#49 - Chris Sale

What’s that Turtle doin’? Like all horizontal cards, I always get an impression that I am looking at the TV broadcast. Without a doubt, I am influenced in that permanent thought in my brain by the 1955 Bowman design. I should really collect at least a page worth of those cards some day.

On this card it, is even easier than ever to hear the producer out in the mobile truck telling the first base side camera to 'zoom in' just before he cuts back to the traditional shot from center field of the ball crossing the plate a couple seconds after the view on this card.

The illusion of motion is supplied by three things - the crowd blurs in the background, say as the camera follows Sale's arm back as his delivery starts, then the way his necklace does the same as his torso begins moving forward as it begins the drive to the plate off Sale's back foot, and finally you notice the 2 leather end tags of the glove webbing now flying straight up as Sale's right arm begins dropping down in his delivery motion.

And amidst all that, you can still tell that for the whole brief second of time just imagined, Chris Sale's eyes are intensely focused on the point in the strike zone where the ball is about to be delivered, precisely.

I definitely have a love/hate thing going with these zoomed-in torso shot horizontal cards. I quite enjoy horizontal cards, unlike so many uptight baseball card collectors. But I think a horizontal torso is often inferior to a horizontal card that lets you see some game action, and hopefully some of the other sights of Major League Baseball than just a player from the belt up and nothing else. But then on the other hand - when these Pitcher torso cards work, they work, and this one works pretty well, for me, and would possibly make it to a 'Favorite 9' binder page for this set if I were to assemble one. It would definitely make it to such a page of just my favorite horizontal cards.

Another obvious feature of this card is Chris Sale's unique frame, which often makes his cards quick to stand out amidst checklist-mates. It wouldn't surprise me if, somewhere in a visual dictionary of some sort, there is a picture of Chris Sale used to illustrate the word 'lanky.'

The other big 'get' in this image is the special red piping on the White Sox uniform here, and the red hat, and the red belt. This seems kind of odd in that one wouldn't expect the White Sox to want to remind people of the other Sox team in another city altogether. But baseball card collectors probably know better than most that a team with one of the more sartorially simple team names has had one of the longer histories of uniform changes.

These red pinstripe uniforms were a Chicago home uni from 1971-1975. Images of them do exist on 70s cards, however you are probably more able to remember their powder blue road uniform from that era, as Topps was so much more likely to shoot a photo of a baseball player in New York City than any other location.

In 2012, the Sox brought the look back for a special "Home Alternate" uniform they only re-used for that one season, before moving on to mining their many other historical uniforms. This 2012 uni will appear in a few more cards in the set; this one is particularly ironic given Chris Sale's famous disdain for 'throwback' uniforms that surfaced a few years later.

Uniform Hero? Once again, the card # appears nearly dead center on the front of the card.

Where’d the egg hatch? The White Sox drafted Sale in the first round in 2010 as the 13th selection. A pretty canny #1 pick by the Sox, given that the 12 teams in front of them batted only about .333 with their picks.

How about the migrations? There has been just one, a famous / 'blockbuster' trade after the 2016 season, when Sale still had 3 more years of club control, a far more serious affair than trading a 1/3 or 1 season 'rental'. The White Sox received Michael Kopech and Yoan Moncada and 2 more prospects back in return; the story of those 2 players has yet to be fully written although as the 2020s dawn as I write this entry, Kopech and especially Moncada could prove to be key pieces on some likely ChiSox playoff teams in the decade to come. 

As for the BoSox, they won the World Series in 2018 and re-signed Sale for the 2020-2024 seasons. I would say the trade was a great success for both parties, and it is not inconceivable to imagine Sale facing Moncada in a key play-off At Bat in the near future.

Don’t flip over real Turtles.

I like the key detail here explaining Sale's initial career arc, which Tigers fans at the time understood all too well. His experience in the bullpen would certainly serve Boston well in 2018. Though I must confess this is the first I have ever heard of Dave Lemonds, who probably has a baseball (& baseball card) story to tell, but for some other blogger to discover.

Can the Turtle Catch the Rabbit?

CAREER CHASE: With 303 strikeouts, Sale is 5,411 away from Nolan Ryan's all-time record of 5,714.

Being 5,411 Ks away from the All-Time leader certainly seems like an impossible comparison, but for an obviously excellent young Pitcher given this choice checklist spot coming off a season of almost 200 Ks, this comp does make sense.

Sale would go on to start earning some red ink in his card back stats, including an MLB leading 308 Ks in 2017. After the 2019 season and ten seasons of play, Chris Sale has the impressive total of 2,007 strikeouts.

Subspecies? As with most players this low on this unique checklist but high on the MLB totem pole, this card does appear in both Chrome and Opening Day, but without any other variations in any of the 3 pack issued sets, outside of a nicely stamped version in the "AL Stars" 'factory' blister pack of cards assembled by Topps for retail sale, usually in June of each year.

Those retail blister products do supply an interesting Sea Turtle variant, however:

I do not know why Topps chose to create another card for Chris Sale here; this is the only unique card from the White Sox "Team Set." On that particular card, Sale's delivery is captured quite near to the same point as depicted on his regular card, with some of the same motion indicators such as the necklace now being pulled forward. Though Sale always looks interesting on his baseball cards, the odd frame slicing of his hand and then glove re-appearing on the card makes me favor the regular horizontal card much more. This card does give a better view of two left shoulder patches the Sox wore in 2012, but I think we will be able to see those better on an upcoming card.

