2017 Sportlots purchases: Happy Drew Year

I promise this will be the end of New Year's-related puns in the titles.  I'm a man of my word, too, which is a good thing since I have Whitaker cards to post and tomorrow could have been "Happy Lou Year".

Anyway, with today my last day off before returning to the daily grind and sporadic blogging, I'm making sure to get one more post up.  Actually it's two since I'm showing off more Sportlots-sourced cards over on TMM this evening:  a nice little bunch representing that blog's inspiration.

In terms of what I have here, today's player is also affiliated with Michigan Football, but we're looking at his appearances on baseball cardboard instead.  Let's have a look at some new additions to my Drew Henson PC:

We'll open with Upper Deck's 2001 SP Top Prospects.  What's interesting is that Drew actually has a card in the '99 version, one where he's juggling a football and a couple baseballs.  Then we have a 2002 quartet from Bowman Draft, Fleer Triple Crown, Studio, and Topps 206.  Speaking of Triple Crown, I do own Henson's RC from the previous year's product.  And of course I'm a huge fan of the Studio design as usual.

Another four-spot takes us into the following year:  Absolute Memorabilia, Bazooka, Donruss Champions, and Donruss Team Heroes.  Absolute Memorabilia isn't a product for those that value subtlety but I think it looks pretty nice.  And even Bazooka manages to look reasonably good here considering how bland that product usually was.  Again, R.I.P. variety.

Our other scan continues with 2003 and remains there, and can you believe that was 15 years ago now?  Two very strong hitters in Leaf Certified Materials and Playoff Portraits are a great way to start before going on an Upper Deck run of Patch Collection, flagship, and 40-Man.  The Upper Deck base set looked great once again that year but I'd argue that the previous version of 40-Man looked nicer.

The one non-standard sized card is a tweener from one of a gazillion Fleer releases of the era, Double Header.  It's too large to call a mini and too small to be normal sized.  The artsy design is very cool, though.

Last up is one horizontal issue, this one from 2003 Upper Deck's Vintage that pairs up Henson with another top Yankees prospect at the time, Alex Graman.  He was a third-rounder like Henson, selected by New York in '99, a year after Drew was drafted, and like Henson he appeared in a handful of games over a couple seasons before washing out of the pros.  At least Henson had football to try to fall back on.

This fun selection bumped his collection up to 51 cards so I get to start 2018 with a nice little milestone.

Stay tuned for more Sportlots pickups at some point in the future!