Saturday Bloody Saturday.

       OK, long story time.  I know some of you don't like to read them, but this one has a point, so either bear with me and read it or skip to the end to get to the important part.

       About 20 years ago, I was roused by my mother from a lovely post-school nap to go give blood.  I had never given before, but my mother had read that there was a critical shortage of blood in the area and she wanted me to go with her to give.  She is blood type O negative, which is considered the universal donor, so she was/is a steady donor.  So, I struggled to my sleepy teenage feet and went with her.  The procedure was relatively quick and painless (even the needle part) and they gave me juice and cookies afterward, which is great...anything with juice and cookies at the end can't be all bad.  I didn't think much of it.  Then, literally two days after I gave blood, my grandfather collapsed in his garden.  He had an aortic aneurysm that burst.  Needless to say, this is a quite catastrophic thing to happen.  He was rushed to the hospital and needed 12 pints of blood to get him through his surgery, which was successful.  In my view, and it may not be entirely true, but in a way, I had helped to save my grandfather's life.  I became a blood donation advocate from then on; I have volunteered for the Red Cross over the years, I constantly give blood, and, best of all, my grandfather lived another 16 years.

So this morning, I got up and drove to beautiful downtown Newark, NJ and gave blood.  I try and do it as often as I am allowed and as long as my health will let me.  I even got some sweet swag while doing it:

I am keeping the hat, because, hey, free hat!  But the shirt is only an XL - I haven't fit into XL shirts since I was about 11.  So I have decided to auction off the shirt and give the money right back to the American Red Cross.  Normally, I would never implore you to look at my eBay auctions, but this one is important...

***Hey everyone who didn't want to read my story, this is the important part***

Please click here to view this charity auction.  I know most of you aren't Devils fans but maybe you know one, you could buy it for them, or at least send them the link.  I am not usually the altruistic type, but I happen to think this is all pretty important and believe me, it saves lives.  People always talk about how they can make a difference in the world.  Well, this is a simple thing anyone can do.

Please give blood.  Please donate to the Red Cross.

Thank you.  I now return you to my usual snarky and immature little blog.

Joy of a Completed Page (or two).

       Someone reads my wantlists! Someone reads my wantlists! I mean, some of you have emailed me saying "nice collection" or "hey! let's trade" but I got some cards in the mail today directly off of my want list.  The system works!

       The package came from old reliable, Night Owl.  This was one of our smaller swaps, as I had sent him a few random Dodgers cards I had found to test a new envelope system.  He reciprocated by sending me a few current Mets (always appreciated) and the following:

Joy of a Completed Page™ #1 2011 Topps Heritage.

He sent eight different cards, but I only needed four. The Ramos, Baily, Konerko, and King Felix found their spots and this page is done.  I now have a page representing every year of Topps Heritage from the beginning.  I built the entire 2001 and 2002 sets back in the day, but sold them long ago.  Those short prints were a real pain in the ass and, from what I have read, they continue to be.  I find this method far more relaxing.  The other ones he sent, Matt Kemp, Whitey Ford, Jon Lester, and Ryan Braun, will all find spots in their respective player collections as I had gaps in each page.  And dig that Konerko card, I believe he is staring into my soul...

Joy of a Completed Page™ #2 1983 Donruss.

This page is nearly 30 years in the making.  Well, to be more precise, about six weeks.  When I decided to organize some of my more basic binders by manufacturer rather than strictly by year, I noticed that I had all the Donruss sets of the 80's represented except for 1982 and 1983.  Most of my cards from this era had long been consolidated (most with extreme prejudice) so I scrambled around to find nine to properly fill the pages.  I only found seven of each.  Enter Greg.  He sent me a pair of '83s, Steve Garvey and George Foster.  I made an executive decision and brought over the Howard Johnson from the Mets binder and replaced him with the Foster.  Now Hojo and Eddie Murray will be in a staring contest for all eternity.

Night Owl also sent over a 2009 Topps Denard Span from my Rookie All Star list, thus completing my 2009 rookie cup needs.  You made my night last night - if only you were a curvy redhead - thanks Greg!

Monthiversary.

       I just noticed I have been at this for a month and I am very surprised...I have no attention span whatsoe...oooo look, cows! - sorry - Anyway, I have never been known for following through on things, so the fact that I have posted (almost) every day and found a small yet loyal audience is pretty amazing to me.  I don't know how long it will last, but hey, like a starry-eyed teenager, I think I have earned the right to celebrate my one month anniversary.  I am still getting my bloglegs under me and I appreciate all the support, encouragement, suggestions, etc.  And if anyone really hates the blog, thank you for keeping that to yourself. 

You may have noticed I tend to write very long, rambling posts, so I am going to try and see if I can reel myself in once in a while.  I have gone on at length about trimming my collection, consolidating all the fluff, etc.  I think I should start to accentuate the positive a little more.  I am going to start more frequently showing you some of my favorite cards, how I got them, and why they aren't going anywhere.  I creatively call this feature "Favorites."

