By Chris Olds | Beckett Baseball Editor | Commentary & Opinion

With the MLB season’s first month half over, now’s the time to look at who’s hot and who’s not …

HOT

Matt Harvey — SP, New York Mets (Beckett checklist & OPG here)
3-0, 0.82 ERA with 25 Ks and six walks in 22 innings
Harvey is the poster boy for red-hot baseball cards this season with his start on Saturday en route to NL Player of the Week honors. His next start on Friday will be just his 14th in MLB and he’ll face a young pitcher many a collector may know, Stephen Strasburg. This guy already has some uttering Gooden and Seaver, so the Big Apple hype machine is primed. His earliest cards can be found in the 2006-07 USA Baseball set — he has plenty of autographs and game-used there — while his MLB prospect debut comes in 2010 Bowman Chrome Draft. That one has generated a lot of attention with a BGS 9.5 Orange Refractor recently selling for $825, while another copy has an even loftier asking price, like many Harvey cards across the board. Remember Ike Davis’ start a couple years ago? We do, but we also remember Strasburg’s.

Jose Fernandez — SP, Florida Marlins (checklist & OPG)
0-0, 0.82 ERA with 13 Ks and three walks in 11 innings
What happens with a young pitcher unexpectedly makes a team strip-mined of talent and actually pitches pretty well? You get asking prices like this. And then you get sales prices like this. His numbers look good but he’s not gotten enough support. I’d tread lightly here — remember Josh Johnson? He never lit things up on cardboard.

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NOT

Jason Heyward – OF, Atlanta Braves (checklist & OPG)
.103 average, one home run, four RBI, seven runs in 12 games
Not long ago, he was a Beckett Baseball cover-worthy rookie. Oh how times have changed. With new talent in Atlanta, will Heyward’s not-cheap earlier cards suffer?  That’s debatable, but the batting average simply is not helping.

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Roy Halladay — SP, Philadelphia Phillies (checklist & OPG)
1-2, 7.63 ERA with 14 Ks and seven walks in 15 innings
He’s been a workhorse for years but nobody pitches forever. If it wasn’t for his last start against the Marlins (eight innings one run and just two strikeouts) he’d be looking at an ERA well over 10 and 12 earned runs in little more than seven innings of work. It can get ugly in Philly and the Phans won’t stand for that — even if it’s from the 200-game winner and two-time Cy Young winner. His RCs are cheap, so the cards that could suffer here with time are his certified autos.

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Josh Hamilton — OF, Los Angeles Angels (checklist & OPG)
.234 average, two home runs, eight RBI, six runs in 12 games
He’s picked up the pace the last two games, but his comments about his former team’s crowd and a crowded lineup that he’s in now — along with an awful start — simply spell doom for his 1999 Rookie Cards. Trout will overshadow him and Albert Pujols unless we see an unprecedented trio of powerful performances this season.

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Giancarlo Stanton — OF, Miami Marlins (checklist & OPG)
.167 average, zero home runs, zero RBI, one run in nine games
When you hit 37 home runs last season, all eyes are on you. When you’re the only potential major-league bat left on the Marlins, even more are watching.  Hobby-wise, the Marlins are a scrap heap — save for a rookie pitcher for now — so that means Stanton is all that matters. And it’s not going well at all. Keep an eye on his 2010 Topps Triple Threads RC. At $150, it’s bound to be the most volatile of the bunch. If you believe in the slugger — or that he’ll be jettisoned soon — this auto-jersey combo limited to 99 is worth keeping an eye on.

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Also cold on the field … Ike Davis, Dustin Ackley.

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Should somebody else have made either list? Tell us in the comments below.

Chris Olds is the editor of Beckett Baseball magazine. Have a comment, question or idea? Send an email to him at colds@beckett.com. Follow him on Twitter by clicking here.

Courtesy of Phillies Network

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By Chris Olds | Beckett Baseball Editor

Sports fans are often all about the details in their card sets and their collections.

But if you’re a game-used memorabilia collector, then you know that the details are even more important — sometimes the difference between something being real and fake.

Now, though, with a new type of bat being used by some MLB players during spring training this year, there’s something new for game-used collectors to look for. It’s the Baden Axe — a  model with a simple difference as its knob is skewed and tapered. That allows for less friction with the player’s hand during swings and doesn’t force a player to pay attention to which way the label is facing when he bats.

While that may not mean much to most of us, it might mean a lot more to players. And it certainly might mean something on the game-used memorabilia front.

