2012 San Francisco Giants

Here we go with another World Series Championship team, the 2012 San Francisco Giants. The Giants went 94-68 in the regular season before sweeping the Detroit Tigers in the World Series. When I was creating these cards it was somewhere in the middle where I learned about the shadow and glow for the cards, so some do not have them but from here on out I believe they will all have that glow.

2014: Best Lineup, Rotation, Bullpen

2014 was a strange season for Showdown teams, without a clearly dominate squad to turn into a team. The Giants won their third title in five seasons, after winning a mere 88 games. They beat the Royals in the World Series, another team that failed to win 90 games. Thus, the most fun way to go about this season (since spoiler alert, a "San Fran Dynasty" post is coming down the pipeline) is to make the best lineup, best rotation, and best bullpen from the season.

Read on to find out what teams made the cut following the season, although I'll give y'all a spoiler for the Rotation with this fun card since the A's had the best Pythagorean W-L from the season (99 wins) despite only winning 88 games.

A Walk Through The Hall of Fame

This write up is focusing on some of the legends of the games past, while I could go on and on forever choosing legends to create, I chose 7 from the past that were dangerous with the bat. 

***UPDATE*** George Brett card has been fixed

First up is Ernie Banks and his 1959 MVP season. He won back to back MVPs in 58 & 59 and i chose 59 due to his higher on-base percentage. He put up 25 double as well as 45 home runs to go along with 143 RBIs. This baseball hall of famer was a 14 time all-star and gold glove winner.

By Request:

This might be one of the oddest post I've made... But when you take requests you get what you get. One of my buddies who will be in my 2018 draft league as you sure to see later (team name "The Butch Huskeys) really loves his Indians. He really loves his odd pitching Indians and mostly lefties. I was then tasked with getting these players together with Mr. Dave Bush to make them into the cards you will see. But be warned these are very odd and in most cases a very small sample size to work with. We had a tweak a few details with the sample size being so small on some of them. But if you are a fan of really off Indians pitchers mostly one and done kind of guys this is the post for you.

Lets get things started in the way back. Back in 2003 with Indians lefty Jason Stanford.

Mostly a starter though did come out of the bullpen 5 times. This Indians started posted a 1-3 record with a 3.60 ERA had a 2:1 strike out to walk ratio and a whip of 1.28. Nothing too crazy but did pretty good for the Indians that year. He pitched the following year then disappeared till 2007.

COLLEGE WORLD SERIES

Happy College World Series!!! Watching the games over the past week, I got an idea that I really enjoy and hope you do too -- to put various cards in their "college" forms. Now, I didn't make cards that actually reflect players college stats, because (a) small sample sizes, (b) the competition makes it hard to make cards that you can actually use without being too unrealistic or too useless either way. So to compromise, these are basically "special edition" versions of cards. So the card below is the 2012 Buster Posey card (his MVP season), but with his Florida State image and logos/colors. 

As a special treat to memorialize the CWS, we changed the "skins" of a card at every position, plus two Starters, a Reliever, and one very special bonus! Not only will these be fun alternate cards, but some are from player's seasons that haven't been published on this blog yet! I hope you enjoy the walk down memory lane as well as adding some very unique cards to your set. Let me know if you'd like to see more of these "college cards" (or other more unique, "special edition" sets) in the future -- honestly this was a blast to make and I can't personally wait to play with them!

Buster's 2012 MVP Card is the one we selected for the College World Series special, harkening back to Posey's dominate days at Florida State. His senior season at FSU, Posey had a .463 AVG and .566 OBP!!! Posey also hit 26 HR in just over 300 PAs. These stats were accomplished while catching, dude was an absolute beast! 

On-Base Percent Update

Two weeks have passed since I did my write up on the race of a 11 or 10 On-Base and just after two weeks there have been a lot of changes. Mike Trout pushed his was from third to first and Joey Votto remained in second  as our two potential 11 OBs. The numbers are starting to lower as were hitting close to mid season and guys percentages are slowly dropping. The best will shine through and a few second half surges will send a few into the discussion.

2015 Blue Jays

Our first season team that didn't win the World Series, and that's because this is the first time (as we turn back the years) in recent years where the best Showdown team was not the World Series champion. Toronto was seemingly constructed to dominate Showdown, with a high On-Base lineup pretty much top to bottom, an elite front end starter without a significant pitching drop off, and an elite closer teamed with solid relievers. In short, like the 2017 Astros and 2016 Cubs, this is a Showdown team without weakness that has talent way over budget, in large part due to blockbuster trades for Troy Tulowitski and David Price. It's still insane to me that this team lost a 7 game series to the Kansas City Royals, who had plenty of OB 9 hitters but three OB 5s and woeful starting pitching before a bullpen that was good, but nowhere near as great as their 2014 bullpen.

Now, it may be a small consolation prize for Toronto fans, but here's the best MLB Showdown team from 2015, the potent and powerful Toronto Blue Jays!