Collect the Mets

2011 was another dismal season for the Mets on the field, but who needs actual games when you have baseball cards?  It was a fairly uneventful season there too until the last few weeks, but there were several bright spots.

Going into the first year of the reborn Topps monopoly (Upper Deck still managed to put out a 2010 product with just a MLB Players Association license before getting sued by MLB Properties), I didn’t exactly have high hopes.  Take out all that Upper Deck and Donruss have given the hobby on the game-used front over the preceding decade and you would be left with mostly mediocre offerings.  Even after just the loss of Donruss and Fleer in 2005, variety in game-used offerings has taken a nosedive; taking Upper Deck out of the picture certainly isn’t going to help.  Gone are the days of finding pieces of hats, gloves, shoes, and other random items embedded in cardboard (I can live without game-used dirt cards).  Gone too are the days of even having any details of the item mentioned on the card – “Congratulations! You have received pieces of stuff used in a game of some sort!”  Based on how Topps seemed to be dumping its excess game-used inventory into cards in 2010 (some cards featured pieces of jerseys from events dating back to 2002), the days of timely and relevant game-used pieces (aside from the annual All-Star game insert sets) seemed long past.  2011 had a few surprises though, giving hope for some interesting products in the years to come (especially now that Panini, aka Donruss Mk. III, is in the market with a license from the MLB Players Association).

Farewells

The new front office regime made some long-overdue cuts in Spring Training, sending Oliver Perez and Luis Castillo walking (with $18 million…).  They’ll be lucky to ever be featured on a baseball card again, much less a game-used card…

Francisco Rodriguez hasn’t had a relevant game-used card since his last All-Star appearance in 2009, so that just leaves Carlos Beltran on the list of mid-season departures.  Beltran had decent amount of game-used cards this year, second on the Mets only to David Wright.  Beltran became the first Met with a game-used card featuring the updated 2010 pinstripe jersey in 2011 Topps Marquee and followed that up with a 2011 All-Star Workout Jersey card in 2011 Topps Updates & Highlights.

Also with an All-Star Workout Jersey card this year was Jose Reyes, who, um, yeah…  Say hello to the starting shortstop for the Miami Marlins.

Angel Pagan finally broke into the game-used ranks with lots of jersey and bat cards in Marquee and Triple Threads just before he was traded in the offseason for Andres Torres and Ramon Ramirez.  It’s sad to see him go, but it was time for a change.  Best of luck in San Francisco.

Hails

The only big addition during the season was Zack Wheeler, who brought with him cards featuring pieces of his 2010 Futures Game jersey.  This was fairly significant because it adds a USA team jersey to Familia’s corresponding World team jersey.  Wheeler also has a red AFLAC All-American Game jersey making the game-used rounds over in the off-brand side of the house.

Five players were added to the 40-man roster from outside of the organization by the end of the year.  First was reliever Jon Rauch, whose game-used resume includes three Team USA jersey cards.  Next were Andres Torres and Ramon Ramirez, who were acquired in the Angel Pagan trade.  Torres has a few bat cards, a 2002 Futures Game jersey, and a fielding glove card and Ramirez has squat.  Frank Francisco was signed to replace Francisco Rodriguez (is there a pattern here?) as closer, making this the second year in a row the Mets have added a player with a Rangers patch card (after Chris Young last year); the list of Rangers players with Mets patch cards remains at just Nolan Ryan.  Jeremy Hefner was picked up on a minor league contract and has no cards worth noting.  Most of them have autographs, but doesn’t everyone these days?

