Card Cameos: Cecil At Home Again

What do you do when you are really, really busy and want to write a blog post but just can't pull something together? You thank the good lord for making other bloggers.

On Tuesday, Night Owl posted a fabulous write up on horizontal cards from the modern era. Apparently, he and I share the same general thoughts on these sorts of things. Essentially: horizontal cards are awesome.

In the course of his post he includes not one, but two wonderful Tigers examples, including the 2008 Stadium Club Card of Gary Sheffield that would likely have been my favorite card of All Time if it included The Whale Building instead of the stupid Verizon ad that covered it up.

But that wasn't it. Also included in the post is a beauty of a Card Cameo featuring the Big Daddy himself:

1993 Upper Deck #117 Lance Parrish f/ Cecil Fielder

How have I never seen this before? It is outstanding. I think I like it even more given Cecil's illustrious history as Cameo Card Play-At-The-Plate subject. It's as though this shot finishes the action generated in the Fisk card, two years later.

Still, even without the context of the other card, this one is a beauty for two reasons. The first is best left to the Night Owl himself:

Cecil Fielder peaking through the wickets makes the entire card.

He's right. It does.

Second is the actual subject of the card--none other than former Tiger great Lance Parrish in his first of what would be four stops in three years post-California Angels. He was actually traded to Seattle mid-season in 1992, which is when this shot was taken, only to end up on Cleveland for the 1993 season. In other words, this card was outdated before it even went to print. Still, could you turn down the opportunity to use that photo just because of some inconvenient reality of the player no longer playing on that team? Me either.

I always loved Lance Parrish when he played for the Tigers or, more specifically, I loved Lance Parrish's history as a Tiger, much of which occurred before I was old enough to follow baseball closely. This led me to be a big Parrish fan in my early collecting years when he continued his All-Star career with the Angels. To see the world of former Tiger great and current Tiger great collide--literally--is just too much fun.

Lastly, I love the ambiguity of the umpire who, with arms outstretched appears as though he is could be making a "safe" call...but who has the body position and tension that almost certainly indicates that he is winding up for a theatrical "OUT!" Umpires need their day in the sun too, you know.

Diminishing Greatness

In the last three years--basically, the three years since I've gotten back into card collecting--I have noticed a general trend among my Tigers. In addition to current Tigers players, there has been a steady stream of retired greats that have made appearances in my sets. However, that steady stream looks pretty much like this:

Ty Cobb
Ty Cobb
Ty Cobb
Ty Cobb
Al Kaline
Ty Cobb
George Kell
Ty Cobb
Al Kaline
Hank Greenberg

For a team that has existed for more than 100 years, it makes me wonder how the history of the great Tigers franchise has essentially been reduced to four players. Four. Seriously, try to find recent Tigers cards that show anyone else. There may be one or two, but that pattern above tends to holds.

Now some of this is attributable to the fact that MLB has contractually limited the degree to which retired players can be included in card sets. Part of it has to do with the rights to the deceased that Topps acquired prior to 2009, leading to Ty Cobb overload, but I'm pretty sure that part of it is this: If you can only have X retired players per release, why even bother with the "second-tier" greats. Hall of Famers are 1. Better Players and 2. Have a wider appeal than your general hometown heroes etc.

The problem is that people can only digest so much of the same thing. There are what, like a dozen photos of these players that the card companies can use? And for how many cards? I feel like I'm seeing the same thing over and over again. Well, no more. Courtesy of some 1993 Ted Williams cards I got last week.

Sure, you've got your old standbys:



But the photos are different from what you typically see nowadays, which is nice.

What's more, is you've got some greats (and goods) from the past too.







So I have two questions. The first is, given that 1993 was in the wheelhouse of my childhood collecting years, how did I not have any of these cards? The second, and more important question, is how many players--for any franchise, not just the Tigers--have essentially been relegated to the annals of history because they weren't in the Top 5% of players all-time? Mickey Lolich was a tremendous pitcher, and was a huge part of the 1968 World Championship Team. Yet, apart from some Sweet Spot autographs in 2004, there has been bupkis.

What ever happened to just good old fashioned baseball cards? Sure, autographs of these players are great, and very cool, but they tend to be rare, expensive and devoid of anything that is actually, well, interesting on them. So where's my Lolich base card now? Or highlight card? Or something that tells me, the collector, who Mickey Lolich was and what he did in his career? The beauty of hindsight is that it gives us perspective on where something fits in the context of history. I can look at vintage cards and see a player's stats in his day, or a neat cartoon factoid about him, but that doesn't mean anything to me when I'm trying to tie that player in to the context of baseball 40 years later.

