Sort 'em If You Got 'em.

       Yesterday was National Baseball Card Day and no, I couldn't get to the National this year (or any year, yet) and no, I didn't get out to my local card shop.  But if you saw my last post, you know that I had plenty to do - I had 925 cards sent from COMC to sort through and revel in.  And that's exactly what I did:

These piles all make sense, to me anyway.  The majority are baseball cards but there are also football, hockey, basketball, bowling, tennis, golf, softball, gaming, movie (James Bond, Batman, and Star Wars among others), music (Beatles and Guided By Voices), and all sorts of Goodwin Champions which include all those things and more. There are three separate piles of Mets cards alone, and also one each for the Saints and the Devils and the Knicks, and a couple of players even got their own piles, Tom Seaver and Todd Hundley (no, really, I am a Hundley super-collector at this point). After that there are Hall of Famers and current stars and retired stars and birthday boys and all-star rookie trophy cards.  It was a fun few hours to go through all these.

I obviously can't highlight and scan 925 cards (103 scans! That would more than double my Seaver memorial post) so I will semi-randomly grab some cards that are either fun or fun to look at or just interesting, to me anyway.  Plus there were a few surprises even for me because after two-plus years, I had forgotten I'd bought them.

The top three here are some multi-player game used cards, one with Gary Carter and Mike Piazza - basically my two favorite players of all time - one with a "Bat Rack" of Mets with the aforementioned Carter and Piazza plus Jose Reyes and Kaz Matsui (remember when he was a thing?) and the third is a glorious mix of 1973 World Series adversaries from the UD Decades set, that one has Tom Seaver and Bud Harrelson along with Reggie Jackson and Bert Campaneris.  THAT is the best card I completely forgot I bought and I was giddy when I saw it.  But it also begs the question, how could I ever forget that card?

 

There is also a Ralph Kiner announcer card, a rarity of him with Mets colors, a great Lee Mazzilli from 1979 Hostess (I have the panel with Steve Garvey and Mike Schmidt but I needed it solo), a 1970 OPC Mets World Champions #1 card, a low numbered Frank Thomas jersey card (with pinstripes!) and a pair of one of my favorite unusual uniform subjects - Pete Rose on the Montreal Expos - I now have a complete page of him in French red, white, and blue.

Let's do a second nine, shall we, I can't just show you less than 1% of these, can I?

First off is the other side of that Carter/Piazza tandem jersey card.  Now I have to decide if it goes with the Carter collection or the Piazza.  Maybe Carter because he's technically the 'front' of the card?  Then you have two modern Topps Hall of Fame short prints.  I am not a big fan of these but sometimes Topps picks really cool photos for them and these two definitely fit that category.  The Koufax is a magnificent shot of him admiring the scoreboard from his perfect game and the Nolan Ryan is a brilliant candid shot that should/could have been one of his 70s cards.  Topps should only pick pictures of this quality when doing these short prints (alas, they often do not).

 

 

There's also a few fun vintage cards here, a 1974 Tony Oliva with its proud position designation of Des(ignated) Hitter, and a late 70s run of Tom Seaver O-Pee-Chee cards.  That last one in the left corner is a 1998 Fleer Tradition Todd Hundley '63 Classic card numbered to /63.  I told you I was becoming a Hundley super-collector.  I also had my eye on a Piazza version of this card but alas did not pull the trigger on it and now it is gone and I might never see another.  I have put that card in my Needed Nine, you can find that list on the right side margin of the blog.  

I teased it in the post from the other day so here is a much better view of the 1952 Andy Pafko #1 I acquired:

I am not certain why I ever bought into the hype of this card but somehow over the years I did and I just decided I must own this stupid thing.  I ended up getting it during the COMC Black Friday sales and the price was right for this condition.  I think what I really like most is the randomness of someone like Andy Pafko being the first card in their first big set.  He was a good ballplayer but nothing anyone would ever consider a superstar.  Donruss went with Ozzie Smith, Fleer went with Pete Rose, Score went with Don Mattingly, Upper Deck lucked out and chose Ken Griffey Jr. over Gregg Jefferies and Gary Sheffield for their lead off but somehow Topps went with Andy Pafko as card number one. If anyone knows the solid reason why they chose him (I don't recall ever seeing one) please enlighten me.  For now, Andy has a hot date with the other two 1952 star cards I keep protected: my Gus Zernial and my Bob Feller.  

I have gotten to the point in my Gary Carter collection where the only cards I don't have are either strange local oddball issues, low numbered monstrosities, or (somewhere in between) just plain old stuff I don't think is worth the money.  I did pull the trigger on a solid gold Gary that I just couldn't pass up during that black Friday sale.  I must say, it is shiny!

I doubt these Danbury Mint cards will ever be worth much (I also bought a Jerry Koosman one in this batch) but I suppose if times are tough I could melt them down and make fillings out of them or something.

Lastly is a card that probably only means something to me but I am so happy that I got it, the nerd in me is still glowing.  It is a 2019 Goodwin Champions Robert Pollard printing plate, a yellow 1/1. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The pandemic left me a lot of time at home to sit and listen to music and Uncle Bob here cranked out something like seven albums (and counting) during 2020 and 2021.  Maybe it is the old man in me, but I don't listen to a lot of music the way I did when I was a younger man but the pandemic did a lot of strange things to all of us so it was nice to have new Guided By Voices albums flying out at the rate they used to in the 1990s.  This card will now be the centerpiece of my Bob Pollard collection from that Goodwin set and I have to trust in myself that I don't become that lunatic who needs to hoard the one-of-one cards.  It helps that I haven't seen any of the others for sale...you know, not that I've checked or anything.  Now excuse me, I have 905 other cards to put in their proper place in my collection. 

Everything But The Verlanders.

This month, I settle all draft folder business.  This week in particular, I am clearing out all the trade posts that I began but for whatever reason, did not finish. 

This one is not so much a trade post as it is a contest winning post, but hey, stuff came in the mail from someone else, so it counts.  This pile of goodness came in June of 2014 from Dennis of Too Many Verlanders (née Too Many Grandersons, who currently patrols right field for my Mets).  Thanks to the magic of randomization, I came in 6th in his spring cleaning sweepstakes and got to choose from an array of prizes.  He was also just flat out giving away stuff and I chose a couple of lots from that booty as well. 

Given that the best cards were gone, I decided to try my luck: behold a 100 card Super Value (re)Pack.  The lots I got were one of Mark McGwire (because why not) and the creative batch of "what's news" football cards: New York, New England, and New Orleans. 

Here are what I thought were the best cards from the first pocket of the repack:

Most of these speak for themselves.  There is a Met, a trade line, a nifty photo, some vague 80s Fleer, The Penguin, a 1970's Expo, and a couple of Tigers, the last no doubt chosen because of the originator of the pack. 

I remember opening this repack vividly because of the second pocket of cards:

Yup, someone down in repack central thought this collation was a good idea.  Dinged corners aside, this means some Big Topps oddballs are coming!

This repack was obviously meant for a Tigers fan because of the mass quantity of bengals there in.  There is also a nice Daniel Murphy in there too. 

 Before there was such a glut of faux-vintage nostalgia cards everywhere, there was Big Topps.  They made the cards in the slightly larger size of 1950s cards and included funny little cartoons on the back.  They were so ahead of their time.  They produced these for three years to a very bemused and uncaring public.  They should bring these back.  Oh wait, they've done Heritage for 15 years now, never mind.

The McGwire lot included some wonderful shiny stuff.

I think we all have a soft spot in our hearts for Big Mac.  I know I do.  I liked those late 80s A's teams against my better judgment and very few will say they hated the 1998 season at the time.  Unless you always hated Mark McGwire, I see very little reason hating him now.  The difference between McGwire and Barry Bonds is I always hated Barry Bonds from moment one; PEDs don't even come into either discussion.

There were some big cards in the package as well, bigger than even the Big Topps.  Dennis took special care to make sure I didn't think that sandwich of cardboard had cards in it and was not a spacer.  How nice. 

Oh yeah, and that 1978 Expo was not just an old card, it was an O-Pee-Chee.  I cannot recall ever getting vintage Canadian goodness in a repack.  Just a great package all around.

Dennis also included a nice little note congratulating me on my win:

Thank you, Dennis!  Your obsessive player collecting is an inspiration to us all.

World Series Rack Packs.

       Walking into K-Mart on a Friday afternoon before Halloween and the perfect killer Frankensnowideathicane 2012, in retrospect, was not the best idea.  First of all, I bought candy a good 4 days before I am going to need it, which means most of it will be eaten between today and the Hallows on Tuesday.  Secondly, I had to walk past the card aisle not once but twice and the siren song of new Topps and discounted product was just too much to ignore.  I noticed that the Update series was out, so I grabbed a couple of the jumbo rack packs, just to amuse myself.  I also saw there was some discounted OPC hockey from a couple years ago, so I snatched one of those too.

