Mailday From The Mitten

I received a nice envelope of cards a week and a half ago from Julie over at A Cracked Bat.   I will run through the cards in a minute, but I really need to get a business card or something catchy to stick into packages.  This is nice.....

My eight year old son was initially really excited about this package of cards.  He checks our mail as part of chores around the house.  If it is mail for me then it is a baseball card, and there is not much excitement over the mail for the day.  However, this package threw him off because the return address was from Michigan.  He was jumping up and down. 

My wife is from Michigan, so there are grandparents, aunts and uncles who live there are mail him stuff.  

Her hometown is actually on this map.  It's right there, next to one of the lakes.  It's a nice place.

So naturally, he opened the envelope and was a little disappointed to see that it was baseball cards, but I was pretty excited.  So, here's what I got:

First off, this was a card from a set that Julie had posted on Twitter, and we had spent some time talking about it one day.  I had never seen anything out of this Church's Chicken card set before.  Are there Church's Chickens in Missouri?  According to Google there are a dozen of them around St. Louis.  I just missed out on these back in the day.  There are even Cardinals players in the set. 

Love the design on these cards, they look like something from the mid 1990s too.  I am going to have to find more of these.  I appreciate that Julie introduced me to these cards.

More cards.

These three Cardinals are out of the 2003 EX set.  Always one of my favorite products from the late 1990s and early 2000s.  These are from the 2003.  Great looking cards.  

Next.  

I know that the Action Packed cards were an oddball set from the early 1990s that featured older players, but I do not know much about them.  I actually have two other Action Packed cards in my collection, a Bob Gibson and a Jerome Bettis, but I am a little fuzzy on how they got here.  Never really got into collecting Rams cards.  I love the photograph on the card.  Nice action shot of Lou Brock running the bases is always a winner. 

 I do not do much with Furcal, but he was on the 2011 Cardinals World Series winner.  Kind of easy to forget he was there.  This is a gold sparkle variation of his 2012 Topps base card.  Not sure the scan really did it justice, sometimes shiny and bright does not scan well, but it's a sharp card. 

This is a really sharp looking card of Cardinals second baseman Kolten Wong.  Love the die cut.  

Last.  

There are not many Ray Lankford cards in this world that I do not own.  However, he is one of the few players whom I actively welcome duplicates of in my collection.  This is a 1998 Donruss Preferred card, which was not only a great set, but also a card from Lankford's prime years as a player.  The years where card companies sort of paid interest in him. 

A great package of cards.  Thank you Julie, I will get you a return package at some point in the near future. 

Rehash, Rehash Again

I was out and about a few days back completing some errands at the local Wally World when I ran across one of those boxes of Topps Archives 65th Anniversary Set.  I believe they are only sold at Wal-Mart and each box has an autograph and a buyback card.  I have seen a few different collectors say some nice things about the boxes, so I figured I would take a chance.

If nothing else, I like the Archives autographs.  The base cards and remakes of Archives cards are a little bit stale.  Maybe more than a little stale.

The base cards in this version of Archives all have the original fronts on the cards.....

and for some reason the backs of the cards are all based on the design of the 1975 Topps card backs.  I have no idea why 1975 was picked....

Perhaps to distinguish this version of Archives from all the other versions of Archives that have been put out over the last few years, or maybe something other reason I am not think of at the moment.  Just a little lost on the choice.

My buyback out of the box is related to the Durham Bulls, which is cool in some ways, but....

didn't the Bull Durham cards come out of this year's Archives set?  The answer is yes, meaning that my buyback is just merely a few months old.  Not sure if this is much of a buyback.  Hey, Durham Bulls, right?  

Last card is my autograph which is, as you can see, former Expos second baseman Jose Vidro.  I am not sure how picky you can be about an autograph out of a $20 box of cards from Wal-Mart.  Always nice to see Expos cards, so I am going to consider this card a winner.  Plus, Jose was a pretty nice player back in the day.  

Topps Series 2 Hits

A quick post tonight.  There have been a ton of products out during the past two weeks.  I feel like I just wrapped up my Archives post and now I am into the Series 2 Topps cards and somewhere in there I skipped Finest.  I might go back and pick that product up in the next week or two.  Until then let's look a few cards tonight that came out of a Jumbo box I picked up from Big D's Sportscards in Raleigh.

