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. 

COMC Badge and Pages.

       Pitchers and catchers report today! Simply one of the best days of the year and not a moment too soon.  The weather has been rainy and dreary and football is over so the dead of winter is at hand.  But nothing combats and destroys the wintry blues like pitchers and catchers reporting.  A close second is going to the mailbox and seeing a big ass box from COMC.com full of all the weird shit that site has to offer. Sticking with the sorting theme from last post, here you see the layout of the grid of goodness that going through a box of 206 cards that were all chosen for their specific nature to my collecting needs.  Each pile is a player collection or a photo collection or a theme collection or a sport collection.  I cannot think of a better way to spend my afternoon where my clothes stay on (not that I am above sorting cards in the nude).

The packing list covers up my nephew's blocks, which I was too lazy to remove from the coffee table.

There is far too much here to highlight each card so let's stay on message and look at the pages that were created and/or completed from this batch. 

Here is a page of 2002 Topps Ten that was completed with the acquisition of a Rangers-clad A-Rod card.  I found a small vein of these cards in an old shoebox and a moment of weakness made me find a few others and when I got to 8 I dejectedly decided it needed a ninth for a page.

Not this is a terrible set in and of itself, mind you.  It's just, well, boring.  It's like one big league leaders subset and the design is underwhelming. It is also an orphan set in that they only did it one year, though I think they did basketball the same way in 2002 as well.  Sports card companies just couldn't help themselves at the turn of the century and just cranked out whatever they felt like it.  Not every page is a winner.

Oh, but then there's this one, the diametric opposite of that Topps Ten page.  These are the 2016 Topps Bunt Program cards. 

I can't say I quite understand the Bunt online cards but I do like their physical manifestation.  They are everything a kid-centric set should be: bright, bold, colorful, and imaginative. These inserts have big logos, a fun baseball theme, faux wear, and good backs (which I neglected to scan ¯\_(ツ)_/¯).   I got the Papi in a lot I got on Listia and decided to find him 8 buddies to make a page.  This was a joyous one to put together. These Bunt cards are everything Opening Day isn't (and that's a good thing).

And to complete a bizarre trio, here is a page of the 1991 Pepsi Flavor of Baseball Superstar cards. 

I am not a big Pepsi drinker in the first place but I never knew these cards existed until one day recently I was looking for Dwight Gooden cards and found his (gloriously bad) version from this set (click on that, it looks like he's pitching in a rec league).  They are everything you want in an oddball food issue.  They have a gaudy product logo, a dense and inexplicable title, no official MLB logos, poor photos, poorer cropping, and a derivative design reminiscent of one of the most terrible over-produced sets of all time.  And as a topper, due to what I can only imagine was crappy cutting, they are all a little wider than 2.5 inches so they barely fit in a standard page (I had to look for one that was a tad bigger, owing to Ultra Pro's sometimes awful quality control).   This page is like good camp, it couldn't be planned for, it just had to exist. 

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And as a total non-sequitur, I recently earned my red founders badge on COMC.com doing their infamous challenge. 

I doubt many of you are impressed but if there is anyone anywhere that I could brag to and get a positive response from this information, it would be on a baseball card blog.  Most people given this fact would tilt their head at me and stare like a confused dog.  All it really means is I need to sleep better and/or leave the house more.