First-Timers

Four Five Mets players had their first game-used cards released in 2011.  Despite his mediocre 2011 season, Angel Pagan’s breakout 2010 was enough to give him a prominent place in the various 2011 Topps Marquee game-used insert sets.  Though the material was limited to the usual boring gray jerseys and bats, there was enough variety to make his debut fairly impressive (particularly the Titanic Threads Autographed Jumbo Relic numbered to 10).  This was followed up with a decent showing in 2011 Topps Triple Threads with (sticker) autographed jersey cards and (sticker) autographed triple jersey cards which, in typical Topps fashion, had cutout windows over the jersey swatches forming words like “Crazy Horse,” “Breakout Season,” “Heaven Sent,” and, worst of all, “Send Me an Angel.”  The various 1 of 1 versions of these cards (of which there were several essentially identical versions, another Topps trademark) featured piping from the jerseys; Pagan has yet to be featured on a patch card.  Pagan also shared a dual Bat / Sticker Autograph card with Ike Davis in Bowman Platinum, but that wasn’t released until the end of the season as a redemption card.

Josh Thole and Jon Niese both played prominent roles in the 2010 season after starting in the minors, so it is fitting that they shared a game-used debut in 2010 Triple Threads.  Both appeared in the needlessly parallelized Unity Autographed Relic insert sets with gray jersey and patch variants.  The card design could have been better and the patches were tiny and boring, but I guess we should be glad to get anything from these guys.

Dillon Gee surprised everyone with the best-ever start for a Mets rookie pitcher (7-0 in 10 starts), then went 6-6 over the rest of the season.  As a backup plan for the inevitable loss of one of the Mets’ two injury risk scrapheap rotation signings, Gee performed admirably, making 27 starts and pitching 160 innings in 30 total appearances.  We may have already seen his best, but a solid cheap, young starter in the back end of the rotation could still be a useful piece.  Gee had a few more surprises after the Mets called it a season; he was named the Mets’ representative in the 2011 Taiwan All-Star Series and, more importantly, he had his first game-used cards in 2011 Topps Finest.  Like the Thole and Niese cards, Gee’s first game-used cards were fairly plain multi-level parallel cards with sticker autographs and the same gray jereys that everyone else has.  Unlike Thole and Niese though, Gee got two pieces of boring gray jersey in his cards.  A few patch cards were also produced, all with print runs of ten or less and featuring a jumbo piece of the “NEW YORK” from a gray road jersey.

UPDATE: How did I miss this one?  At the very end of the year, Bowman Sterling had one little surprise in store – a Justin Turner jersey card!  Turner was red-hot (no pun intended) following his call-up in 2011, but cooled off as it became clear that he would be in the starting lineup somewhere on the field for the duration of the season.  Still, his brief tenure as an RBI machine and his ability to get hit by pitches was one of the few bright spots in the 2011 season.  He joins David Wright as the only two Mets with pieces of the current-style blue jersey available in cards (Turner’s version also includes variants with pieces of the mesh side panels, which is something that only I would notice or care about…).  With the middle of the Mets’ infield very much up in the air, Turner could see significant playing time again in 2012 (unless the Mets spend big bucks and/or prospects to acquire an equivalent backup infielder elsewhere, which would seem a bit stupid).

Expansion

Ike Davis followed up on his rookie year autographed bat cards with a more mainstream offering of bats and jerseys alongside the usual suspects (Wright/Reyes/Beltran) in several 2011 products.  A small number (about 100 total) of patch cards also made it into circulation, mostly in Marquee and Triple Threads.

Omissions

Daniel Murphy

Daniel Murphy’s 2010 DL stint seems to have set his game-used portfolio back as well.  Murphy was virtually unseen in 2011 after having a small number of autographed bat cards in 2009 and 2010.  Hopefully this will turn around in 2012 as Murphy looks to be a starter in 2012 (if he can stay off the DL).

Lucas Duda

Duda split the season between the bench and Right Field as Beltran’s replacement and combined flashes of greatness with periods of mediocrity.  As such, he’s due to be overhyped in 2012, which should hopefully increase his hobby offerings from the current, um, reproduction college patch autograph?  2011 1st round draft pick Brandon Nimmo managed to get a proper Bowman Chrome autograph just three months after signing while Duda gets diddleysquat.

