Another Addition to the Jamie Moyer PC

Just a one-card post today, as I am tired and have to get up extra early tomorrow. We've had a bunch of snow over the last little bit, like much of the US, and I've mostly been working from home during the storms. My wife's car can't make it up the lane in it's current state, so that means I have to get up early to get her and the kids to school (she works as a teacher in the school our kids attend). Today a neighbor, the UPS truck, and the Amazon driver all got stuck on the hill that serves as the driveway for our neighborhood. My truck got up and down it okay with snow tires and 4WD, but it's pretty sketchy. I guess things could be worse, but I'd prefer for the snow and cold to move along.

I mentioned a few days ago that I had sought out a few rarer cards for my Jamie Moyer player collection. This time I snagged an autograph from 2005 Donruss Diamond Kings. I assume it's the Bronze variation based on a cursory look at the Trading Card Database, but there are so many variations with different serial numbers that it would be difficult for me to know for sure. Either way, this one is limited to 50 copies. It's not in great condition and I definitely overpaid for it, but now I have an autograph for the Jamie Moyer PC. I'm not looking to get all of his cards, but I'd like to have a few nice ones in the collection. This one fits the bill as far as I'm concerned.

 

A Numbered Card for the Moyer PC

I figure if I'm going to attract sports card blog readers to my blog again, I should post some stuff featuring more conventional stick-and-ball sports. I've been feeling a little rudderless when it comes to those sports, though, and haven't been buying much in the way of sportsball cards. My focus has been elsewhere, with a lot of wrestling and racing cards in the mix. A lot of my budget and focus has also gone toward hunting and camping gear, as I've been chasing elk and antelope with my coworkers, and in October my dad and I traveled to Kazakhstan to hunt Ibex together. But I still gather the occasional baseball or basketball card to add to my collection.

One player I started a collection for is retired pitcher Jamie Moyer, mostly through a large lot of cards bought on eBay in 2014. A week or so ago I got a wild hair and decided to see what Moyer had in the way of rarer stuff, like parallels and autographs. His career mostly straddled the junk wax era, so I wasn't sure if I'd find anything like that for him. There wasn't a lot available, but I did turn up this 2005 Donruss Elite Turn of the Century parallel, numbered # / 750.

The back of this card discusses Moyer's chase for 200 wins. He would eventually end his career with 269 wins, good for 35th all-time. There aren't a lot of active pitchers on pace to reach that mark, with the closest being Justin Verlander at 257. Gerrit Cole could get there with just over 8 more 15-win seasons. Most other guys are too old or don't have enough wins to get there.

 

Here's a picture of me and my dad in Kazakhstan with our hunting guides. It was a pretty wild trip to a remote area of the world. I'm glad I had the opportunity to go.

What eBay Hath Wrought 121: Pitching Face in HD - 2014 Stadium Club Gio Gonzalez Members Only

I was hanging around the Blowout card forums looking at box and case break results and I found a thread containing discussion about the new iteration of Stadium Club. There were forum users there using the pack odds for numbered inserts to determine how many copies of the unnumbered inserts were packed out.

The consensus was that for the Members Only parallel, which is inserted at about 1 per case, there are probably only around 8 copies of each card. I find that a little bit fascinating for some reason, so I set out to see if I could acquire a few of them on the cheap. The little foil stamp is unobtrusive and these are the kind of thing that could easily slip through the nets of some eBay shoppers. Some of the more popular players' cards are priced with Buy It Now or bidding wars that are worthy of the low print run. But others that end at odd times or are not well-described can fall through the cracks. This Gio Gonzalez card was one of them. I got it for just a couple of dollars, and although it is not serially-numbered, it is a very rare card. It also features a big dose of pitching face, the unfortunate side effect of throwing a ball really hard.

The back of the card has something that may be even worse than pitching face, as Gio looks like he is bound and determined to love somebody, a process that may be less romantic than it sounds. Maybe you could just say he looks focused or serious, but I think there is more to it than that. The numbers in the stat line don't quite match the numbers in the blurb, but the blurb-writer is only counting his full seasons from 2010 to 2013, not the 30 games he appeared in during 2008 and 2009. In 2014 he would post an ERA of 3.57, although his FIP would actually drop to 3.02 and his WHIP would drop as well, suggesting that his pitching actually improved from 2013 to 2014 but the supporting cast had trouble fielding the balls that were hit into play.

I am not too worried about the resale value on these Members Only cards that I've been picking up cheap, but in chasing Hakeem Olajuwon basketball cards from the 90's I am finding that the box or case hits from that era are pulling huge money on eBay because you just can't find them. The player collectors with money in their pockets are looking for cards that may not be serially-numbered but had low print runs, and they are willing to part with big dollars to fill those holes in their collections. Between low print runs and the attrition of time, you may only get one or two shots at a card before it's gone for good, locked up in some other person's collection.

I sometimes feel a little bad when a card falls to me for much less than I think it should, but I guess that's part of buying and selling on the open market. Most of the good deals I get are on things that aren't described well or that end during odd hours, like in the middle of the night or in the early morning. When selling cards I end my auctions at certain times and format the pictures and descriptions to match the research I've done on auction optimization. It usually works out pretty well for me, as long as I don't have to struggle with a non-paying bidder or something. In spite of getting hosed a bit on the price of this card, the seller included a couple of extras for padding. I was pretty happy to see that one of them is a player collection hit, with Jamie Moyer making an appearance in a Bowman card I didn't have yet.

