Card of the Day: 2001 Fleer Tradition Oakland Athletics Checklist
I love team checklist cards. Some collectors hate them, but I enjoy them, especially when I find they possess information that I did not know or realize before. The Oakland Athletics were American League West Champions in 2000, featuring a fearsome trio of young, up-and-coming pitchers. There was Tim Hudson, the 20 game winner; Barry Zito, a rookie of the year contender; and Mark Mulder, the supposed clone of Tom Glavine.
But believe it or not, none of those three aces led the team in ERA, not even Mr. Hudson, the runner up for the Cy Young award that year.
Take a good look at this 2001 Fleer Tradition Oakland A’s team checklist card, then take a moment to catch you breath when you realize who led the team in ERA.
Gil freakin’ Heredia?!?!?!?! Are you kidding me? And to add insult to injury, Heredia didn’t even have a card in the 2001 Tradition set, hence no photo.
While thumbing through a stack of Jason Giambi commons the other day, I stopped when I reached this checklist just to remind myself how good Jason Giambi really was. But instead of gawking at his numbers, I was stumped to see Heredia’s name on the front of the card. In fact, I found this fact so disturbing that I figured it was a misprint. I turned to the Internet to prove me right, but all it did was confirm what the cardboard showed.
With a staff of Huddy, Zito and Mulder, who would have thought Gil Heredia would lead that squad in such an important statistic. For the record, Hudson posted 4.14 ERA in 2000 and finished second in the Cy Young voting to Pedro Martinez, who had a mind-blowing 1.74 ERA — nearly 2.5 runs BETTER than Hudson. Who the hell does that in this day and age?
October 21, 2008 at 3:41 pm
Pedro’s 2000 campaign was one the best ever if not the best in the late modern-age.