Modern Monday - another Project 2020 card

Well, Project 2020 cards seem to  be dropping in price. This was the cheapest of the three cards I have bought so far and is the one with the second-lowest print run. (The card hobby doesn't always make sense!)

This card came from Jason from Dugout Classics who was the source of the second Project 2020 card that I featured on the blog.

Card Number 610: Topps Project 2020, 2020; #113

As with all the Project 2020 cards, this is an artists's reinterpretation of Tony's 1983 Topps rookie card. This one was designed by an artist based in the UK and for me it gives off a Hawaiian vibe, which is very fitting considering that's where Tony was playing just before his call-up to the major leagues.

One the back there is a biography of the artist, Matt Taylor.

The print run for this card was 8,401, which was a massive drop from the print run for the card by Efdot which was #92 and had 31,030 copies printed. There was a brief surge in interest in the Project 2020 range that peaked around that Efdot card. By the time Ermsy's card was printed (#161), the print run was even lower (5,543). 

I have a few theories why these cards are getting cheaper on the secondary market.

Firstly, I've heard that people bulk-ordered in the hope of getting valuable parallel versions and are now left with more than they need. 

Secondly, I think the spike in interest coincided with a huge spike of interest in baseball card collecting. That bubble hasn't exactly popped, but recently it feels like I'm seeing people who launched into the collector's groups on Facebook suddenly announcing that they are not collecting any more and putting the collections they have accumulated up for sale. (My friend Gawain, who buys and sells collections, also says more people are wanting to sell because they have decided to stop collecting.)

Thirdly, these were available to buy on the Topps website and most people who wanted one will have bought one then. That means it's harder to find a buyer if people are trying to resell these cards. Unless someone is a fan of the artist, or the player (hello!), or has decided to collect the set as an afterthought, then it might be hard to find someone who wants one. That is bad news for people who bought them thinking they would always be able to recoup their money or make a profit. But it's good news for people like me!

Having initially passed over the Project 2020 cards, I now have three. I will probably add more as and when affordable ones appear.

Total: 610 cards

One Card Only - Completing the rookie card trinity

I have wanted to complete the trinity of Tony Gwynn's rookie cards for some time. I acquired both the Topps and DonRuss rookie cards several years before I started this blog and they featured in my second ever post.

Marc, one of my contacts from the Facebook collector's groups, messaged me offering me the Fleer rookie card. He was very clear to tell me that it had a dinged corner, and included an extreme close up photo of said corner. 

(I really appreciated Marc's honesty about this. He had bought the card off someone who had sent him a photo that had the seller's thumb obscuring that corner with no mention of a ding - which the seller then blamed on the post service!)

As someone who doesn't mind cards that have obviously been loved, the ding was not a deal-breaker. I don't own a single graded card. Those sterile slabs of plastic do nothing for me and I doubt I will ever buy one. But I had an obvious gap where I had left a pocket in my binder of Fleer cards ready for the 1983 card to slot in.

When it arrived, the mark was barely perceptible. If you really look at it hard enough you will see it, but it's not noticeable when the card is sat in my Fleer binder along with all it's younger relatives.

Card Number 609: Fleer, 1983; #360

Brown and yellow uniform. Visible face. Swinging Friar logo. All bonus points! This is a perfect photo of a young, bushy-haired lad, getting ready to light up the major leagues.

There's a little portrait photo on the back, and a minor league record to boast about.

The factoid is about the franchise, rather than about Tony. He was still just a prospect in the Padres roster at this point and presumably nobody had compiled any interesting trivia tidbits about him yet. I say this as a Padres fan, but it's quite amusing that the first Padre batter ever to reach base safely did so on a fielding error. Yup. Seems 'bout right.

There was a recent article on Beckett about an 'Instant PC' of Tony Gwynn cards that included all three rookie cards.

