Old and New Business on a Pretty Good Good Friday.

   First things first, you will have noticed that the header has changed, I figured the blog could use a spruce and little more color plus the other photo was not a good example of social distancing.  While I am not sure if the new one has the guys 6 feet apart, it is still a better graphic for this day and age. 

A couple packages have come to Starting Nine central recently, one was from a new reader eager to share; Tom from The Angels in Order looked at one of my my wantlists and satisfied some missing base Mets, especially from series 2 of 2018 Topps, from which I purchased exactly zero packs:

One of the last posts I did before I disappeared was a harsh yet fair critique of the 2018 Topps design (and what they could have done about it).  I stand by my thoughts 1000% though I must say, those vertical photos of d'Arnaud and Thor looks great regardless of their borderless nature.  I never did get to say what I thought of the 2019 look, but I liked it more than most; 1982 Topps is one of the first sets I remember and it definitely invokes that look.  Anyway, I have a bunch of Angels stuff to go out to reciprocate these so thanks Tom!

The other came from Nate of The Bucs Stop Here, who read about my glut of 2020 Heritage and wanted to trade.  I sent him the Alvarez/Aquino rookie I had and he sent me some Mets that will be far more appreciated around here:

It may not look it, but that Granderson is shiny foil and rookie cup cards are always appreciated especially when needed. My completed trades column to the right has been updated.  Thanks Nate!   Also in the right column, you will see the "followers" and "blog roll" - if you aren't following me, you may as well click on the button now and rectify that.  Also, if you want to be on the blog roll, just let me know and we'll do the old quid pro quo (and not even get in trouble for it).  I usually don't worry about such things much, but with the blog being dormant for so long, I figure I'd like to see more readers and know who they are, especially if they're new.  Hell, I have now posted more in the last month or so than in any of the last four years.  I am also pleased to see that one of the few bright spots of this current lockdown situation we all find ourselves in is that a few blogs that had gone down have started up again.  Let's hear it for the blogosphere!!!

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A few belated thanks need to also be delivered to some altruistic displays of cardboard giving.  Last November, Jeff from 2 by 3 Heroes sent a random email to me verifying my address.  This email had no other information whatsoever but I told him I hadn't budged, address-wise.  A few days later, a package arrived full of goodies:

I am pretty sure it was this long forgotten post that inspired his delivery, but full of Firefly cards it was.  He even gave it an international header card.  There was also a bunch of Mets cards in there too and it is rare that they are relegated to second tier in a scan, yet here we are.  Firefly is streaming on Hulu right now and we all have nothing but time on our hands, so I suggest highly that if you have never seen it to go watch it.  And hell, now is as good a time as any to watch it again if you have seen it.  (belated) Thanks Jeff!

While I was irregularly (then not) blogging, one person I kept trading with was venerable veteran Night Owl Cards.  We have probably sent 40-50 packages to each other in the last 10 years or so and because we know what each other collect so well, we just kept doing it regardless of online status.  At one point last year I scanned this batch:

Matt Harvey?  Sheesh, this is old.  Remember that guy?

These are some fabulous Mets cards and inserts, then there was this vein of oddities (from NO at least):

The note answered my questions when it said "I didn't suddenly become a Bo-Chro collector, the cards just kind of landed in my lap."  It is probably the strangeness of the rookies in there and the gloriously dismissive abbreviation that made me scan them for future use in the first place.  Well, thanks as always Night Owl, I already have plenty in my pile for your next package.  I even looked at your wantlists for a change.

And speaking of piles, lastly I need to clear up a few unresolved trades.  I keep the outgoing cards on my bookshelf close to my mailing stuff and right now there is a bunch of things I need to figure out.

A few, like those Orioles and Blue Jays, I just need to verify addresses before I send them out.  But I also have a rare Barry Larkin insert that I can't recall whom I was going to swap with.  I also have a bunch of blue parallels, do you collect blue parallels?  Let me know, I think those are for you.  I also have a couple of 1990 UD Marquis Grissom rookies that I know there is a blogger who wants to collect 1000 of them or something but I can't remember who it is.  Is it you? Do you know who it is and if he's done collecting his grand of Grissom?  Please leave a comment or drop me a line. 

So now it's back to the grand Spring Cleaning, in between playing with stuff I find of course...

Sorting things out.

       A few leftover notions from my 2018 Topps post from Sunday.

