My Favorite Card

In the coming days, I'll post more on my Tino Martinez collection. I'd love to list what I have (since I don't even know), and hopefully some bloggers and readers -if I ever have any- will be able to help fill out my collection. I'm nearly certain I own 90% of his base cards, but I'm sure a few slipped through the cracks when I left the hobby.

I wanted to write a short post on my favorite Tino Martinez card. It took me forever to find this card...usually it cost too much on ebay for my liking. Within the last few years, I finally won an auction for it and added it to my collection. I'm not sure what I paid for it, but I doubt it was much more than $10.

Seriously, how cool of a card is this? It's from the 2000 Upper Deck HoloGRFX A Piece of the Series set. I wanted this card as soon as I laid eyes on it. I think the design is great - the red and blue remind me of bunting around the stadium during a World Series game. It's a nice clean layout, minus the four unnecessary pictures of Tino repeating at the bottom of the card. But a chance to get a piece of a game used base? Maybe even the base that Tino manned during the Yankees 1999 World Series title run?! Sign me up.

We've all seen jersey and bat relics, and now even pants and patches and letters. But a piece of a base is definitely different. And it's a fairly generous chunk of base at that. It's not the most valuable Tino card that I own, but it's definitely my favorite. If I ever need a new collecting challenge, maybe I'll try and put this complete set together. It would be a nice change of pace from my usual Tino collection or trading for random Yankee cards for no real rhyme or reason.