no one's going to read this blog

I can't believe it's been almost a year

2012-01-29T14:55:00.001-06:00

In the few years of blogging (I’m not sure if posting once every couple of months could be considered blogging, but bear with me) I’ve never had a bad trade. The worst trade I’ve ever completed was still great because I got exactly what I expected in the trade. Nothing more, nothing less, but exactly what I was expecting which was great because it filled some holes in my player, team or set collection. Most of the time a trade fits all three criteria. Some, actually most trades will include a few extras. Random cards of a team or player that you didn’t expect and that’s nice too. It’s always nice to get extra cards, it’s also nice to get rid of some cards that you know the receiving party will also like.

Their have been a couple of times that I was guilty of the same thing. The person I traded with requested no extras because they didn’t want a bunch of dups of crap they already had. A few times I assumed they didn’t want my extra crap or I didn’t have any extras to send over and I felt a little guilty about that. I’m pretty sure most of my trade partners have intimated that they liked the cards I sent either by email or trade posts or both.

That leaves me to the second part of a trade and that would be the trade post. These days I haven’t done much posting which means I still haven’t gotten around to my trade posts.

Not doing a trade post is sort of like not cuddling after intercourse. * You’re contractually obligated to do one. You don't want to be seen as a brutish oaf, do you?? You also don't want to be labelled an insensitive and selfish person. Honestly you really should show appreciation for the cards and the time it took for people to go through their collections to send you some cards. Add in obnoxious postal workers and kiosks that go on the fritz and the sending part can be tedious.

And it’s not that I don’t want to do a trade post it just seems like the longer I go without doing one it’s just that much more of a insult to the trade partner. So the longer I wait means that the trade post has to be that much better to compensate for my laziness. It’s a vicious circle.

Which brings me to the present day. Even though I’ve spent three paragraphs setting it up, this technically isn’t a trade post. This is a contest winnings post. Not doing a winning contest post is even more egregious simply because the person you should be thanking has braved the postal workers ,kiosk lines, and/or the line at Target or the card store to pick up packing materials as well as pulling the cards. They’ve spent infinitely more time setting up the contest, picking the winners and then sending out the cards so the least you can do is acknowledge the package, right?

I mean, your part of the contest was pretty simple and easy by comparison. A comment, shout out and a random guess or question to answer and that's it.

Yikes! I’m a really bad person. It’s taken me months to get around to blogging about my contest winnings from Ted who runs the blog Crinkly Wrappers. We actually did complete a trade around the time of the contest, but I haven’t done a trade post on that yet either. (Sorry!!)

This is a post that is tough to do not just because of the shear volume of cards, but for the content of the package. The cards he sent over all three criteria, plus the added bonus of being mostly vintage examples of cards that I had never seen in person.

One Topps card from 1952 to 2011. Pretty crazy. Much nicer and better thought out than the Diamond Giveaway stuff that Topps does. In all fairness Topps couldn’t do something quite like this. No offense to Crinkly Wrappers, but if Topps did a similar giveaway they would be expected to have more than a few winners. Think of the outrage if out of all the collectors Topps only awarded 1 set of cards from 1952 to 2011. Their giveaway site is still pretty nice, just not quite a giveaway. More like a lottery. Ted’s giveaway was a true giveaway and I’m definitely pleased to receive the cards. This has got to be one of the most generous packages I’ve ever gotten in the mail.

I mean, when you are holding a 1952 card in your hand and it’s in pretty decent shape that’s saying something. I never thought I would own a 1952 card, much less one in great shape. Honestly I never thought I would hold in my hand any cards from the 50’s or 60’s when I started collecting so this is all mind blowing.

Out of all the cards he sent a few of them were personally more intriguing to me than the others simply because they fit specific holes in my collection.

This 1967 card of Jerry Adair is nice because he’s an Oklahoma guy and this will go into my Oklahoma guy binder. I’m trying to get one card of everybody who is from oklahoma in one binder. The card itself didn’t really grab me. A close up portrait of a ballplayer from the 60’s didn’t immediately grab my attention; it was the name Adair. Adair is a county in Oklahoma so I checked out the back to see who he was. It would be nice if he was from Adair county, but alas Sand Springs is in Osage and Tulsa counties. It would be cool if he was the king of Adair county before becoming a ballplayer.

Another card that immediately went into the binder was this 1973 card. When I decide to collect a set putting what few cards I have into the binder is one of the first things I do. It’s better for me that way than doing the box thing and then putting the cards in binders later. I like to look at them so even if I only have like 10-20 cards they’ll sit in a binder alone into I can fill it out more. This card was needed.

This 2011 Clay Bucholz card was also a set need. It's also a Score Board in the Background candidate.

2008 is a set that I’ve made fun of a few times, but it’s starting to grow on me. The Topps tab thing is still a little irritating, but it’s a nice, colorful set.

just as colorful is the 1960 Topps. A few similarities with the colored names. 1960 Topps and...

....1965 Topps are two sets that I’ll try to tackle at some point. Not to be a pessimist, but they’ll be a little hard to complete too. The journey will be nice though. Unlike the 1973 set these are in the “good box” until I can get a little more to put in the binders. So far I only have a couple of '65's and only the single 1960 card you see above.

1971 would be a nice set to collect. With this Clyde Wright card I now have 3 1971 cards. The journey to collect 1971 has started. We all have to start somewhere right? It only takes a couple of cards to get me into a set and I’m afraid the more I look at these cards in hand I’ll try to collect every year of Topps.

This is only the second 1972 card that I have in hand. I can see why people go crazy for these cards. IT’s such an odd border. You could safely say that nothing like it exists. (1982 Fleer borrowed the lower name plate.) I may put off doing those other sets I mentioned to focus on 1972.

You see what happens when you have an abundance of riches? You become greedy and want more riches. I really would like to own every single card from 1952 to 2008. Crap! I need to reign myself in a little.

In addition to a couple of set needs I also was lucky to get a couple of Mets cards like this 1964 Amado Samuel card.

I have to admit that I’m not familiar with all the players on these cards. A few stand out to me like this 1979 Tony Perez card. I know this guy. I was six when this card was issued.

Jerry Johnson is another name I recognize. Pretty cool action shot. Not a lot of these from the selection Ted sent over. A little faster shutter speed would help with the blurry pitching hand. It looks like a daytime shot so that should allow for a faster shutter speed. Oh well. It’s still a nice shot.

One name I thought I recognized was Jon Matlock. Actually it's Matlack. All this time I referred to him as Matlock. Maybe I was influenced by my grandparents always watching reruns of Andy Griffith's TV detective. Anyway, it's nice to have a card of his as a Met. I only have some childhood cards of him as a Ranger. Pretty cool photo of Jon with a mischievous grin.

Brohamer is a cool name, but I bet every frat boy in his class probably referred to him as "Bro Hammer", rather than "Bro Haymer". "How's it hangin' BroHammer!"

Some photos selections by the editors and/ or photographers on these cards are a little more odd like in this 1977 card of Ralph Garr.

Kind of lame.

This 1959 card is pretty awesome though. Nice clear photo. I like that it’s taken near the dugout rather than in some gully or a fake pose in front of an empty stadium. We could imagine this card being taken while he was waiting to go to the on deck circle. You could imagine him during a game. Most probably it was taken before a game during spring practice. It just doesn’t scream preseason like most cards do.

A plethora a blue backgrounds in the early sixties and late seventies.

Not to mention pretty cool flat tops too.

A nice batting helmet shot in 1963.

And there you have it, basically an example of every Topps card from 1952 to 1979. I didn’t want to bore people with the 80’s and 90’s cards as they’re a little more common and recognizable to us.

I don’t think my crappy, long winded post really did the cards justice. It was mostly a self-deprecating blog about my procrastination.

Thanks for the cards. I really did enjoy them. Hopefully one day I can repay the blogosphere with a cool giveaway of my own.

* Until our collecting community is infiltrated with hot, female collectors I'm not trading cuddling or sex for cards. Maybe a nice compliment or some sweet talking, but that's it. I'm easy, not slutty.

Thanks for reading.

Thanksgiving

2011-11-24T12:44:00.000-06:00

I have a lot of things to be thankful for this year. Actually most years I have a lot of stuff to be thankful for. In my personal life I try to be relatively positive no matter what.

In terms of my card collecting hobby I sometimes wish I had the resources to buy up a little bit or a lot of everything. Mostly I need to collect what I really like and worry too much about my hobbies.

One thing I have to be thankful for is all of the cool packages that I've received in the past year. Unfortunately I haven't gotten around to writing about these package. I have and continue to enjoy the cards, but I haven't done a good job of getting those trade posts.

It's always cool to get a package in the mail when you expect them, but a nice surprise package in the mail is really awesome too. It really shows how thoughtful all of my trade partners are and how thoughtful the blogsphere can be.

A few months ago (I'm really, really late with some of these posts!) Joe from ...the Sandlot

Takahashi doesn't currently play for the Mets, he's in Anaheim these days, but I have always liked this card.

First of all it's chrome, it's a Met and even though I usually prefer action shots that show a player's face sometimes it's nice to see a shot from the back that shows off the name and number of the player. I have a lot of Asian friends and so I have an interest in players from that area.

I think this is one of only a few Dykstra cards that I own. This may have even been the first Dykstra card that I had in my collection. (I have a couple of more now.) '89 Topps has a nice design.

This cool shot of Jose Reyes is not one of his best cards, It's still a nice card though. It's another post I have for later.

Even though this is a Met, the Pagan card is already in the 2011 Topps Baseball binder. (not the official one, just a generic binder) I'm paring down my collection; if I'm collecting the set I'm not going to do a separate team set, just keeping a few players for their respective pages. If I'm not collecting the set then I'll just do the team set.

That's the case with the Ray Searage card. Currently it's in the Mets binder, but whenever I get around to seriously collecting the 1982(if I ever do) then it will be donated to that binder.

I find that when I either don't have the money or interest in buying new stuff reorganizing binders and boxes can be pretty fun in a way.

If you're still reading this: Happy Thanksgiving everyone! It was a pretty short post, but at least it will be a break from arguing with your family about sports, religion and politics.

Ready comprension isn't one of my strong points

2011-11-17T00:09:00.000-06:00

I've been jonesin' for one of those Value box things from Walmart, and finally I made it over their the other day to check out the selection. I picked up one without really looking at it. I also picked up a loose pack. I'm still not sure why. I guess I thought I would might have the chance to pull something really awesome from that one retail pack.

In addition to the Mets cards in U&H I really wanted to try and pull these two cards shown below:

I've seen these two really cool horizontal action shot cards on a few of the blogs and wanted them for my collection. I pulled them both of them in the one loose pack as well as another code card and one of these things that don't exist.

I really love the Kimballs, I just don't want to admit they exist or I will feel self-loathing for not owning all of them.

You see, I want to be cool too and get all the nifty new card sets completed. The Kimballs are some of the nicest retro cards that I've seen in a while. Allen and Ginter is a little weird this year and Turkey Red was getting a little old. These minis are a nice change up. But they don't technically exist in my mind right now. Maybe later I'll look for them online.

Last year I had good luck with those value boxes, so I thought it wouldn't hurt to try it out. I was excited about the one of three refractors and the one pack of bowman chrome. Not much of a fan of Bowman, but I do like some shiny and I haven't bought any chrome this year at all. Sometimes I even get lucky and pull a few extra code cards.

