Complete Set Sunday: Finish What You Start.

     After the pandemic struck and we all went through several rounds of the Kübler-Ross stages, there was a calm when most of us decided "OK, I have all this time on my hands, I am gonna do something important!" and we made plans to learn a craft or go back to school or remodel the house or invent a better mouse trap or focus on our hobbies or whatever.  It's always best to think big so that the actual plans can find the right size but also, reality eventually says that our plans will be big but our follow through small.  At least that seems to be the way things go for me most of the time. Well, I already went back to school a while back, and my house is just fine the way it is, and my inventing skills are nil, so that left me with my hobby.  I did throw myself into my collection in a lot of different ways the last couple years, pruning some parts and expanding others.  I bought some cards I always wanted and got rid of ones that did not spark joy.  In keeping with the Mary Kondo theme, one thing I really lament from my long term collecting history is that a long time ago, I sold off all my vintage Topps sets.  I had built a 1969 set, a 1972 set, and as you can probably tell from the thumbnail of this post, a 1975 set. Given all this time on my hands, I decided to rebuild one of those sets and since the 1975 set is my favorite (for many reasons we'll get to) that was the one I went for.

The pandemic has made it almost impossible to go out and buy cards in a store but the online offerings exploded.  I had my choice of a few nice starter sets and I picked one that had a few of the key rookie cards (Rice, Yount, Hernandez) and then added my back up Gary Carter to the mix.  I then made it a challenge for myself by making my set build a low budget affair.  Sure, I could have just went to ebay and nabbed a few other common lots or just paid for hall of famers but instead, I built most of this set through my own collection, reddit trades, Listia listings, and a great serendipitous find: I got my Brett rookie for nothing because a friend was updating his 1975 set to PSA quality.  He bought a PSA 9 and gave me his old, just fine, ungraded #228. That was nice.

The Mantle/Campy card was the last from the MVP subset and part of the final four.

 

 

So on and off for the last 18 months or so, I have been accumulating cards. A trade here, a find there, a listia seller had a bunch of commons one week.  Slowly but surely, I hammered it down to a final four: three random commons (all in the 500s, as though the 1975 set had high numbers or something) and one of the Mantle MVP cards that for some reason, everyone was hoarding.  Well, I did finally get that Mantle and then I treated myself to buying the final three from ebay to finish things off.  You are now looking at me triumphantly placing those cards into their spots in the binder.

 

 

Gary Thomasson slides in nicely next to Gaylord Perry, who has one of the nifty All Star logos from this set.  You can also see on the page one of the team cards, a lot of mine have pen marks on the checklist but this does not bother me in the least. I was not very picky when it came to condition. As long as it didn't look like Night Owl's original cards, I was okay with it.

 

 

Von Joshua finds his spot here as the penultimate card.  I always thought Von Joshua should be a classical pianist, not an outfielder, but hey, who am I to judge. He was a major leaguer and I wasn't. You can also see on this page that Billy Williams is sadly off center and I will have to perhaps replace some of those.  Maybe during the next pandemic...

 

 

And here it is, the final card, #557 Larry Gura.  There is a fun irony of him being shown as a Yankee since his reputation was that of Yankee Killer later on in his career.  Of all the iconic cards in this set, this one was the last one; not epic but it will do.  Al Oliver looks a little jealous over his shoulder.

 

 

So there it is, I set a goal and accomplished it.  It took a year and a half and some time and patience, but I rebuilt my 1975 Topps set.  I love this set because I was born that year, I love this set because it is garishly bonkers colorful. I love this set because it has the rookie card of my favorite player of all time, Gary Carter.  But now I love this set even more because it will always remind me of a very trying time in my life (and all our lives) but that we made it through.  It will remind me that I can set reasonable goals and follow through on them.  I will be keeping this one for the rest of my life and passing it on to one of my nibblings, with the story of its acquirement (lucky too that my nieces and nephews have already shown great interest in baseball).  It is not perfect by any means, but it is a perfect trophy of the last two years.  And now I have to decide if I want to redo those 1969 and/or 1972 sets.  If we don't all die in a nuclear war in the next few months, maybe I will choose one and get back to you. 

Complete Set Sunday: 1919 Chicago Black Sox Team Reprint Set.

       One of the many things I missed posting about during my long hiatus was the Chicago Cubs finally getting over the hump and winning the World Series after 108 years. Personally, I could not care less about the Cubs or so-called curses but I do have a good friend from college who is a big Cubs fan, so I was ecstatic for him when they won (I also mocked him as best I could from a hospital bed in 2015 when the Mets swept the Cubs in the LCS, but I digress). All you heard from the media during that 2016 run was how much Cubs fans were tortured and how Chicago hadn't seen a championship since 1908.  This always made me irrationally angry. Chicago has two teams last time I checked.  The White Sox once went 88 years without winning a championship and broke that schneid only a few years ago in 2005.  I have always felt a strong kinship to White Sox fans because it must suck to live in a vacuum like that where you are barely an afterthought in your own city, much less on the national stage. Being surrounded by the Evil Empire on all sides, I think Mets fans can sympathize.


This year marks the 100th anniversary of one of the greatest teams every assembled, the 1917 White Sox.  That team steamrolled the American League, winning 100 games and then taking the World Series from the Giants in six games.  Alas, no one remembers that team at all because of what happened two years after that. I present to you the 1919 Chicago Black Sox, in "reprint" form.



This 25-card set (with one bonus Shoeless Joe card in color) is not so much a reprint as a retrospective set, done in faux-vintage form by a company called TNTL in Toms River NJ.  I have never heard of them before and they haven't done anything since, so I imagine this was a vanity or personal set specifically done by a Black Sox nut.  I think they were going for the look of the old E121 Caramel cards and they came pretty close.  The cards aren't standard size but closer to the size of those old ones.  This is a true oddball set and right in my wheelhouse. I think I picked this set up on Listia a few years ago and I scanned it right away and now comes its time to shine.



The backs have a little write up rather than a candy advertisement, and while not poetry, they certainly capture the feeling of the team and the scandal.  As you also may have noticed, since the cards aren't numbered, I put the infamous Eight Men Out together on the same page.  The stats they quote certainly paint the picture of a great team having a bad week.  The book (and I recommend both the book and the movie if you haven't indulged yourself) isn't quite a perfect history as much as it is a JFK-esque what-if group of scenarios.  I personally believe in the grey area story that the team threw the first couple games but never got paid past the first game, but by then it was too late for them to mount a comeback.  We'll probably never know the whole story since everyone involved in the scandal is long dead and the incident makes for a great and sad piece of baseball lore.



The Black Sox are one of those issues that brings out many passions in people.  Did Joe Jackson really understand what was going on?  Did Buck Weaver deserve the treatment he got since he didn't take any money?  Was the tight-fisted ways of Charles Comiskey as much to blame for the scandal as the players themselves?  I see wonderful parallels right now in the whole Steroid Era kerfuffle that has been going on for the last decade or so.  The hall of fame just elected Bud Selig, who pretty much stood by as the owners profited from the players at the time and then decided to "get tough" when the winds of opinion changed.  Those players made the owners countless millions and made fans happy but then got vilified after the fact, a post hoc nightmare if ever there was one.  So now that Selig has been enshrined, I would like to see the Bondses and Clemenses and McGwires get their chance to go in too.  And with that said, you can then deduce that I also think that if Charles Comiskey is in the Hall of Fame as an owner, then Shoeless Joe Jackson should finally be allowed in as a player, warts and all.

Football '13 Week 8: Complete Set Sunday - 2010 Upper Deck New Orleans Saints Super Bowl Champions.

       This week I am bringing back one of my few recurring topics.  A little while ago, after my trip to New Orleans, I decided to augment my Saints collection to fill in a few holes. While I was there I found out there was a commemorative set from the Super Bowl win that I did not have.  I went on to eBay and  got into a bidding war for this 2010 Upper Deck New Orleans Saints Super Bowl Champions set.  Turns out, this is a pretty rare set.  I mean, some of these kinds of sets are still on the shelves today from 5+ years ago.  But of course, for my favorite team, it is rare and hard to get.  Well, I didn't win that one from the bidding war and believe me, we took the closing bid far over the actual retail price.  My collection would not stand for this, so I found another one with an even more ridiculous Buy It Now price.  Luckily, it also had a Make An Offer, so I did.  Sadly, this also turned into a nasty bit of negotiating, but after a bit of back and forth we agreed on an exorbitant price.  Dammit thought, it is all mine so lets take a look.

