Drunk Post: Who Wants It?

      As promised in my last post, I have been drinking. A lot. So it's time for a drunk post!!!  And I am going to ask a question I haven't asked in a while...who wants it? 

No, not my tacos, they are already in my belly...

...and they we're fucking delicious.  No. I am giving away some really great cards here.  Like, how about a 1952 Mickey Mantle!

Okay, not really.  This is actually a hilarious card.  This is a bootleg copy of the 1983 Topps reprint of the 1952 Topps set.  I bought two of these thinking they were the actual 1983 versions, which were 100% issued by Topps and were pretty much the first faux-vintage they ever made.  But on first glance of the back, I knew things were a tad wonky.  The front looks pretty good but the back looks like it was done on a Canon copier in 1983.  It is even clipped on the bottom by the bit that reads "1952 Reprint Series" One of these is in my Mantle pages as a great example of a copy of a copy of a copy (think the Michael Keaton movie Multiplicity).  But if you appreciate such horrors of ineptitude, all you have to do is say you want it.  I don't run contests or ask you to follow me or wax my car or anything. But you might want to wait a moment because I am also giving away...

A 1979-80 Topps Wayne Gretzky rookie card!

You miss 100% of the shots you don't make and this card missed 100%

In the toploader in low light after your third or fourth margarita, this card actually looks kinda good.  The colors of the front are on target and then you turn it over and quickly notice that the texture of the back is all wrong because this was printed on the photographic paperboard they used to include with digital cameras back in 1998.  Unauthorized reprint is a really nifty term for counterfeit but this card has all the presentation of a $100 bill with Benny Hill on it instead of Ben Franklin.  But it is still worth owning if you aren't going to try and fool your blind neighbor into buying it along with your dead parrot.  It can be yours for the asking price of nothing because it is worth less than nothing - but is still a cool copy of one of the cornerstone cards of any hockey collection.  So who wants it?  Just drop a comment or an email or a smoke signal and which card you want (you can only have one) and I will send you a fantastic (copy of a copy of a copy of a) 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle or a (painfully fake) 1979-80 Topps Wayne Gretzky rookie.  Like any good bar, first come, first served.  Now, who dares me to eat the worm!?!?

You Left Me Standing Alone.

       I do not own a page of Blue Moon Odom cards.  If fact, I looked in a few places and I am not sure if I own any Blue Moon Odom cards.  Which is a shame, because I like the name Blue Moon Odom and it would be topical, tonight being a blue moon and all.  I also have been drinking.  DRUNK POST!!! WOOHOO!!!!   Like I said, I couldn't find any Blue Moon Odom cards, but if I had been looking for Sam Octoberfest, American Pickers reruns, and homemade chili...mission accomplished!

       One page I did find, however, is very amusing to drunk Max:

At the end of most of my player books, you will find a few 4 and 8 card pages with the odd sized oddball cards.  This one is especially beyond the normal amount of odd oddball though.  Before I get into it, let's look at the back too:

We're gonna have to break these down one at a time, starting in the upper left.

1) That is a sticker that came with the Mr. T In Your Pocket gag gift that I bought my ex-girlfriend about 8 or 9 years ago.  It was one of those little soundboard thingies that spouts catchphrases when you hit one of the buttons.  My ex, being easily amused (she dated me for 4 years, after all) used to call me and just press one of the buttons over and over again.  Along with the obligatory "I pity the fool!" it also said things like "First name Mister, middle name period, last name T!"  and my personal favorite "Quit your jibber-jabber!"  I hadn't thought of it in a very long time, but seeing that sticker made me miss answering the phone and hearing "Q-Q-Q-Q-Q-Q-Quit your jibber-jabber!!!"  She would hit the button rhythmically for emphasis.  I have no idea why it is in here but it did kindle nice memories.  OK, moving on...

2) A 1984 Carl Yastrzemski Donruss Champions card.  I think that is just runoff from the legitimate cards in the book.  Poor Yaz, always stuck near the end of the list.  Pity us poor 'M' people; sometimes folks will throw the people at the end of the alphabet a bone and start at Z and work backwards.  Either way, us M's are right in the damn middle.  Did I mention I can spell Yastrzemski without looking?  Even drunk?  Now that is a bar bet I should go clean up with....

