1985 Chong Modesto A's #16 Steve Howard

    If there could possibly be a "white whale" of my Steve Howard collection, this would be it.  As mentioned in the post on the 1986 Chong Modesto card, singles in this set are extremely hard to find due to the presence of the Mark McGwire cards and the very low (relative to other contemporary sets) print run.  The 2006 Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards puts the original print run at 500 sets with the six naming errors, 500 more corrected sets and another 700 set corrected run with slightly different cropping on the McGwire.  So out of a possible 1700 Steve Howards that should exist, I've seen only this one in the last 5 years.

    So, now The Total Steve Howard Experience is complete, here it is in technicolor (where available):



All I left out was the 1990 Topps Traded Tiffany since it doesn't exactly show up on a scan. Yeah, I included both the CMC Pre-Rookie and the CMC Tacoma Tigers cards and they look the same, but they had different backs (you just have to look at it from the other side of the screen).

Congratulations, Mr. Howard, for surviving 9 years of minor league baseball!

1986 Chong Modesto #10 Steve Howard

      As a blogger, or any other type of researcher, one has to love Google News Archive.  Especially if one has any interests in Modesto, California in the 1980s.  The Modesto Bee's archives are there for the scouring, making a wonderful history book of the Oakland Athletics minor league system at the time.  Being a fan of Dann Howitt and Steve Howard, this is especially fun for me, to uncover their not-so-glorious days in A-level ball.

      Fortunately, not every day was so bleak in a 1986 season that ended with Howard, one of Oakland's, if not most highly touted, certainly most repetitously touted power prospects.  On June 7th, Steve would show the world what he was capable of, blasting two home runs and drving in seven in a 14-7 blood-letting at Euless Park.  At the time, Howard was leading the league in both walks and strikeouts, but only batting .228.  In his defense, he did undergo arthroscopic surgery to repair pinched cartilage in July, but was back in the lineup by the 22nd of the month.  After returning, Howard warmed up, hitting .338 in August, as Modesto pushed toward the California League North Division playoffs.  The late season surge was enough to get the promising outfielder a promotion to Huntsville for 1987.

      It was my hope to be posting about the 1985 Chong Modesto A's card of Steve Howard, at this point, but that set poses an interesting challenge.  That set includes one "Mark McGwire".  When said "Mark McGwire" person starting knocking everything in sight out of the ballpark, that set shot through the roof, hitting well over $800.  To make matters more interesting, the set was initially released with an error, McGwire misspelled "McGuire", plus misspellings on five other cards in the set.  Naturally, when large numbers and big profits turn blue and brown eyes green with envy and greed, the less scrupulous start rolling their own.  According to Beckett, there were only 1700 total sets printed.  500 initial sets with the errors, 500 corrected sets (slightly off center) and finally 700 corrected and centered sets, the last reprinted from uncut sheets, rather than the original plates or negatives.  Unfortunately, since these were such low-tech productions, they were very easy to counterfeit.  And the counterfeiters let the presses roll.   And since the counterfeits were virtually indistinguishable, it is very likely that most if the PSA graded McGwire cards are fakes.  Both Sports Collector's Digest and Beckett discourage collectors from buying any 1985 Chong McGwire cards that don't come as part of complete sets.

      What all this means to the rest of us poor player collectors of semi-obscure minor leaguers is that we will likely never be able to complete our collections of those players in this set as the set is almost never found broken up. 1700 copies of that Steve Howard card out there, and in the last three years, I've not seen a single one of them.  Not even Dave Weber has singles from this set for sale.  I was really rather hoping that McGwires recent fall from grace would have helped put a dent in the price of the set, but unfortunately, all that remains on eBay are loads of forgeries of the McGwire and the occasional hugely overpriced complete sets.  If all of those McGwires were truely legitimate, it only stands to reason that there would be an abundance of singles from this set circulating in the hobby.  But there's not.

      Instead, what you get is the 1986 edition, this time sponsored by Sequoia Supermarket, "The Biggest Little Supermarket in Town".  The "big" names is this set would be Felix Jose, Lance Blankenship and Kevin Tapani.

1983 TCMA Idaho Falls Athletics #27 Steven Bernard Howard

   

      "Selected by Oakland Athletics in 8th Round (185th overall) of 1983 amateur entry draft" as they say.  Who actually remembered that the A's had a farm team in Idaho Falls?  And who could believe that as of 1983, TCMA was STILL using black & white photos on their cards?  Steve-o had an unimpressive beginning there at Idaho Falls, batting a whopping .222, whiffing 96 times in 203 at bats.  Steve was often considered the strongest power hitter in the Oakland farm system, and this was a system that included Jose Canseco.  However, over the course of his minor league career, he never managed to hit over .270 or more than 17 HR in a season.  But, alas, he played a couple of seasons in Huntsville, and that was enough to qualify him to one of my player collections.  I'm a sucker for minor league sluggers I've seen pop one over the plywood ads for local Mazda dealerships.

Winnie, Tuffy & the Dann

     I didn't really think I had anything to bother posting in a blog until today.  Since I've basically been blogging via my player collection posts on The Bench & SportsCardForum anyway, I've decided it's time to make it more cohesive and drag it all into one place.  No guarantees on timeliness, but I'm planning to make one post for every single card in my player collections.  So over the next 50 years, you can read my rantings, ravings and 'rithmetics about Dave Winfield, Matt Williams, Hensley "Bam Bam" Meulens, Karl "Tuffy" Rhodes, Dave Henderson, Bernardo Brito, Roberto Kelly, Dann Howitt and Steve Howard.

     Winfield has been my favorite player since about 1986, when I started collecting baseball cards.

     Matt Williams impressed me a lot over the course of the 1989 season, so after sending a few cards to him with a letter, begging for autographs (I'll get to that in its own post) I started hoarding cards of him.

     In 1988, I'd started collecting Roberto Kelly & Jay Buhner, hoping they'd someday be huge stars for the Yankees.  Naturally the Yankees promptly unloaded Buhner for some third string pitchers.  Kelly at least went on to be an All Star, and one of the very few bright spots of the early 1989-1992 stretch for the team.  I collected Buhner for a couple more years, but he didn't amount to much by 1991 (hey, who knew?), so I pretty much gave up on him in any serious capacity.

     Hensley Meulens was my only attempt at prospect speculation.  Naturally, it was only because he was a Yankee, not that my 7th grade mind had ever picked up a copy of Baseball America or knew anything whatsoever about who was doing what in the minors (outside of Huntsville, anyway).  But he was a Yankee, and no one else seemed to even notice him in the set.  As a result, by the end of 1990, I had about 40 copies of his 1989 Donruss card (all the other collectors at school just gave them to me, not even bothing to trade).  For some reason, I kept up with him for the next few years until I exited high school and eventually stopped collecting around 1994-96.

     Dave Henderson I collect because he always looked like he was having so much fun out there.  As I post his cards here, just see how many teeth he always showed!

     Bernardo Brito was one of those sad anomalies of the minor leagues.  Stuck in the farm systems of teams who had no need for an extra power-hitting outfielder; first for Cleveland who had Joe Carter, Mell Hall & Brett Butler ahead of him, along with Andre Thornton at DH and then Minnesota where he wasn't going to crack the lineup already containing Dan Gladden, Tom Brunansky, Shane Mack and that Kirby guy.  One would think he would have made a better DH than Carmelo Castillo or Gene Larkin, but one isn't being paid to think.

     Dann Howitt & Steve Howard.  Well, I got to watch them play in
Huntsville (Howitt even hit a home run in either end of a double header I went to) and while both were highly touted at some point, neither measured up to their respective hype.

     And Tuffy.  While chasing down Japanese cards of Brito & Meulens, it was inevitable that I'd run into Tuffy.  The more I read about him, the more I looked at his stats, the more I read of his "legend" from one opening day, the more interested I became.  From being a sort of Kenny Lofton Light to a sort of Japanese Ryan Howard somewhere between 1990-2000.  Now he's a power hitting legend with one or two seasons left in the tank in Orix.