1994 Topps Stadium Club #109 Gregg Jefferies (Cubs Cameo)

I've sporadically done a couple of post series on the blog over the years.

Por Que No Los Dos covers horiztonal Ivy cards, because I collect both of those categories individually and I think it's kind of neat when they overlap.

If a Cubs player shows up in the background of a non-Cubs card, I'll usually set it aside as well and do a "Cubs Cameo" post.

I enjoy finding the source photos of newer cards, but I also really enjoy when I can nail down a game on an older card.

This Gregg Jefferies card out of 1994 Topps Stadium Club hits all of these categories and I was pretty excited when I came across it. It's got some white speckles along the edges as I imagine it was part of a brick of cards at some point. But since it is a non-Cubs card, I will just passively keep an eye out for a better looking copy.

With that said, let's see if we can game date the photo. It looks like a stolen base attempt. I feel like if it was a double, the Cubs player would be in a different position to field the throw from the outfield/cutoff man.

So heading over to Gregg Jefferies' Baseball-Reference page, I'm looking for a 1993 game at Wrigley Field between the Cardinals and Cubs where Gregg Jefferies has a stolen base or a caught stealing.

Jefferies was 2/4 on attempts at Wrigley Field in 1993.

On June 18th, Jefferies reached on an error in the top of the 1st but was thrown out as part of a strike 'em out, throw 'em out double play. The receiving fielder is listed as the shortstop, Rey Sanchez. Though Sanchez wore #6 in 1992*, he wore #11 in 1993, which does not seem to match what can be seen on the back of the mystery Cubs player. So either way, the photo does not seem to match this play.

That didn't deter Jefferies as he stole two bases the next day, June 19th.

In the top of the 5th inning, Jefferies singled and eventually stole 2nd base cleanly. The 2nd baseman was #20, Eric Yelding. Again, not a clean match based on what we can see on the back of the Cubs jersey. Rey Sanchez was again at shortstop. Hmmm.

The other successful stolen base that day was of third, which does have any bearing here.

Let's fast forward to September 22 when Jefferies was thrown out for the second time.

In the top of the 4th inning, Jefferies had an RBI single but was thrown out trying to steal second. The shortstop was again the recipient of the catcher's throw.

This was a high scoring game (11-9 in the Cubs favor) so there were a lot of substitutions. Jose Vizcaino started the game at shortstop and bumped over to second base as part of a double switch-pitching change in the 6th inning. So Vizcaino was the shortstop of record in the 4th inning when this play happened. Vizcaino's jersey number in 1993?

16! I think we have a winner! I can easily see the "1" wrapping around to the unseen side of the fielder in the card photo.

Here is Vizcaino's card from the same set. You can see he is wearing the same kind of high-top Nike cleats in both photos. 

And for good measure, here is the back of the Jefferies card.

* Sanchez switched from #6 when Willie Wilson joined the Cubs prior to the 1993 season. Wilson had worn #6 during most of his tenure with the Royals and A's.



My Frankenset(s)

It seems like most bloggers jumped on the Frankenset bandwagon while I was away. I’ll admit I had aspirations myself before taking my hiatus but I didn’t have much time to think about what I would do.

The first one I remember seeing when I started following blogs a couple of years ago was $30 a Week Habit's Serial Insanity, though I don't think the term Frankenset came around until a little later. If somebody could point me in the direction of its originator, I'd love to give someone credit.

In terms of Cubs bloggers, P-Town Tom of Waiting Til Next Year snagged a good one with making a giant Cubs set. Paul of Wrigley Wax decided to do uniform numbers, which also turned out pretty good.

So what’s a Cubs fan to do with two good ideas already off the board?  Well, I looked at the two mini collections I had going already and decided to make Frankensets out of both!

As a refresher, my two mini collections are posted in the right hand column under the “Niches” headline. The inventory under those links are a little out of date but they'll be updated shortly. The Horizontal Cards mini collection even resulted in a separate blog (that needs to be dusted off once I get the hang of this one again). The goal of that blog was to find the best horizontal card for each team by pitting two against each other every month and letting the readers decide.

For this particular Frankenset, I’ve decided to cap the set at 630 cards. That’s 30 cards for each of the 31 teams from my lifetime. I’m doubling down on the Expos and Nationals since I grew up with the Expos but at 10+ years now, the Nationals probably deserve their own spot, too. I’m hoping to find base set cards (though I may allow parallels) from as many different brands as possible.

