Unlovable Losers

 You may have noticed there's been a weird uptick in Colorado Rockies content on this blog. It's mostly because I find a few of their players (current and former) interesting, but also because the organization fascinates me.

Before we start, let me just say that normally I'd post scans of various Rockies cards scattered through the post to spruce things up, but the Rockies players are great and genuinely trying so I don't want them associated with this post that's got a more negative tone, that type of shame should be reserved for Rockies ownership and the front office they put in place.

Owner Dick Monfort: Rockies can “play .500 ball” in 2023 https://t.co/4gpIpzFhdz

— The Denver Post (@denverpost) January 30, 2023

The Rockies came into being as an expansion team in 1993, 30 years later they've made no progress as a sports franchise. It's pretty remarkable.

They spend money but on players that don't address their most pressing needs.
Their approach to offense is to hit for contact and with no power, in Coors Field.
Their approach to pitching is to get guys who can't consistently throw strikes and have them pitch in Coors Field.
They have no analytics department whatsoever and have no plans to get one anytime soon. Sidenote, whenever I hear someone on social media complaining that there's too much analytics in baseball without much nuance or reasoning behind it, I assume that must mean they're yearning for every baseball team to be the Rockies.

If you want to know more about the Rockies aren't very good Nick Groke of the Colorado Sun wrote an incredibly good article about the sad state of the franchise and how the future doesn't look that much brighter for the team or its business operations. I'd recommend the article if you root for one of the other four teams in the NL West and want to qualm your fears about the Rockies being good out of nowhere one day.

Such levels of incompetence would be amazing if not for how we all collectively as sports fans no longer accept that "lovable losers" nonsense.

Despite my fascination with the org due to a handful of actually fun and enjoyable players and also due to a mild interest in their incompetence, that's also the same reason why I will never believe in them to accomplish much of anything or follow them at anything more than a casual pace.

At this point baseball fans have been conditioned to let an entire decade of rancid baseball happen just so some window of opportunity for a realistic championship might open, which in turn has made teams who are just mediocre at best no longer acceptable. Either be great and win as much as possible in your window of opportunity or tank, reload and get out of the way until you look like a real team Apple TV would want to show. I can't really say I'm immune to that type of thinking.

But there's another issue, the Monforts do not inspire any confidence they or their underlings would have a plan in place to successfully pull off a rebuild.

It's very apparent that the Rockies are the way are not because they're just genuinely trying and just merely bad, they're that way because the folks at the top are incredibly indifferent to any of this.

Coors Field attendance tonight: 30,620 diehard #Rockies fans

— DNVR Rockies (@DNVR_Rockies) September 12, 2023

They know they're bad, they do not care why and they don't need to care since they're one of the teams that's benefitted the most from having being a good team no longer be a requirement to being a profitable team.

Honestly the more I think about this the more I just get jaded in general because, as it usually does, it comes down to a rich failson who happens to own an MLB team getting unprecedented levels of wealth off of their team but not using that to put the best possible product they can out on the field (this was about Dick Monfort but you can probably name several other MLB owners who fit the bill).

But then again this isn't new. And if you want a cure all one needs is to simply just go to a live baseball game in person at any level of competition, crack open a beer or take a big puff of that good good, turn your brain off and just watch the game for a few hours. Note: as bad as the Rockies are, the reviews for Coors Field are spectacular.

Because the game of baseball itself is great. It's just that everything around the sport sucks ass if you think about it for longer than 2 seconds.

Go Rockies I guess. At least their mascot Dinger is one of the best in the game.

As always thanks for stopping by and take care.

After years of saying I'd do it, I did it

I moved.

In a lot of ways I probably should've told more people sooner because I technically moved months ago, but work had a way of consuming most of my time until just recently.

Still, it feels good to know that all of those years spent obsessing about downsizing were all leading to this, and that no matter how painful things were this time, it could've been 100x worse.

Unrelated Scan 1

It should be no surprise that around that time was when the initial draft of my recent-ish Sega Card Gen post where I pondered moving the set came about. Because outside of just sending one assortment to Gavin and finally sending some long overdue packages to other folks, I did have serious thoughts about what the heck I'm going to do with these cards I've accumulated over the years. Right now it'd all fit in two 500 count boxes, I know that to a lot of collectors that's not a lot, but to me it sure is.

