made the first part of right. He still has to throw it somewhere.

1993 Donruss #222 Bret Saberhagen

An infield pop up. Did he field it or get called off by another infielder? Bret had a fielding chance with 6.2 % of the batters he faced. I'm going to stop calculating this now since I made my point. The percentage of baseball cards featuring pitchers fielding is much less that the percentage of actual plays made by pitchers. He had a career fielding percentage of .963 with 24 errors in 16 years.

1993 Stadium Club #167 Doug Drabek

Doug is way out in the grass somewhere trying to make this play. He had a career .954 fielding percentage in 637 chances with 29 errors. Maybe not the best fielding pitcher but he also won 155 games.

1993 Stadium Club #654 Ben Rivera

This is a weird looking play. It looks like Ben was covering first and the batter slid into the bag. You see this sort of play a lot now but were runners doing that much in 1993?  The guy doing the face plant appears to be Will Pennyfeather. Rivera only had a 3 year career but had a .981 fielding percentage with one error in 52 chances.

1994 Score #237 Larry Andersen

This sure looks awkward. Larry seems to have the ball in his glove but there's an opponent heading off-card on the left. Andersen was a pretty good pitcher with a 3.15 ERA over his 17-year career. But he apparently wasn't a good fielder as this photo suggests. He had a .908 fielding percentage with 25 errors.

1995 Stadium Club #189 John Franco

 Here's what you call a come-backer. That ball is real close to John and his glove is not in position. I hope he caught it. Along with his 424 saves, Franco had a .964 fielding percentage with 11 errors. This might have been one of them.

1995 Topps Traded #75 Jim Abbott

This is probably not a fielding play. It looks like Jim is transferring the glove from his left hand after throwing. I never saw Abbott play much and I've always been interesting in how he fielded. 5.3% of the batters he faced resulted in a fielding play for him, so he certainly had his fair share of chances. His career fielding percentage was a pretty good .976 with 9 errors.

1996 Donruss #439 Kevin Appier

Here's Kevin Appier again. This could be an infield pop up but it's more likely he's watching a ball going way over his head.

Big Glasses and Big Hair

I never heard of Pete Ladd before I pulled this card out of a recent repack.

If all you saw was the photo would you be able to guess the year of this baseball card from the glasses and hair alone? I checked on some photos from 1986 and it looks like just about everybody I knew had glasses like that, even me, although not quite so big. What was the deal?

As for the hair, I stopped wearing my hair like that sometime in the 1970s.

Song of the Week - Hide From The Sun by GOAT

Although I enjoy lots of different kind of music, '60s music is always going to be my favorite type of music. I just got this song as a podcast from Minnesota Public Radio and it reminds me of many sixty's bands, perhaps, mostly of Quicksilver Messenger Service.



The video looks like a bad acid trip to me. According to Wikipedia GOAT is a "Swedish alternative and experimental fusion music group". This song is from "Commune" their third album. There is a live performance version of the song, if you're interested. The band performs in weird animal costumes.