I had something interesting happen with the selection of today’s Card of the Day. With an article limited to two trades of note, and two former Pittsburgh Pirates players born on February 11th, there were not a whole lot of choices to match the Card of the Day article up to the daily history article.
One of those players born on this date is Trey Beamon, outfielder for the 1996 Pirates. He was a first round pick, who was also considered to be a solid prospect, so he has more card choices than you would expect from someone who played 24 games in his only season with the team.
The interesting thing happened when I started scrolling through the card options for Beamon and found one I wanted to use. I pulled front/back scans from Ebay, cropped them and sized them for this article, then did a solo search for just his 1995 Collector’s Choice card, so I could use that for the pricing section below. What I found was that I got fooled by the seller’s scan. It looked like this card had a black border, which I thought looked great. I wasn’t seeing that black border with the other cards, which made me realize this card had no borders on front. I didn’t like the actual look of the card as much as the look that fooled me, but I stayed with my selection. So here’s a look at card #36 from the 1995 Collector’s Choice set, featuring Trey Beamon.
Here’s the front of the card, cropped a second time to get rid of the fake black border:
I think it’s obvious to say I wasn’t collecting this set when I was a wee lad and it was new in stores. Without the black border that caught my eye, I noticed that the background is a closeup of a fruit bowl painting. I see blueberries, a strawberry, maybe an orange or a tangerine. I’m not sure why that’s a thing, but Beamon seems happy about it. I think the fact that they used team colors with the writing, but it turns out that all of the cards in this subset used those colors. I still like the usage, it just wasn’t specific to the Pirates. That part with the “Pittsburgh Pirates outfield” looks like the old parental advisory stickers you saw on your favorite CDs, or maybe cassettes back in the day.
There were 18 cards that were part of the Future Foundation subset. The only real star from that group was Nomar Garciaparra. One of the players was Doug Million, a top prospect, who passed away tragically of an asthma attack in 1997 at 21 years old without making it to the majors. Many of the other players had careers similar to Beamon, seeing sporadic big league time.
Here’s the back of the card:
The back looks like they went with Pirates colors here, but that’s just the look of the back for this subset of cards. They know what works though, so of course they chose Pirates colors. As you can see here, you get a little background on the player, with a box of facts inside the other bigger box of facts. What’s up with that one line that just says “handed swing is”?
I learned from this card that Beamon won a batting title in 1994. He then hit .334 with Calgary of the Triple-A Pacific Coast League in 1995, finishing third among qualified hitters. He wasn’t a bad big league hitter, he just never got an extended look in the majors.
These cards are commons and they abide by all laws and rules pertaining to the sale of common cards on Ebay (aka don’t pay more than $2 delivered). There are Silver Signature and Gold Signature versions of this card that are harder to find, but they are facsimile autographs. There isn’t a real added value for those cards, though the only two Silver Signature cards both have high shipping charges attached to a low price.
