Is a White Whale a White Whale if you used to own it?

Long time readers of the blog know that my collection has often featured a lot of moving pieces.  I had sets and guys I collected, but was collecting on the budget of a 20-25 year old, so I was constantly selling or trading cards to acquire other things given limited cashflow.  Mike Schmidt rookie I had since I was a kid?  Traded for customs.  Amazing triple patch of Expos starters?  Sold for rent money.  Nothing was untouchable basically.

Fred McGriff was (And remains) my favorite baseball player, so I had a fairly decent collection of his cards.  But at some point I decided I needed a little spending cash, and I sold the bulk of that collection to a dude in Bloomington, Indiana.  I kept a bunch of key cards that I really enjoyed, but quickly realized I was missing one.  Not an autograph, not a relic, but a parallel card from the late 90's.  I kinda wanted to track it down, as I figured it wouldn't be too difficult.

Problem was, I couldn't remember the exact card.  I knew it was late 90's and shiny, and I thought it had a PP in the card number.  It also had a red wax like stamp in the bottom corner.  I googled around a bit, and figured out the set it was from (1998 Score Artist's Proof, PP91), but couldn't find any versions of the card to buy.  So I set aside the dreams of ever getting this card for a while, but did have some dudes on Blowout make me a Seneca Wallace custom based on that 1998 Score set to whet my appetite a bit.

That must've been like 2010 or 2011.  Now, in 2022, the card came in mind so I went on Ebay and found several copies of the card.  Purchased it and a similar version, and the card is finally mine again.  YESSSSS!

I bought the Platinum Team parallel as well, because it's similar, but I like being able to showcase just how shiny and awesome the Artist's Proof card is.  So below they're side by side.  Artist's Proof on the left, Platinum Team on the right:

Here's a better angle for the shine:

Still looks as great when I'm 35 as it did when I was 12...such a cool card!

Also, I forgot to take a picture of the back, so I had to borrow the below image from COMC...but how good are these stats on the back?

A nice chunky bit of career stats and decent little writeup are just the tip of this iceberg.  The left side of the back is everything though.  Splits for six major stat categories AND fielding statistics?  WHAAAAAAT?  

Clearly one of the best parallel cards of all time.

As an addendum, here's a side by side of the McGriff and the Seneca custom.  Obviously the Seneca is the base version as opposed to the Artist's Proof version, but it's still pretty groovy and really well done.