because the greatest glove of all

it's almost valentine's day and love, or in this case, glove, is on my mind.  i am really trying to give leaf a wide berth - certainly wider than i gave it in recent years - but i have not been able to completely ignore their baseball and multi-sport releases. part of my problem is that they issue cards like this one

when coupled with a very reasonable buy it now price, makes it difficult for me to ignore. that's a steve garvey "great gloves" die-cut sticker auto from 2024 leaf press pass, by the way. it's numbered to 10, and i happened to get the jersey number match

sure, it's a ripoff of sorts of topps' hands of gold inserts from 2000 but i don't mind. garvey won four gold gloves in a row in the mid-1970's, thanks in large part to his ability to scoop balls in the dirt and having an official scorer that was more inclined to assign errors to bill russell than mr. clean. i recognize that garvey didn't have great range, and he was fairly reluctant to throw the ball most of the time. still, he won the hardware and i assume that is the basis for his inclusion in this set.

there are a couple more leaf cards i couldn't pass up. these had more to do with the low prices put on them by the sellers - 2024 leaf metal monumetal pre-production proof 1/1

this is some sort of gold crystal version. there are a lot of these out there with different background treatments and so aren't really scarce. the back is really weird.

you can tell that leaf doesn't think too much of these as they are sealed in top loaders instead of one touch holders.

here's another one - this time it's garvey and steve sax with a dual auto pre-production proof 1/1

the seller didn't even take a shot at trying to define what this background was. the back is different, too

interestingly, this dual auto is from a different set than the garvey/sax dual auto i showed off last year. i guess with stickers you can do a lot more. 

things have continued into 2025 with leaf issuing their metal sports heroes set (which seems to be an autograph set) with more of these pre-production proofs. i bit on a couple, including this red flood all decade teams 1970s steve garvey thing

i say thing because leaf either didn't bother with a sealed toploader or the seller took it upon themselves to break it and so i can see that these are really flimsy pieces of film. this one is thin acetate - here's the back

i originally swooned over seeing a bunch of the "we are the champions 1981" proofs, but limited myself to buying just one of the 22 (!) versions this seller somehow obtained. i chose the one that was listed as the "superfractor" proof

put steve garvey, ron cey, and bill russell on a card on i am there for it every time. this one is maybe double the thickness of the other, but still flimsier than a regular card. here's the back

which fits with the others i showed earlier. the actual cards are encased in a one-touch and look like this

with actual backs

that is the pink crystal version of the card, and it's numbered to 5. oddly enough, this card does not show up on the checklist - instead there is a four player version that also features (not davey lopes, unfortunately) steve yeager. i haven't seen the yeager version yet, but he's on another card so i know he has stickers in the set. anyway, assuming the parallels of this one are consistent with the rest of the checklist, there are 20 different versions of this card, and i went out of my comfort zone to grab this one.  maybe the prices will come down but it is nuts out there for these multi-player autos right now.

there are other cards from this release that have intrigued me. jerry reuss is included on some multi-player cards, as is dodger double dipper joe ferguson! a certified joe ferguson auto is pretty tempting, but i will continue to try to ignore leaf releases until i can't. such is the curse of collecting.