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Rating the Rookie Cups 2.0 - 1974

 

 

 

 

Welcome to the relaunch of Rating the Rookie Cups 2.0.  I am calling it 2.0 because I intend to reexamine all of my choices from the past and because there are a few changes as well.  Before I begin my analysis of the team, I want to address a topic brought forth by the great Fuji.  Fuji posed a question in last week's prelude post about how I determine who the Rookie All Stars were in the years that Topps did not add cups to the cards.  I really wish I had a profound answer to that very good question, but I simply got them off of Wikipedia.  Many of my college professors would threaten to take back my degrees for admitting to using that site as a source of information, but it's quick and easy.  I do recall that the 1982 team was identified in the 1983 Topps sticker album.  Not with a cup, but with bold text beneath their sticker.  Some of the more notable players excluded from cups were included in the 2005 Topps Rookie Cup set as well.

 

With that topic in mind, instead of beginning with a reexamined team I decided to go with a team that has not yet been featured here at the Quarry, the 1973 team which was shown on 1974 Topps cards.  The most notable trait of this particular team is that it is the first one that did not put cups or trophies on the cards.  I don't really know why the cups were omitted in 1974 because they added them back the next year.  I'm sure there was a reason though, even if it probably doesn't make sense now.  

Let's take a look at the 1973 Topps Rookie All Star Team.

 

Bob Boone - C - Phillies - Rookie Rank (16 of 61) - Career Rank (14 of 61)

Gary Thomasson - 1B - Giants - Rookie Rank (50 of 61) - Career Rank (39 of 61)

Dave Lopes - 2B - Dodgers - Rookie Rank (19 of 62) - Career Rank (12 of 62)

 

Dan Driessen - 3B - Reds - Rookie Rank (40 of 61) - Career Rank (13 of 61)

 

Jerry Terrell - SS - Twins - Rookie Rank (46 of 61) - Career Rank (50 of 60)

 

Rich Coggins - OF - Orioles - Rookie Rank (83 of 184) - Career Rank (169 of 184)

Gary Matthews - OF - Giants - Rookie Rank (20 of 184) - Career Rank (22 of 184)

John Grubb - OF - Padres - Rookie Rank (101 of 184) - Career Rank (81 of 184)

 

Steve Rogers - RHP - Expos - Rookie Rank (23 of 50) - Career Rank (8 of 50)

 

Randy Jones - LHP - Padres - Rookie Rank (33 of 49) - Career Rank (13 of 49)

WOULDA, COULDA, SHOULDA

Here are the players I feel should have made the team.  This is based solely on rookie years stats and is a straight up "battle of the stats" with my opinion not factoring into the decision.  I give a chance to all rookies from that season that either played in 100 games, started 15 games, or had at least 10 saves.  If there happen to be less than 2 rookies that meet those qualifications at a position, then I will just compare the top two that don't meet parameters.  In this case, and all cases before 2011, I am retroactively adding a relief pitcher spot to the team.

Catcher - Darrell Porter - Brewers

This was essentially a two man race between actual choice Bob Boone and Porter.  I know that Boone was a far better defender at the position, but for the purposes here, offense matters more.  If I was building a team from scratch in 1973, I would definitely pick Boone over Porter as my catcher.  But for this Rookie All Star Team, Porter narrowly edges him out.

First Base - Tony Muser - White Sox

There were three positions that stood out as weak on this club no matter who was chosen.  First base was one of them.  There were three candidates for this spot among actual winner Thomasson, Tony Muser of the White Sox, and slugger Hal Breeden of the Expos.  In a close battle, the future Royals manager came out on top.

Second Base - Dave Lopes - Dodgers

I went into this thinking there were a couple of positions that probably were not going to be close.  Second base was one because of Lopes' notability.  But as it turned out this was a really close race between Lopes and the career year of runner up Pedro Garcia of the Brewers.  Lopes hung on by the skin of his teeth over Garcia and strong third place finisher Jorge Orta of the White Sox.

Third Base - Ron Cey - Dodgers

According to my criteria, there were four candidates for this position: Topps pick Dan Driessen, Ron  Cey of the Dodgers, future HOFer Mike Schmidt of the Phillies, and Ken Reitz of the Cardinals.  This was not even really close as Cey should have easily been the selection.  I guess it was a sign of the time that the only thing Driessen had over Cey was a better batting average.  Even though he was a clear third in the race, everyone was just lucky that Schmidt did not really acclimate to the majors until his sophomore year.

Shortstop - Jerry Terrell - Twins

I mentioned earlier that there were three weak positions in 1973, well here is the second.  There was no dearth of candidates though as five players met the criteria, but not of them were really that good.  In the end, it came down to a tiebreaker between Topps choice Terrell and the guy whose name became much more famous in the future for a different athlete, Mike Tyson of the Cardinals.  Terrell barely held on, but he did hold the spot.

