Sort 'em If You Got 'em.

       Yesterday was National Baseball Card Day and no, I couldn't get to the National this year (or any year, yet) and no, I didn't get out to my local card shop.  But if you saw my last post, you know that I had plenty to do - I had 925 cards sent from COMC to sort through and revel in.  And that's exactly what I did:

These piles all make sense, to me anyway.  The majority are baseball cards but there are also football, hockey, basketball, bowling, tennis, golf, softball, gaming, movie (James Bond, Batman, and Star Wars among others), music (Beatles and Guided By Voices), and all sorts of Goodwin Champions which include all those things and more. There are three separate piles of Mets cards alone, and also one each for the Saints and the Devils and the Knicks, and a couple of players even got their own piles, Tom Seaver and Todd Hundley (no, really, I am a Hundley super-collector at this point). After that there are Hall of Famers and current stars and retired stars and birthday boys and all-star rookie trophy cards.  It was a fun few hours to go through all these.

I obviously can't highlight and scan 925 cards (103 scans! That would more than double my Seaver memorial post) so I will semi-randomly grab some cards that are either fun or fun to look at or just interesting, to me anyway.  Plus there were a few surprises even for me because after two-plus years, I had forgotten I'd bought them.

The top three here are some multi-player game used cards, one with Gary Carter and Mike Piazza - basically my two favorite players of all time - one with a "Bat Rack" of Mets with the aforementioned Carter and Piazza plus Jose Reyes and Kaz Matsui (remember when he was a thing?) and the third is a glorious mix of 1973 World Series adversaries from the UD Decades set, that one has Tom Seaver and Bud Harrelson along with Reggie Jackson and Bert Campaneris.  THAT is the best card I completely forgot I bought and I was giddy when I saw it.  But it also begs the question, how could I ever forget that card?

 

There is also a Ralph Kiner announcer card, a rarity of him with Mets colors, a great Lee Mazzilli from 1979 Hostess (I have the panel with Steve Garvey and Mike Schmidt but I needed it solo), a 1970 OPC Mets World Champions #1 card, a low numbered Frank Thomas jersey card (with pinstripes!) and a pair of one of my favorite unusual uniform subjects - Pete Rose on the Montreal Expos - I now have a complete page of him in French red, white, and blue.

Let's do a second nine, shall we, I can't just show you less than 1% of these, can I?

First off is the other side of that Carter/Piazza tandem jersey card.  Now I have to decide if it goes with the Carter collection or the Piazza.  Maybe Carter because he's technically the 'front' of the card?  Then you have two modern Topps Hall of Fame short prints.  I am not a big fan of these but sometimes Topps picks really cool photos for them and these two definitely fit that category.  The Koufax is a magnificent shot of him admiring the scoreboard from his perfect game and the Nolan Ryan is a brilliant candid shot that should/could have been one of his 70s cards.  Topps should only pick pictures of this quality when doing these short prints (alas, they often do not).

 

 

There's also a few fun vintage cards here, a 1974 Tony Oliva with its proud position designation of Des(ignated) Hitter, and a late 70s run of Tom Seaver O-Pee-Chee cards.  That last one in the left corner is a 1998 Fleer Tradition Todd Hundley '63 Classic card numbered to /63.  I told you I was becoming a Hundley super-collector.  I also had my eye on a Piazza version of this card but alas did not pull the trigger on it and now it is gone and I might never see another.  I have put that card in my Needed Nine, you can find that list on the right side margin of the blog.  

I teased it in the post from the other day so here is a much better view of the 1952 Andy Pafko #1 I acquired:

I am not certain why I ever bought into the hype of this card but somehow over the years I did and I just decided I must own this stupid thing.  I ended up getting it during the COMC Black Friday sales and the price was right for this condition.  I think what I really like most is the randomness of someone like Andy Pafko being the first card in their first big set.  He was a good ballplayer but nothing anyone would ever consider a superstar.  Donruss went with Ozzie Smith, Fleer went with Pete Rose, Score went with Don Mattingly, Upper Deck lucked out and chose Ken Griffey Jr. over Gregg Jefferies and Gary Sheffield for their lead off but somehow Topps went with Andy Pafko as card number one. If anyone knows the solid reason why they chose him (I don't recall ever seeing one) please enlighten me.  For now, Andy has a hot date with the other two 1952 star cards I keep protected: my Gus Zernial and my Bob Feller.  

