let's play hockey! and to the game?

i really do appreciate folks who trade cards through the mail. whether it's through tcdb (i have yet to complete a trade that way) or through email or blog posts, it's not a small effort these days to pull cards and get them on their way. it's even more difficult to send cards into this country at the moment, so angus of dawg day cards deserves a hearty thanks for sending me some items in return for my "almost free stuff friday" event.

plus, it is now hockey season (although it's still baseball season in my world), and the local club started out the season strong with a shutout in st. louis. i'll get to the hockey content in a moment...

i really should have held off on my post showing some of the other returns i received, as these items were en route at that time and they really do bring the international flair i alluded to in the post. first up is a near complete dodger team set of stickers from 1992 panini

however, these are the canadian version of the stickers as you could probably tell by the french position translations. it's always fun to see "premier but" on baseball cards or stickers.

missing from the set are the dodger team logo/header sticker and mike scioscia's sticker. i will for sure need to track those down. the backs of the stickers invite you to "au jeu!"

which is how they have translated "play ball". based on my rudimentary french knowledge, i would have thought that "au jeu" would be "to the game" (and not to be confused with "au jus" which is "with juice"). with these stickers printed in italy, were there some further language barriers in place? i would be interested to know how a french speaking umpire would say "play ball", and now that i think about it "to the game" sort of makes sense.

the other card that angus sent was one of my most wanted non-dodger cards - a 2013-14 o-pee-chee luc robitaille card

minimal french, even on the back

but it's understandable as there is not really any room for a bilingual bio. robitaille remains my favorite hockey player and i was happy each time he returned to the kings. i've replaced this robitaille card with a ron cey oddball on my most wanted non-dodger list, but i would think luuuuuuuuuuuuuc would reappear on that list at some point. i really need to get the rest of my collection (including my robitailles) entered into tcdb so i have better access to what i am missing.

thanks angus for the cards and for avoiding strikes and tariffs!

winter sports

i wasn't born during baseball season so there is nothing to tie my entry into this world to the national pastime. however, i did want to make that sort of connection with the hobby, so i picked up a couple of cards from other sports instead. 

these cards come from their respective 1970-71 topps sets - bobby orr

and lew alcindor

here are their respective backs:

these cards would have been on the counters of stores when i arrived, and both of these fellows were active that day as well.

there is some level of other connections here as i knew bobby orr was number 4 before i knew about duke snider or lou gehrig, and the first pack of basketball cards that i ever purchased included a kareem abdul-jabbar card. both of these cards are in my "meaningful and just because" mini-collection which has been a fun grouping of cards to page through now and again.

one last time

the nhl season is in full swing, but that's not why i am featuring this 1993-94 opc premier luc robitaille card

yes, it is a card of my favorite hockey player, and one that i did not previously own, but it's not one that i sought out. rather, it came from my dad.

during a recent visit, we were going through photos and books and other things and this card was among the other items. it was completely out of place and my dad had no idea where it came from. whether or not it was originally meant for me (he never collected individual hockey cards - just sets) it didn't matter, as he gave it to me now. he had previously handed over his collection to me in the fall of 2018, so this will almost certainly be the last card that i receive from him.

our collecting adventure began when i gifted him a 1966 topps jim lefebvre card for his birthday in 1979 or 1980. lefebvre was his favorite player you see, and i was so into baseball cards that i thought it would make for a nice gift. my dad thought so, too, and although he had supported my hobby by taking me to the lcs and some card conventions, soon we were collecting together.

at some point i will take some of the hockey sets that he bought back in the early 1980's in for grading and see what happens with the gretzky and lemiuex rookies. for now, finding luc and having a conversation with him about our collecting days is enough.

this seaver is not related to tom

several months ago, i picked up one of the non-dodger cards on my "bonus" nefarious 9 list. it's this 1988 topps growing pains card

the text on the card tells you all you need to know about it. that is the late alan thicke who portrayed the seaver family patriarch on the tv show "growing pains".

i wanted the card in my collection because i had a memorable (to me) encounter with thicke - one that i alluded to in the comments on a post about my interaction with nasa legend gene kranz.

so my story goes like this. i was in college when wayne gretzky began his tenure with the los angeles kings. i had been a hockey fan all of my life thanks to my canadian parents, but very few people that i knew also followed hockey. i did have one hockey aware friend who was also attending college in southern california at the time, and we were talking that day about going to a sports bar to watch the kings' opening night game. i said what the heck, let's go to the game. so, we got in my car and drove to inglewood.

we parked in a residential neighborhood and flagged down a very nice gentleman who was selling tickets on a street corner. we gave him all the cash we had, which for poor college students wasn't too much, and went into the fabulous forum. our seats were pretty good - in the lower section of the forum on one of the blue lines. we pretty quickly noticed that the cast of "growing pains" was sitting in the row in front of us. my friend and i were on the aisle of our row, and at one point thicke got up to head to the concourse. i called out to him just as i would call out to gene kranz in a few years' time. thicke didn't immediately respond, but then turned to me and said "yeeeeeeeeeeeeeessssssssss?" at that point i didn't know what to say so we both sort of agreed to go about our own business.

here's my ticket stub from that game

thicke's friend gretzky scored the first kings' goal and the place went crazy. he assisted on three others, and the kings beat the red wings 8-2. it was a really memorable experience and i am glad that my friend and i did the spontaneous thing. i did get a parking ticket for leaving my car where i did, but the $35 fine was worth it. and then, nine days later, i was in dodger stadium with my dad to witness kirk gibson's walk-off home run in game 1 of the world series. not a bad stretch for a sports fan like me!

here's the back of the card, by the way

"meet alan thicke", huh? i kinda sorta did. now if there were only some "l.a. law" cards out there, i could share my most awkward celebrity/actor encounter.

taking time for hockey

the conference finals of the stanley cup playoffs are well underway, with game 4 between the stars and oilers happening tonight. the oilers are the last of the canadian teams in the tournament, and so i am firmly on their bandwagon.

i collected hockey cards for several years in the 1990's and have retained my wayne gretzky and luc robitaille pc's as well as a few other cards here and there. i recently added a few cards to put into my memorials mini-collection as well.

2017-18 ud trilogy henrik zetterberg

this card is the companion to the tomas tatar card i showed in this post six years ago. both feature the patches that the red wings wore for mike ilitch (mr. i) and gordie howe (9), but this one features the white on red versions instead of the red on white that the tatar card features.

i also added a 2017-18 ud opc retro variation of zetterberg

because it shows the gordie howe patch all on its own.

2020-21 upper deck lukas vejdemo

vejdemo is sporting the 16 patch for henri richard, the younger brother of rocket richard. henri was an 11-time stanley cup champion for the habs. eleven!

2022-23 ud trilogy nick suzuki generations

suzuki is sporting the 10 patch for guy lafluer. lafluer was another all-time great who won "only" five stanley cups with the canadiens.

all four of these cards came from sportlots, and i added another to the order:

2014-15 upper deck o-pee-chee stickers luc robitaille

this is giving off 1975 topps baseball vibes for sure. 

maybe someday i will get my gretzky and robitaille collections entered into tcdb. until then, i am hoping to see the cup return to edmonton!

let's! rip! hockey!

it's been years since i bought any packs of hockey cards, but i was in target the other day and saw some upper deck series two blasters 

and figured i would shoot my (slap) shot at a connor bedard young guns card.  upper deck guarantees at least one young guns card per blaster, and they are listed as being inserted in 1 of every three packs. there are four packs per blaster, but each pack has 12 cards (remember those days?) so the cards wind up averaging about 50 cents apiece.

i feel i should mention that back in the late 1980's and early 1990's, i was collecting hockey cards probably at a greater pace than i was collecting baseball cards. i grew up in a hockey fan household and got to go to a couple of games a year. my dad made sure that we saw wayne gretzky play in the 1980 all-star game in los angeles, and when the great one joined the kings in 1988, i just happened to be living close enough to get to the forum several times to see him in person. even better, my dad purchased some hockey sets in his early collecting days, including the 1979-80 set. unfortunately, he chose topps and not o-pee-chee, but i have a wayne gretzky rookie card as a result so i'm not complaining. 

being from socal, our team was the kings, although i was an inaugural season season ticket holder for the ducks. same for the wild, who came into existence a couple of years after i moved to the twin cities.  anyway, i've let my hockey fandom lapse somewhat so i had no idea what to expect in these packs.

first pack was cole/colton heavy as far as the inserts were concerned. i got an outbursts parallel of colton sissons

an ecliptic insert of cole caufield

and an honor roll insert of cole guttman

i don't follow hockey that closely anymore (i've only been to one wild game this season) so these names are new to me. there was a wild card in the pack, that of joel eriksson

there was also a young guns card in there, but i missed it when i opened the pack since it was a kraken player - 

and not a blackhawk. with that first pack, i beat the odds which is nice i guess. the outbursts parallel is listed at 1:45 packs, and wound up being the scarcest card i pulled in the box. the other two inserts are listed at 1:6 for the ecliptic and 1:3 for the honor roll.

pack 2 had another wild card - mats zuccarello

plus a kirill kaprizov o-pee-chee glossy insert

kaprizov is good at hockey. those glossy inserts are 1:3 packs.

the pc's inserts are 1:4, and this pack had sebastian aho

in it. i had to look his name up because he is only "s. aho" on the card. it looks like "pc" stands for "player character" and not "player collection". the circle under aho makes me think that maybe there is a tie-in to a video game but there's nothing on the card to confirm this.

the last insert of pack 2 was a "dazzlers" card

of sid the kid. although i guess sidney crosby is no longer a kid. these cards are 1:4 packs and remind me of the pink fireworks parallels in panini baseball products.

pack 3 was the one that had the young guns card that i noticed, so i beat the odds with two in the box. and, even better, i noticed this one because it was a blackhawk! however, it was kevin korchinski 

and not bedard.  still, it features the memorial patch that chicago is wearing for their late ceo rocky wirtz, so i can find a place for it in my collection among the few other hockey memorial patch cards i have (here's a link to a post with many of them shown, including one for rocky's dad). i haven't kept up with hockey memorial patches in recent years, but i may go and find a card for the guy lafluer patch that the canadiens wore a couple years ago as well as the gordie howe patches that the red wings wore after he passed.

the only two kings cards in the box were in this third pack - kevin fiala

and gabe vilardi

there appear to be a ton of new and alternate uniform styles in the nhl. the vilardi card features one i had not seen before for the kings. vilardi is wearing gary shuchuck's number, by the way.

as for inserts, this pack had another honor roll card

and an instinctive card

of jake allen. see what i mean about the jerseys? i had no idea that the canadiens, of all teams, wore baby blues. anyway, those instinctive inserts are seeded at 1:4.

the fourth pack had another o-pee-chee glossy insert

a deep roots insert of andrew mangiapane

(which i believe reflects the fact that he is in his seventh season with the flames), and a canvas insert of tanner jeannot

i actually really enjoyed opening these packs even though i recognized only a couple of the players. i am reminded that upper deck puts out a quality product and now am pining for the days that they had a license to produce baseball cards.

all in a week

i went to a card show on april 15 - jackie robinson day - and my favorite purchase of the day was this 2022 topps on-demand rookie of the year 75th anniversary set card of the first rookie of the year

this show was not the regular monthly show, but rather the bi-annual show that the owner of one of the local card shops organizes in a church gymnasium. fittingly, i wore my dodger jackie robinson t-shirt

that i bought at dodger stadium back on opening day in 1997. 

the show was the end of a baseball card themed week for me, in that i stopped in at two local card shops on a couple of the days prior to the show.  on tuesday, an appointment got me close to a shop in the southwest part of the twin cities, so i stopped in for some supplies and to dig through a couple of their monster boxes of singles.

this is the card shop with a bunch of those boxes, but they are stored in such a way as to be difficult to access. the shop is so cluttered that there is really nowhere to put the boxes. it is mildly frustrating, but i still like to look through them so it isn't bad enough to keep me away. i picked out a couple of 2023 topps heritage purple refractors

and a 1994 signature rookies draft picks bonus signature jed hansen card

for the double play collection. most of the cards i pulled were for others, but these three are keepers. i picked up another double play card

but wound up selling it. it is a fairly rare "auction" card from 1998 topps gallery. it wound up covering my outlay for all of the cards i bought from this shop.

a couple of days later, i found myself near another card shop, and stopped in to see what they had to offer. this is the shop whose inventory of singles are either in display cases or part of an online inventory. the last time i was in, i heard one of the workers say that they were considering setting out some dime boxes, and sure enough, i saw some on a table. it turned out that they were quarter boxes, but still worth looking through.

it was a mish-mash of all sports, but i found a few for me and a few for others, including this 1997 fleer flair showcase row 0 brett butler

and a 2015-16 upper deck hockey card of luuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuc robitaille

the big story here is that i also bought a box of 2023 topps big league. i was undecided about this product when i first saw images of the cards at cardboard connection, but nick at dime boxes sent me a couple of singles, and so i figured i would add more of the cards to my collection. i had originally hoped to find singles at the aforementioned card show that was coming up later in the week, but this shop had boxes priced at $50 so i went ahead and pulled the trigger.

i think we all agree that the tier system topps applied to this set (similar to what panini has done with their select release) is dumb and annoying for a product like this. it does, however, allow for nice pulls like this:

red foil adley rutschman rookie!

my blue foil sp was jose altuve, so i will just keep going with an example of the regular foil short prints by showing this corbin burnes card

with opening day out of the picture, big league is your one-stop shop for bad photoshopping:

i would much prefer to have seen these guys as dodgers in the set. even if that meant not getting a jd martinez dodger card yet.

there's jd's card along with a few other dodger base cards.

as for non-dodgers, here's ketel marte turning two

and then there are the inserts...

i am not necessarily a fan of the idea of the city connect uniforms, but i do like some of them, including colorado's

the dodgers wore their city connect stuff in a game last weekend, although it was a mashup. they wore the blue "los dodgers" jerseys, but white pants, and the hat was not the "los dodgers" hat but rather a blue hat with the white interlocking "la" but with a black bill. it didn't look good.

bo jackson looks good on modern cardboard, though, and i was happy to find his 8 bit ballers

and roll call

cards among my inserts.

i found two of the three dodger big leaguers inserts

as well.

and then on saturday was the card show. i wound up purchasing cards from four different dealers. the first dealer was one that i had bought from at a previous show, and i was looking forward to looking through his 50 cent box.  it wasn't as fun as the last time, but i still picked out 23 cards that i got for $10.

here are some of the dodgers i pulled

that's a pretty bland batch of cards now that i look at it, but i was happy to find a few parallels and that chrome decades' best jackie robinson card.

here are some non-dodgers that were among the 23 cards i found

i guess i actually bought 24 cards because the roses were in the same penny sleeve and i didn't notice until i got home. i was really just after the framed parallel.

and yes, that is a basketball card in the scan. in fact, it's a 2021-22 panini donruss optic anthony davis insert

i had been looking at some articles about the nba play-in games earlier in the week and noticed that all players were wearing a memorial patch for bill russell (the celtics great, not the dodgers' shortstop of the team of my youth) and figured i would keep an eye out for a card showing that patch. instead, i found the davis card that shows the black band worn for former commissioner david stern, and the circular patch that the lakers wore for kobe bryant. i figured i would add it to the few non-baseball cards in my memorial collection.

the next dealer was another guy i had bought from in the past, but he was more organized this time with higher prices on his singles. i wound up buying a $10 grab bag and the jackie robinson card at the top of this post for a total of $10. the grab bag was mostly inserts and rookies, and i was guaranteed either an auto or a relic. i got a relic 

from 2017 topps tribute of xander bogaerts. i thought maybe it was a black parallel, but no, it looks like this is jus the base. i had to remind myself that i was at the show to buy cards that i could see rather than packs or bags like this. hopefully future gcrl remembers this.

next up was a dealer i hadn't seen before who had four monster boxes with cards set at 50 cents plus other dollar boxes. i wound up with 32 cards from the 50 cent boxes and 6 from the dollar boxes. he gave me a slight discount and i got them all for $20. i'll just show a couple of the more unusual cards, like this 2021 topps x mickey mantle collection card

it really looks like it is homemade. i think they tried to print it as if it were vintage but it doesn't look right. i can't believe it is a fake, but who knows.

i had never seen npb cards at a show, but this guy had a few. this is a 2021 topps npb card of former yankee zelous wheeler

it's a blue parallel, actually.

the last dealer was one that i had bought from before and provided some pretty good deals with their bargain boxes. this could have been due to some math errors since the person tracking things was keeping track of costs on a post-it note. this time, however, i think any math errors were not in my favor. 

i wound up with 52 cards from the 50 cent boxes (all came in semi-rigid holders so bonus), plus 42 cards from the 7/$1 boxes and then 29 other cards that varied in cost from 25 cents to $3 each. i spent $50 for the 113 cards so i am not really complaining.

it was nice to finally see some 2021 topps chrome platinum anniversary cards in the bargain boxes, and i was able to add a few dodger base cards that i needed

the zach mckinstry parallel was not in the 7/$1 box, but was only 50 cents so still a bargain.  

i also found some 2022 topps chrome sonic parallels in the fifty cent box, including a black and white ray wave refractor of albert pujols

i wrote a short post about this set the other day. it is definitely not a necessary set, but i do like the refractor parallels.  here's a purple and yellow refractor of jorge soler

that was also just 50 cents.

this seller also had some cheap relics and autos. i found a 2020 panini chronicles classic autographs card of dodger legend terrance gore

gore appeared in 2 games for the dodgers. he played half an inning on defense in one appearance and pinch ran in the other. he doesn't have too many dodger cards as a result, although he did appear in 2020 topps update. i don't chase these sorts of autos (certified as a dodger when they were a dodger) like wrigley wax does with his cubs, but i was pretty happy to find even a sticker auto of an obscure dodger!

however, perhaps my favorite find from this dealer was this card from 2021 topps big league

it's one of those ssp home team tradition cards (the dodger dog was featured for us dodger fans), and i know bernie brewer's slide is a fairly popular thing. not a bad find for a quarter.

this post is already too long so i won't show any of the other cards i picked up. all in all, it was a good week on the card front.

and then there was the hotel show i went to this past friday.........