Outfield - Gary Matthews - Giants, Al Bumbry - Orioles, Rich Coggins - Orioles

In this competition among eight candidates, two rose to the top, the respective Rookie of the Year in each league, Matthews and Bumbry.  Honestly, I could not find any reason that Bumbry was not one of the real life choices.  Out of the six remaining candidates , any of five of them would have been a nearly equally good choice for the spot.  However, Coggins outlasted strong challenges from fellow Topps choice Johnny Grubb, Bob Coluccio of the Brewers, Charlie Spikes of the Indians, and Richie Zisk of the Pirates.  Ironically, the outfielder that was clearly at the bottom ended up with the best career of the lot, Dwight Evans of the Reds Sox.

RH Starter - Doc Medich - Yankees

Among six starters that met criteria, it turned into a three man race between Medich, Topps pick Steve Rogers, and Steve Busby of the Royals.  Busby was quickly shown to be third in the race.  The battle between the remaining two is the somewhat classic pairing of the solid full season rookie and the player that performs better on a per game basis, but that only plays half the season.  I have found that match up to be a virtual coin flip in most cases, but as was the case here Topps usually awards the half season guy.  My stats say otherwise, although it was very close.

LH Starter - Randy Jones - Padres

Aside from the top two outfield spots, this was the easiest choice of all positions.  It was not so much a case of the future Cy Young winner being dominant as much as it was a lack of competition.  The only other candidates for the spot were hybrid starter/reliever Rich Troedson also of the Padres and the half season of the minor league skipping 18 year old overall #1 draft pick David Clyde of the Rangers.  Jones won easily over both.

Relief Pitcher - Doug Bird - Royals

This was a very strong year for relievers as there were six rookie pitchers with more than 10 saves along with a few more that were close to 10.  I kept this match up to only those with 10 or more though.  Doug Bird won a very close 3 man race over Elias Sosa of the Giants and Cy Acosta of the White Sox.  

HOW'D TOPPS DO?

100% - Perfect, 80-90% - Great, 60-70% - Good, 40-50% - Poor, < 40% - Utter Failure

POOR

With this group, Topps got 5 out of 10 correct for a 50% average.  A couple of the ones they got incorrect were pretty much toss ups, but so were a couple of the one they got right.  So it all pretty much evens out.  Ron Cey and Al Bumbry being excluded are two of the all time biggest blunders, so I can't justify giving Topps any extra credit here.

Final Thoughts on the Team

Strongest Team Members (rookie) - Gary Matthews, Bob Boone, Dave Lopes

 
Strongest Team Members (career) - Gary Matthews, Steve Rogers, Dave Lopes

 
Weakest Team Members (rookie) - Gary Thomasson, Jerry Terrell, Randy Jones

 
Weakest Team Members (career) - Rich Coggins, Jerry Terrell, Gary Thomasson

 
Rockies on the team (Present and future) - 0 (all were retired before Colorado existed)

Best Card (IMHO) - Gary Matthews (as much as I hate the horizontal 74s, this is the best)

Worst Card (IMHO) - Randy Jones (the Grubb is almost as bad, but Jones adds a weird shadow)

All in all, this team did not have any Hall of Fame players, but it had over half the team with long successful careers.  Even the weakest players ended up with fairly long careers.  Only Rich Coggins peaked with his rookie year.  The strange thing about this year is that every single position other than LHP had at least two rookies that could have easily won.  Most years there are a lot of close battles, but there are also usually 2-3 runaways.  Even the LHP was not a runaway in 1973, it was more of a win by default.  Although to be fair, Gary Matthews would have been a runaway winner if there weren't 3 spots in the OF.  

I hope you all enjoyed the slightly new format.  It's a lot of fun for me.  I enjoyed it so much, I even maintained my database during my blog hiatus when I didn't even have an outlet other than myself.  Although if I am being 100% honest, this post annoyed me.  I had most of the text typed in and was putting in the photos when everything went blank and auto-saved, so I had to start over.  Luckily I had a preview post open, so I at least had a copy of the text on screen to retype.  It wouldn't let me cut and paste though.  Took an extra hour, but hey it's a labor of love.

NEXT WEEK'S PREVIEW

The 1998 team pictured on 1999 Topps cards.

Thanx for reading.

Send me your 86s PLEASE!

Time for a begging post.  I love to do those mainly because I get things due to the incredible generosity of the blogging community.  Don't get me wrong I do enjoy giving just as much and I intend to give here as well, but for now I am just asking for stuff you might not want.  Despite what the title says, please don't send me ACTUAL 1986 cards because I have had that one completed for about 12 years now.  It was the first set I completed when I got back into cards as an adult.

