#12 - A.J. Pierzynski

What’s that Turtle doin’? Here we have one of my favorite cards in the entire set. If I can someday get around to a Base Set's Top 40 Baseball Card Countdown just for the 2013 set say by the year 2029 or so, this card will finish very high indeed.

Even though there is very little mystery or action to discern here. Pierzynski is simply posing for a photographer, probably in what appears to be a voluminous part of what was then called U.S. Cellular Field and is now called Guaranteed Rate Field. I would think he is standing closer to the short wall at the edge of the field than he is to the actual on-deck circle.

And this is a classic baseball card image, with a lineage going back through decades of baseball cards. I would expect that anyone reading this blog is familiar with such. If not, please go out and purchase a random lot of 500 mixed beat-up 60s - 80s Topps commons and start over with the Sea Turtles later on.

But I can hear the complaints coming in through my computer screen already - "I hate all that advertising." "I hate corporate ball-park names!"  I'm with you on that 2nd one; only as pitiful a name as 'Guaranteed Rate' could make you miss saying something like 'out at the ole Cellular today...'

Advertising has been part of baseball pretty much from the beginning, or at least the beginnings of the players being paid. Money to support the whole thing has to come from somewhere, and even 19th century club owners would not turn down a revenue stream just for the sake of some non-commercial purity ethos.

And of course, the very first baseball cards were actually tiny advertisements.

But the ads were largely kept off of the fronts of the cards for a very long time. The first one I could find on a card, admittedly without an exhaustive search, was a 1950 Bowman issue, here cribbed from my collecting projects partner COMC:

I think because of a card from the year 2013, I will some day purchase my first card from the year 1950.

Now to be sure, ads you can't quite connect to a specific actual advertiser aren't quite the same as the 6 easily recognizable ads on the Pierzynski card. And as long as cards were created by hand-made artwork, like this one was, the ads on outfield fences and billboards were usually simply not re-created, even when they were possibly part of source photographs used to create the artwork.

This remained true as baseball cards transitioned to be the simpler-to-create printings of the actual photos. Some of my own base hunches about all this are that photographers shooting photos at major league ball games across all decades were a) cognizant of the fact that an ad in the background of a photo distracts from a subject in the foreground, and were b) largely working for newspapers, who wished to sell advertising, not give it away free in their photographs. Printing an image of a baseball player in front of the Burma Shave billboard in the outfield on the cover of the sports section is not going to be appreciated by the Barbasol executive who just purchased a few weeks of print ads in that same sports section, though maybe the Burma Shave exec would buy you an extra martini at lunch the next day.

To consider the implications of advertising & MLB for this post, I spent a little time wandering the web on the topic. I did not find a just-exactly-perfect, detailed history of the interaction of professional baseball and advertising to share a link with you - perhaps someone out there should write one. But I did pick up a few tidbits along the way this morning, including one about the famous "Green Monster" in Left Field at Fenway. I bet few fans today realize that it only became "Green" in 1947 as previously, it was covered in advertising.

I suspect that as the 50s and 60s and then 70s and even large portions of the 80s moved along, Major League Baseball probably was at a lower point in having tight connections between seeing live baseball action while simultaneously seeing advertising in the same visual frame, as compared to earlier decades, and the way 'the game' looks today, as seen on this A.J. Pierzynski card, and many, many other recent cards. At some point, ownerships once again became quite willing to bring in revenue by returning to selling ads on every surface a fan might gaze upon.

So I think by first becoming familiar with cards always free of ads in previous decades, this then creates a feeling of negativity around cards like this one. "I just want them to be like they were when I was a kid" is an incredibly common sentiment among older collectors today. Now, you kids get off my lawn, too!

Lately I have noticed a new access to historical images of the connection between pro baseball and advertising - on baseball cards, like this one:

Of note regarding this card from the 2011 Topps Lineage set, it is card #42, and not the only card # & Uni # match on the checklist, some 2 years before the 2013 Sea Turtles.

As Topps and Panini continue to mine old photos to use on new baseball cards, a little more of the historical amount of advertising around the game is now seen, on some cards. I haven't found a lot of them over the past decade, but they are here and there, and they do catch your eye with their contrast to original cards of the same Star players from 50+ years ago.

Thus this #12 A.J. Pierzynski 2013 Topps baseball card connects me to major league history in a certain way. It also connects me to baseball card history, as sets of baseball cards used to routinely use photos shot from the sidelines of baseball activity of all types. Naturally, given the location of Topps, Inc., a lot of such images came from Yankee and Shea Stadiums when this practice began. The modern composition of _the_ Topps Baseball set every year is to use action shots, action shots, action shots, as we will see routinely in this blog, but that is in no way an historical Topps approach. I'm not sure just when the set became > 95% live action, but that is the way it is today.

When the first true photographs of live action on cards began appearing (as opposed to the illustrated-from-photos technique occasionally used earlier, as in 1956 for example) in the 1971 set (none in 1970? correct if I am wrong), they were a welcome relief from sets composed of >95% posed pictures. And then for a long time sets were a mix of action, and semi-action or 'candid' photos snapped along sidelines or dug-outs or a spring training field, and actual straight poses for the camera shot in those same locations, often times from the official "Photo Day" teams have (and still do today, in about 3 weeks as I type) at the very beginning of Spring Training. 

