I haven't had a Josh Reddick card on here since the first of the month,
so I thought I would post one I picked up a little while ago. It's an Impact Ink autograph from 2013 Panini America's Pastime. It's a sticker auto, and you can see that the ink is smudged a bit on the 'R' in Reddick, but the asking price was pretty low. It is serially-numbered # 16 / 25, which makes it a "RARE EBAY 1 / 1 PLAYER'S JERSEY NUMBER!!!" card. It's got some decent beard action on it, and since the player picture is tiny and in black-and-white you can hardly notice that there are no MLB logos on it. I guess I am somewhat moving away from my no-Panini bias, as there are a lot of cards out there and they offer something a little different from what Topps churns out. I still wish the major sports leagues would open things up and issue licenses to multiple companies. I think it would open up innovation to have card companies compete on an even level in each sport.
Reddick played in about 2/3 of the A's games this year, and I was surprised to see that he managed 3.5 WAR (Wins Above Replacement) this season. I guess it felt to me like he had kind of a down year, but the numbers seem to say otherwise. He did have a few highlights this year, including some wall-climbing catches and the memorable use of Careless Whisper as his walk-up music for a few games early in the season. The five home runs mentioned on the back of this card would make up nearly half of his homers for the season, as he finished 2013 with twelve.
I think the WAR measurement likes his defense.
ReplyDeleteThat is true. I like his defense, too. I've read that the various stat-heads are really having a hard time getting a defensive metric that works in a way that everyone can feel good about. I guess they feel like the offensive numbers are pretty dialed-in for the most part, but defensively the numbers they come up with don't 'feel' right for a given player.
Delete