Jimmy Howard: Griffins Game Used

One of the best feelings as a player collector is stumbling upon a really cool card of your player that you never even knew existed. It's even better when it is listed as a Buy it Now with a great price. One of my recent pickups even took this up one more level with an almost impossible to find oddball minor league team set.

Between years of scouring eBay and other sites I've gotten a pretty good idea of most of the cards Jimmy Howard has. The Trading Card Database (TCDb) has been pretty helpful too. If something exists, it is likely already listed on there. Most of the time, at least.

Well, thanks to a recent late night eBay search, I actually found something not already in the database. It was from a set I had never seen or heard of before. I check my saved Howard searches on eBay multiple times a day, so to see this card was a complete surprise.

Here is a game-worn jersey card from the 2008-09 Choice Grand Rapids Griffins set. There is no card number and it is not serial numbered. After some digging around the internet, I found that these were given out at specific Griffins home games. There were a couple other players in the set including Derek Meech and Jakub Kindl.

I love the look of this card with the ghosted image in the background and the bright red jersey swatch. Even if there are a couple of small ads it is a very nice looking design for a minor league set. I wonder how many more sets are out there like this.

Getting back to the major trading card companies, I also picked up this nice game-used jersey card from ITG's 2007-08 Heroes and Prospects set. The most noticeable thing about this one is the huge piece of jersey. Even better is that it's not just plain white and is the same color as the Griffins uniform Howard is wearing in the photo.

The last of these is another ITG game-used jersey card. This one comes from the 2006-07 Heroes and Prospects set. It also has a nice big blue swatch, although in this case Howard is shown in the Griffins white uniform. I know it doesn't really matter in the scheme of things, I just think the overall aesthetic of the card is better when the swatch matches the photo.

These three provide a nice boost to the Grand Rapids portion of my Howard collection. While I never saw him play for them in person, or really even at all, I still like adding these cards. The Griffins uniforms back then were pretty sweet and look great on cardboard.