Some people complain about jersey cards, but I think when they are done right, they are spectacular, and this one does it very right:

It is a 2004 Playoff Honors Quad Jersey card, featuring Carlton Fisk, Gary Carter, Johnny Bench, and Mike Piazza (it is also numbered /100, but I couldn't care less about that; I am not a fan of artificial scarcity).  As a failed catcher myself, I have always loved catchers, this badboy has four great ones, including two of my absolute very favorites.  This card has four Hall of Famers on it (three current, one future).  This card has four nice, differently colored jersey pieces, a fantastic aesthetic choice.  Face some hard truth, friends, this card is fucking cool.  My only problem with it is whether to put it with my Mike Piazza collection or my Gary Carter collection - the answer is that it goes into my Piazza collection strictly because he's shown on the Mets and Carter is shown on the Expos...the Mets trump all.  I bought this card on eBay five years ago after seeing it way overpriced at a show (marked $80- talked down to $60- I said no thanks).  My patience was rewarded when I got it for less than half of the price the dude at the show wanted for it ($28 including shipping).  I found this card again recently while sorting my long-neglected Piazza cards.  I thought it deserved some props.  I have about a dozen Piazza memorabilia cards that have someone else on it with him, this one is by far my favorite.

The Far East.

       I could not sleep at all last night.  Lucky for me, there's actual real live baseball on TV this morning thanks to MLB's odd choice to start the season in Japan a good week before the rest of the season.  I am all for the Japan Series, I just find the timing odd.  My Mets were in the first one of these with the Cubs 12 years ago and I remember waking up at the butt crack of dawn to watch those games too.  Japanese baseball crowds are fun to watch and listen to.  They sing, chant, and make a lot of noise.  When I finally break down and leave the United States, I am going to Tokyo and I am gonna make sure it is during baseball season.  This all got me to thinking about Japanese players.

America's love affair with players from the Far East, of course, started with Hideo Nomo:

Nomo became the prototype for Japanese pitchers in the US.  A couple years of dominance and popularity, followed by injury and mediocrity.  I don't know if this has to happen to all Japanese pitchers, it just seems to have happened to all of them.  Nomo, though, was first and probably best.

My love affair with Japanese players, on the Mets anyway, begins and ends with Tsuyoshi Shinjo:

He had style, flair, panache.  I wish the Mets had given him more of a chance because when he was healthy, he was a fun scrappy player.  Sadly, they jerked him around, shipped him out of town, then brought him back and didn't play him.  Wait, the Mets mishandled a player?  Say it aint so...

No breakdown of Japanese players would be complete without Ichiro:

What can you say about him that hasn't already be said?  He's an absolute artist on the ball field.  I have seen very few players like that, no matter where they were born.  I don't think the question is if he belongs in the Hall of Fame, but should he go in on the first ballot.  Plus, dig that Upper Deck card with Mr. Met.  I wish I had a whole page of just that card.  We have recently seen, more and more, that Ichiro is a bit of a jokester.  I wish he has shown this side earlier.

The Yankees have a hit or miss record with Japanese free agents.  The big hit, of course, was Godzilla!

Hideki Matsui!

Matsui is the only Yankee of recent vintage I did not despise with every fiber of my being. 

The misses, on the other hand, have been huge.  Kei Igawa (not shown) is the absolute king of them. As of last year, Igawa was still pitching in the minor leagues, playing out the ill-advised gigantic contract the Yankees gave him with Michael Scott in Scranton-Wilkes Barre.  I saw him pitch a couple years ago at a Durham Bulls game in North Carolina.  He got lit up for like 6 runs in 2 innings.  I have never seen a player look more defeated when, after about the fourth double in a row, Igawa looked into the dugout practically begging to be pulled out of the game and no one came.  I actually felt sorry for him.  Of course, I also heckled him like a New Yorker would and got a lot of gasps from the more congenial southern crowd. 

The other Hideki - Irabu - also did not turn out quite the way everyone imagined, but the man just passed prematurely, so I will not speak ill of the dead.

I will, however, speak ill of the living.  The Mets, at the same time the Yanks got Hideki Matsui, signed Kazuo Matsui, which was a total disaster.  He wouldn't move positions (why the Mets signed him when they had Jose Reyes is besides the point - they got the wrong Matsui), he had one good week to start out, and then settled in to be a little more exciting than tapioca pudding.  I am very bitter about Kaz Matsu, I bought a ton of his cards; the three of them that are left are shown here.  It's not the money, mind you, it is the sour memories.  Loving a sports team is a lot like loving a person sometimes in that respect.  The Mets have also signed about 50 different middle relievers from the Far East - one of them, Hisanori Takahashi, is shown on this page as well - none of them lasted more than a season of two. Who is Jinten Haku?  I had to look him up myself; apparently, he was a pretty decent player for a long time.  That card has been in my collection for as long as I can remember...it is a 1979 TCMA card.

And then there is Dice-K. 

Dice-K should have been...could have been.  He showed flashes of such brilliance, then fell into the same pattern all other Japanese pitchers have.  Plus, he got fat. I mean try-out-as-a-Sumo-wrestler fat.  I know $51 million is a lot of money, but was it too much to ask you to buy a stationary bike alongwith all those cheeseburgers?

For anyone who wants to invest in Yu Darvish cards, remember Matsuzaka.