Longtime readers will remember that my favorite flagship set of all time is 1986 Topps.  Most of you will probably scoff at that notion, but 86 was the first set that I truly tried to collect rather than just buy a few packs.  I never completed it as a kid, but I got really close.  More importantly I had so much fun with those cards.  Like many card collectors, I learned math with the stats on the back.  But I also learned geography by looking up all the player's birthplaces in an atlas.  When else are you going to want to know where San Pedro de Macoris is?  I learned organizational skills by constantly putting the cards in order by number, team, birth state, alphabetically, and just about every other way possible.  The set truly means a lot to me.

One of my favorite blog projects of all time is my 2012 Quarry Unlimited set which was based on the 1986 Topps design.  If you weren't around back then, it was a custom card set that featured a card for every single player that suited up in MLB during the 2012 season.  I didn't get the player name font exactly right and I didn't really know what I was doing with photo resizing for the most part, but I am still very proud of my first real attempt at custom cards from an existing mainstream design. 

I collected the 1986 Topps inspired cards from 2014 Topps Archives which I mentioned in this post from way back when.  I am still missing several of the ridiculously hard to find (for a decent price) SPs.  Although there were several flaws with that attempt (looking at you blue Yankees name) along with the flimsy card stock and using Athletics instead of the abbreviated A's name on the original set.  The Athletics problem does continue in the 2021 set, but the Yankees are back to a white name and the card stock is much better I believe.

 

I also even collected the 2016 Topps Heritage WWE set.  I casually like wrestling, but I don't really love it and I rarely collect the cards.  But I actually bought a couple of hobby boxes of this set back in late 2016/early 2017.  I pulled the autographed version of that Kofi Kingston card, but I sold it back when he was champ for a good price.

As you can see, I really love this design.  

Which brings me to the point of the post.  The cards I want you to send me are the 1986 inserts from 2021 Topps.  I am also collecting the 1986 silver pack chromes as well.  I may even try to build the blue and black parallel sets that Topps seems to think collectors really want.  I am going to collect them throughout the year through all three series if they are included.  Boy, I really hope Topps numbers these cards continuously in Series 2 and Update, but I am not holding my breath.  I will be creating a want list in the right hand sidebar for this set along with the 2014 Archives version soon.  But as of right now, I have exactly zero of the 2021s, so if you have it, I need it.

These should be an easy thing for you guys to track down to use in my Sunday PWE trade bait posts either as the main course or as a side dish for additional cards.  I plan to continue those posts for a long while because I have a lot of trade stuff.  Maybe I can even get enough trades going to complete the sets.  Stranger things have happened.

Thanx for reading.

Taste the Rainbow - A Reboot

 

I am pulling one of my old features out of mothballs and doing the only thing Hollywood really knows how to do anymore, giving it a reboot.  This particular series never really got off the ground, because I only had two posts with it.  What can I say, rainbows are hard to complete.  But I am still trying regardless.  Plus I really like both the title of the series and the header photo.

That brings me to the point of this.  The reason I am calling a "reboot" instead of a "relaunch" or a "continuation" is because there is going to be a slight format change.  Originally this series was showcasing rainbows that I have collected of Rockies across various sets.  That still appeals to me, but the end result can be a much less structured end product.  Meaning I have no idea when I am going to complete a rainbow and I really don't even know what player or set will be involved.  

Instead I have decided to devote this series to showcasing my newest card pursuit, the 2020 Donruss rainbow set.  It is a ridiculous idea to be honest.  I am attempting to collect full sets of 9 different sets.  They are the base, independence day, baby shark, blue, orange, pink, purple, red, and yellow sets.  There are 300 cards per set, although the numbering and structure is different than a simple 1-300 setup.  Cards # 1-260 are relatively normal 1-30 are Diamond Kings, 31-60 are Rated Rookies, 61-210 are the vet base cards, 211-235 are the retired retros, and 236-260 are the rookie retros.  

Then it gets all Panini'd to death.  Cards #261 and 262 are short prints of the San Diego Chicken, world's greatest mascot, and Domingo Ayala, some Youtube baseball comedian.   I am not considering these two as part of any of the sets for two reasons, one they are SPs which I hate in base sets and two they are not in any of the parallel sets.  The whole point of this project is to have a rainbow set, not to have a rainbow set along with two cards that don't fit anywhere else.

Then you come to cards #263 and 264 which are Rated Rookies of Yoshihiro Tsutsugo and Luis Robert.  They ARE part of the set and all the parallel sets.  I assume they were added on at the end due to the fact that neither had appeared in a big league game before 2020.  Anyway, that gives us a total of 262 cards.  