I spoke of the look of the new flagship set and while I don't hate it as much as I have 2017 or 2016 since Topps has gone to a borderless design, they have started to take on the vibe of late era Donruss base cards and this is not necessarily a good thing.  I think one thing that always made Topps special is that they had a specific feel and natural progression and the border is one of those things that now seems is lost. I feel this year's design, unlike the last 2 years, would look great with a border.  My awesome, utterly professional and in no way amateurish photoshop skills came up with this:

You can add a border and they look much more like classic Topps cards (think 1996 perhaps) and if you need to have things extend out a bit, you can see I took the ribbon to the edge of the card and continued the disintegrating name plate into the border as well as the team logo (where applicable).  I am sure somehow Topps thinks borderless cards are all "futuristic" but they have been around since 1990-91 and used on regular base cards since 1994 Donruss and Upper Deck.  I am not sure those are touchstones to be aspiring to. Flagship Topps always had a classic look and they seem to love to celebrate their history, so why have they turned their back on it the last few years in the name of "the future?"

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We all recognize what this is:

I have collated cards for as long as I can remember yet I have never given it much thought.  I don't know if it is like scoring a baseball game but I suspect a lot of people have quirks to the way they do it, as I have seen folks in card shops and at shows do it their own way.  If I have a few dozen cards, I just do it in my hand like shuffling a poker deck.  If I have a few hundred, I sort them as you see above, into blocks of numbers of 50, e.g. 1-49, 50-99, 100-149 etc.  Then I sort them further.  If there is a few thousand to do, I so the same thing, then break them down into the 10s as I do it and then hand sort.  It is a monotonous activity but I have always found something relaxing and a little zen about it.  When I was a kid, my mom referred to it as me "playing solitaire" (which I supposed when you are 10 has a whole different meaning than when you are 15, but I digress).  And this is just numerically.  Anyway, does anyone have any different way they do things?  Let me know since I am momentarily obsessed with whether there's a whole different system I have never been privy to.  Not to mention there is also the classic 8x4 grid of sorting things by team, another issue all together.  I always do the teams alphabetically but maybe you do them by league and/or division?  I must know!  

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And finally, a wonderful bit of card serendipity that I am sure we've all had or hoped to have at one time or another.  As I was searching for the new Topps on Friday, I was also meeting a friend for coffee at a Dunkin Donuts I don't normally go to.  I was a little early and there was a comic book shop next door, so I ducked inside there to kill the 10 minutes I had to wait.  Now, I am not comics guy but I can always enjoy a comic book shop just for the nerdy vibe, the toys, and there's always a chance they have some sports stuff stuck in among their wares.  They had a few long 5000 count boxes full of MTG and Pokemon cards and the like but then my eye caught the unmistakable dull gray cardboard color that can only be vintage Topps cards.  There was only a couple hundred of them, but what a vein of joy it was.  They weren't in sleeves or priced but going through them, there were some I just had to have...

How often does a coffee date turn into 1975 Topps?  More than that, was some of these...

I love the 1973-74 hockey design and there are a couple of wonderfully miscut ones as well.  So I only had a few minutes with these cards and I had no time to go through them all.  These are the few I nabbed while I was there initially.  When I went to check out, the n̶e̶r̶d̶ dude behind the counter said, "oh, anything in there without a sleeve is 10 cents"  I had lucked into a 10 cent vintage box in the middle of Wayne NJ on a Friday afternoon!  I had my coffee and caught up with my friend, and then you better believe I marched back into that shop and bought just about every one of those cards that even remotely interested me.

All because of my efficiency in finding the new Topps and over-promptness in meeting my friend, I now have a few hours of bliss ahead of me this week.  Oh, and I also have this:

If you need an explanation, I don't think we can be friends.

Ride The Waterslide.

       Seeing as I have little to no interest in who wins today's Big Game (aka Super Bowl - sue me!) it seems as good a time as any to break out the new Topps.  I stopped in two Target stores only to stare at bare shelves full of old, picked-through 2017 product and it was only serendipity that led me to cut across a parking lot to a Toys R Us to go looking for the new stuff.

There I found blasters and hanger boxes and seeing as it was Friday and I had some money burning the proverbial hole in my pocket, I bought one of each. 

I assume Topps has Mike Trout under lifetime contract since we get to look at his mug on the packs yet again and I am surprised Aaron Judge isn't here - maybe series 2.  One thing I am amazed at is the now incredible amount of odds and legalese that accompanies baseball cards.  It literally takes up the entire back of the hanger box:

Enough of the packaging, let's take a look at the cards. When this set was previewed last fall people immediately seized upon the 3D ribbon on the bottom of the graphic and referred to it as the Water Slide Set.  I think it is Night Owl that keeps track of "official" nicknames but this one was a no brainer.  If only it twisted in on itself a little, it could have been the Mobius Strip Set, which would be as good a name as the Psychedelic Gravestones IMO.  I'll have more on the design in a later post, though this is a great improvement over the last couple years.

