#20 - Kevin Youkilis

What’s that Turtle doin’? At first glance, this is the exact thing you want to see a baseball player doing - trotting home after hitting a Home Run. The crowd and his teammates in the dug-out are standing, cheering, and clapping. Hooray!

Except one guy on his team is looking behind Youkilis, as are many of the fans - another player is still rounding the bases. It seems to remain a Home Run card, in a sense, but Youkilis didn't hit the Homer. And it is a Homer, right? I mean, it could be just a Double or a Triple sending Kevin to Home Plate here. But it is definitely more fun to just imagine that it is a Home Run.

And those fans - the Sox did seemingly manage to bring one of their fans along to the game there in the front row, with his similar script Chicago uniform as 'Youk is wearing. Which is the road uniform. Probably, only that one fan is actually cheering.

And there is one fan in the stands, with a blue ball cap, with a round, red & white logo that should be oh so familiar to baseball card fans - is Kevin Youkilis rounding Third here, just after a teammate hit a Home Run - @ Wrigley Field?

Sea Turtle Detective is on the case. First stop, Getty Images. "Kevin Youkilis 2012 Wrigley Field" I ask the kind, but terribly silent, website attendant. "Sorry," replies the attendant, somehow, "there does not seem to be any records of such an appearance without Kevin wearing red socks." How did the Getty gate-keeper know I was looking for pics of Youkilis wearing white socks?

But I know the White Sox make that long road trip to the North Side annually, in the 21st century. Baseball Reference will surely lead me to the one game where he scored after a team-mate's Home Run.

Nope. The White Sox did visit Wrigley in 2012 - on May 18-20. On June 24, 2012, Kevin Youkilis played his last game for the Boston Red Sox. On June 25, 2012, Kevin Youkilis played his first game for the Chicago White Sox.

Oh well, it was an enjoyable baseball results research expedition while it lasted.

I can't think of another baseball card where the player is fairly definitively scoring a run after being knocked in by someone else, though I would imagine such do exist. Which makes this another enjoyable Sea Turtle card, for me.

I do like how the Turtle seems to once again be about to serve as Home Plate on Youkilis' next step. But that probably comes at the cost of cutting off most of his right foot. Sometimes I actually like such a framing cut - it can impart a sense of motion, as if the player is still in the process of zooming into view from the side of the card, cf.: #6 - Ryan Howard. Other times I find such cuts distracting.

This one falls in about the middle of that really like / not-so-much possibility. I just want to know who hit the Home Run I guess.

Uniform Hero? Topps is getting on a roll here, with the 3rd card in a row where the card # can be seen clearly, on the front of the card.

Where’d the egg hatch? Youkilis was drafted by the Red Sox in the 8th round in 2001, debuting in Boston with a solid 72 Game Rookie campaign in 2004.

How about the migrations? Unlike many in this checklist neighbord, Kevin did not complete his career in Boston, as we have seen, despite a very impressive run manning Third Base for them nearly every day from 2006 - 2009 making him a fairly maybe someday entry in the Topps "Fan Favorite" series in the Archives release, in my opinion.

Now Boston is a town pretty passionate about their Red Sox, generally a good thing in baseball. Except in 2011, the Red Sox disintegrated down the stretch and the hated Yankees took the division crown. A famous story about fried chicken and beer in the clubhouse soon appeared in the press and many people involved with the franchise soon departed, including one of baseball's most famous General Managers, Theo Epstein. It was felt within the club that the breaking of the what-happens-in-the-clubhouse-stays-in-the-clubhouse rule could be traced to Youkilis, perhaps contributing to the decision on the June trade the next season.

Kevin would finish the 2012 season in Chicago, as well as his then current contract. In December, 2012, as the finishing touches were being put on 2013 Series One, he signed a new one year deal with the Evil Empire - the New York Yankees. This was a year before his former team-mate Jacoby Ellsbury would do the same, and his Fan Favorite stock probably diminished a fair bit in Boston.

In the year of the Sea Turtle, Youkilis' career would come to an end as he needed back surgery in June, 2013, which became both season, and career ending, though he gave it one more brief try in Japan in 2014. Youkilis is currently re-united with Epstein, working as a Special Assistant to the GM of the Chicago Cubs.

Don’t flip over real Turtles.

You can't go wrong with a Tom Brady name drop on the back of a sports card for a popular player in New England.

A bit more surprising on this card, considering what we will consider next here, is a complete lack of League Leads, but then Topps doesn't quite have room amidst baseball card stat columns for noting Youkilis' capture of the title in the Hit-By-Pitch category, with 17 of those in 2012.

