Farewell Geoffrey

I think I purchased my last cards at Toys-R-Us. I had a good run, it was fun, we had seasons in the ...

Well, one season anyway. I really liked these purple parallels this year. Some teams looked just outstanding on these, when you see the cards. Sight unseen, hearing the description "It's a Purple-Orange card" doesn't exactly whisper 'sign me up' very well.

The red teams can really pop -

- as can the yellow team, i.e. the Pirates. 

At first I thought to try for a team set of them on purple. The Purple Pirates. ARRRR! But I thought of a much better team set for these. A glance at my want list at the end of this post will probably reveal what that small side project is.

I will kind of miss Geoffrey though. He's the big giraffe that is the Toys-R-Us mascot, in case you forgot. Show me a grown-up who says they totally hate being inside one of their stores and I'll show you someone who needs to loosen up a little and let their inner child crack a smile for a few minutes.

I mean a lot of toys are fairly timeless, and the ones you liked might likely still be in there, grinning at you on your way through the toy maze towards wherever that particular store keeps their baseball cards. And then there is all the candy.....I try and move a little faster before the Swedish Fish can reel me in, again.

All the teams do very well on the purple parallel though, even the blue teams:

I noticed courtesy of Night Owl's thoughts on logos tonight that the Rays got the ho-hum effort from Topps there, with just their "TB" cap logo, rather than their sweet shoulder patch, an actual Ray. I mean several teams got a graphic logo, not lettering, on their cards, like the Red Sox with their red socks on every card. See what that did for them? Now you see what it takes to win a Championship there Tampa Bay? I suggest stopping down to 1 Whitehall Street in NYC with a suitcase full of bubblegum, or something. I don't see a red bird on that Redbirds card up there either, come to think of it.

But I was surprised at how the blue teams fared on the giraffe cards. I tend to use them for the  Rangers in my parallel set:

Because were the rather pedestrian Texas "logo" to sire the card border color, this would be the obvious result. Obvious? Yeah, silly, Red + Blue = Purple. Every actual recipient of products sold at Toys-R-Us knows that. I'm not sure what Red/Blue/Purple/Yellow/Green makes though. A single card rainbow? Where's Roy G. Biv when you need him? Hiding in the factory set perhaps.

I went to see the goofy ole giraffe again a week or so back. I wanted to verify for myself that Geoffrey wouldn't hook me up with more of these purple baseball cards for the Update series. They weren't showing up on my new baseball card master, eBay, and I kept hoping maybe Topps was running late on their deliveries to the toy syndicate.

But it was not to be. Instead I bought my first "Mega-Box" (post coming soon), which of course turned out to cost $5 more than at the Big Box store just two doors down, where I immediately went to seek out more parallels. I was starting to feel a little edgy and nervous. I guess I should have been happy they did do up the purple for Series 2, which was new this year I believe.

Maybe next year they will do all 3 Series in the royal color. I won't know, or care. My parallel project this year will be a one-time deal, I know that. I have an excellent new project dreamed up to start on for next year that is totally different.

Now there is one team that doesn't fare so well taking a stand down in toy-land:

too .. Much ... PURPLE!

So with no more new purple cards to chase and it otherwise being the most expensive retail baseball cards of any possible place to purchase said item, I knew it was my last ride on the Giraffe. I surely won't miss their interrogation session at the cash register. They are way into their reward card deal, and I hate those things. My usual experience in such stores runs something like this:

"Do You Have Our Rewards Card?"

Nope.

"Why not?"

I'd rather not have a pound of plastic cards in my wallet.

"Oh you could use your phone #."

I'm not interested.

"Here, the application is free."

I just want to buy this.

"OK, what's your phone #."

You don't need it for this.

"But if you have to return it, we'll have to have a record of it."

You mean if I don't get any cards I need, I can bring them back?

"I'm not sure what you mean. I'll still need your phone #."

I gave at the office.

"Oh, would you like to donate a dollar to our Toys-for-Tots charity drive?"

Why don't you just donate the extra toys you don't sell?

"Just click Yes on the screen there, and then you can write your name on this shamrock giraffe here."

[hands me pen and little paper dealie to sign. Entire store deathly quiet by this point, all staring at the middle-aged guy buying baseball cards but not getting with the program....]

No, I won't miss that. I will miss these cards though. The White Sox cards can always use a parallel:

And sometimes, their cards really pop:

That really is a purple Hector Santiago card, not another contestant on the What Does It Mean? rainbow contest. I think the printers forgot to change the White Sox into the Grey Sox that day, and they also poured a little extra purple in the hopper that day too. These things happen in the Parallel World I live in. Surprises.

I put Hector in my project on a Target Red edition for obvious reasons, though that still didn't help the White Sox escape from last place this year. Only Topps has that kind of power, not me. I'm not sure we want to see a graphical pair of white socks on a baseball card though. Sorry Chicago, Boston just has so much more mojo in that department no matter how much you try to get it to rub off on you with special red uniforms. Trying to crib mojo from the Yankees never works either - just ask those guys up in Minnesota.

So if Hector Santiago there is already accounted for in my Parallel Project with a Bullseye card, does that mean it is up for trade?

It sure does. All the cards in this post are available, except for the Kyle Farnsworth. He's on my 40-card roster, just in case, as I never know how the cards might fall on a binder page. I need a good amount of these wonderful purple baseball cards. I also have a good amount of them I could trade to ... You. 

It's that time of the year, folks. We can't have half-finished rainbows languishing around our collections now can we? 

I know you meant well when you started that rainbow. It seemed so simple. You got a parallel card of your favorite player/team/league/whole set. You thought that would sure look nice with some more identical-but-different copies of that card sitting right next to it. But no matter how many times you stopped at that Big Box store with all the pretty young things inside, you just couldn't pull another segment of that rainbow.

So now the Hot Stove is warming up. You can go for that rainbow you've always wanted ... but you have to give up on that promising rainbow that just isn't going to make it. You'll have to trade:

I need these purple cards:

29 (Beltre), 48 (Cook), 76 (Inge), 85 (Doolittle), 116 (McCann), (140 Davis or 145 Bass);

(182 Choate or 184 Soto or 189 NL Avg Leaders); 211 (J. Parker); 

(230 Robertson or 231 Mesa); 259 (Colon), (308 Jennings or 314 A.J. Ellis)

334 (D. Norris), 346 (Hicks), 347 (B. Anderson), 368 (C. Young), 370 (A.J. Griffin), 

401 (Dempster), 408 (Crisp), 428 (McPherson), 425 (J. Donaldson), 433 (A. Werner), 

436 (Andrus), (446 Parmele or 448 Hudson checklist); (469 Warren or 470 Franceour); 

(491-493); 501 (T. Milone), (504 or 507 or 508 or 510 or 511); 

(513 McAllister or 520 Bourjos); (576 Teheran or 580 Brett Jackson or 581 Simmons); 

582 (S. Smith), (585 Bailey or 588 Jordan Zimmerman); 598 (F. Martinez), 

608 (Nolasco or 609 Baker); 617 (Rodney), (623 Ogando or 627 Price Cy Young); 

(638 Cashner or 641 Chen or 642 Jackson); (656 Diamond or 661 Ryu)

_from the cards in parenthesis I only need one card in each group_

I have these to trade:

Series One: 4, 22, 31, 38, 49, 51, 53, 55, 63, 64, 65, 66, 81, 86, 89, 112, 117, 127, 133, 143, 144, 150, 171, 173, 185, 194, 203, 210, 213, 215, 216, 221, 223, 224, 226, 240, 248, 254, 258, 265, 269, 277, 281, 285, 287, 289, 307, 311

Series Two: 339, 342, 355, 362, 364, 394, 397, 410, 437, 443, 461, 463, 494, 499, 502, 509, 514, 515, 522, 524, 525, 527, 530, 533, 542, 560, 563, 569, 573, 575, 584, 592, 620, 624, 639, 651

Thank You and......

                               stay in touch.

Bonus Pack Inside!

I knew this would happen eventually. I carefully saved all these little packs from my Toys-R-Me Opening Day blister packs, like this one:

These are 3 pack blister packs. Not 2 plus a bonus, cheezy Topps blaster ad-blasting style.

Nor are they 4 pack packs with a price seemingly for 3 packs and a 4th pack, Bonus!

No, the Bonus Pack Inside! is just a little pack of 4 cards from Series One. Just regular cards, no inserts or parallels, you know, the average worthless junk from Topps that only children in awe of a whole universe of toys in a toy store would want. Typing that sentence made me realize I should probably report things accurately. What if I was wrong about that and there was a Platinum 1/1 in there? It would be a crime against baseball cards if a 1/1 from a strangely packaged pack of baseball card packs went in the trash wouldn't it? How could Topps not tell me there might be a 1/1 in there? What if it was a Puig, for Mickey Mantle's rookie card's sake? Oh, wait, Puig wasn't in Series One. A forever lost 1/1! A set that will never be completed! Oh the humanity.

In other words, I finally ripped all the packs, just to be sure. Ripping packs packed in clear plastic where you already know 50% of the contents isn't very exciting, which is a part of the reason it took me some four months to rip them. No 1/1 scores to report, sorry. Actually I was a little curious to see if a Short Print could sneak into one. That woulda been hella cool.

Instead the Bonus Packs Inside! had some pretty odd collation. 9 out of 11 of them had official RC Rookie Cards in them, most of them with 2 out of the 4 cards. One instead was a Topps All-Star Rookie Cup hot pack featuring the Cup on 50% of the cards in it. Geoffrey moves in mysterious ways I guess. Maybe he is trying my favorite description of Topps' basic marketing strategy these days - First Hit's Free, Kids - and the big giraffe has to hook those kids on those valuable rookie cards somehow. But then kids don't buy Bowman Draft Fusion Chrome or whatever they call that set with all the little kids in it. Those are for grown-up investors, so Geoffrey generally takes a pass on dealing those.

The Bonus Packs Inside! were not why I actually went to visit Geoffrey to get my toy-like Opening Day cards. Don't forget Opening Day is in April, now! I do like the Opening Day set though this was the first year I collected it. Someday I'll escape from my technicolor parallel daze and finish out typing up the roughly 1/3 of each insert set I need from it, and the roughly 1/3 of each insert set I have to trade from it. Those darn parallels sure got a hold of me this year, and Opening Day has sure helped the Parallel Project as almost every page of Series 1 and Series 2 in the binder includes a player that was part of Opening Day and thus part of the really nice "Blue Foil" /2013 parallels in it. A lot easier to put together with those than 1 pink, 1 camo, and 1 black on every page as I originally dreamed it up. Now I only need 2 of those. Or even just 1 when I can eventually get a hold of some Factory Set Orange. The Update set might even hook me up with another color I forget. I decided the other day to never, ever, look at a "sell sheet" ever again. I'm already bummed about 2014 baseball cards (not Heritage though), and the NFL didn't even start yet.

And the technicolors derailed that paragraph there a little, sorry, though I'm pretty good at that on my own. I purchased my first Opening Day 2013 Toys-R-Us blister pack looking for a card printed on the cardboard packaging. Like the Justin Verlander mini-set last year, about which I still don't know if I have complete at 3 cards.

Instead I found that the Bonus Pack Inside! (hold your horses now children, I'll show you the Bonus Pack when we get outside the store in just a minute) wasn't the only Bonus inside, though Topps did not print a unique card on all that light-blue cardboard field of stars. They just let that possible sweet card border go to waste, actually. And instead, without even blabbing it to the world on the package like one would expect of both Topps and Geoffrey, they slipped in a single parallel per blister pack. Naturally, it was a Toys-R-Us purple. Among the limited amounts of these I have, I did pull this 1 not of 1:

I'm thinking that one will look sharp on the Trade Bait page I haven't built yet. Harper supercollectors can't build the Harper Super Rainbow without the Opening Day Purple very well can they? Topps Super Rainbow chasers this year need 38 cards at last count if their object of rainbow affection (probably sounds a little strange to those strange people outside The Hobby) appears in Opening Day and one of the AL/NL All-Star retail sets. About 15 of those would be 1/1 cards. They might not want to chase those Bonus Packs Inside! too much. Best of luck finding 15 1/1 cards when those dastardly people that don't open their boxes for 38 years stick one on a shelf somewhere. I hope to meet one of those people holding some 1975 wax some day, personally.

I'm trying to limit the Opening Day cards in the Parallel Project to the Blue Foil only unless I'm in a pinch, and though the first page of the Series 1 binder is a little tough to fill with some serious Star Power in cards 1-10, I did pull a gold Bryce Harper to use, so I can trade away his Opening Day Purple. I'm pretty sure I'll be able to track down a Ryan Braun 1/1 of some odd sort to fill the last slot on that page whenever I need to though.

Now when I found my first little Bonus Pack Inside!, (as I opened this post quite awhile ago now) I knew a certain event would happen eventually with these:

Nice Pull! Michael Young in a vintage uni, complete with Eye Black. I think he got a little crazy with the Eye Black on his wrists though. How many genuine Eye Black cards this year? Oh dear, looks like I need another special binder page to keep up with these important details. Hey, didn't I just see some Eye Black on a card somewhere? Oh, yeah, on that purple card up there. Bryce is a helluva ball-player at only 20 years old, but I think he could still use a few Eye Black lessons from the veteran Michael. Children love Eye Black cards, I know that from all those exciting Panini products I see looking lonely on the shelves everywhere I buy Topps cards.

That was the Bonus Pack Inside!? That's it? Wasn't there a magic Bonus event inside? You promised! Oh dear, Topps and promises, there's a difficult toppic. No, the anticipated event appeared in one of the packs inside the blister:

WAIT a minute! The clear-plastic-wrapped Bonus Pack Inside! already told me Michael Young is safely enjoying a solid .301 hitting career all with the Texas Rangers. A clean-cut American ball-player, generally popular I believe, has to be included in the Opening Day set. Now in the space of 2 packs of baseball cards he plays for the Phillies? Daddy, Daddy, I think I pulled an error card! Can you ask those nice Beckett people about this one for me?

Now I am all grown-up now (Really. Yes, really! I swear!), and I know the deal on this card. It is cool that Michael keeps rocking that Eye Black no matter what team he plays for. Not sure how he will do moving back to the infield every day for Philadelphia now that he plays with a claw for a left hand though, looks like that might be a little difficult.

That card is of course a Photoshop card. And I like it. Yesterday I was bitching at Topps for making a Photoshop card, now I am liking them? What gives? Opening Day comes out in late March of course, just-in-time-parts-delivery-guaranteed for Opening Day, which is in April, you can check your pack to be sure. Series One came out in late January, two months previous, and in between there are two whole months of baseball transactions. And more to the point, there are two months of extra production time with the cards scattered all over the Topps factory floor on 220 galleys while the Topps elves tweak them to perfection, right?

And during that time those MLB General Managers might trade a baseball player, or those rarely popular Agents might cut a new deal for their very-not-Free players with a new team. Then what are the Topps elves to do? If they don't fix up a card, a blogger with a whole 30 some readers every day gets real mad at them!

More importantly, kids don't like baseball cards of a player's previous team. They might take out a pen and change the team on the front of the card, O-Pee-Chee style, so their baseball cards are up-to-date and correct for Opening Day.

I did that to my cards when I was young. Then I could file them in the proper team slot in my card case and all was well again. Someday I will be reunited with my 1975 cards and will get a good look at the damage to my Bert Blyleven Dug-Out / Meathook Card that I can still picture pretty well, now that the nightmares have subsided, except for whatever team it was that I wrote on to it over the word TWINS.

Now where is my 1975 Topps font right when I need it? Wouldn't that be handy for blogging? Topps fonts. Yeah, hella cool. Someone needs to get on that and add it to Blogger. Pay attention up there, Google.

So I think it is cool that Topps does this for the Opening Day cards. I think there were a bit less than ten of them this year. I'll link back to this post in the playoffs when I am all giddy playing with new base cards from the Update set. It will be interesting to see if Topps makes yet another Michael Young, Philadelphia Phillies Third Baseman card with a real picture of him in a Phillies uniform, considering how much time they would have to get things right for me....

...if he still plays for the Phillies by then. He cleared waivers the other day. It's more than difficult enough to collect all of the Sea Turtles this year without post-Trade Deadline super super short prints like we had last year.

Those elves had best be working late this summer, tweaking those 330 Update galleys with images fresh from the world wide web of everything ever, right till the Big Box truck backs up to the door for the first pick-up. If they don't, I'm sure I'll get mad at them again.

I laughed at the front, I laughed at the back

Has a baseball card ever flipped us the bird before?

'course, that's just the luck of the shutter there with how Gio holds his glove, so I bet it's been printed on card-stock before. But then, he is smiling. He must know I am working on a Frankenset called Uhh-Oh, The Pitcher Is Smiling At Me.

I spent Opening Night Day driving onwards towards an exciting appointment with my insurance agent tomorrow, then the next day an even more exciting meeting with some guys from state and federal regulatory agencies. The cool thing is my client has to attend that meeting, and the gov't peeps will be telling my client exactly what I have been telling him already, even though his boss refuses to listen to certain facts.

The good news for blog readers is that I got to visit with Geoffrey twice more along the way, and there could be an especially dusty store to visit tomorrow, as I am in a state without an MLB team. But, then, both Toys R Us I went to this morning were also. I didn't find any more of those cut-your-own Verlanders, but I fed my purple jones some more. I'll get one last (hopefully) purple hit tomorrow and then I can put up a full have/need list for 2013 Topps Opening Day.

The bad news is that the 20% off sale on MLB "equipment" at Toys-R-Me is over now. Maybe single stores might still have a buy-one-get-2nd-at-50%-off deal on cards, but I only ever saw that in one store.

I did pick up one trick from the 'ole Giraffe today. I noticed at the second store there were no blister packs of regular '13 Series One on the little free-standing card tower rack thingie that is the flame to baseball card moths like me, even though it has dwindled down to a single side of sports cards. Those Yu-Gi-Oh monsters seem to get stronger every year, be careful out there. So like any experienced big box store shopper, I figured I should check the register aisles for wayward baseball card packages, and there they were, scores of blister packs, rack packs, and fat packs, just waiting to tempt all those milfy baseball fans stuck waiting in line with Jr.'s new video game. How did Griffey make the cover of MLB '13? I dunno, I was busy gawking at something there in the line. What did you say?

I don't really need any more Series One, but those purples kinda sing to me. There's a stack of them on my hotel desk right at hand right now.

Shhhh. I think I can hear them..... I think they're singing "From our imagination,

And when he's tall, he's what we call

A dinosaur sensation!

oh dear, be careful with these things. Quick, turn them over, that will shush them....

oh noooo Mr. Bill, they're still singing! A Topps pun just wasn't strong enough! Maybe these things really are for children after all.

Cutting another Verlander

Huh? Who would cut an extra tall power pitching dominating starter with obvious Hall of Fame potential?

No, no team would cut such a player. But of course, the Houston Astros could hardly take the field with just one player, could they? I'll get back to that.

Yup, I found another 2012 Opening Day Justin Verlander photo variation, though of course I have to cut it into standard baseball card size myself. That makes 3 now. And now it is the perfect day to post this.

A few days ago I found a kinda out-of-the-way Toys R Us, maybe a new one. I had been all through that town all winter long, but I had used some random internet yellow pages type search result to show me where Geoffrey had built his stores, rather than the official Geoffrey.com site. Turns out the site I clicked on was like a couple years old, and it never listed the one that was closest to me. But it was the top search result, and it worked better (i.e. loaded faster) than the tell us your-zip-code official site, which then loads a map you can't scroll with on mobile.

I have had this same problem with searching for Friendly Local Card Shops, going to several locations that were no longer the correct address. Just because information is on the Internet, does it have to stay there forever? Google, you fail sometimes. I know you are listening ... get this stuff together!

So I finally go to the nearest Toys R Us all along, in hopes of finding more of these blister packs of 2012 Opening Day, plus some hopes to get some more 2013 Opening Day too. I found one 3-pack pack of '12, and that was it. This store moves the baseball cards so slowly, they still had blister packs of 2011 Series One (no bonuses at all in that one, I pack-searched the blister pack very carefully). They even had Complete Factory Sets of 2011 for only $79.95. Those came with a special refractor card of Geoffrey himself! Sadly, I didn't get to read the back, as the last thing I would ever buy is a Complete Set over-priced by about $30. Those Geoffrey refractors sure tore up the hobby now didn't they?

But overall I can't complain. I did get what I hoped to get. Another Verlander in the 2012 style. I hope to figure out just how many of these there are. Kind of a cool retail only set, albeit of only one player, but quite unique these days, which no longer features Kelloggs cards, or Burger Kings, or K-Marts.

And of course today had the big news of Justin signing a 5 year contract extension with the Tigers. Which was immediately buried in the national media by Buster Posey's extension. Hitters will always generate more press than pitchers.

I found out in a neat way - Tigers GM Dave Dombrowski appeared in the broadcast booth at the beginning of the Tigers next-to-last Spring Training game. Kind of another Spring Treat. Much like the other day, I had forgotten that Dombrowski likes to chat on the air with Dan and Jim once in a while.

Overall though, the news today kind-of gives me the blahs. Perhaps it was a blessing that the Posey news overshadowed a new high for paying a pitcher. Back when Felix Hernandez signed a few weeks ago, I looked at his pay in an odd way, and I looked into this again today.

Verlander will make about $28 million a year when the extension kicks in. He will likely be averaging 3,500 pitches a season, as he has been lately. That's $8,000 per pitch. Eight Thousand Dollars. For each pitch.

I can't even wrap my mind around that. Sometimes, I think professional sports has just gone too far. This is one of those times.

On top of that, I'm losing my enthusiasm for the Tigers somewhat, though this is something that has been growing far before today. Their owner, Mike Illitch, wants to win a World Series. He played in the minor leagues and has overall been an excellent owner and a decent citizen of Detroit.

But much like the Red Wings before the salary cap, he is attempting to just purchase his way to the top. I think at one point the Wings had a #1 line that was composed of purely All-Stars, thanks to Illitch's checkbook.

Now, sure, Verlander is a product of the Tigers organization, so I can't quite say his wins are purchased victories. But if he had come up with a half-dozen or so well-known "small market" teams, he would obviously have never stayed with one. He is that good after all.

The greatest thing to happen to the Red Wings was the Salary Cap, in my opinion. They just kept on winning and going to the playoffs. This illustrated the skill of the Front Office more than anything.

Sure, baseball as recently as last season is littered with examples of high payroll teams failing miserably. The Dodgers seem to be this year's test of the idea of purchasing wins, moreso than the Tigers. And we've all seen Moneyball. Yet every low-payroll team that makes the playoffs just seems to be the exception that proves the rule. The Twins made it to a lot of playoff games. But did they make it to the Series?

Somewhere else today I read that Alex Rodriguez alone will make more than the entire Houston Astros team this year. I know who I will be rooting for on Sunday night. Winter is coming!

And really, this whole subject is just sad, and talked out, and nothing ever changes, except salaries continue to go up, up, up, as do ticket prices, and cable TV packages. So far, audio-only is still pretty cheap, but it went up $5 this year for using my mobile app. But it is just sucking the life out my enjoyment of baseball cards today. I feel like my Home Team is, well ... I'll still be rooting for them.

But I feel like I am rooting for the Yankees.

No one likes cutting their own cards...

...but it can be worth it. Fortunately, I don't have access to my random amounts of old Hostess cards to scan some severely sad seventies scissors selections.

So just where did this 2012 Justin Verlander card that you've never seen before come from?

Here is the source material:

Courtesy of Geoffrey once again. Who's Geoffrey? Which blog is his? No, no, Geoffrey is the name of the giraffe that is the mascot for Toys R Us. This is a blister pack that held 3 packs of '12 Opening Day, with the usual T-R-U mark-up, so it cost $3.99 for 3 packs. I guess the cut-your-own bonus card is supposed to help make up for that. It has been nice buying cards from Geoffrey this month at least, when the big ole cuddly giraffe is offering them up at 20% off.

And there are random surprises about the 2013 Opening Day blister packs at Toys R Us too. I'll cover that here very soon.

Although it clearly states "Cut Out Your BONUS TRADING CARD Under This Pack" at the top of the blister there, I didn't quite understand that part. I'm slow sometimes. I thought there would be a bonus card in there loose, so I wasn't all that careful peeling open the blister and I put a crease in this 2012 Topps Opening Day Justin Verlander image-variation card. Short Print? Well, in this hobby there are no hard and fast definitions of that term, that's for sure. So I'll leave that alone for a second.

It is interesting that Topps put the April 5, 2012 date on that particular piece of cardboard, just as they do with the Opening Day parallels of late, and only on the parallels now. Does that imply that some of these variant cards might have a color parallel? Don't ask me. Were any printed and cut in the normal process? Again, dunno.

I have put off this post for a few weeks of owning this "card", because I seriously didn't look forward to the required scissors work. Overall it came out pretty good I think. Two slight creases, one wavy edge. The word "mint" will certainly never be attached to the effort though.

Which was OK, but it made for good practice to get this card:

YES! I wasn't looking forward to the effort required to ever get this one. I didn't buy many cards in 2012 (a story I keep promising to tell here) and I'm going to just buy a factory set of them. (Horrors! Yes, I know.) But that means little chance to ever pull one from a pack, or any of the other short-prints from that set to trade for it. And I will have enough of a climb to get the '13 SPs that I want.

I hope maybe to discover the story of this card somewhere. Did they really put that on the scoreboard at Comerica for this shot, or was it done later with digital wizardry? Lots of questions on this one.

For the first week I owned these I thought I might have some fun with saying I scored a 2012 Justin Verlander Short Print Blank Back 1/1!!!!! But then I looked at the actual back:

Pretty boring. And I would just add that I will still use this platform to wonder about the high value of the 1/1 blank back cards. Who wants a baseball card with nothing on the back? Yeah, yeah, there is only one of them. In the Whole World! And I own it! That's what makes it valuable Dude! OK, you get your kicks your way, I'll get mine a different way.

So, of course, I still don't own the 2012 Topps Justin Verlander Short-Print Image Variation baseball card. Technically. And though it is a little hard to see in the small picture above, there is just a trace of the residual gray cardboard this wonderful slab of a cardboard hero was cut from. A Printing Error card. This makes it totally unlike any other version of this card, anywhere. A true 1/1. And I own it.

Buying Cards from Geoffrey

Yeah, yeah, terrible image. 'cept sparkle cards look really sparkly at night.

This card was acquired within just a few feet of a My Little Pony collector's tin, so naturally tonight's purchase was jammed with sparkly goodness. Eric Hosmer RC was also there among the diamond parallels, plus a Cognac Sandy Koufax - a double no less!

But who's Geoffrey? Get with it, card collector:

If you want crazy Purple baseball cards, you must learn to recognize the Toys R Us mascot. You would think he would get his own super short print in the Opening Day set eventually.

It seems that I am Chasing® a certain Rookie Card™ of a fishy player that came out in the 2011 Topps Update set. I do not want to just buy one, what kind of collector would that make? Topps would be so disappointed in me. Plus, I figure extra Updates will make the best trade bait to finish out the rest of my '11 needs, though it will be a good two months or so before I am reunited with my '11 cards and I can type in a list of haves and needs for you dear readers.

But it seems the '11 Topps Updates are disappearing at a rapid clip from the stores. There is far more 2010 left on the shelves at the out-of-the-way 'marts I have been visiting, most of which have exactly zero '11 Update left. One friendly LCS I visited last week had even doubled their pack price of '11 Update up to $4. Any listing of them you can Googlebay tends to include the letters RC along side the name of a certain soooo terribly underpaid player/wage-slave from California or Anaheim or Los Angeles or whatever the heck town he plays in these days. It'z all zzzz out there for me; it'z like their games start in extra inningz or somethin'.

The whole deal almost has me thinking It's A Conspiracy! This is because during my fruitless quest for some purple cards at Toys R Us back on Spring Training Opening Day, I asked the clerk when they might be restocking those special $3 packs with the 3 purple parallels. This about made the store's wheels fall off. But in retail, everyone aims to please, and they were determined to figure out my baseball cardnerd question no matter what. It turns out that baseball cards are handled by an outside vendor, not by T-R-Us employees, and they thus could not predict when he would bring back the special purple packs. And that vendor's name had the word "Beckett" in it. Ha! No wonder I had struck out on the purples! They are so fricking cool looking this year the insider dude kept them all!

No, I don't really think that is true. The last thing anyone drawing a paycheck with the word 'Beckett' on it probably wants to see when they get home from work is a baseball card.

And if it was true, why would that store have had a bunch of '11 Update sitting there? Surely the baseball card market savants wouldn't let them just sit there gathering Yu-Gi-Oh dust any more, when there just might be Angelfish gold inside. But I had Purple-on-the-brain right then and I left them in their sad dust. The 2010s were marked down, maybe I could just wait it out, I thought then.

Fast-forward a fortnight or so (do you know how many days are in a fortnight? I bet you don't either), and I am back in a Cards-R-Me store and there is that Jeter-Pujols-Suzuki triptych running towards me from a blaster box. Plus some 2013 purple packs, and even a 2012 Series One, as I was babbling about the other night.

But, alas, there was no all-time all-fish RC in there. FF a bit more to tonight, when I have a long drive crossing state lines to help out a client....which would lead me right past another big yellow giraffe to pillage.

It seems that us card addicts aren't too fond of paying extra for our "needs". So ole Geoffrey moves the Topps product pretty slowly - I could have acquired 2006 or 2007 cello packs, if I hadn't drawn a line at 2010, beyond which I will not go back. And right now there is a 20% off sale on sports cards, making a 3-purple pack only $2.39 each - only 80¢ a card! Yeah, yeah, you get a regular pack of regular '13 cards too, but I have all of those. I need more Purple.

And tonight, the long-necked maestro of disposable income (I'm running out of toy store similes), had a special treat for me - 3 '11 Update rack packs. Though I had been developing a fondness for the "Fat Pack", chronicled here recently, I also admire the "rack pack". So much less wasteful packaging than the "blaster", and I have way more useless patch cards than I will ever need. Blasters are for working on your color parallel set, in my mind at least, and I am not clear if '11 Update even had color parallels?

So there it was - 216 more chances to get that darn Hey Mikey, They Really Like You card. At which I totally FAILed once again.

But Topps has a way of rewarding it's steady-eddies. And the poorly shot image above was perhaps the best pull so far, with bunches of random purples to peruse yet to go, and at least one more blog post, not to mention my eventual feed-me-purple-baseball-cards trade beggings.

A 2011 'Update Anthony Rizzo "Hope Diamond" RC parallel.

No, you nuts, I did not check the serial # to see if it was sufficiently low or matched his uni # to make you really go nuts. But I will of course.

So what will I do with that treasure? I dunno. I suspect it will get me to try and tune in a bit more WGN this summer.

And I will probably never plumb the mystery of the name of this bunch of parallels. They seem to be worth up to a couple Andrew Jacksons, rather than a couple George Washingtons, like most "hits" we drool over, but they ain't worth nowhere near (holy triple negative sports-quote-like construction!) what the Hope Diamond is worth. And the Hope Diamond is blue because it is full of Boron. And here we spend too much time defending baseball cards from being boring.