Recent Royals: 2005 Topps Zack Greinke

I have very few card collections given my limited resources and space, but I did decide some time ago to begin collecting on-card Royals autographs. It’s been a blast so far trying to track these things down and this is the latest addition to my collection. To view the cards currently in the collection, take a look at the Gallery or the other posts in this series. I’m working on getting a legit want list together on my trade page but, in the meantime, if you have any on-card Royals autos that it looks like I don’t have, don’t hesitate to drop me a line!

AKA: 2005 Boring Auto. AmIRight?!

I had hoped my first Greinke auto would be more impressive than this. Of course, all the impressive ones are out of my price range so here we have an oft-mislabeled 2005 Topps plain Jane auto. For some reason, people on eBay can’t decide if this is a 2004 or 2005, but as far as I can tell these were in both series 1 and series 2 of 2005 Topps. I wouldn’t know as I was on hiatus.

So, coincidentally, was Zack Greinke. He went 5-17 in 2005 and famously took 2006 off due to anxiety problems. A lot of people mocked the hell out of him for that, but I was not one of them. Stress will kill you, man. That’s why I’m sitting on my couch writing about baseball cards instead of practicing my 2-seamer. At any rate, he came back to win the Cy Young Award in 2009 and then had a completely average 2010 (a 100 ERA+ is the definition of average, in fact) and got traded for his weight in gold prospects to the Brewers. If you ask me, the Brewers got took hard in that deal. Of course, having hurt himself playing basketball in Spring Training, Greinke isn’t doing himself any favors. He’s back now and pitching avereage-ly again. I expect him to do pretty well in the National League, even if he’s never the ace everyone assumed him to be.

He’s got a pretty sweet signature, too, when he’s not constrained by a sticker or a window. Cursive Z’s are notoriously kickass and Zack milks this one for all it’s worth. Too bad the design of these cards is so unabashedly lame.

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