In that article, Beckett ranked Tony's rookie cards in order of desirability as Topps, Fleer, DonRuss. I think Beckett are wrong. The only reason the Topps card commands a higher price is because of the obsession some collectors have with Topps. 

If you look at these cards objectively, the Fleer card has the best photo, the DonRuss card has the better lay-out and the second-best photo. And the Topps card is saved by the cameo portrait head and shoulders photo in the circle. The one thing in it's favour is that Tony is wearing the 1982 uniform - even if he has his spring training number on the back of the jersey. (More on that here.)

As a post-script, after I tweeted a photo of the rookie card I got asked if I had the O-Pee-Chee rookie card, which is a reprint of the Topps card. So it would appear there is a fourth rookie card to add to the trinity at some point. (At which point it will be a ... quadrinity? I need to look that up.)

Many thanks to Marc for making this blog post possible!

Total: 609 cards

Saturday diversion - card art by Dave

I'm not showing an actual card today, because I wanted to post about a 'virtual' card that Dave sent me. Dave has a blog called Baseball Fans Only, and recently published an article about my Tony Gwynn collection. 

We also batted around a few ideas for a 'beginner's guide' to collecting baseball cards. It's a huge topic to try and summarise. (Maybe we need a 'beginner's guide to writing beginner's guides about collecting baseball cards'!) Dave gave me a co-author credit on that article although he did almost all the work.

One of Dave's other interests is creating 'virtual baseball cards', and he sent this to me a couple of days ago.

The BFO logo in the corner stands for Baseball Fans Only. This really reminds me of some of the recent Diamond Kings inserts because of the colour scheme. For example, the flashback card from 2019.

Obviously, the actual card from Panini is devoid of logos, which means Dave's card has a bit of an edge.

This isn't the first card-art I've received, of course. I had a Christmas card off Laura (of Laura's Clubhouse) with a doctored 1994 Topps card on it. This still makes me smile.

So that's a slight diversion for today. I'm very excited about the card I get to show you tomorrow!

Sweet Little Mystery (...Finest)

This blog has really opened my eyes to how weird the 90s was as a decade. Baseball cards started out as cheap things on brown cardboard that came with gum and by the end of the decade some of them were CD-Roms. We talk about the pace of change now, but the 90s was the decade when the pace accelerated. In a way, change itself changed.

Looking back on the mid-90s now puts me in the curious position of knowing I lived through it but also feeling like it's an utterly alien decade. It doesn't help when trying to track down a baseball card that becomes symbolic of how complicated things got in the 90s. 

Card Number 608: Topps Mystery Finest, 1998; #M9

"Topps Finest, you say. Why, that should be cinch to find on Trading Card Database."

Narrator: It was not easy to find on Trading Card Database.

The Mystery Finest cards were inserts in the Topps flagship set. There were a few different types. This is from the 20-card set labelled 'Borderless' on TCDb.

It's a very foiley card and it doesn't scan very well on the flatbed.

The overhead scan was much brighter. The baseball in the background was a recurring motif on Finest cards in the 90s.

Oh, on the back there's a clue to the card's set, as it says 'Mystery Finest'. Of course, that only helps if you know that Mystery Finest was different to regular Finest, which I didn't.

Bonus point for a cardback that reminds me of something I had forgotten - Tony left it late in his career to record his first (actually, his only) season batting in more than 100 runs. (This factoid also appeared on his Fleer Ultra card from 1998, but I'd forgotten it until I read it again here.)

Total: 608 cards

Score shows some heart

It's been a while since I last blogged about a Score card.

Card Number 607: Score Hobby Reserve Heart of the Order insert, 1997; #25

So, this gets a bit confusing. There were 18 'Heart of the Order' insert cards in Score Series 2 in 1997, and another 18 'Heart of the Order' in Score Hobby Reserve. According to Trading Card database, Hobby Reserve was "a hobby release that paralleled 1997 Score Series 2. Cards are slightly thicker than the Retail version and have white fronts with a "Hobby Reserve by Score" gold stamp." Hobby Reserve cards have 'HR' in front of the numbers.