Quick aside: I noticed Topps puts their Twitter and Facebook right on the packages now.  Even just 2 years ago, Upper Deck did not have that information on their wrappers. I will have to look to see when they started to put this on the packs.  One thing I love about the old wax packs from the 70's and 80's are the clubs and freebies they advertise on the backs of the wrappers and how dated and odd they look now.  I wonder if kids will look back at these packs in a couple of decades with the same sort of wonderment.  "What the heck is a facebook?" they will ask and go back to playing their 3D imbedded sensory video games that are implanted at birth, or something like that.  Anyway, back to the matter at hand.


The World Series often brings out a longing for baseball cards, new and old alike, in my heart.  Granted, I haven't watched my team in one for a dozen years and haven't seen an actual winner in 26 (though 2004 and 2007 were fun), but there is still a rush that comes from the fall classic.  I like to watch the games, or at very least have them on in the background.  It is all the more enjoyable this year that the Yankees are not involved.  Anyway, let's take a look at what came out of these packs.  I don't like to list every card, so let's just go with the nine highlights:

Hey look, it's superman Mike Trout, I am touting him as MVP of the league.  Sure Miguel Cabrera won the triple crown, but Ted Williams won TWO triple crowns, do you know how many MVPs he won in those years?  Zero.  So I don't think the triple crown is an automatic MVP win.  Also here is the newly minted Giancarlo Stanton.  If I had such a lyrical name as Giancarlo, I would never let anyone call me anything but that.  I assume he went by Mike as a kid because other children couldn't say Giancarlo.  Kids are the worst.  We also have some rookie cards of Trevor Bauer and Will Middlebrooks (who is also on the Golden Giveaway card).  I also got the obligatory Bryce Harper card.  It is players like this that make me feel old.  I am technically old enough to be his father (if I was very popular/irresponsible in high school, that is).  Roy Oswalt tried to pull the Pedro Martinez/Roger Clemens trick of coming in halfway through the year and didn't fare so well.  I have liked Roy ever since I read that he got a bulldozer as a signing bonus (or maybe he bought one with his signing bonus) either way, he went on his ranch and played with it for days.  He didn't really have any heavy earth to move at the time, he just played with it...that sounds like a kid at heart if ever I heard one. On the bottom there are more 1987 minis, the shiny gold and, in a similar move to last year when they put the series 1 and 2 liquorfractors in update, they have the gold numbered parallels for the regular issue in the update.  Why Topps chose to do this and not just, you know, put them in with the proper series, proves that Topps sometimes just likes fucking with us.

Here is Rack Pack #2, and not that it is a contest, but this one was far better:

I didn't get a single Met in the first pack, in this one, I got four, including two Dickeys.  And I have proven time and again how much I love my Dickeys.  Also there are one of my new favorites on the team, Jordany Valdespin, adored for his awesome name, goofy attitude, and hard hitting.  Valdespin can't catch a cold, which means he will eventually find his way to the American League, but I will enjoy him for as long as he is on the Mets.  On the complete opposite end of the love spectrum is Manny Acosta.  The Mets bullpen in 2012 was made of kerosine, but Acosta was more water on magnesium.  I watched him give up 3 runs in 2 innings and his ERA went down.  He was awful.  I mean car crash involving a school bus and a liquid nitrogen tanker awful.  He was so bad, I heckled him in Citizen Bank Ballpark better than the Phillies fans could.  If Manny Acosta is on the team next year, I will know the current regime has no plan on winning anytime soon.  In that upper right corner is the very odd sight of Ichiro in a Yankees uniform. [UPDATE: Eagle eyed reader Nick of Baseball Dime Boxes tells me this cool card is the SP] I watched him the last couple of months of the season and all through the playoffs and I could not get used to this.  I can only imagine what Mariners fans thought of the whole thing.  That other base card is a great shot of the Reds catcher with a glove on his head.  I enjoy silly cards like this and this one is kinda subtle since it does not feature the player listed on the card.  This card will probably make it on to my 2012 Topps page.  The last row is the inserts, which are the same kind as the other rack.  I have no idea if that is the way they are supposed to be or if it is a coincidence.  That mini Mattingly reminds me of the 1987 league leader mini, which is one of my favorite Mattingly cards.  He had a very distinctive follow through on his swing and any card that captures it looks pretty damn good.  If you are building this set/series, drop me an email with your wantlist and I will be happy to send what I have to you.  Everything except the Mets, the Trout, the Ichiro, the Mattingly, and the Simon card are for trade.  I did not use the Golden Giveaway numbers, either, so those are up for grabs if you drop me a line as well.