Can the Turtle Catch the Rabbit?

CAREER CHASE: With 531 walks, Youkilis is 2,027 away from Barry Bonds' all-time record of 2,558.

Now here Topps is definitely paying attention to the player's reputation, as Youkilis' well-known nickname is "The Greek God of Walks," bestowed on him by Billy Beane and famously revealed in the book Moneyball. 

I also find it intriguing that 'Youk follows Joey Votto in the checklist, the player most known for walks in the succeeding decade to the peaks of Youkilis' career. As we saw yesterday, Votto has led his League several times in reaching base the easy way.

Youkilis would Walk only 8 more times in his final, 28 Game season with the Yankees, placing him tied for 637th place, All-Time.

Subspecies? Changing teams in December can result in multiple unique cards in the Topps Baseball product line the next season. We will see Youkilis again in Update, and he also appeared in Chrome, but not Opening Day; checklist decisions which probably all trace to his signing date with the Yankees, and his general base popularity with fans.

Which might also account for his appearance in the "Great Catch" series of Short Prints, meaning it is once again time for 

So, did he catch it? Let's consider the photographic evidence at hand:

Even before asking that inscrutable Getty gatekeeper, we can tell Youkilis is on the road in Toronto, an AL East team the White Sox only visit for one 3 game series per year.

And the Topps contract with Getty remains solid. Here is how Getty captions the result:

TORONTO, CANADA - AUGUST 14: Kevin Youkilis #20 of the Chicago White Sox dives into the crowd while catching a foul ball during MLB game action the Toronto Blue Jays August 14, 2012 at Rogers Centre in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. (Photo by Brad White/Getty Images)

Ahh, but this just declares he is "catching" the ball. We don't see the ball, and there is more than a little Bartman action going on. Isn't there a law against that? Sea Turtle Detective will have to work a little harder to insure total live baseball accuracy for his devoted readers.

As it turns out, in the bottom of the 3rd Toronto First Baseman David Cooper (who?) popped up into foul territory along the third base line, and became the 3rd Out of the inning.

Where does Topps find these people to hit into these Great Catches, anyway? At least that Grand Slam which Andre Ethier couldn't catch was hit by a Topps Baseball alumni. David Cooper is the most tangential member of that club I ever did see....definitely a future blog topic, though probably over at Base Set Calling.

Bling That Shell Let's see a parallel already! I'm going in to withdrawal.

Yet another super simple selection: Black. I think this card came in as part of a small lot of parallels, rather than being purchased as a single. But once I had it, this checklist spot was secure as the team color / parallel baseball card synchronicity here with the road grey uniform is probably better than any other White Sox Uni.

Just recently, I figured out a technical point about the construction of the Sea Turtles that explains why I like the 2013 White Sox parallels so much. I'll illustrate that with this project's next White Sox parallel, which is majestic.

#12 - A.J. Pierzynski

What’s that Turtle doin’? Here we have one of my favorite cards in the entire set. If I can someday get around to a Base Set's Top 40 Baseball Card Countdown just for the 2013 set say by the year 2029 or so, this card will finish very high indeed.

Even though there is very little mystery or action to discern here. Pierzynski is simply posing for a photographer, probably in what appears to be a voluminous part of what was then called U.S. Cellular Field and is now called Guaranteed Rate Field. I would think he is standing closer to the short wall at the edge of the field than he is to the actual on-deck circle.

And this is a classic baseball card image, with a lineage going back through decades of baseball cards. I would expect that anyone reading this blog is familiar with such. If not, please go out and purchase a random lot of 500 mixed beat-up 60s - 80s Topps commons and start over with the Sea Turtles later on.

But I can hear the complaints coming in through my computer screen already - "I hate all that advertising." "I hate corporate ball-park names!"  I'm with you on that 2nd one; only as pitiful a name as 'Guaranteed Rate' could make you miss saying something like 'out at the ole Cellular today...'

Advertising has been part of baseball pretty much from the beginning, or at least the beginnings of the players being paid. Money to support the whole thing has to come from somewhere, and even 19th century club owners would not turn down a revenue stream just for the sake of some non-commercial purity ethos.

And of course, the very first baseball cards were actually tiny advertisements.

But the ads were largely kept off of the fronts of the cards for a very long time. The first one I could find on a card, admittedly without an exhaustive search, was a 1950 Bowman issue, here cribbed from my collecting projects partner COMC:

I think because of a card from the year 2013, I will some day purchase my first card from the year 1950.

