I could care less either way but I'm thinking whether his Angels pages should go with my other Angels - perhaps they can be hidden away with his Red Sox pages.
Maybe it's just a random thing, but him not wearing batting gloves during his at-bats - makes him more of a 'real' player to me.
Despite a relatively impressive rookie season in 2019, I don't know if I was ever aware of him enough - to predict he was going to blossom into Buster Posey lite this past season.
Maybe these pages are not going to be as durable for long term storage but hopefully these aren't completely useless - using penny sleeves would probably help secure particular card (s) in the pages to give me some peace of mind.
I want to see if I can make use of these pages ASAP so they don’t necessarily sit around - maybe my last box of plastic pages lasted about 2 or 3 years just because I wasn't necessarilly gung-ho in displaying the assorted cards that had piled up for certain players.
He was once hyped up as the second coming, but after a good 2019 season and a bad 2020 season - I'm indifferent towards the guy.
He was a wunderkind pitching prospect, but after getting hurt and needing Tommy John surgery - his star dimmed a little bit where his cards represented a bloat I just didn’t want to see.
I tried to think up players who I had enough cards of and wanted to showcase - I didn't want a bunch of partial pages, where I had less than 9 cards to display at the moment, but I made exceptions in some cases where I expect to pull or find more cards to make a full page.
As I tried to rejigger my player binders over the past 10 years, I weeded out certain players' cards for whatever reason - Williams might hot have been associated with the Core Four, but he was an important player during the New York Yankees dynasty run from the mid 1990s through the early 2000s.
There are some ‘completed’ bloodlines connections within this sampler lot - but I feel like I'm lagging when I don’t have a card of an applicable card of a family member handy.
A subject not represented among these sampler pages just means I have to go out and get the card - in my main collection, it isn’t a big deal to be missing a card that makes up part of a family chain, though for the more notable bloodlines, I need to get those missing cards in-hand.
I wanted to make it where in most cases the cards for applicable bloodlines ties were shown side-by-side [for the most part] and used up 7 pages to display the cards I had in-hand - I tried to grab cards from various pro athlete families, though these sampler pages are not comprehensive.
1. Babe Ruth - obviously, though I was going for Lou Gehrig and neither one signed when the New York Yankees came into town one year.
2. Roberto Alomar - I've always seen him as a prima donna of sorts and the only time I'd ever remember him signing was when he was playing for the Cleveland Indians and on a night when I wasn't around.
As the story retold to me goes, someone was heckling him after a game for perhaps ignoring fans on his way out of the ballpark - to shut the heckler up, Alomar proceeds to sign for everyone, but the individual who gave him a hard time.
3. Kirby Puckett - maybe forced to retire the year before I was graphing at my local big league park and my only apparent successes with are TTM.
4. John Smiley - mostly pitched in the National League, before Interleague play was a thing and I was really only getting my autographs at an American League ballpark when I first started.
5. Kim Batiste - I was more into cards when this junk wax era utility man was playing.
I wanted continue seeing if I could display certain collecting subset cards in nine-pocket pages - as featured in previous posts on this blog over the summer, I started to make sampler pages of my favorite mini collections to see if I could put together a binder to flip through.
With a new box of Ultra Pro pages, I wanted to add cards of my bloodlines, inking it up and multi-sport athletes collections as priorities - I put together 17 cards using one page as a snapshot of prominent pro athletes in one sport, yet might have been good enough to dabble in at least one other sport [high school / college / pros] at one point in their playing careers.
These cards were originally referred to as 'two-sport stars' collection, though in my collection, there are cards of players who simply forgettable - guys who may not have developed professionally in a sport they tried to play, like a baseball player who spends four or five years in the minors, but ends up going back to college to play football in anonymity.
In my collecting life, it was Bo Jackson and Deion Sanders who made the idea of two-sport players a real attraction during the junk wax era - Jackson had all-world potential as a baseball player and maybe I saw Sanders as an ersatz version of Bo, maybe more flash than substance on a big league field.
Looking at his stats, Sanders was actually decent MLB player, though the NFL was always the priority - as it goes, Neon Deion was the one who didn't get hurt [insert of some of tired tackling joke here] and ended up in the Pro Football HOF while Jackson's NFL career was cut short by injury.
Because catchers take a beating during a game, catchers stand out as the only guys to wear the tools of ignorance - including shin guards, chest protector a face mask, etc.
Seeing pitchers act the role of hitters or baserunners can be such a peculiar thing - so it is another neat, easter egg deal to find cards with 'action shots' of pitchers not doing the usual pitching.
The Hall of Fame pitcher's slash line as a batter in 1972 was .135 / .153 / .208 - which is probably comparable to the career numbers opposing batters have put up against Ryan on the mound.
I like stumbling upon them because it's like an easter egg most collectors wouldn't pay attention to while flipping through loose cardboard - for a player to count as a 'star' cameo, an all-star appearance is considered as well as whether a player has had some name recognition through points of his MLB career.
Most of the time the obscured player in the background is who I assume it is - but when the image is blurred, there is some doubt at times.
To keep up with a little trivia since I live in Orange County, California, I've built up a collection of cards featuring professional ballplayers local to the county [even if only up a certain point for some guys] - born, raised, has lived or lives in the county, went to high school and/or college.
For my 17-card sampler lot, I went with in-person autograph cards since they stood out a little bit more - the only card that isn't autographed is one featuring Hall of Famer Walter Johnson, who pitched in the early 20th century.
First row: Paul Abbott - Sunny Hills High, Hank Conger [2009 O-Pee-Chee Los Angeles Angels team card] - Huntington Beach High, Alex Burnett - Ocean View High
Second row: Ben Francisco - Servite High, Freddie Freeman - El Modena High, Johnson - Fullerton Union High
Third row: Michael Lorenzen - Fullerton Union High, Ian Kennedy - La Quinta High, Jeff Robinson - Troy High School
*I count guys who went to an OC high school or college but actually from out of state or even from a different nation - since I assume they had to make a commitment to play / live / study within the county for a period of time.
Facial hair is about a manly 'style thing' though, so there maybe a fascination with seeing a beard or mustaches on individual baseball players - because it becomes part of a player's personality [or brand] at times [see one time big leaguer Brian Wilson].
In a conservative sport, players growing a little 'something something' on their faces can be something refreshing to look at - baseball would even be more boring if the other 29 MLB teams adapted the New York Yankees' appearance policy.