3) Billy Joel "The Stranger" press pass.  They gave these out at the Last Play at Shea concert, which I was lucky to attend because my buddy's girlfriend had to work:

buddy: "Hey! You got 275 buck to waste?"
me: "Sure!"
buddy: "OK, you're going with me to the Billy Joel concert tonight" 
(I may have been drunk then too...)

Anyway, I am not a huge Billy Joel guy.  I like him fine, don't get me wrong, but I like my music a little more hardcore and rock and roll and non-mainstream and whatnot (hipster! snob! *flips bird*).  But growing up in the 80's with a more mellow music liking brother, I am overly familiar with Mr. Joel's canon (and I am sure he would appreciate me blogging about him while I was drunk).  I went to the show, which was bathed in historic rhetoric - last rock show at Shea Stadium, blahblahblah.  Considering we had awesome seats and like half a dozen other famous classic rockers showed up (Roger Daltrey, Steven Tyler, Paul McCartney, etc.) it was about 100x cooler than I imagined it would be.  So, they gave us this thing, which I am not sure we got because we had good seats, or if everyone got them, or like the first 10,000 got it or what.  But I remember being offered $50 for mine after the show.  And I also recall them going for similar money on ebay afterwards. But I am a sentimental fool - and because I had such an unexpectedly good time - I kept the thing for prosperity.  Somehow, it wound up here.

4) Mickey Mantle: His Final Inning.  At first glance, one would think this is a card, but it isn't.  It is one of those bible tracts people hand out on the street by subway stops and whatnot.  I am 99% sure I got this in Boston in the late 90's or early aughts.  Full disclosure: I used to collect these things.  As a lapsed Catholic and confirmed atheist, I found the real fire and brimstone tracts funnier than most prime time sitcoms.  They usually had names like "Heaven or Hell - Which Will You Choose?" or "Do You Want to Burn for All Eternity?" with corresponding graphics and over the top preaching backing up those notions.  Hilarious.  Alas, that collection was only a passing fad and I am pretty certain I chucked the whole pile in the trash after moving them one too many times.  I should have put them in top loaders or pages like this to preserve them.  Anyway, this one is a little less old time religion and more self help.  It covers the Mick's drinking and how he recovered and redeemed himself before he died.  It is actually kind of rational about the whole thing.  Definitely a switch from most of the little pamphlets I was handed by the Park Street Station.  I can only assume I kept this thing due to its baseball subject matter.  (I just checked ebay - I could get a whole dollar for one of these.  Plus my memory for dates isn't always flawed: it says there they are from 1998).

So, all that from a few beers and a lack of Blue Moon Odom cards...Wow.  Admit it, you missed me.

Complete Set Sunday - Drunken Easter Diamond King edition.

       My family is large and unwieldy, like a stack of newspapers ready to topple at any minute but you keep throwing onto the pile anyway.  Don't get me wrong, I love my family, but we had 31 for Easter breakfast this morning.  Thirty.  One.  Luckily, we have a few traditions that make Easter a very tolerable family gathering.   One, we start drinking at 9:30 in the morning.  This is always a surefire way to make my family much easier to deal with.  Two, we have an egg fight before we eat.  No, we don't throw them at each other, but we hold them and smash their hard-boiledness at one another and the one that doesn't crack wins.  Alcohol and violence - a marvelous one-two punch to celebrate the resurrection of our lord.  So I drank until 3:30 this afternoon and I am still feeling it, but I haven't blogged in a couple days and I didn't do Complete Set Sunday last week - but, and not to toot my own horn, my post was pretty damn epic. 

       So lemme see if I got something small and easy to work with here.  Ahhhhh yes, I do.  I am a big fan of Donruss Diamond Kings.  They were always the best part of the usually kind of 'meh' Donruss set.  Donruss ended up the bastard child in the set hierarchy, either because of tradition (Topps), or brazen willingness to sue (Fleer), or innovation (Upper Deck), or even just colorful whimsy (Score or Pacific).  Donruss was just sort of there.  It was the set you bought if you didn't feel like the others or they weren't available and now it has been bought and divided so many times, it doesn't exist anymore.  But I always liked the Diamond Kings.

