Matt Davidson's huge day should focus spotlight on key cards

Giancarlo who?

That might be the question for some baseball fans -- particularly if they are Chicago White Sox-minded -- after Opening Day as Matt Davidson and his Sox made a little history on Thursday, despite the two-homer debut of that other guy on some team somewhere.

Davidson became just the fourth player in MLB history to hit three home runs on Opening Day and his team tied the MLB record with six longballs on the day as part of a 14-7 win over the Kansas City Royals.

Davidson joins George Bell (1988), Karl "Tuffy" Rhodes (1994) and Dmitri Young (2005) in the Opening Day club, while the only other team to go yard that often was the 1988 New York Mets. The good news here for collectors? Unlike that guy in pinstripes, Davidson's certified autographs are relatively plentiful and available -- and he's been appearing on cards just as long.

Davidson made his MLB debut with the Arizona Diamondbacks in 2013, hitting three home runs but just .237 in 31 games but had just one game in the bigs between that time and last season when he finally broke in with the Sox and hit 26 home runs (but still .220) in 118 games. He only hit four homers this spring but his batting average was up to .328 and he went 3-for-4 with four runs and five RBI on Thursday to open his season batting .750.

As for his cardboard? Davidson made his debut way back in 2008 on USA Baseball cards as part of its Youth National Team presence, and he's got four different autographed cards there with a standard (/295) card, a green-ink (/2) a 1/1 patch auto and an In His Own Words inscribed signature card (/20, above). Other prospect autographs for him arrived in 2009 -- in Elite Extra Edition and TRISTAR Prospects Plus -- before his first MLB prospect autos in 2010 Bowman Chrome.

Most of Davidson's 2014 Rookie Cards show him with the White Sox and most of his more than 200 different certified autos are from that year. He's got autographs from that year in Bowman products, Elite, Topps Finest, Immaculate Collection, National Treasures, Prizm, Allen & Ginter, Topps Chrome, Topps Heritage High Number, Tier One, Triple Threads and Turkey Red.

Interestingly, he hasn't signed a single certified autograph card since.

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