Wait! There was also hockey cards in this purchase.  I am so mad at hockey right now, I cannot really express my feelings on the matter without swearing and screaming.  The usual cliche anger of millionaire vs. billionaires is tinged with the fact that they just did this 7 years ago.  How greedy/stupid/self-destructive do you have to be to have a lockout again?!?  Anyway, the World Series always reminds me that hockey is around the corner, but this year, it just reminds me that once it ends, I have to wait for all this NHL nonsense to be cleared up; nonsense that really could be settled in a couple hours if everyone involved wasn't dumber than a box of hammers.  I could rant and ramble about this for a long time, and I have done enough of that in this post...

/soapbox

OK, enough, let's look at the highlights of the 2009-2010 OPC pack:

I got one lonely Devil, Colin White, who isn't even on the team anymore.  I also got one rookie, a dude named Matt Hendricks whom I have never heard of before, but I went to school with a bunch of kids named Hendricks and I am pretty sure one of them was named Matt.  I am sure it is not the same one, though.  Also here are former Devil Bill Guerin, rare black dude Wayne Simmonds, a whole bunch of goalies, and one of my favorite hockey names - Martin St. Louis.  If you are a hockey fan/francophile, you know how to pronounce his name correctly.  Why he hasn't been traded to the Blues, I will never understand. 

Quick Trade with gcrl

      You may think that I have abandoned blogging everyday or perhaps my industrial strength ADD has kicked in and my focus has gone elsewhere.  Well, luckily the answer to both of those is no and no.  The truth is I have been traveling and, surprisingly, actually working more the last couple weeks (yay!).  How do you bloggers with a full time job do it?  I guess blogging is like anything else in this world - if you really want to do it, you find the time.

     Tonight I can't sleep, so here is a quick post about a little (yet awesome) trade with jim of gcrl (the man has a lot of ee cummings in him).  I find his main blog a most excellent read (I am a huge Ron Cey fan), but my trade query regarded his side project, oh my o-pee-chee! (oh mon o-pee-chee!), which is a fantastic salute to one of my own obsessions, the variations on O-Pee-Chee cards.  Now, I had recently found a nearly complete 1986 OPC set amongst my piles.  It was missing six odd cards; I can't figure out if they were pulled out of the set by someone (or even myself once upon a time) or if these really were the actual six cards that helped this set evade completion.  Knowing the cards he had on his site were all his, I figured if anyone in the blogosphere had these six cards, it would be him, or he would know someone who would.  After a quick email exchange, I was tickled to know that he had the dastardly six I needed:

Odd combination, don't you think?  Jim also found a few of my rookie all star needs.  In fact, he emailed me that he had a 1964 Jimmie Hall and I ignored it at first, figuring he had emailed me this information by mistake.  But nope, it was on my wantlist and he had read it and found it for me.  The man knew my wantlist better than me...much like Henry Jones Jr., this is why I write things down, so I don't have to remember.  And once again, it is nice to know the system works!  I hope I can find the time this week to get to the post office to drop his cards in the mail.  Plus, his generosity is being rewarded by an all out insomnia driven search for a few of his nebulous nine.

Jim also put a little note in with the cards, always a wise decision, since sometimes packages get misplaced or worse, get to the bottom of the pile...

...no jim, thank you!

O Canada.

       I have a confession to make, well, I don't know if it is a confession per se, but it is something that is hard to admit nonetheless.  I have never been out of the country.  I suppose on one level, that makes me a very patriotic American, but it means I have never seen the pyramids, the Eiffel Tower, the Great Wall of China.  Heck, it means I have never even been to Canada.  Well, I once took a boat tour of the Thousand Islands and we sailed into Canadian waters, but I have never set foot in Canada.  Semantics aside, I find this odd.  I have been on this planet for nearly 37 years and I have been confined to one little geographic area; granted I have been to 41 different states, but never beyond the United State's borders.

     Anyway, as usual, I am rambling and not getting to the point, which is, I dig Canada.  They seem pretty laid back as a people and have wacky accents.  They have a lot of wide open space and universal health care.  My cousin and my good friend both married smokin' hot women from Vancouver.  I always root for the Canadian team in the playoffs if the Devils don't make it or get eliminated. And I, of course, like O-Pee-Chee cards.  Ever since I discovered their existence in my youth, I have been fascinated with them.  If you think about it, they are kind of the first parallel cards.

