The Card O' The Day (or every third day) - 2005 Donruss Champions 365 Alex Cintron

Card O' The Day Volume 5: 2005 Donruss Champions #365 Alex Cintron



2005 Donruss Champions

I can't say much about 2005 Donruss Champions from personal expierence. I started growing frustrated in 2004 with the mass product from Donruss that was basically the same as everything else they produced. It had a different name and design but the products were basically the same.. structure, inserts.. Long sentence, just to say, I didn't buy this. I did buy one complete set from someone, and broke that up.. thus, I have about half that set still available. The design is outright pathetic. Action photos pushed to the far left, with blank space through 2/3rds of the card. Sure it looks good when you stick a relic on the rest of the card, but the base cards shouldn't suffer so the relic parrallel's can look good.
The set was a mix set of current and retired players. A bit obnoxious in that they'd have multiple cards of the same player spread throughout the set with no apparent reasoning to who got more cards. There are 3 Adam Dunns. 4 Andres Galarragas. Only 1 ARod. I never got it. On top of that, for many cards (many many) the player would be shown in one uniform on card front, but on the card back they would feature a season in which the player played for a different team. Really, thats just dumb. Boxes of this stuff is kind of pricey ($100) but its got 8 relics/autos per box.. so there's that.

Alex Cintron

I have it in my head that Cintron has been around for decades. He's just one of those guys that seems to always be around, but never really any good. But at the same time I'm also suprised that he's still in the league. He's a middle infielder, known by most for his years with Arizona. He played for the White Sox for a couple of years. He was cut by the Cubs this spring and then signed a minor league contract with the Orioles. He's only 29... I know. Shocked.

The Card O' The Day (or every third day) - 1982 Topps 134 Dan Ford

Card 'O The Day Volume 4: 1982 Topps #134 Dan Ford.



1982 Topps:

1982 was the first year the Topps set contained 792 cards. This was a staple throughout my childhood. Honestly, as a kid I thought Donruss and Fleer were a bunch of hacks because their sets had 660 cards, instead of the required 792. The big card is obviously the Ripken Rookie card.. As a Ripken fan growing up the 82 Traded Ripken was the pinnacle of cards. If there was a card I dreamed of owning, but was certain I never would, it was that traded Ripken. My dad bought one when I was 8. That was when I was certain he was rich and lying to me about the whole money doesn't grow on trees thing.
There aren't any other really significant cards in the set, Terry Francona, Dave Righetti, and Lee Smith Rookie cards, and a Pascual Perez error card that doesn't show his position on the front of the card (I've never had one of these to sell, and they are fairly rare, but not impossible to find)

Dan Ford:

Dan played outfield for 11 seasons split between the Twins, Angels and Orioles. He retired after the 1985 season. His nickname was Disco. He wasn't a bad hitter. He hit 20 homeruns twice and cracked 100 RBI's once. His average hovered around .270 most of his career. I know these days we scoff at 20 homeruns and a .270 batting average, but those were respectable numbers in the early 80's. Dan hit for the cycle in 1979, and homered in the World Series for the Orioles in 1983 (man, its really been that long).

It's hard to find out where Dan is now. In 1991 he worked in the "speakers bureau" of the then Anaheim (or California, or whatever they were) Angels. If anyone knows anything more about Dan Ford let us know and we'll update this post.

The Card O' The Day (or every third day) - 2001 Topps Limited 125 Ken Caminiti

Card 'O The Day volume 3. 2001 Topps Limited #125 Ken Caminiti. The random number generator still hasn't spit out a really nice card yet.. Maybe I should start fudging the numbers a bit?



2001 Topps Limited:

Topps returned to making the limited edition or "Tiffany" sets in 2000. It only lasted through 2002. Honestly I'm not sure why they stopped. Maybe it wasn't very popular. I always liked it. The cards are on thicker stock than the standard 2001 Topps and have a high gloss finish. Sadly though the high gloss finish seems to break down over time, particularly if they weren't stored in a climate controlled area. The cards were only released in complete set form in a nice cherry finished box with a metallic Topps faceplate. Each box was individually numbered. (the cards are not numbered.) There were only 3,805 sets made. Commons in the set book at $1.

Ken Caminiti:

Ken Caminiti was a star in the 90's. He played 15 seasons and was the NL MVP in 1996. He ended his career in 2001 with 239 home runs and 983 RBIs.

