As promised in yesterday's post, I am showcasing the cards of Craig Kimbrel on the Padres and Red Sox that I acquired in a COMC purchase recently. This will complete the 2 posts showing the highlights of my recent purchase that I made to heavily boost the Kimbrel collection and bring the total up from around 30 cards to nearly 90 different cards of the 6-time All-Star.
The cards in this purchase included my very first cards of Craig Kimbrel on the Padres. He only spent 1 season in San Diego, and even though I didn't buy many new products in 2015, I'm still surprised that this is the first time I'm adding cards of Kimbrel on the Padres to my collection.
I also tried to add new cards of him on the Red Sox, because they're the team he's on currently and because the Red Sox are obviously my favorite team. Kimbrel is in a contract year and is coming off possibly one of his best seasons ever. He'll be 30 in May, and considering that relief pitchers aren't great their whole careers, Kimbrel would be smart signing a 3-4 year contract, and the Red Sox would be smart to offer him that.
Since he was traded to the Red Sox after his 2016 base card was made, Kimbrel wasn't included on the Sox in 2016 Flagship, so he was given a card in Topps Update. They used the same awesome image in 2016 Topps Holiday to make 2 different cards that look very similar. The Holiday set worked so much better in 2016 than in any other year, because the snowflakes looked like the actually had a purpose being there instead of the smoke.
The same image was also used in 2016 Topps Chrome Update, a card I acquired along with his Chrome Update card from 2015, which was another Padres card of Kimbrel to add to the total thus far.
The Heritage version of Topps Update is Topps Heritage High Number, a set that provided 2 cards to the Kimbrel Collection. They are both from 2015 High Number, the one on the left being a base short-print, and the one on the right is the hobby-exclusive purple refractor.
As this recap draws to a close, I'm ending it by showing off my favorite card of Craig Kimbrel I've ever seen, and definitely one of my favorites in my collection. He was included on the Braves in 2015 Topps, so while on the Padres he was able to be included in 2015 Topps Chrome. The card I got was the prism refractor that quickly became a favorite of mine because of the image quality. I truly have never seen a card like this before as it provides such a different perspective of Kimbrel's unique pitching techniques. Seeing this beautiful card gives me the motivation to chase after all the parallels of this card online so I wouldn't just have 1 card with this image on it, but rather 10 of them.
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