I have gotten to the point in my Gary Carter collection where the only cards I don't have are either strange local oddball issues, low numbered monstrosities, or (somewhere in between) just plain old stuff I don't think is worth the money.  I did pull the trigger on a solid gold Gary that I just couldn't pass up during that black Friday sale.  I must say, it is shiny!

I doubt these Danbury Mint cards will ever be worth much (I also bought a Jerry Koosman one in this batch) but I suppose if times are tough I could melt them down and make fillings out of them or something.

Lastly is a card that probably only means something to me but I am so happy that I got it, the nerd in me is still glowing.  It is a 2019 Goodwin Champions Robert Pollard printing plate, a yellow 1/1. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The pandemic left me a lot of time at home to sit and listen to music and Uncle Bob here cranked out something like seven albums (and counting) during 2020 and 2021.  Maybe it is the old man in me, but I don't listen to a lot of music the way I did when I was a younger man but the pandemic did a lot of strange things to all of us so it was nice to have new Guided By Voices albums flying out at the rate they used to in the 1990s.  This card will now be the centerpiece of my Bob Pollard collection from that Goodwin set and I have to trust in myself that I don't become that lunatic who needs to hoard the one-of-one cards.  It helps that I haven't seen any of the others for sale...you know, not that I've checked or anything.  Now excuse me, I have 905 other cards to put in their proper place in my collection. 

Do You Believe in Miracles?

 Kind of.

This package was waiting for me on my doorstep yesterday:

yes, that is a 1952 Topps #1 Andy Pafko along with 1989 LJN Baseball Talk. Fun Times!

If you cannot read that tiny little print on the label, it came from the glorious Seattle suburb of Redmond WA from a company you might know, COMC.  Remember them?  Well, I requested this package in February and it was scheduled for a May delivery - I doubt you need a calendar to see what today is but I can assure you, it is not May.  I am not saying I completely gave up on ever seeing it but their pandemic combination of horrible customer service and empty promises made me wonder if 2022 was out of the question.  But it did arrive.  They have answered emails faster of late and it was very well packaged when I got it.  You can see a nice tease of the stuff that was on top and I am going to spend the weekend sorting and enjoying the 900+ cards that are inside.  I am not here to praise COMC or bury them right now since the world is still knee deep in madness but I will say to anyone reading this wondering if they will ever see their package: miracles do happen.

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. 

***

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.

Mail Call: Shiny!

       I am a sucker for free shipping.  Yes, I am the kind of buffoon who will buy extra stuff just to qualify for it.  Like when COMC.com has one of their free shipping promotions there is usually a minimum number involved, but this really isn't a problem for me since I am pretty active buying and selling on their site.  Well, this spring has thrown all sorts of curve balls and I just haven't been as card-centric as I normally am.  So when I noticed they were having a free shipping for 30+ cards promotion a couple weeks ago, I was forlorn to see that I only had 6 cards waiting in my shipping queue.  Do you think this deterred me?  Did you read the first two sentences of the post? 

I delved into my watch list but only saw high priced stuff for the most part.  I did, however, notice two very reasonably priced inserts from last year's Bowman set.  These inserts were not only Mets cards, they were shiny.  Very shiny.  I got swept up in the moment and decided it would be easiest to make a page of each of these inserts to qualify for my free shipping.  Hey, a bargain is a bargain and shiny is shiny.

The first page is of the 1989 Bowman is Back inserts.

The scan does these no justice.  They are glittery and atomic refractor-esque.  They are like the Diamond Anniversary parallels from a 2011.  I picked out 9 of the most interesting photos I could from the first page of the "lowest price" tab and voila!

The other page is from the Bowman Chrome Fire Die-Cut set. 

I cannot express how much I like the concept behind this set.  I like die cuts.  I like shiny.  I am a bit of a pyromaniac, at least I was in my youth when I almost burned my house down once by making a camp fire in the basement (gimme a break, I was like 8).  I had not seen these in real life and it took me holding one to realize that they weren't just shiny and die cut, but the design itself was the base design, only melted.  I am usually not one for prospect cards, but damn, I love this set.  They are amazing.  Once again, I picked 9 off the first page and now I am sorry I didn't build the whole set.

Keeping with the theme, I nabbed some Mets from those two sets, which were the cards I had watched in the first place.  They were the Noah Syndergaard and Michael Conforto to be specific.  I also got the David Wright and Gary Carter BiB and Travis d'Arnaud of both sets. 

The bottom cards here are three of the six I had in my original queue. They are from an early 80's oddball Cramer set of vintage players in sepia tones.  I chose players I don't have a lot of since the six I had were of the Hank Aaron/Willie Mays very-well represented type.  Brief aside: I have an obsession with pie along the lines of Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks so it stuns me that I don't have a whole Pie Traynor page or player collection.  That is a situation I might have to rectify. 

Here are the other orphans from the original six. 

Nothing very surprising here.  A New Orleans Saint.  A Mike Piazza.  Another Michael Conforto card - and with the Mets quite literally scoring only 1 run a game for the last 2-3 weeks, I am bewildered as to why they haven't called him up, he's only hitting like .330.  So I got my free shipping and it only cost me like ten bucks.  My little buying binge left me with .42 cents credit left and while that is a very good number, I just couldn't leave that in there even though I had hit my magic number of 30.  So one last check of my watch list showed me that the most inexpensive card I had was that Topps 60 Keith Hernandez.  Price: 41 cents.  I love it when a plan comes together.

Mail Call: COMC Cyber Monday.

       I trust all of you enjoyed your Christmas.  I trust Santa Claus brought you everything your heart desired.  Me? I got a nice big lump of coal, but hey, free coal!  Anyway, as a certified (if not quite bonafide) "grown up" I really don't exchange presents much anymore.  Oh, I will bring something if I go to a party, and of course the kids in my life got something, but my attitude towards the whole gift-giving component of the holidays can be summed up in this little exchange between my sister and I the other day at lunch:

Sis: Oh, by the way, I didn't get you anything for Christmas.

Me: Don't worry, I didn't get you anything, either.

Sis: Well, you did just buy me lunch at McDonalds...

Me: Woohoo! Big Macs for Christmas!

All this does not mean I do not take advantage of the retail Armageddon that takes place every year around this time.  One of my favorite sites, COMC.com, always has a big Black Friday sale and then a Cyber Monday shipping special.  I used the latter to get a bunch of cards I had accumulated over the last many months to my house for free.  Freedom!  Let's take a look at what the gods of commerce have wrought:

 Those Iooss' make for one hell of a nice page.  The Jimmy Deans?  Well, they look okay, too. These cards finished off two half pages I started at a show over the summer.  It's nice to see the seasons come together so well.  That last vertical Met also finishes a page started at that same show, alas, it did not get a scanning opportunity.

The second batch here is not quite as cut and dry as it is all over the place.  You have a rookie cup addition and some wonderful Mars Attacks inserts to complete a page.  Then it gets even more obscure with a Chico Resch box bottom card that I accidentally discovered while doing the COMC challenge and immediately gobbled up. There is also an obligatory Gary Carter and a Pinnacle Trophy Collection card to fix a page that I had somehow screwed up while building (it happens). Then on the bottom row there is a NASCAR(?) driver and a 1964 Donruss Addams Family card, a must for any non-sports collection. 

But wait, what is that last card?  What's that name?

Buzz Nutter!


BUZZ NUTTER!!!


BUZZ fucking NUTTER!!!!!!!

Look at that, it's glorious.  I might never recover knowing there was once a professional football player, hell, that there was once a human being that went by the name Buzz Nutter.

Just Check Out My (Not So) Common Birthday Present To Myself.

       Tuesday was my birthday; I hit the immortal Jack Benny number.  Much as 29 sounded much older to me than 30, 39 seems to be bumming me out much more than I imagine 40 will.  My mood increased tremendously, though, when I went to the mailbox and found not one but two fat jiffy packs waiting for me - one from COMC.com and one from Just Commons.  Granted, I didn't actually plan for them to arrive on my birthday but I'll take a thin slice of serendipity any time. 

The stuff I ordered from COMC was pure frivolity.  Like many of you I'm sure, I have plucked away at their Challenge to help reassemble their database.  Over the last few weeks, I've used my insomnia time to squirrel away $42 worth of found money for cardboard.  The next couple of scans show the bounty of my superfluous harvest:

Shiny Mets.  Shiny Mets everywhere.  Normally, these Fan Favorites refractors are overpriced but with a fistful of loose dollars, I made offers on as many as I could.  I got the four you see for between 2 and 3 bucks each.  Speaking of shiny, those Tribute cards finish off a set I started making 11 years ago.  Well, I started making it a couple months ago with some cards I found in a long forgotten box from 11 years ago.  Funny how that works.  Nolan and Roberto there weren't cheap but in my world, they were free.  Those bottom three Finest cards are pre-production models that finish off a page that has had six of them for as long as I have been making pages of sets.  Of course, now I have to figure out what to do with the 3 1994 Bowman promos that have been occupying that page for a while.

Following that trend, I finished off a few other pages that have long eluded completion.  This buying spree was like finding two $20 bills in a winter coat:

Those 1996 Playoff Pennant football cards are not just die cut triangles, they are made of felt, so they are all fuzzy and touchable.  I have had seven of them laying around forever.  Now they have the required nine.  The Donruss Champions sent from 2005 was not a favorite, but I liked the award winners subset and now there is a page of that too.  I had Legends pages of 2002 and 2003 Diamond Kings, so for completistism's sake, I now have 2004.  Half of them are in color and half are in black and white.  I am not certain if that is part of the design or if they are variations or something but I like the B&W ones better.  Lastly, I bought one each of the Heritage buybacks I didn't have so they can hang out on my Topps pages.  I picked those up for $2 pretend dollars each. 

My other spree from mid-May was on Just Commons.  Once again, I blame my current bought of insomnia.  Over three or four nights, I filled up my shopping cart with about 100 cards and $20 worth of stuff.  Sadly, these cost me a real Andrew Jackson.  Happily, Just Commons is a wonderful site to pick up random cards you never thought you'd find and/or refuse to buy for $3 each on ebay.  Aside from the first card on the first scan, nothing was more than 37 cents.

I discovered that Brooks Robinson and David Wright card while I was obsession of one of the same players of a slightly different caliber.  While going through my HOF binder, I noticed I didn't have a Lou Brock card of him on the Cubs, so I rectified that issue.  I recently decided to make a Gregg Jefferies page of cards of him not on the Mets, since that was when he was most successful.  My last package of JC cards had boatloads of Rookie Cup needs, this time, it only has three but it does complete the 1997 team.  The bottom three are some Sandy Koufax cards for his page and a Jim Bunning card to start his page.  I wrote about this year's Gypsy Queen on A Pack to be Named Later; I might have been too kind.

I finished off a lot of player pages, here they are in condensed pile form:

Jimmie Foxx, Joe Torre, Starlin Castro, Luis Tiant, and Bobby Murcer are now all completed (I underestimated my needs and still need one Walt Alston).  I was born a bit too young to have seen Luis Tiant pitch but from everything I have seen about him, I am absolutely convinced he would have been my favorite pitcher.  He's like the best parts of Hideo Nomo, Fernando Valenzuela, and Pedro Martinez all thrown together.  I think we all should worship at the alter of El Tiante.  Right in the middle there is Matt Harvey, I mean, how could go on a spree and not buy some Harvey cards?  The last two piles are of cards with a particular number (527) and of players named Max.  I couldn't think of anything more appropriate to get on my birthday. 

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.

Recovery.

       First and foremost, we are all okay.  Hurricane Sandy blew through New Jersey and most of the northeast Monday & Tuesday and knocked some trees around and took the power out.  Luckily, my family and I all made it through in one piece.  Unfortunately, the power company says I will not be getting any juice back for another 5-10 days(!) so I am currently a refugee in Pennsylvania because my brother somehow kept his electricity thought out the storm.  I am making good use of myself by dog sitting his adorable puppy while he and his wife work overtime, so I have some time on my hands.  While the dog sleeps, I figured it would be a good time to post. 

I recently had some COMC.com purchases mailed to me, and since this is probably the last bit of mail I am gonna see for a while, let's take a look at those:

I have threatened to make a page of the Upper Deck Heroes blue parallel Mets and I plucked four on the way to that goal.  The Gypsy Queen base set isn't much to look at, but some of the inserts are marvelous.  I picked off the regular and mini version of the Endy Chavez Glove Stories.  For three innings, that was the greatest catch ever.  Still, six years later, it is pretty damn good.  I also grabbed the Gary Carter mini numbered out of /99 since these cards work well in mini and sepia tones.  Also here are a couple of David Wright cards (the Mets just wisely picked up his option for 2013 and *gasp* may actually spend the money to sign him long term....).  While I am not a big fan of plain white jersey squares, this year's Ginter picture of Wright is so good - and the price was so right - I grabbed it anyway.  The last card there is a 1976 SSPC card of Jerry Koosman and Duke Snider that Night Owl featured a while ago and I was so taken with the card, I immediately went online and bought it.  The internet = instant gratification.  Of course, I waited almost 4 months to have it sent to me, so I also delayed gratification on that one too.

The second part of the batch; I was on a Tom Seaver kick:

The card that started that kick was the Allen & Ginter What's in a Name insert.  I found that one and decided to grab the other two 2012 Golden thingies I needed.  I also then got the Archives base and floating head rubdown.  The 2012 Ginter search lead me also to the Sketch card, which I grabbed, and then, somehow, I got to the 1984 traded (which I could have sworn I owned but it turns out somehow I didn't) and also some 1984 ultra oddball rubdowns.  Twins fans would like that one too.  The last card there is a Mike Piazza manufactured patch card.  Something seems a tad amiss with that one...let's take a close look:

Enhance!!!

Jumping Jesus on a pogo stick, look at that!  That's not even close, Upper Deck. Nice quality control.  What you can't really see there is the smear of glue where the patch was placed and then somehow slipped off.  I guess UD should also put the "contents may settle during shipment" warning they place on cereal boxes on their wrappers.  Oh, and this was not the card they had scanned into COMC either. I don't know who to complain to about this one...well, other than to you guys.

And on a serious note if you were in Sandy's way, I hope you and your family are safe, that the damage isn't too bad, and that the power and insurance companies are expedient.   Plus, it is times like this when we all pull together and figure stuff out.  As long as you and your loved ones are safe, that is all that matters.

Completed Pages, Complete With Joy.

     While my blogging may have slowed down some recently, my collecting never stops.  Today I have some completed pages, one quite recent and a few more than a decade in the making.

I haven't bought much Bowman the last few years.  In fact, I haven't bought any Bowman the last two years.  I used to be quite the Bowman backer, especially Chrome.  I liked the shiny and the speculation, and I also liked the vague rookies who you'd never hear from again (there is a reason my collection is eclectic and devoid of great value, after all).  This year, my interest in Bowman was renewed, well, my interest in one specific kind of card was piqued.  A while ago, Night Owl sent me an R.A. Dickey from the silver ice parallels and I was immediately struck by it.  I am such a sucker for the shiny and in this case it was a different shiny than I had ever seen before on a card.  I went to eBay with the task of finding myself a lot of them.  The cards themselves were only popping up one or two a box, I believe, so the prices were a little high.  I waited out a nice lot of 12 and snagged it at a price I could live with.  From those, I made this page:

The scan does not do these cards justice.  They are really really really shiny (no, really!).  They remind me of the 1998 Bowman's Best Atomic Refractors, my all time favorite shiny (and a page I have yet to complete).  I got a nice mix of players and colors in this lot; even the Yankee player is a tolerable one.  I am quite pleased with this page.

While recently rummaging through a pile of cards, I found a 1998 SP Authentic Jeff Conine.  I had forgotten all about this set but I remembered that I really liked it when it came out.  Back then, SP Authentic was very high end stuff and (I believe) this was their first baseball offering.  I liked the foil-like pictures and the use of negative space.  I looked around in a few boxes, but alas, that Jeff Conine was the only one I had.  So, in my quest to make a page, I went first to eBay, but eBay did not have any lots of the base cards (nor had they in a while - hint: always check completed auctions when looking for something vague to see how easy/hard it will be to find).  So, I went to COMC.com for these instead. 

I was able to pick off these cards for 20-25 cents apiece.  I went with a few beloved subjects (NOMAHHHH!! and a catcher pose) and a few reviled subjects as well (Clemens, Palmeiro).  Overall, I think I captured a good mix of players and poses and it only took me 14 years to get around to it. 

I also read a blog piece recently (the blog itself escapes my memory, lemme know if you recognize your dilemma) that was very puzzled with the 2001 Donruss baseball set and what they did for parallels.

This page here is of the 2001 Donruss base cards.  This page has been in my binders for quite a while.  See, 2001 Donruss was their first baseball set since 1998 - I am not sure if their exile was self imposed or contractual - and it celebrated their 20th anniversary.  For the parallels, they decided to fill in those two missing years by making "2000 Donruss" and "1999 Donruss" cards.  I always found this odd and I can certainly understand some collector's confusion over the cards, especially 10 years after the fact.

I had, along with that 2001 Donruss page a 1999 Donruss page. 

A pretty sharp (and Indians heavy) page.  What I did not have was a 2000 Donruss page to go along with the other two.  Since I decided my Donruss pages would not be complete without it, I went to eBay again, but only found a large (and way overpriced) lot for sale.  Back to COMC.com again for me!

Since I still had the 1998 SP Authentics cards still unsent, it made sense to grab the cards I needed for the 2000 Donruss page as well.  This is what I came up with.

Once again, a nice mix of players and colors, and, as an accidental aesthetic choice, a lot of batting follow thru pictures.  I snagged these at 20-35 cents apiece with the Tony Gwynn costing me that big 35 cents.  I had never actually seen the 2000 Donruss baseball cards and I immediately recognized them...they copied the 2000 Donruss football set.  I have had this page forever:

Now, Topps used to, and in fact still, uses their baseball set as a tablet for their football design, and some card makers use the same design for each name plate brand for each sport (like Prestige or SP etc.).  But this is the first time I can think of that a unique and singular football set was the basis for a baseball set and not the other way around.  Can anyone else think of one?  You know, if you can even understand what the heck I am talking about.

Anyway, COMC has had a nice cheap bulk shipping option for the last couple months, so I might load up on some more neglected or ignored pages in the future. 

***
And as one final update, I recently showed the spoils of a recent new product buying binge.  Some specific cards were put aside and dropped in the mail this week.  Some of you know they are coming and some of you don't.  Anyway, rest assured, they are out there and on their way...

Right now, if anyone wants to reciprocate, I am desperately trying to get my hands on the two SP rookie cup cards from this years Topps - #158 Josh Reddick and #207 J.P. Arencibia.  I am also looking for the Dwight Gooden Mound Dominance insert from this year's Topps and the 1977 Gary Carter reprint and cloth sticker from the Archives set (plus his Gold Foil parallel). I am always dubious of people actually looking at my wantlist, so if anyone has any of these, please please email me post haste. Thanks!

Complete Set Sunday - Drunken Easter Diamond King edition.

       My family is large and unwieldy, like a stack of newspapers ready to topple at any minute but you keep throwing onto the pile anyway.  Don't get me wrong, I love my family, but we had 31 for Easter breakfast this morning.  Thirty.  One.  Luckily, we have a few traditions that make Easter a very tolerable family gathering.   One, we start drinking at 9:30 in the morning.  This is always a surefire way to make my family much easier to deal with.  Two, we have an egg fight before we eat.  No, we don't throw them at each other, but we hold them and smash their hard-boiledness at one another and the one that doesn't crack wins.  Alcohol and violence - a marvelous one-two punch to celebrate the resurrection of our lord.  So I drank until 3:30 this afternoon and I am still feeling it, but I haven't blogged in a couple days and I didn't do Complete Set Sunday last week - but, and not to toot my own horn, my post was pretty damn epic. 

       So lemme see if I got something small and easy to work with here.  Ahhhhh yes, I do.  I am a big fan of Donruss Diamond Kings.  They were always the best part of the usually kind of 'meh' Donruss set.  Donruss ended up the bastard child in the set hierarchy, either because of tradition (Topps), or brazen willingness to sue (Fleer), or innovation (Upper Deck), or even just colorful whimsy (Score or Pacific).  Donruss was just sort of there.  It was the set you bought if you didn't feel like the others or they weren't available and now it has been bought and divided so many times, it doesn't exist anymore.  But I always liked the Diamond Kings.

       I guess because I spent most of my childhood drawing baseball players, I respected Dick Perez because he turned that skill/hobby into a marketable commodity.  I mean, now with the power of hindsight, I can see he was not much of an artist, but getting a painted portrait in your pack instead of a photo was always kind of neat.  The Diamond Kings were, from 1982-1991, the first 26 cards of the Donruss set.  Then, in 1992, something odd happened; they weren't the first 26 cards.  What fuckery was this?  Well, it turns out with the advent of insert-mania, Donruss made the rather brand-wrecking choice of making the Diamond Kings an insert set instead of the cornerstone of the base set.

Now, I am not gonna lie, these full-bleed cards with their dash of foil are pretty damn handsome.  I would say of all the Diamond King sets, this one is the sharpest.  It has good player choice (except Scott Sanderson...remember when the Yankees sucked so bad that Scott Sanderson was their Diamond King?) and Perez reeled in the wacky backgrounds of the last few sets and keeps them simple and classy...but...

It was a stupid stupid choice to make the Diamond Kings an insert set!!! This choice made their already rather bland and poorly put together base set completely disposable.  Their go-to insert in 1991 was the Elite Dominators (cards I will cover another time) and Donruss got greedy and wanted another one and they never really recovered from this sea change.  They eventually made the other mistake of thinking "more is more" and became the company that really ramped up the different various releases without any personality or purpose.  They even made Diamond Kings their own Gallery-esque separate set with very mixed results.  I shed no tears for the demise of Donruss, but I do still like the Diamond Kings.

Wait a minute, this is Complete Set Sunday, and that is a hole!  Come on, this is a 27-card set (still, always appreciated by its divisibility by nine), where is that other card, dammit!  Well, I solved my own One-Card Challenge™ with a quick trip to COMC.com and picked up old #22 for my set for a cool 14 cents.  Fourteen cents!  ahhh, the joy of a completed page - and set for that matter.

Much better!  I put this set together from a lot I picked up at a local card shop years ago.  I augmented that lot with my own cards in my big-ass pile of Diamond Kings and finished it about an hour ago by adding the aforementioned Randy Johnson to its spot.  The other 26 cards have been sitting in one of my set binders for a while now and given my love of Diamond Kings, complete sets, shiny, and sets divisible by nine, this set is gonna be there for a long time.  That is, until I decide to put ALL my old school Diamond Kings in to a binder, but that is a long term collecting goal that is way way down on the list...that would be pretty damn cool, though, given that, with the checklist, all the DK sets until 1993 have 27 cards (then the Marlins and Rockies screwed up the whole system).  I also gave up on Diamond Kings in 1994 when they got so pug fugly, I couldn't stand them.  Wow, Jesus, I am rambling in my buzzed state, I have no finish.  Well, except for another slice of cake and some Aleve.