Hometown.

       I grew up living in a few different places in northern New Jersey before my family finally settled in the town of Ramsey.  Now, Ramsey's big claim to fame is...well...come to think of it, it has no claim to fame.  It is the epitome of the upper middle class, white, bedroom community, suburban ghetto.  It isn't rich or special enough to have famous people live here nor is it poor enough for anything nasty to transpire here leading to infamy.  Anyway, I could not get out of this place fast enough when I turned 18, going away to Boston first for college and then to live.  But, of course, in the usual It's A Wonderful Life cliche turn of events, I came back here to live seven years ago - and have been plotting, in vain, to leave ever since.  So, if you were to ask me what my hometown was, I would reluctantly yet firmly say "Ramsey, NJ."

       I was surfing around some card blogs a night or two ago (stay with me, the point is coming) and I hit upon an especially odd group of players being discussed and in one of the comments, a player was given props merely for being from someone's hometown.  That little defense got me to thinking of my childhood. Going further in the WABAC, I was a pretty terrible athlete as a kid.  At first, I was short and chubby, than after puberty hit me (like a ton of bricks), I became lanky and awkward.  While I am tall and wide, I lost the overall natural lottery with an overall goofy body with no discernible center of gravity.  All in all, though, I was very enthusiastic about playing sports and went out for all the teams, sometimes even making them.  When I was in middle school in the late 80's and then high school in the early 90's, Ramsey was known as a local hotbed of athletics.  Unfortunately, it was the classes behind me and ahead of me that had all the good jocks (it seems the mid-70's were not a particularly fertile time for those kinds of genetics in this town).  The late 70's and early 80's had brought a couple county champions in baseball and one state champion.  That state championship team featured a player that was spoken of in hushed tones in my hometown: Mike Laga.

Mike Laga is by far the most famous baseball player to come out of Ramsey.  There was a brief time when he was thought of as one of the best prospects in all of baseball.  You could just ask Sparky Anderson (except he's dead) and my long time local high school baseball coach and they would tell you all about it.  Unfortunately, Mike flamed out and never amounted to much.  He had power to spare, but never got that contact or defense thing down.  He is known in card circles, sadly, for his awful airbrushed 1987 Topps card (oh the pink! see above) and in baseball circles for hitting the most impressive foul ball in Busch Stadium history.  Not a grand legacy...but in my hometown, he is still held in high regard.  I got that autograph on the 1986 Donruss card in person at a card show in Ramsey High School sometime in 1987 or 1988 and, I can say from experience, Mike is a very nice guy...the very definition of a hometown hero.

The other three cards on that page are of Frank Eufemia, and 64 silver dollars to you if you'd ever heard of him.  He is, though, a bit of a North Jersey legend.  He made the big leagues in 1985 (as you can plainly see by his three 1986 cards) with the Twins.  He got hurt and bounced around the minor leagues for years trying to get back.  Around 1991, he was the star of the local Hackensack Troasts, a semi-pro team.  Having family and once even having lived in Hackensack, I knew the team well.  On more than a few occasions, I got to play catch and warm up Frank Eufemia, my closest brush with the big leagues.  For a 15 year old, this was a pretty big deal (his time with the Troasts led him to being signed by the Mets in 1992, but he never got higher than AAA). I never got up the nerve to ask Frank for his autograph, but he does teach gym a few towns over now, so maybe if I am ever bored, I could go over and make up for that oversight. 

Fast forward a decade or so to when I lived in Boston and, as I have described before, I worked in a baseball card store.  I actually lived in a suburb of Boston named Somerville.  At around the same time, a slugger named Paul Sorrento was bouncing around the American League.  He put together a pretty decent big league career all through the 90's.  He was even an original Devil Ray:

So, one day I had this big, happy Italian customer in the baseball card store and when he handed me his credit card, I saw his last name was "Sorrento" - for whatever reason, I mention Paul Sorrento and asked if he knew of him.  "Know him, he's my cousin!" was the reply and he went on and on about his cousin Pauly.  I then had a customer for life and he came in the store all the time.  One afternoon, he walked in and introduced me to his cousin, Paul.  Both of them were big, goofy, friendly guys.  Turns out, I also lived about three blocks from Paul's parents. I ended up becoming pretty decent friends, for a time, with the entire Sorrento clan.  Very nice people, definitely hometown guys.

So, those are my hometown people and a couple of interesting little brushes with greatness.  As I said, I was not great, or even a very good, baseball player.  Luckily, by the late 80's, that didn't matter.  Most little league teams got their own homemade baseball cards, myself included:

I think I was 12 in that picture.  The other two homemade-type cards are of my cousin (Robbie) and a childhood friend (Jared).  They were nice enough to autograph their cards for me.  And yes, I signed my own card. Sad, sure, but practicing your autograph is what you do at 12 when you just know, with a few breaks, you'll make the majors.  Alas, my cousin and my friend never made the majors, either, but their autographs are priceless in my book.  In an odd twist, another one of my cards had an awesome brush with greatness:

It is very hard to tell, since it is blue sharpie on a blue jersey, but there is an autograph on that card, and it isn't mine.  My mother was traveling through Baltimore on business one time in the late 80's and there was some kind of meet and greet in her hotel with local famous folks.  She saw one of them was a baseball player and, not having anything for him to sign, she pulled out my baseball card from her wallet and had him sign that.  She had no idea who he was (my mother is not much of a baseball fan) but that card has a unique place of honor in my collection.  The player?  Brooks Robinson.