The design integrates the bright bright orange and blue of the Super Bowl XLIV logo, which is a jarring contrast to the black and gold of the Who Dats.

The font for the player name is really tiny, but believe me, they included a lot of the players from the 2009 roster/

They certainly got a lot of nice action shots.

Did you know that technically, Scott Fujita is the first Japanese-American to play in the NFL?  You can look it up.

OK, enough of those garish fronts, let's see the backs...

Whoa, just as bright.  Nice mirror reflection of the picture on front, though.

The page placement splits the regular season highlights and the post-season highlights quite nicely.  I still have the call from the Porter interception on my ipod and smile every time it comes on.  A sad oversight is the lack of a card for the onside kick from the start of the second half of the Super Bowl. Still the ballsiest call I have ever seen (especially since it worked).

The only other drawback?  50 card set...leftover spaces...nooooooooooooooo!

The set also came with an oversized card.  I have left it in the little cellophane sleeve just because. 

I watched this Super Bowl up in Boston with my usual party crew.  Oddly enough, I had won the lottery for season ticket holders for the chance to buy tickets for Miami but I would have had to get a certified check in person to Metairie LA on a Tuesday morning.  It just wasn't gonna happen.  It's just as well. 

One last thing.  The set came nicely packed and padded in bubble wrap and still got crushed by the USPS.  Look at that box:

Luckily, the cards inside were safe.  Stupid post office.

Complete Set Sunday: 1990 Starline - Long John Silver's.

       In my last post, I went on and on about my birthday presents to myself, one of them being a repack.  In that rather disappointing pile of cards was four cards that immediately sparked my memory and yet, at the same time, made me say "hey, I don't remember these at all."  The cards belonged to the 1990 Starline set.  Now, I remember these posters being everywhere when I was a kid.  It was a very clean design and if you went to toy stores or shoe stores or sporting goods stores, they were everywhere.  I cannot, though, for the life of me, recall them releasing a card set of them.  On one hand, this makes perfect sense - I have never eaten at a Long John Silver's joint ever.  I don't even know if they have them in Jersey, to be honest.  On the other hand, I pride myself in owning oddball food issues, so I am truly surprised this set got by me.  I went to ebay and picked up the set of 40 cards for $3- shipped.  Plus it was sent from a town in New Jersey, so I got it the next day; practically instant gratification. 

The set came still sealed in the original packs that came from the restaurant.  I assume you got one with each purchase, meaning you'd have to choke down 8 different meals of fried mystery fish to finish this set.  Yuck. 

I was kind of torn how to handle this set.  As you may well know from reading this blog, I am kind of obsessed with having everything neatly fitting in to 9-pages (thus the name).  If fact, I have covered this particular predilection before.  A 40-card set does not fit neatly.  Even with the 8(!) header cards, this would be 48 cards, also not neatly divisible by nine (checks 3rd grade math flash cards, hey! I'm right).  So I looked at the way the cards were packaged and realized that these are eight pretty big stars.  Plus I had the leftover cards from the repacks to fill in the one blank, so voila:

They all work very well aesthetically and the loose Chris Sabo breaks up the color scheme.  I love it when a plan comes together.  

Let's look at the back:

Wow. That is pretty ugly.  You do get to see one card back, and it is not Chris Sabo but Glenn Davis (I like to keep people guessing).  I checked my set books before I decided to keep them wrapped to see if there was a set with a 4 or 3 card gap and there was not, so for now, I am satisfied to keep the set this way.  Maybe one day in the future I will get the urge to spring them from their decades-long plastic cocoons.

      Click here to see the checklist, if only for posterity and understanding.  And if you would like to actually see all the cards in the set, check out this post from Fuji, who covered them better than I ever could.  For now, this thick awkward page will sit in my set binders as a monument to the fact that as a teenager, I liked to get fat on burgers and doughnuts and not fried fish.

Complete Set Sunday - Strange Things Are Afoot.

