Young Players who have slipped through the cracks.....Crappy player selection....
CdnOsfan
Posts: 279 ✭✭✭
I am constantly searching for cards of players who are establishing themselves and have ALMOST NO CARDS! The latest example is John Means of the Baltimore Orioles. This guy is putting up some numbers unheard of recently for an Orioles starting pitcher, yet he has a couple minor league cards and 1 Topps Now Future card, that is it! NO BOWMAN cards, NO TOPPS PRO DEBUT.
So called, once BIG PROSPECTS like Hunter Harvey have 228 different cards listed just on COMC as far back as 2013 and this kid is made out of glass and I think he may never make it!
At least Topps made a few 2019 Tim Beckham Orioles cards. 
Who selects the players? Why, for instance Tim Beckham, would they not be in the loop and know that he was NOT LIKELY coming back to the Orioles this year and hold off on 2 Tim Beckham base cards (Orioles and Mariners) in their sets? Why the rush to get Tim Beckham into series 1?
Comments
I'm totally in agreement. For roughly one night a week, my Kansas City gear gets put to the side, and I put on my Orioles t-shirt with the throwback '80's circular logo with the bird batting and the white paneled hat and sit down and watch John Means pitch on MLB.TV. I know his grandparents well, somewhat know aunts and uncles, and know his parents even less (although John's dad was part of a group of guys that I made my first Las Vegas trip with), and have only met John a couple of times when he was just a young boy, but the success that he is having is exciting for everyone that even "knows" him just a bit.
Obviously, his grandfather would love to have a stack of cards to pass out to all the kids he sees around the small town that he lives in, and I was only just mildly surprised that John didn't have a series 1 card. I had told him ahead of time last fall that it was going to be considerably more likely that John would be in Series 2 Topps, and/or Heritage high series. It was quite the disappointment for everyone that he's been skipped over up to this point in the 2019 releases.
Like the Royals, the Orioles may also be having a really down year, but that makes what John Means is accomplishing even more impressive. With a little better run support, he'd have 9 or 10 wins, and because of the quasi-6-man rotation, he needed literally just one more out to have enough innings pitched to qualify for the A.L. leader board, and would be roughly 5th in E.R.A. when I looked Wednesday morning after his most recent start. His changeup is Bugs Bunny-like, and sometimes I giggle out loud like a little girl at how foolish that he makes some hitters look. Of course, when he makes a mistake, which isn't all that often, they do tend to hit it a looooong way. I believe at one time, something like 75 percent of the runs he's given up has been the result of a homerun, solo or otherwise. That is an MLB problem league-wide, though.
Anyway, I got these courtesy of grandpa, so thought I'd share since you mentioned him. Everyone even ever so slightly connected to him looks forward to eventually seeing John on a card with his MLB uniform.