Progress? Eventually.

       There is a room in my house, as I assume there is in many of your houses, that has become "The Slash Room."  In this case, it is the guest/closet/junk/spare/hobby room.  It is a room that seems to draw all the extra crap that doesn't have a place.  It is the room where out-of-towners too cheap to spring for a hotel sleep.  It also is where childish things get banished, things like say, baseball cards.  This is where I spend a great deal of my spare time, in this spare room.  My mission?  To whittle down all my excess cardboard into a manageable and enjoyable collection.  The "small collection" idea has been a work in progress 2+ years running.  Once you could barely walk into this room without nearly killing yourself on a crate full of 800-count boxes, now there has been a lot of headway made. 

There was once about 20 huge boxes and crates, there are now only eight:

I consider this progress.  Those three postal crates have mostly junk wax era complete sets in them, so those will (eventually) be easy to either put into binders, sell, or give away.  The others are full of boxes and shoe boxes.  They are the tougher ones to get through.

See the boxes in the crates here:

Those are the better cards I like organized into teams.  When I trade with you, that is usually where your favorite team's cards come from.  Some of them are packed (Yankees, Red Sox) some of them are pretty skint (Dodgers, Pirates). I am not attached to those cards in the least; they will all leave the roost (once again, eventually). Those three boxes on the right?  That is a bunch of memorabilia I haven't gone through in ages.  Balls, Photos, etc.  I used to have about a dozen of those paper boxes full, so again, I consider this progress.

OK, that is what the stuff I am trying to get rid of looks like, what about the stuff that is staying?  Isn't that more important?  Why, yes it is:

This is one 6-foot tall bookcase from Target full of binders.  Next to it are six shoe boxes full of cards in top loaders.  Eventually, this is all that my collection will consist of.  This amount seems manageable to me.  The black binders are sets.  The old timey binders are mostly labeled by team, sport, or maker.  The bottom shelf was cut off, but that consists of newer binders and just a little empty space to add more.  And why six shoe boxes?  Because eight is too many and four is too few.  They will eventually reside on top of this bookcase.  What's on top of it now?  Don't ask.  And you gotta dig my collection of sports jerseys there.  Yes, I am eternally 10 years old.

I was looking for my Piazza boxes, which are two of my favorites.  One of them was given to me about 25 years ago by my Gramma for Christmas:

It was one of those terrible boxes was full of junk wax stuff and somehow it never got thrown out.  Now, I still have this awful, cheesy, beat-to-hell box...but it reminds me of my grandmother every time I open it.  I wouldn't get rid of it for the world.

As you can see, I keep some very random things in there.  My beloved Rookie All Stars, some smaller sets (some of which are even finished) that may or may not find a binder, and my Mike Piazza game used cards...yes, I have a boatload of them.  No, I am not looking to get rid of any them.  Yet.

The real problem with my organization is...I keep finding more stuff.  Stuff I didn't know I had.  Stuff I thought I already dealt with.


So this box was on top, easy enough to spot.  And I can always pick out my three-row monster box full of Piazza cards, since it is the only three row monster box I own.  But what were these boxes under them?  I took them all down. 

What mysteries await me?  First of all, that red box is a 1989 Fleer Factory set.  No, really.  I love that box because it has Gary Carter on the front.  I might ditch the set and just keep the box.  It somehow made it to the back of this pile.

Let's look inside the Piazza box...

...wow, it is a mess, I have neglected my Piazza collection for a while. I have a whole cigar box full of cards to integrate into this box AND now these cards I just tossed inside.  Ugh.  Gonna be a long night of sorting.

But what of those other boxes?  You must understand, for a few years there I would go to a show, buy a bunch of cards - both dime box type and high end stuff - and it would just be thrown in a larger box waiting to be sorted.  Needless to say, these boxes built up a lot faster than my sorting could get rid of them.

And now I keep finding them!

This thing is full of new stuff, vintage, autographs, ten cent cards, ten dollar cards, hundred dollar cards. I thought I was done finding these...but nope, here's more.

And the 800-count boxes?

Even more unsorted stuff.  If you look, you can already see a 3x5 Darryl Strawberry card.  And team sets. And lord knows what else.

How much is this like archeology?  These boxes were on top of a dresser (see the upper right corner of the first picture), take a good look the layer of dust that was under those boxes:

Just call me the Indiana Jones of sports cards. *whip crack*

Lots of Mets.