       In the 80's, anyone who was anyone had a retail box set.  Every Revco and Rite Aid, Woolworth's and K-Mart, Toys 'R' Us and CVS. These stores and dozens more all had vanity 33 and 44 card sets made for them by Fleer and/or Topps of the superest superstars or the highest highlights or the rookiest rookies or, in rare instances, some combination therein.  I am not going to lie, when I was a kid, these boxed sets seemed like a grand idea.  You could spend $3 or $4 and get a bevy of stars and you even got a checklist telling you exactly who you were getting.  At one point, I must have owned 40 or 50 of these sets.  Time and a greater sophistication of my collecting tastes has dissipated this pile, not to mention some just got broken up and absorbed by player and team collections.  Some of these sets are held in such low regard to me now that when I find them, I just give them away.

       But one retail boxed set has stayed near and dear to my heart and instead of being broken up or discarded, it found its way into my set binders: the 1985 Topps Circle-K Baseball All Time Home Run Kings.

This box is typical for any retail box set of the time: simple graphics, the store's logo prominently on the front, a checklist on the back.  Oh, but what was inside this box is very different indeed from most of the tacky over (or under) designed cards that you usually found in these sets.

Quick aside, for those of you who don't know, Circle-K is a convenience store found mostly in the south and midwest but really all over, though not nearly as much as say, 7-11.  The rest stops on the Mass Pike used to all have Circle-Ks, which is how I know them.  Their most famous moment by far is when they got a shout out in the 1989 film Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure:

Those of you with a fine knowledge of stoner cinema already knew that (and that that is where the title of this post originated). 

OK, enough of all that, let's take a look at the cards.

Now that is a classy looking set - great pictures and a clean simple design.  You should recognize that the design comes from the Topps Glossy All Stars Set that they used to advertise on their wrappers.  You collected wrappers and mailed them into Topps and got part of a 60 card set of the year's All Stars and All Star Rookies.  The sets were available from 1983 to 1991 and the only difference in the look year to year was the color of the border around the picture.  They are about as minimalist as you can get without just having a full bleed picture alone on the front of the card. 

I cannot tell you how much I love the look of these cards. The Glossy mail in All Stars always looked good, but with the vintage Hall of Fame stars, the simple design is 100x cooler and Topps wisely co-opted it for this set.

Not to mention they also picked a dramatic subject for the set, it is full of the great sluggers of all time up to that point.  Topps always dabbled in subsets of all time leaders in their main sets and had some oddball issues with them as well, but I think this set is by far their most effective use of all time greats, both in subject (home runs) and presentation (classic).

Hey look, that page is all color photos. Neat!

Of course, this is almost 30 years ago.  The all time home run list has shifted just a tad since then.  If they were to reissue a similar set today, the cut off point of 33rd would not be Lee May at 354, it would be Dave Winfield at 465.  If we were gonna issue a set today that got down to Lee May it would have to be a set of 83, not 33.  (of course the cut off in this set is really 34, not 33; I often wondered why Joe DiMaggio wasn't in this set.  I can only assume he wouldn't give his permission or wanted more money than Topps was willing to pay, Joe D was known to be a little, um, difficult.)

I decided not to use this post to deride the decline in prestige of the home run but rather to celebrate an awesome looking set.  I bought this set 27 years ago and it is the last of the retail box sets that I own that is intact. I kept this set in my collection this way because of my love of retro vintage stars and you have to remember, this was one of the first ways for a kid in 1985 to get cards of players like Babe Ruth or Lou Gehrig or, heck, even Johnny Bench and Willie Stargell.  Now, if all retail box sets were 33 subjects, I would consider having more of them in my binders, as 33 can work well since every third set makes 99 - a perfect 11 pages worth.  Alas, most of the Fleer sets of the era are 44 cards, thus screwing up the whole system and ruining my love of the factors of nine.  But this one is here and it isn't going anywhere.  In fact, rather than adding other retail box sets, I should start combing eBay and pick up the All Star Glossy mail in sets to match it instead.

***

This will be the last Complete Set Sunday for a while.  First of all, because I am running out of complete sets in my binders.  Second of all, football is gonna start up next week and I can't think of a better day and a better way to highlight this than designating Sunday for football cards.  I have organized a whole mess of football cards recently and made not one but two new binders just for these newly sorted cards.  I think they deserve a showcase, don't you?

(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.

Complete Set Sunday: 2002 UD Authentics

       I figure we all get overcome with waves of nostalgia.  Our brains are designed to filter out the "bad parts", or at least minimize them, thus leaving us with a wave of positive feelings about the past.  Card companies have had a glorious time exploiting that emotion for the last decade and a half or so.  Now Topps has a pretty good reason to do this, they have been around the longest.  There is a fine line between history and nostalgia and Topps can tiptoe that line very well.  Upper Deck, on the other hand, always seems to want it both ways.  They want to seem like the new and shiny and modern card company, yet they also want to somehow exploit history and mine nostalgia for all its worth.  They made 5th anniversary insert cards that looked like their first design, as though that design was already some kind of classic.  And Upper Deck has treated their 1989 design with some kind of undeserved historical reverence ever since.  Now, this is not to mock or belittle the 1989 Upper Deck set.  It is a seminal set.  It is a pretty clean and nifty design.  But it would have been nice to have let time decide that, not endless and premature marketing.

     In my set binders, you will find the ultimate piece of forced nostalgia Upper Deck has given us, the 2002 UD Authentics set.  Upper Deck went all out with this bad boy, giving us not only the exact design from a whole 13 years back (perhaps they felt this set was their company's Bar Mitzvah?) but they also gave us the packs and  boxes that emulate the 1989 look as well.  First, let's look at the fronts:

I must say, it looks great.  They got the design perfect and the fonts dead on (something Topps either can't or won't do).  The pictures were typical sharp Upper Deck photography, though they do lack the rare injection of quirkiness the 1989 set had, and are pretty heavy on action shots.

One very odd thing they did with this set was order the cards by teams an alphabetically, which is more of a Fleer convention than an Upper Deck one and something they did not do with the 1989 set, though UD did tend to do this with their smaller satellite sets at the time this set came out.  There is also a lot of traded lines with new logos but without updated photos.  I guess their photoshop sensibilities were not honed sharp at the time.

Let's look at the backs:

The backs are also pretty spot on for the look of the 1989's except for a couple obvious issues.  First, the abundance of obligatory and obnoxious extra logos, disclaimer, and copyright info (which totally takes away from the photo).  Second, and most important, instead of listing 5 years of stats, they listed only one year and gave each player a little write up.  Since they were already truncating the stats, I guess this isn't a big deal, but it is the biggest difference in these from the 1989 backs.

Like I said, lots of action shots:

Remember 2002 when all the Mets cards had to have shots of them wearing their post 9/11 NYC hats?  Remember when the White Sox were on the forefront of retro jerseys?  Remember when Jose Canseco was just hanging on?  Remember when Roger Clemens was an ageless marvel and a first ballot hall of famer?

Remember when the signing of Jason Giambi was something for the Yankees to be very proud of?  See?  Isn't nostalgia wonderful?

The last 20 cards of the set are the Star Rookies, which once again are very nicely emulated from the 1989 set.  The rookies are all in posed shots, instead of action shots.

Too bad they picked 20 of the most nondescript and unknown rookies possible.  I mean, I had never heard of most of them and the ones I had heard of were pretty terrible major league baseball players.  I guess since they weren't short printed and serial numbered, Upper Deck didn't give much of a damn in selecting them.

One other thing about this set that grinds my gears is that it is a 200 card set.  That means a 2 card hangover in my 9 pocket pages, which in my world is just about the most awful thing ever.  I filled in the space here with a five card Wayne Gretzky insert set, which I believe is a companion to this set which I covered earlier.  Why it is here and not with that set (which is in a completely different binder) is beyond me and shows my mystifying organizational skills. 

One neat thing about that Gretzky set is that the prefix to the card numbers is "GR81-"  which is just outstanding.  I should probably put it back where it belongs.

The packs of this set had the usual serial numbered star inserts and game used jerseys and such, but the parallel set was a little different and was somewhat inspired if hamfistedly executed.  The 1989 Upper Deck set was known for a couple of rare error cards which were caught early in the print run.  The rarest of these  is a reverse negative Dale Murphy card, which is still sought after by collectors today.  So, knowing that...

...look at this page of cards - a random selection of 9 of the cards from this set...

...now look at this one...