I don't know. Maybe I'm just crotchety, or sick of having a million Ty Cobb cards from the last two years. And, honestly, I'd probably give an out-loud WTF if Darrell Evans was a short-printed Topps issue or part of an insert set. But please, can we get some context around here? Or are we going to be forced into believing that there are two tiers of players in baseball: the Hall of Famers, and everyone else? Has time really diminished their greatness that much? Or have cards betrayed the legacy of these former All-Stars, Hometown Heroes and Franchise Mainstays and, in so doing, veiled the character and context in which the game was played?

I'm sure I'm being overdramatic, but seriously, there's more to baseball than the Hall of Fame and I'm afraid that point is being lost in today's landscape. It is up to baseball cards, as much as it is journalists or media or whatever, to remind us that there were some great players who did great things beyond what is enshrined in Cooperstown.

Remembering That Cup Of Coffee (Part 1)

As I mentioned in yesterday's Grand Scheme, Blake over at The Spot Starters has put together a list of notable ball players who spent a wee bit of their careers as Tigers. Here is Part One, which is recommended reading.

Being a baseball card site, I thought that it was only appropriate to profile these Tigers in cardboard form. I mean, that's the whole reason baseball cards exist, right? To keep track of and commemorate baseball history? I'm not going to recap Blake's summaries, but may add bits of insight here and there. With that, I give you the Spot Starter's Cup Of Coffee Tigers, in cardboard form.

Earl Averill

1940 Play Ball #46 Earl Averill

Play Ball gets it, just look at the bottom of the card: "A pictoral news record of America's favorite sport". I dare you to define baseball cards better then that.

This card is one of two cards of Earl as a Tiger. The other, a 1939 "Sportservice Tigers" is so obscure that I have no idea what I am even looking for. Play Ball is a legitimate and well known set, on the other hand. The back makes mention of the Earl Averill acquisition:

The Indians, who paid a reported price of $50,000 for Averill in 1929, traded the outfielder to the Detroit Tigers in June last year and while Earl was not up to his par in hitting, he managed to drive in 65 runs with 98 hits, almost half of them for extra bases.

Update: Mark of Mark's Ephemera, in addition to editing my posts, sent me a link about the obscure 1939 set. A little extra research indicates that this set was released by the Tigers and is a 1939-1940 set and is listed as either one, the other, or both. More specifically, 1939 was the first year that SportService was the Detroit Tigers' official concessionaire, which leads me to believe that the cards were essentially corporately sponsored by them, despite being considered a "team-issue". The more you know...

Steve Avery
I loved Steve Avery growing up. He was a Michigander and he was a rising star on the Braves, which for whatever reason, I always liked as a kid. Well, the two worlds converged, briefly, in 2003.

2003 Topps Traded #T42 Steve Avery

Why the Tigers in 2003? The back of the card gives us some insight on this one.

"At the urging of his son, this former Braves star tried a comeback in 2003 after being out of baseball for two years. He signed with his hometown Tigers, beat Atlanta in Spring Training and won a spot in Detroit's pen."

That's neat.

Billy Bean and Billy Beane
The first, and less notable, actually had enough of a presence on the Tigers to warrant a card.

1988 Topps #267 Billy Bean

The other Billy Beane, well known for being the current GM of the A's and the man behind Moneyball, had such a short stint in Detroit that they didn't even bother to make a card for him. He did have a lasting legacy in that other role, however:


Rico Brogna
The last of this group of shortly tenured Tigers is a once rising star in the system:


Rico was a big deal. He got a coveted "top prospects" card in 1992 with a couple of guys who went on to have solid careers (Klesko and Jaha). A bunch of prospect cards preceded that 1992 version as well. In 1993 he got one of his own:

1993 Topps #598 Rico Brogna

This was one of many cards that Brogna had as a Tiger, dating back to 1989. In fact his 1991 Upper Deck card was the one that stuck out with me, but I didn't remember that when I was rushing to pull cards this morning, so Topps it is. This card, the 1993 version, was the end of the brief Rico Brogna era in Detroit and you know that he was only up for a cup of coffee--he is wearing an away uniform and home helmet, a telltale sign of a Spring Training picture, indicating that there wasn't much in the way of regular season game action for him.

And so concludes Part 1. Part 2 is now up at the Spot Starters, and I'll be chasing down those cards just as soon as I can.