Ruben Tejada

Tejada isn’t completely without game-used cards, having been featured on a couple of WBC jersey cards back in 2009, but he has yet to have any MLB material released despite a decent amount of playing time over the last two years.  As the team’s new starting shortstop, this should change.

R.A. Dickey

One of the most consistent performers on the Mets over the last two seasons, Dickey hasn’t seen dickey in the game-used department.  In fact, Dickey barely registers in the hobby at all.  Even Topps Heritage, with countless variations and inserts, only featured him on one card (the same treatment as Terry Collins, Jon Niese, and Francisco Rodriguez).  If there’s one thing this hobby needs more of, it’s Dickey.

Alumni

Padres closer and former Met Heath Bell appeared in his last game in a Padres uniform at about the same time as his first Padres patch card appeared in 2011 Topps Marquee.  It is a testament to the difficulty of getting timely material out in cards that it took several All-Star seasons to get some new material for Bell (last seen outside of All-Star jerseys with a Mets patch in 2003).

Special Events

As usual, Topps Updates & Highlights had plenty of All-Star workout jersey cards to go around.  The 2011 All-Star game was light on Mets players though (soon-to-be former Mets Carlos Beltran and Jose Reyes were the only Mets in attendance, with ex-Met Heath Bell rounding out the trio of Mets alumni on the roster), so that left us with just three cards of interest to Mets fans.  Well, maybe six if you count the parallel versions numbered to 60 (which carried little to no premium over the regular versions for most players).  Or nine if you count the jersey color variations; as usual, the 2011 All-Star workout jerseys featured three colors and, unlike last year, all three colors were used in the basic All-Star Stitches insert set, for whatever that’s worth. Some patches also made their way into Triple Threads, but like most of the good pieces in that product, their print runs were too small for them to be obtainable.

Of interest to fabric buffs is the change in jersey material to, well, whatever it is now.  The last significant changes were the material change in 2003 and the addition of colored side panels in 2005.  I wish I could say more, but all I know is what I can tell from tiny scraps embedded in cardboard.

Futures Game jersey cards started showing up by late November, featuring Mets minor leaguers Matt Harvey (USA team) and Jefry Marte (World team).  While the Futures Game jerseys, like the All-Star workout jerseys, each had three different colors, only the primary colors have made it into cards so far.  Patch variants have also been sighted.

Autographs

Last, but not least, several Mets players made their official autograph debut in 2011 (with “official” meaning MLBP-licensed, aka Topps).

On the Bowman side of things, long-time minor leaguers Reese Havens and Brad Holt joined 2010 draft picks Blake Forsythe and Erik Goeddel and 2011 draft picks Brandon Nimmo and Michael Fulmer with their first Bowman autographs.  Dillon Gee also had a Bowman autograph, though this was not his first year with a Bowman card (the Rookie Card designation has long since lost all significance, so this is the best we can do).

Digging way back to the 1960s, for Mets from the 1962 Topps set got their first certified autograph cards in 2011 Topps Heritage.  Frank Thomas, the biggest star on the 1962 Mets team (not to be confused with the White Sox player with the same name and a pretty good Hall of Fame case), took the spotlight in the product’s various insert sets.  Ed Bouchee, Neil Chrisley (who never appeared in a game with the Mets, or anyone else for that matter, after being returned to the Braves just prior to the start of the 1962 season), and John DeMerit (the most fitting name on the ’62 Mets) rounded out the ’62 Mets tribute autographs.

Final Thoughts

Did I miss anything?  Probably, but I only started paying attention with the release of 2011 Topps Heritage and stopped shortly thereafter.  There were assorted pieces from ’86 Mets alumni Gary Carter, Dwight Gooden, Keith Hernandez, Howard Johnson, and Darryl Strawberry (No Lenny Dykstra?  Isn’t he due for a big memorabilia fire sale to pay his legal bills?), but I loaded up on them years ago when the prices were more favorable.  If there is anything I missed, leave a comment and I’ll get right on it.  Note to self: get readers before you give them homework…