Well, reading comprehension isn't one of my strong suites, as the refractors are all of the same guy. Nothing against Bryce Harper, but I was hoping for another Mantle or Jackie. The Mantle I pulled last year was beautiful, one of the nicest cards that I own. The Harper card is pretty nice too.

Except I'm not really head over heels with this guy. I could've done with a retired legend rather than an up-and-coming guy. But oh well.

I guess I should have looked at the back of the box. It shows three different versions of the same card. Not that I would have noticed that either.

Another thing that kicks me in the balls is that the packs in the value box only have eight cards in them. That sucks.

My first pack of cards yielded this nice relic though. I like the design of these. The cacti really makes the card look different. The cutout for the relic looks nice too.

So at least I pulled a hit. Not much else in the box except for some cool base cards.

Reminds me a little of the Rangers card in 2009.

3 really nice expressions on these cards. I love the reaction of the fan in the first row.

Now I remember why I don't buy much Bowman Chrome. Or any chrome for that matter.

4 cards per pack and two of them will be White Sox.

the other two, people you've probably never heard of. (at least I haven't)

Caminero has a pretty cool name. Arquimedes. like the famous mathmetician Arquimedes of Syracuse. His sig is pretty different too. it looks like BACCA inside a floating muffin top.

Maybe he'll go in the wacky name binder. The wacky name binder and cool shots binder is the same binder for now. Maybe one of these days the collections will get big enough so that they'll each have their own binder.

I didn't do too badly with the inserts. I really like the look of the liqourfractors. The darker background is so much better than the older diamond things.
The Vlad card is cool, but overall I think they're a little ugly.

This card is cool because I used an image for this same card when I was trying to do a sketch of Rickey last year.

My proportions are a little off, but you can tell it's from the same photo. Or at least I think it is. Maybe he was photographed a lot in that same running position.

So basically all of these cards except the cool base cards are for trade. Nobody gets my cool base cards. Let me know if you all see anything that you like. I should have some more inserts and other stuff posted up pretty soon.

Oh also time for my first ever Reyting for the box.

I'm going to rank it about a 3 Reys mainly for the relic in the box. I would give it less if not for that one card. I didn't like the 8 card packs. The rest of my disappointment rests solely with me not being a more careful shopper.

Thanks for reading.

Giving a 110 Percent!

2011-11-10T20:52:00.001-06:00

With my re-dedication to the old blog, I wanted to do something that I've been thinking over for a while, but just never had the right idea on how to do it correctly. I'm still tweaking a few things, but I think I've got a good start on something to "jazz up" the ole blog.

I've always liked the idea of having a rating system like I see on other blogs and websites and thought that a ratings system would be a good idea for my blog as well.

The one the sticks out the most is the rating system used by Beardy on his blog The Mojo Beard. you probably already know this, but he bases his ratings on beards which makes sense because it's his nickname and part of the title of his blog.

I can't really do that as my blog is a little harder to define. How do you encapsulate a "no one", as in "No One's Going to Read this Blog"? I didn't think I could get away with continuing the self deprecating tone of the blog title in my ratings system, but maybe I could find a player that would encapsulate a total team effort. someone who was a fan favorite or who, by just seeing their face would immediately tell the viewer that this person means business.

In the few years that I've been collecting I've received a bunch of cards that for what ever reason were never scanned and posted up in my blog. They've been siting in the "good box" waiting for a chance to be spotlighted on their own blog post. Either I didn't realize how great they were because of the other cards greatness overshadowing them or maybe I just wasn't ready for their greatness.

I found the perfect player with the perfect card for my rating system.

Rey Ordonez wasn't necessarily known for his hitting ability. He was a defensive specialist at the shortstop position earning 3 golden gloves. Set a Major League record for shortstops by playing 101 consecutive games without committing a fielding error. Compared to Ozzie Smith early in his career, an injury to his arm prevented him from playing in the 2000 Subway Series. He left the Mets in 2002.

Here's a quick highlight reel:

I'm nominating Rey as my "Reytings" guy for any and all future box and pack reviews. I'm probably not going to use the Reyting system for trade posts because I truly feel that all the trade packages that I've received are golden.

How do you feel Rey?

Even at boring press conferences it's safe to say he always gives 110%. Definitely the guy we want at NOGTRTB. Happy to have you on board Rey!! *

Here's a look at the design.

Hopefully I'll never bust anything that warrants a 1 or 1 1/2.

I'm a pretty optimistic guy so hopefully their will be a bunch of 5 Rey Head products in my future.

A little insight into the design. I've been wanting to do something with all the different team logos on this years Topps baseball cards. The baseball in the middle with the logo looks cool.

I haven't figured out what I want to do with all the different logos, but for now I used the logo as the border to my Rey Head.**

This is the Rey card in it's entirety.

"Shows intensity as he scores vs. Astros 7-14-96" No kidding.

The back gives us a little more info: "Rey grimaces as he rounds third on his way to scoring a run in the Mets' -5 loss to the Astros. The rookie, whose offensive ability was questioned going into the season, got a hit in the game to keep his average at a steady .265."

It's a little disappointing that the card in question details a game in which the Mets lost. But he wasn't a guy that got on base much. His lifetime OPS was .599.

Actually I'm glad I took the time to look into this card more. I found out a lot about a player that I didn't know much about. That's the nice thing about older cards, sometimes they give you a little more insight in to your teams history.

* I'd like to think the New York Mets for letting us use their conference room for my press conference. They weren't using it anyway.

I might need to add a border or something to make it stand out, but I'm happy with what I've got so far.

** I really hope I don't get sued by Topps. Or Upper Deck for that matter.

One track mind

2011-11-06T21:46:00.000-06:00

Growing up my family used to always complain about me "havin' a one track mind". I guess once I get something on my mind I can't jump over to another subject without finishing what I've started. I thought I had outgrown that habit, but apparently not. One of the reasons I haven't been posting lately is that I feel like I should finish up my trade posts before blogging on other subjects.

If I were a little bit more creative in my writing, I could somehow combine the two together. Maybe I should take a creative writing course to get my head right. And it's not just that I want to get to the trade posts, it's that I want to do them in order that I received the packages. Even though it's been months, I still have all of the folders in some sort of order with the cards that were sent to me. So I've got this stubborn idea that everything should be linear, but I don't really think in a linear way anymore, but I'm forcing myself to behave that way. So in the spirit of trying to shake things up I'm going to jump ahead and focus on a package that came my way a few days ago.

I hope you'll forgive me past trading partners, I promise I'll get to all the cool packages that I've received from you guys when I get over this procrastinating hurdle.

Kyle from the Juust a bit outside blog contacted me about having some Allen and Ginter cards off of my want list. My want list for this years A&G is extensive. That's another thing that I've procrastinated on as well. It's hard to get excited to collect a set that doesn't really grab you. Add a bunch of inserts on top of a somewhat weird base card design and it makes collecting the whole set a little daunting. Of course there's no law that says I have to collect any of it, but I'd like to have every A&G set from 2006 on in my collection.

I'm doing pretty good in that regard. I'm only needing one short print for 2009, a couple of base for 2010 to have most of 2007-2010 locked. (If you've been following this blog for a while you'll notice I've conveniently left off the black bordered minis from those collecting goals. For now I'm pretending those don't exist. Sort of like how I'm pretending that Kimball Champions 101-150 don't exist. Because if they exist and they look cool, I'll have to collect all of them.) Also, I haven't really gotten around to the 2006 version of Allen and Ginter yet either. That's for another day.

One of the nice things that I do like about this years set is that they put team logos on the bottom border of the card.

The Brewers color scheme looks really good with this card design.

Verlanders' follow through motion is made for a horizontal card.

If it's a non-baseball subject they put the groovy looking A&G logo in the bottom right of the card.

I already pulled a Hope Solo out of a rack pack, so this is my ohh la la! moment. You guys are all probably sick of these cards already. I'm a little behind schedule when it comes to this set.

The amount of subsets is crazy big this year. And I mean that literally.
You've got your Floating Fortresses cards in a full size card, unlike a few years ago when they were represented in mini form in the Topps Mayo line.

I like the rope border around the nameplate and card. I think bigger cards work better for this subject. Maybe my eyes are just getting tired and old, but I like that they can show the art work better on a bigger card. I mean how could you have a Floating Fortress on a mini card?

You've got your standby sketch highlight cards. The few of these that I've pulled look pretty good this year.

I still love the minis though. I still think that one of these days I'm going to have to invest in a lighted magnifying glass to enjoy them fully.

I thought the "Poe Toaster" was a piece of toast with the image of a raven burned into the bread. Turns out its a dude that will use any excuse to drink in a cemetery. Or maybe he's just pouring one out for his homie.

The borders on all these A&G cards look really nice. I especially like the Topps logo stuff on the bottom of the PP card.

This is the first Portraits of Penultimacy and World's Most Mysterious figures cards that I've seen in person.

These cards are all from Kyle(obviously) and he's got a group break going on right now. I haven't done a group break in a while, so maybe it's time to try my luck at getting some cool cards that I need. He's still looking for some takers so check it out.

Thanks for the cards Kyle. I really do enjoy them and it gets me a lot closer to feeling like I'm accomplishing something.

my 26 cent summer

2011-07-02T16:14:00.001-05:00

The Summer of 1987 I became a huge fan of Gun's and Roses. Their single Sweet Child of Mine was all over the airwaves and on MTV. I didn't have MTV in my home town, but my cousins did and I was staying with them for a week so needless to say, every waking minute I was glued to the TV waiting for that iconic shot of Slash plugging in his guitar and playing the opening chords to the song.

At that time i could care less about sports, sports cards or even comic books. I was entranced by this guitar thing and I swore I would be the next Slash.

Well, obviously that never happened. Actually I would spend the next 4 years or so (high school) trying to be Slash but it never worked out. I could manage a half-assed version of some of G n' R's songs, but I was a poor imitator of Slash's guitar work.

I was hoping the follow up to Appetite would be cool. Lies wasn't much of an album. A half live/half acoustic album it was an abbreviated stop gap filler before the "real" album was supposed to be released.

Then came the Spaghetti Incident (more cover songs).

The grunge movement came and went and still no follow up. Seventeen years later Chinese Democracy was released and in true weirdo Axl Rose fashion it was only released online or Best Buy. I'm sort of boycotting Best Buy so that wasn't an option. Honestly by this time I didn't even really care that much. Seventeen years is a long time to wait for anything.

Going 3 months in between posting seems like 17 years in the blogsphere.

I hope my next series of posts aren't like "Lies"(abbreviated and thrown together) or the two Use Your Illusion albums. (self-indulgent and aimless)

The people that I've traded with months ago deserve better. They deserve an Appetite for Destruction, not an acoustic version of "You're Crazy". They definitely don't need a Chinese Democracy type of effort.

