Mail Call: COMC Black Friday.

       Today is the infamous "Black Monday" in NFL coaching circles - the day when poor head coaches find out their (usually poor) fate.  Watching ESPN this morning is like watching a funeral procession, one after another crappy coach after crappy coach is thrown on the fire.  It is schadenfreude at its finest especially when your teams aren't involved.  What better day to check out all my Black Friday booty from COMC (how's that for a segue?) Every year they run a special for free shipping - plus most sellers have kickass sales - so it is the best day of the year to load up on cards.  I nabbed some stuff I have had my eye on for most of the year and broke down and bought a few things I had been aching to have but wanted at my price.

First we'll start with some die cut numbered 2004 eX rookies:

To be honest, I only wanted a page of the base cards and had been striking out in trades or at shows finding any.  As I perused my wantlists, this was the first incomplete page that stood out for some reason.  This set just screams "millennium design" with all its metallic highlights and swoops and blocky modern fonts.  When I searched the site, I saw that these die cut rookies were more readily available (and cheaper) than the base cards.  So I switched gears and nabbed nine of these instead and made this nifty page out of them.  

I also loaded up on some of this year's Mets cards I had not yet added:

In a minor upset, I got many more Zack Wheeler cards than anything else.  That orange refractor is just spectacular, as most Mets cards in orange refractor form are.  That overly ornate die cut Matt Harvey was a must-add as it is so over the top and silly looking, it belongs in 1996.  I also think you could use those cards as shurikens.  I also nabbed a low number shiny 2004 eX rookie of Mets failed prospect Aarom Baldiris.  He deserved to washout just for the silly spelling of his name.  I might own more of his useless cards than any other Mets prospect that never got to the majors (he was big in Japan, though).

I also got some single cards to complete some pages:

I am trying to put together a page of all the Topps Finest and that Livan Hernandez finished off the 2004 page (check my want lists to see if you can help).  I also found that Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds cards are pretty cheap - gee, I wonder why? - and grabbed a couple of those to complete a couple of vague pages.  That Gary Sheffield finishes his page in my retired book; I wanted to get a card for each team he played for and since he only played for eight different teams, I decided on a minor league card to round it out.  The bottom row shows piles of cards I needed to finish two pages I really really wanted to get done.  I suppose it is my love of shiny, but I have wanted to do a page of those 2005 UD Reflections Legends cards for a while.  The other cards were to complete a page of 2001 UD Decade inserts.  I would have done a page for each of the different inserts, but for some odd reason most of the inserts in that set are only 6 total cards and that just doesn't jibe with the Starting Nine theme.  The patchwork page practically works better as a dayglow memorial to 1970's excess and now has a place of honor in my faux vintage book. 

One more card on that last scan deserves to be seen in its rightful place:

I am kind of a sucker for all of the Upper Deck Heroes sets and subsets, so when I saw a couple of years ago that Martin Brodeur had one, I had to have it.  Getting the first 8 was easy enough, but Upper Deck being Upper Deck, the ninth card, the fancy painting checklist card, was severely short printed.  The thing cost $20 or more on ebay if you could find one.  I love #30, don't get me wrong, but this nonsense seemed a bit extreme.  So there sat a hole in the very front page of my hockey binder for a long long time.  I just couldn't/wouldn't give in to short printed extortion.  But as often happens during these kinds of shopping sprees, you get on a roll.  I plugged that card into the search and came back with a few hits, one of them for $8.20 - a 50% sale that would only last Black Friday weekend.  So I sighed, swallowed my pride and bit; it is by far the most expensive card I bought.  I'm sorry but I'm not sorry. 

I filled in holes old and new in my Topps All Star Rookie needs:

I grabbed those two 1964 and the 1963 cards on the super cheap and finally added the 2012 Brett Lawrie which had somehow eluded me.  My modern needs have now been whittled down to (mostly) parallels and inserts.  I have plenty of vintage ones yet to go, though.  Also in this scan are a couple more faux vintage pages finishing cards.  The Eck and Bench cards are from the Shoebox set back at the height of retro reprint mania.  The 2004 retired set page leaves only the 2005 Topps retired page left to be completed. 

A few more odds and ends and some non-baseball cards:

That Bob Gibson finishes off one of the first pages of faux-vintage cards I had made but it had a Cal Ripken card in it, who at the time was technically a current player.  If you are going to have rules about your pages, you have to be a stickler and I just don't like to mix current and retro players (unless I feel like it, of course).  Those top two football cards are from an obscure Collector's Edge set that I had to have a page of just because of its 90's see-thru acetate goodness. The Gene Sykes completes one of my last 1960's football pages (hopefully that post will happen soon) and that Wayne Babych is an OPC hockey card that finishes off that vintage page.  I think those old school hockey cards work so much better in poorly cut Canadian style, don't you?  Finally, the last four cards all have something in common and 64 silver dollars* to the person who figures it out.