Caminiti was the first baseball player to publicly admit to steroid use. In 2002 he admitted to using steroids for much of the latter part of his career including his 1996 MVP season.

Caminiti had problems with drugs and alcohol. He died of a drug induced heart attack in 2004.

The Card O' The Day (or every third day) - 1999 Upper Deck 450 Bobby Estallela

Here you go all. Card 'O The Day volume 2. 1999 Upper Deck #450 Bobby Estallela. I was really hoping the old number generator would spit out a card that was significant.. or better yet.. really old. Instead we have this. Lets make the best of it.



1999 Upper Deck:

Nothing too significant about this set. Just another in a long line of adequate UD base sets. This was a period where I had taken a hiatus from collecting so as to fund my excessive drinking college expenses. My firsthand knowledge of the nuance of this set is very limited. What I can tell you is that it was a two series release (as are practically all the UD base sets) and it has 525 cards in the set. If I can recall correctly you could pull an auto'd Griffey card out of series 1, which I imagine was probably a pretty big deal in 1999. (yeah, it books at $1250) The wax on these isn't readily available, but you can still find it if you look around a bit. Only one guy has the product for sale on Ebay and he's been unable to move the Hobby series 1 and 2 for $40 and $30 for about 3 weeks.

Bobby Estallela:

Good old Bobby is a 9 year big league veteran. Played catcher. Known by most as a Phillie, he also played with the Giants, Yankees, Rockes, D'Backs, and Blue Jays. Bobby doesn't appear to have ever been an every day player, having played in more than 47 games in a season only once. (106 with the Giants in 2000) His career highlight was hitting 3 home runs in a game in 1997. (3 home runs constitutes 6.25% of his career total, so.. wow!) He last played in the bigs in 2004.

Interesting trivia on Estallela: He was signed as a free agent by the Tigers in January 2004 and released three weeks later. Before spring training even started. That can't be normal.

Estallela is from Florida and his grandfather (also Bobby) played in the majors in the 1930's and 40's.

Estallela was named in the Mitchell report.. for what its worth. I can't get over the fact that there are FOUR Bobby Estallela fan clubs on Yahoo.

The Card O' The Day (or every third day) - 2002 Topps 206 Pedro 113 Pedro Astacio

A new feature to our oft ignored blog: The card o' the day. We'll use a random number generator to spit out a number.. We'll go to our giant database, enter that number, and whatever card shows up.. that'll be the card o' the day. Today the number was 117642. That gives us the 2002 Topps 206 #113 Pedro Astacio.



2002 Topps 206:

If I recall this was the first set to revive the pre-war card design and names. Every year since Topps has done something similar. The set was released in three series. Series 1 was the hot item. When this product came out it generated a lot of excitement. I remember a story about series 1. We lived in California at that time and I knew all the shop owners in the area very well. A few weeks after this product came out one of the local shops still had 4 boxes in stock and he hadn't raised the price since its release date. I do not recall the price point on the product at release but it was probably in the $65-$75 range. The price quickly shot up to $100-$110. The product had been generating a lot of noise so I bought his last four. If I didn't crack it, I could sell it on the website. Later that same day I visited another shop, and the owner asked if I knew where he could find some 206 wax. He had sold out, and really wanted to pick up a few more boxes. In that short drive I went from a shop that couldn't sell it to a shop that was desperate to find it.

As Topps does occasionally do, they killed the product. Series 2 was overproduced and watered down, and by Series 3 I had lost all interest. We still have some Series 1, and a decent amount of Series 2, but we didn't pick up a single box of series 3. By 2003 they moved on to Topps 205, which wasn't nearly as popular.

Pedro Astacio -

A 15-year MLB veteran that last played in 2006. A starting pitcher for the Dodgers and Rockies for most of his career. He hopped from the Astros, Mets, Rangers, Padres and Nationals for the last 4 or so years of his career. On the Card O' The Day he is pictured in an Astros Uniform even though he played in all of 4 games for the Astros in his career.

He came into the league like a rockstar. In 11 starts in 1992 he threw 4 shutouts. His best full season came the next year where he finished 14-9 with a 3.57 ERA. He had some decent seasons after that and finished his career with a 129-124 record. During his career he led the league three times in home runs allowed, and twice in hit batsmen. Oops.

Interesting Factoid courtesy of Wikipedia: Astacio "is an amateur Jai Lai player and has recently applied for Pakistani citizenship so he may compete in the annual National Jai Lai Championships (NJLC)."