Going Dutch.

     This is not my first international trade, as Canada insists upon being a different country.  This is not even my first overseas trade, as I have sent Red Sox to England.  But this is my very first trade with continental Europe so I guess that is something.  I am, of course, talking about everyone's favorite Dutch card guy, um, The Dutch Card Guy.  In keeping with yesterday's 2014 Topps trades, I noticed when he posted about his newest flagship break that he got a 1970 Topps Ron Swoboda with the Topps 75 logo.  I did not get any of these classic pulls in my packs, so I inquired about it, offering a couple of Glavine numbered cards as bait.  The Dutch Card Guy immediately took me up on the offer.  He also said he would take a look at my want lists and augment the deal...

Proving European folk are much more polite than us American folks, he really really augmented:

He sent a bunch of players from my player want lists.  And I mean a bunch.  Here you see almost enough Stephen Strasburg cards to make a page all by themselves.  That's one page off the list.  That Justin Upton card helps, but he is still on the list.

You see here a block from the AL East:

Those Boggs cards will complete his second page.  The Bautista and Buchholz cards come close to finishing their player pages and that Team USA WBC card completes Pedroia's page.  That's three. 

Now we go to Cincinnati:

The Aroldis Chapman cards find places on his incomplete page and all those Jay Bruce cards more than finish off his page.  That's four.

He sent enough David Price cards for a whole page alone with one to spare:

So that's five.

Lastly, he sent a Ty Cobb which knock off his page in my Hall of Fame books - so that makes six player pages completed in one trade.  That might be a record, though I have not kept total track of such occurrences.  He also generously included a couple of Bryce Harper cards, which I keep on that want list page just to remind myself I need them, not expecting anyone to actually send them.  And yet, there they are.

DCG also included a few great oddball non-sports cards and some (I assume) Dutch soccer stickers.  Excuse me, football (pfft, I am such an American).  And very lastly, you see the card that kicked off this wonderful package, the 1970 Ron Swoboda with the Topps 75 logo.  All I can say about all this is wow!  My last bit of shame here is I have not even sent out the package I have for DCG, but it gives me the opportunity to add some goodies for his collection.   Dank u, Jeroen. (yes, I had to look that up on Google).

Apparently A Trade With Fuji.

       This one has been in the queue for a while, but it is important for me to both empty this damn draft folder and highlight the giving nature of the card blogosphere.  This time it is the fine altruism of Mark, aka Mr. Fuji of The Chronicles of Fuji, one of the finest blogs that doesn't get nearly enough love - I blame east coast bias.  A little while ago, he posted about picking up a near complete 1984 Donruss set at his infamous flea market that was missing like five common cards.  I immediately looked and realized I had for of them (three of them were Diamond Kings, a subset I am known to hoard) and sent them off to him, expecting nothing in return.  Well, in early January (yup, I am way behind on my posts) these cards arrived in the mail for me:

The man is a scholar and a gentleman as he looked at my want lists and sent me five awesome cards I needed, all either inserts, shiny parallels, or oddballs I have extolled my everlasting love for.  So thank you Fuji for paying it forward; in the grand scheme of things I seem to have gotten the better of this trade - including a second personalized card that has a different autograph from the first (are these little Japanese affirmations or are you cursing at me in another language?;)

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.

LuniTek.

       This post is about my furthest journey out into the collecting wilderness, Topps Tek.  In the late '90s, it seems card companies could not draw the line on what wacky crap they would put out.  Cards escalated with gold, shiny, gold and shiny, then thick, then plastic, then 1998 brought us the first set of Topps Tek.  It was plastic, thick, AND shiny; a set that had 90 players, 90 patterns, which means a master set of these badboys would be 8,100 cards. Eight Thousand One Hundred Cards.  And I know collectors who attempted this.  I sold them boxes and boxes of this stuff. I watched them trade and use a website called eBay to augment their collections.  It was a major obsession for some and I thought they were nuts.  1999 brought a second round of Tek - 45 players, this time with home and away variations, making 90 cards total and 30 patterns each.  This is a more manageable 2,700 cards for the master set ("manageable" being a very loose term here).  Having watched the insanity the year before, I anticipated a similar crazy push and bought a lot of it for the store.  Turns out, people had come to their senses and I way over-ordered this product from Topps and ended up having 3-4 cases of this stuff laying around for months.  During a late season lull in product, I got the bright idea "hey, why don't I buy all this Tek stuff and try to put together a set myself?"  As usual, I was way ahead or (in this case) way behind the curve.  I bought it all, busted it and was, um, not even close.  At only 80 cards per box, 6 boxes per case, and less than perfect collation, I wasn't even half done.  Oh, I went the eBay route and sold the gold cards (numbered to 10! - they actually still bring good money) and inserts (FantasTEK Phenoms and TEKnicians - oh those punsters at Topps) and bought some other lots and everything, but after a year, I was still only about 2,000 cards in. 

      The cards sat in a jumbo shoebox for a few years, nearly forgotten as I focused most of my energy in those years to vintage sets.  Then in 2003, the madness returned and I was like "hey, why don't I finish that Topps Tek set?"  Yes, in retrospect, it was a poor decision.  I went back to eBay and after 6 months only got another 300 cards.  2,300 out of 2,700 would seem like way too much to turn your back on.  But I did.  My girlfriend at the time was a very kind and understanding woman, but she never understood my love of baseball cards and really REALLY did not understand my obsession with finding the same card over and over and over again (yes, I made the mistake of explaining it to her one day when she asked me "whatcha doin'?"  Let that be a lesson to all the boys and girls out there - never ask that question and never answer it).  So when we decided to move in together, one thing I did was pare down my card collection and one big casualty was the '99 Tek near set.  I don't regret dumping the set - even though, later on, the girl dumped me - and I cannot imagine what people who tried to put together the '98 set are like.  I suppose there is a wing in asylums everywhere for the 1998 Topps Tek set builders.  I mean, the 2,700 cards beat me, a devout (if recovering) completist...I cannot imagine what 8,100 cards has done to the psyche of some men.

In my binders lies a few reminders of my insanity tango with Tek.  Enjoy.
 
As a post script, Tek went out with a whimper in 2000 with a set I don't think anyone remembers.

If anyone knows of anyone who has completed a master set of Topps Tek, please let me see the link.  And the phone number of their psychiatrist.