2014 Quarry Unlimited - 2014 Season Highlights

The final subset that I will be featuring this week is the 2014 Season Highlights.  As you may or may not remember, in the 1988 Score set, the Highlights subset was the final 9 cards of the set and featured future Hall of Famers such as Paul Molitor, Kirby Puckett, and Mike Schmidt along side the "one season wonders" of Steve Bedrosian, Benito Santiago, and Juan Nieves.  It really was a fun little highlights set and focused on the big things like Schmidt's 500th homer, Mark McGwire's rookie HR record, and Molitor's 39 game hitting streak to the very obscure things like Don Mattingly's consecutive game home run streak, Puckett's 10 hits in 2 games, and Vince Coleman's record stolen bases.  I set out for the same type of Highlights set.  I made cards for the no hitters and the career milestones, but also for the obscure records that you may not have heard about until now and you may not hear about again until they are broken again.

NO HITTERS

Josh Beckett - May 25 at Phillies  FINAL OUT = Chase Utley

Clayton Kershaw - June 18 vs. Rockies  FINAL OUT = Corey Dickerson

 Tim Lincecum - June 25 vs. Padres  FINAL OUT = Will Venable

Hamels, Diekman, Giles, Papelbon - September 1 at Braves  FINAL OUT = Phil Gosselin

Jordan Zimmermann - September 28 vs. Marlins  FINAL OUT = Christian Yelich

One of my favorite oddities of the season was that for the second straight season there was a no hitter pitched on the last day of the season.  The losing pitcher in the 2014 final day no hitter, Henderson Alvarez, was the winning pitcher in the 2013 final day no hitter.  The Phillies no hitter card is also the only card in the 2014 Quarry Unlimited set that is landscape oriented, or horizontal.  I am not a big fan of the mixing of the two orientations, but there was no real way to get all four pitchers in a portrait style card.  I'm sure you can tell that I just had to make something up when it came to the top banner for that card as well.  It's decent, but I'm not really thrilled with the look of it.  Oh well.

HIT FOR THE CYCLE

Michael Cuddyer - August 17 - 4-5 3 RBIs

The only cycle of the season was hit by Michael Cuddyer.  Several odd occurrences had to happen for this cycle to even take place.  First off Cuddyer only played in 49 games all season and this game happened in between his two long DL stints.  Secondly, this was the second game of a Sunday doubleheader against which had to take place because of a broken water main in Denver on the Saturday before the game.  Strange but true.

CAREER MILESTONES

 Albert Pujols - Home Run #500 - April 22

Bartolo Colon - Win #200 - August 8

 Adrian Beltre - Hit #2,500 - June 24

Albert Pujols - Hit #2,500 - September 6

Some people might argue that 2,500 hits and 200 wins aren't really milestones, but I would argue that 2500 is the final stop before 3000 which is a big one and 200 wins might become what 300 wins was in the past.  I doubt I will ever see another 300 game winner because the game is changing, so 200 might just have to do.

OBSCURE RECORDS

Most Consecutive Relief Appearances with at Least 1 Strikeout - 49 games

Old Record - Bruce Sutter, 39 games (1977)

Most Strikeouts to Begin a Game - 8 batters (tied)

Old Record (well continued record) - Jim Deshaies, 8 batters (1986)

Most Consecutive Outs - 46

Old Record - Mark Buehrle, 45 (2009)

There are two weird coincidences about these records.  First is that two were broken against the Rockies (deGrom did it against Miami).  Second is that two of the records were broken by pitchers at the plate.  Jordan Lyles singled against Petit while Jarrod Cosart singled off of deGrom. 

PLAYOFF MVP WINNERS

League Championship Series MVP Winners

World Series MVP Winner

The less said about the playoffs, the better.  But hearty congrats to the Royals and those guys that wear the same colors as Baltimore.  I still really want to punch Hunter Pence in the face.  But I digress.

There you have the 2014 MLB season in a nutshell.  Before I say my goodbyes for the day I have a couple of logistical things to get out of the way that I meant to include in yesterday's post.  But I forgot...whoops.

Anyway, as some of you may have noticed I only used 5 of the 6 borders for the Quarry Rookie All Star Team.  I didn't use the orange borders at all for two reasons.  First because I had 10 guys and 5 worked better, but the main reason was that I didn't want rookie overload on orange because the entire rookie prospect subset uses the orange border.  This is the template that I used to create rookie prospects in the 2014 Quarry Unlimited set.

Looks cool with no photo, doesn't it?

The 1988 Score set had 25 cards that were assigned to this subset, but they were limited to 660 cards.  I upped the number to 100, but I did set a few limits.

1. At least 1 player from every team.  There were 3 teams with only 1 prospect.

2. No more than 5 players for a single team. There were 3 teams with 5 prospects.  When more than 5 were available, I went with the more highly regarded prospects.

3. I started with trying to find 3 for every team and then filled in the rest.  Most got 3.

4. All players must have made their MLB debut in 2014 (not a single game before this year)

5. All players must have maintained their rookie status for 2015.

Who doesn't love setting arbitrary rules for yourself?

The final item on the agenda is the way I will be presenting the team sets.  In 2012 and 2013, I went with a straight alphabetical listing.  This year I will be changing things up a bit.  I will still be presenting teams in the order of my personal likability, but I will be showing team sets grouped by color.  Each border color has an equal number of cards and each team has an equal color distribution or as close as possible given rounding.  Day #1 will feature the dark colors (purple, blue, green) while day #2 will showcase the light colors (red, yellow, orange including prospects).  There are also a few instances where the logos will differ between the light and dark colors, but I will get into that more when it pops up.

I hope you have enjoyed the subsets from this season's Quarry Unlimited set and I will be back Monday with the #1 Colorado Rockies.

Thanx for reading.