2014 Topps Finest 51-60

Way back in August of 2014 I started posting about the 2014 Topps Finest baseball set, working through the checklist in groups of ten. I got four posts done between August and October 2014, then skipped over a year and posted about cards 41-50 in early 2016. I still have the scans in my folder, but I just never make the time to get them cropped and loaded into the blog. At this point, a base set from 2014 is maybe not the most exciting thing in the world. It feels weird to leave it incomplete, though, so I've got another couple of posts queued up. Today, I talk about cards 51-60. Today's post is pretty heavy on the AL East and recently-retired greats.

Taijuan Walker spent a couple of years being touted as a breakout candidate in Seattle, but never really got going there. He showed flashes, but they traded him to Arizona this year in a deal that included Jean Segura going the other way. He was doing pretty well for them, with an ERA about a run lower than he'd produced the last two years in Seattle, but recently landed on the DL with a blister.

Christian Bethancourt's story has become kind of interesting recently. He hadn't found much success with his bat over a couple of seasons with the Braves and Padres, so he is currently working on converting himself into a bullpen pitcher. He has struggled so far in the role, but I guess that's to be expected.

Here is a guy with plenty of controversy lately, as he continues to flip his bat and jaw with other teams. After a down 2016, Jose Bautista started off pretty slowly for 2017. He's turned things up a bit lately, though, so maybe he hasn't fallen all the way off the cliff in his age-36 season.

Although he retired at the end of 2014, Jeter still appears in the news so much that it's like he never left. The Yankees just recently retired his number, blocking any future Yankees from wearing any single-digit numbers on their jerseys. He'll probably waltz into the Hall of Fame when he's eligible, so he should remain prominent in the news cycle for a while still.

David Ortiz is another recently-retired player in the Hall of Fame discussion. If he does struggle to get in, it will probably be due to PED issues and the amount of time he spent playing at DH rather than in the field. I think he's popular enough that he gets in at some point.

Manny Machado is a guy I targeted in most of my fantasy baseball drafts this year. I didn't land him in any leagues, though. He's struggled (by first-round fantasy draft standards) this year so far, but he's still no slouch. His 162-game pace according to Baseball Reference is still 87 runs, 40 home runs, 95 RBI, and 8 stolen bases.

Felix Hernandez has been the ace for the Mariners for about as long as I can remember, but last year he started to regress a bit in his age-30 season. This year he made five starts, with his last start on April 25th ending after two innings with a shoulder injury and a DL stint. He might be back in June. I wonder if he'll return to his 'King Felix' form?

Adam Jones has been his usual consistent self this season, doing a little bit of everything. I used to pick him up in fantasy baseball nearly every year, but I didn't get him on any of my four teams this season. He has a reputation as being underrated, and it's come full circle so that now he's so underrated that he's overrated.

I picked up Schoop in a couple of my leagues, hoping for some power out of my 2B slot. He delivered in April, with 5 home runs and a good average. That has all disappeared in May, as he hasn't hit a home run this month and has only generated 2 RBI. Hopefully he can get back on track going into June.

Joe Mauer has been okay this year, although you definitely want some more production out of your 1B spot. When it comes to 1B-eligible players in fantasy, he barely cracks the top 50. His glory days are well behind him.

And that's another 10 cards knocked off the checklist of 2014 Topps Finest. It's still a cool-looking set, with all those crazy colors, but I'll be happy when I post the last ten cards and close out this series. At my current pace, I should be able to finish it in 2021. I'm going to dig deep and try to get it done by the end of this year, though.

2014 Topps Finest 41-50

Here's a set I haven't looked at in a while. My last post about 2014 Topps Finest covered cards 31-40 in the checklist and went up on my blog in October 2014. Let's see who Topps put on the checklist for cards 41-50 in this colorful set.

First up is Jason Heyward, who spent 2015 with the Cardinals and goes into 2016 as a member of the super-hyped Chicago Cubs. I know he's a good player, but he played in Atlanta and St. Louis, which are two teams that don't pop up on my radar that much. He also gets a lot of his value from his defense, so I haven't had him on many fantasy baseball rosters. Chicks (and fantasy baseball players) dig the long ball.