Each jumbo box of 2015 Series 2 offers an autograph and two relic cards.  It seems that recently the relic cards usually include one manu-type of card which held true for this box too.  Here's my autograph first......

I was really surprised to pull this card.  I know Willingham was still playing last year for the Royals, but is currently not on a Major League team.  I guess it's not surprising that Topps would have an older player sign cards, but Willingham has not been a regular signer in card products since 2008.  He did sign for a Panini product in 2012, but has almost nothing out over the last seven or eight years.  Usually players stop signing, they stop signing.  I could make a huge long list of players that fit this description, but we are getting off topic.

It's probably not a really valuable autograph, but there are worse things than pulling the autograph of someone with almost 200 career home runs and an OPS+ of 120.

This Blackmon jersey relic was the first of my two out of the box.  It's just about par for the course for a regular box of Topps.  I would love to land a Cardinals card, but I have done a post or two on Blackmon and saw him play a few years back while he was at Georgia Tech.  Plus, relic pieces with pinstripes are always a plus.  Which brings me to my last card for the evening and maybe my favorite card out of this box.....

The card is thick.  Scan does it not justice.  The pin on the right side of the card is a smooth metallic pin with the White Sox 95th Anniversary logo.  I don't remember such a thing existing, but it clearly there on the sleeve of Thomas's jersey on the left hand side of the card.  It's numbered out of /199, but it's hard to see up in the top right hand corner.

Overall, three pretty nice cards as hits from my box.  Certainly could have been better, but after looking through some of the other autographs and relics in this product I am content with the cards I have.  Now, I am going to go do search my base cards for variations and sparkles.......

Where Art Thou John Olerud?

Earlier this week I made a post about a cool Moises Alou autograph that I had landed during the weekend and how much I loved the Flashbacks set in this year's Bowman product.  I was contemplating completing the set when I hit the publish button on Tuesday, but was not totally sold on the idea.  While the Flashbacks set is a small collection of autographs, there are two difficult autographs and an autograph of a player I immensely dislike.

By the time Wednesday afternoon rolled around I had sealed the deal on both of the tough autographs.  Another one of the autographs had been picked up last Monday.  All three autographs were scheduled to arrive on Friday, so I was eager to get home from work, break open the mail, and make a cool post about my three latest autographs......

Did I mention I went on a field trip Friday?  I love field trips, but they are energy zappers if you are a teacher on a field trip and not a student.  My class went to the Moravian town of Old Salem located in Winston-Salem.  It's a fun trip if you live in North Carolina, or perhaps parts of Virginia.  Anyway, long field trips usually result in a lazy follow up day that involve a lot of sitting on the sofa.  Today I have watched parts of three ACC Baseball Tournament games along with a part of the Brewers/Braves game, and a few partial movies......

Now that it is 10:30 I am wide awake and ready to talk about baseball cards.  Perfect.

This was my card from last Monday.  When I first started looking into the Flashback Autographs this was the card that originally caught my attention.  Topps has plenty of products that offer autographs of retired players, but they can repeat the same players over and over.  I like to look for some fresh faces.  Particularly if they are a player from the 1990s.  I liked watching Marquis play for Expos, and several other teams along the way, and with no certified autographs prior to this set, his autograph seemed like it would be a fun get.  Moises Alou, check.  Marquis Grissom, check.  

On to the tough ones.....

I honestly was not expecting to land this autograph.  This card was not something that I was willing to spend money on, and Yankees fans have always been pretty generous with trades on Bernie Williams cards from my experiences, so I thought I would have been outbid on a trade too.  Well, sometimes you just have the right combination of cards to win over a trade partner.  A few high end minor league autographs, a few Dodgers relics, and this autograph (including those awesome glasses) was all mine.  The actual tough autograph I really wanted was.......

In my opinion this is easily the best card in set.  So many cool things are going on in this card.  I love the old White Sox uniforms along with Old Comiskey.  I love looking at the signature of Frank Thomas.  Definitely one of the more recognizable John Hancock's in the hobby.  This card was actually a purchase for me.  This is a really nice autograph and probably better than the other Thomas autographs that I currently have in my collection.   

Both the Thomas and the Williams cards are numbered out of 99.  Their addition, along with the Alou, leaves me three cards away from finishing this set.  I need a John Olerud, Juan Gonzalez, and Carlos Baerga.  I have a trade in the works for the Gonzalez and have my eye on buying a copy of the Baerga.  Looks like I might be down to John Olerud by the end of the weekend, these cards would all look nice in a side by side photo of some sort.....

Friday Five: Best 5 Sets From 1990

The last couple of Friday Five posts were focused on 1980s cards, but it starts to get a little bit more complicated after that decade.  The 90s brought in a boom of new products, some good and some not so good, which makes it harder to break down sets by brand.  I could have continued that same line of posts and just used the base sets for Fleer, Donruss, Upper Deck, and Topps, but there are all sorts of complications even within that.  

So, instead I am going to spend my Friday's during this baseball season counting down the best five sets from each year.  And by best five I am not speaking of value, although it's a consideration, same with design, player selection, and all sorts of other factors.  Basically, I am looking through boxes of cards for the year and pulling out cards from five sets I really like....Deal with it.  

The card sets are ranked in order from least liked to best liked.  1990 there were still a reasonable number of cards sets.  Besides the five sets listed below I also considered: Fleer Update, Topps Traded, Score, Score Rookie/Traded, and Donruss The Rookies.  Your consolation trophy is in the mail....

 5.  Donruss- This card design is a mixture of Eddie Van Halen's guitar and one of those Jasper Johns drizzle paintings.  You won't see Donruss on this list for a while after this one, because in my opinion, the products went drastically down hill after this one.  The 1990 Donruss set still had a similar feel to the 1988 plaids and the 1989 black borders.  It was the largest Donruss set up to that point, over 700 cards, but still kept a lot of the trademark Donruss features like the Diamond Kings and Rated Rookies subsets.  There were also a ton of minor errors in this set, which people swore were going to be worth something in 1990, but are actually not worth much of anything today.

Can we also talk about the smell of the cards?  There are people that swear by certain smells in certain sets.  I am not really too sensitive to the smells that come out of packs of cards, but for some reason this set hits my sense of smell.  It always has.   Don't think that I ran around huffing Scotch Guard or something as a middle schooler, but if you blindfolded me and asked me to identify a 1990 Donruss card I would know the smell anywhere.  Not a bad smell, not good, it's just there....

4. Fleer- Not as interesting design wise as the Donruss set, but there are a bunch of different things I like about the Fleer set.  First, there are a bunch of good rookies in the set.  All of these sets actually have them: Sosa, Thomas, Larry Walker, and Juan Gonzalez.  Others are unique to Fleer, like the Moises Alou rookie.....

The set also had some of the staples of 1980s Fleer sets like the SuperStar cards.  The Players of the Decade inset set is also a really nice touch in this set.  Throw in the fact that Fleer did a little better job of editing their set and I put it just ahead of the Donruss set.  

3. Topps- I like the design.  Seriously, this seems like a take or leave kind of year.  This set has a bunch of the usual 1990 rookie cards, Frank Thomas and Sammy Sosa, but also has a few other really cool things going for it too.  The set has the normal 792 cards you would expect to see out of this era of Topps set, but the best part of this set is the Nolan Ryan subset....

There is one Ryan card for each of the teams that he played for over his career.  This set is really inexpensive and probably worth it for the Nolan Ryan cards alone.  I am pretty sure this is the cheapest Topps set you can possibly find....

2.  Upper Deck- I am a huge fan of the Upper Deck set.  It was still pretty much alone in being a high end set in 1990 and it's not all that different from the 1989 set.  Same card stock, similar elements in the design, but it just missed out on the rookie cards.  I am not sure I can really fault Upper Deck for the fact that Ray Lankford and Sammy Sosa did not pan out quite the same way as Ken Griffey Jr.  Believe me, I would love it if Ray Lankford had that sort of card value.  The backs of the cards are really awesome too.....

The design was honestly pretty simple and photography was really nice.  Not a lot of frills and extras here, but you do get a lot of really nice baseball cards.  Again, like the Topps set, the Upper Deck set is extremely cheap and inexpensive to pick up.  I have thought about picking up a couple of cheap boxes off of Ebay and opening them up just for fun.  Perhaps......

1.  Leaf- Notice on the Upper Deck write up I said that it was almost the only premier baseball card product released in 1990.  Donruss created this product to directly compete with Upper Deck that summer.  Foil packaging, better card stock, and color photos on the front and back.  Leaf was supposed to be the rival of Upper Deck and it actually did one better than that.  If I was going to tell you to buy one set from the 1990 set this would be the one.  While the rookies in the set are essentially the same names as the other 1990s products, Walker, Thomas, and Sammy Sosa, the cards out of this set have been far more popular and desired by collectors.  Easily the best set from 1990.

Big Hurt and Sweet Baby Ray

I have settled back into being in North Carolina and finally have a little bit of time to write about a few of the items I picked up over break.  While I traveled back to Missouri I did not have a chance to go to any card shops while I was there.  There was a plan to go to a card shop, but...well.  Anyway, I picked up two really nice items during my travels.  

Let's start with the first item which came from my brother in-law who gave me a sweet Ray Lankford Starting Lineup.  I actually have a bunch of these hanging out in my man room, but cannot remember the last time I got a new one.  At some point in the late 90s/early 2000s they were basically run over by MacFarlane figurines.  

I have one Ray Lankford Starting Lineup from 1993 where he is sliding head first into a base, but did not realize that they actually put out three different figurines for my favorite Cardinals outfielder.  He also had a figurine made in 1998 too.  The 1995 figurine shows Lankford wearing a home Cardinals uniform and batting left-handed, but there is one curiosity with this piece.

Despite wearing a home uniform Lankford is wearing a blue road batting helmet on the figurine.  I know that MacFarlane Figurines have different variations, but I do not remember Starting Lineups ever having any variations.  I did a little bit of looking into the figurine, and SLUs in general, but cannot find any mention of variations with the different player figurines.  

In this case, it seems like it was just an oversight on the part of SLU.  There are a few other figurines where the company missed a little bit on the uniform or some particular aspect of the figurine.  I actually like the change on this figurine.  While the Cardinals traditionally wear their blue hats on the road, with the exception of the blue Bird on the Bat hat on home Sunday games starting in 1998, they used to wear blue hats all of the time before 1964 when the team introduced their home red hats.  They looked something like this:

  

The backs of the Starting Lineup boxes were always really cool too.  They always showed some of the other figurines in the set for the year, but never all of them.  I searched around and found some cool names in the 1995 set like Andujar Cedeno and Dave Nilson.  There is also a Darren Daulton, but he's not being trucked over by Ray.

Next up is a cool Frank Thomas bobblehead my brother sent me for Christmas.  This was a stadium giveaway that the White Sox did in conjunction with his induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame.  I like that they put him in the home white uniform and love the look on the face of the bobble.  The bottom picture shows the backside of the Big Hurt bobblehead.  Overall, the White Sox did a good job job with this bobblehead.  Pretty accurate look for Frank Thomas from the facial expressions to the uniform to the batting stance.

Five 2000 Topps Sets later....

I need to do a comprehensive post again about my reorganization project I have been working on for the past year.  It just keeps going and going.  This week I was snowed in my house and tackled my stack of 2000 Topps cards.  It was a pretty big stack. 

They are not even all in the picture.  Basically, I have been breaking my boxes, sorted by team, into sets of cards.  Some sets I might have gone overboard.  Slightly.  I really liked the Hank Aaron reprints in this set, but at some point should have just bought the insert set and stopped opening packs.  I broke several giant stacks of cards down into the sets. 

 

Five sets later I decided it was time to stop.  I still have a big stack of cards from this set, but it is less than 80% of the 470 cards needed to complete the set.  I am taking all of the leftover singles and putting them in with the rest of my dupes which I am using as trade bait.  I am also going to start selling them in player lots.  Some of them are pretty pick lots of cards.  Anyway, if you are not familiar with the 2000 Topps set here's my quick run down.  