*may not be actual silver or dollars

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.

Cooperstown.

       By my early teens, my mother was out of ideas.  She raised me, my older brother, and my younger sister by herself - my father put the absent in absentee father by disappearing before my eighth birthday, never to return.  To her credit, she could have given up at any time and never did.  I was always precocious and hard to handle, but when the double whammy of my brother leaving the house to join the army and puberty hit, I became borderline incorrigible. My mother grew up with four sisters and didn't exactly know what to do with a boy. It was my mother who took me to baseball games as a child and now at age 13, when she was trying anything to reach out to me, she decided to take me to Cooperstown.  This was a grand idea as it was pretty close by (we live in northern New Jersey close to New York...how close?..like 400-yards-from-the-border close) and it combined my two favorite nerdy things: baseball and museums.  The first trip went so well, it became a yearly tradition.  We went four or five times in my teens and they are some of my most cherished late-childhood memories.  My last trip took place somewhere around my 17th birthday.  Through the years, I had always wanted to return.  My brother and I talked about it and talked about it but never went.  For four years, I dated a woman from Syracuse with family in Watertown, Rochester, and Buffalo, so I was constantly in upstate New York, yet somehow I never got around to going with her either. 

       So last month, when I was suffering from a nasty case of cabin fever, I got the brilliant idea of driving up to Cooperstown.  I find spontaneity the best, so when this idea came on that Saturday morning, I got in the car and just went.  After a long winding two hour drive, I was there.

That scan shows my ticket and brochure.  The bottom ticket there is from one of my childhood trips in 1992, but it has the "junior" discount, so I think that is my sister's ticket and not mine.  It has been in my Hall of Fame binder for 20 years and I just noticed that.  Either that, or my mother somehow convinced the guy back then that her gigantic 16 year old son was a "junior".

I also took some great pictures in the museum with my cell phone.  Do you think I have any idea how to get pictures off of my phone and onto my computer?  Nope.  I tried for two days with no success, so you will just have to imagine how much fun I had in the museum. Besides, this is a card blog, not a repository for my pseudo-vacation photos.

OK, trips like this require a pocket check, so let's do it:

Now, aside from the museum, the strip of Main Street in Cooperstown has about a dozen sports memorabilia and card stores.  It is basically the baseball geek mecca.  I had left without my wantlists or anything, so I was flying blind, but I picked up some good stuff.  The receipt there is from one of the shops.  The Cooperstown Bat brochure is for a gift I want to buy for my uncle.  I even found two dollars stuck in the CB Brochure there - score!  I also had to buy a hat in the museum gift shop since I left the house without one and I chose the one day of the year it actually snowed this winter to drive north.

So what cards did I score?  Aside from the usual bevy of Mets (which will show up in another post) and, oddly, some Saints (which already got a shout out in a recent post) I filled in some holes in some pages and player collections and I will, appropriately, show the Hall of Famers I got here.

Working on a budget, as usual, I picked up some nicely worn and loved vintage cards.  That 1971 Bench set me back a whole quarter - but I knew my Bench collection was heavy on faux-vintage, so I had to have it.
 
From the same pile came they 1971 Kaline, which totally matches that 1966 in dinged cornerness.

Breaking with the pattern here, I did not buy that 1971, but that handsome 1974. And who rocked better sideburns, year after year, than Stretch?  I used to own the "Wash. Nat. League" error version; it was a cornerstone of my long neglected error and variation collection.  I still need one more vintage McCovey to finish this page - that Topps Archives card belongs with my Rookie All Stars.  You can see how organization is not my strong suit...moving on.

I found a bunch of these Ripken '94 Score cards I didn't know existed in one shop.  I grabbed nine of them and made this page, I decided to break up the longways and uprightways cards for a little variety.

When Topps went through their reprint-a-famous-player's-cards-every-year phase, Nolan Ryan was one of those players (also see Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle).  I had long known I only had eight of those cards.  Much like the McCovey, I put X in the center square and picked up that 1975 reprint for this page.
 
I have long been obsessed with Babe Ruth's pitching career.  And if there is one player that has more faux vintage cards than the Babe, I don't know who it is.  Yet somehow, I did not have the Babe in a pitching pose on a card...until now.  I have no idea why I didn't put it in the middle, where it belongs.

Last but not least, I had recently reorganized a few players pages and I recalled that Fergie could have a nifty stripe of the three teams he is best known for if I somehow scored a third Rangers card.  When I saw that 1976 Topps with the palm trees, how could I resist even if I didn't "need" it.  Turns out, it makes this page look pretty awesome.