One card only - Tony's first home run

Opinion is divided on 'manufactured relics' like this card. They're usually found as bonus cards in blaster boxes. While I realise they aren't to every collector's taste, they're a bit out of the ordinary and I like adding them to my collection. This particular one was an eBay purchase from a seller in Germany.

Card Number 1035: Topps First Home Run Medallions, 2015; #FHRM-TG

These cards were bonus cards in blaster boxes of Series Two of Topps's flagship set. The 'medallion' is a heavy piece of metal embedded in a partial hole scooped out of the foamboard material used to make the 'card'.

Credit to Topps for using a photo of Tony in a uniform from roughly the right era to commemorate an event in 1982. (I feel like I'm crediting Topps for doing the bare minimum these days!)

If I was more co-ordinated I would have posted this on 22nd August! But sadly I have only just realised I have missed that by a handful of days. 

Wrigley Field is on my list of ball parks I want to visit. As Tony hit his first home run there, I think I might have to make it a priority when I'm next planning a trip to the USA.

Total: 1035 cards

Sweetness (and a sour taste)

This was the card that tipped my hand into buying a recent joblot of cards from 2001, but I was very disappointed with it when I had it 'in hand'.

Card Number 711: Topps Combos insert, 2001; TC-15

The Combos were a 20-card insert series featuring stars of the past and current big names. Tony was paired with Ted Williams, one of his heroes.

The photo composition is a little bit odd, but that's not what was disappointing about this card. There is some surface damage with a large area of speckling across Tony's face. I have a feeling this card is from some recently opened packs where the cards have stuck together over time. I have seen this a lot in pack-ripping videos where older packs are opened and cards get damaged as they are pulled apart. 

The damage wasn't noticeable in the picture on eBay. I use my phone to look at eBay and that might be why I didn't see it. The damage wasn't mentioned in the listing description either, so it was very disappointing to only discover it when I opened the box of cards. 

I messaged the seller, and received a small refund for this and the handful of other cards affected. But as this was the one card I really wanted from the lot, it's not really about the money.

Despite the damage (which is also visible on the back of the card, below), this is a nice concept for a card. The "Sweetness" refers to Tony and Ted's sweet swings as they batted their way to greatness.

The state of this Sweetness card has left a sour taste in my mouth, and puts me off buying from that seller again. At the moment this is just a place-holder in my collection and hopefully I will find a nicer copy one day.

Total: 711 cards

One card only - Gypsy gold from 2012

I had been feeling a little bit down recently but my mood was lifted last week when two fellow collectors contacted me separately on the same day to each show me a card and ask if I would like it. One of those people was Laura, the t-shirt designer who created the .394 t-shirt I am wearing in my bio pic to the right there (if you are looking at the web version of this rather than the mobile version!) 

Laura has created a few Padres-themed t-shirts, including a "Slam Diego" design, which I was wearing on Wednesday to watch the first game in the Padres' double-header against the Rockies, when Victor Caratini hit a grand slam! You can check out more of Laura's designs here.

Card Number 675: Topps Gypsy Queen gold frame parallel, 2012; #252

This card is numbered 252, like the base card, but there were actually only 100 cards given the 'gold frame' treatment.

I had wanted this card for a while because I wanted to talk about Topps re-using images on cards. I knew this card set used the image that had appeared on Tony's Topps card from 1988.

The Gypsy Queen version has been sharpened in photoshop, but the equipment in the dug-out and the people in the crowd are the same. 

I'd like to be able to claim that I spotted this all by myself, but actually it's because I saw the card designs next to each other in an image of an auction lot on eBay. I 'borrowed' that image as a reference and have kept it for several months waiting for the opportunity to use it.

That picture shows what the regular base card looks like. This is a 'gold frame' parallel, which means there is literally a gold card frame stuck on the front of the card in a decoupage style. It's hard to see on the scan but that gives the card added depth and makes a real nice effect.

Based on my research, I think the framed versions were included in the 'value packs' which contained 3 packs of Gypsy Queen cards and 3 framed parallels. The gold were the most common framed card. There were also blue-framed cards serially numbered to 599 cards, and black-framed cards that were released in a print run of one card each (known as 1/1s).

There were lots of variations in this set as well, so there are two variants of Tony's base card and two variants of the 'mini' version of his card. There don't seem to be any variants of the framed cards on Trading Card Database, but even so that adds up to a lot of different versions of this card for collectors to tray and track down. It's also a good illustration of the 'bloat' that has happened in terms of total cards released for a given player. 

The back of the card is sllightly dull in comparison. At least it wasn't complete gibberish like the cardback the previous year.

"He paced the NL..." is an odd phrase. Maybe the cardback writer felt "led" was a bit too boring a word to use on a boring cardback.