2000 Topps Cal Ripken

The base set is your usually Topps base set.  The 2000 set is a little bit smaller than most of the Topps sets at only 479 cards plus a Mark McGwire reprint.  Topps went through a phase in the late 90s were they put out a few smaller base sets.  This set was the last of the little base sets.  The 2001 Topps set is 792 I believe.  Inside and outside of the base set there are a few things to like about this set. 

2000 Topps Mark McGwire 1985 Topps Reprint

I really liked the Mark McGwire rookie reprint.  Yes, I like the Cardinals.  This set was issued before Topps had any of the Archives or Fan Favorites lines and this was a singular reprint.  Topps had done reprints with Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, and Hank Aaron in this set.  What's one more reprint?  Besides, many collectors actually count this as the last card in the set and Topps did short-print this card.  Although, I always seem to remember landing more than a few of these.  My stack of dupes agrees. 

I also really liked these 20th Century Best subset cards which showed the active Major League leader in a particular category.  Check out Frank Thomas and his OBP.  Pretty cool that Topps threw this card into the 2000 Topps set.  I wonder if Billy Beane helped design the set?  There are also sparkly versions of these cards that are serial numbered and cost $4 on Ebay instead of $0.50.  Worth a look around. 

Outside of the base set I had two inserts I really liked from this set (three, but you've all seen a Hank Aaron card-imagine it reprinted).  The Topps Combos insert was ten cards that looked a lot like the art work Topps had been using in their Topps Gallery Heritage Sets.  Only these cards had combinations of players instead of a singular player.  Always really liked this Pedro and Big Unit card.  Pedro might be too tall, or is Randy Johnson too short?  Something is off, but I still love it. 

 

I am not sure what happened here with the scan, but this card is really cool.  If I wasn't working tomorrow I would rescan it.  School on Saturdays is fun.  Anyway, this set is die-cut and focuses on really good defensive players.  Some different names in here and the cards are die-cut.  That's always fun.  

The Expanded Topps Postseason Set

I have always really liked the Postseason cards that Topps has included in their products starting with the 2006 Topps set.  The cards always focused on the World Series winning team and often featured a mixture of autographs and relics.  My Cardinals won two World Series titles during that time and I was happy to add a few cards from both sets to my collection.  Topps has always done a great job of getting a good sampling of players from the winning teams too.  The 2007 Topps version of the Cardinals team had a Pujols card, but also featured some lesser names who made big contributions to the team winning the series.  One of my favorites...

 

Weaver had a rather lackluster career after being a pretty highly touted prospect, but pitched a bunch of big games in the playoffs for the Cardinals that year and was a key contributor in the team's World Series win.  While the older Postseason sets do feature role players from the World Series team, they have provided collectors great value.  It really does not matter who you pull from the set, the cards sell, and price out very well.  For example, I was interested in adding a copy of the 2007 Topps Ronnie Belliard card.  The Cardinals traded for him at the deadline that season and he filled a need and made some great plays for the team.

I kind of thought it might sell for $50, but did not see this card getting much past that.  I was in on this item, but lost it.  These are the types of cards that made the Postseason set great though.  Limited numbers of cards with content that generates a great deal of interest.  What Cardinals collector wouldn't want one of these cards?  Who cares if it's Ronnie Belliard, he won a ring too.  There are plenty of other players just like Ronnie Belliard on the checklist though.  Anyone remember Preston Wilson playing on the Cardinals?

The other World Series cards have been cool too.  I have a couple of non-Cardinals cards in my collection and I hold on to them for several reasons.  First, they are really cool cards.  Second, I am pretty sure that I can trade them pretty high up on their value.  The White Sox and two Giants sets might be my favorite two outside of the Cardinals, though the Red Sox from 2008 has a good look about it.  This is from the original 2006 World Series Champions set:

So, this year Topps has decided to add in cards of all the Postseason teams.  Meaning that besides the usual band of Red Sox cards, for winning the World Series, we also are blessed with cards of the A's, Tigers, Rays, Tigers, Braves, Cardinals, and Dodgers.  While the cards have a nice look to them they have really dropped in price.  I landed a Anibal Sanchez card in a Jumbo Box, but have held onto the card after watching the prices slide over the past two or three weeks.  Cooler card than the price they are selling for on-line.  