In particular the TTMs and IPs. That box was heavy. In some ways there's probably some "good stuff" in there but without proper certification they're kinda moot. So I think the most reasonable thing to do eventually is to carefully take them out of their penny sleeves, recycle the sleeves and then throw the cards all in a river (1952 Topps style), since I think it's a more dignified end than if they just end up in those bargain bins at card shows where after whatever "good stuff" inside is picked through, the rest just sit there unwanted in perpetuity.

But whatever, that'll be another issue for another day.

Unrelated Scan 2

Also I don't really do trades that often anymore anyway since I usually just mail people stuff at random and re-gift whatever's sent my way (not trying to be rude but I really have a thing for just dumping stuff I'm at least 51% okay with parting with to much more appreciative homes), but I am currently in the process of setting up a PO Box. I'm not sure when that'll go live but I'll be sure to let the two people who asked me know when it is.

Unrelated Scan 3

So thank fuck that's over with for now. But I might end up on the move again next year so I'll have to save these boxes.

Blarg.

As always thanks for stopping by and take care.

Full Circle

 My Kyle Freeland collecting experience is starting to enter the stage that all collections of mine inevitably enters, slowing down. I've assembled what I think is a solid collection of his cards and I'm pretty content with how it is right now. There are a few other cards of his out there that I think would be nice to get but they're kind of rare and I think I'm good for now.

Among the last few cards of his I added, there was one that took me back to where I originally was in 2014 when this blog was first starting out.

Yep, an all too familiar design.

It seems forever ago that I was once working on both the New York Highlanders team set and also sending people T206es to form "Club T206". Good times, but little did I know that it would be dead and gone by 2016 as prices for vintage started inflating in a hurry. A decade ago the beat up T206 commons could be had for anywhere between $10 to $20. Nowadays you'd be lucky if you got a deal around the $30 to $50 range for T206es for the same, or maybe even worse, condition.

Maybe I can use whether or not T206es are overpriced as a benchmark when responding to polls asking me if I think America is in a recession.

Being the sucker that I am, I picked up a vintage T206 at these higher prices a little after Freeland to help beef up this post a little more. The Ray Demmitt is the first New York Highlander I've acquired in quite a while and it cost me about 1.5x what beat up copies of this card I had on my watchlist all those years ago were going for.

 

Also picked up a non-Highlanders T206 of Frank Arellanes too. It doesn't help my Highlanders set but having T206es lying around is never a bad thing. Especially when it's a Boston Red Stocking and also a very rare Mexican-American player from this time period.

Maybe one day I'll revisit the T206 Highlanders project, given my collecting habits I'll either go nuts and assemble the rest in like a week, or get bored and move onto some other random thing.

Even so, no matter how much my mind wanders from that project I still do get a kick out of how I've got these little pieces of cardboard from over a hundred years ago before baseball was even considered a noteworthy sport.

To this day, Jack Chesbro is still one of my favorite legends in the game, and someone who's routinely given me a great score in Immaculate Grid whenever the Pirates, Red Sox and Yankees are involved.

Man, who'd have thought that Freeland would be sending me back into a headspace I hadn't been in since 2015. It was nice, and maybe just a teeny bit surprising given how overused the T206 design is in recent times, but unfortunately none of the other players I've collected these past few years made it to these designs. At least not yet.

As always thanks for stopping by and take care :).

Macho Macho Man (and a Few Others)

Following Masataka Yoshida's season this year has been very fun overall.

After a whole winter of people making too big a deal about his contract, he's come into the season and just flat out hit. He's slowed down a bit in the second half but team has done a pretty good job of keeping him rested enough to keep his bat in the lineup. If nothing else the Boston Red Sox have a lot of question marks right now and Yoshida has been far from the biggest problem, which helps. Right now he at least looks to be someone who can be a productive bat for the next few years. That's good in and of itself methinks.

Earlier this year I picked up Shohei Ohtani and Ichiro Suzuki's autographs so once these Topps Chrome autographs came out and the Yoshida autograph market finally got big enough that prices fell to levels I was okay with, I decided to just nab it. Now I can say I finally got all three!