Unlike Topps, I have not made a page of each year of OPC cards (nor do I plan to) but I did decide a while ago to get each year where they paralleled the Topps set represented with a single card and make a few pages out of that.

The first year of OPC cards was 1965, and the cards look just like their Topps counterparts.  Well, the fronts do...the fun part of these O-Pee-Chee cards are the backs:

OOOOooooo....now we're talkin'  The '65, '66, and '67s look disturbingly just like Topps except for the magic indicator "Printed in Canada" - this and the slightly lower quality cardboard are the only way to tell the difference between Topps and OPC of the time.  Then things start to change.  The 1968's have a much different color to the backs than the Topps cards; the '69s even more so, they are almost red vs. bubble gum pink for the Topps.  Then the wackiness of Canadian laws step in to change these cards forever.  The one thing that keeps Canada from being boring is their (more specifically Quebec's) obsession over the French language.  In 1969, they passed the Official Languages Act, which not only made French the co-official language of Canada, it also made all sorts of rules of where and when French must be used.  This law obligated Topps to print the backs of the cards in both English and French.  It made the cards quirky and cool.  The 1970 set is the first to have this variation.  Then the 1971 set happened.  They might be the most different of the "parallels" of the OPC to the Topps set.  Instead of pea green, the backs are bright yellow and the floating head is centered instead of to the left.  I love the 1971 OPC set...it is the same, but very different.  Just as suddenly, order was restored.  The 1972 and 1973 sets are virtually identical to the Topps except for the French and the lighter, whiter cardboard used.

Starting in 1971, the OPC set started to do something else quite awesome, they started to update player movement on the front of the cards.  Since they were printed later than the Topps base set, they could do this.  This also adds another whole layer of quirkiness to the OPC cards.  You can see here, the 1978 Messersmith shows his movement to the Yankees, the 1979 Carew shows his Trade to the Angels, the 1980 Lockwood shows he is "Now with the Red Sox", and the 1981 Simmons shows he is "Now with Brewers."  The front of the cards with a variation from this era are a marvelous mishmash of logos and colors.  O-Pee-Chee variations make me very very happy.

Except for the 1974 cards, the colors of the backs are virtually identical to the Topps sets.  I also love the fact that they have to translate the captions to the cartoons.  This makes for some teeny tiny print.  This scan also shows another thing the OPC cards are notorious for - the rough cut.  Look at the side of the 1980 Lockwood, or the whole thing of the 1978 Messersmith and you can see what I am talking about.  I always wondered if this was because they always used the same crappy machine to cut the cards, or if they only sharpened the blades once a year, and the later cards had the rough cut.  These are the kinds of things that keep me up at night.

If you look at the backs of the other cards, or at the front of the 1979 or 1982, you will see a big O logo for the O-Pee-Chee cards that sort of matched the style of the Topps logo of the time.  When Topps changed their logo in the early 80's, OPC seemed to not have one to go on the cards, so the 1983 and 1984 have just a simple font print out of "O-Pee-Chee." Then in 1985, they came up with a nifty font logo that I have always been fond of.  It has been on OPC cards pretty much ever since. 

The high water mark of OPC cards was the 1988 set.  It was really the last effort on their part to put out a quality set.  It had some interesting changes, a few different cards from the Topps set, etc.  But starting in 1989, they were just going through the motions, using pretty much the same exact set up as the Topps set and they didn't even bother to put the OPC logo on the 1990 and 1991 sets.  The 1992 was a nice way to go out, though.  They had their own logo back, and a bunch of variations to mix things up (including a five card tribute to my boy, Gary Carter).  Starting that year, O-Pee-Chee started doing a separate premium type set and never did a parallel Topps set again.

O-Pee-Chee did their parallel sets for 28 years, but I fudged and only have 27 shown - the ugly 1990 set misses the cut due to its nearly identical look to the Topps set and lack of an OPC logo.  I don't have time to point out all the little differences in these sets, but one crazy man does.  If you are interested to know all the variations to O-Pee-Chee cards, check out the great Oh My O-Pee-Chee (oh mon o-pee-chee!) blog, an insane side blog by the man behind garvey cey russell lopes.  If you are into such minutiae, I recommend that blog highly.