We'll get to that shortly of course; as far as this baseball card goes, it is somewhat the opposite of the previous card. A pitcher that hasn't released the ball yet still might throw a Strike, of course; these "pre-pitch" cards often seem more optimistic to me.
I like the light on this card for some reason. It seems to be a night game, though I can't tell if indoors or out. But overall, the photographer got the focus crisp, and on-point, particularly for Wang's uniform. Even his hair flowing out behind him is perfectly sharp, leading your eye right to the baseball.
This card is almost identical to the Scherzer card just a few checklist spots back in most every way, and especially with how the "hington" script letters and their nice underline, all courtesy of the Nationals' road uniform, then lift the eye up off the card in anticipation of the flight of the ball. Maybe that is where the optimism derives on this card, I guess.
+Bonus points for the Swoosh on the glove. I did not know Nike makes baseball gloves, too.
Uniform Hero? The road uniform comes through again for Topps here. Plus Topps always likes a good comeback story. Sometimes, perhaps a bit too much.
Where’d the egg hatch? Chien-Ming is from Taiwan, so he was scouted and then signed independently by the New York Yankees in the year 2000. Although the list of MLB players from Taiwan is still relatively short at only 14 players, baseball card collectors are probably the most familiar with them and for collectors a Taiwanese player now seems like just another part of the International flavor of Major League Baseball. But when Wang debuted in NYC in 2005, he was only the 3rd player from Taiwan to have done so.
How about the migrations? Wang quickly lit up the MLB leader boards, particularly in his brilliant 2nd and 3rd seasons. From 2008 and onwards, however, things would never be the same for him as injuries struck repeatedly.
In the year of the Sea Turtle, Wang would actually be under contract with 2 other MLB teams - not the Nationals; those being the Yankees once again, for whom he did not appear in a game, and the Toronto Blue Jays, where he showed flashes of his early success, but ultimately appeared in only 6 games before being released yet again. He did manage to make it to the majors one final time, working as a reliever for Kansas City in 2016.
A puzzling thing about this card is that Wang was released by the Nationals on October 29, 2012 - a standard baseball date for this type of thing, as it was the day after the World Series, when MLB clubs begin making roster moves. This would leave plenty of time for Topps to shift such a player to a Series 2 card perhaps, but players released on that date routinely appear in Series 1, anyway. Given that particular release date, that makes this particular card back...
Don’t flip over real Turtles.
...all the more puzzling. Clearly Washington's hopes don't have much chance if they released him 3 months before this card appeared in packs. I would have to mark this particular card back as a FAIL.
Can the Turtle Catch the Rabbit?
CAREER CHASE: With 61 wins, Wang is 450 away from Cy Young's all-time record of 511.
I guess after all there are only 7 stats that Topps can select for one of these CHASE comparisons, as they must be a counting stat that appears on the back of the card. And since it always has to be sunny on the back of a Topps Baseball card, they can hardly jeer at a player by comparing him to the All-Time leader for Losses, who is also Cy Young.
So another quick go at that famous 511 seems as easy as any of the other 7 here.
Chien-Ming Wang did manage to add a few Wins after this card appeared, mostly from that bullpen stint in KC. He finished his Major League career with 68 Wins.
Subspecies? Nope. This would actually be Wang's final MLB Topps card as Topps declined to include him in 2016 Update, despite 3 months of steady work before the '16 trade deadline; I guess Topps could no longer hold out hope for him. His final actual baseball card was a Minor League Leaders card in 2015, for Innings Pitched. Probably, that is a unique baseball card epitaph.
Bling That Shell With the simple two-tone background for this image, I figured this would look nice on the Blue Sparkle design:
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