Tommy Hanson's Second Start of the Season Today

Thanks to Joe and Chris over at Opening Day Cards, yet again. This time for the very nice Tommy Hanson rookie card depicted below. He helped me take the championship in my fantasy league last year and, seeing as I kept him, if I win this year he will likely be a part of that again.


His first start of the season it seemed as if the umpire had a small strike zone, so I will be interested to see what he does against the Padres tonight.

Also a question, is it bad to just pull some of the images off COMC.com rather than scanning my version of the card if there is no ostensible difference?

Draft Day Special: Edgardo Alfonzo Lucky #13

So today is the day of my fantasy draft. It is a NL only keeper league and I am the defending champion. If I repeat this year I get to keep an otherwise rotating trophy.

In honor of such a fun day I posted the "Have List" of my all-time favorite player: Edgardo Alfonzo. Take a look, and if you have any Alfonzo cards not on that list, please contact me for a trade.

I also took a picture of my favorite card of #13: a 1998 Metal Universe card. While the card is not actually metal there is some foil which gave the set some link to its name.





















As a kid I was in love with the Metal sets. I think the 1998 Metal Universe set in particular has actually grown on me over the years to the point where I like it more now. This is not necessarily true of the sets' previous years and the subsequent year was awful even to my childhood tastes. As you can see in this card, the backgrounds were taken from the area where each team plays. This idea worked really well for players from cities with lots of well known landmarks like New York, Chicago, and even Baltimore (maybe not so well for the Marlins).

Putting Fonzie in front of Radio City Music Hall of the famed Radio City Christmas Spectacular, of which I also have fond childhood memories, sealed the deal with my choice of this as my favorite card of my favorite player.

To succinctly sum up why Edgardo Alfonzo is my favorite player of all time I refer to pages 241-242 from The Last Best League by Jim Collins, which I highly recommend (it chronicles the 2002 Season of the Cape Cod League's Chatham A's).

Basically, those pages explain a test created by Herb Greenberg that measures self confidence and competitiveness that many major league teams use to project how well talent will translate to on the field performance. Out of between six and seven hundred of these tests that MLB teams get analyzed every year only eight to ten get the highest score of 1. Edgardo Alfonzo got a 1 on this test which meant that he would likely "exceed his talent."

Add that to all the big hits that Fonzie got for the Mets over the years and the superb defense at two positions and you will begin to understand my rationale for liking him the best.

Hopefully my own competitiveness and self confidence will lead me to a great draft tomorrow.

Wish me luck!