Today I waived goodbye to Raichu. This little card lived in our house for barely a week, lasting just long enough to gauge how quickly word gets around the neighborhood about any new Pokemon cards in my daughter’s possession. A quick in-and-out visit to a local TCG show in February had yielded a single pack of cards as an after school treat. I didn’t know what I was buying, other than the fact that the 5 cards inside were Pokemon and they were packaged in impressively shiny foil with Japanese writing.
We opened the cards together and collectively tried to figure out what we had just pulled. In preparation for this I watched a box break of these cards, concluding that neither I or the person opening the cards had any idea of what was going on. The codes on the packaging told us these were from a relatively recent release entitled “Cyber Judge.” Not being able to read kanji, we used icons and artwork to identify which characters were in hand. Raichu, an advanced version of the famous Pikachu, stood out as being somewhat meaningful given the name recognition and a much higher HP balance in the upper right corner (if Pokemon cards had corners). Everything appeared to be a base card, which would have made that breaker I watched very, very sad.
This afternoon I heard voices coming from our front steps. Looking through the fisheye on the door, I spied my daughter sifting through a stack of penny sleeved cards while one of her friends was quickly rearranging cards in a binder. Oh no, I thought. That kid is a walking Pokedex of information. He is an expert negotiator and can spot a good card from all the way across the neighborhood. I stepped outside to see what kind of trade was underway.
Every one of the new cards was in his stack and my daughter was busy building a grouping of her own selections. I stepped back from active involvement and just observed after making sure she still had possession of a prized card that she had spent most of her savings on three years ago. She completed the trade, getting one additional card added to her end of the bargain in exchange for agreeing to make an animated .gif of her trading partner’s favorite Pokemon.
I was a bit younger than her when I began opening packs and swapping baseball cards on the front steps of other kids’ houses. Aside from a couple names gleamed from evening news highlight reels, I didn’t really know what I was doing. Other than the concept of see the ball/hit the ball, the game of baseball and its stats were still foreign to me. I had no frame of reference to judge the quality of the contents of a newly opened pack.
The first packs I bought all came from a Rite Aid situated a 5-minute bike ride away. Most of the cards from the 1991 edition of Donruss, though one or two packs of Topps made it into the rotation whenever I rode in the other direction towards a nearby 7-Eleven.
That’s where this card comes into play. Somewhere along the line I was given a price guide that was out of date by 2 or 3 months. I scanned the names and corresponding prices for the packs which I had been buying, seeing many of the same names displaying similar collector demand regardless of which wrapper they had emerged from. I didn’t yet understand batting average and whatever black magic resulted in a pitching “win.” What I did know after reading this was that Don Mattingly was superior to Don Slaught and cards of Kevin Maas were to be preferred over Kevin Tapani. I certainly took note of the fact that, according to the guide, my Alex Fernandez card was the most sought after piece of blue cardboard in the ’91 Donruss set.
I didn’t know that Fernandez had been the top-ranked college baseball player just one year earlier with a 14-0 record and 0.56 ERA. I had no idea he had twice been a first round draft pick, first in 1988 and again in 1990. Long before I understood which cards were rare and which players were good, I was using pricing data to infer these collector preferences. It is something that most people end up doing when faced with ranking desirability in the absence of data of any real substance. If you don’t know anything about car tires, for example, you can reasonably assume the one the garage prices at $150 will probably provide some sort of advantage over the one they have for $90.
It took about a year for 9 year-old me to really understand baseball stats and get enough playing time under my belt to draw my own pricing independent conclusions. In the interim, this method and particularly this Alex Fernandez card bridged the gap. I have fallen right back into it when it comes to refereeing my daughter’s Pokemon trades. Maybe we should just invite her friend over for pizza while he explains relative Pokemon values to us both.
Real Baseball, Not Cardboard Baseball
I had a pretty good sense of where my Alex Fernandez card stood in 1991, as well as later in the decade when everything connected with ’91 Donruss pretty became worthless. However, that’s just cardboard. What kind of value did the actual White Sox get from their new pitcher?
They got a pitcher who struggled for a couple early seasons before becoming one of the best players on the Chicago pitching staff. He threw a near perfect game against the Brewers and then saw his career take off in 1993, going 18-9 with a 3.10 ERA and 169 strikeouts. A control guy, he consistently generated above average strikeout rates while issuing few walks. Free agency led him to his hometown Miami Marlins, where he promptly took a no-hitter into the 9th inning against the Chicago Cubs.
The Marlins’ 1997 acquisition benefitted from more than just that win against the Cubs. Fernandez led the team in wins (17) in a year in which the club became the surprise World Series winners. He didn’t get to play for that title, as his rotator cuff blew out in the NL championship series. He would miss the series and the following year before a fitful attempt to come back to the game that was met by limited success.
The ’97 Marlins are famous for two things: Winning a World Series and immediately holding a fire sale of their players as they sought to dump salary. The team traded away 7 of their starting 9 postion players, including Charles Johnson, Jeff Conine, Bobby Bonilla, Moises Alou, and Gary Sheffield. This wasn’t a shift towards pitching either, as Kevin Brown, Al Leiter, and Robb Nen were quickly jettisoned in quick succession.
There would have been another name on the list, had he not been sitting at home with a torn rotator cuff. The Marlins found themselves unable to trade one of their most valuable pitchers and unable to utilize his services for at least a year. They pursued the next best course of action: They filed an insurance claim.
Fernandez had signed for $35 million payable over five years when he joined the team at the beginning of 1997. The injury would prevent him from playing in the second year of that contract and threatened his effectiveness in the out years, assuming he would ever come back from the damage. Having spent heavily in 1996-97 to assemble this team, the Marlins front office hedged their bets by taking out an insurance policy on Fernandez’ arm. Lloyds, the underwriter of the policy, disputed the claim before eventually reimbursing the team for a large portion of the broken pitcher’s contract.
Refractor
The ’93 Finest Refractors mark a substantial step up in my collecting focus from the days of picking up Donruss packs at the local pharmacy. Sure, there aren’t any Willie Stargell puzzle pieces included with these shiny cards but that doesn’t mean they are devoid of random additional “bonuses.” Like the rest of my refractors, my Alex Fernandez card is slabbed by one of the big grading services. Unlike the others, this one has a small scrap of tissue paper floating around in the plastic case. It is trapped against the back of the card, just to the left of the photo. One might even call it a relic card given the manufactured nature of so many cards today.
The front and back pictures appear to have been taken a split second apart. It is possible they are from the same pitch and were taken in a high speed burst, though Fernandez was such a consistent pitcher that most of his windups looked the same. It’s a nice visual effect, even if not from the same pitch.
What I really like about this card is the way the etching really shows up on Fernandez’ jersey. Dark clothing gets the color shifting refractor treatment while light colors do not. This produces an outstanding visual effect around team logos and player numbers. The effect is heightened by the way folds in the darker material each get their own ridge in the etched layer, producing rainbow tinted lines that snake their way through the design. The effect can be seen just below his uniform number in the photo and really shines when held in hand.
