Cards on my Mind: 2002 Topps Chrome Tim Raines

Figured I'd start a new series on here in the wake of...there not being anything to write about [at least for another month]. 

So here's a card I received in the mail recently from a CardBarrel order. I didn't do a whole post about the order because it mostly consisted of cards from the past two years of Stadium Club, and I figured there was no way to make that interesting.

But this is...maybe one of the most interesting cards of its time.

First of all, it's a low-number card from 2002 Topps Traded, one of the most maniacally complicated sets in  the company's recent history. For those unaware, it was sold as a dual flagship/chrome set, unlike recent Update sets that have a chrome edition in mega-boxes in retail. The deal was you get 8 base cards and 2 chrome cards per pack. Sounds simple.

Well, the base set, which was 275 cards, has the first 110 cards short-printed. These are your traded cards. They are seeded 1 per pack. So actually pulling cards of the traded players the set was actually made for, people like Bartolo Colon as an Expo, Jeff Weaver as a Yankee, Rookie of the Year Eric Hinske, Juan Gonzalez as a Ranger again, and Johnny Damon as a Red Sock, was painstakingly difficult, while the PROSPECT CARDS were all seeded evenly, 7 to a pack. So you could find 5 Jason  Bay rookies before you found Rickey Henderson's base card.

The Chrome base cards, on the other hand, came 2 in every pack, and had no Short Print separation. All 275 were printed equally. So you had more of a chance to get a chrome base card of Placido Polanco than you did his actual base card. It's genuinely dumbfounding.

However, thanks to CardBarrel, I did manage to finally attain two cards from this set that I'd been looking for since I'd become aware of the set. One was an account of Bartolo Colon's two glorious months in Montreal, and the other...was this one.

There is so much to love about this card.

First of all, it's the...insanely weird combo of 1981 Rookie of the Year runner-up Tim Raines in a 2002 Marlins jersey. He's really one of those players that look odd in a Marlins uniform, much like Charlie Hough, Darren Daulton, Carlos Lee and Ozzie Guillen. 

Second of all, not just the contrast of baseball eras stands out to me, but the contrast of card making eras. Tim Raines was a part of the very first TRADED set Topps ever did in 1981, and 21 years later he finds himself on the checklist for not just the 2002 Traded set, but the 2002 Chrome traded set. Seeing people from the 80s, and not just the 80s but the  EARLY 80s, wind up on chrome or dufex sets is never not gonna be weird to me. Like Socrates stepping into the San Dimas Mall.

But also, 2002 Topps is one  of those sets that looks weird in chrome anyway, because it belongs to a color scheme that contrasts with chrome, like the gold, so the whole design has to be redone for chrome. It's not like 1999, 2000, 2001 and 2003 Topps, whose border color deviations actually fit really  well with chrome. This one sticks out, and even the rectification doesn't completely work.

Look at those sweet career stats for Tim Raines, one of the greats. Look at how happy he looks to still be in a baseball uniform at the age of 42. This card shouldn't fit together, and yet it kind of does, a lot like Rickey Henderson's late-career issues.

I will say that his stats from 1999 to 2002 are all very interesting in itself, as he was used mostly as a bench guy with speed, and these are teams associated with different types of youth movements. The 1999 A's are associated with the grassroots youth movement guys like Jason Giambi, Eric Chavez, Miguel Tejada and Tim Hudson. The 2001 Orioles are associated with veterans crowding around Ripken while the young guys like Mora slowly repopulate the team, and the 2002 Marlins are the prelude to the Championship year, with pieces like Beckett, Lee, Burnett and Lowell being shifted into place. Tim Raines shouldn't fit into any of these teams, and yet he tried to, and did what he could for a lot of them.

This is a card that shouldn't exist  for a year that's only being commemorated because it's Tim Raines, and it's likely his sunset issue [it was], and yet it works so well despite that because it represents the sort of late-career push that you don't get many cards of lately. Last year you had late career pushes from Hanley Ramirez in Cleveland, Carlos Gonzalez in Chicago and Cleveland, and Carlos Gomez in Queens, and none of them got Topps cards! Omar Vizquel had a fun final season in 2012 with the Blue Jays, and nobody knew about that. Same with Jim Thome's farewell in Baltimore. The sort of thing where a Hall-of-Famer gets a final sendoff in an unlikely place on a Topps card doesn't happen anymore, and cards like the 2002 Tim Raines one aren't ideas that Topps still has. And that saddens me.

I'm happy this card exists, and I'm even happier it exists in my collection.