Michael Wacha is a decent pitcher. Again, though, he's not been much of a factor on my fantasy baseball teams and I don't follow the Cardinals too closely, so I don't pay much attention to him. Sorry, NL fans, but I am just not that big on your teams. I guess that seems a little silly, as my Astros were members of the NL Central from 1994-2012, but I wasn't paying particularly close attention to baseball until 2013. I watched the standings for the Astros and played fantasy baseball, but never really followed or watched much of it at all until getting back into collecting in 2013 and realizing that basketball wasn't really my thing anymore and football cards weren't keeping my interest.

The only Major League Baseball game I ever attended was a Cincinnati Reds game where they hosted the Houston Astros, probably in the late 80's or early 90's. I remember very little from that experience outside of a couple fragments of sitting in the stands with my dad and my grandpa. I could probably narrow down the dates a bit if I dug into old letters and stuff, but I'm not going to do that right now. The Reds and Pirates are probably the two NL teams I follow most closely.

I don't know anything really about Josmil Pinto. It looks like he was waived by the Twins, picked up by the Padres, waived by them, and now he is with the Brewers. I don't think he will be much of a factor with them.

Freeman is looking at another good year on a bad team. It's weird to think of the Braves as a bad team, because they spent so many of my formative years being very good. The main thing they have going for them in their Division is that they are not the Phillies.

Speaking of the Phillies, here's a retired guy who spent some time in Philadelphia. He won a Cy Young award with the Indians, but he had a couple of All-Star appearances and made $82.5 million with Philadelphia.

Jacoby Ellsbury jumped ship from Boston to New York in exchange for wheelbarrows full of money. His numbers have been all right with the Yankees, but health has been a factor for him. He got hit by a pitch today, but appears to have escaped without major damage to his wrist.

Bryce Harper is one side of baseball's current big-issue Civil War, whether hitters should be demonstrative after big hits or put their heads down and be all about business as they round the bases. Harper is in favor of bringing more emotion and flair to the game of baseball, while his AL counterpart, Mike Trout, believes that hitters should be more about the unwritten rules of the game. When asked about the controversy, famed reliever Goose Gossage said, "*%$& these young @#$%#* who want to $%*# this venerated game with their disrespectful %$$*(#!" Anyway, Harper is good at baseballing and I personally think that batters should be allowed to show a little flair as long as they are backing it up with their play. If the pitchers can fist pump and dance around after every strikeout, the batters should be able to flaunt it a bit when they knock the ball into the seats.

Things are picking up in this batch of cards, as young ace Gerrit Cole is the next card in the checklist. He is looking to follow up on the huge success of last year, and the Pirates will need his best as they are playing in one of the toughest Divisions in baseball, with the Cubs and Cardinals also looking to win it all this year.

Here's another guy who is more likely to be demonstrative on the field than not. Yasiel Puig was pretty huge when he hit the league, but spotty play and questionable attitude have him needing to come up with some kind of rebound in his play and some fence-mending in the locker room.

There are another ten cards from the 2014 Topps Finest checklist. I guess this kind of stuff has long fallen out of the hobby news cycle, but I feel compelled to at least try to finish this series. I wouldn't want some future reader to show up on my blog, read about the first 40 cards, and then be left hanging as to what else is in the set.

2014 Topps Finest 31-40

I have kind of slowed down on the set review posts for 2014 Finest and 2013 SEGA Card-Gen. Each post takes a lot of time to write and it seems like I don't make the time for long-form posts much anymore. Here are the next ten cards in the Finest base set, starting with Marcus Semien, a 2B prospect with the White Sox. I don't know much about this guy aside from what I learned doing a quick Google search on him a few minutes ago. It looks like he is one of three guys expected to compete for the White Sox' starting second base spot next year. He's also the guy who shows up in card packs and disappoints you, as you see the White Sox logo and think, "Yes! Jose Abreu!" and then the card turns out to be this Semien guy. He is probably a pretty good player, but his cards aren't instant money like Abreu's are (at the moment). Time will tell if Abreu's cards keep their value, but I would be selling now if I had any spare Abreu cards that were worth a darn.

