barrels are (not) overrated

if you watched any dodger baseball in 2020, you likely saw one of them get on base and then do this:

i hope the .gif loads properly!

whether you saw that or not, the shaking of the hands and fingers represents the pain experienced when getting jammed by a pitch and having the bat vibrate as opposed to the zen feeling of hitting a ball square on the barrel. the point is that the texas leaguer hits that resulted from being jammed were still productive hits, and so, "barrels were overrated". like everything else, this quickly became a t-shirt.

in the card collecting world, bat barrel cards are scarce and coveted. in my opinion, they are not overrated. overpriced? very often, yes. it's been about two years since i showed the first two bat barrel cards that i acquired for my steve garvey collection, and in the time since i have found another card that i was willing to set the market on.  it's this card from 2006 fleer greats of the game

that's a blurry scan of it, so i tried to take a picture, too.

still not the best, but you get the idea. it is a "bat barrel autogreats" card of steve garvey. it features a sticker auto, unfortunately, and is numbered 1 of 4. i find it interesting that fleer (upper deck at this point, really) made multiple versions of this card rather than save inventory for future releases. 

speaking of future releases (actually now a current release), 2021 topps sterling has two garvey cards on the checklist. both are 1/1 with one being an autographed bat knob and the other being a bat barrel nameplate. the latter card, which is more appropriate for this post, hit ebay the other day with a $1,600 buy-it-now price.  it's a snazzy looking card

but i will just enjoy the downloaded image at that price.

here's another card from the final greats of the game release that i have added to my collection in the last year or so

it's a dodgers greats auto-jersey parallel numbered 30/30. it's another sticker auto, sadly. it comes from the same set as the barrel card above, and the photo somewhat prominently features the barrel of garvey's bat, so i figured it was appropriate for this post.

finally, here's another bat barrel card that i've acquired recently - this one in the last month or so.

that's a 2021 leaf lumber davey lopes bat card. as leaf is wont to do, there are a ton of parallels and different bat cards in this release - it's crazy.  this particular card is the emerald parallel and is numbered 2/4. the card doesn't explicitly mention the barrel, but this chunk is from the outside of the bat. i suppose it could be from closer to the handle, but who cares. barrels are, according to some, overrated.