Free Agent Jigsaw: Clayton Kershaw

Clayton Kershaw didn't give me much time to debut my off-season segment by agreeing to an extra year extension on his two year contract rather than opting out and becoming a free agent.

Over the course of this off-season I would like to look at some of the marquee free agents out there and discuss possible landing spots for them.  I will also show off some cardboard that features Cutch with the pending free agents.  That list includes Bryce Harper, Manny Machado, Josh Donaldson, Adam Jones, among others.

I will also hold a contest to guess where Cutch will land this off-season. Details will be up Monday.

Since the 3 time Cy Young winner and 7 time All-Star is off the market lets look at a handful of cards I have with Kershaw and Cutch.

These 2014 Elite Face2Face inserts are a really cool insert set that I wish Topps would use the concept of in one of their many products.

The concept is to take two elite players in the game to determine how they face off against each other.

Think about how cool it would be for fans young and old to look at the stars and how they do against each other.  Mix in a few parallels and you could have a very collectible insert set and a player collector's dream/nightmare.

Sale vs. Judge
Verlander vs. Trout
deGrom vs. Harper
Otani vs. ANY pitcher or hitter they choose
Syndergaard vs. Yelich
Chapman vs. Betts
Kimbrel vs. Stanton
Kershaw vs. Goldschmidt

And the list goes on and on...

I also have a boxtopper featuring Cutch and Kershaw from Topps Heritage 2015.

These Heritage box toppers are always fun to add to the collection as it offers me the opportunity to get a card of a player I normally wouldn't collect.

The final pair of Cutch and Kershaw cards comes from Immaculate and feature some of the best players in the game.

Travel back to 2015 and you won't find any bigger names following the 2014 season than Mike Trout, Cutch, Giancarlo Stanton, and Clayton Kershaw.  That is because the National League MVP voting was Kershaw, Stanton, McCutchen in that order and all three players posted WAR over 7.0 each.

On the American League side, Trout won his first MVP award in 2014.

The limited to 49 copies has a patch version numbered to 10 copies, but I have only seen 1 copy appear in 3 year's.

SAVING ..
THE...
BEST....
FOR.....
LAST......

If this card was a booklet, it would probably rank near the top 10 for my favorite Cutch cards featuring other players.  Unfortunately because of how thick it is and the fact that I can't show off Cutch/Trout/Stanton/Tulo at the same time as Kershaw/Posey/Abreau/Cano/Cabrera it loses some of it's luster.  Just some though.

As this card is