Retired Refractor Review: Red Sox Royalty

It's Easter, so that's as good a time as any to post some lovely pastel rainbow-looking cards. My Topps Retired refractors are among the top jewels of my collection. As a theme to tie them together, the three guys I'm featuring today all first made a name for themselves in Boston, though not all of these are Red Sox cards.

This is a cool shot of Carlton Fisk, apparently shouting to second base or perhaps giving direction to a cutoff man. Those 80s White Sox uniforms with the number on the pants are pretty funky.

That's a long time behind the dish. I didn't realize Fisk had such quick legs for a catcher, swiping 128 bases in his career and leading the league in triples during his ROY campaign in 1972.

Here's a nice posed shot of Fred Lynn from his days as an Angel. I always love picking up 2003 Topps Retired refractors when I can find them for a good price. They don't seem to pop up as often as their 2005 counterparts.

Freddy put up great numbers during his Red Sox days, but leveled off a bit once he moved on to California and later Baltimore. I know it sounds like a joke everytime I say it, but I think of him first and foremost as a Padre, since 1990 happened to be the year I first really got into baseball as a kid in San Diego.

(Update: I've since sold the Fred Lynn for twice what I paid for it. Sorry to see it go, but couldn't pass up that deal.)

This Jim Lonborg card is another instance of a seller screw-up lending itself to a good deal. The listing neglected to mention that this was a refractor parallel, or that it was serial numbered out of 25. But I could tell by the rainbow sheen in the photo that it was definitely a refractor, so I was able to score it for the opening bid. Not that it would have been considerably more expensive had the seller properly listed it, but I bet he could have easily gotten a few bucks more, perhaps even twice as much if a couple BoSox fans got into a bidding war over it.

In a happy coincidence, I'm posting this on Jim's birthday. As the red stats indicate, he was at his best in 1967, helping the "Impossible Dream" Red Sox reach the World Series. As the sentence on the back states, he did very well in his first two WS starts, but then they put him back out there on short rest for Game 7 and well, you know how that ended for Boston. He won the Cy that year, and had a few more solid seasons in his career, but was never quite as dominant.

A fun fact about Lonborg is that he's the real baseball player in the "Sam Malone pitching" photo hanging in the bar on the show Cheers.

Good enough excuse to revisit the fun TTM return last year from the great Wade Boggs.

That's gonna do it for today. Happy Easter, everybody!