One of the players who used the bat this year during spring training is Jimmy Rollins of the Philadelphia Phillies, who hit the first MLB home run using one of the bats earlier this month, according to the Federal Way, Wash.-based company. While the model has been approved for use by MLB in 2010, most converts have been at the collegiate level until this spring. The bat also has been approved for use at the Little League and high school levels.

Could there be a premium for game-used bats such as these compared to, say, other Rollins gamers? Maybe for now, based on sheer quantity of game-used bats available on the secondary market — if any even are available. It’s been seen before with sluggers such as Barry Bonds, whose Sam Bats typically command more cash than those used earlier in his career.

Chris Olds is the editor of Beckett Baseball magazine. Have a comment, question or idea? Send an email to him at colds@beckett.com. Follow him on Twitter by clicking here.

Join Beckett Baseball’s Chris Olds and Brian Fleischer as they rip some 2011 Leaf Pete Rose Legacy boxes along with Leaf’s Brian Gray in this latest edition of Box Busters.

What will they find inside? What won’t they find inside? Watch and find out …

By Chris Olds | Beckett Baseball Editor

Baseball’s career hits leader is one of the sports world’s most polarizing — and, yet in some areas, beloved — figures.

And that enigma that is Pete Rose not lost on Leaf as the company is readying a Pete Rose Legacy set coming in November, which will apparently be chock-full of autographs, memorabilia and more. The high-end offering will include signatures, game-used pieces (a bat and a game-used Montreal Expos jersey were used) and inscriptions … lots of inscriptions.

Because he was banned from baseball for betting on the game, Rose has not appeared on an MLB-approved trading card in a standard set since 1989. That has made his releases since then — there have been plenty from companies that are not MLB-approved — of interest to collectors who prefer to remember Rose for his achievements on the field, not his failures off of it.

Click on the images for a full view of the cards below if it shows a thumbnail.

Chris Olds is the editor of Beckett Baseball magazine. Have a comment, question or idea? Send an email to him at colds@beckett.com. Follow him on Twitter by clicking here.

By Chris Olds | Beckett Baseball Editor

The stars of Major League Baseball have a few new rookies to deal with — guys who are pretty well-known in their own right — in a forthcoming video game release.

Who?

SpongeBob Squarepants, Ren and Stimpy, Chum Chum and Danny Phantom to name a few.

These rookies — and more Nicktoons – will be competing against actual MLB players in actual MLB stadiums in 2K Play‘s Nicktoons MLB for the Xbox 360 with support for Kinect along with versions for the Wii and Nintendo DS. The game arrives on Sept. 13.

Just think, SpongeBob in Wrigley Field … and who wins in a showdown between him and Cliff Lee?

Among the MLB stars who will be profiled — and appear on the video game’s box art — are Lee,Robinson Cano, Andre Ethier, Miguel Cabrera, Jason Heyward and many more. Each team will have players represented. While some players will have a home-field advantage at times in their real-life ballparks in the game, it also will include new digital parks that are more energized for the child’s gaming experience — how will guys like Matt Holliday hold up at Frosty Freeze Field?

Well, then again, Holliday did play in Colorado …

The game is actually a first for combining Nickelodeon’s characters with MLB players, according to Shaan Kandawalla, the VP for digital retail games for Nickelodeon.

“Our Nicktoons stars are taking the field and plan to go yard against the best players in Major League Baseball,” Kandawalla said. “Nicktoons MLB will introduce a whole new rivalry on the baseball diamond.”

Chris Olds is the editor of Beckett Baseball magazine. Have a comment, question or idea? Send an email to him at colds@beckett.com. Follow him on Twitter by clicking here.

To see more from the game, check out our Box Busters (of an admittedly different kind) video below … and you’ll have a chance to win a copy of the game right here closer to release and then in the October issue of Beckett Baseball.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Arriving in December, the set includes 50 cards of this year’s championship team — 25 player cards, 15 season highlight cards, nine postseason highlight cards and a card of World Series MVP Cole Hamels. In addition, an oversized (3.5×5 inches) commemorative team celebration card will be included in every set.

The sets retail for approximately $20 — about the price of a typical blaster box — and are routinely a popular way for (at least one team’s) fans to cap the baseball season.

Look for a piece on the Phillies’ championship team in the December/January issue (No. 40) of Beckett Baseball arriving in hobby shops soon.

Chris Olds has collected sports cards and memorabilia since 1987. Before coming to Beckett Media, he wrote about the hobby for the Orlando Sentinel on his blog, SportsStuff, and for the San Antonio Express-News and The Tuscaloosa (Ala.) News. Do you have a comment, question or idea? Send e-mail to him at colds@beckett.com.