2017 JustCommons purchase: just Abbotts

Back in late May I made my largest JustCommons purchase yet:  around 330 cards for about $57.  That total included a few things heading into trade packages, but overall I added almost 300 new cards to some of my baseball PCs.  Over something like seven different posts I'll cover those new cards, player by player!

The first player in this series may prove to be the most popular one among my readers as I know a good number of you collect him either as a PC or because of the teams for which he played.  We're kicking things off alphabetically with Jim Abbott!

I went for quantity over quality with these purchases, so there's a lot of junk wax-type stuff--not that nothing here is interesting.  We begin with a lone 1990 card:  Jim's entry in the Score Rising Stars boxed set.  1991 is represented by the oddball-ish Classic III and Fleer's maiden voyage of Ultra.  We then begin a tour of 1992 with Donruss Triple Play (I keep making that mistake!), Fleer, OPC, Pinnacle, Score, and Abbott's other Topps base card I needed from that year (I already had the one that mirrors the OPC version).

1992 concludes with this scan's first two cards:  the Gold Winner version of the Topps card you just saw, plus Jim's base from the much-improved Ultra offering from that year.  1993 claims the next five cards, including Donruss Triple Play (DAMMIT!), Fleer, OPC Premier, Topps, and Topps Traded.  I always was a sucker for update/traded sets!  We get a brief opening look at 1994 with Donruss' and Fleer's base sets of the new Yankee.  Speaking of that, what's the deal with the Triple Play Boggs card above?

Jim's on the back!  Why Donruss couldn't put together a horizontally-oriented card with both images on the front, I don't know.  As a reminder, Abbott headed to the Bronx before the '93 season in a deal that brought J.T. Snow back to the Angels.  Jim had just put up 5.8 bWAR for the Halos in '92, and though he couldn't live up to that performance with the Yankees, he did make history with his no-hitter late in the '93 campaign.

One card here finishes off the '94 card season:  Triple Play (got it right!) in one of my favorite designs for the product.  That's followed by a lone example from 1995 out of another Donruss base set.  1996 saw Jim's return to an Angels uni on cardboard, and he's shown here on portraits from Pacific (normal Pacific, not LSD Pacific) and Score (doing side-eyes), plus a zoomed-in-like-Topps mound shot from Upper Deck Collector's Choice (sometimes I scan things too quickly for my own good).  We then jump all the way forward to 2013 and Gypsy Queen, plus one I grabbed without realizing I already had it--USA Baseball Champions from the same year; there's another one for Jeff's pile.  Finally, we go back just one year from when I'm posting this and see that Jim was still plenty relevant to be included in the 2016 Archives base set.

That's not quite all I have, though, as I ended up with one more scan of the horizontal cards:

Topps Big cards, like this one from 1990, bug me by being just a bit oversized, but are fun anyway.  Hologram-loving UD put out card #2, a Team MVP Hologram from 1992.  Being a big fan of mid-90s Pinnacle, I grabbed the third card--Jim's base from the '94 set, another card that gives you a fun view of his patented pitching motion.  The photo used on the next card, Abbott's base from Upper Deck's offering from the same year, might make for a good caption contest.  And last but not least, we have another pitching action shot from a different angle courtesy of Score's interesting 1995 set.

For as little as I paid for most of these I came out happy with the variety of years and designs I came up with as I added 30 new cards to my Abbott PC, a collection that now totals 155 items!

Stay tuned for more JustCommons PC additions very soon.