First Ultimate Super Jumbo Pack, CMC Finds

These Ultimate Super Jumbo Packs have cards centered around the junk wax era, the perfect centering for my effort to find CMC set members in other sets. In this first pack, of the 54 cards, there were four players from the CMC set, only one of whom I've gotten to.

All four came from 1993 sets, a good year to let the CMC set members get to the majors. Two of the cards were 1993 Topps, one from Pinnacle and one from Fleer Ultra.

One of the 1993 Topps cards as of Brian Hunter, the one from the Braves. Hunter was one of my earlier write-ups, coming just over a month after I started the blog. The back of his card highlights Hunter's performance in the 1991 NLCS, including his two-run home run in Game 7 against the Pirates. It was a career highlight easily featured in my write-up from February.

The other 1993 Topps card was Jim Leyritz, who first made the majors in 1990, the year of his CMC card. His card also highlights a two-run home run, thought not in the playoffs, one from June 7, 1992, a home run that gave the Yankees a 6-5 win. His notable playoff exploits were still to come. His alleged post-career exploits, outlined in his Wikipedia entry, were also still years away.

The other two entries were CMC set members with double-digit time in the majors, Chris Hammond and Royce Clayton.

Hammond is pictured as a member of the new Florida Marlins. He'd spent his first three seasons with the Reds, coming up first in June 1990. He went 11-12 for Florida in 1993, starting 32 games for the fledgling team. He stayed with the Marlins through 1996 and was out of the majors from 1991 to 2001, returning with Atlanta in 2002. His last major league game came with his first team, the Reds, in 2006.

Clayton spent his 1993 completely in San Francisco, his first full year in the majors, where he would stay until his final game in September 2007. While the back of Hammond's Fleer Ultra card had little information, just his vitals, the previous year's stats and his major league totals, Clayton's Pinnacle has a write-up. The write-up references pressure on the young Clayton, that he'd been compared to Barry Larkin. Clayton struggled at times, the card notes, but he was still a can't-miss player.

I've got one more post on this first Ultimate Super Jumbo Pack. That post is to cover the flat-out interesting cards and players from the pack and there were several. Then I can bust into one of the five others I picked up on our vacation.

295 - Brian Hunter, Brave Hunter, 2/8/10