       I love lots.  No, that is not an incomplete sentence, I love buying and selling lots of cards on eBay.  All sorts of people will tell you all kinds of strategies for getting a good price on the venerable auction site; ideas ranging from searching misspellings to sniping to days of the week, etc. etc.   I have bought and sold on there for over a decade and I find the best way to get bang for your buck is lots.  When I sell in lots, I always list everything that's involved, including names, card numbers, and serial numbers - not just one of these but all of them.  Sure, it can be time consuming, but such completist actions gets results.  And conversely, when I am looking for a card, I will always use the "search description" option to see if I can find it in a lot to get some other cards with it, either to add to my collection or turn around and resell.  I find this adds to the fun and since this is a hobby, that is the name of the game.

       I don't always have a specific target when I search, sometimes I just plug in a few words and "lot" and see what comes up.  "Mets lot" is one of my five most common searches on eBay and last week I found a rather vaguely worded listing, offering 50 cards including "serial numbers" and "refractors" with nothing listed and only one card pictured.  Normally, I would not take a chance on such a lot, but I was feeling frisky and the price was right.  Lucky for me, the lot was all refractors and serial numbered cards.  It is one of my favorite buys of recent memory.  Lets take a look:

Right away, there are some Topps gold parallels, I happen to love these cards.  Johan is always appreciated, I am still a little weary of Pelfrey.  Pagan is now gone, but he did have one good season on a bad team and, last but not least, Brandon Looper.  I like Brandon Looper strictly because in MVP 2005, he was listed as B. Looper - so that means the Mets closer was literally a Blooper!  How appropriate. *sigh* Moving on, there is some Heritage Chrome and those wacky Topps Co-Signers cards, with their labyrinthine system of colors and numbers.  Luckily, Jose Reyes is in the dark shadows of two of them and not featured.  My love affair with Jose Reyes is over and I am very broken-hearted about the whole thing.  It is always nice to see David Wright's smiling face, with any luck, we will see more of it on the field this year. 

Let's move on to the shiny, OOOOOOooooooooooo..... shiny...

Night Owl was right when he said the 2010 Chrome cards were the worst offenders of the curling, that Jason Bay bows something awful and it was packed tight with these other cards.  Oh, but those Blue and Orange refractors are purdy.  I can't tell which color works better.  That David Wright looks 100x better in person, with its orange popping right out at ya.  More stately and beautiful is the 2011 Johan Santana; that might be my favorite new Johan.  Heck, the blue even makes Armando Benitez look good.  There, once again, is a mega-shiny X-Fractor Jose Reyes...there was a time when I would have been thrilled to own that card.  Then there are some Bowman refractors, which are always hit or miss.  The shine on the black borders is hard to see in person, much less in the scans here.  And while I love the color purple normally, it does nothing for Mets cards.  I do like that those cards are numbered out of /777 - I like it when they mix it up from the usual /999 or /500 or what have you.

Here are some more Mets shiny.  Told you there were a lot of refractors...

Lots of painful memories in this scan, but being a Mets fan is knowing the meaning of the words "what might have been."  That Daniel Murphy X-Fractor is quite something in person; he is the only potential positive here.  The less said about the others, the better.

Even more shiny and some die-cut rookies:

Kurt Presley's claim to fame is being a cousin of The King; too bad Lisa Marie has a stronger arm.  That gold refractor David Wright is the rare card that looks better in the scan than it does in person.  The colors don't quite work in real life, but the scanner seemed to get the right angle on it.  Odd.  Oh, and Darryl Strawberry.  I have been in an abusive relationship with Straw since 1983.  I wish I could quit you, but a low numbered blue shiny Topps Tribute card is not going to help at all.  Deolis Guerra was one of the pieces of the Johan Santana trade, I think he parked my car last week in the city, I can't be 100% sure.  Then there are two more Orange vs. Blue examples.  These are both off colors to the Mets colors, but both work; yes, even with Victor Zambrano prominently involved.  Matt Den Dekker opened some eyes in Spring Training this year, and this is the first card of his I have.  The only thing I have to look forward to this year is some young bucks going out there and showing something, so I hope they keep some of these kids up.  If you're gonna fail, you might as well do it with rookies.  I remember we picked Steve Matz in 2009 and this is the first I have heard of him since.

Getting a little older with these, and a little more random:

Mike Piazza and Tom Glavine.  You cannot get further on my love list than those two.  I have never said a kind word about Tom Glavine and I never will.  OK, Carlos Beltran.  I avoided commenting on his cards now long enough.  I want to like Carlos Beltran.  Heck, I want to love him.  I have a boatload of his cards.  And yes, I know he had some good years for the team, but I am afraid in the long run, the best thing about Carlos Beltran for the Mets is he got us Zack Wheeler.  Sad.  The bottom row has a neat old Topps Gallery Players Private Issue card of Rey Ordonez.  I now look back on Rey Ordonez fondly, so I guess there is hope for Carlos Beltran.  I have that Dynasty card in a gold ultra-low numbered version, so having it in orange is nice too (the back has Keith Hernandez and Darryl Strawberry).  That last card proves the old Meatloaf lyric correct: two outta three aint bad.

This was a 50 card lot, so the last scan only had five cards:

The top row are three rookies that didn't pan out, two of them from Japan.  I love all of the Mets failed experiments in free agents from the far east, so these cards will find themselves in good company with Kazuo Matsui and Tsuyoshi Shinjo, et al.  The last two cards kind of belong together...Darryl Strawberry and Jose Reyes.  Probably the two best position players the Mets have ever developed.  Both of them left for greener pastures and fatter wallets.  One of them regrets it, I hope the other one lives to. *double sigh* To end this post on a more positive note, those Upper Deck Baseball Heroes cards sure look wonderful in blue. 

