championship prestige

the dodgers' 2021 postseason begins (and possibly ends) tonight, so i've got a postseason themed post for your perusal.  five times in steve garvey's career, and five times in eleven seasons, he was part of a team that could call itself the national league champion.  in 2005, playoff included parallels celebrating the different levels of postseason access in their prestige release, and i recently acquired the nl champ garvey card:

these cards were found in special factory sets that were only available via exchange with a winning playoff champions combos insert card, like this one

that would have paid off had the dodgers won the world series. i took that image from comc. here's the back:

you can see back then we were still dealing with hard mail-in redemptions and exchanges. the nice thing is that playoff gave collectors until april 15, 2006 (jackie robinson day!) to redeem their cards, so you knew whether or not your card was a winner before mailing it in.

anyway, what my garvey card shown up above means is that someone out there had an astros combo card that named them as the national league champions, and they successfully redeemed the card for a complete 200-card parallel set. according to donruss, the national league champion set is the rarest of the sets, with only 7 having been issued.  here are all the set print run breakdowns:

al wild card champions: 13 sets
nl wild card champions: 15 sets
al west division champions: 17 sets
al central division champions: 27 sets
al east division champions: 20 sets
nl west division champions: 18 sets
nl central division champions: 21 sets
nl east division champions: 18 sets
al champions: 12 Sets
nl champions: 7 sets
world series champions: 19 sets

the only other garvey parallels i have are from the nl central and al east division 

champion sets, which have the second and third highest print run of all the sets. i would love to find an nl west division champion card as well as a world series champion card for my collection, even though these parallels are not numbered and are somewhat derivative. you know what they say - player collectors gonna collect!