Speaking of crazy. I shouldn't have been so careless with opening the package that I received from Matt B. from the blog 26 Cent Summer. It was filled to the brim with a bunch of hard core guys from the past. Matt's blog title comes from his own summer spent collecting cards. The 26 cents refer to the price of packs in 1980. In the time it's taken me to finish this trade post he's already finished his 1980 Topps set. (I'm still working on mine)

Let's see what sort of doubles he had to send over:

I recalled that Fergie had an Oklahoma connection when I was bored and digging up info on him. I found this touching article in an old SI article: Glory Amid Grief

This is probably the most angriest player photo card that I own. At least George isn't staring us down, he's looking at someone off camera. I've never been more scared to look at a thin piece of cardboard in my life. I can see now why he's a part of the badass and you're not club.

Even though this is the only Rollie Fingers card that I own, it's still a little weird that he's in a Padres uniform instead of an A's uniform.

Ladies and Gentlemen I bring you the 1980 Mets!! The last place finishers in 1979 would be in rebuilding mode with new owners Doubleday and Wilpon. Due to a last place finish they would have the first pick and would use it to draft Darryl Strawberry. Six years later they would win it all with a little help from the guy below:

Here we see a youthful Keith Hernandez in the batting cage. The mustache looks smaller and more youthful too. He said that combined with his high cheekbones and large mustache he didn't have to use eye black while playing baseball.

He has an Oklahoma connection in that he played with the Tulsa Drillers before being called up to play for the Cards. He would also split the 1975 season between St. Louis and Tulsa.

Keith was in his 7th year with the Cardinals in 1980. He tied Willie Stargell for MVP in 1979.

I'm still needing about 18 left to finish the set, but I'm gettin' there.

Obviously a good trade. It's always nice to find some one with the same collecting goals as you so that you can help each other out.

Thanks very much for the cards Matt. I enjoyed reading your blog.

apologies everyone..

2011-03-26T20:20:00.000-05:00

I have been a pretty bad trade partner these days. Last month you'll remember I did a huge trade bait post and got a lot of responses. For a moment I almost felt like Oprah when she gives away a new car or something.

I've been to busy to post them up with work issues, family and friend issues. Not necessarily bad issues, but just.... stuff. Unavoidable stuff that I needed to take care of. I don't want to do a long trade post including all the cards in one post as I want to give each blogger their own trade post.

I've been pretty busy, but I'm almost certain that you other bloggers with jobs, family and wives are more busier and yet you guys (and girls) all find time to blog more frequently than I.

Compounding the problem is that most of the packages had a combination of 1980 Topps, 2010 Topps and a bunch of 2011 Topps. So I'm sorry to report that I might have gotten some of the packages mixed up.

It's really hard being Oprah. On that note I'll leave you with a little video I did of last years Colombian Night Cultural show held at OU. I usually do the video and photos for these guys as I'm friends with some of the members. This clip is only 26 seconds long as has a little piece of some of the performances.

I'm currently working on this years video so maybe when I get a chance to take a real break I'll get those trade posts together and hopefully show off some cool photos/videos that I'm working on.

On a brighter note, my scanner suddenly stopped making that clacking sound when it scans an image. I don't know if it's because I haven't used it that much, or if it's because it has a mind of it's own. It's not really that far-fetched; it actually is a sentient being with it's own mind so maybe it repaired itself.

'Till next time.

Xerces Blue

2011-02-26T17:46:00.001-06:00

Let's go back in the time machine or as I like to call it the Clock Defier and take a look at my Allen and Ginter collection.

That's right boys and girls, I've got another wonderful A&G post for everybody to enjoy.

I have slowly been putting together a huge part of the 2009 Allen and Ginter World Champions set.

Recently I have been focusing on the Extinct Creatures and the Future Inventions mini sets.

I was most excited about the Extinct Creatures set mainly for this one card.

The Xerces Blue Butterfly.

This would be the one card from the non-advertised subsets that I was really hoping to one day find. It took a while but I finally found one in my price range. I really love that these cards in the 2009 set have the same basic look as the base set.

The one problem I have with these two subsets is that they don't have an explanation of the subject on the card backs. Just a checklist. A nice looking back, but I need more than a nice looking card so I went to google.

Here's what I found out:

The Xerces Blue became extinct around 1941-43 and was mostly found in the San Francisco bay area. Scientists speculate that the butterfly's symbiotic relationship with ants was the cause of it's demise. Apparently as more people moved into the bay area they brought with them different types of ants and these ants replaced the ones that were common to the area.

Botanists are trying to re- inhabit a close cousin of the butterfly known as the Palos Verde Blue which is considered the LA equivalent to the Xerces Blue. Pretty exciting stuff.

I went through a butterfly period a few years ago in which I would try to paint little butterfly paintings. It's a little lame, but here is one of my attempts at painting a butterfly.
The reason for the interest in butterflies aside from the obvious reason of the colorfulness of their wings was also because of a Indonesian legend. I had a lot of friends at that time from Indonesia and they invited me over to watch the movie The Sixth Sense. That will tell you how long ago it was. After walking in to the house they pointed out a butterfly on the wall.

Apparently in Indonesia if you see a butterfly in your house it's an omen that you will have visitors soon. I haven't checked around to see if this is true or if maybe I misunderstood what she was saying. Her English wasn't the best and some of what she was saying may have been lost in the translation. Maybe she was just making a joke or something and I didn't catch it. Anyway, it always stuck with me and I started painting butterflies that summer. Seeing the entomology cards in Goodwin and also this Xerces Blue card reminds me of those days when I was enamored with painting butterflies. Kind of weird.

Thanks for reading. I hope you guys enjoy the cards.

Trade bait post

2011-02-23T18:49:00.000-06:00

I haven't done one of these in a while so I thought I'd scan the inserts from the new baseball set that I have available for trade. I need to do another one of these for the stuff from 2009 and 2010 that I want to get rid of.

If you see anything you want or if you need to know the exact numbers of any of these cards let me know.

I also have a decent amount of base cards available for trade as well.

This is my 2011 Want List. I wouldn't mind trading for anything on my wantlists though.

Thanks for reading.

My Mel Ott cards are procreating...

2011-02-22T19:49:00.000-06:00

I've only bought about 7 retail packs and a rack pack and already I've got3 Mel Ott reprints. I was really happy to pull the first one, but now I'm pulling dups and triples of inserts rather than base cards.

The only good thing about all these inserts is that I've been lucky enough to pull about 7 Kimball Minis so far with only two dups.

I pulled this nice Gehrig reprint. Actually the Delong cards are nice, but the card itself is a little sketchy. It's not a high quality card in the representation of Mr. Gehrig, but I still like it nonetheless. I'm a big fan of reprints.

These stupid things are horrible.

So is this History of Topps thing. Nobody cares about this. I sort of halfheartedly tried to collect Tales of the Game and History of the Game last year, but this is going to far. Really not even worth the time to write about it. Having said that if anybody is looking for these cards let me know. Actually any of these cards are up for grabs except for the Gehrig and one of the Ott cards. I don't know why I'm saving these cards as I'll probably just pull more of them tomorrow.

Later on I'm going to get all my inserts together and do a big trade bait post so that I can hopefully turn all these cards into something that I might want for my collection.

Go Join Now!! Crinkly Wrappers Contest!

2011-02-17T19:50:00.003-06:00

Crinkly Wrappers is a having a very generous contest where he's giving one card each from 1952-2011. Waaaaay better than any Topps corporate lam-0 free (but not really free) giveaway.

Discount pack hit

2011-02-15T19:14:00.000-06:00

A few days ago I mentioned the cool sketch card I pulled out of one random pack of Star Wars. I shouldn't have been that surprised because I have had pretty good luck in pulling nice relics and autos from this one store that I shop at. I still didn't think I could ever pull something like this.

In addition to getting the pack of Star Wars and I also got a few packs of 2008 Topps Mayo as well as a few packs of Looney Tunes Comic Ball cards.

The comic ball cards are reserved for a Pack to be Named Later. The first of my two Mayo packs produced a pretty good selection of cards.

First card out of the pack was Paul Gauguin.

I love to pull artists and other non-sports people out of cards. Some people hate them, but I think it's cool.

I pulled an Archie Manning.

An Adrian Peterson base card that I still needed.

A Mark Bradley base card that I still needed. He's a former OU wide out.

A nice mini of Steven Jackson. A running back for the Rams.

a couple of lame base cards.

and lastly a really nice white jersey relic of Archie's son:

Peyton Manning. These relic cards are nice. The other relic I pulled was also from this same box at the store. I wonder if their is one more hit left? I almost don't want to buy any more packs from the box as it would be a let down from these two packs.

The other pack yielded a nice Bradshaw base card.

And a Darren McFadden mini.

Yale back. I guess the Yale and Harvard backs weren't serial numbered in 2008 like they were in 2009.

I mainly took a chance on all these random packs because Topps Baseball wasn't in stock and I sometimes like to buy random stuff to see if they will have something cool. This is one of the best outings that I have had finding base cards and hits for my collection. I believe every one of these packs was discounted in some way. The Mayo was buy one get one free.

Thanks for reading. I hope you all will have as good as I have had recently in pulling awesome hits from your packs.

Trade with "e rayhahn, rayhahn"

2011-02-12T18:51:00.000-06:00

The great thing about trades is that you get cards that you have had your eye on for a while or at least have a general idea of how they will look. Sometimes though you will get a card or two in the trade that you have never seen before. An insert set that you didn't know existed or a complete product that you didn't know existed.

In my first ever trade with David over at "e rayhahn, rayhahn" I managed to get both cards that I have had my eye on for a while as well as cards that I didn't really know existed.

First up is a card that I have wanted since I saw it on one of the blogs a few years back.

This is one of the nicest David Wright cards that I have received in a trade and that's saying a lot. I've received a bunch of nice Wright cards over the past few years.

The first thing that caught my eye and the main reason why I needed this card was of course the dirt on the pants. I think that's the coolest thing to see in this card because of the implied "Joe Hustle" type of effort he was putting in on this particular game.

Up next is a card of Dwight Gooden in a repo of a 1975 card. Gooden would have been 11 in 1975, but still it makes for a good card.

The next section of cards is from Topps Archives. I don't know if this was an actual set or just an insert set within a much larger set.

Either way, I really like the 1973 card set as I'm trying to work on collecting this set. I've put most of that off for the past few months, but at some point I need to get back on track collecting this nice set.

Another set that I really want to get into is the 1965 set.

Spahn has a statue outside of the OKC Redhawks stadium and is listed on the back as residing in Hartshorne, Oklahoma. I still don't know why he lived here. Oh well. Interesting fact is that he gave up the first home run to Willie Mays.

This looks like one half of a 1967 Rookie Stars card of Tom Seaver. Missing from this card is Bill Denehy.

Here is one half of a 1968 Rookie Stars card of Nolan Ryan. Missing is Jerry Koosman.

These Topps Archive cards are pretty nice. Reprints are cool, especially when the originals are too expensive, rare or in these two cases don't really exist.

Thanks for the cool cards David. Thanks for reading

My first sketch card pull!!

2011-02-11T22:35:00.001-06:00

Still no hobby packs of 2011 topps baseball at one of the hobby shops. So I decided to pick up some random packs of goodness.

I haven't bought any non-sports cards in a while so I bought a pack of Star Wars the Clone Wars which is apparently based on an animated TV show. I didn't realize that as I picked up the pack.

The base cards are a little lame, but the sketch card is pretty nice.

I'm guessing it might be a reproduction of a sketch card and not a true 1/1 sketch card. I tried looking at the texture of the card to see, but I couldn't tell.

The back wasn't much help either,but at least it has a real on card auto. I did a little sleuthing and came to the conclusion that it was a Brian Rood auto.

The only problem I have is that I have no idea who the character depicted on the card is supposed to be. I don't watch the show so I'm at a loss as to who this could be. If anybody out there has a clue please let me know.

The odds for these sketch cards fall 1 in every hobby box, so I guess I did pretty well for my one and only pack that I purchased. If I liked the base cards more I would go back and grab some more packs.

Leonardo da Vinci - Allen and Ginter style

2011-02-09T18:49:00.001-06:00

One my favorite things about Allen and Ginter is the non-sports subjects in the set. Actually it's probably one of the main reasons why most people like this set so much. I've neglected this years set as I've been mostly focused on collecting and blogging about the 2009 set.

As a guy who likes to paint and draw I especially like the artists that are included in card sets.
This past year A&G had at least one artist included in the set by the name of Leonardo da Vinci.

I did a similar post last year with the inclusion of Vincent Van Gogh. I'm not sure if I can go too in depth in this post as I'm more of a fan of Van Gogh's work than I am a da Vinci fan.

Anyway, here goes.

One of his most notable paintings is the Mona Lisa.

Nobody knows who "Mona Lisa" really is, but people have a lot of different theories on who it might be.

Some people have theorized that it is basically a self portrait of Da Vinci as a woman.
I'm not sure if that was a conscious decision or just a case of how artists sometimes subconsciously or consciously paint a self-portrait of themselves when they are doing a portrait of somebody else. I don't know if I necessarily believe that in this case, but I have noticed that sometimes painter's styles seem to favor a particular body and facial type.

Here is another shot with the two faces superimposed on each other.

You can decide for yourself.

Another famous painting is The Last Supper.

Which has something to do with the DaVinci Code movie which I still haven't seen.

He was a student of human anatomy as well as the anatomy of birds and how they fly.

He was not just a painter but also a scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, sculptor, architect, botanist, musician, and writer.

The most interesting invention of his is that he invented the human powered Ornithopter.

As you can see that it's basically an aircraft based on the anatomy of a bird.

Here is a nice sketch of the wings.

This is a really nice shot I found on flickr from photonquantique. He graciously allowed me to use his photo from the exhibit: From the Mind of Leonardo. A look into the exhibit can be found here:

The Mind of Leonardo

Check out Photonquantique's Photostream sometime. He's got some nice photos in his flickr.

You can see from this sculpture how the wings that da Vinci conceptualized influenced another artist by the name of Bob Kane.

You might know him as the creator of Batman. He used these sketches as a design motif for the cape that Batman wore. I don't think of Batman as a flying super hero, but apparently in the first versions of the comic the wings gave him the ability to sort of fly.

This is a cover from Detective Comics #27, which is the first appearance of "The Bat-Man".

No one benefited more from da Vinci's inventions than the genius himself:

Wile E. Coyote.

Here is a perfect example of the genius and his contraption in action.

Just like Wile E. Coyote this post is finished.

Thanks for reading. I hope everybody enjoyed the post.

Go PACK Go!!!

2011-02-09T00:25:00.000-06:00

I didn't have a chance to post up my feelings on the Super Bowl until now. I'm really glad the Packers won. I have been a fan of there's for years and I think it's really cool that they won especially Aaron Rodgers.

I was going to show off all the cool Packers cards that I had pulled or had have had other bloggers send over to me in trades, but I feel like it's too late now.

I will however take this chance to show off some cool cards from my trade buddy Cameron over at Reds and More....

We've traded a few times now and he always seems to find some really nice cards to send over.

In honor of the current Super Bowl champs here is a card of Ryan Grant. A really nice player who missed out on the super bowl run this year as he got hurt in....

This is one of the few cards that I own that I immediately know that it depicts a game that I actually watched on TV. How crazy is that? Not too crazy when you think about it being a play off game. Playoff games are a little more memorable, especially when the person on the card starts off the game with such a horrible performance only to end the game breaking a few franchise records.

This was his first playoff game and things were a little rocky at first. He fumbled twice which led to two Seahawk touchdowns. Down 14-0 the Packers would rebound and win 42-20.

Grant would finish with 3 TD's and 201 rushing yards and the Packers would score 42 points which were all franchise records.

I remember how in his two turnovers and later throughout the game his teammates kept cheering him on. It's one of the few times in an NFL game where I saw professional players pat someone on the back and look genuine doing it. They really seemed to care for each other as teammates.

A guy who did play and came up with some big plays was Greg Jennings.
His catch on 3 and10 in Green Bays territory set up a nice first down conversion when we needed it. The Steelers had cut it to a 3 point game by that time. He had 4 catches for 64 yards and two touchdowns.

Keeping with the football theme here is a nice card of former OU receiver Malcom Kelly. He plays for the Redskins. Sorry to say this, but I don't think the Redskins are going to be seeing the post season any time soon. Hope that doesn't offend any 'Skins fans, but I can't see it happening. I really like these Score inserts. They're much better looking than the base cards.

Cam sent over a bunch more cards, but I wanted to show these three off only. The rest were really nice too, but that's a lot of scanning and writing for me these days.

And lastly GO PACK GO!!! I'm pretty happy that a team that I root for got to the big game and won it.

Contest over at Things are funner here!! GO ENTER!!!

2011-02-08T19:50:00.003-06:00

Their is a cool contest over at: Things are Funner Here

Go enter now !!! whoo hooo!!

Going out on a limb-Rack pack vs loose packs.

2011-02-06T00:15:00.000-06:00

The other day I sort of went out on a limb when I proclaimed that Rack packs were better than loose packs. I probably shouldn't have made that claim without doing my patented loose pack VS rack pack nonsensical product comparison that I usually do when a new product hits the shelves.

So in the interest of science or fairness or just plain boredom I'm now going to do the second half of the comparison and see how just three random loose packs will compare with one rack pack.

I spent 5 bucks on the rack pack and 6 on the three retail packs. The rack pack was from Target the loose packs were from WalMart. I'm not sure how that will factor in to the fairness of the comparison, but who cares? This is only going to be mildly interesting to the few people who haven't overdosed on the flagship these past few days.

I mixed up all the base cards so that I could keep the mess on my desk somewhat in check so I'm not going to do a base card comparison. This is mainly about the inserts.

First off the inserts I pulled were almost identical to the rack pack:
One diamond parallel.
One Topps 60 card. Another Yankee.

Two of these Topps 60 years of Topps Cards. As a comparison the rack pack yielded one 60 Years of Topps card and a 60 Years of Topps Lost card.

These 60 year inserts are confusing me.

I didn't pull a Diamond Duo, (Thank Goodness!!!) but I did pull another Kimball mini. Love the minis!!!

I also didn't pull a Diamond Giveaway code card, but I did pull something that I think is nicer:

A Mel Ott reprint.

A 1933 Goudey card.

Pretty cool. In case you were thinking that I would leave the post focusing on inserts only I had to add a few base cards in the post.

First up is one of only a hand full of cards that I've ever pulled in my collecting that were damaged.

I thought it was some weird parallel at first, but the foil Topps logo and a "national league leader" type name plate was printed vertically across the card. It's sort of hard to see, but in the lower left corner you can make out a little "T" in the name arch. In the right corner where the team logo is you can see the national league letters over the logo. Kind of interesting.

It's kind of amazing that in these pitcher shots the pitcher looks like he's throwing the ball directly up in the air. I can't imagine that pitcher reaching the plate.

Awesome card shot. I count at least 5 ankles on this card. Ankiel=ankle. I know, it's lame. Everytime I see an Ankiel card I think of ankles.

Really nice shot of Ichiro. I love this guy's cards. This looks like the ball is just leaving the bat.

Something I didn't notice before was this little item on the right border on the back.

It's a little random fact about the cards themselves rather than a stat line or a 6 degrees of Mantleness.

In case it's too illegible it says,"in the 1980 Topps set, card number 200 was Willie Mays.

I hope everybody's isn't sick to death of seeing more Topps flagship. I don't think that my experiment really proved much. I was surprised that my three packs yielded that many inserts. I guess part of that is that their are so many of them this year. I still haven't pulled any of those History of Topps cards, and I'm glad I didn't. They look like the worst designed cards in a looong time. Hopefully I won't pull any of those or at least maybe I can find somebody going for that set so I can trade them away.

I'm not sure if my experiences are a good indication of what to expect from retail. I guess just looking at the odds on the back of the wrappers would be better. But that's no fun. I'm going to keep on doing my lame-o experimenting as I collect this set.

My own Private Rainbow.

2011-02-03T17:44:00.000-06:00

I never really had any desire to do the "Rainbow Thing". I've seen some other bloggers go after a particular player or players and they would try for the different parallel borders of a player's card. Bowman seems to be the most obvious choice for this type of thing as they have so many different bordered parallels running through the set. I don't think it's necessarily a bad or weird thing to do, it just wasn't for me.

Up until now that is.

I have my own little "Rainbow" that I've been working on, but unfortunately it has hit a little snag in the form of an unscrupulous Ebay seller that refused to send me the next to last piece in my rainbow.

I had bid and won a relic from the 2008 A&G set, but she never sent it over. At least I got my refund, but I really was hoping to get that piece to my rainbow. I want to eventually get all the Allen and Ginter relic cards of David Wright from 2006-2010.

Instead of focusing on the negative and crying about what I don't have I thought it would be better to continue on with the post and show off what I have accomplished so far.

As you can tell from the scan you can see the obvious rainbow of the different color borders.
David Wright relic cards from 2009, 2007 and 2010. Not a huge difference in 06 and 07 or 08 and 09 as far as the borders go, but when I put the three relics together I noticed that....

...the jersey swatches are all a different color too. Wish I could be lucky enough to grab a swatch with stitching, but I'm still pretty excited to have at least three different color combinations on my three David Wright relic cards.

Looking at the back I was a little surprised that the 2009 card was the 2 variation (AGR-DAW2). This seems to be the most common of the relic cards on ebay and I'm wondering if the two cards have different photos on the front.

I think my favorite of the four has to be the 2007 card. It's my one and only 2007 relic card. I've been wanting to go after getting a relic or auto from the 2006 or 2007 set simply because I wanted an example of one of the white border cards.

Looking at the details in the relic windows and the way the fonts and borders are built around these relic cards makes me yearn for next years Allen and Ginter set. I'm pretty stoked about the new Topps series one hitting shelves, but I still look forward to A&G mostly.

Thanks for indulging me in showing off my relics in another Allen and Ginter post.

2011 Topps Baseball rack pack

2011-02-02T20:52:00.001-06:00

I braved the snow storm today to go over to Target to get some groceries and of course some of the new Topps Flagship brand. I wasn't disappointed as they had blasters, rack packs and single packs. I only bought a rack pack as I have only seen a few of the cards online and I wanted to check out the cards for myself before I bought up a bunch of packs.

Let's look at the base cards first.

I always gravitate towards action photography when I look at cards.

Who doesn't like a guy jumping over a player sliding into second.

Or a cool broken bat shot.

Out of the few action shot cards that I deemed scanworthy only two of them were vertical.

..and only one was horizontal. The blue background makes the gray and red of the uniform stand out more.

