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.

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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?

Even More Joy.

       Complete pages are what my collection is all about.  Starting Nine is not just a name, it's a philosophy.  These eight pages have all been finished recently and then added to their respective books.  Each one has its own story of who, what, where, and why and I will fill in the blanks if circumstances call for it.

I didn't buy much 2010 Topps.  I believe I bought a series one jumbo out of habit and it was not long after when I realized the bloom was off the rose for me constantly purchasing new product strictly "out of habit."  This is not to say 2010 Topps was a bad set, quite to the contrary, I rather liked it.  I especially liked the Franchise History cards they gave each team.  It was a good way to add a little wrinkle to the base set.  I recently gathered the doubles from that aforementioned jumbo box and wouldn't you know it, I had nine of the Franchise History cards in there.  That calls for a page:

Sometimes I go out of my way to find nine very specific cards for a page.  This is a good example of the exact opposite, making a page out of only nine cards.  I mixed up the horizontal and vertical and got a nice mix of old and new teams, not to mention a nice mix of different pictures. 

I think I have made a good point of emphasizing my love of dime boxes.  I am the guy who, when he finds a nice one, will pull up a chair and pour over the whole thing while at a show.  I take care not to block others with equal love of the dime box, but I have been known to make an afternoon of especially good full boxes.  I found one such box at the White Plains show over the winter.  I plucked 442 cards from that one.  That particular haul has been poured over and divided a few times, but there were some leftovers that I never got around to sorting until this week.  The following five pages come from those cards.

I love Topps Finest, but in my typical contradictory fashion, I have never really bought any of it.  I can't really tell if it is a price thing or a fatigue thing (Finest usually comes out later in the year).  Finest, more often than not, lives up to its name, at least visually.  They are usually very good looking cards.  I found a vein of the 2010 base cards in this box and made a pile of them.

I then, while still sitting at the dime box, went though them, found a nice mix of players and poses, and plotted out my page.  I do this a lot and while it usually illicits a funny look, it hardly ever gets questioned aloud.  Eventually, I will make a page of all the Finest offerings, for now, I have a lot of mid 90's stuff and only a smattering of recent offerings. Quick aside: I once bought a box of 1993 Finest for a (relatively) cheap price just to find a refractor - and, of course, hope it was a good rare one.  Oh, and I got a refractor...the player I pulled: Lee Smith.  Oh well.

Dime boxes are usually the dumping spot for a lot of unwanted base cards plus unnumbered and unautographed inserts.  While this is a sad end for some nice cards, it also lets me build pages I otherwise never would have even considered for less than a buck.  Much like Finest, SP Authentic is a venerable brand that I have long admired but rarely purchased.  This is a page of abandoned 2008 SP Authentic inserts, a handsome little set called Authentic Achievements.

I kind of like these little orphan inserts.  The scan doesn't show it, but the writing is all in a shiny rainbow foil, and the set itself is like 50 cards, which is large but not unwieldy.  Anyway, there were only about 12 of these and this was the best I could do with what I had.  While not the most aesthetically pleasing group of pictures, I think it fits with the whole nature of this set and the reasons for me finding it.

Ahhhh, the 2008 UD Documentary set.  This set has been run through the ringer so many times, I am not going to dig up the corpse and do it again.  Needless to say, it is one of the perfect examples of a great idea poorly executed.  So poor, in fact, that this set may have been the nail in Upper Deck's coffin in the eyes of many collectors.  I avoided this set like the plague.  I heard so many bad things, I never bought a single pack and never even asked any one about it.  In this dime box seemed to be about 1000 of these cards. 

Enough time has passed since the initial release of this horrorshow, so I took a chance.  I made a pile and, once again, carefully selected a nice assortment of photos and players for the page.  I purposely ignored any write ups on the front or back, knowing that I would be infuriated by what I read.  Overall, I think this is a very good looking page, as long as I never read a word and just look at the pretty pictures.

I need to learn to write things down.  I know how unorganized I am and yet I do very little to remedy the fact.  If I consistently wrote things down, both important and trivial, I could save myself a lot of headaches.  Every once in a while, though, I randomly remember something at the right moment and those little moments of synchronicity make good things happen.  While going through this box, I found a little run of 1993 Stadium Club stars.  Big stars.  This made me recall that while looking at my Topps books recently, I noticed that the only SC year I was missing was 1993.  Instead of rummaging through all my boxes to see if I had any, I now had all I needed to make a page.  Well, almost...

...I got eight cards from this dime box.  Look at the names here and I will let you decide which is the one that does not belong.  That card was found amongst my endless team piles and placed on this page to complete it. 

The nice thing about collecting your way is you get to make the rules.  Every once in a while, I get to make an executive decision about a page and that word is law.  We're still in that same dime box and I found a bunch of 1994 Fleer inserts.  These inserts were as understated as the base set.  But, much like that set, they work.  And while they all seemed to be the same, it turns out, they were different.  I found 6 Team Leaders and 5 Prospects.  Not enough to make a page of each, but, since they looked so strikingly similar, I decided to make a page that combined the two sets:

Both sets have gray borders, super imposed players, gold titles, and big colorful logos in the background.  If you just glanced at this page quickly, chances are you wouldn't even realize they were different sets.  The differences and similarities contrast very nice, I think.  It makes for a nice change up in my Fleer book, if you are even paying attention. 

The last two pages here have been a long time in completion, at least in my definition of completion.  This first one has been sitting in my retro book since the set came out in 2002.

Well, eight of those cards have been in that page for 10 years, that middle one was only recently procured from COMC. These cards are specifically a subset called the All-Time Series Team and it is from the 2002 Fleer Fall Classic set (a most handsome faux vintage set as has ever been produced IMHO). I have no idea why it took me a decade to complete this page.  The middle card was forever a random insert from this set featuring Yogi Berra and Thurman Munson.  I am not sure if I didn't like the three outfielders breaking up the nice symmetry of the two players on the other cards or if I just never pulled one of the two outfielders cards from this subset. Recently, I decided I didn't like how this page looked - unfinished - so I went online and fixed that. 

Last but not least is a similar dilemma I found a distinctly different solution to.  I have, since they started the set in 2001, bought some of the Topps Heritage set when it came out.  Heritage has a nice regimented sameness to it.  The inserts always have the same theme yet a unified look to the design of the year in question.  Since I am a sucker for faux vintage in general and nostalgia specifically, the Then and Now inserts have always been a favorite of mine out of Heritage.  But what to do?  Having page after page of the same kind of insert set would be dull.  Plus, there is always 10 cards in the T&N set, which ruins my love of 9 card pages.  Who do I leave out?  Do I leave out the same card for every year?  Not to mention the cost of accumulating all these inserts would be prohibitive to the overall result.  What to do, what to do?  Well, make a page with one from each year, of course. 

I had between one and eight of just about each year of the Then and Now inserts.  I didn't have any from this year, nor did I have any from 2001, 2002 or 2004.  So, to complete the page with a run of years, I went back to COMC and grabbed the 2004/1955 Herb Score/Kerry Wood card you see there.  Perhaps in seven years, if Topps is still marching the Heritage set out every year, I will make another page, including the missing 2001 & 2002.  Please check back in 2019 to see if I do.

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Robert of $30 a Week Habit has claimed the 2012 Topps Stickers from last post.  The system works.