       I guess because I spent most of my childhood drawing baseball players, I respected Dick Perez because he turned that skill/hobby into a marketable commodity.  I mean, now with the power of hindsight, I can see he was not much of an artist, but getting a painted portrait in your pack instead of a photo was always kind of neat.  The Diamond Kings were, from 1982-1991, the first 26 cards of the Donruss set.  Then, in 1992, something odd happened; they weren't the first 26 cards.  What fuckery was this?  Well, it turns out with the advent of insert-mania, Donruss made the rather brand-wrecking choice of making the Diamond Kings an insert set instead of the cornerstone of the base set.

Now, I am not gonna lie, these full-bleed cards with their dash of foil are pretty damn handsome.  I would say of all the Diamond King sets, this one is the sharpest.  It has good player choice (except Scott Sanderson...remember when the Yankees sucked so bad that Scott Sanderson was their Diamond King?) and Perez reeled in the wacky backgrounds of the last few sets and keeps them simple and classy...but...

It was a stupid stupid choice to make the Diamond Kings an insert set!!! This choice made their already rather bland and poorly put together base set completely disposable.  Their go-to insert in 1991 was the Elite Dominators (cards I will cover another time) and Donruss got greedy and wanted another one and they never really recovered from this sea change.  They eventually made the other mistake of thinking "more is more" and became the company that really ramped up the different various releases without any personality or purpose.  They even made Diamond Kings their own Gallery-esque separate set with very mixed results.  I shed no tears for the demise of Donruss, but I do still like the Diamond Kings.

Wait a minute, this is Complete Set Sunday, and that is a hole!  Come on, this is a 27-card set (still, always appreciated by its divisibility by nine), where is that other card, dammit!  Well, I solved my own One-Card Challenge™ with a quick trip to COMC.com and picked up old #22 for my set for a cool 14 cents.  Fourteen cents!  ahhh, the joy of a completed page - and set for that matter.

Much better!  I put this set together from a lot I picked up at a local card shop years ago.  I augmented that lot with my own cards in my big-ass pile of Diamond Kings and finished it about an hour ago by adding the aforementioned Randy Johnson to its spot.  The other 26 cards have been sitting in one of my set binders for a while now and given my love of Diamond Kings, complete sets, shiny, and sets divisible by nine, this set is gonna be there for a long time.  That is, until I decide to put ALL my old school Diamond Kings in to a binder, but that is a long term collecting goal that is way way down on the list...that would be pretty damn cool, though, given that, with the checklist, all the DK sets until 1993 have 27 cards (then the Marlins and Rockies screwed up the whole system).  I also gave up on Diamond Kings in 1994 when they got so pug fugly, I couldn't stand them.  Wow, Jesus, I am rambling in my buzzed state, I have no finish.  Well, except for another slice of cake and some Aleve.

Drunk Post #1.

      It is St. Patrick's Day and *gasp!* I've been drinking.  Since it is an "amateur hour" night, I have wisely chosen to stay home and do my drinking in the comfort of my own abode.  I had a few friends over and they have fled the scene, so now I am blogging...BWI.  I wonder if my post will be any more or less coherent?

Problem is, I have nothing prepared, nothing scanned, and nothing on my mind - this should be my best post ever! - so lets see what's hiding in the folder marked "unused":

Atomic refractors! Shiny! Sexy! Alluring! Wait, no, just shiny.  OK, and a little sexy.  Why did I scan this page?  I dunno.  I obviously need to get three more of the 1997 atomics or this page will continue to be a train wreck.  Those 1998s are ten kinds of cool, though.  I need me more of those.


Presidents!  Vintage and neat, but certainly not sexy.  Well, maybe Taft, chicks dig the mustache - so how do you explain Cleveland?

I started this blog after Presidents Day, so lord only knows why I scanned this one.  Maybe it is a reject from the TWO FOUR SIX EIGHT post?  moving on...

Sideways inserts!

This page has some bitchin' cards but nothing even resembling a coherent theme; sounds a little like this post...

 Last and certainly least:
 
Donruss Americana! I may be the first person who has ever triumphantly and exclamatorily presented Donruss Americana, the most underwhelming pile of "meh" of all pop culture sets ever.

I must have bought only one pack of this stuff, because what an odd mix of human beings...we've got Cameron, Brad, Joanie, Greg, Swoozie, the chick from Miller's Crossing, and someone named Cordin Bleu.  I pray that is a stage name.  Either way, it's making me hungry.