I guess the main reason why I like these types of pitching cards is the pose of the pitcher right before he throws his arm forward. This is one of the most aesthetically pleasing of the horizontal shots of pitchers.

It seems like the release and follow through of the pitching motion is usually captured as a vertical card like this one of Jamie Moyer.

It's one of those diamond variation cards. I don't know if it's obvious but the player isn't all diamondy, just the background. I can't get over the blurry figure in the outfield. The diamond treatment doesn't work out well for the background figures.

I'm not wild about the diamond replacing the team logo at the bottom right of the card because mainly I really like the way the team logo is encased in a circle. I'm a little iffy on the arch that contains the players name, but overall I like the base set design a lot better than last years set.

I don't think that I have seen many cards of a pitcher in the beginning of his windup until now.
I think this card is the first one that I have pulled of a rigor mortis impaired pitcher.

In addition to the action shot cards are the ones that I find unusual.
These two cards are what I think are unusual and stand out when I'm going through my cards.

Two different treatments of candid shots. The team card of the Red Sox is a nice candid moment captured on a card, but the Jefferies card is just bizarre. A candid shot gone wrong.

Since I haven't shown off the back I'll use the Jefferies card as my example. I picked this one because of the little confused head in the upper left of the card.

In addition to the diamond card I pulled one of these Topps 60th anniversary thing of Lou Gehrig.

These are pretty nice. I thought at first that these were the CTYMTO cards. I guess in a way it's similar. The Musial is a "lost card": a card that was never made, but should have been.

The 1972 Carew cards is a little different. I know it's a reprint of his card, but I don't know how it fits into that subset. I'm guessing that they have one card that represents each year and they decided on Rod Carew for 1972. Hey that rhymes.

Diamond Duos card of Utley and Rollins. A replacement of Legendary Lineage perhaps?

I was wondering why everybody was mentioning the Toppstown cards online and seeing them in person I now know why; They're pretty nice looking this year. I don't collect or redeem Toppstown so if anybody wants my codes let me know.

I pulled one of these Diamond Giveaway cards that I'll try to redeem at some point in the future.

Lastly the one subset that I really do like.

The Kimball Champions inspired minis.
This card was a bit longer and wider than the other minis that Topps offers like A&G. The border is the difference in sizes. So not as big as Mayo, but still a little bigger than other Topps minis. It could be that it was cut a little bigger, but I compared it to 4 different A&G minis and they were all smaller than the N184 card.

These cards are going to be in each series as well as updates and highlights a la 2009 Turkey Red. Out of all of the cards offered this is the one set that I'm really really interested in. I'm going to try and get as many of these minis as possible.

I realized last year that rack packs were the best at giving me a random assortment of inserts and base cards and I when I go retail I'll probably stick with rack packs. I'm looking forward to seeing what the hobby packs have to offer. I'm still on the fence about getting a box of these cards. I think it might be more fun to try and go for the whole set by getting packs as I feel like purchasing them rather than going all out and trying to finish it as quickly as possible. This base set looks like it will be fun to try and finish.

contest winnings-Smallest Group Break Ever!!

2011-01-20T19:32:00.000-06:00

A couple of weeks ago Dayf had a smallest group break ever and I picked the Yankees as well as a few other teams. There are a few older and current Yankees that I like and I was hoping to pick up the Mantle refractor thing.

I won't bore you with all of the cards as he's already
posted them up on his blog, so I'll just show off the main card that I was interested in:

The cool mantle card.

In his post he mentioned attacking my want lists and that's true, he sent over a bunch of different cards from a variety of my want lists. Let's start off with some more Mantle cards.

With these two checklist cards I'm officially done with the Mantle cards from that set.
Edit: as I was putting these two in the binder I realize that I still need checklist number 7. Crap!!

I've got a couple of 2008 sets I'm working on; Masterpieces and Stadium Club.

This is as good of an example of why I like Stadium Club: A nice horizontal shot. This time a candid shot of a player in front of a huge scoreboard. The most important part of why I like this card is the shadow on A-Rod's lower body. The photographer caught him at a moment when his upper torso is light by sunlight and for me that's pretty cool. I also like the huge Boston scoreboard in the background.

I can't show off an A-rod without showing off another card Dayf sent:

This nice Stadium Club David Wright. I wanted to post this mainly to cleanse the pallet for the next few cards.

Roy Oswalt always seems to have cool action shot cards. I guess most pitchers do.

... and lastly an Ichiro mini!

I'm not putting myself through the anguish of trying for the whole black border mini set this year, I'm only going for a few of the minis that I think are cool. This is one such mini that I was hoping to get. Pretty nice. I've been holding off on looking for these cards from 2010 as I'm still going after the cards from 2009 A&G.

Thanks for hosting the cool box break. Thanks also for knocking some cards off of my wantlist.

big step in my player collections courtesy of Shot not Taken

2011-01-15T23:36:00.000-06:00

Since I got back into collecting I mostly have been interested in set collecting. I'm probably working on about 10 different sets and subsets right now and sometimes it feels like 100.

Because of that I've pretty much neglected doing the player collection thing until recently. I came across a post on A Shot Not Taken late last year and Ray is looking to complete the Propaganda subset from 2009 Update and Highlights.

Earlier in the year I had the pleasure of trading with Ray. He sent me a beautiful Adrian Peterson jersey card for some sketches and cards he needed.

Here's the card again. You can never have too much A.D.

Anyway, I wasn't expecting anything in return, but he sent over some really nice cards that all fit into my different player collections.

Since this hasn't been much of a focus until now I was really happy to get these cards.

First up is a card of a former OU and current NFL star, Adrian Peterson.

I've had my eye on this card for a while, but have never pulled it from a pack of cards. Looks like he's in mid-juke here.

A couple of Bowman reprints of Mickey Mantle.

A nice MMHR chrome card of the Mick!

And something new for me is a couple of nice Blake Griffin cards.

He was a standout at OU for a couple of seasons and was the top pick in the draft. He sat out last year with an injury.

He's back now and looks to be doing pretty good for an otherwise crappy team. Poor Clippers.
This is a Passing the Torch card detailing at that time how these guys were the past two (at the time) NCAA Player of the Year award winners.

This is nice posed dunk shot of Mr. Griffin. As of Jan 10th he's leading the NBA in dunks with 88. Up until this point I only had one Panini sticker and one EEE card of Blake. Now I've doubled my collection in only one trade.

Lastly was this gold bordered card of Koyie Hill. I was wondering why a Cub would be in the pack. I did not realize that he was an Oklahoma guy.

He was born in Tulsa and graduated from Lawton Ike. That's not the interesting part about this guy: apparently he got into an accident with a table saw and it cut into his thumb and apparently severed part or all of the remaining 4 fingers. He saved them long enough for the doctors to reattach them.

Reminds me of a Bill Brasky fact:

Watch Bill Brasky-Brasky Buddies in Entertainment | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Thank you very much for the cards Ray! They will be a significant part of my collection.

It's a Festivus Miracle!!

2011-01-15T00:32:00.000-06:00

When I first started blogging about cards in the summer of 2009 once of the first things that I did was put up a want list. Blogging would give me a chance to practice my writing and I wanted to share my new hobby with all the blogospere, but mainly I wanted to partake in the cool trades that I saw happening amongst all the bloggers.

In making the wantlist I put down that I was interested in any cards of old teams especially the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers. Dodgers a little more than the Giants mainly because of Jackie Robinson. I was a Jackie Robinson fan when I was a kid.

I never dreamt that I would ever own any authentic cards from when the Giants and Dodgers were in New York. I assumed that the cards would be too scarce, too expensive or both.

So I wrote that I would be happy with any cool reprints that anybody wanted to send. After about a year and a half of blogging I have received many cool cards. I even get a few old reprints in the mail from bloggers like the three that I've shown above.

It also never occurred to me that another way to get cool cards is from bloggers holding giveaway contests on their blogs.

Matthew Glidden owner of the number 5 Type collection blog was having a 400th post Festivus contest and I happened to be one of the 5 chosen as a winner.

He showcases some really cool cards mainly of the vintage variety and it's a good read.

He sent some vintage cards in addition to the reprints above.

A couple of 1954 Topps cards.
This one has been cut down to a more modern card size and has been heavily taped. I'm not sure why. It's kind of got a full-bleed look to it now.

These two Giants along with a ....
...St. Louis Brown: Gordon Goldsberry. Pretty cool expression of Gordon's face. He seems pretty surprised to be on a baseball card.

I can now say that I own four different cards from the 1954 set. Pretty awesome! The other card came from the Topps Million Card website.

This is my first 1955 card.

As you can see from the cartoon Ramon hails from Venezuela! you'll notice that there's not one, but 3 cartoons on the back.
Pretty cool.

This is my first and only 1957 card.

I can't quite explain why I have a fascination for these New York teams. Part of it has to do with the fact that they don't exist anymore. I'm not sure if I really want to go into to much introspection figuring it out either.

The big card in the package was this 1955 card of Brooklyn Dodger 2nd baseman Jim Gilliam.
Perhaps the portrait photo must have been taken on a cold spring day. I've noticed on some of these horizontal sets with the portraits the guys are wearing turtle neck looking undershirts.

This must be one of Matthew's doubles as it's a number 5 card.

Cool back. I love the cartoons on the backs of these cards. All these old cartoons remind me of Christmas with the red and green backs.

Thanks very much for the cards Matthew. You may not be reading this, but it was an awesome contest and a very generous offering of cards.

Trade with the Conquistador from Miami-My Past Time ... I love it!

2011-01-12T22:16:00.001-06:00

I finally got the chance to complete a trade with the one and only Conquistador of Miami, Wicked Ponce DeLeon of South Florida. You all might know him better as Alfredo from the blog My Past Time.. I Love It!!

If you're wondering why I call him Wicked Juan Ponce De leon, it's because of my goofy sketch card that I included with the trade.

I always picture Alfredo as a Spanish conquistador with his many golden refractors and autos at his feet so that's where the idea for the sketch came from.

We had a pretty decent trade set up earlier this year. Yikes! It's already 2011, so I guess it was last year. I can't believe that I'm still this far behind on my blog posts. I really need to work on that.

Anyway, enough with the self-loathing; lets get on with the cards.

First up a few nice Packers cards of some former players:

Brett Favre and..

a nice action shot of Robert Brooks. Pretty cool film grain look on this card.

A couple of nice cards of the late Reverend Reggie White. I can't believe that it's been a little over six years since he passed away. Time has been going fast this winter which is good for me as I hate the winter.

Let's go onto some happier thoughts in the form of two nice Met's cards:

Two Goudey Mets.

and two nice UD X cards.

and a insert card of David Wright.

A couple of nice Donruss Threads cards of up and coming shortstop Ruben Tejada.

Along with the specific cards he also sent over some random packs.

This card should have stayed in South Florida.

Don't get me wrong, it's a nice card I just think that Alfredo would have liked to keep this one as he's a Dolphins fan.

I also pulled this cool card of Barry Sanders: a former Oklahoma State and Detroit Lion. Pretty nice card.

I'm not certain, but I think Alfredo won 2009 Blogger of the Year last year and I can see why so many people like to trade with him. Thanks again for the cards dude! Hopefully we can trade again sometime.