There are a few other teams that have a unique card for a key star in those Team Sets and those share a key similarity - the pack issued card is a horizontal card, as in this case, and the differing card in the Team Set becomes a vertical card. At first I suspected there may have been a production advantage in not using any horizontal cards for the product, but then I began discovering plenty of horizontal cards still included in the small, generally 17 card sets. My new theory is that for a player selected to be the 'cover' card fronting the stack of cards inside the blister, it looks much better to have a vertical card; and each team has a key player that is the obvious best player that should be the 'cover' player. Other unique Team Set cards are connected to players changing teams during the creation of S1, S2, and Update, and a few Forgotten Sea Turtles were just otherwise forgotten by Topps outside of the Team Sets, something true of one other class of Forgotten Sea Turtle that I won't be posting for a long time to come.

I have been holding off on posting any cards from these  retail blisters, in hopes of finishing off my collection of all 30 teams. And as it turns out, I already skipped over one such 'Forgotten Sea Turtle' card, as I will be labeling them in posts to come. A lot of those cards will actually appear in connection with pack issued cards in Update; on this blog, that will be many years from now. But I have gone back and added one such card, to the #5 - Carlos Gonzalez entry.

Alas, I probably took too long to try and pick up all of the sets and it has now become impossible to find the last few teams I need: Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, New York Mets, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland. Most of the sets do have a card I want - a "Stadium" card. Those were a remarkable entry on the 2019 Topps Baseball checklist, but were not a completely new idea. The Sea Turtle design serves them well.

I will be adding the Stadium cards to various individual card posts as I move along, generally when a unique "Team Set" card has to be added to an individual card post. There is a 'U.S. Cellular Field' card for the White Sox which could be appended here, but for what should be obvious reasons, I have added it to the #12 - A.J. Pierzynski post.

At this point however, obtaining my own copy of the last 6 team sets I need looks like it will be very difficult. I do want the Stadium cards, and any card in them that is unique to the Team Sets. But even more than that, I need checklist information from them, such as whether a Stadium card even exists (not all 30 of them were made by Topps), and whether any unique card is included on the short checklist (same, in that not all teams have a card different than the pack issued cards). 

If you have any of those 6 'Factory' Team Sets from 2013, please get in touch.

Bling That Shell You should have been able to already guess which parallel I selected here for the All Parallel set:

Similarly to the Rizzo card, this relatively low leverage 'retail' parallel is one of my favorites of all the 2013 cards.

This card is also a perfect place to illustrate a key construction detail on the Sea Turtle cards. For a long time, I didn't understand why I was so drawn to the White Sox parallels in particular. I also often wondered how the 2013 cards would be handled by the 'TPGs' - Third Party Graders. I have zero wish to own any graded cards for my collection, but as I read baseball card hobby commentary on the Internet, I know well how important grading is to others. Overall, I basically feel sorry for people who can't enjoy a card unless it has been declared 'perfect' by someone else.

And of all the possible imperfections that can ruin a chance at perfection, there was one I figured to exist on almost every Sea Turtle card I have ever purchased, _except_ most of the White Sox parallels. That possible imperfection, I thought, was the print registration of the image, and more specifically the boundary between the photo content and the design content.

Here is an example from the same regular white base card scan of the Ryan Cook card in the previous post to this one:

The construction technique is now obvious - rather than have the image snug up to the color portion of the design, whatever color that may be, the graphic design is actually bounded by a thin grey line. However until this is seen in close detail, many a 2013 card looks like the the image and the design edge are just not getting along correctly, leaving a bit of white space rather than a clean connection from imagery to design element.

Here is the same area from the Sale card:

Since the White Sox have a grey team color, there is no additional grey line between image and colorful design element; instead there is a single grey line, thicker than any of the image boundary lines for the other colors in the set.

This gives the White Sox cards, for the most part, an extra crispness to this portion of the card. Although ironically, any teeny tiny flaw in the printing process, leaving a bit of white between the image edge and the design edge, is most easily seen on a White Sox card. Which thus illustrates the reason to use a tiny grey boundary for the image rather than letting the image adjoin the color striping —any white space created during printing would be far more noticeable between colors of the image and the bright color of all non-White Sox designs.

And what I finally realized is that for the White Sox parallels, that increased purity of just the grey striping to the design makes them 'pop' that much more effectively on their parallels. Not so much of that can be seen in a clipping of that same area, from the red parallel:

though there is a touch less white created at the edge of the photography. That would actually vary completely from individual card to individual card, and I don't mean card #49 vs card #48 - ten copies of either card might have ever so slight differences in all this, created during production, not design.

There are many more White Sox cards to come in this project, and many of them are beautiful, crisp parallels. So as with the #12 - A.J. Pierzynski card, I am collecting a full 'rainbow' effort of this card. I would almost like to collect a full White Sox team set in the following parallel (as I started to attempt with one other team, before deciding to collect the whole set in parallel, sort of). So I will leave you with one bonus parallel for this favorite Sea Turtle: