Tease and Re-Tease.

     Thursdays always bring me the same errands and appointments, I am kind of a creature of habit that way.  I like to have one day a week where I bang out the nonsense chores and I have found it is infinitely easier to do it on a weekday rather than a weekend.  I usually try to interject some fun into the slog of doctors and pharmacies and supermarkets, so I always stop in the card aisle of Target when my day finds me there.  I had seen on some other blogs that Heritage packs had been spotted in retail settings so today I made sure I got to the right spot.  Alas, it was not to be.  Two Targets, zero packs of Heritage found.  But there was a fine consolation prize...

A discounted Pete Rose The Living Legend blaster.  I have seen this product in a few different places and think I bought a single pack of it at one point during a former trip to Target.  I had even seen it in this cheap form amongst the blogs, but I had never come across this kind of autograph-promising blaster.  I decided to take my chances, because really, what are the odds Leaf would ever properly fill a redemption card from this product?  I tore it open and boom!

I got an autograph right in the box, just like it said.  It was even already nestled in a top loader.  So that's a pretty good trip, I got me a Pete Rose autograph for $13.  It is a halfway decent picture on the card - though it is a sticker - and in my estimation there is even a 50% chance he signed it himself and not some assistant or his crazy Asian girlfriend.  The other 60 cards in the box are mostly filler, though I am sure I will make a page out of them.  The real interesting ones are pictures of Pete in an Expos uniform or highlighting his horrible haircut and/or fashion choices.  The man was one of the highest paid players in the league during the 70's, you'd think he could get someone to do better by him, look wise. 

That blaster was the only card related thing I bought at either Target today, a rare display of restraint by yours truly.  But then I was driving home and I felt empty and unfulfilled.  What I really wanted was Heritage and a Pete Rose autograph, no matter how cool, was not going to cut it.  So while I was trapped in traffic at the 4 and 17 interchange, I darted up route 4 instead of heading up 17 and made a beeline to the one store I knew would have Heritage, a hobby shop.

So this evening I will chill out with some terrible TV and tear this bad boy open, my first hobby box of Heritage in 6 years. Some Thursdays, I will not be denied. 

Refugee Report: Boston.

       We are now in day five of my electric exile from my home.  The first couple of days found me in Pennsylvania taking care of my brother's adorable doggie.  The last couple have found me visiting friends in Boston.  To be honest, a good friend of mine is in town and I am really slumming it staying with her.  This trip was planned well in advance, so it has turned into quite the serendipitous refuge.  I will be spending the rest of the weekend with some good friends in the Boston suburbs.  It turns out I made a very wise decision in fleeing the northern Jersey area, since things there have gotten worse since Tuesday.  I don't own a generator and I have no stomach for panic, so I would just like to thank my friends and family for putting me up (and putting up with me).

       Lemme tell you, being stuck in a luxury hotel for three days is no picnic.  I mean, I am right by the waterfront and downtown, how on earth am I supposed to cope and keep myself occupied?  I mean, I had to have lunch with a couple of good friends at a wonderful (tastefully named) deli.  And then I could easily walk to one of my old and all time favorite baseball card haunts, the venerable Bay State Coin.  I have known the proprietor Andy for almost 20 years and I even have worked there and done some online work for him over the years.  He is a prickly yet loveable character; they don't make them like him anymore.  He is a huge Cardinals and Stan Musial fan (and erstwhile Albert Pujols supporter as well, though bring his name up now and all you will get is a loudly shouted "traitor!!!").  He is also one of the biggest Celtics fans I know.  He goes to just about every home game and in fact I found out today that he has been to every Celtics home playoff game since 1966 but two - and one of those he missed to meet Stan Musial.  Anyway, Andy was happy to see me as I don't get in much to see him anymore.  We gabbed and jabbed for an hour or so and then, just so I wouldn't appear to be a freeloader, looked at some of this years Topps inserts.  Seeing how I have some time to kill, I will now show them. You will have to forgive me as I do not have access to a scanner and my photography skills are not exactly on par with Ansel Adams, but being a refugee, I am making do with what I have.

First, I saw that he had multiple copies of my favorite insert set from the first series of 2012 Topps, the Classic Walk Offs: 

While not the best designed cards in the world, I do like the subject matter (they would be far better if they enlarged the main picture and better highlighted the background secondary picture, but who am I, a graphic designer?).  They got a nice mix of modern and vintage players and with the inclusion of such memorable homers like Bill Mazeroski, David Ortiz, and of course, Carlton Fisk, it is a very comprehensive set as well.  I don't always like to mix current and retired players on a page, but this set kind of calls for it.  I also kind of like how they got Jay Bruce and Jim Thome in the exact same pose.  I am glad I didn't have to go online to find these and pick them off one by one.  There is something to be said for a well stocked Local Card Shop.