Current decade sets have abandoned that approach entirely, at least in the 660 or 700 card Topps Baseball set. Recent Heritage releases have used cards almost exclusively sourced at Photo Day, but then recent Heritage years have been reproducing a difficult period for Topps, the late 60s, when photo rights contracts with the players were in a great deal of flux and assembling the images for the sets was probably the most challenging in the whole history of Topps. So Heritage sets of the last few years really shouldn't be judged much, on this question. The imminent release of the 1970 style Heritage set will be fascinating in this regard - will "the Stadium" once again appear as a back-drop on the baseball cards? One bright spot on this question has been found in recent releases of the Archives set, where the tradition of mixing up the photo sources has begun to ramp up somewhat, after initial Archives sets were heavily composed of generally tepid Photo Day images.

Meanwhile in the most recent Topps Baseball sets, only a similar handful of cards are drawn from 'candid' sources in a set using >95% live game images, though perhaps with a few more cards than we will see in the 2013 set. These days, 'candids' are largely reserved for use as Photo Variations, which most casual collectors will never own beyond an occasional example pulled from a pack.

When I first beheld this A.J. Pierzynski card, it gave me hope that the set was going to become more 'mixed' in terms of photo type diversity, a hope that did not come true. But whenever I see this card, that hope is renewed, as with baseball cards, the old expression re: baseball is also quite true: "there's always next year."

Whew. That leaves just one more mystery about the card at hand - what game is it from? I have tried several times to figure that out; only a high quality scan of the card finally cracked the case for me. There is a very similar image of A.J. from September 2011 in the Getty archives, however it clearly shows Paul Konerko in the batter's box. On this card, Alex Rios is batting in front of Pierzynski, in the bottom of the 1st, with a runner on 3rd and 2 Outs. It is a nice sunny day game, with full stands - probably a weekend game. The visiting team has their road greys on, but they have blue caps and other bits of blue on.

As it turns out, the Blue Jays visited Chicago on Saturday, July 7, 2012. In the At Bat underway on this card, Rios grounded out, ending the inning.

Uniform Hero? As seen on A.J.'s right breast - and the bat knob.

Where’d the egg hatch? A.J. Pierzynski was drafted in the 3rd round by the Twins in 1994, for whom he essentially had 3 "Cups of Coffee" type appearances in MLB from 98 through 2000, before becoming a starter at Catcher for them in 2001.

How about the migrations? His stint in Minnesota would include 2 more full seasons before a trade to the Giants for the 2004 season and then moving to the White Sox in 2005. As this card was coming out of packs, he was coming off his best ever season at the plate for Chicago, posting an .827 OPS. However his contract expired after the 2012 season and Pierzynski had already (December, 2012) signed with the Texas Rangers for the 2013 season. So this became his final White Sox baseball card. He would go on to also play in St. Louis and Boston before retiring after 2 seasons with Atlanta in 2015 and 2016 - his 19th.

Pierzynski was definitely not a "beloved" player by many, for transgressions I am not always familiar with, including one famous on-field brawl. Despite that, he began a broadcasting career while still an active player in 2011, by working on post-season broadcasts. He is currently a full-time baseball analyst for the Fox network.

My own most cognizant memory of A.J. Pierzynski is an oddball stat that I have never put much time into tracking down. After his many years in the AL Central, he was quite familiar to broadcasters in the division. The radio crew for the Detroit Tigers, who supply me with a large portion of my baseball news every season, would always comment on one of his hitting tendencies - he would normally be found atop the current  'leader boards', wherever those are kept, for one specific stat: his tendency to swing at the first pitch of an At Bat. I do hope to see some actual #s on that, somewhere, some day.

Don’t flip over real Turtles.

No fuss no muss, just a nice compendium of his career stats to date.

Can the Turtle Catch the Rabbit?

CAREER CHASE: With 1,645 hits, Pierzynski is 2,611 away from the all-time record of 4,256.

On their 4th try with this one, Topps did get the math right, for only the 2nd time.

Pierzynski finished his career with 2,043 Hits, becoming just the 9th (10th if you count Joe Torre, who played more games in the infield than behind the plate) Catcher to break the 2,000 Hit mark. Unlike Yadier Molina, I do not expect he will receive many Hall of Fame votes, though his career was very impressive nonetheless.

Subspecies? After changing teams probably during the production of this card, Pierzynski does have some other Sea Turtle design cards, though he is the first player on the Series 1 checklist to not appear on the 220 card Opening Day checklist. He appears with the Texas Rangers in the Update set, as he does in Chrome and on one other card. When I reach his Update card, many years from now, I will examine the other Pierzynski Sea Turtles.

2019 Update: As I detail in the #49 - Chris Sale entry, I have now begun adding unique cards from the Topps 'factory' "Team Set" issued in blister packs in June of each year. As I wish to keep the one card, one post format for the blog, I will be adding the various unique cards to the most apropos pack issued card as I go along. This is clearly the right post to add this card:

& the straight-forward card back:

Bling That Shell Another easy decision to select this one, although another that also took a few years to track down. The White Sox have a singular Sea Turtle 'team color' - grey - that looks excellent on most every parallel, though of all the teams, their cards do struggle the most on the /99 Camo version. But along with one other easily guessed team, their cards look absolutely exactly perfect on the /62 Black versions:

However, I like this card so much that I decided to collect a partial 'Rainbow' of the possibilities. My first shipment home from COMC includes our first view of the /230 'Factory Set Orange' parallel, for a page I have made good progress on, with just 2 easy spots and one difficult one to go: