One card only - streaks and a plain patch

As is customary for this blog, it's Sunday so that means one card only. As is also customary for this blog, there will be a short complaint about the card hobby at the moment.

But first, the Padres 2020 season came to an end in the early hours of Friday morning (UK time). One benefit of getting up for a 2am first pitch was it meant I could text my friend who was being kept up all night by her brand new twins and say "Hi, I'm up in the middle of the night too!" I didn't last the whole game. 8-2 down at the end of the fifth inning I went back to bed. I wasn't too surprised to see the Dodgers had gone on to win the game and the series when I woke up in the morning. 

It's been an exciting season to be a 'Slam Diego' fan. Fernando Tatis Jr has become a very hot property in the collecting world and it's been funny watching my fellow collectors scramble to pick up Padres cards in the various Facebook groups I'm in. Until this year I've had a free run at anything Padres. Now I'd have to be quick if I wanted to buy any. I'm not complaining. It's nice to be a fan of a popular team for a change.

However, being in those groups, I have noticed how many people are putting relic and autographed cards up for sale. There is a constant stream of newly minted, newly pulled relics up for grabs. Now you can buy boxes that guarantee you a relic inside and it feels like they are almost too common. In fact they are so common now, a friend gave me a Topps hangar fatpack as a birthday present, and I pulled a relic card out of that. It was the first time I had ever done that in my life, and I feel that if I'm pulling them, given the rarity of how often I open packs, then it shows what I mean about them becoming almost commonplace.

But that is the situation at the moment. I've seen several people ask if we are into a second over-production era. I think we are. Except this time it's not just junk wax. It's also junk parallels and junk relics and junk autos. There are a few people still building sets out there, but there are also people accumulating lots of special insert cards that they don't really want. 

Anyway, enough of my complaints. Today's one card only dates from a time when relic cards were difficult cards to pull from a pack.

Card Number 401: Pacific Private Stock, 2001; #148

It's a dark blue swatch card.

On the back there is a note about the item's provenance. It claims to be from "game used gear" and specifies the season it was worn - 1999. The Padres introduced a navy blue 'alternate uniform' in 1999. An alternate uniform is different from a 'road uniform', which was dishwater grey for a number of years.

Summarising the 1999 season, the cardback mentions Tony's batting average and a 16-game hitting streak, but doesn't mention his 3000th hit that season.

Hitting streaks are odd things. Tony's record was 25 games in his first full season (1983). He is third on the all-time Padres hitting streaks list. Weirdly the top two streaks in Padres history are both by catchers - John Flaherty surpassed Tony's 25 with a 27 game streak in 1996, and the all-time leader is Benito Santiago with a streak of 34 games in 1987, which was his rookie year. That's actually still the longest hitting streak by a catcher in Major League Baseball. 

So far none of the big hitters in the Slam Diego line up in 2020 have had a streak to rival these records. Maybe one of them will next season.

Total: 401 cards