What’s that Turtle doin’? The third horizontal card in the set is also the third Fielding card. It is also the first to feature a live action baseball, flying through the air - always a center of attention on a card.
In general Jones is moving so fast here that a few more small portions of the card seem to show a slight bit of blur to them; unusual in the often incredible stop-motion sports photography of the 21st century. This card also includes a background probably not seen much on 20th century baseball cards - a 100% green grass background, which is now not uncommon on live game image cards. That is just a hunch; more specifically my thought is that players can now be photographed like this from a little farther away than they could a couple decades ago, making these All Green cards for Outfielders pretty All Good.
My only complaint with this card is the way it almost seems like Jones is tripping on the frame of the card, however it is quite beyond my pay grade to know whether it would have been possible to fix that with the probably powerful imagery workstation computer at Topps HQ - though I suspect it might have been.
Uniform Hero? Of course. Jones switched to Uni #10 after his Rookie season in Seattle, and has worn it in Baltimore ever since.
Where’d the egg hatch? The Mariners drafted Jones in 2003, technically in the 1st round, but just barely, as he was the final selection in the Compensation Round - the 37th pick overall. This type of draft order positioning structure changes every four years or so in MLB, as the League and the Major League Baseball Player's Association tweak the main MLB -- MLBPA Collective Bargaining Agreement.
How about the migrations? Before the 2009 season, Jones was traded from Seattle to Baltimore, along with 5 (!) other players, including long-time O's starter Chris Tillman. All for Erik Bedard, who accumulated about 4 WAR for the M's over 3 seasons before being traded away for not all that much. I would say the Orioles definitely won that trade.
Jones has been on 5 All-Star Teams and won 4 Gold Gloves and 1 Silver Slugger while playing in Baltimore. Late in the summer of 2018, he moved from Center to Right Field for the first time in his career, in part to help make room for a promising Rookie in Center.
Not long afterwards, he took the unusual step of rejecting a proposed trade to the Philadelphia Phillies. This is something allowed for MLB veterans with so-called '10-and-5' rights, which alludes to having played for 10 years in the Majors, and the previous 5 with their current team.
I deem this 'unusual' because I think it has been a number of years since a player has used this right outlined in the Collective Bargaining Agreement. Although it is also unusual in that we don't know if any other players have refused a trade without it ever becoming public knowledge, but I doubt that happens very often either.
This trade decline seems to imply Jones might want to retire as an Oriole, and his contract expired at the end of the 2018 season. In the winter of 2019, he has not made much news around the decidedly Cold Stove, and it remains a bit unconfirmed, via any recent interviews, if he is seeking a new contract in Baltimore, or elsewhere, for the 2019 season, though that is likely. It remains unlikely the Orioles would hire him as they have little choice but to attempt to climb from deep in the cellar of the AL East largely by evaluating new young talent, who will need playing time and lots of it.
Don’t flip over real Turtles.
In a certain way, this is the most classical baseball card back we've seen yet. Finding a stat of X things happening in Y games in the month/year Z while being only the nth time this has happened in team/AL/NL/MLB history is a hallmark of the genre.
If you had to write hundreds upon hundreds of baseball card backs annually, generally for players far less good than Adam Jones, I am sure you would resort to this tactic quite soon, also.
Can the Turtle Catch the Rabbit?
CAREER CHASE: With 107 Home Runs, Jones is 655 away from Barry Bonds' all-time record of 762.
I have a feeling we will be reading Barry Bonds' name here quite a bit as this set rolls along.
By 2018, Adam Jones had increased his career Home Run mark to 266 as he had begun cruising through the peak of his career just as this card was issued.
Subspecies? Another long-time, not-going-anywhere, popular MLB Veteran, Jones has this same card in Opening Day and Chrome. He also has a 'Sunglasses' photo variant / SP issued in Series 2 packs, with this card #, and one other variant I hope to share with you eventually.