I know that Anibal is not the biggest name on the Tigers, but it's not like their setting the world on fire the value of their postseason cards either.  Let's just go ahead and look at Miguel Cabrera cards in the set.  The only active auction on Ebay is offering a card for $50, but more than a handful have landed south of forty dollars in auctions, including one that failed to reach $20.  

and while I am sure that many Tigers fans and card collectors would love to add a cool Miguel Cabrera relic, I am sure the postseason last year was not at the top of their good memories list.  In fact, knowing fans of all the eliminated teams, I think that their fans had all expected better.  In the long term I think that these cards will continue to underperform the Postseason cards from past years save for a few Red Sox and the Pirates.  In fact, if Topps wanted to add Postseason cards, some sort of Pirates postseason set would have been really cool.  Wildly popular too.  

My Top 50 On Cardboard- #14 Frank Thomas

My Top 50 On Cardboard 
#14
Frank Thomas

1990 Leaf Frank Thomas 

One of the worst things about the backlog of players waiting to get into the Hall of Fame is players like Frank Thomas.  Throughout his nineteen year career "The Big Hurt" was one of the best and most prolific hitters in the game.  Unfortunately Thomas was a pretty big guy and I am sure that there are a decent amount of sports writers who are willing to let Thomas sit on the sidelines of Cooperstown along with a lot of other deserving players.   Thomas had a big impact on the baseball card world too starting with his rookie cards released in 1990.  He was instantly a fan favorite and his cards became extremely popular and stayed that way for the better part of two decades.

Hobby Impact-
Pick a Thomas rookie card and you've got a classic early 90s baseball card.  One of my favorites is at the end of the post as one of my favorite cards.  Thomas had a great run of cards and was featured on some truly unique and groundbreaking cards.  One of the great white whales of my collection, this would be a white whale I have not caught, is a 1997 Leaf Frank Thomas Collection Relic card.  While many people are familiar with the 1997 Upper Deck jersey cards of Griffey, Gwynn, and Rey Ordonez the Thomas card offers far better value and scarcity for collectors searching out a truly unique item to add to their collection.  They are quite pricey.  Quite.

Maybe someday.  Until then there are plenty of other great Frank Thomas cards to track down.  He's got a lot of great autographs and more affordable relic cards out on the secondary market.  Thomas has been a consistent signer throughout his career and has a great looking autograph.  One of my favorite autographs.  In all of my years collecting cards I have only pulled one Frank Thomas and have never traded it or sold it.  It's one of my favorite autographs, even if it's on a sticker.

2003 Playoff Piece of the Game Frank Thomas Jersey/Autograph 

I have had a few other Frank Thomas autographs along the way, but if I had to pick one up tomorrow I would definitely make sure that he was a White Sox on the card.  I know that Thomas played his last few years with the Blue Jays and A's, but in my mind he's always a White Sox player.

On The Field- 
Thomas should be a Hall of Famer and he's one of the most likely to be passed over because of "suspicions".  Completely ridiculous.  Before being drafted by the White Sox he starred at Auburn as a tight end.  Check out a few Thomas rookie cards and its clear that Thomas was always a really big guy.  Have there been any allegations of him using anything?  No.  I will be upset if he's not quickly in the Hall of Fame.  If he did not make on his first year I would understand, but much past that is not cool.

Thomas had almost 2,500 hits in his career with more than 500 home runs.  Add in a .300 batting average and a on-base percentage of .400 and you've got a really special player.  While Thomas was primarily a DH during his career, JAWS rates The Big Hurt as the ninth best first baseman in the history of the game.

The players rated ahead of Thomas are all Hall of Famers except Jeff Bagwell and Albert Pujols.  You'd assume that those two will end up in the Hall, so Thomas should be there too.  Thomas also rates ahead of players like Eddie Murray, Willie McCovey, and George Sisler.  If you look at first baseman by OPS+ Thomas jumps up to eighth in the rankings ahead of several Hall of Famers including Willie McCovey and Orlando Cepeda.

If you never had a chance to watch Thomas play in person he was a lot of fun to watch.  Big guy with a really powerful swing.

Favorite Card-

I have gone this entire time without picking and posting two rookie cards in my countdown.  Well, I cannot pass by the 1990 Topps Frank Thomas.  Iconic card.  

1990 Topps Frank Thomas