Card #87: 150 years of baseball fun

The Pittsburgh Pirates and Cincinnati Reds got into another near altercation yesterday when Clay Holmes of the Pirates hit Eugenio Suarez on the hand.  Reds manager, David Bell, believed it,was on purpose and would eventually be tossed for arguing about it.

The Reds and Pirates have had a lot of skirmishes in the past and in 2012-2016 no two teams hit more batters than these two against each other. 

The Reds and Pirates had some battles in the 70s too when the Pittsburgh Lumber Company would be competing for the NL pennant against the Big Red Machine. 

The Reds are celebrating their 150th anniversary this year as being a professional major league team.

Last year Topps celebrated 100 years for their Topps Heritage release.  That's because the 1969 designed cards were celebrating 100 years of baseball.  This year, 2019, Topps is celebrating 150 years of baseball.  In addition to every flagship base card having a 150 year stamp parallel to,chase there is an insert set celebrating the first 150 years.

150 Years of Fun is the insert set to chase

The back goes on to show how much of a great humanitarian Clemente was as just a few days before his passing he was holding a baseball clinic for young kids.

On a completely unrelated note, please pray for the family of the little girl hit at the Astros game yesterday.

Card #86: Cannonball Coming!!!

Famous Pirates announcer, Greg Brown, has a saying "Clear The Deck, Cannonball Coming!"

Had he been around in 1964, he surely would have said it many times during Roberto Clemente's career.

485 FEET!!!!

That is a shot!!! The only problem with such a homerun happening so long ago is that it depreciates over time.  You see in 2015, the homerun was calculated at 492 feet according to the 2015 insert Topps made.  I wrote about it here.

I don't have the complete sets of either Long Ball Leaders (2018 insert) or Tape Measure Blasts (2015) so I can't confirm if any other cards feature questionable distances.

Card #85: Batting Practice with The King?

Nick Kingham has a rookie debut card in 2018 Update.  It is number US9.  Topps has been using legendary players in their recent releases of the past decade to get retired players on current designs. 

The Pirates pitcher was replaced with a Roberto Clemente SP photo variant.

This is a shot of Roberto that hasn't been used over and over again.  Love the pregame batting practice.

Here are the front and back of the Kingham card.

Card #84: 1984 design

Roberto Clemente appeared in the 2012 Archives release using the 1984 design.

1984 Topps is most memorable to me for the Darryl Strawberry rookie card.

The original card numbered 185 in the 1984 set belonged to Sixto Lezcano.  To say Clemente had a better career than Sixto would he the understatement of the century.

I don't own a Sixto card so I had to take this image from COMC.

Looks like he had a decent big league career.

Card #83: Snow Day in May?

It's been a long,time simce I posted on here and I probably have at least 100 more cards that need to be scanned. 

The other day I was watching The Rundown on MLB Network and I couldn't believe that Colorado is still cancelling games because of snow in May.  That weather is relentless.

If I were to ever live out there I know I,would be sporting a great beard like one of my current favorite big leaguers, Charlie Blackmon.

Charlie has started getting red hot at the plate lately.  It's a shame he started his career at an older age and was never a top prospect.  All he does is do professional at bat after at bat.  The guy knows how to hit.  At age 32, he doesn't look like he plans on slowing down any time soon either.