I imagine it will be easy to get it started and then tough to fill in gaps. But that’s what makes this fun, right? Maybe once I get to that stage, that Horizontal Card Challenge blog will turn into a battle of making it into the Frankenset!

The second Frankenset will involve cards that feature the ivy covered walls of Wrigley Field in the background. This one won’t have a set number of cards from each team as it’ll be tough to find American League teams at Wrigley. As with the horizontal set, I will try to get as many different brands as possible. I don’t know if I’ll put a cap on this set as I have to go through what I already have.

I guess I have a reason to include some Cardinals cards in the collection. Ugh. I love this shot of Bill Sampen in the powder blues with his full nameplate and number showing. That ones a keeper!

Both of these Beltrans have a home for now but I'd like to bump one out eventually for variety sake.

I will always chase Cubs cards for my overall collection, but for the purposes of this set, unless I want some place fillers, I’m also going to try and avoid using Cubs cards like the Dave Smith below.

Upper Deck has some great ivy shots on the backs of cards but this one will probably be filler as well until something better comes along.

Before my hiatus, I had a box of cards that I’ll be going through shortly to scan and catalog so stay tuned. I’m excited to get to and figure out haves and needs. And hopefully putting it out there for the world to see keeps me accountable when I don’t feel like organizing…

And I'd like to give a big shout out to Jeff at 2x3 Heroes for the cards above that arrived in a PWE while I was away on my trip. He dropped some PWE's on me while I was away too and nudged me back in the direction of this blog on more than one occasion. Thanks for the support and cards, Jeff!

Jeff stunned me with his generosity with one final card in the envelope and since it doesn't fit this theme, it'll get its own post sometime next week.

PWE from 2x3 Heroes

I don't know if it's practiced efficiency or some kind of Jedi mind trick but Jeff from 2x3 Heroes managed to sneak 6 cards into a PWE and past the postal scale with a single forever stamp. Mine always seem to get bumped up to the next ounce. Nice work!

First up, we have a pair of this year's Heritage Cubs cards. Starlin Castro finally gave us Cubs fans something to smile about in Wednesday's game against the Pirates. He seemed to have found his bat from 2011 and Darwin Barney's Gold Glove from 2012 all at the same time. Chris Rusin just missed out on making the Opening Day roster, but he'll be up with the club again before you know it.

Also from 2014, but from the flagship product, Jeff managed to find an Ernie Banks mini for me. Nice! As for Aramis Ramirez, he always seemed to have MVP Potential but never quite got there. He received MVP votes in four different season with the Cubs but only got as high as 10th. Until his first season in Milwaukee where he squeaked up to 9th.

Jeff also managed to find two cards for my new niche collection, cards with Wrigley's ivy in the background. Since they are both pitchers and less likely to have a bunch of games as Wrigley, I thought I'd do a little digging to see if I could find the games.

First up is a 1989 Fleer Dennis Martinez. According to Baseball-Reference.com, Martinez pitched in six games against the Cubs in 1988, three of them at Wrigley.

The first game was in Montreal so we can skip that one. The second one was a dominant 9-1 complete game at Wrigley. But if you look at the game date in the chart above, you'll see the date was April 19th. Now look back at the card and any Cubs fan can tell you that the ivy isn't that green and lush that early in the season.

Two months later, the Expos returned to Wrigley and Martinez got drubbed for 7 runs in only 3.1 innings. His next game against the Cubs is a head scratcher. If you just look at the line above. He pitched 7.2 innings, only gave up two runs, the Expos won 8-4, but Martinez didn't get the win. That must have been some late inning rally for the Expos. But it was in Montreal so it doesn't pertain to the card.

His last game at Wrigley in 1988 came in late September. The Expos fell to the Cubs 5-4 but Martinez escaped without taking the loss. Narrowing the card down to two games (June 19 and September 20), I'm going to guess this photo came from the June game. I don't know what the production process on cards was like back then, but September seems too late in the season to be included. And of course, this is assuming the photo used even came from 1988.

And finally, we have a 1991 Upper Deck Juan Agosto. Look at that perfectly lined up pant striping and stirrup. And that pouty duck face.

Agosto made four appearances against the Cubs in 1990, split evenly between Wrigley and the Astrodome. Unfortunately for Agosto and the 'Stros, the Cubs came away winners every time. Unlike the Martinez card, the full ivy doesn't really help me narrow down the game so it's a tossup between the May 27 and Aug 14 games at Wrigley.