I also picked up a few Mets and player odds and ends from this years inserts that I didn't have yet:
 
There is an awesome Dwight Gooden card that I had been hungering for.  As memory fades from the 1980's, we have all forgotten how awesome Doc really was. Also, with the same old school players in the same Topps sets over and over again, it is nice to see someone as underutilized as the Doctor used and I'd like to see them use him more - to the point where I get sick of him.  Just like, say, Tom Seaver (this is, of course, preposterous, as I could never get tired of Tom Seaver). I grabbed the Golden Moments, which I wasn't sure if I had or not, and a rare non-Mets card of him.  I really dig those horrifyingly ugly 80's White Sox unis.  There is also the David Wright Golden Memories, which I thought $30 a Week Habit had sent me - turns out he sent me something much better.  Lastly, I grabbed a bunch of the 1987 mini type cards, just because, well, minis!!!  The Roberto Clemente is a wonderful photo that I hadn't seen before, too bad my picture on the hotel bed does it no justice.  Oh wait! I forgot Yaz! How could I forget about Yaz?  I am not entirely sure if I have expounded on my love of Carl Yastrzemski on this blog yet.  I am not going to now, but trust me, he is one of my all time favs.  I am puzzled about the logo on that card.  Is that a Red Sox B?  Is that current? Period?  Is that just a mistake and it is a Brooklyn Dodgers B?  I am stumped and to be honest, I just don't have the energy right now to go looking it up...not with all the great bars in Boston just waiting for me to go and drown my sorrows in.

(In)Complete Set Sunday: 2001 Sunoco Dream Team.

        A couple years ago, yet another local card shop was closing.  This old dude had been at his location for like 30 years, but hard economic times and modern collecting sensibilities had driven him from maintaining a brick and mortar shop.  He had kept up with the times by having a strong online presence and it just made sense for him in time to keep that and ditch the overhead of the store.  This story has repeated itself locally a dozen times and nationally thousands of times over.  It is nothing new.  But where as I once had a bunch of local card shops to choose from, I now only have two, and both of those are basically offices for the proprietors to work out of.  Of course, in my sorrow, I am never one to overlook a bargain, and when this shop went out of business, he sold off a lot of his inexpensive-type inventory dirty dirt cheap.  I swept in and grabbed a lot of great deals and a lot of stuff I normally wouldn't have purchased.  There was a huge box of oddball sets marked down to a dollar each.  I'm not sure if I bought them all, but I came pretty close.  One of those sets was one I had seen a few random singles from but never the entire set, the 2001 Sunoco Dream Team Limited Edition set.

The cards in this set were supposedly given out at gas stations in 2001, but I never saw it advertised and if I ever stopped at a Sunoco station, I never got any cards out of the deal.  This was not Sunoco's first baseball card promotion; they were involved in some Fleer parallels in the mid 90's and those I remember, but this set slipped through my consciousness.  It is a 12-card set of All Time greats representing a famous team two at a time. You have wonderful duos like Joe Morgan and Tony Perez, Fred Lynn and Jim Rice, Jim Palmer and Frank Robinson, Mike Schmidt and Steve Carlton, and even some more eclectic combos like Yogi Berra and Don Mattingly, and Sparky Anderson and Al Kaline.  Anyway, they are pretty sweet looking cards and I got 3 or 4 of the sets in that card shop liquidation sale.  I sold the excess ones on eBay and kept one for myself.  And well, to tell the truth, I decided not to keep that set intact.  Twelve card sets just don't do well in a 9-card page setting.  I do have a few of them represented - mostly Fleer World Series sets from the 80's - and they either leave a nasty six card void, or if you put them together it is hard to keep a continuity, or worst of all, if I get cute and do six cards a page, you leave two three card spaces to fill.  They just don't work well for what I want my collection to look like.  So with the Sunoco set that I had, I kept nine of the cards for a page and I then divided the three cards I excised: one went into my team collection, one went to my player collections, and the final one went to a hardcore team collecting blogger.  Here is the page you were left with:

I assume this giveaway was an east coast/mid west thing as you have 2 Philly cards, 2 Yankees cards, then a Detroit, a Cleveland, a Cincinnati, and a Pittsburgh.   For completeness, let's look at the backs:

Each card has a snappy write up and even a title, which is a nice touch.  Plus, Coca Cola gets in on the sponsorship too (when doesn't Coke get in on the advertising?).  It is also nice, and kinda rare for this kind of oddball set, that the cards are authorized and therefore can use the MLB logos.  That always makes for a better looking card.  I keep this page in with my set binders because if I weren't so damn particular about how things look, it would be complete....in my mind's eye, it is.

***

You will see on the side margin there is a new bit of propaganda.  That is because I want you to go vote for Greg Zakwin on Beckett's website so he can win contest and a Sandy Koufax autograph.  I like his blog and I even genuinely like his entry best, so please take 20 seconds and do so.  Thanks.

Hometown.

       I grew up living in a few different places in northern New Jersey before my family finally settled in the town of Ramsey.  Now, Ramsey's big claim to fame is...well...come to think of it, it has no claim to fame.  It is the epitome of the upper middle class, white, bedroom community, suburban ghetto.  It isn't rich or special enough to have famous people live here nor is it poor enough for anything nasty to transpire here leading to infamy.  Anyway, I could not get out of this place fast enough when I turned 18, going away to Boston first for college and then to live.  But, of course, in the usual It's A Wonderful Life cliche turn of events, I came back here to live seven years ago - and have been plotting, in vain, to leave ever since.  So, if you were to ask me what my hometown was, I would reluctantly yet firmly say "Ramsey, NJ."

       I was surfing around some card blogs a night or two ago (stay with me, the point is coming) and I hit upon an especially odd group of players being discussed and in one of the comments, a player was given props merely for being from someone's hometown.  That little defense got me to thinking of my childhood. Going further in the WABAC, I was a pretty terrible athlete as a kid.  At first, I was short and chubby, than after puberty hit me (like a ton of bricks), I became lanky and awkward.  While I am tall and wide, I lost the overall natural lottery with an overall goofy body with no discernible center of gravity.  All in all, though, I was very enthusiastic about playing sports and went out for all the teams, sometimes even making them.  When I was in middle school in the late 80's and then high school in the early 90's, Ramsey was known as a local hotbed of athletics.  Unfortunately, it was the classes behind me and ahead of me that had all the good jocks (it seems the mid-70's were not a particularly fertile time for those kinds of genetics in this town).  The late 70's and early 80's had brought a couple county champions in baseball and one state champion.  That state championship team featured a player that was spoken of in hushed tones in my hometown: Mike Laga.

Mike Laga is by far the most famous baseball player to come out of Ramsey.  There was a brief time when he was thought of as one of the best prospects in all of baseball.  You could just ask Sparky Anderson (except he's dead) and my long time local high school baseball coach and they would tell you all about it.  Unfortunately, Mike flamed out and never amounted to much.  He had power to spare, but never got that contact or defense thing down.  He is known in card circles, sadly, for his awful airbrushed 1987 Topps card (oh the pink! see above) and in baseball circles for hitting the most impressive foul ball in Busch Stadium history.  Not a grand legacy...but in my hometown, he is still held in high regard.  I got that autograph on the 1986 Donruss card in person at a card show in Ramsey High School sometime in 1987 or 1988 and, I can say from experience, Mike is a very nice guy...the very definition of a hometown hero.

The other three cards on that page are of Frank Eufemia, and 64 silver dollars to you if you'd ever heard of him.  He is, though, a bit of a North Jersey legend.  He made the big leagues in 1985 (as you can plainly see by his three 1986 cards) with the Twins.  He got hurt and bounced around the minor leagues for years trying to get back.  Around 1991, he was the star of the local Hackensack Troasts, a semi-pro team.  Having family and once even having lived in Hackensack, I knew the team well.  On more than a few occasions, I got to play catch and warm up Frank Eufemia, my closest brush with the big leagues.  For a 15 year old, this was a pretty big deal (his time with the Troasts led him to being signed by the Mets in 1992, but he never got higher than AAA). I never got up the nerve to ask Frank for his autograph, but he does teach gym a few towns over now, so maybe if I am ever bored, I could go over and make up for that oversight. 

Fast forward a decade or so to when I lived in Boston and, as I have described before, I worked in a baseball card store.  I actually lived in a suburb of Boston named Somerville.  At around the same time, a slugger named Paul Sorrento was bouncing around the American League.  He put together a pretty decent big league career all through the 90's.  He was even an original Devil Ray:

So, one day I had this big, happy Italian customer in the baseball card store and when he handed me his credit card, I saw his last name was "Sorrento" - for whatever reason, I mention Paul Sorrento and asked if he knew of him.  "Know him, he's my cousin!" was the reply and he went on and on about his cousin Pauly.  I then had a customer for life and he came in the store all the time.  One afternoon, he walked in and introduced me to his cousin, Paul.  Both of them were big, goofy, friendly guys.  Turns out, I also lived about three blocks from Paul's parents. I ended up becoming pretty decent friends, for a time, with the entire Sorrento clan.  Very nice people, definitely hometown guys.

So, those are my hometown people and a couple of interesting little brushes with greatness.  As I said, I was not great, or even a very good, baseball player.  Luckily, by the late 80's, that didn't matter.  Most little league teams got their own homemade baseball cards, myself included:

I think I was 12 in that picture.  The other two homemade-type cards are of my cousin (Robbie) and a childhood friend (Jared).  They were nice enough to autograph their cards for me.  And yes, I signed my own card. Sad, sure, but practicing your autograph is what you do at 12 when you just know, with a few breaks, you'll make the majors.  Alas, my cousin and my friend never made the majors, either, but their autographs are priceless in my book.  In an odd twist, another one of my cards had an awesome brush with greatness:

It is very hard to tell, since it is blue sharpie on a blue jersey, but there is an autograph on that card, and it isn't mine.  My mother was traveling through Baltimore on business one time in the late 80's and there was some kind of meet and greet in her hotel with local famous folks.  She saw one of them was a baseball player and, not having anything for him to sign, she pulled out my baseball card from her wallet and had him sign that.  She had no idea who he was (my mother is not much of a baseball fan) but that card has a unique place of honor in my collection.  The player?  Brooks Robinson.

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.