Bling That Shell For the Jones card, I selected a parallel to use right at the beginning of the project. And it is one of the parallels that probably led to the creation of this project - the 'Blue Sparkle' / 'Wrapper Redemption' cards. These were given out in small packs, mailed directly from Topps, for anyone who sent in a requisite number of wrappers. I gave this the old college drop-out try and mailed in the needed bunch, but sometime right around the officially announced cut-off date for the promotion, which was probably well after the supplies of packs were exhausted by baseball card collectors with far more free time than I had that winter.
This relatively early iteration of "Silver Pack" give-aways for most loyal Topps addicts has become a standard part of the release of Series 1, Series 2, and now even Update as well. In 2013, the packs mainly held the 'Blue Sparkle' parallels (sometimes called 'Blue Slate'), later determined, somehow, to be printed in /150 editions, although not actually stamped with individual serial #s. But the packs held 2 other possible cards - a very limited, individually stamped /10 'Silver Slate' parallel of the card image in-set in a thick cardboard frame with a foil / 'silver' Sea Turtle stamped on grey stock. I hope to show you one of those when we reach the early #200s in this set - some day.
And it wouldn't be a Topps product these days without yet another type of rare Sea Turtle - autographed cards with a wide range of /x copies being made. Those cards moved the Sea Turtle iconography about half-way up the card, enclosing a much smaller image, generally but not always the same as the player's S1 or S2 card. This allowed a 'sticker auto' to be affixed to the lower half of the card. I have not obtained any of these autographed Sea Turtles to share with you, yet.
At some point in the summer of 2013, I purchased a small lot of the Blue Sparkle parallels via eBay. Nothing in particular in terms of a collecting goal triggered the purchase, beyond wanting to see some of these cards, in-hand, rather than only on my computer screen. I enjoyed them quite a bit - the cards really sparkle quite well in the light.
I soon noticed a certain thing about them - the ones I liked the best had a lot of green in the image, like this Adam Jones card does -
On most of the cards, whatever is in the background also becomes blue. But on certain cards, other colors appear in the sparkles after the mysterious sparkle creation process at the Topps printing plant. The most 'green' cards become essentially a tri-color card. The main Sea Turtle design elements remain in their calming normal ink, and everything else becomes sparkle-ized, save the team logo, the Topps logo, the actual player (and here, the actual baseball - a nice touch), and the player's name. These cards look nice in a scan, but also look very nice in a good amount of any kind of light, especially natural sunlight.
The other key thing I noticed about them arrived more slowly - I did not really care for the cards from the 'blue teams' - which have a blue Sea Turtle. There are 12 such teams in the set. The blue frame design elements largely disappear on a blue background - true for all the blue parallels; these, as well as the Wal-Mart blues only found in packs sold at Wal-Mart, and also the Opening Day Blue /2013 foils.
I am not much of a Player Collector. I am a Team Collector, always keeping all Detroit Tigers cards I run across. But I like to follow all of Major League Baseball via my baseball cards, so I like completing certain sets, including the main Topps Baseball set every year.
But I wanted to keep some of these pretty parallels in my collection somehow too. They reminded me quite a bit of the first baseball cards I ever saw - from 1975 Topps, with their 3 color design and use of colors like Purple and Pink, which were never otherwise seen in Major League Baseball.
How would I collect these? My first thought was to do team sets of certain color combos. I don't think I ever started one with the Blue Sparkle cards, but an early effort was the "Purple A's" using the purple parallels available at Toys R Us. Those cards look sharp, and I liked the play-on-words from the song "Purple Haze" too of course.
Other teams looked really good on those purples, too, including the White Sox and the Pirates. And then some teams looked good on other combos. I started collecting the Cardinals on the Emerald parallel, present in every pack configuration. The red-on-green colors seemed like they would make a nice team set gift for my uncle, a life-long Cardinals fan. I could send them to him for Christmas, even. Red, Green, Christmas, the Cardinals - get it? - Christmas Cards.