Here's another guy who I don't know much about, John Ryan 'Don't Call Me J.R.' Murphy. He's had a couple of stretches with the Yankees and apparently projects to be a decent backup catcher somewhere. Judging by this picture, his bat flip skills need some work.

Kinsler was acquired by the Tigers in exchange for Prince Fielder, and had a much better year than Fielder, who was ineffective or out altogether for most of the season with a neck injury. Kinsler made the All-Star team, keeping his every-other-year pattern going.

Romero pitched one game for the Rays in 2013. He is apparently a highly-rated prospect who can throw the ball really hard but has difficulty controlling where exactly it goes. Maybe he will make it back up to the big club and maybe he will be traded away.

Now this is a bat flip you can appreciate. It's got the height and the rotation you're looking for if you really want to make the pitcher and catcher mad at you. Myers went to Tampa Bay in the trade that brought James Shields and Wade Davis to the Royals. He had a pretty good 2013, winning the Rookie of the Year award, but his 2014 kind of stunk. He's got plenty of time to get back on track, though, after his sophomore slump. But right now Kansas City has got to feel pretty good about the trade, as Shields and Davis are key component on that team. Davis was a big help in fantasy baseball this season, too. I had him in a few leagues, and his huge strikeout numbers and awesome ratios really boosted my pitching. 

This rookie-heavy post is killing me. I barely know most of the veterans, and while most of the rookie and prospect names are familiar, I don't know their stories or own them on any fantasy teams. I know just about nothing about C.J. Cron.

Normally I wouldn't have anything to say about Braun, but I'll make an exception this one time. I've been playing through a GM career in Out of the Park 15. I have the game set up so that it chooses random players from MLB history to include in each draft, and they have somewhat random careers, although it does seem like the bigger stars from real baseball history wind up being the big stars in the fake game. Maybe I have a box checked somewhere that causes this to happen instead of completely random results.

Anyway, Braun was a key component in my Houston Astros MLB Championship teams in 2018 and 2022, with only Rogers Hornsby outclassing him as a batter. The 2018 Championship really came on the back of a solid pitching staff, but Braun played in 129 games, batting .310 and netting 88 runs, 30 home runs, 96 runs batted in, and 11 stolen bases.

The 2022 Championship overcame average pitching with plenty of offense, with Braun playing in 156 games with a .280 batting average, netting 106 runs, 45 home runs, 119 runs batted in, and 22 steals. Then all of my veterans got old and their contracts all ballooned and my team went back to being somewhat mediocre for a couple of years. Then I got fired, even though I had assembled the consensus #1 minor league system in baseball. Now I am GM of the pretend Oakland Athletics, trying to overcome a team that was in a similar situation to the one I left, without the benefit of a stable full of decent prospects. I guess in the end all I am doing is entertaining myself with a colorful spreadsheet, but I can't help getting optimistic each season and hoping that my trades and draft picks pan out.

Yu Darvish started out pretty well in 2014, but shut down in August about 10 games short of a full complement due to an arm injury. The rumor is that he might be able to start throwing again in December.

George Springer is one of the Astros' hot young players. He played about a half-season's worth of games for them in 2014, shutting it down early due to a quad strain incurred in July that never really went away. He still managed to hit 20 home runs during the games he was able to play, and hopefully will be able to come back in 2015 ready to do some damage.

Closing things out for this post is another young player I don't know much about. He played a good portion of 2014 with the Rangers and put up pretty average stats. He's still young, though, so there is time for him to improve.

And that's it for this post. I like the Finest set, although I think that Topps could have zoomed out some of the photos or cropped in on dugout shots or something for some close-ups. As the pictures stand, it seems like the players are a bit crowded inside the border of the card. I guess you can give points for consistency across the set, as all the cards seem to fit a certain photographic style, but I wish the players had a little more breathing room at the edges of the photos.