Around the time the ESPN article about Daniel Norris came out I considered starting a player collection of his cards. This was the worst possible time to do so, as a lot of other people read that article and decided either that they wanted to collect his cards or that they could make money prospecting on his cards. I did wind up with a handful of Daniel Norris cards, including this group I purchased from sellers on Sportlots. I guess the big card in the lot was this 2012 Bowman Platinum Prospects Autograph card, featuring an on-card signature and a lot of shiny.
These are all mini cards from the Bowman line. The first two are Cream of the Crop Mini Refractors from 2013 Bowman Chrome. The one on the left is the base model and the one in the middle is the Blue parallel. On the far right is a 2014 Bowman Chrome Mini Purple Refractor.
The backs of the cards show the top 5 prospects in the organization as determined by the Bowman scouts, which probably means that the card designer does a web search for [Team Name] top prospects and copy/pastes the first list they find that seems legit. The main difference between 2013 and 2014 is that Sean Nolin came off the list and got replaced by Roberto Osuna. The Blue Jays traded away a number of prospects this year, so it will be interesting to see what the 2016 Bowman list looks like.
I grabbed a couple of 2015 Topps cards, too. On the left is the purple Toys "R" Us parallel and on the left is Norris' standard base card.
I picked up his 2012 Bowman and 2012 Bowman Chrome issues as well. The card on the right is a Blue Wave Refractor parallel from 2012 Bowman Chrome. It doesn't show up in the Sportlots order history, so I must have picked it up on eBay or something.
Closing things out are a couple of 2011 Donruss Elite Extra Edition cards. One is a solo card and the other is a Building Blocks card that Norris shares with Joseph Musgrove and Kevin Comer. And that is most of my Daniel Norris collection. I think I picked up a couple of his other cards on eBay over the last few months, but in the end I couldn't hang with the prospectors and their crazy prices.
Because he was a second rounder I know guys who've been high on him since 2011 and invested heavily into his cards, especially once his 2012 Bowman Chrome autographs came out. In the early going it was apparently a bit easier to collect him because the focus (at least as far as the Jays farms sytem was concerned) was on a three headed monster consisting of Aaron Sanchez, Noah Syndergaard and Justin Nicolino. Norris was sort of an afterthought and sort of in a second tier along with Roberto Osuna. It became tougher when the Jays started gutting their system and Norris became one of the top guys by default. And eventually he got shipped out to Detroit as one of the key guys in the David Price trade so now even more eyes are on him.
ReplyDeleteI didn't know anything about him in his earlier days. I can barely keep up with portions of the ML rosters, so the minor leagues are a vast blank spot for me until a guy gets some publicity and / or gets called up. By the time that happens it's usually too late for me to get their cards at a discount, unless they flop once they come up and I can catch them after they get sent back down.
Delete