Joey Bart Redux

Well folks, Joey Bart - the San Francisco Giants' top prospect, and a subject of some card-collectin' discussion on this blog - made it to the bigs. This has been a huge topic of discussion in SF Giants' media the past several months, and all the kid did was come up and smack a bunch of doubles and help a not-very-good team reel off a 7-game winning streak. The talk around the Bay Area is that he's "here to stay".

This is what makes prospect collecting really fun for me, personally. Though I'm not really gambling on ultimate card value - because these are not cards I want to sell, and even in a best-case scenario, we're talking $75 cards and not $7,500 cards - it's great to see these guys come up and do what they're supposed to do. You look in your card box and - oh - I have 25 beautiful-lookin' Joey Bart cards already. I'm going to assume that the prices for the ones I don't have just tripled this past week.

Contrast Bart with poor Jo Adell, who also got called up very recently, and whom I also collect. As of this writing, Adell is hitting .186 with a .250 OBP - and man - I saw him make a howler of an error in right field the other day. For all we know, he turns it around after a bumpy start and becomes an Angels mainstay for the next 15 years. I hope so. This is as close to gambling as I get: hoarding a bunch of 50-cent/$1 prospect cards for guys I'm intrigued by and seeing what happens. It's fun to be watching it play out in real time, at the same time, with the 2 prospects I chose to chase in 2020.