Hey! Look at that, they are the reverse negative of the first page.  That's right, the 2002 UD Authentics set's parallels were a reverse negative set.  This would be pretty awesome if not for one glaring weakness: the team logos are airbrushed out of the reverse negative card.  I have no idea if this is aesthetic choice on their part, if it was so you could more easily tell that this was the reverse negative card, or if there is some kind of clause in their contract that says they couldn't show the logos that way - whatever the reason, it is there and it ruins the whole effect.  It is not too bad on some cards, like the Martinez or the Sweeney, but it is distracting and ugly on most of them, like the Washburn and the Mondesi.  It makes them look like unlicensed oddball food issues rather than like the epic parallels they should have been.  In fact, this whole set could be filed under "what might have been."  Look at that Nomar card to get what I am hinting at - this parallel set could have been so damn cool.  I would have happily put together the parallel set for this set if not for the logo thing.

I bought two boxes of this stuff at the time it came out, probably out of a need to open something new and out of the aforementioned fit of nostalgia.  There should have been some magic in this set.  Either in finding a rookie like the Ken Griffey Jr. that opened the 1989 set or in chasing a quirky and unique parallel set.  But, sadly, the set just falls flat.  I put it together at the time from those two boxes and I somehow, it wound up in my set binders.  Perhaps I planned on pairing it with my 1989 Upper Deck set, which at one time I wanted to put into pages but ended up selling instead.   I wanted it to be so good when it came out and it fell so short.  Unfortunately, there is no nostalgic glow in looking at it again 10 years later.  If anything, time has accentuated its ugliness and flaws - don't tell me you can look at those reverse negative parallels and NOT think of the horrid 2010 Upper Deck set - and it will take a long time to ever look at this set as anything but ugly and flawed.

Complete Set Sunday - 1999-00 UD Retro McDonald's Hockey

      Seeing how I dropped like 30 scans on you yesterday, I thought I'd take it easy on you today and do a smaller set.  Also, seeing how we are now smack dab in the middle of the NHL playoffs, I thought it would be a good time to do some hockey.  I tend to describe sports like relationships...I often call baseball my wife and hockey my mistress.  Come springtime, I get torn between two lovers very easily, especially when my Devils are actually winning series, rather than choking them away.  Plus, granted with a speed bump or two, my Mets are also not sucking with vacuum-like precision (yet).  So while I have been very busy and stressed out recently, my sports watching has been a most welcoming and relaxing oasis. It is with that I give you the 1999-2000 Upper Deck Retro McDonald's Hockey set.

This is a 35 card set featuring 15 different hockey superstars, each shown in a contemporary photo on one card and a rookie photo on another, thus properly fitting under the "retro" banner.  The cards themselves are printed on thick rough cardboard stock, like old school Topps, another defining feature of the Upper Deck Retro cards.

The dual photo set up works well for some players (like Brett Hull, Patrick Roy, and Dominik Hasek) and not so well for others (Jarome Iginla and Paul Kariya) but overall it is a real nice way to present superstar players.  I was always a sucker for those 1983 Topps Super Veterans and these work along the same lines.

The player selection leaves a little to be desired - no Martin Broduer?  hello?!!? plus, no Gretzky, Messier, etc. - but it does capture fifteen of the best players of the turn of the century.  Since this was a regional set, there might have been a method to their madness, I just can't quite figure it out.  Let's look at the backs...

...they are well done...the contemporary cards have complete career stats and the rookie flashback cards have stats from their rookie years and little blurbs about their rookie exploits with matching photos to boot.  These cards being Canadian, they are also written in French as well as English. 

The last five cards of the set are the obligatory "rookie prospect" type cards.  They actually did a pretty good job choosing five players who have had decent long careers.  The only aesthetic drawback to the set, really, is that it is 35 cards, leaving that nasty nasty empty pocket.  Oh well, you can't have everything.

I fell hook, line, and sinker for the Upper Deck Retro card sets.  They were some of the first attempts at faux vintage and they had real personality.  I voraciously collected the baseball sets and when I found out these cards existed, I had to have them.  Of course, they were only available in Canada and as I have mentioned, I have never been out of the country, so I went to eBay to pick up this set, when I cannot recall, and it has resided in my set binders with a few other smaller oddball sets ever since.  I have oddly not chosen to put the baseball Retro sets in my set binders yet, but when I do, this set might go live with them.  In fact, I have a half completed UD Football Retro set from the same time period as well, which I should get around to completing and then I can have the whole happy UD Retro family.

Complete Set Sunday - 2004 Upper Deck Rivals.

