The Zito Effect and The Hunt.

The Zito Effect rages on. A recent trio from jacobmrleymax:

In particular, we'd never seen anything like the Hobby Masters card on the right. Exploring the Zito Effect (obtaining many cards of a player but rarely getting a double), David at Indians Cards pointed out a possible connection to Z's status as a fallen star--in that people are willing to give up cards of a fallen star, thus making it easier to amass a greater variety. But the Zito Effect ALMOST applies to some star players, too. For instance, Ichiro.

We receive many cards of Ichiro Suzuki from various wondrous sources, but not many are ever doubles. (The six cards above, which we didn't have, also are from mr. jmm, along with others we'll show in a later post.) Thus we are arbitrarily setting the Full Zito Effect cutoff at 8 percent. We say arbitrarily because we didn't actually do the math. For our Zitos, it's probably less than that. But we don't want to set the bar too high.That is, if you go to card shops and shows (you lucky devils) and easily find reasonably priced cards of the player you collect, and there are scads of that player's cards in existence, and you receive many of that player's cards in packets from other bloggers, and still less than 8 percent of your collection consists of duplicates of cards you already have, you are experiencing the Full Zito.

Apparently, Zito and Ichiro also have cards in the hundreds. In response to a request from Eric S., and because we needed SOMETHING to do during the results show of American Idol tonight other than actually watch it, we present our Barry Zito collection. This includes recent acquisitions from jacobmrley, night owl, john/jack the british fellow (we are putting together some good 80s for you, good sir); ryan s. of baltimore; zman (we have your packet ready to mail, by the way, but are waiting for one more card), and many other blogville greats.

For some reason, we rarely if ever pull a Zito card from a pack--it's happened only twice--so the lion's share of these cards truly do come from bloggers and readers, and I wish we could express how cool that is. These also represent a couple of card shop stops, and three eBay wayfares. We're not that good with words. So instead, here are pictures:

Here's a mild-mannered trio.

Followed by an impressionist classic.

This is one of those cards where BZ does not facially resemble himself.

Barry batting!

Repeating that motion cannot be good for a person's arm.

Shiny Zee.

Three very different Zito faces.

Love these two. Why? Can't explain it. Like having a favorite pillow.

One of our two Zito card autographs. Bailey once sent us an autographed Zito ticket! His face is pretty much invisible. A nice visual metaphor for his pre-MLB days, before he made too much money.

Here is a view from AFTER he made too much money. Yet not as much as he would make soon. Aha! We need more Zitos in a Giants uniform.

The windup and the pitch.

He lent us his personal credit card. We bought Mets jerseys.

"You wouldn't LIKE me when I'm angry."

There's sure a lot going on in that card on the left.

This looks dangerous.

A herald-ish jersey card.

Green again.

High kick. High stockings.
Mainly it's me that likes Zito cards. Although Lucy is partial to

that Turkey Red. And after extensive forensic analysis we determined that Barry's card (left) is the darkest of all the '08 Masterpieces.

Love the Legendary Cuts Barry card. And the Fleer card on the left is wildly and greatly red:

Who is that guy on the left? You see how he sometimes doesn't look like himself?

This pair proves that Topps needs to vary it up a little bit from year to year. Well, that's most of the Zito cards we have. In the great scheme of card collections it's far from vast. But when is enough enough? What is it about card collecting? Philosophically, certainly we have enough Barry Zito cards. So why do we want more? Is it the thrill of the hunt? There must be some vestigial or at least Flintstonian element at work, as if we seek baseball cards, wrestle them to the ground, and then strap them to the top of our Land Rover. But a day later, we're hungry again.