A Miniature Red Singleton

I am looking forward to playoff baseball, but along with that anticipation comes the fear of the Astros' inevitable collapse. Only one fan base out of ten will be happy at the end of it all, and there are a lot of dangerous teams in the way of a Houston World Series win.

One player who won't be a part of it, win or lose, is Jon Singleton. He spent 2017 down at AA, and hasn't had an MLB at-bat since 2015. He was among the team leaders for the Corpus Christi Hooks in Runs, Home Runs, and Runs Batted In, but probably didn't do enough to earn a promotion to AAA, let alone the big-league club. He could be a replacement-level guy on a weaker roster, but there's not any room for him on the Astros after several other corner-infield/DH-type guys leapfrogged him.

I still keep plugging away at my Singleton player collection. This card comes from the 2014 Bowman Chrome Mini factory set. Each factory set came with 30 parallels of various colors, with these Red Refractors being limited to 5 copies apiece. My Singleton card is # 2 / 5.

A Cracked Bat Contest - Where the Last Shall Be First

In case you haven't seen all the other posts about this contest, Julie over at A Cracked Bat: Baseball Cards and a Hot Dog is running a contest to celebrate the blog's 100th post. The prize is a 400-count box of cards that are not junk, and it will be sent to the person who appears last on her randomized list of entrants. To find out how to get an entry for yourself, click her blog title above.

Back in April, I picked up this Yellow Printing Plate from 2014 Bowman Chrome Mini for my Jon Singleton player collection. It's cool to add a 1 / 1 to my collection, even if it is a fairly ugly card piece of metal with a sticker on the back.

Singleton is playing all right down at AA this year, but it's usually not a great sign for your career trajectory if you go from MLB to AAA to AA instead of the other way around. His batting average isn't that pretty, but his counting stats are on a pretty good pace and he draws enough walks that his on-base percentage is higher than you would expect.

Just a Little Bit of Baseball

My eldest son just started in Cub Scouts this year, and one of the big annual events is the Pinewood Derby, where dads compete to build the best race car out of a block of wood and then all pretend like the Cub Scouts did most of the work. I thought that our Derby was next month, but last night I learned that it was today. So I had my son pick a pattern and draw the outline on the side of the wood block. I then cut out a rough approximation of that shape and did some sanding and reading, and at about midnight I spray painted a base coat on the car. He had a dentist appointment today, and after that he finished up the painting. After I got home from work, I had about an hour to get the weight up to the maximum (5 oz.) and put the wheels on. I drilled holes in the front of the car, then realized that I was drilling the wrong side. I determined that those holes were for weight reduction, as a successful car is usually heavier in the back. Then I drilled more holes in the back, and stacked pennies in them until the car weighed enough. I barely had enough time to pound the axles into the car body before it was time to leave. I just hoped that the car would be able to make all of the runs down the track with all of the parts intact.

There were about a dozen cars in the competition, with a four-lane track. The boys all rotated through a few times, with each kid participating in 12 races (I think, it could have been 10). My son's car never placed first in a race, but he got a lot of 2nd-place finishes, along with a few 3rd-place runs. When they announced the Top 4 cars that would compete in the finals, I was surprised to hear his name called. After each boy in the Top 4 raced once in each lane, he came in 4th overall. I thought it was a pretty good finish for a car that was built in less than 24 hours. I didn't have time to sand and polish the axles, align the wheels, balance the weights, or otherwise optimize the car. He also had a good time and expressed a lot of excitement about being a Scout, which is pretty good.

This Jon Singleton card is an Orange Refractor from 2014 Bowman Chrome Mini. This product was released as a factory set, with a certain number of randomly-inserted Refractors in each box. The Orange Refractors are pretty limited, with this being # 09 / 10 in the print run.

Singleton was sent down from Spring Training to minor league camp a couple of days ago. I doubt he'll be called back up during the year, barring some kind of catastrophe or him going on an epic tear at AAA. I think the Astros' plan at 1B is to have Yulieski Gurriel learn the position. I guess we'll see how it goes.

A Few Jo(h)n Singleton Cards

I grabbed up a few nice Jon Singleton cards over the last few months. This first one is a quad relic card from 2015 Topps Museum Collection. There are nicer examples of this card out there that feature a little color on the memorabilia swatches, but they don't come as cheaply as this one did. This one is numbered # 45 / 75.

The back of the card keeps with the quad theme by mentioning four of Singleton's qualities. Most of them center around his ability to hit for power, although he does get a mention for improving his plate discipline. It would be hard to do anything but improve when it comes to that, though.

Here is an earlier Singleton card from his time in the Phillies organization. This card has him listed as John instead of Jon, which I guess can be a problem when you have a name with multiple potential spellings. It was probably too much work for whoever designed 2010 Bowman Sterling to look him up on Baseball-Reference or something and grab the right spelling. Anyway, this is a Gold parallel and it's numbered # 28 / 50. I wonder if the reference to his enjoyment of the laid-back West Coast lifestyle is a backhanded way of saying he has trouble passing drug tests? I guess his first positive test was in 2012, so maybe the marijuana habit wasn't common knowledge when this card was made. It seems like he's been making progress on his rehabilitation, so I shouldn't talk crap about it. Addiction is a heck of a thing to struggle with.

The final card in this bunch is from 2014 Bowman Chrome Mini. It's a Yellow Refractor and is numbered # 01 / 25. It also features a nice photo of Singleton in an Astros throwback uniform. The only problem is that I think this photo has been used in a few different sets. I could just be thinking of parallels, though. Who even knows anymore? (I wasn't wrong. This image was used on his 2015 Gypsy Queen relics, and maybe some others, too).