Trade with Joe.... from the Sandlot

2010-12-26T21:48:00.000-06:00

A long, looooong time ago I put in a request for some free Packers cards. The catch was that Joe from .... the Sandlot was requesting some Mets cards for his Piazza or D. Wright collection that he didn't already have. I had some Piazza cards for him and so I asked for some Green Bay Packers cards in return.

For some inexplicable reason I am a Green Bay Packers fan. I'm not sure if I can really go into why I root for the Pack, but I do. Anyway, as it turns out there wasn't much Cheese head excitement left. Didn't matter to Joe. As a fellow Mets fan.(another team I can't quite explain why I like) he sent over a bunch of cool Mets cards.

A few older ones and a few newer ones.

First card up is a brand new (to me) Jose Reyes 206 base card. Pretty cool. Sort of like 206, but never enough to buy more than one or two packs.

This one of Keith Hernandez is a new card of an older player so it's a nice transition to the older cards in the trade.

This Magic Mets card is pretty awesome: A lot of great players. A very young looking Hernandez as well as a healthy looking Darryl Strawberry on the far right. Cool stadium lights and scoreboard lights in the background too.

Any Dwight Gooden card is pretty awesome. Cool expression and pose. The vertical gray lines in '89 Fleer is a nice border for this card.

Lastly the 4 or so Packers cards.

I like them. A cool card of current ESPN Game day co-host and former Michigan Wolverine Mr. Heisman Desmond Howard. Sterling Sharpe and Dorsey Levens. I can still hear Pat Summerall calling out Dorsey Levens name in 2001 John Madden. That was my first introduction to video games since Atari 2600. I still think that he has one of the most distinctive voices in play by play.

Lots of nice cards and Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays everyone!

Trade with Behind these Hazel Eyes- Cool Sketch cards

2010-12-22T21:45:00.002-06:00

About a month ago,possibly a few months ago I completed a trade with Lonestarr who runs the Behind these Hazel Eyes blog. Since we are both comic book and sketch card fans we decided to make part of the trade a couple of sketch cards. Since this is the highlight of the trade I'm starting off with the two sketch cards.

This is the first time that I have received a sketch card and I loved both of them. The Adrian Peterson card is really good and sort of funny. I've seen that look on AD's face a lot as he looks up at his replay on the jumbo screen. He always seems to staring up at something on the sideline. This has to be from a card or photo, but I can't remember which one. Great stuff.

I also requested the Fantastic Four as it was one of my favorite comics growing up. I still like the FF, but I don't currently read the newer comics. I still go out and pick up the older ones from the '60's and 70's.

I think it would be really cool to start collecting sketch cards done by bloggers. It would be interesting to see what they would come up with.

In addition to the cool sketch cards he sent over some 2008 Masterpieces to help me out with that set.
I picked this nice one of Harmon Killebrew as an example of the Masterpieces card that he sent over.

He also sent over a nice assortment of Topps Magic Football. A couple of former Buckeyes.

Troy Smith won a Heisman and now is with the 49'ers.

.... and Anthony Gonzalez is currently with the Colts.

A cool card of the Cadillac. A really good running back from Auburn who is currently with the Buccaneers.

I've never really gotten excited over checklists before, but I took a liking to the ones in 2009 T206. It's another way to get Mickey into every pack. I didn't buy much of these cards, so needless to say I need some help finishing this up. Thanks to Charley I only have one more to go.

and lastly he knocked out a few A&G cards for me.

Pretty cool trade. Thanks for the cool cards Lonestarr. If any of you like to check out cool art, you should check out his deviantArt page. It's got loads of cool stuff on it.

What I don't like about the hobby.

2010-12-16T02:50:00.000-06:00

I normally don't like to be negative on this blog. I have negative tendencies sometimes,but I try to hold them back when I write this blog so that I could keep the blog as positive as possible. Card collecting is a cool hobby and if it's not fun then I don't think it should be your hobby. It's still fun for me, but I haven't had much to write about lately.

I haven't had the time to comment much lately on the blogs either, but I still enjoy reading them. I'm not a very good commenter. I'm either too vague or I leave a long winded comment that should be reserved for it's own post.

Since reading a few posts by Brain at Play at the Plate, I have decided to weigh in on one of the reasons why lately I'm disenchanted with this hobby.

When I first got into blogging/trading I was mostly interested in Mets, some Yankees and I really wanted to get as much 2009 Allen and Ginter that I could get my hands on.

(Don't worry this won't be a Gintercentric post; only a mild Gintering will follow.)

As I mentioned earlier, Brian has posed a few questions about the state of the hobby and blogging in general. I decided to use his post as a jumping off point on a very important (to me) part of card production that I think people haven't complained about enough and that's the use and reuse of the same stock photo for different sets.

I first noticed it when I went Ginter crazy last year when 2009 Ginter came out. I liked all the cards, but I put a little more time and effort in examining the cards of my beloved Mets. One of the cards I pulled was this pedestrian card of pitcher Francisco Rodriquez. You might remember him recently for his semi-Oedipal outburst after one of his losses.

A few weeks later I pulled this card:

Same set, different verse.

I like both cards. I just don't like the recycled photo, but I didn't think much of it because it's from the same year and product (2009 A&G) so I let it go. I mean, it still has a different border and a completely different back so I thought it wasn't a big deal.

Around that same time a trade came in the mailbox. I'm pretty sure it was from Mike at JD's Wild Cardz. (sorry if it was from another blogger, but it's been like a year and a half. Forgive me).

Notice anything similar?

Obviously the same pose. Same lighting. Same last year at the Shea Stadium logo thingy on the hat. Except there is one big difference: this is from a different company Upper Deck.

I'm guessing that the stars get different cards each year, but I haven't done enough research on that. I know that Jose Reyes and David Wright usually have a different photo in the same A&G set and I'm almost sure they have different cards from different companies.

I realize that it's hard to mass produce these cards sets year after year, and even more so when you have like 30 sets a year.

If you're going to do a set why not make a flagship, retro and high end product. Maybe an entry level product like Opening Day or Kickoff and leave it at that.

Flag ship could be inexpensive but with a huge checklist and smallish price with a COMPLETELY NEW PHOTO for the retro set and then a nice card stock for the high end product with.... and wait for it: A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PHOTO for each card. Don't rehash the same photo year to year and product to product.

I realize as I write this that I haven't done a huge research to find all the examples of Topps and Upper Deck regurgitating the same photos, but I don't have to. You guys have all experienced this much more often than I have. We just all except just like we except miscut cards, missing hits and bad collation because we are all addicted to card collecting and we hope that things will get better. I've got to think that the card companies have a pretty decent library of photos of different guys to include in their sets.

I'm almost certain that I've seen this happen with other players, not just F-Rod. It's a laziness and more importantly a factory system approach to producing sets.

I'll leave you with this:
Some gratuitous minis of F-Rod.

The reason why I'm showing these off is that I'm sooo close to finishing off the 2009 mini set and maybe 1/3 of the way from finishing the black bordered mini set. This is the part of the hobby that I've been focusing on these past few months; which is the all the different Allen and Ginter sets.

I couldn't do a rant without at least posting up a few cool cards from my collection.

Thanks for reading and feel free to vent your feelings, comments and frustration with the hobby.

Yet another Ginter post! Avert your eyes if you're tired of the Ginter!

2010-12-09T00:28:00.001-06:00

I'm a little uninterested in the new stuff that's out there so I thought I'd show off some cool stuff that I purchased quite a while ago, but haven't gotten around to talk about.

I know that some people don't like Ginter and some people love it. I'm assuming at this point most everybody is sick of it and are looking for something else to collect, but I still have a few more A&G posts in me, so hopefully it'll be worth it for ya'll to go down the Allen and Ginter path with me one more time.

This is a little different in that it's from last years release so maybe that'll be more interesting.

When I started collecting last year, one of the products I was most excited about was Allen and Ginter. I really like the original stuff from the 1800's and I sort of liked the individual years from 2006-08. I really loved the overall feel of the sets. The minis, N43 cards, the weird non-baseball and non-sports people included in the set. I was even interested in the odd sized cabinet cards.

Up to that point I had always assumed that all cards were basically 2 1/2 by 3 1/2 size and that was it.

I once found a few uncut 1985 topps cards that I'm still not sure where they came from. (the backs have no info or stats on them.) but that was it. I didn't know much about tobacco cards except for the reprint of the Honus Wagner card that I owned when I was a kid.

So when last years A&G came out I went nuts. I bought every variation that was available.

Retail, hobby packs 12 card blister packs, blasters and lastly a hobby box.
In my one lone hobby box I pulled an N43 card.

At some point in my quest to finish the black border and regular minis I came across a huge lot of cards that included, among other things, a 3 card lot of cabinet cards.

That was all it took for me to consider trying to finish all ten of the cabinet cards.

I kept at it and eventually finished off the cabinet cards around the same time I finished ripping the packs of my 2010 hobby box.

It's a pretty nice part of my overall 2009 Allen and Ginter collection. I have them all in binder pages in the front of my binder before the base set starts.

I have thought about framing them. Normally I wouldn't think of doing that because I'd like to look at the backs from time to time, but these cabinet cards really don't have much in the way of info on the backs. Just a partial checklist, so it's still on the table as far as possibly framing them and putting them on the wall. Has anybody else done this with any current releases?

The ironic thing is that I got CB1 last. It took forever for the seller to send it over. With the cabinet cards in place I feel like I'm really on my way to having a really nice somewhat complete master set of 2009 Allen and Ginter. Now all I need are about 20 more relics. 30 more autos and some cut signatures! Ha! That ain't happening. But I'm happy with what I've got so far. I'm really not that keen on having a master set, but a few more N43's and those pesky minis would be nice to have in the collection.

Thanks for reading!

Contest at The Vintage Sportscards Blog

2010-11-17T16:50:00.003-06:00

The Vintage Sportscards blog is having a cool contest of vintage cards. (What else would a blog about vintage cards be offering up!!) Head over there and see if you can win a cool vintage card. Chris is also the guy that has the cool 1973 Topps photography blog. Check out either of them if you are into vintage.

Respect your elders

2010-11-17T00:21:00.001-06:00

I haven't done a vintage Saturday type post for a while so I thought I'd knock one out. I know that technically it's not Saturday, but I've been busy with football season and life stuff. The life stuff is good stuff, not bad stuff. But still, life has a tendency to get in the way though.

This particular post is sponsored by the Topps Million Card Giveaway. I finally got around to having some of my cards delivered. I'm really surprised by how quickly they got here! I think it was late Wednesday night when I ordered them and by Saturday I had them in my hands. I know that there was a least one blogger complaining about Topps not having the cards in stock that they requested. Thankfully I didn't have to go through that.

First up is this card of Skip Pitlock. This was one of the cards that I showed off when the Giveaway was still fresh on people's minds, but now that I have the card in hand I wanted to scan it and show it off again. He looks just as dorky in "person" as he does online, but the card itself is in pretty decent shape. A little miscut, but not much chipping.

I noticed that the 1971 cards are a lot darker compared to other vintage cards. The 1970 cards have those gray borders and they don't call the '72 set the psychedelic tombstone set for nothing.

Maybe it's because I "pulled" this 2007 card out of the bubble mailer right after the Pitlock card, but I think the 1971 and 2007 cards have some similarities. Obviously the black borders, but...

