Don’t Call It a Comeback, I’ve Been Here For Years

I have very few card collections given my limited resources and space, but I did decide some time ago to begin collecting on-card Royals autographs. It’s been a blast so far trying to track these things down and this is the latest addition to my collection. To view the cards currently in the collection, take a look at the Gallery or the other posts in this series. I’m working on getting a legit want list together on my trade page but, in the meantime, if you have any on-card Royals autos that it looks like I don’t have, don’t hesitate to drop me a line!

His hat is like a shark fin.

If you’re following baseball at all this past season, you’ve surely heard that Alex Gordon is mounting what lots of people are calling a “comeback.” Now, I like a comeback as much as the next guy and it is an indisputable fact that he had his best Major League year in 2011, culminating in his recent (albeit debatable- Hunter Pence, anyone?) Gold Glove award. Batting average over .300, more than 20 HR, 81 RBI, 17 stolen bases? All career highs. His hitting had a WAR of 5.1. Not bad for someone people had written off as a bust. In fact, earlier in the season, I picked up not one but two versions of his most sought-after autograph cards. The base 2006 Bowman Chrome you see above and the refractor below.

Chromeo and Gordonette... a match befitting The Bard.

2006 was a turning point for baseball cards just as 2011 was a turning point for Alex Gordon. In fact, Gordon himself was the subject of one of the biggest card debacles in the young new century. 2006 is the year that Topps was supposed to stop confusing everybody about what a rookie card was. They would do that by not putting players who weren’t actually rookies in their products. Seems simple enough- it never made sense to me to see a Minor League player in a Major League jersey. It seems basically deceptive and certainly confusing to the casual collector.

So when Topps “inadvertently” made a 2006 Topps base card of Mr. Alex Gordon up there (easily the top prospect at the time) and then inserted it into packs, it caused quite a hullaballoo. There were a few versions of it that ended up in packs (much like the Billy Ripken “Rick Face” of 1989 Fleer) and eBay went bonkers over them. I wasn’t at all into the hobby in 2006, so I don’t have much to say about Topps’ motives there, but I will say that I have a very strong opinion about the rookie card debate that may be evident from much of my Bowman Chrome bashing on this here blog. It’s a post (or maybe even a series of posts) on its own, so I won’t get into it here- I’ll save those rants for later.

But until then, I’ll enjoy having these two nice looking cards in my collection despite my complaints.