2021 Sportlots purchases part 6: Dizzying Deans

Previously: Quick summary and set wants; Big and small we have them all!; Better off Ted; A Tettle-ton of Froot Loops; Lucky Tiger Seven

Tonight's post is definitely the largest in the series in terms of quantity of cards, but I'm going to do my best to get through it quickly and let the scans mostly speak for themselves. That's partially because I don't want to get hung up writing something that's too long--I'd love to get these cards put away and on to the next post--plus I have a show coming up this weekend, and I have a super cool new Facebook purchase to show off that I'm looking forward to posting.

So let's get to this evening's subject. I'm not quite sure what made me decide to PC Dean Palmer, a 3B who mostly played in the 90s for Texas, KC, and then Detroit. He spent his last five seasons with the Tigers but only two of those were full years--he'd appear in just 87 games from 2001 to his sunset season of 2003. Still, he was kind of a highlight on some of those awful Detroit teams, continuing to show the pop he did with the Rangers and Royals by putting up 38 and 29 bombs and 100 and 102 RBI in '99 and 2000. If anything, it's probably a combination of his power, brief Tigers tenure, and the fact that most of his cards hail from my favorite hobby era: the mid-90s to the mid-aughts.

So here's a look at the roughly 180 items I added via Sportlots. I picked five scans worth of vertical cards and one of horizontals to highlight, then covered the rest via photos. Honestly, who wants to look at 20 scans of Dean Palmer cards?

Here's a lot of Deans:

To start with I picked one of a few Minors issues I grabbed this time, opting for the one you see because I thought "89ers" was a great example of fun farm team nicknames. There's also pairs of Sportflics (the first a RC), black inserts, Finest (OG '93 and '94), and sweet Pinnacle dufex inserts. Don't worry, there's plenty more "90s inserts rule" goodness where that came from!

In terms of the base here we continue the Finest run with '95 while adding the following year's artistic E-MotionXL, the non-autographed Leaf Signature, and Topps Chrome version 1.0, which I think ended up looking quite nice despite the original product being relatively boring. Everything else is a parallel, from '95 Summit's Nth Degree and '96's Donruss Press Proof, Fleer Tiffany, Score Dugout Collection, and Ultra Gold Medallion. The Press Proof was one of the costlier cards in my cart at a buck but I thought it was worth it.

This scan may be my favorite of the bunch with a who's who of 90s giants of design and shininess. '97 includes two versions of the eye-popping color brought by Flair Showcase, the artistic visions of Studio and Topps Gallery, and a high-flying Palmer on Topps Chrome's excellent sophomore effort. Not to be outdone, 1998 starts very strongly thanks to Fleer's amazing E-X2001, and the bar stays high with Finest (having skipped a couple years I already had), another gorgeous Flair Showcase base, and lastly Pacific's "I dare you to try to ignore me" Revolution.

Are you enjoying seeing all these high-end brands? Then you'll like these too! SP Authentic's had a number of looks and '98's is one of the best. That year's Gold Label pops just like the Showcase cards that keep coming up in this post. We go back to the UD well a couple more times to finish up 1998 with the "hobby" version of the 10th Anniversary Preview (I own the retail set), plus the higher-end parallel of the flagship product, called Special F/X. 1999 opens with beautiful designs and familiar names like Finest, Flair Showcase (x2) and Topps Chrome (more acrobatics from Palmer!) plus Fleer's Mystique, a product where you got to peel opaque film from a number of mystery cards.

And here we have the last of the scanned vertical stuff. Don't ask me how a '98 Sports Illustrated card ended up dead center in a scan with cards from 2000-01, I couldn't tell you. In terms of base stuff, that joins some very nice offerings from 2001 Bowman's Best, Finest, Studio, Topps Fusion, and Topps HD. I believe I've said a few times how much I admire Fusion, which used gorgeous designs from Bowman's Best, Finest, Gallery, Gold Label, and Stadium Club--some of Topps' best lookers from that time. By the way, Palmer was the only Tiger to appear on two designs in the product. HD was no slouch either, and way ahead of its time in terms of the name. Man, I can't even remember when I first got an HD TV, but nobody was thinking about them back in 2001!

The group also includes a pair of parallels. Upper Deck's Ionix from 2000 was one of a number of weird brands from that era (remember HoloGrFx?), but the insert version called Reciprocal was kind of a fun idea. Besides the rainbow shininess, the images on the front and back are flipped (including the tiny slide-like photos on the bottom of the front). Ultra's Gold Medallion is much more familiar, and in 2000 Fleer opted to go with a die-cut design in addition to the other elements for the first time.

I had a pretty easy time selecting a third of the 24 horizontal cards to highlight for this post--nothing boring here, if you ask me! I don't usually put much effort into oddballs but I thought the three-player '91 Baseball Cards Magazine issue (done in the style of '66 Topps) would be fun. Pinnacle's GOAT flagship product from '95 makes yet another appearance here thanks to the highly sought-after Artist's Proof parallel, another $1 I was glad to shell out for. That's joined by a couple more '95s from Score's Gold Rush and a base from the first of two years of Sportflix with an "X". I don't know what stat Palmer had to achieve for that '97 UD Predictor to turn into a winner, but maybe someday I'll land a double and scratch it off. Part of Dean's career coincided with the dawn of the explosion of numbered cards, such as '98 SPx Finite (Radiance Parallel, #d /4500) and '99 Flair Showcase Row 1 (/6000). So limited! And we'll end the discussion of scans with a 2000 SPx Power Brokers insert, released a year after he tied his career-high of 38 bombs as a member of the Tigers.

Photo #1 is part 1 of two of "the rest". While these are less exciting to me compared to what I showed off above, there's still lots to enjoy. More Minors cards, tons of Stadium Club, UD's Fun Packs (including a card that folds out), multiple Pinnacle brands.... If there's something you remember from the 90s it's probably here!

Since the second photo covers '97-2003 it's the one that's heavier on the Tigers stuff, which is great. Plenty of good looking designs plus some inserts here, just nothing that beat out what I chose for the scans. The final card here is a 2003 Topps Chrome, the last I needed to cover his mainstream base from the final season during which he appeared on cards during his career (though I still need some parallels).

And here are the remaining 16 horizontals. A few stand out, like Pacific's Crown Royale die-cut base cards, plus Topps' goofy DIII from '95. The last card here is a 2001 UD Vintage team checklist that servers as a good reminder that it's easy to miss cards of your player if you only search their full name; Sometimes card descriptions include only a last name, an abbreviated name, or in this case, the team name. So it pays to keep a player checklist open on TCDB to avoid missing stuff like this!

I'm stating the obvious here but that was a lot of stuff to show off, and I hope some of you found some of it interesting since I don't know many others who are interested in collecting Palmer. As you might expect, this purchase did major damage to his checklist, getting me to 411 of his 1024 TCDB-listed items, and moving him up to #7 overall in my collection.

Oh yeah, and it allowed me to easily take the crown among Palmer collectors on TCDB as one of just five guys to have 200+, and the first to 400!

I certainly feel productive thanks to that and the fact that I get to put these away, meaning there should be just a few more posts left in this series, all of them of much smaller stacks. First, though, I think I'll get to that interesting Facebook pickup I teased, and then maybe a show recap depending on how Friday goes as well.