..also on the two cards you can see a box for the players head, albeit much smaller on the '07 than the window on the 1971 card. There is also an absence of a cartoon on both cards. The 1970 and 2006 cards both had cartoons. Hmm. That might be the impetus for another post, but for now I'm just saying their are a few similarities. I guess you can make a case for a lot of the card sets having some similar traits.

Yes, I had a 2007 card set to me. Don't ask me why, possibly I just had a brain freeze. I had about 6 cards that I was on the fence about having sent home, and three of them made it to my house. I probably shouldn't have done that, but oh well. I just can't stand the idea of something that I "own" sitting in some warehouse. I think I still have two cards sitting in the virtual warehouse gathering dust.

This card was a no brainer to have delivered. It's a 1966 Ray Herbert card. Looking at it in person I originally thought it was from 1970.

Side by side you can see the similarities.

The backs of the two sets are similar too. Again, I guess with a little imagination a lot of the card sets could be "similar" in most respects. cartoons, stat lines and player portraits, but these '66 and '70 seem pretty close in a lot of ways. ( for full disclosure I got the Alomar card at a flea market, not the MCG site)

The most colorful and oldest card that I obtained from the Giveaway was this cool Murray card.

It's got all the makings of a vintage card:

1. Miscut? Check!
2. Colorful background Check
3. Confused expression on subject's face Check!
4. Retired franchise Check!

Great card!

The funny thing is that I didn't notice that it was larger than the other cards. This is my first time dealing with a card this old and I forgot that they were of a different size than modern cards. Hopefully this side by side comparison shows off the dimensions better. I didn't realize that their were toploaders that size too. I guess you learn all sorts of stuff from vintage cards.

The cartoon is pretty cool. For some reason I always have an affinity for players who have played in Oklahoma at some point in their career.

This is by far my oldest card in my collection. Pretty nice if you ask me. Thanks for reading and if for any reason somebody else has used the title "respect your elders" in regards to a vintage style post I'm sorry in advance. I didn't try to plagiarize anybody I just thought it was a clever title.

Trade with Reds and More

2010-11-06T21:45:00.001-05:00

I've been a procrastinating blogger these days. I want to blog. I need to blog but I just can't get up the energy to post up anything . I know the world is clamoring for another one of my lengthy trade posts so here goes.

I personally love reading other peoples' trade posts for the simple fact that I want to vicariously live through their card acquisitions. I'm hoping that people will want to live vicariously through my card acquisitions too and see what cool stuff came in the mail.

This selection of cards comes all the way from Bixby, Oklahoma which should easily be the closest blogger to me in proximity.

Cam of Reds and More was advertising a team set giveaway. Like any greedy blogger I jumped at the chance to pick up some Mets cards. I really didn't expect the amount of cards that would be in the box though. The scope of the years and different sets is staggering.

Before Cam I only had a small Mets team set binder. After seeing the box of cards he sent over I went out and got a bigger binder and a lot more pages. It's been easily a month and I still haven't gotten a chance to really go over the entire box and organize everything like I want.

The cards range from vintage to retro to shiny and everything in between. The vintage took me by surprise.

You can probably tell from the photos how many cards he sent over. Actually this is only a small portion of the cards in the box.

Vintage...

Shiny..

...and retro...

Let's start with the vintage.

I have only two '75 Mets cards. Seeing this assortment of vintage cards reminds me that I need to get to the card store and see what kind of cool old cards I can find. This Ted Martinez card was one of 9 cards that Cam sent over. I have this goal to complete as many team sets or complete sets and these cards gives me a good start on the Mets team set.

This is a great indication of the other '75 cards with the cool expression and even cooler facial hair!!

I have about 10 or so cards that I'd like to have from 1974 detailing the world series games between the A's and Mets. Seeing this team card makes me want to try for the whole set.

Let's work our way down to the retro.

I haven't had a chance to see any Cracker Jack cards in person, so this is my first exposure to them. Pretty nice. I think they're nicer looking in person than online. This would be a neat set to try and complete or at least search around for some singles.

This Reyes mini is cool. I have the base card and the mini goes nice with that one. I think I have two of the minis from this set now. I still enjoy seeing the dirt on his jersey in this card.

Lastly some shiny:

Prior to this I didn't have nearly enough shiny in my collection. That's a pretty common theme amongst bloggers though. Everybody could use more chrome. I have a random chrome card or two from this year, but now I'm pretty close to finishing off the 2009 chrome Mets.

A nice selection of Walmart black Mets to go with a couple of others already in the binder.

a bunch of really nice 2008 chrome cards to go with a huge stack of non-chrome base cards from '08. Here's an example of one each of my favorite pitcher Johan Santana.

These two shiny 2007 cards are the first chrome cards from 2007 that I've laid my eyes on.

Cool actions shots make these cards better in my opinion.

All bloggers probably are like me in that we find little things that appeal to us that makes us like a card more than normal. One big reason why I like this card is that it's a "Farmhand Signature" card, but the dude's name is Vineyard. Get it? Oh well. It's sort of a reach, but it amuses me and that's all that matters.

Unfortunately it looks he's retired from baseball. Still it will be a good addition to my unusual names collection.

Another prospect who has done well for the Mets is this guy:

A Just Minors card of David Wright has a slight Heritage feel. The minor league uniform complete with dorky batting gloves set against a minor league stadium background with billboards and pine trees seems more Heritage-y than Heritage. Maybe Topps could pick some old fashion backgrounds to shoot their subjects against.

I still haven't gotten to the Packers cards that he sent over that were much appreciated. Maybe I'll do a part two post to show off the rest of the cards.

I loved the cards Cam! Thanks very much. I'm working on another package to send your way.

Contest at Too Many Grandersons!!!

2010-10-18T16:15:00.000-05:00

Too Many Grandersons is having a cool NFL contest tonight. Get your entries in quick. Pick the final score of the MNF game tonight between the Titans and Jaguars to win some 2008 Football Masterpieces cards.

my new obsession

2010-10-07T19:17:00.000-05:00

In case you haven't noticed it yet, my new obsession these days is trying to get caught up on all my trade posts. Hopefully I can give everyone their day in the sun because I really do like the cards they send over. Plus, having them out on my desk gives me a chance to pour over them a few more times before they are relegated to the binder.

I still go through my binders semi regularly, but it still isn't the same as when they are new.

Having said that, I really feel like I need to devote some time and obsess over how I can properly memorialize the cool cards that people sent over.

Kelly, from My Baseball Obsession-itis sent over some cool cards that will fill many little holes in my want lists.

One insert from 2009 that I originally had little interest in last year was the Legends of the Game subset. I liked some of them, others not so much. I guess it was hard for me to wrap my pea brain around the different numbering systems depending on where you bought the cards from. Having a desire to complete every little set and subset out there makes me think that it would be too difficult to get all these cards especially considering that I would never know if I had all of them or not.

I've traded many of them away, but when I see a player come around that I want to start collecting I can't help but try to put out a request for these cards.

One such card is this Johnny Bench card. It's a photo taken from a game, but obviously not an action shot. Still, it's a nice card. I really need to do more research and find out what kind of lenses where used in those days. I have seen quite a few cards that feature this type of "double circle" bokeh in the background and it's bothering me that I don't know what equipment produced this effect. Bokeh is the type of background blur that occurs in the unfocused part of the photo. It's the out of focus circular orbs that you can sometimes see in photos.

I finally did some research and figured out that the reason that the Bokeh looks like a "donut" is that the lens is a catadioptric lens. It's a mirror lens that photographers sometimes use because of it's light weight and I guess at one point they were less expensive than normal lenses. One problem is the fact that the aperture was usually fixed at f8 or f11. That would make it harder to photograph night time subjects or at least night time subjects in action. I've seen so many cards recently that have had subjects from the '70's that have this sort of donut bokeh. It looks a little distracting to me sometimes. If I ever get around to it, I'll try to do a real post on the cards that I'm talking about.

I guess it should go without saying, but I really like the card. I won't put this with my other LOTG cards, it will go in the fledgling Oklahoma binder with my other two Johnny Bench cards.

Next up is another player that I'm sort of collecting, but not really going heavy after. I like Pujols. Especially this year as they played lots of ST. Louis games on cable in Norman/OKC. I like to watch Matt Holiday too. There is another Okie on the team Ryan Franklin, but I only have one of his cards that I know of.

This Pujols card pulls me within three cards of finishing the 2009 U&H Propaganda set!! Yay!

This Dostoevsky brings me that much closer to finishing off the Words Greatest Wordsmiths mini card set.

only 5 more cards now!!

These two National Animals get me within 15 cards of finishing off the 50 card set. Not too bad.

These two cards also represent two places that I would like to visit. Machu Pichu in Peru and the Philippines in general.

Thanks again Kelly. If ya'll haven't had a chance to check out her blog you should. She's a big Red Sox fan who takes really cool photos of her trips to Fenway Park.

inspiration from south florida

2010-10-04T23:19:00.001-05:00

As most of you know, our favorite blogger Marck from the Collective Troll blog is a very verbose character. His posts are almost always long and insightful, but never boring. I can't say the same for my own posts, but that's my own cross to bear. When I got my part of the cheap box break in the mail the other day I couldn't believe the amount of cards in that little box. I should have known by the weight of the box that there would be a bunch of cards. It felt like a little brick. A little brick of awesomeness!

I don't think I have it in me to do a Troll-sized post so I'll hit the highlights.

First off the bizarre pack of Space shots Series 3. 8 cards per pack.
I think it's pretty funny that they have a series three of this set. Really? They couldn't fit the entire checklist into one or two series? They had to add in another series. I'm joking, I really do like the oddball stuff. These cards will go nicely in the binder with all the non-sports stuff.

Play at the Plate already beat me to the punch by posting up his pack. I still want to show off a couple of cards that I thought were interesting.

First off the Soyuz 19 from Apollo.
Pretty cool shot when you think about it. Sort of like the cell phone pics people take outside a plane, but obviously much cooler.

"I wish I would've pulled a Yuri G!. It's just the things that she does to me."
I didn't, but I pulled a Yuri V. Close enough. He has really cool hair so that makes up for it.

I'm not sure if Yuri Gagarin was in this issue or not. I always loved P.J. Harvey in the late '90's and this song was one of my favorites:

It's Yuri G from the album 4-track demos. If you couldn't tell earlier that was me rewriting the lyrics to fit the mood of this post.

Here is a card of the first female EVA Savitskaya.

Pretty nifty shot as well.

The bulk of the package was from the nineties and their is no better example of the nineties than this card of Bobby Bonilla.

Wow.
It looks like Kid 'n Play invited Skreech to a House Party, they all got drunk and came up with this card design.

I'm almost certain I have had some school binder with this same design in high school. The photo itself is pretty cool though.

The back is nice too. I like cartoon backs.

Here's a 1995 Stadium Club card of Jeff Kent labeled "Dug out Dirt". Weird.

But again, the back is nice. This time a bigger cartoon.

I'm guessing this is a minor league issue of some sort from the Jacksonville Suns. It's also from the '90's(notice the big 1 9 9 2 letters across the top of the card), but the old photo from the '60's saves it from looking too 90's ish.

This is one of my favorites from this package. This one and the next card are two that still remain in a special place on my desk so that I can display them easily. Eventually they will probably find a place in a binder, but for now I have them out so I can look at them occasionally.

