Modern Monday - Topps pay tribute again

This rather lovely card came to me courtesy of Graham in the UK collector's group on Facebook. It's a high end card printed on 1mm thick stock that feels more like plastic than cardboard. 

Card Number 680: Topps Tribute, 2021; #58

The blue outline on this scanned card is silvery foilboard in real life.

I would guess this photo was taken around about 1986 and it felt familiar. It looks very similar to the photo on the Topps insert released in 2019 that used the 1975 template.

I would not be surprised if those photos were taken a split second after each other. The blurred out faces in the crowd behind look like they might be the same, particularly the guy in the blue cap by Tony's right hip.

The back is incredibly clean for a cardback and has some great factoids on it.

I didn't know about Tony's excellent hit rate against Hall of Fame pitchers. It goes to show how Tony wasn't in awe of anybody. He was happy to try and hit against the greats of his generation as much as against people nobody remembers. (To that end, I think it's really impressive that he recorded his 1,000th career hit off the legendary Nolan Ryan!)

When I discussed this card with Graham, he said he really liked the Tribute set this year and that it was one of Topp's nicer designs. I agree with him completely and am very pleased to have added this card to my collection.

Total: 680 cards

Brotherly bonus card

Chris Gwynn, Tony's younger brother, was also a Major League Baseball player. He featured on a card with Tony shortly after making it to the majors, and of course had his own cards too. 

I recently purchased a joblot of random cards because there were several cards from the Leaf 1993 set, which I have toyed with trying to setbuild. It turned out all the Leaf cards were from the Update set (#450 and above). And as an added bonus, one of the Leaf cards was of Chris Gwynn!

I think Chris really looks like his older brother in the photo on the front.

The really nice thing about the Leaf set from 1993 are the cardbacks that include images of relevant landmarks and city-scapes. I presume this is somewhere in Kansas City.

Chris had a fraction of the number of baseball cards that Tony had. Although Chris mainly featured on base cards in common sets, I have only got two of his cards. I have probably got more cards of Tony that mention Chris on the back than cards of Chris!

Tony's Project70 cameo appearance

I'm bending my own rules here about cameo appearances on cards, but I have some good reasons. 

Card Number 679: Topps Project70, 2021; #61

This is a card of Fernando Tatis, Jr. But I'm including it anyway, for obvious reasons if you look at the card.

This card was designed by Keith Shore in a homage to Tony's Topps card from 1986.

And Tony is featured in Keith's artwork, looking on from Heaven as Fernando tears up records for the Padres. (He was the fastest Padre to reach 200 hits a couple of days ago, and one of the fastest players ever to reach 50 home runs.)

It's a bit of a sentimental depiction and I'm in two minds about it really. It's less intrusive than the 'Master and Apprentice' card from the Topps Gallery insert set in 2020, which paired Fernando and Tony, and was anachronistic on a number of levels. But I'm not sure whether it's particularly respectful of Tony's memory to reduce him to a 'spirit in the sky' onlooker.

There is a short biography of Keith Shore on the generic-looking back. Keith is a popular baseball card artist, and that's reflected in the demand for this card, which had a print run of 9,884. That's well over three times as many sold compared to the Project70 card of Tony by Mimsbandz that I blogged about yesterday. I think partly that reflects the popularity of Fernando Tatis, Jr as well. 

So, although this is a 'cameo card', it's a bit different to cameo cards where Tony is in a photo of another player. He has been deliberately included in the artwork, so I'm counting this as a card in the collection, even though, technically, it probably isn't really a Tony Gwynn card.

Total: 679 cards

My Project70 postal saga

I don't seem to have a huge amount of luck with the post. Back in November last year I had the saga where Royal Mail charged me a customs fee and then delivered the parcel to the wrong house. I've also had cards occasionally arrive with dinged corners, although that's a packaging issue more than anything else. 

The saga over the past month has set a new low in terms of waiting for parcels that just seem to never come. I ordered two Topps Project70 cards via Dugout Classics and got the shipping notice about them on 26 April. I had hoped to have them in time to blog on my one year blog anniversary, but they seemed to disappear.

After several long conversations with Jason who runs Dugout Classics, we finally decided on Monday - which was 4 weeks after the cards had shipped - to call it a bust. Jason refunded my money and I felt disappointed, but okay about it. I figured the cards would tip up on the secondary market eventually. I even joked with Jason that we were tempting fate by doing the refund and now the universe was bound to find the cards for me.