Now to be sure, ads you can't quite connect to a specific actual advertiser aren't quite the same as the 6 easily recognizable ads on the Pierzynski card. And as long as cards were created by hand-made artwork, like this one was, the ads on outfield fences and billboards were usually simply not re-created, even when they were possibly part of source photographs used to create the artwork.

This remained true as baseball cards transitioned to be the simpler-to-create printings of the actual photos. Some of my own base hunches about all this are that photographers shooting photos at major league ball games across all decades were a) cognizant of the fact that an ad in the background of a photo distracts from a subject in the foreground, and were b) largely working for newspapers, who wished to sell advertising, not give it away free in their photographs. Printing an image of a baseball player in front of the Burma Shave billboard in the outfield on the cover of the sports section is not going to be appreciated by the Barbasol executive who just purchased a few weeks of print ads in that same sports section, though maybe the Burma Shave exec would buy you an extra martini at lunch the next day.

To consider the implications of advertising & MLB for this post, I spent a little time wandering the web on the topic. I did not find a just-exactly-perfect, detailed history of the interaction of professional baseball and advertising to share a link with you - perhaps someone out there should write one. But I did pick up a few tidbits along the way this morning, including one about the famous "Green Monster" in Left Field at Fenway. I bet few fans today realize that it only became "Green" in 1947 as previously, it was covered in advertising.

I suspect that as the 50s and 60s and then 70s and even large portions of the 80s moved along, Major League Baseball probably was at a lower point in having tight connections between seeing live baseball action while simultaneously seeing advertising in the same visual frame, as compared to earlier decades, and the way 'the game' looks today, as seen on this A.J. Pierzynski card, and many, many other recent cards. At some point, ownerships once again became quite willing to bring in revenue by returning to selling ads on every surface a fan might gaze upon.

So I think by first becoming familiar with cards always free of ads in previous decades, this then creates a feeling of negativity around cards like this one. "I just want them to be like they were when I was a kid" is an incredibly common sentiment among older collectors today. Now, you kids get off my lawn, too!

Lately I have noticed a new access to historical images of the connection between pro baseball and advertising - on baseball cards, like this one:

Of note regarding this card from the 2011 Topps Lineage set, it is card #42, and not the only card # & Uni # match on the checklist, some 2 years before the 2013 Sea Turtles.

As Topps and Panini continue to mine old photos to use on new baseball cards, a little more of the historical amount of advertising around the game is now seen, on some cards. I haven't found a lot of them over the past decade, but they are here and there, and they do catch your eye with their contrast to original cards of the same Star players from 50+ years ago.

Thus this #12 A.J. Pierzynski 2013 Topps baseball card connects me to major league history in a certain way. It also connects me to baseball card history, as sets of baseball cards used to routinely use photos shot from the sidelines of baseball activity of all types. Naturally, given the location of Topps, Inc., a lot of such images came from Yankee and Shea Stadiums when this practice began. The modern composition of _the_ Topps Baseball set every year is to use action shots, action shots, action shots, as we will see routinely in this blog, but that is in no way an historical Topps approach. I'm not sure just when the set became > 95% live action, but that is the way it is today.

When the first true photographs of live action on cards began appearing (as opposed to the illustrated-from-photos technique occasionally used earlier, as in 1956 for example) in the 1971 set (none in 1970? correct if I am wrong), they were a welcome relief from sets composed of >95% posed pictures. And then for a long time sets were a mix of action, and semi-action or 'candid' photos snapped along sidelines or dug-outs or a spring training field, and actual straight poses for the camera shot in those same locations, often times from the official "Photo Day" teams have (and still do today, in about 3 weeks as I type) at the very beginning of Spring Training. 

Current decade sets have abandoned that approach entirely, at least in the 660 or 700 card Topps Baseball set. Recent Heritage releases have used cards almost exclusively sourced at Photo Day, but then recent Heritage years have been reproducing a difficult period for Topps, the late 60s, when photo rights contracts with the players were in a great deal of flux and assembling the images for the sets was probably the most challenging in the whole history of Topps. So Heritage sets of the last few years really shouldn't be judged much, on this question. The imminent release of the 1970 style Heritage set will be fascinating in this regard - will "the Stadium" once again appear as a back-drop on the baseball cards? One bright spot on this question has been found in recent releases of the Archives set, where the tradition of mixing up the photo sources has begun to ramp up somewhat, after initial Archives sets were heavily composed of generally tepid Photo Day images.

Meanwhile in the most recent Topps Baseball sets, only a similar handful of cards are drawn from 'candid' sources in a set using >95% live game images, though perhaps with a few more cards than we will see in the 2013 set. These days, 'candids' are largely reserved for use as Photo Variations, which most casual collectors will never own beyond an occasional example pulled from a pack.

