Today’s Card of the Day subject is right-handed pitcher Trevor Williams, who spent the 2016-2020 seasons with the Pittsburgh Pirates. Today’s Card of the Day comes from the 2021 Topps set. It pictures him with the Pirates, but his time with the club was already over before people were getting these cards in packs.
I didn’t just go with the regular base card from the 2021 Topps set here. If you collect newer cards, you know most of them have plenty of variations to keep people collecting. One of those variations is a gold border card with ten copies printed, making it a very rare card. That’s not the only difference from the regular base card though. This card is also 5″ x 7″ in size, and it goes by the easier to write 5×7 name, and/or jumbo cards. You won’t be able to tell this size difference from a regular card in the scan, so just keep that in mind.
Here’s the front of the card:
I don’t know what Topps was going for here with the border design and random shapes, but it’s not strange/busy enough that it’s too distracting from the rest of the card. The Williams card is a horizontal layout, which is not typical for the set. I’ve mentioned how much I like this layout plenty of times before, probably because I’m drawn to horizontal cards, so they appear here a disproportionate amount of times compared to their occurrence within the baseball card world. They usually make for better action photos. This is a good example of the horizontal usage.
As for some details on the card. This border is usually white, though these modern sets have a ridiculous amount of chase cards. I’ll get into that in some detail in the pricing section. You have the boring modern Pirates logo in the bottom left corner. Even deeper into that left corner is “01/10”, letting you know this is card #1 of ten printed for this particular variation. This is not the toughest card to find in the set.
Topps has the 70th anniversary logo here, which is a nice touch.
Here’s the back of the card:
The back of the card has the standard black writing on a white background that took Topps far too long to figure out. They carry over some of the design ideas from the front, with those shapes in the top left and random tire marks down the middle, seen at the top and bottom here.
What I like about this particular card is that you have all of the Pirates stats for Williams, which was his entire career up to that point. You see that Williams led the league in runs allowed in 2020, but not earned runs. That’s interesting considering the small difference in those two numbers. He was tied for the league lead with one shutout in 2018. I mentioned it in his bio section of today’s history article, but that one shutout has been his only career complete game, and it was actually ended early due to rain. I like that they included WAR as the final category here. The WHIP stat is also there. I still don’t know why they don’t include hit batters in that stat. A guy could allow 100 walks/hits in 60 innings, hit 20 batters, and have the same WHIP as a 100/60/0 pitcher in those categories. They are not the same pitcher (end mini rant).
The price of this card is $11 delivered on Ebay. A second seller has one for $10, with a best offer option. There is a laundry list of options besides the base and this card. I like the black border one, which is numbered to 70 copies. Only one seller has one and it is overpriced at nearly $20. I also like the Vintage Stock version, which is limited to 99 copies. One is listed for $14, with a best offer option.
There’s a 5×7 of the base card (no gold border) for $6, with a best offer option. There are 49 copies of that card. There are also Father’s Day, Mother’s Day and Independence Day versions of the card, with the first two limited to 50 copies, and the latter appropriately numbered to 76 copies. I could go on and one, but there are really a ton of options here. If you just like the card, get the base version for $2 delivered.