Tuesday morning the postman put a form through the letterbox saying I needed to collect something from the main sorting office. Was this the missing Project70 cards? Was it something else entirely? I couldn't find out because they have restricted opening times at the moment, so I had to wait until Wednesday to go and pick the parcel up.

So, yesterday, the 26 May, one entire calendar month since the shipping notice, my wife went to the sorting office on my behalf and came back with a padded envelope with the Project70 cards in!

Huzzah!

(And yes, that is a thank you sticker on the back of a Fleer base card of Tony from 1989. I have several already - here's where I blogged about it just over a year ago.)

Card Number 678: Topps Project70, 2021; #51

I really like this card because it looks very different, designed to look like a fabric patch. Mimsbandz were embroidered designs produced for and worn by many players in the 1980s as a drugs awareness programme. 

I think almost all the player who wore Mimsbandz were black. Until recently Mimsbandz was the only black-owned company to have a contract with Major League Baseball, but that contract lapsed in 2020 and there are no black-owned companies linked to MLB. (Hat tip to Jason who found this out while researching about the Negro Leagues. recently.)

Tony wore Mimsbandz during his career and they are quite prominent on a couple of his cards, including this Topps Archives card from 2003:

Here's a close up of the patch.

The bands were also prominent on the Topps Super 70s Sports card released in 2020.

The back of the Project70 card has a bit more information about Mimsbandz. The repeating Topps logo are actually holograms.

Trading Card Database lists this card's print run as 2,713. Due to the huge postal delay, it wouldn't surprise me to find out that I was the 2,713th person to receive their card. (But I was the first person to upload a picture to TCDb!)

Total: 678 cards

Now Topps shows some heart

A couple of months ago I blogged Score's card from 1997 referencing the 'Heart of the Order'. Topps waited 18 years amd then released an insert series called the same name.

Card number 677: Topps Heart of the Order insert, 2015; #HOR-11

This is quite an unusual card for Topps as it relied heavily on a quirky design and less on the photo. The racked bats are an interesting design choice but make the card look a little bit dated. I wouldn't have been surprised if it was 20 years older. 

I received this card from Jamie, who posted a large spreadsheet of cards he had available in one of the Facebook groups for UK-based collectors. This was the only Tony Gwynn card on his list, and one I had not seen before, from an insert series I hadn't seen before either. Cards from 2015 don't come up that often in the groups - it's from a lean spell in the hobby just before baseball card collecting really started to take off again.

This card was released the year after Tony passed away but his passing isn't mentioned on the card back. Instead they tried to justify including Tony in an insert set called the 'Heart of the Order' with stats about his place in the Padres' batting line up. 

I was surprised that Tony batted most often in third place in the line-up because he's often described as a lead off hitter, who left other batters in clean up duty. Given Tony's improved batting average in third spot, maybe he should have played there even more often. (Although this is a Topps card we are talking about, so take these statistics with a hefty pinch of salt. Topps have been known to get things wrong!)

All told though, this is an interesting looking insert and I'm grateful to Jamie for listing his cards so it was easy to find the one I needed, and for being willing to send out just one card from his large list!

Total: 677 cards 

Modern Monday - The Art of Hitting

I mentioned yesterday how two fellow collectors contacted me on the same day last week to ask if I wanted a Tony Gwynn card they had available. Russell was a bit hesitant in his offer because the card in question was unlicensed. However, that isn't an issue for me, and when an unlicensed card looks as good as this one, who cares about logos?

Card Number 676: Panini Diamond Kings Art of Hitting insert, 2021; #AOH6

There are 10 cards in this insert series. It's especially relevant to Tony who wrote a book called The Art of Hitting. I remember reading a comment that Tony should have called his book the Science of Hitting instead of the Art, because he took a very methodical approach to the game and applied trial and error to everything. However, Ted Williams had already used that title for his book about hitting, which Tony read and re-read multiple times.

Diamond Kings cards are all 'illustrated' in a similar style now and no artist is credited with designs like these. I like the way the image has been replicated on the cards in this insert series, although in this case it does look a little bit like a chorus line. (My wife, Cathy, said "Ooh, he's dancing!" when she saw it.)

The image features on the back as well.

Now I'm known as someone who reads cardbacks and has a passing interest in cardbacks that feature other languages besides English. Have a close look at the copyright notice and it looks like there are some hanzi or kanji letters there.

I would like to know if that is Chinese or Japanese, or neither. I'd be very happy to add that tiny bit of non-English to my list of languages that feature on Tony's baseball cards.

A big thank you to Russell for sending me this card. It takes me up to 6 cards issued in 2021 in my collection.

Total: 676 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