For completeness I scanned the backs of the throw-ins, even though I don't have much to say about them. It's an interesting format for the stat blocks, although I think it takes a little too much concentration to try to read them. The word seems to be getting out about the Members Only cards, so my little run of cheap cards will soon be at an end. It was a lot of fun while it lasted, though.

What eBay Hath Wrought 113: Jamie Moyer Instant Player Collection

One way I've been entertaining myself lately is picking up 'instant' player collections on the cheap from eBay. They are usually just bulk lots of base cards featuring the non-star players who intrigue me. One of those guys is Jamie Moyer, who pitched at a pretty good level from age 23 to age 49, getting his first and only All-Star berth at age 40 with Seattle and winning a World Series ring at age 45 with Philadelphia. Topps should do one of those Through the Years Wall Art things everyone's talking about for Moyer. Actually, the one I really want is one for Mario Mendoza. I would 100% for real buy that one.

I snagged a lot of around 75 Jamie Moyer cards for pennies per card. There is nothing really spectacular in this lot, but I wan't really expecting that. I just wanted to kick-start a player collection I'd been thinking about for a while, but hadn't taken any action on. There are some gems in here, though.

First up are some nice junk-wax era cards of various designs. I don't have much to say about this, but you can see he wears his pant-legs in the proper old-school style. This is a trend that would continue throughout his career, as we will see.

Moyer got a couple of cards in each of these sets for 1989, with cards noting his move to the Rangers. That first Upper Deck picture isn't very flattering. And that second Topps card is interesting to me for some reason. I think it has to do with the placement of the ball in his glove. I know he's probably pinching the back of it with his hand, but the optical illusion is that it's just kind of hanging there.

I've already mentioned that some of the 2014 Topps Finest cards look like Fruit Roll-Ups. With '89 Donruss we add another set to the Fruit Roll-Up list. Moyer looks pretty perplexed on his card. He's like, "What the heck is a Fruit Roll-Up?" Just kidding. He and his wife have got 8 kids, so he probably knows exactly what a Fruit Roll-Up is. Of course, he may not have had any kids this early in his career, so maybe he didn't know what a Fruit Roll-Up was when this photo was taken.

It seems that I don't have much to say about 1990. There have been a lot of cards from this particular year in my collection over time, but I don't have any insight to offer.

The 1991 Upper Deck card with Moyer lounging in a chair is pretty good. Upper Deck and the sub-brand Collector's Choice always seemed to have good photos. I thought is was interesting that the Stadium Club and Score cards almost look like continuations of the same pitch, and the Fleer and Topps cards have almost exactly the same photo chosen, although the pictures were obviously from different games.

There is a gap in the action as Moyer spent 1992 in Detroit's minor league system. He resurfaced with the Orioles in 1993, and started getting baseball cards again. I know the little position indicator guy has been done on cards before, but I like it when it pops up. Did I already mention that I really liked the Collector's Choice brand? Moyer gets another cool lounging photo on the card from Score.

I bought a lot of 1993-94 Topps Basketball cards, which were basically the same design as 1994 Topps Baseball, with the exception that the sharp angle on the bottom of the baseball design was a curved line on the basketball set.

Somehow Fleer managed to fit three or four different pictures of players on each card, distributed between front and back, while these days Topps struggles just to find one different image per card.

Do you think Jamie was going for the high five in that picture, got denied, and then tried to play it off as a wave? If so, then he was Tom Brady before Tom Brady was Tom Brady.

This group of cards has one of my favorite photos of the lot, with the Score card featuring what must have been a castoff photo from a shoot for the Studio brand. That's a glamour shot fit for a king, or at least for Uncle Rico.

I like to see athletes showing proper respect during the National Anthem. An easy way for an athlete to lose me as a fan is to not show some respect for the Anthem. Maybe this reaction leads me to unfairly judge athletes who aren't originally from America, but when I am watching a game and have that gut reaction to a player I don't usually go and research their home of origin. Moyer is showing good form here.

The Aurora card is kind of interesting. With that little starburst halo around Moyer's headshot, it looks like he is being venerated as a Saint or something. I know he's a pretty religious dude (because Wikipedia), but I don't know that he considers himself devout enough to emanate light.

Again with the lounging shots. This appears to be another Studio castoff. The photographer was like, "Okay, now let's get a spontaneous lying down shot! Good! Good! Now raise that left arm a bit and show a little midriff! Excellent! That hot stuff! You're a manimal! Flex those arms and give us a casual smile!"

Not much to see here. This dude has got a pretty consistent pitching motion. I keep having to bounce back and forth between card groups because I think there is a reused photo, but usually it is pretty obvious that the photos aren't from the same day or even the same year. The Skybox Thunder backdrop is hideous.

Horizontal cards always present a problem when trying to compose good scans.

Here we are exposed to Jamie Moyer's man-butt from a couple of different angles. One of my blog posts gets an unreasonable number of hits compared to all of my other posts, and I think it's because the word man-butt is included in the text. I am going to try it again and see if this post also gets an inordinate number of page views.

In addition to being a rare shot of Moyer at the plate, the Topps Total card features Moyer's first name spelled as Jaime and not Jamie. It's okay, Topps, Moyer's only been in the league for like 500 years. You can't be expected to know everybody player's name, not even in a set called Total.

And here is the end of the lot, with a few cards featuring Moyer as a Phillie. I guess the most notable thing in this bunch is Moyer's hint of UPF (Ugly Pitching Face) on the Upper Deck card. Maybe he is trying to do a Popeye impression while pitching as part of a dare from his teammates. Gugguguguguh! I yam what I yam!