Completed Refractor Run: Eric Owens

Here's another collecting project I completed recently: every Eric Owens refractor. All the variations and everything.

Background: Eric Owens was a fan favorite for a couple years on bad Padres teams at the turn of the millennium. He was a scrapy guy who played hard and would deliver an exciting highlight here and there to help keep the season interesting in San Diego. He had already hung up his cleats by the time I returned to the hobby, but going back and collecting his cards brings back fond memories of watching him play, and in turn memories from those days, meandering my way through community college with plenty of freetime to watch Padres broadcasts all summer long. Good times.

So yeah, he's a guy I like to collect, and am somewhat compelled to supercollect. But with all my other active collecting goals keeping me busy, I'm reluctant trying to supercollect anybody besides maybe guys with less than 50 total cards like Dan Walters from last post. TCDB says Eric Owens has 259 cards, and I'm tempted to log my PC one of these days, but I'd be unlikely to ever land them all without putting in significant effort and money (he has some 1996 Select Certified Edition "Mirror" [foilboard] color parallels that can get pricey due to low print runs), so just focusing on refractors seemed like the way to go.

I went through Eric Owens' TCDB checklist and made myself a list of just refractors. The "refractor run" took some patience, but I eventually tracked down them all. Luckily, the final Chrome set he was included in (2004) was the last one before 2005's premiere of the superfractor as we know it, and so there were no 1/1's I had to worry about. Barring anything that slipped by me and/or TCDB, I can now say there isn't an Eric Owens refractor that I don't have.

Without further delay, let's check out all of Eric Owens' refractors.

1996 Finest kicks things off, with both peeled and unpeeled examples.

The Limited Exposure parallels in 1997 Donruss Limited utilize "Holographic Poly-Chromium Technology" though they weren't able to come right out and call them refractors, as Topps has the trademark of using the word refractor in regards to branding trading cards, as is my understanding. But yeah, I'll count this in my refractor run. It's kind of a dumb set, though, with another player on the other side-- some chump named Trey Beamon (Padres) on the back of this one. Actually Eric is on the back, evidenced by the legalese along the right side and card number at the top. He got his first solo Padres refractor in 2000 Chrome. (He was briefly with the Brewers between his stints in Cincinnati and San Diego, but no refractors document that stop.)

In 2001, Owens was included in that year's Topps Chrome set as a Padre, and then after crossing the country to Miami, appeared in the 2001 Topps Traded & Rookies set as a Marlin, both of which had "retrofractor" parallels. Retrofractor seems to just mean Heritage-style refractors where the back of the card is rougher cardboard, which is a nice pairing to the plastic fronts from a tactile perspective. The Topps All-Time Fan Favorites refractors I've been chasing (over 95% complete now!) are also like this.

2002 Topps Chrome has 2 refractor parallels: gold and black (/50).

2003 Topps Chrome trumpets Eric's return to Southern California. Here's our first legit "rainbow" grouping, as Topps started adding more parallels this year. Blue, Silver, Gold, Black, and X-Fractor (the latter of which I've got both factory-encased and freed). This same posed shot is also in flagship 2003 Topps, but of course I'm just interested in refractor parallels here. I really only mention it because they included him in Traded that year, too...

Not sure why Topps bothered, but Eric shows up in 2003 Topps Traded & Rookies even though he was already pictured on the Angels in the main set (both flagship and Chrome), and he definitely wasn't a rookie by that point. Chrome parallels were mixed in with base (paper) for the Traded & Rookies packs that year, with both refractor and X-fractor parallels available. I've again got the X-fractor in both raw and encased ("uncirculated"), which is made more impressive by virtue of it being a /25 card (and sadly, no, neither of my copes is the Christmas Card). Honestly I didn't really set out to get both peeled/unpeeled and encased/unencased variations of Eric Owens refractors where available, originally fine with either, but as the project went on, it just kinda happened and so I leaned into the overkill.

Eric's 2003 season in Anaheim was his last MLB action, yet he shows up in 2004 Topps and 2004 Topps Chrome with this pre-game stretch photo. In reality, he was stretching for the Mariners that spring training, but didn't make the squad, then played for Detroit's Triple A club that year before wrapping up his playing career with a year in Mexico. Anyways, the refractors in 2004 Chrome are base (white), gold, black, and red x-fractor. Of most interest to me are the black refractors; My ambitious longterm set-collecting quest for them is down to a baker's dozen remaining to complete the whole set in black refractors. I had to pick up a dupe Eric Owens for the Refractor Run.

As I said before, for a collecting standpoint it's lucky for me that he didn't stick around long enough to be included in 2005 Topps Chrome, because that's when the superfractor came into play (not to mention printing plates getting packed out by then), so hobby completists had to rethink the old "collect them all" philosophy.

As for Eric Owens' journey, the Angels liked his moxy enough to bring him back as a minor league coach for a few years. He returned to the majors as assistant hitting coach for the Blue Jays in 2015 and 2016. Since June 2024, he's been head coach of his alma mater's baseball team, Ferrum College, located in the Blue Ridge Mountains of his native Virginia. Sounds like a sweet gig for him.

Thanks for reading.