Trade with Dime Boxes.

This month has been declared the one where I settle all draft folder business.  This week I am focusing upon the trade posts that I scanned and set up, but for some reason, did not complete. 

Last July, I had a card overload, full of show trips, dog sitting, and sorting through a lot of new product that I had ripped but not collated properly. I had a great time doing nothing and as I read through blogs, I could go through want lists and help out.  Enter Nick and his blog Dime Boxes - The Low-End Baseball Card Collector's Journey (sort of the blog equivalent of How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb). I am a huge fan of this frugal and eclectic approach to collecting.  When I posted Topps series two, Nick let me know he was building the set and would like to swap to get my cards since I was not.  I checked out his wantlists and saw he needed a bunch of other 2014 stuff as well and I sent him an email and after the usual back and forth, I sent off a metric fuckton* of cards from his lists.

In return, a few weeks later, I found a fat and heavy jiffy pack full of Mets cards. 

That John Maine covers not only my love of Mets cards but one of my favorite collecting quirks. It is also impressive to find a Mike Piazza card I do not have.

This pack was loaded with oddballs and oddities.  I mean, when was the last time you got a package with two pitchers batting cards?  Not to mention a player taking photos card?

Plus there was two vague shiny Mets I didn't have, that 3D Bonilla and that dufex Murray.  The early 90s were a black hole for the Mets, but the cards were pretty sweet.

And the oddballs keep coming fast and furious here.  Food issues, box sets, Ted Williams faux-vintage and...

...SSPC cards.  How great is it when an Archives reprint is the least oddball of any card in a scan?

Speaking of faux-vintage, there was some Tom Terrific cards too.  And some Nolan Ryan on the Mets cards. I need to make a Nolan Ryan Mets page now that I finally have more cards of him in blue and orange than cowboy hats.

And low and behold, it's one of my all time favorite card sets from the 1990s, that hot pink Classic update set.  I have the whole set somewhere - I recall buying a bunch of those on clearance at Bradlees back in the day - I just didn't have a single of that Julio Machado card. Machado was a pretty terrible pitcher but he is famous for eating iguana and randomly killing a woman after a car accident.  Seriously, I couldn't make that up if I tried.

Not only were there great Mets cards in the package, there were some cards straight off my want lists too.  He sent cards for my Mike Trout collection and my Jim Bunning and Jim Kaat pages.  I am still torn if I should start a Trout collection but I am accumulating his cards anyway.

Also from my player collections were a couple of Jeff Bagwells and Reggie Jacksons, two of my faves.  That center Bagwell hologram is so beautiful yet so vague, I'd never even seen it before. 

There was so much in that package, I obviously ran out of patience for it and just did a Gilligan's Island "and the rest" on it.  Just from here, I see Diamond Kings, more food issues, more Classic, some 1985 All Star cards, 1990 Score Traded, a couple more Reggie Jacksons, and I wisely emphasized the 1966 Topps Dan Napoleon. That is a super card.

Nick put a friendly little note in with the trade pack and yes, I can assure you these cards found me well.  I am just sorry it took me so long to post this awesome trade.  Thanks, Nick!

*it's an industry term

Football '13 Week 5: It Belongs In a Museum.

       Back in the early '90s, the shiny high end parallel war scorched the earth.  Every brand came out with a high end brand and every high end brand tried to out-shiny the other guy.  It was an ever escalating battle that was eventually deemed moot by serial numbers and game used swatches.  It also left a few brands in its wake.  One of them was one I thought could have been a contender: Score.  Score came out in 1988, a year before Upper Deck.  It was colorful and had big bright pictures.  It's entry in the high end sweepstakes was Pinnacle and Pinnacle looked great.  It had solid designs and great backs.  Then when everyone decided to go full bleed (one of the shots across the bow Stadium Club is responsible for), Pinnacle lost its way.  It stayed simple, but just could not keep up with the SPs and Stadium Clubs of the world.  Score was eventually bought out by Donruss and Donruss was eventually bought out by Pinnacle and by 1997, Score and Pinnacle were gone.  Panini has brought back the Pinnacle name recently, but it just isn't the same. 

The one thing Pinnacle can hang its hat on was what they called the dufex effect.  It made things all shimmery and shiny and it looked wonderful.  Pinnacle referred to these parallel cards as the Museum Collection.  Sadly, I cannot explain why they decided that shiny was museum quality and not, say, painted-style pictures, but who am I to try to explain marketing from the 1990s? For football, they changed the name to the Trophy Collection, because, well, once again, who really knows...

I picked these cards up in recent years and never had the joy of pulling a shiny dufex out of a pack.  I have to think it was kinda mind-blowing in 1994 to pull such a weird wild card.  My, how times have changed.

So shiny, so 90s.  RIP Kory Stringer - always hydrate when you workout.

I never noticed before, but the corner of that Craver card is clipped off.  I also have a card from the wrong year on this page.  I am a terrible curator of my dufex museum. 

Ketchup.

       I hate people who lament how much or little they blog.  I believe I blog just the right amount.  I do it as a hobby or, more to the point, to augment the hobby I love.  I do it when I have time or when I am inspired.  I have gotten behind, though, it would seem, as I have a bunch of drafts and a fuckton of scans that I haven't used.  So what am I gonna do now? Post about brand new cards I just scanned, of course. 

When I returned from New Orleans, there were a few packages waiting for me, one of them an eBay lot I had purchased and seemed to take forever to arrive.  I believe it was coming from Long Island, so I found it in my heart to excuse any Sandy-related delays.  I am a sucker for Topps Triple Threads.  I used to buy a few boxes of the stuff every year.  It seemed I would nail a big hit that would pay for the others.  It was a nice zero sum game.  Then, two years in a row, I kind of struck out and it soured me on the whole thing.  But I still like to have a nice page of the base cards, or in this instance, the sepia parallels:

I bought this lot because I got a lot of other cards that I wanted/can sell.  This is a good looking page and highlights the brief time Hanley Ramirez was in a Miami Marlins jersey. 

The other exciting package was a thick load of 30 cards from COMC.com.  I probably should have waited for Black Friday, but I am a firm supporter of Buy-Nothing Day, so I decided I can spend a dollar or two more for the bulk shipping and wait patiently.  Let's looks at the first nine:

OK, eight.  No surprises here.  Two Gary Carters from this year that I needed.  Two Zack Wheelers to start off my collection of him.  I think he and Matt Harvey will fight for my affection by the end of the 2013 season.  Also here are a 1984 Topps sticker of Tom Seaver and a 2004 Topps Pristine Legend of Reggie Jackson in his Arizona State uniform.  For all my huge Reggie player collection, I did not have single one with him in his Sun Devil digs; now I do.  Lastly, there are a mini Dickey and a golden Dickey, which matches my shiny Dickey.

Second nine:

Since no one seemed to have them to trade, I broke down and grabbed the two short print rookie cup cards from this year's Topps (the Reddick and the Arencibia). I also didn't have the Revere, but somehow overlooked snagging the Brett Lawrie...anybody have that one to spare/trade?  This shipment will expose the self centered habit I have to collect cards of people named Max.  You can see four of them here, two of them fictional (the Mann and Rebo) and two of them real, of which I did not have any (Russell and Monica Maxwell).  Rounding these out is a Cameron Jordan die cut rookie, Saints player I like (more on the direct purpose of that tomorrow or next week) and a OPC Legends card of Claude Lemieux, one of my favorite Devils of all time.  Remember hockey?  Yeah, me too.

This next batch are five 1996 Pinnacle Trophy Collection parallels and four 1984 Topps USFL cards:

I needed these to complete pages...

Here:

and here...

I now have pages of both USFL Topps sets and two from Pinnacle's late 90's obsession with dufex parallels, though I haven't featured the other yet. 

Since I have been obsessed and sorting my football cards, I have a few more to show.  I had found seven faux-vintage cards of two of my favorite old players, Gale Sayers and Joe Namath.

I snatched two more of each...

And now have a fantastic page of The Kansas Comet...


And Broadway Joe:

I should think about putting together that whole Namath UD Football Heroes set.  I do so enjoy those.  Namath and the Jets were my mother's favorite when she was a kid (for obvious reasons).  So while I am not big on the Jets in general, it seems fitting for me to have a page of Joe Willie.  The man is just too epic and awesome not to be represented.

***

You will also notice I updated the header graphic and added a festive holiday background picture (I would hate for all of you to get bored with my layout).  I have a bunch of Mets ornaments that go on my tree each year.  I would do a post about them, but someone already has a definitive Mets Christmas online repository.

Football Week 7: Random Shiny!

      I have spent the last few months trying to sort out the miasma that is my football binders into something with the appearance of a collection.  The deeper in I get, the more messy everything appears to be.  I want to streamline things the way I have my baseball and (for the most part) my hockey collection.  I want nice nine pocket pages with a single theme.  I want my favorite players and cards well represented.  I want it to look like someone applied a modicum of thought to the whole thing.

That brings us to this couple of pages I found this morning.  They are kooky.  They are full of random cards.  Sure, random can be fun sometimes, but wow, these bring random to a whole new level.  I truly would like to know what I was thinking when these pages were created: "Hey! This one is kinda shiny...this one is die-cut...this one is die-cut and kinda shiny, I think I'll stick it in here!"  That would seem to be the maximum amount of brain power that went into this one:

Ahhhh, the late 90's and early aughts were such a wonderful time.  Cards with a patchwork of foil, cuts, see-thru, reflectors, refractors, and whatever the hell dufex is.  This page is glorious in its representation of that era.  I am almost tempted not to change this one at all.  It is so organically haphazard that it almost seems planned.  I really wish it was.  The scan does not do it justice either.  That Tamarick Vanover (great name alert!) in the upper left is a Trophy Collection card. The Jim Harbaugh (current 49ers coach) in the middle left is a Stadium Club Dot Matrix parallel.  Yeah, maybe those card styles mean nothing to you, but in real life, they are sooooooo shiny.  The scans of the Kevin Greene and Edgerrin James on the right kinda show how shiny these cards are.  I could probably blind drivers from 50 yards with that Greene card.  The bottom row is a a trio of foil drenched die cuts.  Upper Deck really loves that little curved notch they used on the Kerry Collins card; they used it as recently as 2010. 

This page has a companion.  Unfortunately, it is not nearly as connected by its randomness:

It would seem that with this page, I really was just sticking cards in the pages.  The Rocket Ismail in the upper left is a Members Only Stadium Club cards and is very shiny (shouldn't he be wearing a jacket?) and apparently, I went completely 5th grade and put in a couple of Marion Butts cards.  That Joey Harrington card in the center square is just as epic as it would appear.  All foil and lightning bolts, it looks like ol' Joe is getting his comeuppance for years of sucking by being electrocuted.  Too bad that insert set was only 6 cards, because a design that dramatic deserves a page of its own.  Sadly, it is downhill from there for this page.  There is a Rick Mirer card that is 1 out of 90,000 - wow, so limited - and a couple of Raiders cards, though one of them is an Upper Deck hologram card of Fred Biletnikoff.  Then it looks like I just stuck a Tom Jackson card in for no reason, since it is neither shiny nor die cut nor a parallel nor anything that would tie it in with the rest of these.  Last but not least is that Earl Campbell card in the middle bottom, which is from 2005, proving I have looked at this page in the last couple years and did nothing about it.  That said, Earl Campbell was a monster.  Never saw him play?  Go take a look...he was amazing.