Complete Set Sunday - 1995 Topps Cyberstats.

       Today I wrap up what became parallel weekend here at Starting Nine with one of my favorite sets of all time.  First, let's jump into the WABAC machine...1995 was an odd time for baseball.  The 1994 strike was damn near armageddon for the sport.  Both sides got themselves in a Mexican standoff over the issue of a salary cap and neither side blinked; we lost the World Series because of it.  Spring of 1995 brought folly to the proceedings when the owners decided to bring in replacement players for spring training.  Once they realized how ridiculous that idea was, they blinked and the sides settled, but nothing was really settled.  Not to get into the boring details, but it is obvious that the only one's who lost the 1994 strike were the fans.  I know folks who still don't care about baseball because of the whole nasty affair and I really can't blame them.

       Topps released their flagship set of cards in 1995 in a rather muted manner.  It wasn't in every toy store and CVS and they say the presses were run at their lowest levels since the mid 60's, so the cards were a little hard to find.  I was in my junior year of college in 1995 and probably at an all time low in terms of excitement about baseball in general and card collecting specifically.  So, due to the combination of youthful shenanigans and ennui over baseball, I don't think I bought a single pack of 1995 cards in 1995.  And it is a shame, because the Topps put out a quality set:

The simple borders and non-offensive but stylish font make for some good looking cards. They used some nice pictures and the area for the photo is nice and big.  Most noticeably, for the first time, Topps used gold foil on the base set, not the parallel set.  Turn the cards over and you see the backs also had some flair to them:

You get two pictures, an action shot and a head shot cleverly stylized into a Diamond Vision scoreboard look.  There were also the usual stats and some good write ups.  It is a shame no one noticed at the time, but the 1995 Topps set was put together very well, I wish they put as much time and creative effort into the contemporary base sets.

So, with gold foil on the front of the base cards, what on earth was Topps to do for a parallel?  I think the world would have continued turning without a parallel set (the base set did just fine without one inserted from 1996-2000), but Topps did something very different and kinda ballsy.  Now, because the mid 90's cards are not as deeply discussed in blog circles as current or vintage stuff, I have not seen many opinions about this parallel set...but I will throw out the notion that what Topps did was one of their most ingenious and daring efforts.

I present the 1995 Topps Cyberstats:

First, let's cover the aesthetics, the shimmering, refractor-like glow these cards have make them very attractive.  Sadly, I don't think my scanner captures the effect perfectly, but believe me, the shiny foil fronts alone would make this a worthy parallel set.  The kicker is the backs:

This is where this set differentiates its self from any set, before or after.  Topps decided to run a computer simulation to complete the unfinished 1994 baseball season and the put the results of that on the backs of these cards...

That's right, this is a parallel set from a parallel universe.


Like I said, I was too busy ignoring baseball and being a capricious youth to notice this set early in the year.  But the 1995 baseball season in Boston (where I was living) was pretty exciting.  The Sox surprisingly won the division and, little by little, they sucked me back into baseball fandom.  It was this team that made the Red Sox my baseball mistress (I am married to the Mets, after all).

Oh, back to the cards, lets look at a few more fronts and then get back to those backs.




Diving into some of these stats...according to Topps, Ken Griffey Jr. would have a monster year: .330 average 55 HR 133 RBI, which seems pretty accurate, given how well he was doing up until then and he would pretty much have two or three years just like that in the next few years.  I have to disagree with the Jeff Bagwell numbers, though.  The players went out on strike on August 12, and Bagwell was hit in the wrist with a pitch on August 10, breaking it.  I am pretty sure he would not have returned until very late in the season, if at all, so his numbers would have stayed right where they were (Bagwell won the 1994 NL MVP unanimously with a .368 average 39 HR and 116 RBI and an incredible .750 slugging - and no, I didn't have to look those numbers up...I am a big Bagwell fan). 


This is the last page of the set.  You can check out the stats for Darryl Strawberry on the original base card (above) and here in the Cyberstats world.  Darryl Strawberry was, as usual, coming back from injury and a drug suspension.  Look at that very Pedro-esque year they had for Pedro.  You might have thought it kind of a long shot then, but Pedro went on to put up those kind of numbers - and a heck of a lot better - over the next 10+ years.  Pedro Martinez makes me as happy as Darryl Strawberry makes me sad.

The set itself covers 396 of the 660 cards in the set, so most major players are covered and a lot of the rookies too.  If you have been paying attention to my odd predilections, I love that this set is 396 cards, because it fits perfectly into 44 pages, but that is certainly not why I kept this set.  When I discovered this set late in the 1995 year, I didn't do much about it, but in 1996, when my card collecting habit regained some steam, I bought as much of the 1995 cards as I could to catch up.  I built most of this set myself from those packs and finished it off at a show in 1996.  This set grew on me exponentially, both because of the spectra light fronts and the weird, bizarro-world stat backs.  I found it such an audacious choice for a parallel set and I poured over the alternative universe Topps created.  I wish they had advertised it more back then; I wish Topps would make such bold choices today in their set making.  I wish I knew more people as obsessed with this set as I am.  The set is in the front of the first book on my set shelf and it will probably always keep that status.