I was also living through one of my periodic returns to high activity levels in this hobby, after encountering a set of cards I particularly liked, the 2011 Topps Baseball set. That gave me some of my first parallels, with the Golds and the Diamond Sparkle cards, and then the 'Cognacs' in Update. It seemed like these gave collectors an interesting, challenging way to collect the set - all of the cards in their colorful/shiny 'parallel' versions.
But I didn't want a Gold set of the 2013 cards, or a Red set, or a Blue set. Each parallel, except Gold, had a corresponding 'team color' that just didn't look all that great - blue-on-blue, or red-on-red, etc.
Finally the technique I have settled on came to me, and seemed obvious. I would collect a Parallel Set - but of all different colors, all at the same time. And to keep dull repetition at bay, I would simply not repeat a color combination on any single binder page. Eureka!
It is past time to show you some more cards here, though you have probably just seen all of these already. May I present:
Page One of the 2013 All-Parallel Set
That's 9 All-Stars on a single Topps Baseball set binder page, and not in a special All-Star subset. Perhaps technically, not all of these players (Dee Gordon?) has actually been a Starting-8 All-Star, as voted in by the fans. I am not sure 9 such players have ever graced a page of 9 sequential-in-checklist cards, in a full set of the annual Topps Baseball set, before this 2013 set. ?
This page has gone through some changes over the years. When a page holds a player with a card in Opening Day, the page is simplest to complete - I only need 2 of the limited /x parallels, aside from the /2013 Gold and Opening Day Blue, and the actually /150 Blue Sparkle. Emerald, Wal-Mart Blue, and Target Red can fill out the page easily enough after those.
So each page starts with an attempt to find needed /x parallels first, as I already have a random amount of the basic / 'retail' parallels to use. It makes no difference if a /x card replaces one of the more easily obtained parallels.
On this page, I acquired a Black /62 parallel of the Dee Gordon card quite some time ago, via a < $5 purchase on eBay. Looking at all of the other cards on the page and the color combos possible to use, or not use, and the cards I already had (Jeter and Harper parallels are not cheap), consistently circled me back to wanting the Ryan Braun card specifically in Pink /50. That required setting an automatic notification search on eBay, which took almost two years to turn one up.
With that in hand, and Jeter and Harper secured, I could wrap this page up. But then at some point I noticed on other pages with a Camo /99 parallel in use, the player's foil printed name about disappeared on the card, amidst the Camo pattern. I am not a fan of foil printing on my baseball cards. I decided to eliminate those from the project, requiring a re-organization of most of the project, including many completed pages. Ahh, the things a pursuit of Art make one do.
While doing that, I realized how little "Pop" the 'blue team' cards had on the black parallel, as compared to so many other combinations. I decided to mostly eliminate those as well. So much for the Dee Gordon card I already had - I could do better. Particularly on the first page of the project.
Teams that use Black in their uniforms look very nice on the Black parallel, and none of them are 'blue teams', in terms of the color of the Sea Turtle used on the card. With 2 players sporting black socks on this page, it was clear a Black parallel for Pence or Jones would be a classy choice here. But with my love for the Blue Sparkle Jones card, that made Pence the easy choice.
All that was then left was replacing the Dee Gordon card, accomplished easily enough with a Gold card. When the Pence and Gordon cards finally arrived last week, my goal of perfecting this page before starting the blog was met.
I think that is all the fine points of this collecting project, probably in too much detail. I have decided to keep the blog structure to one post per card #, and I will be simply appending miscellaneous Sea Turtle Card things I encounter, or already have, to the single player card posts, all along the way.
After every 9th card, I will take a look at the resulting binder page in the All-Parallel project. The next page will be seen after card #19, however that page still has many gaps in it. I will work my way towards it with some more single card posts soon, to illustrate in-progress work on assembling this set, and sort out a few more of the color rules I am using then as well.
Whew! You made it! Thanks for reading!
