Yeah, These Ruled

 So as part of my downsizing efforts I try to constantly filter stuff I want to keep by asking a simple question " why do I need this around?".

In years past answers like "just because" or "I just like the way this card looks" were sufficient but now my criteria is a lot stricter. If a card wants to occupy space in my tiny apartment it's going to need to have a reason.

Some have an extremely solid, albeit extremely personal, reason to me and me alone.

There are six cards that are part of an exclusive club I like to call "these cards mattered to me a lot in the winter of 2012 and I got to meet the players on them in person later too".

2012 was a very special year for me. I was a freshman in college living on my own for the first time in Japan. It was also my first full year in the hobby and the first year I was a fan of baseball following along the season and of course prospects. Like...

Austin Aune, Ty Hensley and Mark Montgomery.

In the winter of 2012 at least they were still considered top prospects.

Hensley and Aune were the Yankees' first and second round draft picks in that year's draft respectively and though the Yankees took a big risk with high school players, there was hope they'd turn into productive players since at the time the Yankees started to try and get more out of their farmsystem. 

More importantly I opened two hobby boxes of Bowman Draft and pulled BOTH of their autographs myself. It felt so awesome to pull prospects I wanted from my then-favorite team.

Montgomery was also a big name in prospecting circles since he climbed the ladder so quickly in 2012 as a relief prospect that with Mariano Rivera's looming retirement people thought maybe Montgomery would be a candidate fill that void when the time came.

The unfortunate part of me associating them so much with 2012 specifically is that their careers in the years to come wouldn't really go how everyone including them originally hoped. But maybe because of that I associate them and these cards with a specific point in my life that I like having them even more.

But onto 2013. When I moved back to the US.

My first ever baseball card purchase on eBay was that Montgomery autograph from 2013 Bowman. Which is another point in this card's favor. I still remember how the Yankees had a small army of prospects in the non-autograph checklist but Montgomery was the lone representative in the autograph checklist. I also overpaid a ton for this, a whopping $20 shipped at release. At least I had enough sense more like lack of funds to not go after the superfractor autograph.

2013 was a mixed, mostly negative, year for the trio as players. Hensley needed hip surgery and was out for the year. Montgomery also suffered injuries and despite making it to triple-A, he was never able to quite make that one last big leap to get the MLB call-up. Aune's season in rookie-ball unfortunately was the first of many seasons where he had a lot of strike-outs while the rest of his offensive game struggled to develop.

The real fun (for me personally at least) came after the end of the 2013 season.

For starters I got to meet Montgomery at a card show in November of 2013. The drop in his prospect stock made it a lot less interesting than it should've been at the time but in hindsight I regret not being more appreciative that I just casually met someone who I'd only been reading about in prospect lists just a year earlier. At the same show I got to meet Ivan Nova and Adam Warren too.

Then skip a bit to 2014 and I got to meet Aune in Staten Island.

My attention in 2014 was on a certain prospect named Luis Torrens but I still can't forget how Aune took the time to sign my card with a card that was basically still an exact 1:1 of his certified signature. Look at it, it's legible!

Then finally in the later half of the 2014 season I got to meet Hensley. Even got to see him pitch.

I'll never forget how he was so cool and willing to sign for fans after the game even with his arm bandaged and wrapped up just in case. Makes it super understandable why he went the extra mile with his (still) biggest fan The Lost Collector.

It didn't dawn on me until I came back to Japan in 2024 and went through numerous rounds of downsizings that I was able to have some sort of full circle moment.

I knew about all these guys before I met them, I learned about them in Japan, I even had some of their cards which I pulled from boxes of Bowman Draft. Then I got to meet them in the US and got their autographs (on 2013 Pro Debut at that!). Then a decade later all these cards came back with me to Japan where I'm blogging about them in retrospect.

Even this unlicensed Panini Contenders Montgomery autograph above is important to me because I remember really wanting it in late-2012 but the card shops in Japan I went to just didn't have it. 2011 Contenders was also sold out everywhere so pulling one was a non-option. It wasn't until a couple of years ago that I was able to get one for super cheap.

Which unfortunately kind of brings us to what happened after 2014.

Hensley went on to miss three straight seasons between 2015-17 with various injuries. He was released in early 2018 and went on to pitch in indy ball. He did throw a no-hitter in 2020 but his career ended after 2021. All time what-if for me, because going into the 2012 draft he was seen as having one of the best curveballs among all draft prospects and he was a 6'5 giant capable of reaching 97 mph as a teenager. Who knows what he could've turned into if he was healthy and allowed to develop.

Ty Hensley in 2014

Montgomery continued to try and make his push towards the big leagues but velocity issues had him going back and forth between double-A and triple-A until he was released by the Yankees in early 2017. The St. Louis Cardinals, Detroit Tigers and Boston Red Sox took fliers on him later but bad luck and injuries never really allowed him to make that one leap with those organizations either.

Aune continued giving his best effort in the Yankees system but the results were more or less the same every year. He was released in mid-2017 and then went down the college football route, something he had originally been considering before the Yankees gave him a big bonus to play baseball instead. He became a quarterback for North Texas and after four years he was signed by the Atlanta Falcons as an undrafted free agent but waived a month later.

For those of you who skipped those paragraphs, basically the years after 2014 weren't kind to their professional careers. Thus cementing them in my mind to 2012.

To the wider public these are just cards of prospect busts, to me they're really important memories of my earliest years in the hobby. I can't put a price on that.

As always thanks for stopping by and take care.