Sho' Nuff.

       As you may have been able to tell from yesterday's teaser, I am on the road away from Starting Nine World HQ and currently at my brother's house in PA dog sitting.  It is a nice situation where I get a little QT with the dog and a staycation away from the world.  Another perk is I found out there was a card show Sunday at a fire house in Newark DE, not far from where I am staying.   It's always nice to get away and even better to see some new faces and sellers.  So I ventured out to (the safe) Newark yesterday with a fist full of dirty money and my usual penchant for dime box diving. In fact, just about all the cards you are about to see are dime box finds unless otherwise noted. 

I will start off with some current stars:

I picked up a good beginning of a Yoenis Cespedes page, and seeing as I had zero of his cards set aside for such a thing, six is a very good start indeed.  Keeping with the Cuban flavor, that is my first keeper Yasiel Puig as all the others I have pulled have gone out to greener, bluer pastures.  Jose Fernandez is also from Cuba, Giancarlo Stanton, alas, is not.

How about some faux-vintage Hall of Famers?

I go a little crazy when I find these kinds of players in dime boxes.  Plus, these are some great looking cards.  That Bench GQ Collisions card is just magnificent.  That Frank Robinson is not only a picture I have never seen before, but the kind of photo you don't often see on cards at all.  And somehow that Tony Gwynn wandered in on this group but seeing how he just passed, I will let it pass.

These are 2010 Topps Vintage Legends cards:

This is yet another one of those insert sets that shows how infuriating Topps can be.  They used some great old timey players on Topps designs they weren't originally shown on - a very good idea.  They also picked some photos they hadn't reused over and over again - also good.  But the usual 5% failure on their part shows in font choices and incorrect colors -  the kind of thing that would take but a minute to fix.  I am sure I am not the only one to rail about these inserts but since they are new to me, I am railing anyway.  Still, this will make for a great page.

Here are some more faux-vintage:

That Vlad Guerrero Post card did not scan well but trust me, the chrome parallel makes it look all shiny and so different but not from the originals.  Alas, those are just reprints of the Robbie traded and McCovey Washington error, but since I don't own either of these cards anymore, I will enjoy them all the same.  I like the simplicity of those UD Origins cards so I am gonna track down 6 more and make a page.  I have wanted that Vida Blue card since I saw it on another blog last year and now I have it, for a nice thin dime. 

Did I pick up any real vintage?  Why yes I did...

I nabbed that '67 Jim Wynn and '66 Hoyt Wilhelm for a buck a piece.  Seeing how the Wynn is a semi high and the Wilhelm is a high number, that is quite a deal.  The Fred Whitfield and Charlie Smith are welcome additions to my slowly dwindling All Star Rookie needs - also just a dollar each.  The other three cards are from reprint sets, but I am a rookie cup completist, so they had to come home with me.

I really like these 1993 Upper Deck Iooss Collection cards.  They are the height of minimalist design and the photos are incredible.  Not only am I gonna make a page, I might build the whole set. 

The other five surrounding those cards are some nifty retired star pick ups.  I always forget Carlos Delgado came up as a catcher until I see one of his rookie cards. 

Out of the almost 500 cards I picked up (don't worry, I am not going to show all of them) I bought exactly one (1) Gary Carter card.  Bizarre.

I am pretty sure I don't have any of those Mike Piazza cards  - I also picked up one of his cousin, who has decided to go by the same name - this strategy didn't work for Edgard Clemente either.  The Frank Thomas No Name On Front card you see there is from the Cards Your Mother Threw Out insert set from a couple years back.  I wonder if anyone's mom actually threw one of those out considering at the time they were a big deal and worth about $2,000 even back then? 

Some more favorite players:

A six pack of Reggie Jacksons - Reggie seems to have gotten a lot of my love on this blog lately, huh?  I picked up two odd Jeff Bagwell cards, one with rainbow action and the other where he seems to be hitting the Space Shuttle.  I have never seen this card before but it may quickly become an oddball favorite.  I mean, look at it!  How wonderfully ridiculous.

Wait, did I not buy any Mets cards?  Of course I did...

That David Wright refractor on the top was bought for a dime.  I will grab almost any refractor for a dime, much less my current fave.  The Bowman Platinum Wright on the second row did cost me a dollar, but it was worth it - the scan does not do the shininess justice. 

More Mets:

I have developed some mad respect for Bartolo Colon.  He is older than me, he is fatter than me, and he is pitching in the major leagues.  You kids can live vicariously through Mike Trout or Jose Abreu, as for me?  I am kindred spirits with old Bartolo there. 

