What’s that Turtle doin’? On our first horizontal card, Topps deploys a not uncommon live game baseball card trope, though technically a post-game trope: a Catcher congratulating his battery-mate on a Win.
Except normally, such cards feature relievers at a minimum, and usually show well-known Closers. This card features Cardinals Ace Adam Wainwright, leading one to guess this is a celebration of an ever more rare thing in today's MLB - a Complete Game Victory.
And a quick bit of clicking through Baseball Reference and Getty Images, the source of a great many Topps baseball cards, reveals that this image is from the conclusion of a game on May 22, 2012, when Wainwright threw a 9 Inning, 4 Hit Shut-out at home to beat the San Diego Padres, 4-0.
Uniform Hero? No question on a card with this low of a #. In his first two seasons, Molina wore #41 before settling in at #4 in 2006. I would say there is a good chance the Cardinals might someday retire this #, as they have not done so since honoring Ozzie Smith at #1, and a future date in Cooperstown is not out of the range of possibilities for 'Yadi'.
Where’d the egg hatch? A 4th round pick for the Cards, Molina debuted in 2004.
How about the migrations? A steady presence in St. Louis ever since, with numerous accolades, MLB Awards, All-Star games, and post-season triumphs, Molina is quite likely to remain a Franchise Player for his entire career. He is currently signed with the Cardinals through the 2020 season.
Don’t flip over real Turtles.
A straight-forward, insightful comment on Molina's impressive gains with the bat as his career matured.
Can the Turtle Catch the Rabbit?
CAREER CHASE: With 1,022 hits, Molina is 3,727 away from the all-time record of 3,234.
Perhaps The Hit King invisibly looms so large over this stat challenge construction, that the worn-out miner deep in the Topps baseball card mines has lost the ability to do basic math here. Though one also has to wonder just who has 4,749 Hits in some combination of baseball Leagues, somewhere, or who it is/was that had 3,234 somethings playing organized baseball.
Of course few would ever expect a Catcher, given the wear&tear and rest days required of the position, to be able to catch an Infielder in any given offensive stat of the counting variety. This example also illustrates the possibilities that could have existed if Topps could have put more miner hours into the creation of this set, and used occasional position-specific stats for this card-back feature.
After the 2018 season, Molina's career Hit total has reached 1,850. This gives him an excellent chance to reach 2,000 Hits - something only 9 other Catchers have done in the history of Major League Baseball, and just one simple reason he may some day give a speech in a small town in upstate New York.
Subspecies? This image is also used in Chrome, and in Opening Day, which we will see shortly. However as seeing more cards is more fun, I thought I would share a Molina card from an insert set I quite enjoyed and collected to completion in 2013, in Opening Day - the "Play Hard" inserts.
Now, Play @ the Plate cards are always popular of course, but seeing a moment of impact is somewhat rare. Would a Catcher blocking Home with another Catcher coming down the line from 3rd receive any professional courtesy from that Catcher, a year or so after the famous injury to Buster Posey, but before the new Buster Posey Rule? Nah man, Yadier Molina wants to win this game. Brace yourselves.
Bling That Shell This was another easy decision for the All-Parallel Turtles. As I am already going to be using the Emerald Foil parallels included in S1, S2, & Update, it was not much of a leap to also use the Blue Foil /2013 parallels found on the 220 card Opening Day checklist, about 97% of which uses the same image on the front of the card as is used in Series 1 & 2. I somewhat prefer the parallels that do not use the 'Foil' image modification, but the project would be too overly difficult without them.
The only minor nitpick to the idea is the basically superfluous Opening Day logo included on the cards, but I can live with that. I do like the dark blue border on these quite a bit.
Although 8 of the 9 cards on the 1st binder page have equivalents in Opening Day, 3 of them are "Blue Team" cards, which would break a basic color rule I use for constructing the set, as I will explain a bit more after the post for the 9th card. Of the five choices for using an Opening Day Blue on the page, I pulled this card from a pack:
