#16 - Andre Ethier

What’s that Turtle doin’? "I got it!" A basic Outfielder in Action card. A complete player image that is nice to see for a complete player. There are some combinations of parallel lines to consider, but none of the combos really add together in any cohesive way. Even the ones that lead you to the ground, not always a good thing on a baseball card, don't really matter - he's about to catch the ball. Out!

I would hand out only a 9.5, Gem/Mint, for the way the tennis shoes come to rest on the frame; more like the Adam Jones card than the more near to Pristine framing effort on the Ryan Howard card, though his isn't quite a Black Label in that regard.

This Fielding card reveals something on the checklist - Fielding cards are easily keeping up with Hitting cards. Hitters Hitting cards are so same-same sometimes, that I bet you expect there a lot more of them than Fielding cards. I know I do. So I decided to add a "Hitting" label to each appropriate blog post, to keep track of Topps here, over the long haul. Adding a "Pitching" label still seems a little pointless however, but if I am keeping track of all the rest...

Probably my favorite element on the card is the classic red Uniform # the Dodgers wear. Without it, this would be a fair bit more dreary of a card; blue, blue, blue. I am fairly sure I have a Wal-Mart Blue copy of this card in a little pile somewhere for a future "None More Blue" baseball card contest on my other blog.

Blue is a solid baseball color, but it really needs it's eternal American trinity mates red & white to be hanging out with it, too. The odd red dot on Ethier's wrist-band and the red stripe on the outfield wall advertising helps, a little, but those also just remind you of how this card is almost a monochromatic card like a White Sox card. A Blue Sox card? We can't see his socks. Ahh, red #16 to the rescue. 

Fortunately, in 2013, we have all those parallels....

Uniform Hero? A just about perfect example, just about perfectly in the center of the card.

Where’d the egg hatch? Would it surprise you to learn that Ethier was actually drafted by Billy Beane? (2nd Round, 2003). Has anyone ever calculated what % of MLB players have passed through Oakland? It certainly seems like Beane would have some League Leader #s in italics on the back of his card, under Transactions.

How about the migrations? Beane traded Ethier to L.A. in December, 2005, before Ethier had ever appeared in MLB. The return player? Milton Bradley, and one other player who adds little to this narrative, but can be discovered easily enough.

Ethier debuted with a full, excellent Rookie season in 2006. He went on to play his entire career in L.A. with eventually fairly similar, and quite good, #s as Bradley, though without all the drama. Advantage: L.A.

After 2 frustrating seasons of injury-comeback-attempts, Ethier retired after the 2017 season.

Don’t flip over real Turtles.

That Rookie season was no fluke as Ethier became a model of excellent consistency. 

Usually in a set of baseball cards the Topps card back writer is too, effortlessly summoning classic (imaginary?) statistical bon mots like this one, casually dropping a "Jerry Mumphrey" from way downtown! 

Oh sure, _you_ remember the game on the 50th anniversary of Dodger Stadium like it was yesterday, but I bet _you_ can't name all the other players who hit Home Runs on their 30th birthday, let alone which ones did it after the 8th inning. But Topps can.

Can the Turtle Catch the Rabbit?

CAREER CHASE: With 535 RBI, Ethier is 1,702 away from Hank Aaron's all-time record of 2,297.

1,702 away, huh? I think we have a long way to go with these in this set.

Ethier finished his career with 687 RBI, 1,610 away from Hank Aaron's All-Time record. Wait. So much for trusting Topps math, which was off. 

Ethier was 1,762 RBIs away from breaking Aaron's record when this card was created. So close, Topps, so close.

Subspecies? Like a few more than 200 of the other top 1/3 of MLB players, and a bit before RC logo mania commandeered ever more checklist spots, Ethier appears in 2013 Opening Day and 2013 Chrome with this same card image.

I can't think of owning too many Ethier cards from the first half of his career, when my collecting activity was quite low. But I also thought Topps and Andre Ethier and baseball cards got on pretty well, when I did find one of his cards a bit later in his career. And that warm touchy-feely feeling is reinforced by his presence in the "Great Catch" SP series, which I can share with you below. Pondering that Lawrie "Great Catch" card just 2 cards ago, I realized the blog needs a new section here in Series One, for these cards -

So, did he catch it? I mean, Topps probably wants you to just presume the player caught the ball. What fun would it be if he didn't? We don't need to know this, to show off a cool looking baseball picture card like this one.

But if you buy Topps products for long enough, you can start to become a little suspicious. You know things are not always as they seem in the cheerful world of Topps baseball cards. You would enjoy your "Great Catch" baseball card so much more if you could just hear the announcer definitively giving you some closure with a bumped up volume "And He Makes THE CATCH!!!"

So you want to be sure, and you double check to see if Getty Images was the original hook-up for Topps here. Odds are usually good on such an inquest, with all the live baseball used in the Topps Baseball set now. I'm not perfectly clear on using the images here, so for now I will just tip with you an example of how easy their search window is to use: "Andre Ethier 2012 Catch."

And there it was, a photo obviously taken just after, probably even the next shutter click after, the one on this card. Confirmed by the exact same set of fans in the stands, and is a fun photo worth a quick copy/paste and a few clicks of your own to see it; it looks like Ethier is casually drinking a Coke during this catch. On that photo, you can see the ball, and it is not where Topps probably thinks you should think it is. So instead of the second photo, and to still give a minor, probably never seen shout-out to the sports photog for this one, I will share just the caption of the 2nd photo with you, since you have a digital baseball card of the first photo to go along with it:

HOUSTON,TX- APRIL 22: Andre Ethier #16 of the Los Angeles Dodgers leaps but can't make a catch on a grand slam home run off the bat of Jordan Schafer #1 of the Houston Astros in the second inning on April 22, 2012 at Minute Maid Park in Houston, Texas.(Photo by Bob Levey/Getty Images)

Bling That Shell

A package of 2013 Parallels has arrived here at Sea Turtle HQ! An original sealed package of Parallels packaged by Topps Chewing Gum Co. New York, NY, no less! Tune in to blog post #19 in a few days to see what's in the little package of baseball cards from all the way back in the year two thousand, thirteen, as well as actual construction techniques used to create an all-parallel page of 2013 Topps!