I found a vein of 1995 Flair cards, so I grabbed all the Mets, alas there are 8 and not 9:

I added the Iooss Hojo card to round out the scan, which kind of fits and also kind of doesn't.  The 1995 Flair set is a really nice one.  It sort of echoes 1955-56 Topps while at the same time looking both very modern and timeless.  I am sorry I missed this one 20 years ago.

More more Mets:

The top row is a nice trio of Mets failures.  The middle row has some actual vintage, once again, cards had for a dollar.  Any time you can get Choo Choo for a buck, you do it.  The bottom row are all cards I am 98% certain I already have but I couldn't pass them up for a dime a piece - one can get on a roll that way.

Saints?  Saints.

I like that Drew Brees cards with him shown on Purdue look almost indistinguishable from the ones with him on the Saints.

A few more football cards:

No matter how terrible the Mets are this year, it is still way too early to be thinking about fall and the start of football season.  I mean, summer just started.  Yes, I am trying to convince myself this is true.

I even nabbed a few hockey and basketball cards, but very few:

Wait, that is a baseball card - no it isn't.  That is Trevor Gretzky, Wayne's son.  I doubt he will amount to much as a player, but hey, he got a baseball card (his dad never did).  You see a few Knicks cards from the heyday of the early 90's.  All Knicks fans did back then was complain that they didn't win championships; if only they could see the future when making the playoffs would be a pipe dream. 

I didn't buy much Allen and Ginter last year, so when I found a bunch of the non baseball players, I pounced.  I mean, there is a Fish card...Fish! 

Aside from Abe Vigoda, there are some lovely ladies and Ben Franklin, who would greatly appreciate being included on such a scan. 

I am semi-obsessed with that Topps 75 set.  It highlights all the non-sports cards Topps has put out over the years and I might just have to invest in the base set.  Where else can one find Donkey Kong, Neil Armstrong, Martin Van Buren, and Mulder & Scully? 

Also here are some Heritage Flashback cards, including two of the Beatles and one of the Stones.  That seems like a proper ratio to me. 

I also built some ready made nine pocket pages:

2013 Topps WBC inserts.

2014 Panini Prizm.

I have been burned by this product the last couple years, so I just bought nine of them for a page to be done with it.  Same crappy look, same pseudo-chrome design, same no-logos. Get your shit together, Panini.

The aforementioned 1995 Flair:

Remember when early Alex Rodriguez cards were a big deal and not in dime boxes?

2010 Turkey Red retro stars:

These not only look great, I just noticed everyone has their socks looking properly done.  This is a great page for that alone.  High striped socks forever!

2004 UD Legends basketball:

I saw the World B. Free card of this in one of the dime boxes I scoured and I decided to get him some friends to make a page.  I am glad I did this if only to highlight Artis Gilmore's amazing facial hair and expression. 

2013-14 Score Hockey Gold:

I found some of these and decided I liked the look of the design and I picked up nine of them.  Turns out, this is the gold parallel and not just the base.  Works for me.

Speaking of Gold Parallels:

One dealer had a huge block of Topps Gold parallels from all sorts of years, so I grabbed a bunch.  I am talking about close to 100.  I will spare you the details, you know what these look like. 

I was kind of underwhelmed by the high end cards most of the dealers had.  Luckily, I was not interested in buying fancy shiny cards.  I did find this Drew Brees double jersey card...

...that Drew Storen kind of came with the Drew Brees.  The cards were $6 each or 2 for $10.  I can't resist a bargain and a 2 for 1 Drew special just seemed right.  And of course, I picked up some cards for other bloggers as well.  At a dime a piece, it is hard to go wrong with a little altruism.

I had a great time at the show talking to some new collectors and mocking a few Phillies fans.  An even better time was had this evening while I figured out the peculiarities of my brother's scanner...

...lucky for me, I had an adorable helper.

Mail Call: Ten! Ten Plain White Envelopes!

       Ahahahaha! Okay, well, to be all nit-picky and specific, it is nine plain white envelopes and one yellow one...

                                                                                                                                                                      ^^^ See? Yellow one.

I swear to god, my postman hoards my mail and delivers it all at once.  This represents almost two weeks of purchases on Listia and eBay all spread out on different days and yet somehow, magically, they all get delivered at once.  I mean, yeah, there was three snow storms and a holiday but still, it makes me imagine the Newman style of postal delivery.

Now sprung from their PWE prisons, what you see here is an odd mix - but really, if you read this blog with any sort of regularity, it all makers perfect sense...

In the first row, you'll see I picked off that Pujols and those two 1985 Topps hall of famers for literally nothing on Listia.  I grabbed that gold Jimenez parallel on eBay for a dollar for my pages.  In the second row is some very typical Max pickups, New Orleans Saints and New York Mets cards.  I got that Sid Fernandez for 100 credits on Listia and bought a whole lot of nine cards to secure that Hojo, which I am 98% sure I don't have.  Of course now I have 8 Mets doubles - that I will probably put on Listia.  Oh the circle of life.  The final row shows a couple of Oakland A's players who are both #527 in their respective sets.  Somehow, I still have not written my post about my 527 collection.  At least I - and by extension you - have something to look forward to.  Lastly is one of those Olivia II smutty art cards.  Shiny and boobies for free?  How could I resist?

Another Trade With Robert of $30 A Week Habit.

       My collecting habits have been well chronicled on this blog, as have my buying habits.  Which is to say, my habits are consistently inconsistent.  I go to shows and dive into dime boxes.  I buy and sell on ebay.  I have a new love of the junk on listia.  I am the king of the impulse buy at K-Mart and Target. What happens to all these cards is they get neatly sorted into piles.  I think that is the zen part of this hobby for me.  I sit on my couch in front of a little card table in a yogi position with my legs folded under each other (no joke) and break all these cards that come into my collection into piles of what goes, what stays, what I need, what others need, etc. etc., ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

       I read so many different card blogs and it is hard to say why some folks get piles and some don't.  Maybe it's because he has a hook or because he has so many interests, but Robert from $30 a Week Habit gets such a pile.  My excess Blue Jays, Maple Leafs, and Topps serial numbered cards all get thrown together and when the pile gets too big or I get tired of looking at them, I compare and contrast what he needs (or might need) and out the door they go.  It is an inelegant solution but it seems to make me seem altruistic.  Sometimes I even remember the actual cards we agreed to trade.  Lucky for me, Robert is always ready to reciprocate:

That Darryl Strawberry is from this years Archives and it is a beaut. The mini Ted Williams I asked for a long while ago and only remembered that I had when I saw it.  The Topps Gold Nieuwenhuis is a great picture of a player that has proven you can't steal first base enough that I don't think the Mets will call him back up no matter how well he fields.  The shiny Jose Bautista was on my wantlist - yay! someone reads my wantlists - because I want to make a player page of him (3 down 6 to go).  He also included a nice shiny numbered autographed Devils rookie card...because, hockey!

Finally, the Chrome Heritage David Wright (always appreciated) is a nice contrast to the 1964 Topps Joe Gibbon, the actual card we had agreed to trade.  He bought it for his set not realizing it had the added Heritage parallel stamp on it.  I wanted one of those because I have been integrating one into the Topps pages since they started inserting those things in 2008 with the 1959 set.  I sent him one, sans foil, from that '64 page he needed: the John Roseboro (a player whose most famous hit with a bat did not involve a ball).  And as always, Robert included a nice little note to remind me who sent the cards...as always the man is unflappably polite.  Thanks Robert!

***

Want to get a pile too?  Really the best way is to be a team collector since I have boxes and boxes of cards all sorted into teams.  If you have stuff from my wantlists, send me an email and let's get cracking. 

Card Draft Results: Shoebox Legends.

       The Whaler Worshiping Wonder over at Shoebox Legends recently held a card draft.  One thing you folks may not know about me is my minor obsession with the Hartford Whalers, problem is the NHL has conspired to keep me infuriated about hockey, thus unable to post about it...but I digress.  I saw the nice mix of cards he was offering and bought in.  I do enjoy these as a way of putting unwanted cards in the hands of those that want them, skipping the messy middle man of commerce or the convoluted nonsense of contests.  In these, everyone wins: the draft holder gets some cash and rid of some excess cards, the drafters get some cards they want at a fraction of the price one might normally pay. As it is, I paid about a dollar a piece for these cards and there is not a single one you wouldn't grab if you saw it in a dollar box at a show or in a store.  The system works!

Let's take a look at the haul I brought up with my net: 

Nine nifty cards here.  The Maine game used there was my first pick - not exactly a glamorous choice, but one I was happy with after the first two cards I wanted went off the board one-two.  That shiny Jeter card was nabbed in one of the four bonus rounds that were offered, a very nice wrinkle in the draft game.  Jeter may not be my favorite, but hey, shiny!

