jose canseco final tributes

i am not ashamed to say that i was, and still am to a degree, a jose canseco fan.  as any good card collector in 1986, i tried for as many of his rookie cards as i could, and i followed his home run and stolen base exploits with quite a bit of interest.  you may recall that i had adopted the a's as my american league team with the arrival of rickey henderson and billy ball in 1980, quickly and shamelessly abandoning the excitement over the angels and don baylor that i had felt in 1979.  so, i still had a soft spot for oakland in the mid-80's, and was glad to see canseco making them relevant again.

even as i joined the 'ste-roids' chant from the right field pavilion at dodger stadium during game 1 of the 1988 world series, i marveled at the grand slam canseco had hit in the first inning.  it is still one of the top 3 hardest hit balls i have ever seen in person (willie mccovey and willie stargell hit the other two, with albert belle and carlos delgado not far behind).  anyway, i was always willing to give canseco the benefit of the doubt even as there became no doubt.  i was annoyed when the yankees claimed him on waivers in 2000 just to block another team from picking him up as i knew it would be difficult for canseco to sign on with another team in 2001.  as luck would have it, the angels signed him just before spring training, but then released him in march (although topps still put out cards of him in 2001 in the angels' uni).  i thought that that may have been it, but to his credit, canseco went to the independent league and played minor league ball until the white sox came calling at mid-season.

thanks to canseco's perseverance and the fact that frank thomas was lost for the season, we were treated to some non-yankee (and angel) final tributes in 2002.  i've got a lot of them.

2002 donruss

with full career stats on the back

2002 donruss fan club

perhaps the 'bulkiest' photo of canseco on any card, and also with complete career stats on the back

2002 fleer maximum

the back of which gives a closer look at the travels of canseco towards the end of his career

he came oh-so-close to another 30/30 season while with the blue jays in 1998.  i believe he also hit the longest home run in skydome history that year as well.

2002 fleer platinum

more full career stats

did anybody ever look at those graphs on the back of 1987 (and 2002 fleer platinum) cards?  i didn't.  if i had more initiative, i would dig up canseco's 1987 fleer card and compare the graphs between this card and that one.  i just looked his card up on comc, and now recall that the graphs on the back of '87 fleer cards were different than those above.  never mind.

2002 fleer tradition

again with the full career stats, with room to spare at the bottom

202 fleer triple crown

another final tribute with the full career stats, although fleer doesn't care to give individual rows of stats to each team played for in a single season.  advantage donruss and topps.

speaking of which, here's canseco's 2002 topps 206 card

no stats on the back, but a note that canseco became the first man to hit 400 home runs and steal 200 bases in a career

2002 upper deck authentics

here, even though there is just one row of stats on the back, we can see his career totals

and notice that he stole 2 bases on the season to finish with exactly 200 steals.  he was caught one time.

2002 upper deck vintage

this was the most blatant to-date rip off of topps that i recall; upper deck's 2001 decade 1970's set kind of looked like 1975 topps, and their 2001 vintage release looked a lot like 1963 topps.  here, they dropped the text to the bottom of the card and made the backs yellow to look like the late series o-pee-chee cards did in 1971

they weren't ripping off topps, it was o-pee-chee that they were using.  the only problem was that upper deck didn't acquire the rights to o-pee-chee until 2006 if i recall correctly.

perhaps my favorite two final tributes for mr. 40/40 came from topps.  canseco, as he had done in 2001, signed a deal prior to 2002's spring training, this time with the expos.  topps, as it had done in 2001, issued cards featuring canseco his his new uniform.  never mind that he was released again during spring training, we get these final tributes from 2002 topps

full career stats, with league leader designations.  i thank you, topps.

and 2002 topps chrome

with the same info on the back

i also appreciate topps (and fleer platinum) for putting strikeouts on the backs of their cards.  canseco retired with 1942 k's, which at the time was good for second on the all-time list behind only canseco's 1987 a's teammate reggie jackson.  jackson had 101 more homers than canseco, however.

canseco eventually returned to the white sox organization in 2002, appearing in 18 games for their triple-a  affiliate and slugging 5 home runs, but didn't get back to the big leagues.  he has since played in the minors in a few different seasons (2006, 2010-2013), and even had a short (one-day) stint in dodger camp prior to the 2004 season.  it's too bad topps didn't put out a card that year like they did in '01 and '02...