       Fear not, intrepid Starting Nine readers (of which, I believe there are nine of you), I have not abandoned my posting; I was just on a little pleasure trip to my old stomping grounds of Boston.  I went to see some good friends and to see a Sox game.  I would really have liked to have gone to see the 100th anniversary of Fenway on Friday, but alas, I could not get tickets to that game - not without skipping a mortgage payment anyway - so I settled on Saturday afternoon's game.  Red Sox vs. Yankees.  The Greatest Rivalry in Sports® etc., etc.  It was such a beautiful afternoon.  I was with my Sox fan friends.  We had damn good brews at the Boston Beer Works before the game (only poser pink hat fans go to the Cask and Flagon).  By the fifth inning, the Sox were up 9-0 and all was right with the world.  Everything was going so well.  And then...and then it all fell apart and something happened that has shaken my baseball fandom to the core - and remember, I am a Mets fan first and foremost so that is saying something.  The Red Sox coughed up that nine run lead.  And almost once over again.  They gave up seven in the seventh and seven in the eighth.  I was stunned, stymied, dumbfounded, and pissed.  I did something I have not done in 25+ years of going to baseball games.  I left early.  I looked at my buddies and said, "I need beer.  Right now...and they stopped selling them. Let's go." and I left.  I am kind of mad at myself for doing that.  I am also friends with far too many Yankees fans who left all form of nasty messages on my phone and facebook.  Sure, those first six innings were fun, but besides that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?  Yes, the Red Sox shot me in the back of the head.  It was a bad day for baseball.

It is with that backdrop that I present the 2004 Upper Deck Rivals.  

It is a set featuring the Red Sox and the Yankees and it was sold as a complete set in hobby outlets.  

It has 30 cards, which, out of some fit of laziness, I did not scan all of.  I probably skipped some of the Yankees.  I guess I am still mad.

Upper Deck did a bunch of these types of sets in the mid-aughts.  It is kind of a fancier version of the old Fleer boxed sets sold in drugstores and toy shops in the 1980's, but who cares? It has a bunch of classic photos and players and the Rivals section with contemporary positional match ups are well done and pretty awesome.

When I got this set in 2004, a local card shop (one of those overpriced mall-type ones that I don't frequent) was having a signing with Peter Gammons, who has cards highlighting What If? scenarios in the set.

The odd thing is that, at the time, my girlfriend worked directly with Gammons' nephew; I probably could have met him any time I wanted.  But as it turns out, I met him at the mall.  And he was very affable and friendly, we had a brief conversation about music and baseball (and his nephew) and he signed my big ass card.  That was a good day.

I have a few Red Sox sets, a couple from their World Series wins and this one, which was made right before they actually won it all in 2004.  This was at the very pinnacle of Red Sox/Yankees hostilities.  The 2003 ALCS was an all out war (brought to a nasty conclusion by Aaron bleeping Boone).  Then the 2004 ALCS happened.  The Sox came back from down 3-0 in the series to win.  And now, eight years later, they are choking away nine run leads.  Baseball is a funny, brutal game.  As you can tell by my rambling, I am still overly affected by yesterday's debacle.  I will reel it in and head for the big finish.  This set is in the binders because the Red Sox are my baseball mistress.  I don't love them like my wife, but I adore them all the same.  If they keep playing like they did yesterday, there won't be anymore sets for me to add to this one for a long long time.

Complete Set Sunday - 2001 UD Legends of New York

       If you read yesterday's post - and if you didn't, just scroll down and do so - you know that I am spending this afternoon in Philadelphia in the sunshine of the upper deck of Citizen's Bank Park watching my Mets (hopefully) beat the Phucking Phillies.  But, through the magic of scheduled posting, this write up has appeared for your reading pleasure.  Seeing how it is the first full week of the season and that I am going to Jackie Robinson Day, and since it is Complete Set Sunday, I have chosen a subject near and dear to my heart, the 2001 Upper Deck Legends of New York set.

This is a very handsome set.  Granted, also a bit of a niche set, but this was Upper Deck at the height of its powers.  The set covers all four major league teams that have been in New York City in the 20th century.  They first cover the Brooklyn Dodgers.  Today's honoree, Jack Roosevelt Robinson is there in the lower left corner.  I am sure if Ralph Kiner is covering today's Mets game, he will wish him a very happy birthday.

