J. J. Hardy, 2014 Panini Donruss Career Stat Line #130

This card is pretty snazzy in spite of Panini's generic, derivative design. Shiny foil, J. J. Hardy rocking the Brady Anderson sideburns, and a pointless serial-numbered parallel with its print number determined by a randomly chosen statistic from the featured player's stat line. In this case, I have the 124th of Hardy's 158 Career Stat Line cards, aligning nicely with the shortstop's 158 career home runs. As it so happens, J. J.'s 124th homer came on July 14, 2012. It was a game-tying shot off of Detroit's Joaquin Benoit in the bottom of the 11th inning. Two innings later, Taylor Teagarden's first hit as an Oriole was a walkoff two-run homer. I stood in Oriole Park at Camden Yards that Saturday evening, jumping up and down and shouting in disbelief. I mentioned it on the blog.

It's great to relive that bizarre game, because there's a lot of joy associated with that entire weekend for me. 24 hours before Saturday's game, I was on my first date with my future wife at the Hamilton Tavern. Max couldn't have known any of that when he sent this card to me. Well, he could have done the legwork I just did, and pieced together the context clues from my blog entries, but that would be...unsettling. That's my completely backwards way of thanking Max. I'm just going to quit while I'm behind.