Ten of My Favorite Dickeys

We are in the last few days of a contest over at the Collecting Cutch blog. The method of entry for the contest is to post your ten favorite cards of your favorite player. The prizes on offer are pretty epic, so if you haven't posted an entry yet, I would suggest doing so by the deadline of May 30th. I have a couple of decent-sized player collections, but I decided to go with R.A. Dickey for this post. He was the first guy I started collecting heavily when I got back into collecting in 2013. These are ten of my favorite cards from my Dickey collection. They are posted roughly in ascending order of favoritism, but don't hold me to that.

This card gets pushed to the bottom of the list because Panini doesn't get to put logos on their MLB cards, so Dickey looks like he's wearing pajamas or a prison uniform. It gets on the list because it has a small print run, and more importantly, because it's an on-card signature that allowed room for Dickey to let loose with the marker. Most of my R.A. Dickey autographs are on stickers, and they look constricted. This one is from 2014 Panini Immaculate Collection.

I like this Red Ice parallel from 2014 Bowman. It's shiny and the # 12 / 25 serial number makes it a Christmas card! In 2013 and 2014 I tried very hard to build as many parallel rainbows as I could for my favorite players, and 2014 Bowman was one that I tried for Dickey. I think I got most of the easier variations, but no 1 / 1's or anything that epic.

This Prime Patch Red parallel from 2013 Topps Tribute World Baseball Classic Edition is a nice-looking card that features Dickey in his USA uniform. It's numbered # 07 / 10 and the text on the back actually asserts that the relic piece comes from a uniform worn during the 2013 WBC tournament. 

This Acclaimed Autographs Silver Ink card from 2014 Topps Tier One makes the list for many of the same reasons the Panini card up at the top does, but it gets a higher ranking because it has logos and because the metallic ink on a dark background looks so good.

This card makes the list because I chased it for a long time. It's a photo variation card from 2013 Topps Opening Day. The photo variations in this set were pretty hard to get, with odds putting them at 1:617 packs, or about 1 per 17 boxes. The photo variations in this opening day set featured one of two themes, playoff celebrations or press conferences. This was a press conference photo, when Dickey joined the Blue Jays in a trade.

This All-Star Workout Jersey relic comes from 2012 Topps Update, and features a swatch from Dickey's only All-Star appearance. I think this was a card that I found pretty hard to track down, and I was happy to have a Dickey relic from the event. It would be nice if he could get back to the All-Star game, but that ship has probably sailed unless the knuckleball magic comes back.

This is another card that I had a heck of a time tracking down. This is the most recent card on the list, as well, as after 2014 the card manufacturers moved on from Dickey for the most part. This is a Postseason Performance relic card from 2016 Topps Series 1. The funny thing is that Topps doesn't certify that the relic swatch actually came from the postseason, so it could be from anything. The 2015 postseason was Dickey's only playoff appearance to date, and his performance in the ALDS was really good, while his performance in the ALCS was really bad. Either way, this card was a bugger to get, and I was happy when I finally got a copy. This one is numbered # 066 / 100. 

The last three cards on my list come from one of my favorite card products, SEGA Card-Gen. These cards were produced as part of an arcade game in Japan, so they have star ratings and video game stats on the backs. I have the 2012 and 2013 base cards, and down at the bottom there is arguably my favorite Dickey card of all time, the 2013 SEGA Card-Gen Foil Rare. Not only is it a hard-to-find card of a favorite player, I was only able to obtain it through the help of another blogger. I knew the card existed, but I hadn't been able to track down a copy at all. Zippy Zappy eventually located it and pointed me in the direction of the seller. I don't know if I have a grail card anymore, but for a long time this was that card for me.

Bonus Card - This isn't a Dickey card exactly, as David Wright's name in on the front and back, but it's a photo variation from 2012 Topps Update that features Dickey and Wright as teammates on the NL All-Star team. It wasn't nearly as hard to track down as the Opening Day photo variation listed above, but I like the picture on it and I had to get a copy of it for my Dickey collection.

It was a lot of fun going back through my R.A. Dickey collection and trying to whittle it down to ten of my favorite cards. There are a couple of others I have that might have made the list due to scarcity or cool factor, but I think I selected the ones that are most exciting to me at the moment. There were even a few that I had forgotten about. Sometimes we get so focused on tracking down the next thing for our collections that we forget to enjoy the cards we already have.

Thanks for running this contest, Collecting Cutch! It was a good excuse to look through a player collection that's been neglected for a little while.