As the name of my blog hints at, I tend to view sports cards nine at a time and this is the page I made from the 20(!) doubles I got in 172 cards.  Since I bought 2 different boxes I guess that isn't terrible collation but hardly optimal for the set builder (full disclosure, I am not building the set).  The real disappointment was that I only got 3(!) Mets cards out of all those cards.  All things considered, statistically, I should have gotten 5 or 6.  Luckily Amed Rosario was 2 of those cards.

These are some more cards that are staying in the collection: rookie cups and World Series cards, and of course a couple of my birthday boys, Garrett Richards and Yoan Moncada. Not to mention a couple of dudes that are tastefully named. The rest are for player collections or other such things.

This is just about all the cards that are staying in the collection this time around.  Not an inspirational haul but part of the joy of this time of year is the opening of the new flagship as a reminder that spring and the season are just around the corner.  Good thing to since it is cold as fuck this weekend and this Superb Owl has me rooting for the meteor strike.  In the name of completeness, let's look at the inserts that Topps inundates us with:

This is Year 18 of the gold parallels, they are now old enough to vote.  I am always fond of the shiny and that McCullers is a rainbow foil parallel; alas my scanner didn't quite do it justice.  Topps has a new contest that is convoluted as it is uninspired.  It involves scratching things and home runs hit on certain dates and in the end winning a trip to the 2019 Home Run Derby.  The fine print is what you're going to get is an all expense paid trip to Cleveland.  Wonderful.  Also seen here are the opposite ends of the insert spectrum, the Superstar Sensations which features players in glorious swooshes of purple and sparkles, and then MLB Award winners, a well-worn concept drably presented in what looks like a design that was rejected last year with all it's bad negative space and jutting angles.

On the top row we see the Salute cards again, in what looks like a rejected design for this year's flagship set; I had a hard time picking them out during my sort.  I am not sure if presenting 100 different cards in a bunch of different subsets reeks of overkill or laziness.  That is not high praise.  Speaking of lazy, Topps also has a whole insert set here titled Opening Day.  Given the design, why not something with "Wall" or "Bricks" or "Foundation" or some other cliche rather than the same name as an entirely different set they already release.  *sigh*

I ruminated last time around if the 30th anniversary milestone would be a touchstone for a design reprint insert.  I was wrong because this time they are going with 1983 as a 35th anniversary.  Topps really does love to congratulate itself on its own history.  But between Archives and Heritage, these are overkill to the extreme.  We just got 1983 in Archives a few years back anyway.  Since they insist on reusing all their old nostalgic designs, I wish they could/would use Archives base cards to highlight subsets or odd vintage inserts rather than flagship designs, or even other sports designs applied to baseball, as they have done before for inserts.  This could mix things up a little and they have done it to interesting results for their WWE Heritage sets.  Also above you see a set called Legends in the Making and they are exactly what you would expect from that bland moniker, a rehash of young stars and highly touted rookies presented in some splattery computer design that looks like something Panini would reject.  Am I wrong in thinking Topps would be better off focusing on a few excellent inserts with nifty designs rather than a bunch of rehashes and rejects?  That or since this is the flagship, just keep parallels, inserts and short print variations to a minimum and focus on the base cards.  I know, this is crazy talk.

Speaking of which, last but not least here you see my promised manu-patch card from the blaster.  I really liked the idea of Players Weekend, with the funky jerseys and nicknames on the back of uniforms.  I think it would make a splendid topic for a well done insert set.  Instead, Topps kind of throws the idea away without bringing it to full fruition and giving it the attention it deserves.  They don't focus on the nicknames the players used at all and use the same "patch" for every card.  They at least did come up with a photo of Miguel Cabrera in the uniform the Tigers used that weekend.  It really makes you wonder who's making decisions over there.  

Most of the cards here are available for trade (think from the gold parallels down) and I have a whole list of cards (in comments) if you need to fill your want lists. Be warned, these cards are destined for eBay so act quickly.  I am looking for the Mets cards and inserts and will gladly trade for them as I didn't get very many, as I lamented before.  Drop me an email or comment if you're game for swapping.   And now, back to hour nine of the SB pregame show.