Tuesday Tribute Triple

I recently bought a few cards from an eBay vendor that shipped very quickly from the USA. However, unfortunately some of the cards arrived with dinged corners. The dealer refunded the money for those cards and said they didn't want me to send them back. So, basically what I'm saying is the cards in today's post were effectively free. I will hopefully replace these in my binders at some point. However, for now, they are shiny placeholders.

How shiny? Well, they broke my scanner.

This is more reflective (ha!) of how they actually look.

They are three more cards in the 5-strong "Tribute" insert series that DonRuss including in their 2015 set. One of the cards from the set was the 100th card to feature on this blog.

Card Number 423: DonRuss "Tony Gwynn Tribute", 2015; #1

Until the cards arrived I hadn't noticed that the little picture of Tony on the front was different on each one. This card shows him following through on a swing, but it really looks like he's busting out some dance moves!

This card commemorates Tony's perennial selection for the All Star teams and particularly focuses on his first appearance, in 1984.

Tony was the lead-off hitter for the National League team in the 1984 All-Star Game, with a hit and a strike out from 3 at bats. He also stole a base. It was a night game at Candlestick Park in San Francisco and the National League won 3-1.

Card Number 424: DonRuss "Tony Gwynn Tribute", 2015; #3

The third card in the series is about Tony's career hits. (You can really see the corner ding on this one!)

There's a slightly forced write up on the back, punning on the idea of Tony having hits if he was a musician. Tony's wife, Alicia, is actually in the music industry. She owns a record label and studio in Indianapolis. Tony's daughter, Anisha, released an album called '19' back in 2003 and the single from that album ('No Means No') was in the R&B charts for 19 weeks! This version on YouTube apparently features Tony. If DonRuss were going to riff (ha!) on the music idea, it's a shame they didn't mention this.

Card Number 425: DonRuss "Tony Gwynn Tribute", 2015; #5

I only bought the odd numbers in this series this time around.

The final card in the Tribute series is about Tony's career batting average.

There's some real truth in the comment that Tony's batting average was a throwback to baseball history. If you look on Baseball Reference at the Career Batting Average Leaders, Tony's is the only colour photo. 

Tony is joint 18th on the all-time list and most of the players ahead of him had passed away before he was born. The exceptions are Ty Cobb (died, 1961), Rogers Hornsby (died, 1963), Lefty O'Doul (died, 1969), George Sisler (died, 1973), Bill Terry (died, 1989) and Ted Williams who lived until 2002. Tony is the only player in the top 20 to play baseball after 1960. That was Ted Williams' final season in the game and the year Tony was born. So there was literally nobody hitting to the same consistency as Tony throughout his entire lifetime!

Total cards: 425

Modern Monday - Stadium Club 2020

Andy M, who sent me the DonRuss card packet featuring Tony recently, got back in touch to ask if I had the 2020 Stadium Club card. (At that point I didn't, although I've subsequently been offered it by several people.)

Card Number 402: Topps Stadium Club, 2020; #160

That's an attractive photo, although Topps seems to be doing their darnedest to make it look like a logoless card. However, it's a great pose and always fun to see a batting doughnut on the bat.

Tony's place on the all-time hitting list is dependent on whether you count Cap Anson's total as 3,435 or 3,081. This comes down to which leagues are counted as "major" leagues. Baseball Reference includes Anson's batting record from the five seasons he spent in the North American League before he joined the Cubs in the National League. Topps have followed the Baseball Reference list.

As an aside, I've noticed that Tony has had a card in all of Topps's main releases this year. This includes in Topps Archives, where it makes sense for Tony to have a card, but it also includes a short print card in the flagship set along with some inserts and retro cards, a faux rookie card, cards in Allen & Ginter and the Topps 206 sets, and so on. There have also been more than a few put out by Panini under various brands like DonRuss.

Out of curiosity I went to Trading Card Database to see how many Tony Gwynn cards have been released recently. I was astounded really to see that since Tony passed away, almost 1,800 cards have been produced and listed on the database.

