#30 - Neftali Feliz

What’s that Turtle doin’? This card is an example of a seeming ever increasing style of baseball card in each given year's Topps Baseball set.  Whereas horizontal cards had generally been used for some of the best action photos available to the set editor, they are now more likely to use just a simple individual profile shot like this one.

One reason for that could be a basic increase in horizontal cards. It does seem clear to me that they are cut off of the printing sheets from adjacent positions - because these days they always arrive together, in packs, which is true even of the smallest runs of base cards as when 2 of them are packed together in a retail 'blister pack' including 2 parallels. Those will both be horizontal, or both be vertical. No one will find a pack of all horizontal cards as there aren't quite that many, but no one will ever find a pack with only one horizontal card, either. Though it is possible to open a pack with zero horizontals.

Now it would be easy to conclude with that printing sheet based logic that each large checklist release might now have one sheet of horizontal cards each time, but I don't think that is the case. 2013 Series One being examined here has 330 cards and was most likely produced from 3 sheets of 110 cards each - but there are not 110 horizontal cards in this set. Lately, I am pretty sure printing sheets have been changed to 100 cards each, as Opening Day and Chrome checklists have decreased from 220 card sets to 200 cards (2 sheets each), while S1 and S2 have increased to 350 cards (3.5 sheets each).

But let's get back to this Neftali Feliz card before it scrolls too much further away. I do like this particular card. Feliz's arms obviously set the main line of whole image. What I like about it is all the harmoniously parallel lines with that - the brim of the cap, his eyes, even Neftali's mouth; they all are inline with the plane to the Plate he is about to deliver that fastball right through.

Ultimately for all the cards like this one now, I like some of them a fair bit, but perhaps that just depends to a large degree on how many such cards I have run across on that particular day. Some days, it's too many.

I still don't much care for this white Texas uniform, though it does come off better being in 'full' view on this card, as it pleasingly participates in the main line of the card. 

One thing that arrives to the viewer much more slowly from this card is the colors in the composition - & I don't mean the fantastic red glove making a trio with the cap and the red sleeves. This card is a "Mother's Day" card, from a photo taken on that day each year when MLB teams wear a pink ribbon on the left breast, which many players augment with pink "flair" in various ways. Feliz decided to sport a pink necklace, though it takes some familiarity with the card to realize that, after the red glove captures so much attention, at first. I very much like these Mother's Day outings in MLB, which donates some money to Breast Cancer research along the way. My own Mother has survived Breast Cancer, twice, while one of her sisters has not.

Uniform Hero? Still rolling strong here. Topps occasionally slots 2 teammates together on their checklists, and sometimes even several altogether and then more rarely entire teams get sequential checklist ordering. Probably, this happened on this unique checklist more due to the random chance of who sported Uni #s 29 & 30 in 2012 MLB, and how Topps felt about all of the players to pick from here.

Where’d the egg hatch? Feliz was originally an international signing out of the Dominican Republic, scouted and signed by the Braves. He was subsequently traded to the Rangers at the 2007 trade deadline as part of the package Texas received for Mark Teixeira, who now lives just 5 cards away on this checklist. He then debuted impressively with Texas in 2009 but did not use up his "rookie limits."

How about the migrations? Thus 2010 would become his official Rookie year and he would subsequently win Rookie-of-the-Year honors for the AL. Feliz contributed much to the strength of the Texas clubs, early in his career, and I well recall the Tigers facing him in the 2011 ALCS, where it hardly seemed fair to see someone so good in a bullpen; a luxury I can rarely recall the Tigers having.

But the 2011 postseason was probably the peak of his career, unfortunately. Injuries would become a sad routine for him and he would pitch only 4 2/3 innings the year this card arrived. Texas eventually traded him away during the 2015 season, the start of a four team odyssey that never saw a return to the brilliance of his first years in the Majors. His last stop was with the Kansas City Royals in 2017 but he was subsequently unable to reach the 'bigs' in 2018 from within the Diamondbacks' minor league system. Although he might well throw a baseball for an MLB club in Florida or Arizona in March, 2019, not much optimism remains for the career of this former Topps All-Rookie Cup selection.

Don’t flip over real Turtles.

Basically reads now as a sad foreshadowing of what was to come, rather than what could have been.

Can the Turtle Catch the Rabbit?

CAREER CHASE: With 74 saves, Feliz is 534 saves away from Mariano Rivera's all-time record of 608.

A simple comparison choice to make for a Rookie breaking into MLB so spectacularly as a Reliever.

Neftali Feliz has 107 Saves after the 2017 season, though technically he could still pitch again in Major League Baseball.

Subspecies? As evidenced by this checklist position, Neftali Feliz was an exciting young Pitcher as 2013 got rolling; he was also placed in the Opening Day and Chrome checklists with this same card composition, but without any known variants in those products. There is one more Topps Baseball product that could still yield a variant of this card, that I have not been able to examine just yet.

Bling That Shell Although the ab-fab red glove, etc., makes it tempting to pick a Target Red parallel for this card (and those do work well for the Ranger team logo in particular, with the blue Sea Turtle), I much prefer accenting the Mother's Day memorial-ness of the card by using the Pink parallel: 

Also of note here is that this card is the 9th horizontal card in the set. Back in 2013 I quickly had far more copies of the base cards in this set than I truly needed, so early on I began assembling a side collection of the horizontal cards. Going forward in baseball card collecting, I am pretty sure I am going to junk sequential checklist #-ing on binder pages and display all the horizontal cards together, like this:

Oops!

That was just a somewhat inevitable result of pondering the parallel possibilities presented by this next page...and I would rather this post end with a very nice page of baseball cards, the way they are meant to be enjoyed: