be careful what you wish for

you are probably aware that one of my frequent themes is lamenting the lack of new steve garvey cards. when i bring this up, i am mainly referring to topps and non-numbered panini offerings. garvey has had a good run over the last few years as a mainstay in most of panini's higher end sets like flawless, immaculate, national treasures, etc. he's had some autograph cards in a couple of regular donruss and donruss optic sets, plus one in a diamond kings release a couple of years ago. however, he hadn't made the cut for a good old fashioned base card for quite some time.  until 2021, that is.

seeing other hall of very good players from his era like dale murphy show up on checklists gave me some hope that garvey would finally make it, and with a 1987 themed card in their 2021 donruss release, panini has granted my wish.

yay! even though the card looks incomplete without logos and all that white, yay! here's the back:

the back focuses on the 1970's  mostly, which was a surprise to me given the design of the card. still, yay!

now, you know how panini does their donruss release. parallelamania!  here's the "red" parallel, which is numbered to 2021

and is more like a candy cane parallel.  this next one is the career stat line parallel

that is numbered to 500. note that panini used that white bar above the name to give us the career stat line (in this case, garvey's .996 career fielding percentage). the print run on these must be capped at 500 because i would otherwise expect this to be /996 instead of /500.  moving on, here is the season stat line parallel:

this one is numbered to 210 which matches garvey's season high hit total. now on to the unnumbered holo parallels - blue:

orange:

pink:

purple:

and red:

that's all of the colors, thankfully. the artist proof parallel is numbered to 10, and is sort of gold-ish

but it is not officially assigned a color as far as i know.

panini is also known for their emoji parallels, so here we go.  first up is "independence day" which some refer to as "stars":

liberty (because that's the statue of liberty):

100 (in both emoji and print run):

fire (numbered to 75):

president (washington and lincoln busts and numbered to 50 - instead of 46):

mask (numbered to 19):

i might have numbered the mask parallel to 2020.

there are two parallels i don't have - press proof /5 and number 1 /1. i do have 1 of the four printing plates though:

cyan! the font panini uses for their 1 of 1 is similar to what upper deck used on some of their releases back in 2004 and 2005.

here are the non-emoji parallels all together

and here are the six emoji parallels:

they look pretty decent in pages.

i am happy that garvey made the checklist this year, but now that i've chased this rainbow i think i could use a break.  unfortunately, there's another rainbow i chased from a 2021 topps product that i'll post about soon. stay tuned!