In 2015, the year after he passed away, 313 cards were produced. That's understandable given the cicumstances. DonRuss produced a set of 5 tribute cards for example. There were 155 cards released in 2016, 153 in 2017 and 159 in 2018. A lot of these are parallels and short print versions of the same card, so in reality there aren't that many cards to collect to have an example of each type.

150 cards a year for a player who stopped playing over a decade beforehand is a lot. But things went slightly bonkers in 2019. TCDb lists 514 Tony Gwynn cards released last year. That level of production has continued into this year. As of the 2nd October when I was looking these numbers up, TCDb had 426 cards listed. That's more than were released in 2001, the season Tony retired.

The peak year of releases during Tony's career was 1998 when 812 cards are listed. However, at least 200 of these are variant patterns in the plastic on "Topps Tek" cards. While that is a ridiculous volume, it was at the height of the mad card boom in the 1990s, and, more importantly, Tony was still playing!

Just to show the 'bloat' in production, at the end of the 80s Tony's card totals rose from 66 in 1987 to 108 in 1990. in 1995, the season after he recorded his .394 modern day batting record, he featured on 173 cards. Then there is a huge peak at the end of the 90s, before the bell curve drops back down to more sensible levels. In 2002, the year after he retired, he featured on 232 cards. It peaks back up for a few years to an ultimate high (1,297 cards in 2005 after 648 in 2004 and before 485 in 2006), mainly because card companies started doing lots of very short print memorabilia cards, and then drops again (189 in 2010). So this is definitely a third surge in sheer numbers of cards.

There are probably lots of reasons why Tony is such a popular choice for the card companies in the last year or two. I get a sense from reading card blogs that a lot of collectors are a bit older and nostalgia plays a factor in their collecting. Cards of retired heroes, particularly the cards designed to look like cards from the 70s and 80s, or referencing events in the 80s and 90s, are targeting that demographic of collector who isn't interested in the latest hot rookie. And because absolutely every card in a set released this year will have multiple parallels as a matter of course, the number of cards will be inflated even more.

And that's why I'm blogging about a Stadium Club card released this year on a blog dedicated to a player who stopped playing 18 years ago and passed away six years ago.

Total cards: 402

Two Hundred Tony Gwynn Cards

Today's post will take us up to 200 cards on the blog. Two whole centuries! So what better than to show two cards about the 20th Century's Best?

Card Number 199: Topps, 2000; #229
This is a shiny Topps insert. It doesn't scan well. Sorry.

It's hard to read, but in the little box on the front, it says 'average'.

On the back, it lists Tony as the leader in batting averages among active players. He doesn't make it onto the all-time top ten list though. He is joint 16th on the all-time list, according to ESPN.

It is always difficult comparing players from different eras, though. It's the same in any sport. Equipment changes. Rules change. Ballparks change. Substances are banned.

In He Left His Heart in San Diego, Michael Schell repeats his claims made in 1999 that Tony was the greatest hitter in the history of Major League Baseball. Schell adjusted the hitting rates for all time, comparing the first 8,000 at bats for all players, and on that basis proclaims Tony to be the best ever. He also notes that strike out rates have risen immensely since players like Ty Cobb and Ted Williams were playing, and that Tony's strike out rate was unusually low. (Schell's section in the book is from page 135 onwards.)

Card Number 200: Topps, 2000; #468
Another shiny card. One day someone will invent a scanner that works on shiny trading cards. I will buy one!

This card is about hits. Tony was the leading active hitter at the end of the 20th Century. Again, he didn't feature on the all-time top ten.

There was a conversation on Facebook recently about which records will never be broken. I think it's Pete Rose's hits total. A player would have to make 213 hits a season for 20 seasons to break it. Even Tony was 1,000 behind Pete Rose's total when he retired.

Despite not being in the all-time top tens, there's no doubt Tony was one of the best players of the 20th Century. If Michael Schell is right, had he been born 25 years earlier and started playing in the 1950s, he could well have been the greatest batter ever, without needing to have his figures adjusted to take into account changes in the game.

Total: 200/394