The card shows Tony photoshopped over a virtually empty Jack Murphy Stadium. The arrangement makes it look like Tony is swinging in the top deck of the stadium. The red foil squiggle is a stylised ECG line with the word 'Heart' written above it. 

Tony's sleeve patch is the Jackie Robinson 50 years commemoration, so this is a photo from 1997 on a card issued in 1997.

On the back the stadium in the background has a lot more people in it. There's also a rare photo of Tony wearing glasses with regular lenses in.

It was easier to find these inserts in Hobby Reserve then in the Score Series 2. The ratios respectively were 1 in 15 packs for Hobby Reserve and 1 in 23 packs for Series 2. That meant you had mildly better odds of finding a card of Tony than for any of the players on the 18 cards inserted in Series 2... as long as you could find packs of Hobby Reserve to buy.

Total: 607 cards

Another take on leather

Wood and leather. The two main materials that symbolise baseball. For every card insert series focusing about lumber, there are cards focusing on leather. And even some sets that focus on both.

Card Number 606: Fleer Ultra Prime Leather (Gold Medallion), 1996; #16

It's hard to tell from, but the little gold circle above 'Tony' is a foil stamped medallion. This is a parallel 'gold medallion' version of this card.

The cardback follow up on the leather theme and talks about Tony's defensive game. 

Truthfully, by 1996 his fielding prowess wasn't as great as early in his career. Unlike Tony's batting, which improved in the second decade he was playing, Tony never won another fielding title after 1991. 

In his book Tony Gwynn's Total Baseball Player, there is a chapter called 'In Search of the Golden Glove' (p.89ff). The first piece of advice Tony offers is to always pick a glove you feel comfortable wearing, as he believes that "Feeling comfortable is the key to success in any sport."

Tony's advice can be summarised as:

• Pick a glove you feel comfortable in
• Use a big glove in the outfield (easier on ground balls)
• If you can, catch fly balls two-handed, so you can close your other hand over the top of the ball in the glove and make sure it doesn't pop back out
• Look after your glove
• Break in yout glove in practice, not a game
• While breaking in your glove, form it to create a pocket - that makes it easier to catch and quickly locate the ball with your throwing hand

It's a very short chapter, but there you have it - advice from a five time Golden Glove winner.

Total: 606 cards

Modern Monday - silver pack chrome

Today's card arrived in all its shiny glory hard on the heels of my first Tony Gwynn card from 2021. It came from Jeff in one of the UK collectors groups on Facebook. 

Card Number 605: Topps Silver Pack Chrome, 2021; #86BC-77

These chrome cards are included in the "Silver packs" inserted as bonuses in hobby boxes of Topps Series 1. It has a different picture of Tony than the regular 35th anniversary retro cards that make up a large insert set in the flagship Series 1 set. 

The scanner really activated the refractor card. I haven't done an overhead scan, but I did take a photo to pop on Instagram, so here's that for comparison (complete with a bit of my thumb):

There are 100 cards in both the insert set and the chrome cards from the silver packs. I've seen a lot of love for these cards in the collectors groups but it's not a template I've ever been particularly fond of. Of course, I own the original 1986 card, and I have an Archives card from 2014 that also uses this template so it isn't new to me. 

The cardback is pretty dull. It manages to be both a big stats box and an incomplete record. 

This is bizarre to me. If you are going to just have a massive stats box, why would you not have all 19 seasons on there? But the thing that annoys me the most about this is they start from 1988. It's a 1986 style card. Tony was playing in 1986. Couldn't they have squeezed 1986 on there? It just feels like a silly missed opportunity.

However, this is a very nice refractor card and it means I have a quarter of the checklist of Tony Gwynn cards from Series 1 already. I would like to add the other retro card and I will be keeping my eyes peeled for it.

Total: 605 cards