And now an added bonus. I said I had been feeling a bit despondent recently. When I opened the envelope and took the card out there was a little post-it note on it with a cheerful message. It really made my day!

I hope that however this blog post finds you, you find the time to look for rainbows when it rains.

Total: 675 cards

Short Print Legend

This was one of those late night 'see a card on eBay and make an offer which gets immediately accepted' purchases that arrived a couple of days ago. It's a short print from Topps flagship release last year when they subbed in "legends" to replace some other players.

Card Number 574: Topps (Short Print), 2020; #248

This is an unusual photo of Tony. I'm not sure what the booklet is that he's holding. It could be a game programme, with a loose piece of paper in. It's also unusual to have an advertising hoarding in the background. I'm a little surprised Topps didn't airbrush that out. At least it's for Coca Cola and Diet Coke rather than Marlboro!

Apparently if you look at the serial numbers in the legalese, that will tell you this is a short print. The regular card numbered 248 was Hunter Renfroe's card, which showed him as a Padre even though he had been traded to Tampa Bay. (He has recently been traded to the Red Sox so I wonder if Topps will show him a Red Sox uniform next year and his sojourn in Tampa will go unrecorded on Topps cards.)

Topps stuffed their Series 1 with short print and super short print variations, but I haven't found a figure for how short a short print was. I asked in the UK collectors group on Facebook and Andy M replied saying that short prints were available in fat packs in a 1:18 ratio and in retail packs in a 1:38 ratio.  Given that the "Advanced Stats" insert cards were serial numbered to 300 and their appearance ratios were about treble the short print ratios, Andy suggested that short prints probably mean a print run of about 1000.

However, Beckett has different ratio figures, which if true would make the short prints even smaller print runs. Beckett describes them as "pretty tough" to get. However this card had sat on eBay for a while, so much so my offer at just above half the asking price was accepted without quibble.

Total: 574 cards

A quick note: This is my 250th blog post, and I have run out of cards to blog. From now on I will blog as I add new cards to the collection, so this blog is going to be intermittent. (I took my first break last Sunday after 246 daily posts.) Of course if someone sends me a large number of cards I don't have, I will take up the daily schedule again!

Modern Monday - got your number

This card from the recently released Topps Update set came all the way from Plymouth, Massachusetts, via eBay. Then, after I'd bought it and while it was somewhere in the postal system, Marc from the UK Facebook collectors group asked me if I had it. The lesson? Wait and see what turns up in the group!

Card Number 547: Topps Update Numbers Game insert, 2020; #NG-15

The theme of this insert set are the various numbers retired by clubs. 

If that picture on the front looks familiar, it might be because it appeared on an insert card in Topps Chrome Update in 2019.

On the back there is a little write up about Tony's career.

I have one quibble with this insert series - why didn't Topps try to align the card numbers with the retired numbers? NG-19 in the series is Ernie Banks, who wore #14. They gave Derek Jeter's card the number NG-22, but his uniform number was #2, while NG-2 is a card for Ryne Sandberg, who wore #23.

Yesterday I talked about how I felt Topps's licensing monopoly had rendered the company lazy. This is the kind of thing I mean. I realise it might not always be possible to number all the cards exactly aligned to the shirt numbers of the players. But Topps could have done that with a lot of them. 

Total: 547 cards

Modern Monday - Where's Tony?

I was trawling across eBay a couple of weeks ago and ran a search for Padres Baseball Cards. I noticed a small lot of nine cards for sale, all modern stuff, but something must have pinged my "Tony Radar" because I took a second look. I've saved the photo from the listing. Can you see what I saw?

Obviously one of the first things you see is the luxuriant backdrop. I can't decide if it's a fluffy cushion or shag carpeting. Neither of which I would really recommend as a surface for photographing cards, but it's not reflective, I suppose.

Anyway on the right hand edge, which I'm sure you will have seen, there's Tony peeping around the corner of another card. 

I didn't recognise it. Turns out it was an insert card from the Topps Update series in 2019, and, in fact it was the Chrome version. 

Card Number 344: Topps Chrome Update, 2019; FBC-16

As it's a Chrome card, it's shiny! It's also a bit unusual because it shows "young Tony" from the 80s. Most recent cards seem to be using pictures of Tony towards the end of his career - for example, the recent(ish) DonRuss cards I posted last week or these cards from Topps issued this year. It's a good choice of photo. 

On the back it explains why Tony qualified for an insert card about "The Family Business", talking about how his brother and son also played Major League baseball.

That would be quite a fun baseball trivia question. What have the Padres had 3 of, the Dodgers had 2 of and the Royals and Brewers had one each of? The answer would be "Members of the Gwynn family playing for them!"

This card has also taught me a useful lesson - take the time to have a good look at photos in eBay listings!

Total: 344/394 (Fifty cards to my target!)