I didn't blog about it before, but I do also want to take this time to also show this autograph I got of Yoshida's Samurai Japan teammate Lars Nootbaar.

Nootbaar's season in 2023 has been kind of the same as Yoshida. Very good offensive production, in a year where that production is being overlooked with thanks to the issues the team is having. Tacchan's at least been far from the problem and it's been really easy to see why the St. Louis Cardinals kept him out of trades even for Sean Murphy, and why the A's really wanted him too. He just gets on base, as that one overused reaction meme from that one movie says.

Might as well just show off some of the other Japanese MLBer autographs I got earlier this year too at this point.

Shun Yamaguchi was a very accomplished starter in Japan, mostly with the Yokohama/DeNA Baystars but also with the Yomiuri Giants where he arguably had his best career year in 2019. Over there he was a four time All Star, threw a no-hitter, won a few pitching titles, the works.

Yet despite how he put up a lot of good numbers for the BayStars my lasting memory of him is always how BayStars fans still hate him because it was clear he wanted to bolt for the Yomiuri Giants the second he became a free agent.

Back when teams were heavily scouting the Nippon Ham Fighters for Shohei Ohtani, they were also making note of some of his teammates, Kohei Arihara was a really popular name for a while and was even potentially thought of as a backup option for teams in need of pitching if they missed out on Ohtani. For a while there he was looking like one of the best pitchers in Japan and was a pivotal part of the Fighters winning the Japan Series in 2016. Then things kinda started going downhill for him where for the next two seasons he would be a mix of injured or ineffective. He did have a major comeback in 2019 and regained the confidence to give MLB a try again. The Texas Rangers signed Arihara but unfortunately his time in Arlington was marred with injuries. He had some moments but ultimately he elected free agency after two years, and he's been with the SoftBank Hawks ever since.

And finally an autograph of Yoshitomo Tsutsugo.

Once one of the premier power hitters in Japan, his time stateside hasn't really gone as well as he'd hoped. He struggled with the Tampa Bay Rays and though he'd still continue to get both MLB and triple-A opportunities with teams like the Los Angeles Dodgers and Pittsburgh Pirates, he's never been able to put up the results he and others envisioned.

That said even though he'd immediately probably find a team in the NPB that would love to have his bat, he's refused to go back. He still feels like he has a lot of prove and he's willing to hustle in the minors and even the independent leagues to see that through. His determination is truly admirable, and I hope that more people take notice. This year he came into the season as a minor league free agent with the Rangers but after being released he signed with the Staten Island FerryHawks (indy ball team that plays where the Staten Island Yankees used to) but a few weeks later he was signed by the San Francisco Giants as a minor league free agent and he's still in their org now. 

While I'm not sure what the future holds for Tsutsugo, his story of sheer determination and not giving up until the heart is fully content is one that is very inspiring. I'm sure a Japanese baseball writer will write a book about it one day. There's already been a good article about it.

And those were this year's haul of what's suddenly become an annual haul of NPB-ish autograph cards.

As always thanks for stopping by and take care.

First Were the Patches...

 ...now for the actual jersey.

BEHOLD!

For the first time since like 2012 I got myself a new jersey.

This is just a run of the mill replica you can find in the team shops. Originally I wanted the City Connect jersey for the Colorado Rockies (the green ones) but the tragic flaw is that I wasn't able to customize it to the player I wanted it to be.

That player being Kyle Freeland. But I didn't mind too much since these purple jerseys are also just as neat because very few professional baseball teams use the color purple.

Note: I'm aware that there are probably are sites that would let me get a City Connect replica jersey of Freeland but I did not want to bother putting in more effort beyond clicking a few times from the Rockies homepage. I still do not.

Accompanying the jersey were a pair of Rockies shorts and a new Rockies fitted hat to replace my very worn down and sun-bleached NY Rangers hat. My transformation to a Rockies fan is nearly complete. 

Now all that's left is for me to like or care about the team. I have a separate post going into my recent fascination with the Rockies in the works but here's a spoiler, it sure isn't because I think they're any good or will be any time soon.

To end off this post I'll share some Rockies related things that are good though, cards!

Freeland's Bowman Chrome auto prices are all over the place but when I can get parallels for under $10 shipped, I pounce.

