COMC Delivers! Part 3 (Cal Ripken, Barry Larkin, and Parallels Galore!)

Welcome back to my ongoing purchase reveal from COMC.  I like to use COMC to help me finish off sets primarily, but I also like to browse the site for various Barry Larkin cards that I'm missing.  My latest purchase landed me a few different Barry Larkin cards and that's what I want to show off today!

First up, from 1996 Bowman's Best comes this Mirror Image Refractor:

I don't think Bowman did a great job of pairing up and coming players with established stars.  Mark Bellhorn, while marginally servicable throughout his MLB career, certainly can't compare to Cal Ripken, Jr.  On the other side of the card, we get an equally marginal player in Neifi Perez who also cannot compete with the Hall of Famer Barry Larkin.

Here's how the two pairings compare based on WAR values from Baseball Reference:

Cal Ripken, Jr.:  95.9 WAR spread across 21 MLB seasons

Mark Bellhorn:  8.0 WAR spread across 10 MLB seasons

Barry Larkin:  70.5 WAR spread across 19 MLB seasons

Neifi Perez:  2.6 WAR spread across 12 MLB seasons

Yep, safe to say that the "mirror image" versions of the two Hall of Famers failed to live up to Bowman's billing.

Next up, a confusing card from 1998 Donruss Collections Leaf:

I don't pretend to understand the 1998 Donruss Collections family of sets, though I guess I'll have to do some lengthy research whenever I get around to featuring the above card in my ongoing Barry Larkin Collection series of posts.  For today, I'll leave it as "I needed this card, and now I don't."

Moving on to the year 2021, I picked up a pair of 2021 Panini Donruss cards:

The parallel is an On Fire card numbered out of 75 copies.  The relic isn't serially numbered but it is quite a bit thicker than your usual base relic (I also love the red bit of cloth embedded within the card).  Donruss has a silly number of parallels, but at least for 2021, I've done a good job of acquiring the majority of the Barry Larkin cards in the set!  

Here's the full Barry Larkin checklist that I'm chasing for 2021 Donruss:

Yes 2021 215 Donruss

Yes 2021 215 Donruss - Career Stat Line

Yes 2021 215 Donruss - Holo Blue

Yes 2021 215 Donruss - Holo Orange

Yes 2021 215 Donruss - Holo Pink

Yes 2021 215 Donruss - Holo Purple

Yes 2021 215 Donruss - Holo Red

Yes 2021 215 Donruss - Independence Day

Yes 2021 215 Donruss - Liberty

Yes 2021 215 Donruss - On Fire Emoji

Yes 2021 215 Donruss - One Hundred Emoji

No 2021 215 Donruss - Presidential Collection

Yes 2021 215 Donruss - Red and White Stripes

Yes 2021 87M-BA Donruss - Retro 1987 Materials

No 2021 87M-BA Donruss - Retro 1987 Materials Gold

No 2021 87M-BA Donruss - Retro 1987 Materials Red

No 2021 215 Donruss - Season Stat Line

A "No" means that I still need the card.  As you can see, I'm down to needing only two base parallels and two relic parallels!  Not bad at all, considering there are 17 different Barry Larkin cards to track down in the set!

My penultimate Barry Larkin purchase was from the 2022 Topps Chrome Platinum Anniversary set.

That's a Rose Gold Refractor #/75, one of the many, many parallels in the 2022 set.  For as much grief as I gave the 2021 Donruss set for having a lot of Larkin cards, the 2022 Topps Chrome Platinum Anniversary set is even worse!  There are 35 different Barry Larkin cards that I'm chasing after, double that of the 2021 Donruss set!

My final Barry Larkin purchase from this COMC order was a 2024 Allen & Ginter mini Gold Border parallel:

The Gold Border minis were retail-exclusives and since I generally buy hobby boxes of Ginter, I almost exclusively have to rely on trading or purchasing for any retail-only goodies.  

Overall, that was a rather eclectic selection of Barry Larkin cards but they all had one thing in common:  I didn't own any of them prior to my COMC purchase!  I'm certainly happy to have six more cards for my collection.  I'm also happy to report that I'm still not quite done showing off my COMC goodies, look for one more post in the near future.