Either way, I'm pretty sure the Cubs were 2-0 on these cards. Bonus!

Thanks for the cards, Jeff!

Card Show Part 1: Supplies and Niches

I have good news and some less than ok news. The good news us that I got all of my scans done from the card show. Yay! The less than ok news is that I still have some cropping and file naming to do before I can show too much off. Boo! I'm going to break the show up into four posts to give me a little time to catch up on that.

As you can see in the title, today is dedicated to supplies and niches. Tomorrow will be my non-dime box pickups. And the last two posts will be split between the vintage dime boxes and the contemporary dime boxes but I haven't decided the order yet.

Supplies were at the top of my list this time around as its tough to get decent prices on that stuff online because of shipping. I had an Andrew Jackson specifically designated for that. Yesterday I showed this picture:

The box itself was my first pickup of the day for $2. The contents look a little haphazard, but I set them like that on purpose for the photo. The different stacks represent the different tables I visited as I originally planned to do a post on each one. Until I decided it would flow better with the groups I mentioned above. In the top row on the left are five packages of team bags (100 count each). I've got some packages that need to go out and these will definitely help with that. I'm thinking about trying to sell some lots on eBay too but we'll see how that goes. 

Dividing the different cards/tables in the box are twenty packages of penny sleeves for my Cubs collection. Speaking of which, when all was said and done, I added about 125 new Cubs cards, with about as many "other"cards to go out in trade packages. Not a bad haul and I can't wait to show off individual stuff.

For now though, I'll leave you with a four cards I picked up for my niches, even though I said I wouldn't be adding to them through purchases. I'm sure I passed a bunch of cards that had ivy in the background but this trio caught my eye as I was thumbing through rows and rows of cards.

Spoiler alert, there will be quite a bit of 1984 Donruss showing up in a later post. I couldn't resist the new Hall of Famer in Glavine. And why not get a North Side-South Side rivalry card into the collection? Thirty years between that 1984 Lea and the 2014 Dunn. Man, am I getting old.

I'm not a big vintage guy so there are a ton of non-Cubs cards I've never seen before and this is one of them. Gary Matthews was one of first favorite Cubs in the mid 80s. Probably because my first name is his last name (without the "s") and my last name (Major) is a rank like his nickname (Sarge). The things we latch onto as a kid, right?

So when I came across this in the vintage dimebox, I snagged it without a second thought. It really contrasts with the zoomed in, super close cards of today's Topps. Third base coach McNamara seems to be throwing his hands up in exasperation, wondering why Matthews is sliding and not rounding the base as there doesn't appear to be a play at the bag. And this card is in great shape. Not for a 40 year old card, but for a card in general. That helped make it a no-doubter for the Horizontal collection.

OK, back to cropping so I can show off more cards!

A Forgotten Mini Collection

I've seen a few other bloggers use Zistle as a means to catalog their collections and advertise their "haves" lists and I really like that idea. With an unknown checklist for niche collection cards, posting "haves" instead of "wants" is pretty brilliant. But the idea of inputting thousands of Cubs cards after spending so much time with them already seemed daunting. I signed up last year but never added any cards. But after seeing it recently on one of Jeff's 2x3 Heroes posts, I checked it out again and am going to start small, with my "Horizontal" collection, see how it goes and take it from there.

And in my excitement over starting my new Horizontal card collection, I forgot that right after I started this blog nearly two years ago, I sort of, kind of started a different mini collection. I only "remembered" after clearing a binder in anticipation of needing one for Horizontal cards.

One lonely, single sided page in this now empty binder contained non-Cubs cards that showed Wrigley Field's ivy covered walls in the background.

When I was growing up, I thought it would be cool to get some kind of clipping from Wrigley that I could use to start my own authentic Wrigley ivy vine at my house. What can I say, the original Karate Kid movie made me think gardening/grooming bonsai trees would be cool. Why not do it with ivy?

Now, as an adult homeowner, I know how destructive the plant can actually be and will stick with the cardboard variety. While I won't announce this with as much fanfare as I did the Horizontal cards the other day, count me in for any cards showing ivy from Wrigley. While all of these guys are opponents, I suppose if I had duplicates of Cubs players, I'd add them, too.

Below are the other eight that made up that binder page. Now I just have to go figure out Zistle for these and maintain!