Two additions to the minor league team sets came in today. I’m on a slow burn to get a complete Phillies minor league team set…set (and I’m picking up Pawtucket Red Sox team sets as I see them, because they were my home team for 2017-2019). Found an eBay seller called Lake Country Minors that specializes in minor league team sets at pretty reasonable prices. LCM had the 2015 Lehigh Valley IronPigs. It’s your standard Choice set, quality photos and production. The set itself is pretty unremarkable. You’re looking at a Mikael Franco, Hector Neris and an Adam Morgan set. They did a good job of showcasing the huge collection of theme uniforms the IronPigs wore that season.
The other set is the 1995 Reading Phillies Team Set…set. This one is strictly a “well, I want a complete collection” pick-up. The design is pretty uninspiring, even for the mid-90’s. Almost feels like it was designed in MS-Word. The print quality is really weird. The front is high quality gloss, the back feels like just regular printer paper. Barely a step-up from those entrepreneurial late 80’s sets that printed the back of the card on a dot-matrix deal. The player quality is also laughably non existent. The cupboard was bare in the Phillies’ system in 95. Aside from a few utility players that had a cuppa in the bigs here and there, the only recognizable name in the set is Larry Anderson. LA had been a part of the Phillies’ 1983 & ’93 World Series teams. His biggest contribution to the game, however, may be the notorious Mr. Jello that terrorized Rene Lachemann during the Seattle Mariners’ 1982 season.
Listen, there are a lot of lean years for the Phillies all up and down the organization. So we’re not going to hold weak team sets against them. We’re going after all of ’em, so there are going to be a lot of these.
