It’s common to see someone identify as a “lifelong Mets fan,” but what does that really mean? Were you born wearing orange and blue face paint? Were your first words “Let’s go Mets?” Did you learn to walk just so you could participate in a “kids run the bases” event at Shea? I could see this being true in Boston, where indoctrination begins in the womb, but New York has too many sports options for that to be practical. My blessing and my curse is being able to remember what and how I thought as a child, which means I can never call myself a “lifelong” anything (genetics aside). When it comes to the Mets, I can remember a time before I had developed an opinion. I can remember when I chose to be a Mets fan. And I can remember the first team I chose to be a fan of – the New York Yankees.
Author Archives: Matthew Lug - Page 37
My dirty little secret: I was once a Yankees fan
Random Thought: The Number 18, an exercise in Small Sample Sizes
The tip of the iceberg?
I noticed something interesting the other day while sorting through scans for this site: I have a lot of cards numbered 18/25. I rarely notice any particular number, even the ones that idiot sellers on eBay proclaim to be “Like a 1/1!!!” (jersey numbers, first/last numbered, etc.). Once I got that in my head, I started noticing more of them on a regular basis. While interesting anecdotally, I wondered how significant the population of 18/25s would turn out to be when studied more closely. And so today’s random diversion was born.
Making the Cut: Eligibility requirements for this collection
Note: One of the challenges of this project has been dealing with a lack of appropriate terminology and notation. What I’ve come up with seems complex on the surface, so I’ll be explaining things as I go. This week, it’s a detailed listing of requirements for inclusion in the collection for this site. If requirements documents are your thing, you’ll enjoy this. If not, well, your brain is going to hurt.
What is the most important component of any collection? Money? Storage space? A Holy Grail? An understanding significant other? No, the most important component is the line that determines whether something belongs in the collection or doesn’t. Without that line, a collection can grow like a cancer, burning through all available storage space and your significant other’s patience. Having clear requirements may seem a bit overly pedantic, but it is essential for any large collection.
Understanding GUAR: The hot new sports statistic that nobody is using
Note: One of the challenges of this project has been dealing with a lack of appropriate terminology and notation. What I’ve come up with seems complex on the surface (often because it is), so I’ll be explaining things as I go. Some of the details won’t completely make sense until everything has been posted; please bear with me. This week, I’ll be taking a look at GUAR, my measure of the variety of a player’s game-used offerings.
I’ve always wanted to get in on the invented statistics racket, but I find myself more interested in the psychology of baseball minutiae than the mathematics. Looking at game-used cards for this project highlighted an opportunity – how do you quantify how much clout a player has in the hobby? You could add up the total number of cards, but that would be an exercise in insanity. You could add up just game-used cards, but that suffers from the same problem. Maybe if you add up the different TYPES of game-used in cards…
2011 Mets Game-Used Set of the Year
2011 Topps Marquee
Look at all the pretty Mets cards...
It was another rough year for the Mets, with Ike Davis being the only addition the core group of Wright, Reyes, Beltran, and sometimes Santana in the lineup for game-used insert sets in the first half of the year (Bay was in there too, but I’m trying to forget that he exists). 2011 Topps Marquee added Angel Pagan and Fernando Martinez to the mix with the former’s first-ever game-used cards and the latter’s first MLB game-used material, both with cards featuring sticker autographs (as well as on-card autographs in a separate insert set). There were several other notable cards, including the first pieces from the 2010 pinstripe uniforms (Beltran), large multi-color jerseys from Nolan Ryan (sadly, not Mets jerseys, though he is shown as a Met on the card) and Eddie Murray (Orioles), Mets logo patches from Johan Santana (though he is shown in a Twins uniform for some reason), and more mundane material from Jose Reyes, David Wright, and Tom Seaver (Roberto Alomar and Rickey Henderson were in there too, but I have nothing interesting to say about them). Finish it off with a variety of autograph, jersey, and Padres patch cards featuring ex-Met Heath Bell, and you have a set with plenty to offer any Mets collector.
2011 Mets Game-Used Year in Review
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).
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