Game 11 - Saturday Night, April 12th in Philadelphia
Record - 5-6, Tied for 3rd Place, 2 games behind the Braves and Nationals
One Sentence Summary: Jimmy Rollins gave the Phillies a 5-4 win in 10 innings with a walk-off home run.
What It Means: The Phillies have looked good the past two games and they'll go for the series sweep this afternoon with Kyle Kendrick on the hill.
What Happened: Rollins' heroics wouldn't have been needed if the Phillies were able to contain Giancarlo Stanton. Stanton hit a monster home run to Ashburn Alley in the fifth and then tied up the score at 4-4 with a two-run home run in the seventh. A pair of RBI-doubles from Chase Utley and RBI singles from Rollins and Ryan Howard gave the Phillies their first four runs.
Featured Cards/Field Report: I attended this game with my seven-year-old son Doug and I can say with absolutely no shame that we left in the eighth inning because the little guy was just too dang tired. Prior to the game, we walked around the concourse and met up with Phillies Room favorite Rheal Cormier. Cormier was signing autographs and he was kind enough to pose for a picture with Doug. The former lefty reliever was on hand to throw out the ceremonial first pitch as part of the ongoing ten-year anniversary celebration of Citizens Bank Park.What's interesting about the card Cormier was signing is that it's in the same style as other Phillies Alumni cards, but the copyright on the back is 2014. This is truly an unchecklisted set at this point, and the Phillies clearly just print these cards up whenever the need arises for one of their returning alumni.
Doug and I also picked up the team issued postcard set (one for him and one for me) and the Topps Phillies retail set (again, one for each of us). I was thankful to find a Bobby Abreu card in my team issued set as early reports indicated these cards had already been pulled from the set. (And thank you to reader Brad who had graciously volunteered to send me his Abreu card. I'm good to go now, Brad!)
The Phillies are off to a 1-0 start in games I've attended this year.
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| Doug and Rheal Cormier |
6 comments:
You wouldn't by any chance happen to have an extra Cormier would ya?
Actually - I need one myself!
Cormier autographed two cards for us - one to Doug and one to my wife. Neither of which are currently in my collection. Had I been thinking, I would have asked for a few blank cards from the stack on his table.
I found a dealer at the Poppel show on Saturday who had a shoebox full of signed Phillies photocards, mostly from the past 5 years. He said he purchased them from the Phillies directly, and he had a bunch of signed locker nameplates as well, also purcahsed from the team, so I believe him. (It helped that the autographs looked right, and that he had mostly commons; if it was all Ryan Howards and Chase Utleys I would have questioned it.) I noticed that a bunch of the photocards had just Phillies logos on the back instead of the usual stats, and for some of them the picture didn't look familiar. Rather than buying them all (for prices between $3 for the commons and $10 for Manuel and Victorino) I asked if I could take a picture of them and see whether they were in my collection already. Alas, they all were. I might still but a couple of them by mail from him, especially Victorino, whose autograph is not in my collection in any form. But I found it interesting that the Phils had printed up a bunch of these more-or-less "blank back" photocards instead of sending out ones with stats.
I'm not going to collect them as separate photocards, but in case anyone reading is interested, these blank-backs exist as follows:
2009:
Happ
2010 Version 2:
Mathieson
Victorino
2011 version 2:
Pence
Polanco
Schneider
Victorino
Wigginton
Willis
Worley
2012 version 2:
Billmeyer
Manuel
Nix
As far as I can tell, the 2010 Mathieson and 2011 Willis and Worley exist only in this format (i.e., were never part of a set available for purchase); the others were all available in team photocard sets sold at the park, albeit with the backs showing their stats.
Two other quick comments that I forgot to add:
1) My guess is that these were issued to be mailed out to people seeking autographs in lieu of getting the players to actually sign the mailed-in card, along with a letter saying "Blah blah blah. Too busy to sign. Thanks for being a fan. Please accept this signed photocard instead. Blah blah blah." So the players probably signed a pile of these in spring training and then ignored their mail the rest of the year and let the Phillies staff deal with it. And these were the leftovers bought by this dealer at some low price.
2) There's no guarantee that the ones I listed were all he had. I just pulled out the ones that had the different background, but they started to be the same 10 or so so finally I just stopped looking at all the backs.
Thanks again for the information Steve. We may never have a complete checklist of these team issued cards, but at least we're trying!
Matt - Still need a Cormier card?
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