When I first beheld this A.J. Pierzynski card, it gave me hope that the set was going to become more 'mixed' in terms of photo type diversity, a hope that did not come true. But whenever I see this card, that hope is renewed, as with baseball cards, the old expression re: baseball is also quite true: "there's always next year."

Whew. That leaves just one more mystery about the card at hand - what game is it from? I have tried several times to figure that out; only a high quality scan of the card finally cracked the case for me. There is a very similar image of A.J. from September 2011 in the Getty archives, however it clearly shows Paul Konerko in the batter's box. On this card, Alex Rios is batting in front of Pierzynski, in the bottom of the 1st, with a runner on 3rd and 2 Outs. It is a nice sunny day game, with full stands - probably a weekend game. The visiting team has their road greys on, but they have blue caps and other bits of blue on.

As it turns out, the Blue Jays visited Chicago on Saturday, July 7, 2012. In the At Bat underway on this card, Rios grounded out, ending the inning.

Uniform Hero? As seen on A.J.'s right breast - and the bat knob.

Where’d the egg hatch? A.J. Pierzynski was drafted in the 3rd round by the Twins in 1994, for whom he essentially had 3 "Cups of Coffee" type appearances in MLB from 98 through 2000, before becoming a starter at Catcher for them in 2001.

How about the migrations? His stint in Minnesota would include 2 more full seasons before a trade to the Giants for the 2004 season and then moving to the White Sox in 2005. As this card was coming out of packs, he was coming off his best ever season at the plate for Chicago, posting an .827 OPS. However his contract expired after the 2012 season and Pierzynski had already (December, 2012) signed with the Texas Rangers for the 2013 season. So this became his final White Sox baseball card. He would go on to also play in St. Louis and Boston before retiring after 2 seasons with Atlanta in 2015 and 2016 - his 19th.

Pierzynski was definitely not a "beloved" player by many, for transgressions I am not always familiar with, including one famous on-field brawl. Despite that, he began a broadcasting career while still an active player in 2011, by working on post-season broadcasts. He is currently a full-time baseball analyst for the Fox network.

My own most cognizant memory of A.J. Pierzynski is an oddball stat that I have never put much time into tracking down. After his many years in the AL Central, he was quite familiar to broadcasters in the division. The radio crew for the Detroit Tigers, who supply me with a large portion of my baseball news every season, would always comment on one of his hitting tendencies - he would normally be found atop the current  'leader boards', wherever those are kept, for one specific stat: his tendency to swing at the first pitch of an At Bat. I do hope to see some actual #s on that, somewhere, some day.

Don’t flip over real Turtles.

No fuss no muss, just a nice compendium of his career stats to date.

Can the Turtle Catch the Rabbit?

CAREER CHASE: With 1,645 hits, Pierzynski is 2,611 away from the all-time record of 4,256.

On their 4th try with this one, Topps did get the math right, for only the 2nd time.

Pierzynski finished his career with 2,043 Hits, becoming just the 9th (10th if you count Joe Torre, who played more games in the infield than behind the plate) Catcher to break the 2,000 Hit mark. Unlike Yadier Molina, I do not expect he will receive many Hall of Fame votes, though his career was very impressive nonetheless.

Subspecies? After changing teams probably during the production of this card, Pierzynski does have some other Sea Turtle design cards, though he is the first player on the Series 1 checklist to not appear on the 220 card Opening Day checklist. He appears with the Texas Rangers in the Update set, as he does in Chrome and on one other card. When I reach his Update card, many years from now, I will examine the other Pierzynski Sea Turtles.

2019 Update: As I detail in the #49 - Chris Sale entry, I have now begun adding unique cards from the Topps 'factory' "Team Set" issued in blister packs in June of each year. As I wish to keep the one card, one post format for the blog, I will be adding the various unique cards to the most apropos pack issued card as I go along. This is clearly the right post to add this card:

& the straight-forward card back:

Bling That Shell Another easy decision to select this one, although another that also took a few years to track down. The White Sox have a singular Sea Turtle 'team color' - grey - that looks excellent on most every parallel, though of all the teams, their cards do struggle the most on the /99 Camo version. But along with one other easily guessed team, their cards look absolutely exactly perfect on the /62 Black versions:

However, I like this card so much that I decided to collect a partial 'Rainbow' of the possibilities. My first shipment home from COMC includes our first view of the /230 'Factory Set Orange' parallel, for a page I have made good progress on, with just 2 easy spots and one difficult one to go: