#3 - Hunter Pence

What’s that Turtle doin’? Pence always seemed to me to be both an intense player, in a good way, and a popular player. As he largely played for NL teams on the coast which are the most difficult for me to follow I get that idea largely from baseball cards, and this one supports the former proposition. Hunter is intent on an incoming pitch - the ball is probably on it's way to Home, as he has already raised his left foot, and he seems to have already judged it to be a pitch worthy of a swing. The lines of his left arm and thigh combine nicely with the lines of his left shin and the bat. These then lead you back to his eyes focusing on the ball and the line of the brim of his batting helmet, which lead your thoughts out into the field of play. If he makes contact, a few tenths of a second from now, that ball is going somewhere.

Overall, a fine example of live action baseball portraiture.

Intriguingly, Pence is wearing only one batting glove - a rare approach. Additionally, this card illustrates a fair bit of 'choking up on the bat', also an increasingly rare approach to hitting in MLB these days, as it sacrifices potential power for better bat control and a higher contact rate, if I understand Hitting 101 correctly. I never advanced out of that class aside from perpetual backyard Home Run Derbies in a small neighborhood without enough kids to play 'teams'. Having never analyzed an entire set of baseball cards like this, I will be keeping an eye out for either of these hitting styles later in the checklist. I know one card in Update I will compare this to, many years from today.

Uniform Hero? I would have to oddly call this one an "almost" or "sort of" - Topps felt Pence deserving of a Uniform card #, which seems fitting for such a prime checklist position when using this concept. However they somewhat dropped the ball here. The Topps card wizard back in the hometown of the Mets was probably familiar with Pence from his two half-seasons with the Phillies; subsequently Pence was traded to the Giants in the summer of 2012, astutely noted on the back of the card. In Philadelphia, Hunter wore #3, matching this card #, however in San Francisco he wore #8 for the balance of his career. Fortunately for Topps, the Giants do not put uniform #s on the front of their uniforms, and only baseball card collectors in the Bay Area likely noticed this discrepancy.

Where’d the egg hatch? Pence was drafted by Houston in the 2nd round in 2004 and came up with the Astros in 2007 for a very impressive 108 game Rookie campaign.

How about the migrations? The struggling 2011 Astros, on their way to losing 100 games, flipped Pence to the Phillies, who found themselves on their way to a .500 record in 2012 when they did the same thing, sending him to the Giants. Neither team really profited from trading away the balance of their time with Pence, and the trade from Houston somewhat later contributed to the 'Stros giving up a pre-MLB Josh Hader to Milwaukee in exchange for some late career starts from Carlos Gomez. Oops. 

San Francisco declined to re-sign Hunter after the 2018 season, and he quickly began playing in Dominican winter leagues. Clearly he is looking for some more playing time in Major League Baseball, which I would say is not an impossibility. Perhaps there will be yet more Hunter Pence Topps baseball cards, but I would not expect one before the 2019 Update set.

Don’t flip over real Turtles.

A perfectly fine workman like effort, succinctly explaining Pence's recent career. Perhaps if a classic "he hit 3 Doubles on every Monday in April last season" type stat was at hand, the last bit of white space at the bottom there could have been used up.

Can the Turtle Catch the Rabbit?

CAREER CHASE: With 516 RBI, Pence is 1,781 away from Hank Aaron's all-time record of 2,297.

If only those first 2 numbers had been reversed, maybe Pence might have had a shot at that over his 6 subsequent seasons with the Giants. The end of the 2018 season found him with 877 RBIs on his ledger.

Subspecies? Pence's Opening Day and Chrome cards mirror this one. There is an intriguing team issue set of the 2013 Giants that I will begin sharing with you a bit later on in this blog, however the Pence card only includes an additional stamp on this same image.

There are no other variants to this card, however I pulled an enjoyable Pence card from this set in the summer of 2014 from a then-discounted 36 card 'rack' pack, found in a Kmart with only another year or two of being open for business, in the capital of the illustrious 51st State of our Union - Superior. You have never heard of Superior? More is the pity, you are missing out on da wonders of da U.P., eh? A beautiful part of our country, though one where it can be exceptionally difficult to find some baseball cards for sale - I can count the # of possible sources on only 2 hands across the whole of the peninsula(s). But since I can so clearly remember that nice summery day in Escanaba, MI, and this particular card, and the way I much prefer bat 'relics' to uniform swatches, and is one of only 2 I have ever pulled amidst my retail baseball card addiction, and as it contributed to becoming a Hunter Pence fan with an eventual 9 card binder page in my collection, including this one, I thought I would share this not-quite-a-Sea Turtle card with you too:

Bling That Shell It took me some time to finalize a decision on which parallel to use for this fondly enjoyed baseball card. Initially, I used a Toys R Us Purple for this slot, after acquiring a /62 Black card elsewhere on this all important first binder page in the project. The Purple Giants really pop, as I think we will see before too many pages deep into the project, but probably quite a long time on this blog's calendar.

However as I began to refine the project on esthetics rather than purely on budget, I realized this card would look best with a bit of a 'team colors' approach, so I finally went large with about  $7 worth of COMC credit from selling all those other miscellaneous pulls of $1 baseball cards that accumulate when you buy baseball cards with your groceries all the time. And the other day, this card finally arrived at Base Set 2013 Sea Turtle HQ, an event which contributed mightily to getting this blog off the ground -- Voila!

On this one I should note that the difficulty in reading the foil printed player name is basically a problem for the scanner to pick up the foil amidst the black cardboard, in much the same way that the 'topps' logo disappears somewhat inside the scans of the actual image. This is not a problem on the card when seen actually in-hand — however that is a definite problem for one of the parallels, which led to a large overhaul of the All-Parallel set a year or two ago now.