A Few Gems from Amongst the New Cards

Hey folks - no real "theme" to today's post, outside of, "check out these new cards that hit the collection in the past week that I'm pretty psyched to have around".

For years I've heard of the legend of Stu Miller being blown off the mound at Candlestick Park during the 1961 All-Star Game. I love that there's a card that commemorates it, albeit without any evidence that it actually happened. There is debate about whether it's even true. 

What is true, and I say this as someone who attended many, many games there, is that Candlestick Park was indeed, in the immortal words of Tommy Lasorda, "a toilet with the lid up". Totally fine for football, and often great for baseball during a rare warm afternoon game, but mostly terrible for baseball, particularly at night. This lovely photo shows the park before it was closed in completely. I just finished reading Lincoln Mitchell's excellent "The Giants and Their City: Major League Baseball in San Francisco 1976-1992". The park comes in for much consternation, and the struggle of the team to stay in San Francisco - which they nearly left multiple times due to the hatred of Candlestick Park and the inability to build a new local ballpark - is the core theme of the book. Otherwise known as "my childhood and young adult years". So naturally I had to order this 2010 Topps Heritage baseball card!

Next up, my two newest Jo Adell cards - one of the two prospects that I collect everything of - both courtesy of Kevin, the Diamond King. What a great American...!

I had found that this 1974 Topps Rookie Pitchers card was kind of eluding me, and everytime I wanted to spring for these 4 nobodies - I only wanted it because of the Giants dude, to complete my '74 team set - it was always like $6 or something. For these guys? Anyway, I gave in. The lure of completion was just too great.

Also burnished the Tim Lincecum player collection a tiny bit this week, thanks to the arrival of my Card Barrel order on Saturday. Alas, the Allen and Ginter "N43" card with the flowers and "field of dreams" imagery is an odd-sized card, something I didn't know when I ordered it. I hate odd-sized cards!

But here's some good news - with the acquisition of this Bryan Harvey card, I've completed the 1994 Tombstone Pizza set that Dave S was so kind to start for me in early February, sending me 29 of the 30 cards! 

Finally, this outstanding Zellers Gary Carter card was immediately placed into my COMC basket a month or two ago when I saw it on Nick's Dime Boxes blog. "Les Secrets du Baseball". Instantly a Top 200 favorite card in the collection. That's all for now folks - more to come later this week!

3 Barts, 3 Adells

The two prospects that I decided to bet on and collect a year ago were San Francisco's Joey Bart and the Los Angeles Angels' Jo Adell. I liked the swagger of both, and I liked their odds to come up immediately, in 2020, and make a big difference for both teams - both of whom needed another young difference-maker to make up for the haphazard pieces they'd assembled.

2020 was a bit of an odd year for baseball, for sports and for the world, as I'm sure you remember. Both guys did come up, and in a relatively small sample size for each of them, barely contributed a thing. "Inauspicious debuts", you might call them. I'm still bullish on both guys - but then I'd have to be, because I've been collecting their cards all year, haven't I?

Anyway, some new (to me) Adells and Barts have come out recently and have made their way into my clutches. 2019's Bowman Prismatic Prodigies was a line of cards I wasn't familiar with, but I found a lot of them on eBay the other day that included both of my dudes, so I bought it. I like them. Here's what Bart's looks like:

Both guys were also featured in the relics that sparingly came with Topps Heritage Minors 2020, a set that I've completed in full (not all the relics, just the base cards, short prints and a smattering of extras here and there). Looks like Adell's jersey got a bit of a workout on the day they cut it up, and we've got some loose thread action going.

This next Joey Bart comes from a Bowman's Best "Franchise 2020" spin-off that I really don't know much about. This would be an "atomic refractor":

Finally, to close our proceedings today, I have a shiny 2019 Bowman Chrome 1990 throwback card of Mr. Adell, #90B-JA. See you later in the week,

Here's What Showed Up Recently

This is one of those scan-n-posts. I have had a variety of small orders arrive the past couple of weeks on eBay and whatnot, and it just feel sorta wrong to file some of the better cards away without putting them up on the internet for the people to review. One I'm particularly happy about is "my first Mossi", this Topps 1962 Don Mossi. Mr. Mossi is a baseball card collectors' legend, for obvious reasons. He's one of those guys that you just need to have a card or two of, and I'm pretty sure I'm only getting started on building a set of Mossi cards. Mossi was also a damn good starting pitcher as well, after having started off as a reliever in the 50s and then having been converted to a starter by the Tigers.

I also picked another 1962 single card to kick off another player collection I'd like to pull together, this time for Billy Martin. Some of my earliest baseball memories are of Martin being fired as a manager, first from the Texas Rangers, and then his multiple hirings-and-firings with the New York Yankees. Later, he came here to the SF Bay Area and led the A's to an amazing turnaround in fortunes in the early 1980s. The book BillyBall by Dale Tafoya, which I read earlier this year, is an excellent of those years.

Here are a couple of new Joey Bart gems. He's a dude I collect. Next year I think he might be Rookie of the Year and MVP, I'm pretty sure.

...and here's one of those Bowman Chrome Dawn of Glory cards for Jo Adell, the other prospect whose cards I'm accumulating:

Here's another youngster I've just finished spending a couple of week watching in the playoffs. I'm sure you have as well. I like this guy.

As well as his Dodger teammate Brusdar Graterol, whom I like even better. This is from before he was traded to LA during the offseason:

Finally, another youngster who did some very evil things to my San Francisco Giants this season on his way to the playoffs whilst eliminating us:

Let's round out this post with some of the other gems that came in them mail these past couple of weeks. Let me know if you have any questions on 'em!

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.

Jo Adell, Prospect and/or Goldmine

I talk a really good game when it comes to collecting cards without any regard to their future value. "Just the players I admire, even if no one else does" - you know? I'm no flipper, just a normal "citizen collector". And yet I'm now collecting the cards of two current prospects whom I've never actually seen play: Joey Bart, and the Los Angeles California Angels of Anaheim's Jo Adell. So yeah. Why collect prospects if not for the potential to "hit it big" with their minor league and early cards, once they become superstars?

I don't think that's really it with me, honestly. How much can my Jo Adell Salt Lake Bees card really be worth, ten years down the line? Say the dude maintains a lifetime .320 average ten years from now, and wins a couple of MVPs over his teammate Mike Trout. Maybe sell the thing for $25 somewhere down the road? Yeah, not really moving the needle for me. And of course, that's not likely to happen, no matter how much hype is buzzing around Orange County right now,

No, I think it's a more primal or goofball need to be on the ground floor of a given phenomenon - in this case,  a baseball player who might end up being a household name a few years from now. Oh hey, I had all his cards when he was playing for the Mobile Baybears! I guess I read about Adell a year or two ago, followed his progress in the minors, and bought into the lore that he's going to be a big piece of the next Angels World Championship team. That's why. Guy seems like someone worth following - and his cards are pretty cheap, too - for now.

I don't even know if Jo Adell is going to make the team for the 60-game season that starts in two days. For now, however, please have a look at 8 of the 13 or so cards of his I've accumulated.