Seven more:

I really like the Turkey Red Chrome cards, and he had a bunch of the Mickey Mantles in the draft.  I think I got three of the four.  That first one is a refractor, once again shiny trumps Yankee.  That hockey card on the far right is numbered 02/10 and I got it in a late round, which I considered a major upset.  Like any sports draft, you always look for value in later rounds.  There was a bunch of game used Hockey cards in the draft and I got a couple of nice ones - dual ones to be specific.  I would be lying if I said I was planning to keep the Rangers one, but I have a friend who will appreciate it a lot more than me and I am sure he has some unwanted Devils card he will swap me for it. 

There was also some great vintage stuff in the draft and I am sorry I didn't snag more of it:

In some kind of grand oversight, I do not own a 1970-71 Topps basketball tallboy. Well, I should say didn't, because now I have that one - and it's a Happy one at that.  The most popular cards of the draft seemed to be the 1953 Bowman color cards and I was a round behind in grabbing the best ones, but I did procure the two you see there.  In one of the bonus rounds, I added that 1962-63 Topps Bill Hay to my small collection of vintage hockey.  If they ever clear up the lockout mess, I might even show you some of them.

One other wonderful thing SL did was properly pack the cards for shipping: top loaders for the better cards, soft sleeves for all the cards, team bags to hold them together and...

Blue Packing tape!  It is my continuing crusade to get all people to never ever use scotch tape on top loaders and this is yet another opportunity for me to mention it and even to show the pleasing results.  Plus, he used enough tape to hold these cards together so tight that even the US Postal Service couldn't move the pile.  Well done.

Oh, I forgot two cards!  Two awesome 2007 Goudey mini short prints - one for my Reggie player collection and one just because.  Magnificent. 

No, Shoebox Legends, thank you!

Trade With Stackhouse at Tim Wallach blog. aka Goals.

       You gotta have goals.  Long term, short term, midterm, it is always best to have something to aim for.  Not to get into deeper life lessons here, I will specifically apply this concept to a card collection.  Your collection can get out of hand real quick, both in terms of size and scope, if you don't know what you are trying to accomplish with it.  I have narrowed my collection in recent years to a very personal group of criteria.  But not everyone wants to narrow their collections down.  Some people want to expand and grow.  I respect that.  I envy that, in a way.

       There is one collector who has a vision I think we all should envy.  We all have favorite teams and players that we like to collect en masse.  This collector I am speaking of is a fan of Tim Wallach, former third baseman for the Expos and Dodgers.  He has a simple goal: collect all his cards.  And I don't mean one of each of his cards, I mean ALL his cards.  There is a fine line between madness and genius, I believe J Corey Stackhouse straddles this line perfectly. 

After finding his blog and immediately embracing his audacity, I sent him an email praising his insanity and promised him I would comb my collection for every Tim Wallach card I could find.  While I only found 14 of them, it was a nice mix of rookies and oddballs and Stackhouse reciprocated by sending me a nice selection of Mets and Saints cards:

I mean, how can you go wrong with a shiny David Wright and a vintage Gil Hodges?  Short answer: you can't.  And the hit parade continues with more shiny of Mike Pelfrey (that is a refractor, trust me) and Lucas Duda.  I really should collect the entire Mets set of those 2011 Topps Diamond cards.  They bring shiny to a whole new level.  Also here are some nouveau Gary Carters and Tom Seavers - a couple nice additions to two of my favorite players to collect (though I couldn't dream of collection all of their cards).   Plus, I love vague Mets stickers and that Panini is one I do not have.  Sweet.

Wait, there is more:

Stackhouse said he was going to come up with some of my Rookie Cup needs, but he only found one.  One is always enough if you don't have it.  There are a couple more oblong Mets inserts there that I am not sure if I have, but will go in the team book regardless.  Rounding out the package were some recent Saints cards that I did not yet have.  I didn't even know Topps did an Attax for football.  The caption on the Marques Colston insert is "Ringmaster of Offensive Circus" OK, sure.

I will now implore all my readers: please check out Stackhouse's blog.  Please search your collections and help him with his goal.  His chutzpah alone should be an inspiration to us all.  You gotta have goals, even if they are crazy.  Nothing is impossible.  Thanks, Corey!

Jaybarkerfan's Junk Part 1 - The Draft

       This post was going to cover my recent dealings with Wes from Jaybarkerfan's Junk but it seems there is so much stuff, I am going to have to split it into two parts, Kill Bill style (definitely NOT Twilight style).  Wes recently cleaned house, or at least cleaned card pile, and had all sorts of stuff up for sale, trade, and such.  He also decided to run a trade bait draft, a brilliant solution to get rid of those middle of the road cards - too nice to give away, not substantial enough to sell on eBay, not beloved enough to have been directly traded for.  I decided to buy into this draft since he wisely had a complete preview of all the cards he was going to have up for bid (a most welcome bit of organization) and there seemed to be some stuff I would want.  Part one here is going to cover the draft.

       This was a most deliberate process.  It went round by round via lists we sent by email.  I am surprised it didn't take longer than it did (which was actually quite a while).  As an organizationally challenged person, I appreciate Wes' patience and thoroughness.  It was quite a nice little distraction to see what cards I got and missed on.  In the end, I am quite pleased.  Let's take a look at what came in:

The 1952 Coogan there was my #1 pick.  How can you turn down a such a perfect piece of imperfect vintage cardboard?  While I don't think it was my first choice, it does fit a very specific purpose.  My 1952 Topps page is mostly very well loved cards.  One of them, though, was not.  This specimen will fit right in with the rest of the well-loved original Topps cards and I can move the more handsome card to a toploader or to eBay.  I plan on starting a series of posts highlighting my Topps pages, since these pages cover every set since 1952 (and a lot of them replace the sets I built myself).  You will see the Coogan there.  Also here is a Nolan Ryan insert I didn't have, in fact one I have never heard of...it is from one of Donruss' Spanish language sets.  The two Reggie Jacksons here are wonderful; great contrasting images and uniforms.  Plus, shiny!  The Gary Carter there is actually not the 1978 Topps card, but the 2011 Cards Your Mother Threw Out insert (observant students of fontage will notice the difference).  If my mother ever threw out my baseball cards, I'd disown her.  The rest of the cards are all pretty predictable: a David Wright insert, a 1992 Gold Winner Met, a groovy UD Decade Gaylord Perry and a Allen & Ginter Mickey Mantle.  Well, OK, that last one isn't exactly predictable, but I can't turn down A&G vintage stars, even Yankees.

On to the next nine:

Right off the bat, three Mets inserts of three of my personal favs.  I looked and could not believe I didn't have that Wonder Years Mike Piazza card.  I own the UD Retro Lunchbox of Piazza for crying out loud, but somehow that piece of nouvelle psychedelia missed my collection.  The second row has some Sportflix Cecil Fielder goodness, a Paul Sorrento über-shiny Pinnacle card that I did not have (click here to see why this is important), and a Joey Votto insert from last year for his player page.  The last three there are: a 3D Topps insert of Ubaldo Jimenez - this set is so wonderful, plus it matches will with the Fielder above it.  I have a soft spot for ol' Froot Loops, so I had to snag that Mickey Tettleton insert...after all, how many Mickey Tettleton inserts can there be?  Lastly, I grabbed that Neil Walker Topps Gold card for Robert's Insanity Set, but it turns out it is a number he already has, so it will find a spot in my Rookie Cup collection.  Oh, and these were kind of in drafting order, but I think I mixed them up for aesthetic layout purposes.   I am a slave to my particular fashion.

Last batch:

First card here is a 1998 SPx Finite Frank Thomas.  I was obsessed with this set when it came out.  It was the first all serial numbered set and I fell for it head over heels.  I bought boxes and boxes of it.  It has three levels of shiny to each card and they are numbered accordingly.  This is the "spectrum" level, the highest thus the lowest numbered, this one is numbered to /1750, which in 1998 was pretty damn low.  Plus, the scan doesn't give it its proper blinding due.  Second, there is another Mike Piazza insert I didn't have, as well as a Tom Seaver shiny insert that I didn't have.  In the very middle there is a Carlos Delgado insert which I picked late, just because it is a Met and I am a completist when it comes to having all the Mets.  Also picked late was that 1983 Topps ERA Leaders card.  I am a sucker for league leader cards.  The rest of this scan are minis, all with various destinations.  The Adrian Gonzalez mini is going to Night Owl, since he is more obsessed with minis than anyone ever.  The Reggie and Seaver minis are going right into my player collections.  The last three are Allen and Ginter minis of various years and subject.  I will probably keep them, but the McGehee might go to Thorzol when he has his "Trade Me Anything" posts.  I keep oddball Brewers around for just such emergencies.   

So I picked up 28 cards for about 50 cents each.  How can you beat Seaver and Piazza inserts, 1952 Topps cards, and Allen and Ginter mini inserts for 50 cents a piece?  Point is, you can't.  Thanks again Wes for running your draft and having such marvelous cards to choose from.