Daniel Bard unfortunately doesn't have any autographed Rockies cards (not the certified variety anyway) but I was able to pick up this ToppsNow card commemorating his incredible comeback and return to an MLB mound after he got the yips. A comeback so great the Rockies extended him as opposed to trading him last year. As great as Bard and his story is, that move is a clear sign the org has no clue what its doing.

Mmm, speaking of the Rockies not knowing what they're doing...

What's done is done I suppose, but why the hell did the team throw in $51 million to move Nolan Arenado?

At least these cards look fantastic and I was able to add Arenado to the collection of "notable Rockies I have a patch card of".

At some point I might need to look into the likes of Jhoulys Chacin and Ubaldo Jimenez. Guys who really carried the franchise even though most people can't remember how to spell their names.

As always thanks for stopping by and take care.

Upgrades

 The only baseball set I've completed that has a checklist with over 100 cards was the 2012 base Sega Card Gen set. I blogged about finishing it nine (9!) years ago. All these years later I'm still very happy and proud I was able to finish it, but at various points during these past few years I've had that one thought that a collector probably doesn't want to have but does at some point.

What happens if/when I try to move this set?

To be clear I have no real intentions to part with this set, at least not right now. It took me two years across two different countries to finish it. Trying to sell this would be a nightmarish undertaking as there's no real market for this.

At the same time however that thought exercise was useful in helping me revisit something I probably should've done a while ago before the wells dried up, which was making the set actually ready to be moved if necessary.

You see even though I assembled all 408 cards in the set, one key issue is that a few of the cards needed upgrades. They fall into two distinct categories.

1). Inked

If you look at the scans I posted when I first finished the set you'll see that a few are autographed. Very early on I had a loose but lofty goal to get as many of these SCG cards signed as possible. It didn't happen often but when it did I tried to make sure the player got a copy to keep themselves. After I managed to get myself a big lot of SCGs from 2010 and 2011 I switched to those instead but the fact remains that for some cards I ended up with only an autographed copy and not an untouched normal card. As cool as an autographed SCG card is in theory, I'm 99.9% sure that if you're getting a full set you want an unblemished copy. I had three cards that fell in this category and thanks to a seller on eBay all were upgraded (or downgraded?). 

Ivan Nova

Acquired at a card show Nova was signing at. I gave him the only other copy I had on the spot. He was really nice and even took a picture with me.

Chase Headley

Headley was one of the most responsive TTM signers when he was active. I tried giving him a copy for him to keep and he just signed that and sent that back to me anyway. What a guy.

Yoshinori Tateyama

For one summer Tateyama-san was in the Yankees' minor league system after signing as a minor league free agent. I sent him a TTM request and similar to the Nova situation, the signed copy ended up becoming my only copy. Luckily his card is easier to find as Japanese MLBers in the set wind up on Japanese sites like Yahoo Auctions or Mercari more often than the other players in the set do. Although they're also at risk of being priced way too high.

2). Beginner Promos

The second category of cards in need of upgrades were cards that I technically acquired but they were promo cards. You see these cards came in individually wrapped cellophane packs (1 card per pack) that were given away to new players at a few select arcades that had the Card Gen machines. Given how you'd only get one card per playthrough, you'd have to play several times before you were able to finally assemble a full team with cards, so these cards were supposed to help beginners get on the fast track.

The best way to denote which ones are these beginner promos is by looking at the Sega Card Gen logo on the top left. You'll notice that the words "CARDGEN" is actually 95% filled in with blue.

For these I had about four cards in need of upgrades including the John Jaso above.

Enerio Del Rosario

Jose Constanza

Henry Rodriguez

I was only able to upgrade three of these four. Which isn't terrible, but has me feeling a familiar sense of dread that I thought I was able to leave behind years ago.

Rodriguez, the lone upgrade I wasn't able to make, is a Washington National. The thing about the 2012 Sega Card Gen set is that the Nationals are really really rare. Maybe even rarer than the foil rares. That's the whole reason Gio Gonzalez and Tyler Clippard were the last two cards I needed to originally finish the set.

