Small Panini Mailday

Something I would really like to see is for a set dedicated to history that features lesser-known players.  Panini has a chance to do that now that they no longer have a license from the Players Association.  Sometimes I just worry that some players are going to be forgotten.  I love Red Sox history, as is obvious from the types of posts that go up on this blog.  As part of that, I love getting cards of players from all throughout the team's history.  I get a little bored with some of the same players popping up again and again though.  I get that it wouldn't make much sense to do an entire set with obscure past players, but it would be so much more fun.  

Anyway, enough of that.  Let's look at my recent Panini mailday.

Johnny Pesky is one of those players that does appear fairly frequently, but is not one that I ever get tired of seeing.  He was an ambassador for the team for decades and a pretty damn good player in his own right.  If the Hall of Fame ever figures out what to do about players who sacrificed prime years of their careers for service during WWII and others, he could be a player who gets in.  Pesky led the league in hits in each of his first three Major League seasons, which were wrapped around three years spent in military service.  Given that he put up more than 5.0 WAR per season in those years, it is reasonable to assume he would have lost about 15 WAR for military service.  That would give him a much more impressive career total, plus he would have surpassed 2,000 hits.  

This is the Ruby Wave parallel from last year's Prizm, which did feature a number of interesting players.  Fred Lynn, Tim Wakefield, Nomar Garciaparra and several Hall of Famers joined with some prospects and Masataka Yoshida, who managed to appear in Prizm sets as a result of not yet being a member of the Players Association.  You can bet there will be a bunch of Panini cards of Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Shota Imanaga this year too.

I was very excited about this card.  You don't see too many Lee Smith cards with the Red Sox these days.  Smith, despite now being a Hall of Famer, does not appear in too many sets anyway, but most of his appearances are with the Cubs and Cardinals.  And for good reason.  He made his biggest marks with those two teams.  Still, I love seeing Panini put him on a Red Sox card.  Now, this is actually the second relic of Lee Smith in my Red Sox collection from Panini, but the picture on that card from a few years ago was pretty clearly from his Cardinals tenure.  This really does seem to be from his time in Boston based on the way the uniform looks (even with the air-brushing) and his hair is a pretty big giveaway.  So I am thrilled to add this to my collection.