When game-used cards came about, jerseys/uniforms/pants were the only items being sliced and diced and then mounted in cards. Then bats became the next item of insertion, followed by bases and even dirt from the field (see 2001 Stadium Club — ugh). But in 2001, Upper Deck began using batting gloves, which I always found to be the coolest item.

Today I present a 2001 UD MVP Souvenirs Game-Used Batting Glove Ken Griffey Jr.  card. Don’t bother checking your price guide, this card only books at $25, and probably could be had much cheaper on eBay.

The batting glove cards seemingly always offer up something different. There is no single color jersey/uniform/pant swatch, and no indistinguishable chip of wood. Here we’ve got a swatch of fabric with some character!

Here’s another batting glove card I own2001 Gold Glove Slugger’s Choice Ivan Rodriguez

Don’t know about you, but I’m always looking for a memorabilia card that shows something different than everything else. A rip, a tear, a stain — anything. (Note: patches do it for me sometimes, but there are LOTS of those now). With the batting gloves, there are so many different characteristics, and the actual glove itself is relatively small, so the odds of getting a card featuring some character is pretty high.

The swatch on this Griffey card comes from a blue batting glove, which obviously was used during his playing days in Seattle. (A big plus) And based on what is shown in the swatch window, it appears I’ve got a piece from the side of a finger. How awesome is that?

Part of the appeal to game-used memorabilia is that the featured player wore/used the item. And in my mind, I find the batting gloves to be the coolest item of them all, followed by jerseys, because these had direct contact with the player.Jerseys are nice, but think about the batting gloves: There’s dirt, pine tar, sweat, spit and other stuff. Kind of disgusting neat, yes?

As far as I’m concerned, the most useless piece of memorabilia (assuming no one likes the dirt cards) is the bat. I actually despise the game-used bat card, unless of course it’s someone like Babe Ruth,  because so many of them look exactly the same. Also, you can literally get several thousand chips from one bat. And really, how special is it to get a piece of wood from the center of the bat? The same argument can be made for the jersey, but at least it’s not extremely thick.

So with this I present this poll question:

This entry was posted on December 7, 2008 at 4:39 am and is filed under Card of the Day with tags baseball, baseball cards, Card of the Day, Cardboard Icons, game-used, Ken Griffey Jr., memorabilia, Upper Deck. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.