Post Script.  The set was punctuated with an insert set that was only available in the very hard to find 1995 factory set.  The set celebrates the pretend achievements of their alternative 1994.  I only have three of those cards seven cards, but I have the shiny foil Ken Griffey Jr. promo card, which is also pretty rare - and features a much better photo than the base card.

I will hopefully complete this page someday.  I have added the cards I need to my wantlist...if you think you can help, drop me a line.

O Canada.

       I have a confession to make, well, I don't know if it is a confession per se, but it is something that is hard to admit nonetheless.  I have never been out of the country.  I suppose on one level, that makes me a very patriotic American, but it means I have never seen the pyramids, the Eiffel Tower, the Great Wall of China.  Heck, it means I have never even been to Canada.  Well, I once took a boat tour of the Thousand Islands and we sailed into Canadian waters, but I have never set foot in Canada.  Semantics aside, I find this odd.  I have been on this planet for nearly 37 years and I have been confined to one little geographic area; granted I have been to 41 different states, but never beyond the United State's borders.

     Anyway, as usual, I am rambling and not getting to the point, which is, I dig Canada.  They seem pretty laid back as a people and have wacky accents.  They have a lot of wide open space and universal health care.  My cousin and my good friend both married smokin' hot women from Vancouver.  I always root for the Canadian team in the playoffs if the Devils don't make it or get eliminated. And I, of course, like O-Pee-Chee cards.  Ever since I discovered their existence in my youth, I have been fascinated with them.  If you think about it, they are kind of the first parallel cards.

Unlike Topps, I have not made a page of each year of OPC cards (nor do I plan to) but I did decide a while ago to get each year where they paralleled the Topps set represented with a single card and make a few pages out of that.

The first year of OPC cards was 1965, and the cards look just like their Topps counterparts.  Well, the fronts do...the fun part of these O-Pee-Chee cards are the backs:

OOOOooooo....now we're talkin'  The '65, '66, and '67s look disturbingly just like Topps except for the magic indicator "Printed in Canada" - this and the slightly lower quality cardboard are the only way to tell the difference between Topps and OPC of the time.  Then things start to change.  The 1968's have a much different color to the backs than the Topps cards; the '69s even more so, they are almost red vs. bubble gum pink for the Topps.  Then the wackiness of Canadian laws step in to change these cards forever.  The one thing that keeps Canada from being boring is their (more specifically Quebec's) obsession over the French language.  In 1969, they passed the Official Languages Act, which not only made French the co-official language of Canada, it also made all sorts of rules of where and when French must be used.  This law obligated Topps to print the backs of the cards in both English and French.  It made the cards quirky and cool.  The 1970 set is the first to have this variation.  Then the 1971 set happened.  They might be the most different of the "parallels" of the OPC to the Topps set.  Instead of pea green, the backs are bright yellow and the floating head is centered instead of to the left.  I love the 1971 OPC set...it is the same, but very different.  Just as suddenly, order was restored.  The 1972 and 1973 sets are virtually identical to the Topps except for the French and the lighter, whiter cardboard used.

Starting in 1971, the OPC set started to do something else quite awesome, they started to update player movement on the front of the cards.  Since they were printed later than the Topps base set, they could do this.  This also adds another whole layer of quirkiness to the OPC cards.  You can see here, the 1978 Messersmith shows his movement to the Yankees, the 1979 Carew shows his Trade to the Angels, the 1980 Lockwood shows he is "Now with the Red Sox", and the 1981 Simmons shows he is "Now with Brewers."  The front of the cards with a variation from this era are a marvelous mishmash of logos and colors.  O-Pee-Chee variations make me very very happy.

Except for the 1974 cards, the colors of the backs are virtually identical to the Topps sets.  I also love the fact that they have to translate the captions to the cartoons.  This makes for some teeny tiny print.  This scan also shows another thing the OPC cards are notorious for - the rough cut.  Look at the side of the 1980 Lockwood, or the whole thing of the 1978 Messersmith and you can see what I am talking about.  I always wondered if this was because they always used the same crappy machine to cut the cards, or if they only sharpened the blades once a year, and the later cards had the rough cut.  These are the kinds of things that keep me up at night.

If you look at the backs of the other cards, or at the front of the 1979 or 1982, you will see a big O logo for the O-Pee-Chee cards that sort of matched the style of the Topps logo of the time.  When Topps changed their logo in the early 80's, OPC seemed to not have one to go on the cards, so the 1983 and 1984 have just a simple font print out of "O-Pee-Chee." Then in 1985, they came up with a nifty font logo that I have always been fond of.  It has been on OPC cards pretty much ever since. 