The set selects the all-time players from each team and then highlights the best seasons of both the team and the players.  It is a very well researched and well thought out set.  There is also something else magnificent and unique about it...

Those brightly colored bits are not just colorful...they are FUZZY!  Yes, this is the first non-kiddie set I can ever recall that, instead of foil or refraction, used fuzziness as an element of design.  It makes the very attractive cards very tactile as well.  The only thing more irresistible in life than shiny might just be fuzzy.  I dare you to pick up one of these cards and NOT touch the little felt part. 

Yes, I am kind of skimming over the New York Giants, I am pretty ambivalent towards them.  Let's get to the best part, that's right, my Metsies!  and look, here they are!

OK, so maybe the Mets don't have the Hall of Fame superstar selection that the other three teams have, but they are probably more beloved than all the other three teams put together.  Yeah yeah, the Brooklyn Dodgers were worshiped by a whole borough, but that was, like, 60 years ago.  And remember, they LEFT!  Sure, at one point I loved my ex-girlfriend, but she walked out on me and barely bothered to say goodbye.  Face it, for all the love and myth-making, the Brooklyn Dodgers are the psycho ex-girlfriends of New York baseball (and the Giants are just the over-infatuated wannabe boyfriend who followed them).  OK, I am getting all worked up here over a history that isn't even my own; this is a good opportunity to look at the backs of the cards.

Gotta love cards that include full career stats and good write ups.  This is a habit that Upper Deck worked itself into and then, sadly, got itself out of.  Luckily, this set lands right in the middle of their disciplined period of fabulous full stat backs.  I also like the graphic that echoes the front picture and uniform number.  The yearly highlight cards also have very well written info.  Did I mention how well put together this set is?

It is obvious that the Mets don't have a lot of great position players, but I will put their all time starting five up against any other teams' in the last 50 years...Seaver, Gooden, Koosman, Ryan et al.  Pitching is the richest part of their history, by far.  It is a sad testament that Wayne Garrett was still considered an all time great Met 11 years ago.

Yup, I am showing every last Mets card in the set.  Besides, they don't have a lot of pennant winning seasons, so it will go by pretty quickly.  I appreciate Upper Deck's use of Mr. Met as their alternate logo.  Say what you want about baseball mascots, but if you don't like Mr. Met, there is something seriously wrong with you.

Also included in this set is that other team.  That collection of overrated, overpaid, overweight, overfed, overwrought overlords.  The team that was born on third base and thinks it hit a triple.  Damn Yankees...

Since they cover all the MVP and pennant winners of a team in the set, there is a LOT of these cards.  The less said about them the better.  I don't even wanna touch their fuzzy parts.  Lets move on...

There is also a subset that covers all the Subway Series played by the New York teams.  I guess the set was put together too late to include the 2000 World Series - which kinda works out in a Mets fan's favor.  The set concludes with a newspaper inspired subset of date specific achievements.  Alas, these subsets lack the fuzzy bits, but are pretty neat nonetheless.

This set is obviously not everyone's cup of tea.  Having grown up in New Jersey a fanatical Mets fan surrounded by a family of Yankees and erstwhile Brooklyn Dodgers fans, this set is an extra large chai latte for me.  I put this set together while living in Boston after a crescendo of New York baseball greatness.  The Yankees did what they do and the Mets actually mattered at the time (and Boston's time was yet to come).  I bought two boxes of this product from my local card shop (I assume at a great discount) and then bought packs until I completed the set.  Well, nearly...if I recall, I was one card short for quite a while and finished it off after finding that one card on eBay.  I also still have a number of the game used inserts, which were also pretty cool; they will no doubt pop up on a few "favorites" posts.

       Needless to say (yet I have said it like a dozen times) I adore this set.  Why this set is in my binders is pretty damn obvious and if I have to explain it to you, I will punctuate my speech with head slaps.  I can even overlook the fact that it is 200 cards long and has an awful overrun of 2 cards in the whole "divisible by nine" obsession of mine.  Since this set coexists with a number of other New York themed sets, that over run is matched up with another and it isn't so bad.  Why yes, I do have a whole binder of New York themed sets - and this fantastic set leads it off.  And I do wish the whole "fuzzy" thing had caught on, but I guess you can't have everything.