Life of Pie.

      Things have gotten a little, um, weird, this week for most of us.  But really, is there anything going on that can't be solved with a hot cup of coffee and a beautiful slice of pie?  Alas, my love of Twin Peaks will have to wait for another time (my best friend got me this for Christmas and all that will show up here eventually).  I also was going to post my American Pie sets but I checked and saw that I did already.  That left me with the very obvious choice of Hall of Famer Pie Traynor.

Long ago I made a threat to put together a page of ol' Pie here and in the subsequent five years, look, I actually did.  Pie Traynor, despite his wonderful nickname, is one of those hall of famers that I don't know much about.  I know he was considered the best third baseman in history until Eddie Mathews and then Mike Schmidt and George Brett came along...and that's about it.  I couldn't even tell you his real name (Harold Joseph Traynor).  So a little bit of card back reading and SABR and wiki research has made a ten minute expert in the life and times of Pie. He was considered a wizard with the glove.  He only hit double digits in homers once and hit just 58 in his career.  He did, however, hit 164 triples and while that is a ton, it doesn't crack the top three in Pirates history - Honus Wagner, Paul Waner, and Roberto Clemente all have more.  In fact, those 164 would lead all but five teams in MLB history, including some very old ones (The Yankees and the Giants to name two - I also learned that Lou Gehrig leads the Yanks with 163, a number I wouldn't have come close to guess for him). He is the only player to steal home in an All-Star Game.  He was a player manager for a time and resigned as manager after the Homer in the Gloamin' (one of my favorite event nicknames in all of sport) ruined his confidence in himself and the team.  I also learned that he grew up in Somerville MA (a town I know well) and his nickname came from a grocer who called him Pie Face due to his...love of pie.  I am not sure what I was expecting from a nickname like that, but hey, that'll do. 

Happy Pi Day everyone!

Mail Call: Shiny!

       I am a sucker for free shipping.  Yes, I am the kind of buffoon who will buy extra stuff just to qualify for it.  Like when COMC.com has one of their free shipping promotions there is usually a minimum number involved, but this really isn't a problem for me since I am pretty active buying and selling on their site.  Well, this spring has thrown all sorts of curve balls and I just haven't been as card-centric as I normally am.  So when I noticed they were having a free shipping for 30+ cards promotion a couple weeks ago, I was forlorn to see that I only had 6 cards waiting in my shipping queue.  Do you think this deterred me?  Did you read the first two sentences of the post? 

I delved into my watch list but only saw high priced stuff for the most part.  I did, however, notice two very reasonably priced inserts from last year's Bowman set.  These inserts were not only Mets cards, they were shiny.  Very shiny.  I got swept up in the moment and decided it would be easiest to make a page of each of these inserts to qualify for my free shipping.  Hey, a bargain is a bargain and shiny is shiny.

The first page is of the 1989 Bowman is Back inserts.

The scan does these no justice.  They are glittery and atomic refractor-esque.  They are like the Diamond Anniversary parallels from a 2011.  I picked out 9 of the most interesting photos I could from the first page of the "lowest price" tab and voila!

The other page is from the Bowman Chrome Fire Die-Cut set. 

I cannot express how much I like the concept behind this set.  I like die cuts.  I like shiny.  I am a bit of a pyromaniac, at least I was in my youth when I almost burned my house down once by making a camp fire in the basement (gimme a break, I was like 8).  I had not seen these in real life and it took me holding one to realize that they weren't just shiny and die cut, but the design itself was the base design, only melted.  I am usually not one for prospect cards, but damn, I love this set.  They are amazing.  Once again, I picked 9 off the first page and now I am sorry I didn't build the whole set.

Keeping with the theme, I nabbed some Mets from those two sets, which were the cards I had watched in the first place.  They were the Noah Syndergaard and Michael Conforto to be specific.  I also got the David Wright and Gary Carter BiB and Travis d'Arnaud of both sets. 

The bottom cards here are three of the six I had in my original queue. They are from an early 80's oddball Cramer set of vintage players in sepia tones.  I chose players I don't have a lot of since the six I had were of the Hank Aaron/Willie Mays very-well represented type.  Brief aside: I have an obsession with pie along the lines of Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks so it stuns me that I don't have a whole Pie Traynor page or player collection.  That is a situation I might have to rectify. 

Here are the other orphans from the original six. 

Nothing very surprising here.  A New Orleans Saint.  A Mike Piazza.  Another Michael Conforto card - and with the Mets quite literally scoring only 1 run a game for the last 2-3 weeks, I am bewildered as to why they haven't called him up, he's only hitting like .330.  So I got my free shipping and it only cost me like ten bucks.  My little buying binge left me with .42 cents credit left and while that is a very good number, I just couldn't leave that in there even though I had hit my magic number of 30.  So one last check of my watch list showed me that the most inexpensive card I had was that Topps 60 Keith Hernandez.  Price: 41 cents.  I love it when a plan comes together.

Easy as Pi.

If you know the words, sing along...

3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974
94459230781640628620899862803482534211706798214808651328230

Not enough for you?

You can always go look at my breakdown of the classic Topps American Pie sets.  As for me, I am going to have a nice big slice of cherry pie for breakfast.