A True White Whale (For Me At Least)

For a long time, I didn't believe this card existed. It couldn't. In thirteen years, I have never seen one for sale, let alone in person. The only way I have seen this card is in out of focus, grainy, small pictures. It is the Sasquatch of White Whales, if you will.

I stumbled across a long lost account last night and I fond this photo of the 2007 Topps Josh Fields variation. It was the best photo I have ever seen of this card. It is still is small, grainy and out of focus, but it gives me new hope. I found this image on Zistle.

I had completely forgotten about Zistle. The last time I logged in was probably sometime in 2012. I am still a Hall of Fame contributor, after not logging in after seven years. That was a bit weird. I started digging around the site and discovered the latest entries for cards were 2017.

Zistle wasn't perfect, but it was pretty cool. I guess people just gravitated toward places like BaseballCardPedia, Beckett and Cardboard Connection. I appreciated Zistle for two reasons. There were places for images for each card. The database was also user generated, so minor and regional sets could be added without much hassle. In my experience, the only facet that I didn't care for was how collections came up. It listed everything by card number in numerical order. This made sorting through your collection a bit clunky.

I have great memories of contributing to Zistle early on. Even though sometimes I'll have a prickly demeanor, I love helping out. Sometimes to a fault. I really enjoyed bringing my collection of card images to the masses. I'm not sure why I stopped. I suppose like anything else, other things took priority and it fell by the wayside. That's a shame. Zistle was a great idea. It still doesn't bring me any closer to obtaining my White Whale.

I opened 2007 Topps product with gusto. I am surprised that I never came across this card. I found the Jeter variation card in a pack, but never this one. Topps is sometimes faulty with their final checklists, so I think I was right to assume that this card never got made. Like Sasquatch, I have people swear that they have seen it out there. I have never heard directly of anyone owning though, but the photographic evidence is mounting.

One of the reasons I started to doubt its existence, is that the variation is listed as the "A" card. The variation is almost always listed as the "B" card. I believe this card is out there and I believe someday it will be in my collection.