The other 38 are Panini's world famous variants.  I don't call them photo variations because not all of them are.  There are actually 4 categories of variations, the nickname, the photo, the team name, and the world series champs.  The WS champs are 3 Washington Nationals that have a different photo and team name on the back.  There are 7 team name variants which have the same photo as the base but instead of team city, a different caption is used.  There are 13 regular photo variations which use only a different photo with everything else the same.  Finally there are 15 nickname variations which changes only the player's name to a nickname.  

The parallels all came in different packs.  3 of the sets, base, independence day, and baby sharks were available to get in all forms of retail and hobby packaging.  Each of the colored parallels were available only through a certain type of pack.  Blue were hobby box exclusives.  Pinks were exclusive to the retail mega boxes.  Purples were exclusive to retail blasters.  Oranges were retail hanger box exclusives.  Reds were fat pack exclusives.  And finally yellows were exclusive to Dollar Tree retail packs. 

There you have the background on the set, now for the background of my decision to take on such a daunting task of building a 2700 card set.  

The pandemic was the main cause.  When the card industry was shut down in late March of 2020, there were only a handful of 2020 sets that had been released up to that point.  If I remember correctly, retail was basically only Topps Series 1, Gypsy Queen, Opening Day, and Donruss.  Retail bandits gobbled up all of these products in quick fashion, so my only outlet was eBay.  But, instead of buying retail at inflated prices online, I decided to just buy lots from people searching for whatever.  After a bit of research, I noticed Donruss parallel lots were selling for far less than Topps or GQ, so I started buying up the ones that had Rockies players in them.  I figured I could get the card I wanted and then sell the rest to recoup.  Except I never got around to listing the excess cards.  So by the time I got pretty close to having full parallels on my Rockies team set, I noticed I had a large collection of parallels, specifically the yellows which were the most expensive colors on the secondary market.  So I decided to build the yellow set.  Yellows were plentiful then because this was about the time they were first released to Dollar Tree and the supply was very high.  Once I gathered about 200 of the 300 card set, the supply of yellows started drying up.  So I decided to go for other colors.  Then as those sets got bigger, I thought about what to do with them.  I had six different sets working, so why not up it to 9 and have a full page set?  What can I say, it made sense at the time.  

I started selling on Sportlots in September of 2018.  It was never intended as a career or anything, just a way to pay for my own card habit.  I would slowly add to my inventory and even more slowly, sell cards.  This continued for a year.  I had decent sales months, I had bad sales months, I even had one month where I had a grand total of $8 for the whole month.  Needless to say, I wasn't quitting my day job.  The one positive thing about the pandemic is that my fledgling Sportlots business took off.  I assume it had to do with people being stuck at home unable to spend their disposable income at restaurants and movies.  That and a combination of people trying to flip rookies to supplement their own income.  Whatever the reason, I had high sales in the summer.  Still not nearly good enough to let me quit my day job, but I had a decent amount of card money to play with last summer.   

The intersection of me having excess card money, no new cards being made by anyone, COMC's warehouse basically being located at COVID ground zero, and the availability of large cheap Donruss lots led to this project.  That and I really like the design as well, it's good for a Panini Donruss set anyway.  I love borders and Topps seems to be going away from that.  

To make a long story even longer, the point of this is the reboot of Taste the Rainbow.  I have finished the 9 card rainbow for 13 cards thus far with another 4 that are finished, but not in hand.  I also have 60  at the 8 card level, so I should have plenty of ammo to keep this series going regularly for a while.  What I intend to do starting next week is to spotlight two cards from the 2020 Donruss set.  I will showcase them in the order I got the rainbow complete.  I am aiming for a regular Wednesday time slot for the feature, but who knows if I will be able to stick to that. 

Man I really didn't intend to write a novel here, but I tend to run on at times.  I hope you enjoyed the read regardless.  

Thanx for reading.

Just a quick question

I don't really have a real post tonight, but I do have a quick question for anyone that might know.  Most of the comments that come through the blog go straight to my email, but some don't.  Specifically Fuji, Night Owl, and the Diamond King never go to my email when they make comments.  I have checked my spam folder and my trash folder and still nothing.  This is especially troubling for me because they are 3 of my more chatty commenters.  I always enjoy getting comments and responding to them, but I sometimes miss them unless someone else comments after them.

Anyway, my question is, whose end is the problem on?  Have i done something wrong?  Do any other bloggers have this same problem?  Has anyone solved the problem?  

Feel free to comment with the answer, but if you are one the three I mentioned, it might take me a little longer to see.