Trade O' the Day.

       Kevin of O's Card of the Day (and about half a dozen other blogs) is my oldest online trade partner.  Way before this blog existed, my first online trade was sending him some 1965 Topps cards for his set.  After seeing that his love of the Orioles is as strong (if not stronger) for my adoration of the Mets, I started putting O's cards aside for him almost immediately.  It has now become an unbreakable habit.  If I am opening a pack or a repack or even if I am at a show, I just instinctively put aside Baltimore cards and when the pile becomes large or interesting, I send them off to Maryland.  When I am lucky, a return package arrives and a couple of weeks ago, such a package was waiting for me and boy is it a doozy.

There was some 1970's Mets goodness:

Granted I have most of these cards, but the Torre is destined for my page of 1978 Topps manager cards that is now almost complete and the Hodges will find a home on his player page, which is now finished.  That Mike Jorgensen was somehow missing in my collection.

There were some new Mets in there too...

I didn't have any of those 2012 Triple Play cards nor that Lucas Duda.  The 1993 Leaf Fernandez was also a new edition (the backs of those cards are magnificent). And speaking of the backs, that mini Strawberry's back is full of such teasing at how good he could/should have been - "After Darryl's final Mets campaign in 1990, his 252 home runs were 2 more than Willie Mays and 14 more than Babe Ruth through their age 28 seasons" *heavy sigh*.  And then there is Bobby Bonilla, the scourge of both Mets and Orioles fans.  I'll get back to that card...

Kevin also seems to mine this endless vein of oddball and vintage (and oddball vintage) football cards and sends me the Giants and Saints he finds. 

Yup, that is a 1960 Topps Frank Gifford.  Drink it in.  Next to that is a pair of 1969 Topps stamp books for the aforementioned Giants and Saints.  Simply amazing stuff.  And perhaps I can start a rumor that Gary Jeter is Derek's half brother and cause a sudden spike in the value of his cards. 

More 1990's football goodness:

I have precious few 1993 Score baseball cards and even fewer football cards.  I guess you can say I spent my senior year of high school and first year of college doing things other than collecting cards, so those are good additions to my collection.  That Stadium Club card of the Saints punter spinning the ball is great and then on the bottom far right is a Bo Jackson SI for Kids card.  That card is so perfectly early 90's, it scares me.  It will find a place of honor in my Bo collection. 

Last but not least, Kevin sent a little note on the best stationary possible:

He not only mocks the Yankees in it, he apologizes for putting Bobby Bo on top of the package.  Way to scare the shit out of me, Kevin.  The back of that card lists Bobby's hobby as golf and lord knows with the Mets and the Orioles, he did a lot of that after September.  I assume that card was a giveaway with a pack of Ultra Pro pages, man did anyone who bought that package get ripped off.  I will begrudgingly put it with my Mets oddballs and hopefully it won't show anyone the Bronx. 

Football Week 11: The Autumn Wind.

       ...is a Raider, pillaging just for fun. At least that's how the poem goes. As far back as the 1970's, the Raiders represented rebellion and they were "the bad guys."  They were the repository for every castoff, thug, and ne'er-do-well in the NFL.  And worse, they won.  A lot.  Like most males of my generation, I went through a brief fascination with the LA/Oakland Raiders in the late 80's and early 90's.  By the time I was a teenager, gangster rappers had adopted the silver and black and made them cool all over again by being everything conventional society and parents hated.  They used the Raider colors as their own uniform and really, look how simple and badass those uniforms are:

Now I am very white and from a very very white town, but I lived briefly in a non lily-white area so I know first hand how ridiculous it is when upper middle class kids adopt the urban attitude.  For the white kids in the 'burbs, it is a poseur persona; for kids in the ghetto, it is just the way life is.  So I never really liked the Raiders because it was "cool," I liked the Raiders for a different, better reason: Bo Jackson.

Bo Jackson was unbelievable. There will never be someone like Bo Jackson ever again.  He was an athletic savant.  He made everything look easy.  I watched Bo play baseball with awe, but then he started playing football too, you know, as a hobby (seriously).  And whatever the equivalent of 500 foot homers are in baseball, he did that in football.  Every time he came to bat, you dropped what you were doing and watched.  When he was in the back field, every single time he touched the ball, a touchdown was likely.  He made moves that defy logic.  They needed a higher league for his talents.  If you never saw him play, go to youtube and watch some of his highlights.  It's OK, I'll wait...

Unfortunately, he was a shooting star that streamed across the sky briefly and faded away.  Because he chose that rather dangerous hobby, he got hurt.  And by hurt, I mean he got brutally tackled and it ground his hip into dust and hamburger.  After that, he never played football again.  But defying all logic once again, he got a hip replacement and came back to play baseball for a few more years.  That's right, he played baseball with a frigging artificial joint in his leg. 

I say that we will never see another person like Bo Jackson again because, sure, while maybe there will be another athlete like him, no one will ever play baseball and running back at the same time again nor to the level that he achieved at each (All Star and Pro Bowl, respectively).  We might get another Deion Sanders or Brian Jordan, but another Bo? No way.  He is unique amongst athletes in history.  And in a way, we kind of got cheated.  If he had focused on baseball, who knows what we could have seen.  What was the celing - Ken Griffey Jr., maybe?  Sammy Sosa may have been the floor.  If he had focused on football and not gotten hurt?  We would probably talk about him over Barry Sanders and Emmitt Smith, since he was pretty much a combination of those two, with some Earl Campbell thrown in for good measure.  Bo Jackson is one of the all time What Might Have Beens in sports.  Oh, but what we got was pretty damn good.

I am using the Raiders today because my Saints are playing them in Oakland (and I even get to watch them on the television because of the Giants bye week...woohoo!). My infatuation with the Raiders is long over, so watching New Orleans stomp them today will bring me great joy.  I used Bo Jackson today to introduce one of my absolute favorite player collections.  I have a whole cube of Bo which means about 150 different cards.  Very few of my player collections are in binders - Mike Piazza, Gary Carter, Keith Hernandez, Todd Hundley are about it.  The rest are in a big box trapped in plastic cases and cubes waiting to get the call to the big time.  I think of all my player collections, Bo might be the next to get the nine page treatment. 

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UPDATE:  I posted this 12 days before Bo's 50th birthday.  Bo Jackson is 50?  Wow.  I am old.