Coming tomorrow: Lots from Jaybarkerfan's Junk.  Lots and Lots of Lots.

Parallels.

       I'm not entirely sure when the card companies lost their mind.  It might have been in the late 80's, when their printing presses got more work than Bill Cosby.  It was abundantly clear, however, that by the early 90's, they had gone insane and it was an absolutely collective disease.  That disease had a very simple yet haunting name: parallels.  And the road to that illness was paved with gold...gold foil to be specific.  In 1992, Topps did two things to their base set, one of them brilliant and one of them practically the downfall of all cardom.  The first was they printed their flagship set on bright white cardboard, an excellent move.  The second was they made parallel inserts of the entire base set with gold foil on them and randomly inserted them into packs.

They also had a contest that you could enter to win more gold foiled parallels.  Trouble was, the contest was easy to win because of a printing flaw in the contest cards so Topps had to print more gold cards to meet demand.  This made a parallel set to their parallel set, and, oh, it was a winner:


Then to perpetuate the madness, Topps took things one step further in 1993 and started to insert the gold foil parallels one per pack:

I never caught parallel fever bad enough to try and build an entire set, but for some reason, I have the first and second series of 1993 represented with pages, maybe it was because two different series were new at the time, I have no idea:

1994 brought more of the same from Topps and their flagship brand:

They added the concept of Black Gold at this point, which I do not have a page of and they weren't parallels but inserts, so let's just look at some more 1994 Gold cards since I once again have a series one page and series two page:

Exhausting?  We haven't even started...

Upper Deck, feeling left out, looked at Topps' madness and said "me too!" Their 1993 was almost perfect in every way, including the fact that it did not have parallels.  Then in 1994 Upper Deck came up with their Electric Diamond parallels.  They weren't gold, they were electric, whatever that is supposed to mean:

That page is ugly in its attempt to be all inclusive.  Looking at the aesthetics of that page, I should be ashamed of myself.  Upper Deck repeated the Electric Diamond idea in 1995, but the difference was so slight, I have never bothered with a page of them.

One place Upper Deck did get all crazy with the rare metals was with their Collector's Choice set.  Starting in 1994, they started with Silver and Gold signature parallels:
The Gold is much more rare than the silver, which I suppose is fitting:

Collector's Choice set had special editions and all sorts of nonsense, keeping it all straight makes my head hurt:




Donruss would eventually take the notion of the parallel farther than anyone, but they started out pretty nice.  The 1992 Leaf base set had silver borders, but the parallels were black with gold foil and they look sharp:

The 1994 Donruss base set had a rainbow parallel, which takes shiny to a whole new level:

By the late 90's, the Donruss sets were a horrifying menagerie of parallels, numbered parallels, proofs, artist proofs, die cuts, and the like:




And don't get me started with what they did to the Leaf set.  A person could go mad just trying to look up one parallel card from the 1998 Leaf set alone.  I have none of those cards represented just to avoid the temptation.

Fleer kept up with the Joneses with their Tiffany parallels:

Their '96 & '97 sets were already a little different in that the base cards were matte finished and the inserts were shiny.  In the end, though, their heart just wasn't in it...

But Fleer Ultra had Gold Medallion...and boy, is there gold in them thar cards.  Gold medallion over the years varied in it's presentation from full gold:


To hard to tell it's a parallel:

To die cut:

To die cut and golden:

Still with me?  Are you paying attention?  There will be a written quiz...

Topps eventually branched out from the base set and took parallelitis to its premium set Stadium Club.  In 1993, the shiny "1st day issue" block first appeared:

They continued in 1994:

Plus, 1994 also brought some golden rainbow shiny of their own:

1995's Stadium Club parallels combined the then-already worn out phrase "Virtual Reality" and the idea of continuing the 1994 baseball season from where it ended on August 12:

The cards in question featured stats on the back as run through a computer simulation.  The 1995 Topps set also had a parallel that hinged on this concept, but you will have to come back on Sunday to see all about that one.


Post script. I just didn't have the energy to do all of Score and Pinnacle and Pacific and go into the late 90's and the numbered parallels of the 2000's....heck, it looks like this will have to become an ongoing series.  But believe me, Score was also on the gold bandwagon:

As I have shown with this post, parallels can be quite frustrating, but sometimes, they can almost induce seizure...take these 1997 Score Artist Proofs:

Wow.  Just, wow.