(Greetings on the first day of Daylight Spending Time. I don't know why we're still doing this time change thing, but I'll take the extra hour of sleep. As for all of the Facebook memes about how dark it's going to be now ... I think you know, the night owl doesn't mind at all. Time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 328th in a series):
I checked to see if this "Pocket Profile" Corey Seager is listed on Trading Card Database. I couldn't find it. I suppose it's not "card enough" but it seems more card-like than some things that are listed on TCDB.
It's not like I'm looking to pad my Seager collection on there. I have plenty of his cards (277) and now that he's with the Rangers, he won't be climbing up from his No. 16 ranking among the players with the most cards in my collection.
I am happy though that his Rangers won the World Series. I haven't said anything about the Series here since it ended, mostly because, like the rest of the country, I didn't care much. The only game I got to see was the one Diamondbacks victory (thanks, MLB, for not scheduling a game on a perfectly watchable day, such as Sunday).
But, yeah, the Rangers winning was better than the D'backs for sure. Set aside my opposition to them existing, a team of that quality winning the Series is just not "good for baseball" (P.S.: I hate that phrase). Folks have mentioned the Diamondbacks' 84 wins as inferior but that doesn't bother me quite as much as them finishing 16 games behind in the regular season. The year before, the Phillies finished 14 games behind. If we're going to have wild cards, maybe put a cap on the GB total? At least the 2002 Angels were pretty close to first, even the 2014 Giants, which I will always find distasteful, were six games back.
This doesn't mean I don't like upstarts in the postseason. Just maybe MLB's made too much of a good thing.
So, Seager is my hero in that way, it's good to see the former Dodger win another and get the Rangers their first and smite the snakes. Seager has always been kind of a streaky hitter but I don't know why the Dodgers let him go, even less of an idea than Seager does. (OK, it was money). Yeah, the Dodgers had Trea Turner, but then they didn't sign him and they had Gavin Lux's season-ending spring training injury to pay them back for all of the pruning. I like that the Dodgers have a real farm system but sometimes they lean on it too much.
Topps and Panini created a lot of cards of Seager when he was a Dodger, I've lost count of how many rookie cards I have of him. For fun, I went through my TCDB inventory to see which cards of Seager that I had in which there's no scan of the card on the site.
I don't know if any one else does this but I automatically feel a little surge of pride when I see a card I own that doesn't have a TCDB scan, like it's kind of exclusive. That feeling is always followed by a pang of guilt for not scanning it in myself, which will now be following me for the rest of this post.
I counted 30 Seager cards in my collection that do not have a TCDB scan. Here are just some of them.
I don't have any of Seager's Bowman Draft cards, which I think are from around 2010-12, I will never be collecting Bowman Draft. This is among the earliest (and not scanned!) in my collection. It's the 2013 Bowman silver ice parallel.
Minor league cards of future star players are super-fun. This is from the 2015 Oklahoma City Dodgers team-issue set. This tells you that Seager still hadn't reached the majors at this point, no matter what all those Bowman cards said.
Most of Seager's 2016 cards show images in TCDB because that was the year of his rookie cards, but this one does not show up. It's from that wacked-out 2016 Topps Archives 65th Anniversary set. There were rookie variations, too, as if the set wasn't annoying enough.
I won't even say the back is a "saving grace," because this set is dumb but I liked the '75 backs on all the cards -- amusing that they're searching for a "greatest season" for Seager 27 games into his MLB career.
The majority of Seager cards I own that aren't scanned in TCDB are parallels, because who the hell has the time? These are a couple of 2017 Optic color parallels. I'll show off a few more key ones quickly.
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The 2017 Heritage Chrome card is the best of the bunch for me. I need to do more about the Heritage Chrome Dodgers in my collection (just added a Manny Ramirez about a week ago). The Gypsy Queen is one of those ridiculous "missing color plate" parallels. The bottom four are more-recent additions. Prizm calls that parallel "Cosmic Haze" because Panini is all about confusing collectors. They could have called it the "root beer parallel" and I would know exactly what it was.
Some of the 2018 Dodger Stadium 60th Anniversary Seagers are scanned but these ones are not.
I don't have a lot of Seager relics, maybe three? Seager came along after I stopped caring about relics (too bad I wasn't stopping during the Adrian Gonzalez era). These two haven't been scanned.
I'll end it with this Gypsy Queen Glassworks box-topper, which I enjoyed so much that I made an entire post about it.
This "card" really needs to be scanned so others can see its glory.
So maybe I'll do that one first -- although I'm not sure when that will happen. (Oh, the guilt).
Congrats to Seager and the Rangers -- at least the Rangers players that I enjoy, anyway. And that's more players than I enjoy on the Diamondbacks.
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