If I had to guess the Nationals were likely short printed, no documented proof of this exists but I did hear this via word-of-mouth from two different stores under the Mint umbrella that sold Card Gen cards back then. A lot of these cards I saw like twice but then never again. This set is already niche and obscure, this doesn't help! I did ask the seller I bought the rest of the upgrades from just in case and they confirmed they didn't have Rodriguez or any Nationals.

It's ironic, years ago when I got that Rodriguez card I was really really ecstatic that it was right there in the open, for the taking and filled a set need. Now all these years later I still consider it filling a need, but is also the last thing standing between a legit "pure" base set (based off one logo) and one that is technically complete but also kinda sort've not maybe.

Will the hole ever be filled? Maybe, I think the more likely scenario is that I grow old and just dump this set onto someone and have it be their problem (should they perceive it as such) before I ever find another copy. But anything is possible. After all I didn't think I'd ever finish the set in the first place. I might keep an eye out but I won't be obsessing over it, there'd be no point.

And since we're talking about Card Gen again for the first time in a while, let me also just quickly wrap this post up with two unique cards I picked up sometime earlier this year.

The first is this Prize Foil rare of Takashi Saito.

In my last Card Gen post I blogged about the Hideki Matsui version of this, but for those of you who missed it or forgot, this card was one of the prizes given to people who won the tournaments held at arcades around the country. 

This Saito was left in its cellophane which suggests that the lucky soul who won this never used him for their team.

I got another one with Kosuke Fukudome too. This one was already freed from the cellophane so I assume whoever won this immediately slotted this card to use for their team/games.

Amazing how much clearer the scan looks when cellophane isn't in the way.

As always thanks for stopping by and take care.

Wowza

 One of the types of cards I've never delved too much into on this blog are relic cards. Cards that often tend to feature pieces of cloth originally from a jersey, or a piece of wood from a bat, or something of that nature.

The biggest reason is because for the majority of my collecting tenure I never really saw the appeal for them. When I started collecting in the early 2010's it was the worst possible time to get introduced to relic cards because the vibe around then was that they were garbage due to authenticity concerns surrounding what the card companies claimed the relics were.

To make matters worse, the relic cards being made at the time were horrible. Just small pieces of cloth that were just all white or all gray, obviously taken from the less interesting parts of the jersey. And there isn't really much you can do with the bats unless you're doing something creative with the bat knob or bat barrel.

I know why those cards are made that way, but boy did it do nothing but hammer home the point that rather than relic cards you'd be much better off getting autographs and low numbered parallel cards. If the autograph came with a jersey relic or something, great that's a bonus. But if that's all the card is you were screwed.

In the decade since I've noticed that things have shifted slightly, or at least my perception has.

That's largely due to card makers kinda sorta making an effort to have relic cards actually be somewhat worthwhile again. Because there is a way to make them at least look presentable. Even I can see that.

This Troy Tulowitzki relic is interesting, if you look at Tulo's relics from around this time (or really any time before his Blue Jays tenure) they're all awful but I got lucky and found this gem with the patch in the top left. The other relics in the other three windows fit more in line with what you'd get back then. Lots of boring and maybe a pinstripe somewhere.

Fast forward nine years and here's a Trevor Story relic from 2021 Topps. Even I can see the massive difference in appeal. Three colors AND a pinstripe! A visible bulge in layers! That's how you get people to care about cards like this.

MORE FUN COLORS!

The only non-patch you'll see in this post

I think the shift towards making relics not completely suck came sometime around 2015-16. I can't remember which was the first but certain products began including authenticity stickers which people could use to trace which event/game the relic on the card came from, and it was authenticated by MLB so there was some level of trust unlike the years prior where you just had to blindly trust the card company. Add to that, more parts of the actual patch started getting used again and the visual appeal improved.

This doesn't have one of those stickers but I would still like to point out how in the beginning of the decade Carlos Gonzalez's jersey cards didn't look a thing like this (not even those high end Triple Threads cards), but by the end of his time in Colorado even the cards with 99 copy print runs looked like this.

The stickers sort've came and went but I do think they helped re-establish some trust that these relics were at least something again. I don't think they'll dethrone the vaunted autograph and they'll still be the worst "hits" you can get in a box/pack break by default, but I do at least think the powers at be started to put a little more effort in.

As always thanks for stopping by and take care. Go Rockies.