The Irony Of It All

Andrew McCutchen will be going in for surgery today. Prayers for a speedy recovery so that he may recover and be ready for next year's Opening Day.

Lots of players with torn ACL have been making headlines lately.

Alex Morgan scored 5 goals for women's Team USA versus Thailand in the World Cup.  The US Women's team completely dismantled Thailand in a 13-0 routing.  Morgan, the team's most famous player had torn her ACL several years ago.

Golden State Warriors superstars Kevin Durant and Klay Thompson both suffered injuries in games 5 and 6 of the NBA Finals. Both are expected to miss most of the 2019-20 season.  Durant confirmed he has a torn ACL.

Mike Moustakas hit a game winning homerun for the Brewers in the 14th inning versus the Astros a few days ago.  He is having a career season this year with 21 homers already and 2.4 WAR.  He had missed most of the 2016 season with a torn ACL and has had his best seasons of his career since returning.

Despite missing the past week and half, Cutch is still in second place for National League in walks.  It's doubtful he will finish in the top 10 with missing four months of the season, but that just shows how good his eye and plate discipline was prior to the injury and likely that won't change after he returns from the injury.

I received this 2019 Topps Top of the Class insert in the mail yesterday and since it is graduation weekend for most of the schools in my area, it makes sense to show off this card.

The back reveals a rather ironic name in a fact about how good Cutch has been at the top of a batting lineup since his 2009 debut.

Ian Kinsler is the only active person to score more runs than Cutch since his debut.

Of course Ian Kinsler is the player who intentionally dropped Jean Segura's pop up so that the Padres could start a double play which lead to Cutch tearing his ACL.

The Topps of the Class is a rather neat looking set if they were all horizontal like this McCutchen card.  Most of the cards I have seen from the set are vertical though and are not nearly as good looking. 

The Mystery of Dirty Dishes?

The past few days I have been organizing my card collection and it has been a daunting task.  While going through the collection I have found things about the cards I never noticed before.

Take these three printing plates for example.

At first glance they appear to be just three more 1 of 1 printing plates for the collection, but if you look closer you can tell that these plates didn't fully dry prior to being cut up and grouped together.

Now the back of magenta and black plates both show signs of a wet press of cyan ink.  The cyan plate clearly shows signs of a black plate with wet ink on it.

In addition to that there is a clear 001 that appears to the right of Andrew's face on the cyan plate.

I adjusted the color so it can be more visible.

The same numbering appears on the back of the magenta plate in stamped black ink when flipped upside down.

More mystery surrounds these plates when looking at the top right corner of the black plate where there is clearly a banner for First Base.

The black plate in general appears to have finger prints on it.

The magenta plate shows a lot of streaks on the front.

There appears to be some mystery surrounding how these plates were stacked after printing was complete to make the finalized 2012 Archives Cloth Sticker

As you can see from the image above, Cutch's face got the same treatment as that "other guy" on Frank Thomas' 1990 Topps card.  His face appears to have been airbrushed.

A Hero Answers The Call

June 12th is National Superman Day

When I think about superheroes wearing capes, I immediately think of the DC Comics characters.  Heroes such as Batman, Superman, the Spectre, Shazam!, and many more of the Justice League/Justice Society wear capes.

However, when Stan Lee was cocreating the Marvel universe he used the idea of that and flipped it upside down. Stan wanted his villains to wear the capes to rival what DC had created.  So when characters like Loki, Magneto, and Doctor Doom were being created Stan was insisting they wear capes.  Stan's Marvel Heroes didn't wear capes except Thor. 

I have always been more of a Marvel fan than DC Comics fan, but when I think of caped characters it is the heroes that stand out.  Batman, Superman, and Spawn immediately come to mind before anyone else.

Heroes wear capes...

Back of this National Treasures 1/1 card discusses Cutch's heroic act on May 29th when he wore a cape to save the city of Pittsburgh from a loss against the Snakes.

Complete recap of the walkoff can be seen in the video below.

Cutch would strut into home with a lil extra swagger

With that HR he joined Hall of Famers Willie Stargell and Ralph Kiner as the only Pirates to have 6 walk off homers in their careers.

The More You Know: Double Ear Flaps?

Do you see what Andrew is wearing in this 1/1 Uncirculated Glossy Auto?

The helmet he is sporting as a teenager playing for the Gulf Coast League Pirates has double ear flaps.

Currently, the only player I can think of that wears the double ear flaps is Jed Lowrie who enjoyed an All-Star season last year for the Oakland Athletics.

I decided to research some cards on COMC to see if I can see a trend of when the general players association stopped wearing double ear flaps.

The A's don't keep players for very long, but I thought I could use Rickey Henderson and his many stints with the A's as a foundation.

1984 Topps Highlights of the 83 season

Still only 1 flap...

1981 stickers. Still only 1 flap...
Ok, maybe we need to go back further?

What happened to most players wearing the double ear flap helmets?  I remember I had no choice but to wear the double ear flaps when I was playing in little league during the 80s and 90s.

That makes sense because while researching this, I learned that minor league players are REQUIRED to wear double ear flaps.

In 1983 it became mandatory for major league players to wear at least one ear flap unless they were grandfathered in prior to that mandate.  When Tim Raines retired in the 2003 season he became the last player to not wear ear flaps on his batting helmet.

Did you know that double ear flaps are required for all players in the minors and college ranks, but not required at the major league level?

Who likes buttons? BUTTON SHOW OFF POST

Who likes buttons?

I do.

I currently have 10 button cards of Cutch and scanned them in two lots.

5 are designed vertically

And 5 are designed horizontally

Sorry for the upside down scan of Marte dual button.  I didn't notice it until I had already begun this post.

The button cards range in rarity to /6 to 1/1s.

Here they are all individually.

Tier 1 Giants Pickups

While I didn't hit anything big in my player break I showed off a few weeks ago, I have been adding to my McCutchen collection by grabbing some more 2019 Tier One cards.

This jumbo patch appears to be part of the "22" worn on the back of the jersey.  It is numbered to only 20 copies.

I also picked up another autograph.  I think I have to be nearing 200 unique autos at this point. 

The sticker auto is on a grey jersey swatch and is limited to 30 copies.

A 1/1 Cheaper Than 2,013 copies?

It took 3 weeks for the seller to finally ship the card to me (and over a year in my possession to show off), but adding another printing plate (nearing 100 different plates) made it all worth the wait.

Now what is strange about adding this particular 1/1 printing plate was actually cheaper than adding the Gold /2013.

It has been reported that many of the 2013 Update Golds for Cutch (#US35) were destroyed in the making of the cards due to quality issues.  When they hit the open market, a single copy can sell for over $100.

It's a shame that Cutch got injured and will be out for the rest of the season.  He was almost a top 10 in the NL for WAR position players at time of injury.  On top of that he still leads the NL in base on balls despite missing the last week.