By the page: R.A. Dickey

2 years ago, I was skeptical about the trade that brought R.A. Dickey to the Blue Jays.  Yes, he had just finished a 20 win season with the Mets, earned the Cy Young award and his knuckle ball was the talk of baseball.

2 seasons later, and my feelings are still mixed.  28-26 record, ERA just under 4, and 61 (yikes!) HR allowed don't make for a #1 starter.  Between him and Mark Buehrle, at least the Jays have 2 veterans that will take the ball every 5th day and give it their all. 

I wasn't even sure whether I would be able to put enough cards together to fill a page for R.A.  But the inserts and parallels over the past couple of seasons were numerous enough to put something together.

Top row:  the inserts

I haven't really bought a lot of Gypsy Queen the past 2 years, but one of my favorite insert sets to come from any recent product has to be the Dealing Aces that you see on the right.  My love of playing cards has a lot to do with that.  The Opening Day stars card has a bit of a similar feel to the Sportflics cards of the 80's.  The Cut to the Chase insert set was one that I liked as well, and I originally had this in the center of the page, but changed my mind.

Middle row:  the base cards

The 2013 Bowman card has him in the dark blues, so that was an easy choice.  The GQ card features him in the Canada Day red uniform, another favorite of mine, so again an easy choice.  I don't have a man crush on R.A., but for some reason I thought that the '14 Heritage card that features just a head shot kind of belonged in the middle.   We'll see how that works out at the end.

Bottom row:  parallels

I originally was going to surround the Bowman Blue with the two identical photos.   In the end, I decided to go blue, red, and blue.  Now that I look at it, the identical cards look OK to me side by side. 

Now that I look at the finished product, I believe that the head shot was a good choice in the middle.  That's also the only card that doesn't feature R.A. in a pitching motion.  I should be able to put another page of Mr. Dickey sooner or later; I still have quite a few parallels of him to acquire from the past two seasons. 

thanks for reading, Robert