The high water mark of OPC cards was the 1988 set.  It was really the last effort on their part to put out a quality set.  It had some interesting changes, a few different cards from the Topps set, etc.  But starting in 1989, they were just going through the motions, using pretty much the same exact set up as the Topps set and they didn't even bother to put the OPC logo on the 1990 and 1991 sets.  The 1992 was a nice way to go out, though.  They had their own logo back, and a bunch of variations to mix things up (including a five card tribute to my boy, Gary Carter).  Starting that year, O-Pee-Chee started doing a separate premium type set and never did a parallel Topps set again.

O-Pee-Chee did their parallel sets for 28 years, but I fudged and only have 27 shown - the ugly 1990 set misses the cut due to its nearly identical look to the Topps set and lack of an OPC logo.  I don't have time to point out all the little differences in these sets, but one crazy man does.  If you are interested to know all the variations to O-Pee-Chee cards, check out the great Oh My O-Pee-Chee (oh mon o-pee-chee!) blog, an insane side blog by the man behind garvey cey russell lopes.  If you are into such minutiae, I recommend that blog highly. 

Parallels.

       I'm not entirely sure when the card companies lost their mind.  It might have been in the late 80's, when their printing presses got more work than Bill Cosby.  It was abundantly clear, however, that by the early 90's, they had gone insane and it was an absolutely collective disease.  That disease had a very simple yet haunting name: parallels.  And the road to that illness was paved with gold...gold foil to be specific.  In 1992, Topps did two things to their base set, one of them brilliant and one of them practically the downfall of all cardom.  The first was they printed their flagship set on bright white cardboard, an excellent move.  The second was they made parallel inserts of the entire base set with gold foil on them and randomly inserted them into packs.

They also had a contest that you could enter to win more gold foiled parallels.  Trouble was, the contest was easy to win because of a printing flaw in the contest cards so Topps had to print more gold cards to meet demand.  This made a parallel set to their parallel set, and, oh, it was a winner:


Then to perpetuate the madness, Topps took things one step further in 1993 and started to insert the gold foil parallels one per pack:

I never caught parallel fever bad enough to try and build an entire set, but for some reason, I have the first and second series of 1993 represented with pages, maybe it was because two different series were new at the time, I have no idea:

1994 brought more of the same from Topps and their flagship brand:

They added the concept of Black Gold at this point, which I do not have a page of and they weren't parallels but inserts, so let's just look at some more 1994 Gold cards since I once again have a series one page and series two page:

Exhausting?  We haven't even started...

Upper Deck, feeling left out, looked at Topps' madness and said "me too!" Their 1993 was almost perfect in every way, including the fact that it did not have parallels.  Then in 1994 Upper Deck came up with their Electric Diamond parallels.  They weren't gold, they were electric, whatever that is supposed to mean:

That page is ugly in its attempt to be all inclusive.  Looking at the aesthetics of that page, I should be ashamed of myself.  Upper Deck repeated the Electric Diamond idea in 1995, but the difference was so slight, I have never bothered with a page of them.

One place Upper Deck did get all crazy with the rare metals was with their Collector's Choice set.  Starting in 1994, they started with Silver and Gold signature parallels:
The Gold is much more rare than the silver, which I suppose is fitting:

Collector's Choice set had special editions and all sorts of nonsense, keeping it all straight makes my head hurt:




Donruss would eventually take the notion of the parallel farther than anyone, but they started out pretty nice.  The 1992 Leaf base set had silver borders, but the parallels were black with gold foil and they look sharp:

The 1994 Donruss base set had a rainbow parallel, which takes shiny to a whole new level:

By the late 90's, the Donruss sets were a horrifying menagerie of parallels, numbered parallels, proofs, artist proofs, die cuts, and the like:




And don't get me started with what they did to the Leaf set.  A person could go mad just trying to look up one parallel card from the 1998 Leaf set alone.  I have none of those cards represented just to avoid the temptation.

Fleer kept up with the Joneses with their Tiffany parallels:

Their '96 & '97 sets were already a little different in that the base cards were matte finished and the inserts were shiny.  In the end, though, their heart just wasn't in it...

But Fleer Ultra had Gold Medallion...and boy, is there gold in them thar cards.  Gold medallion over the years varied in it's presentation from full gold:


To hard to tell it's a parallel:

To die cut:

To die cut and golden:

Still with me?  Are you paying attention?  There will be a written quiz...

Topps eventually branched out from the base set and took parallelitis to its premium set Stadium Club.  In 1993, the shiny "1st day issue" block first appeared:

They continued in 1994:

Plus, 1994 also brought some golden rainbow shiny of their own:

1995's Stadium Club parallels combined the then-already worn out phrase "Virtual Reality" and the idea of continuing the 1994 baseball season from where it ended on August 12:

The cards in question featured stats on the back as run through a computer simulation.  The 1995 Topps set also had a parallel that hinged on this concept, but you will have to come back on Sunday to see all about that one.


Post script. I just didn't have the energy to do all of Score and Pinnacle and Pacific and go into the late 90's and the numbered parallels of the 2000's....heck, it looks like this will have to become an ongoing series.  But believe me, Score was also on the gold bandwagon:

As I have shown with this post, parallels can be quite frustrating, but sometimes, they can almost induce seizure...take these 1997 Score Artist Proofs:

Wow.  Just, wow.