I found a bunch of these Pacific cards online a few months ago. They're thin, but I like the design a lot. It's got an old fashioned look to the layout on the fronts and backs. The older photos of players in their heyday is really nice too.

These Heritage High Numbers are great as I don't have any of these cards. The 1960 is one of the nicest and makes any player look good. I don't even mind the pink, black and white on the Reddon card. It somehow fits.

Lastly, but not least a Heritage Chrome of Gary Sheffield. Shiny is always good. It looks really nice with the other Heritage chrome cards that I have.

I think the only 2007 cards that I own have all come from Marck. He must have opened a lot of 2007 Topps. I haven't pulled a single 2007 card from a pack that I want to keep. Good thing he has a bunch of duplicates to send over.

These two cards look really nice and I didn't have either one. Actually about 90 % of the cards I didn't have yet.

Thanks for hosting the cool break Marck. I know I got a really good deal on the break. I just didn't have the energy to show off all the cards. It was a very generous offer to host the break.

Thanks for reading!

My take on the OU/Texas game: Red River Shootout

2010-10-01T11:18:00.000-05:00

This is a view from my seat last year.

This Saturday I will be making my annual trek to the Big D' Dallas, Texas to see the football game featuring my Alma Mater The University of Oklahoma playing against the University of Texas. In the past ten seasons or so one or both of the teams have been ranked in the top ten. 6 times in the past 11 years one of the teams has played for a national championship. (2000, 2003, 2004, and 2008 for Oklahoma and 2005 and 2009 for Texas.)

This year's game has lost a little luster with Texas losing at home last week 34-12 to a 2-2 UCLA team. The last time Texas lost at home (2007 Kansas State) was also the last time they lost to OU in the Cotton bowl by a score of 28-21.

For their part OU has a 4-0 record but have only put away one team (Florida State)by a score of 47-17 while winning by a touchdown or less in the other three games(Utah State, Air Force and Cincinnati).

Team Stats so far:

W L PF PA Home Road Neutral
Oklahoma 4 0 136 94 3-0 1-0 0-0
Texas 3 1 104 72 1-1 1-0 1-0

Team stats based on www.ncaafootball.com

OKLA:
Passing Offense: G Att Com Int Pct Yds TD YDPG
10. Oklahoma 4 171 111 3 64.91 1235 9 308.75

Rushing Offense: G Rsh Net Avg TD Ydspg
89. Oklahoma 4 163 483 2.96 8 120.75

Rushing Defense: G Rsh Net Avg TD Ydspg
93. Oklahoma 4 165 710 4.30 5 177.50

Passing Defense: G Att Com Pct Yds TD Ydspg
90. Oklahoma 4 125 63 50.40 975 6 243.75

Tied for 4th in turnover margin
6 fbl recovery, 6 INT, giving away 1 fumble and 3 INT

Total Defense: G Pl Yds Avg TD Ydspg
97. Oklahoma 4 290 1685 5.81 11 421.25

Texas:
Passing Offense: G Att Com Int Pct Yds TD YDPG
60. Texas 4 140 87 4 62.14 885 4 221.25

Rushing Offense: G Rsh Net Avg TD Ydspg
76. Texas 4 141 542 3.84 7 135.50

Rushing Defense: G Rsh Net Avg TD Ydspg
20. Texas 4 146 396 2.71 5 99.00

Passing Defense: G Att Com Pct Yds TD Ydspg
6. Texas 4 94 58 61.70 515 3 128.75

Tied for 92nd with 4 fumbles, 3INT and giving away 6 fumbles and 4 INT

Total Defense: G Pl Yds Avg TD Ydspg
2. Texas 4 240 911 3.80 9 227.75

Yikes!! Those stats don't bode well for an OU victory. The fact that we are +2 in turnover margin is encouraging though.

Basically what I've seen in a few UT games and 4 OU games is that Texas is lame on offense and pretty good on defense. OU seems to be pretty streaky on offense and have bent (a lot) and not really broken down too much on defense. We can't run and neither can Texas. The only positive spin that I can put on our horrible rushing defense is that two of the 4 teams that we have faced have a run based offense in Utah State and Air Force and hopefully facing an immobile quarterback in Garrett Gilbert will help OU in their pass and run defense. I'm only saying this as running Qb's have always given us trouble. Teeing off on a slow QB is to OU's advantage. (Keeping my fingers crossed)

Now with the fun stuff. I've been going to this game since 2004. Currently I have a 2-4 record at the Cotton Bowl. My first game was in 2004 and we won 12-0. I endured a beat down in 2005 and '06 and saw my team win 28-21 in '07. 2008 and 2009 were both pretty close games. I would love to notch another win over the Longhorns. Actually I would love to avoid the drunken brawl outside of the stadium this year.

Last year I had to endure this crap all game long. Waaaay too many Longhorn fans in our section. For the uninitiated this is a "Hook'em Horns" thing. We have our own version, but I didn't think to get a photo of it. It's basically the same thing but upside down.

Apparently about 5 other schools use this same hand gesture. I didn't realize this,but the Hook'em Horns gesture was in response to the widespread popularity of the "Gig'em" gesture at Texas A&M, which was in response to Texas Christian University(TCU) which has a Horned Frog as a mascot. OU has an official hand gesture which is lame. I think a girl came up with ours so out of shame I'm not showing it here.

The series started in 1900 with a Texas win 28-2. It should be noted that the first game was played 7 years before Oklahoma Statehood. Oklahoma was known as Indian Territory at that time.

Currently Texas leads the series 59-40-5. The game has been played in three locations: Norman, Austin and of course the Cotton Bowl.
The Cotton Bowl has been the site for the OU/Texas game since 1929. The game has been sold out since 1941.

Notable trivia about the game.

The game is known now as the Red River Rivalry. Prior to 2005 the game was known as the Red River Shootout.

Since 1945 one or both of the teams have been in the top 25 except for 5 times.

The Red River is the river that acts as a border through much of the two states.

Former Governor Alfalfa Bill asked the state militia to monitor the border during the Red River Bridge War of 1931.

He also asked the Oklahoma National Guard to enforce ticket sales at OU football games.

Seriously, this guy is a nut job. Having said that, if anyone has any Alfalfa Bill Murray cards or memorabilia laying around let me know. Dude's nuts, but still an interesting character.

The game is held at the State Fair of Texas where you will see a ton of people going to the fair as well as 92,000 fans looking to have some corn dogs and fried coke before the game.

If I saw this shirt this year I would change the caption to read," Texas,you're F***n out(of the national championship picture) and "OU you're F****n in (a lot of trouble with your horrible defense.)

My dad was really interested in getting a t-shirt like the one this girl is wearing. She was only interested in telling us inappropriate stories of her being "kidnapped" the night before in some sort of white trash drama. Also, she seemed really bothered by the fact that I had taken her photo. Honestly I could care less.

Here is a shot I found online that shows the 50 yard line division better than I could describe it.

The stadium is split at the 50 yard line, but in recent years I have seen a lot of burnt orange in our section. I have had to sit by 3 UT fans last year taking the space of 1 seat. Sucks. Bench seats are hard to enforce, but I did my best to squeeze those three guys out hoping that they would leave and go squeeze in on their own side, but they never did. I recall them cheering loudly when Bradford went down with an injury. I immediately thought of those three clowns when Colt McCoy went down with an injury in the NC game against Alabama. Karma's a bitch indeed.

Here's a shot of the flyover last year.

And a shot of the OU band taking the field. Sorry, didn't have a chance to get the Texas band.

No matter how hot it gets, or how drunk you get there is absolutely no passing out until halftime.

Maybe I'm taking this sign too literally.

A mass exodus of OU fans leaving the stadium. This sad sight has been repeated too many times in recent years.

A quick pic of the coolest hat I've seen. If I ever become a hat wearing guy I'm getting one of these. This would go great with one of those Hawaiian themed sports shirts.

I hope everybody likes my quick rundown of the OU/Texas rivalry. Look for me in section 137. I'm going to be the guy in the red shirt. Haha.

Here's a snippet of a DVD detailing the game. It's a bit long, but the even longer version is probably too much for someone who isn't a fan of either team. The Dvd is really nice though if you are into college football.

Hopefully I haven't jinxed myself by writing this pre-game review. Last time I did this we lost. I'll have a good time nonetheless.

Thanks for reading!

Calling Mr. Clete Thomas!

2010-09-30T17:49:00.002-05:00

I've had a keen interest lately in a particular Detroit Tiger; Outfielder Clete Thomas. Until recently he's a been flying under my radar. One thing is I don't keep up much with the Tigers and Mr. Thomas has been battling an injured shoulder for most of the season.

I have a few of his cards already:

A really cool Heritage Rookie Stars of 2008 to go with my...

...even cooler Heritage ad panel of Clete with a couple o' Rays.

In my rush to put my '09 Updates in a binder I had forgotten about this gem:

A nice action shot of Thomas running to third.

In case you think I've become a Clete Thomas player collector, that's not quite true. No offense to Mr. Thomas. I think it stinks that his injury could have possibly killed his chances to stay in the majors, I'm not that keen on collecting every one of his cards. I'm just looking for one:

2008 Allen and Ginter card NO# 209. If you missed it before , I had bought a "complete" set off of Ebay but it was missing this one card.

Thanks to Brian from Play at the Plate I can finally put Mr. Clete Thomas in his rightful place in between Bruce Jenner and Carlos Lee. You can tell from the scan that Bruce is super excited to see Clete, but Carlos is a little bit more subdued in his reaction to Mr. Thomas sharing a binder page with him.

That's not all Brian sent. In the package was a couple of players that I am really interested in getting every card made of them.

These two cards have eluded me all year. The awesome action shot of David Wright doing what he does at the hot corner.

And an even better shot of not one, but three priceless expressions on one card. The main subject Reyes is obviously showing a lot of emotion and is the focal point of the card, but look at the umpire and the Marlins player's leg up in the air. Not to mention his shocked expression too. A really nice card. I think there's something to the diagonal white baseline running through the frame and Jose's white uniform that makes the photo stand out more.

Sorry for the short post, but I love the cards. Thanks a bunch Brian. Now I can put the 2008 A&G base and SP set to bed!

trade with too many grandersons

2010-09-23T21:04:00.001-05:00

As most of you know the new blog Too Many Grandersons hit the blogo-spere about a week or so ago and made a big splash with his giveaway posts. On a side note it makes me feel a little guilty about having a sports blog for a little over a year and still not doing a giveaway.

Unfortunately I don't think many people want a bunch of 2009 Topps baseball or 2009 Allen and Ginter base cards. That seems to be majority of my "left over" cards so I probably won't be doing an official giveaway anytime soon. I do however need to do a cheap box break one of these days. I just need to find out what I want to break.

He sent out a Gridiron code which I redeemed for this beauty:

A 1973 Chip Glass. A pretty cool card. I now need to find out if the football cards ship with the baseball cards. I have a few cool cards that I want to get shipped to me. Out of curiosity I'll probably go ahead and get all of them sent over.

I think I've figured out what the card reminds me of and that's a Mustang emblem.

I found this one that is labeled 1967 Mustang. This seems right, but I recall some sort of emblem with a forked pennant look to it. If anybody has a clue(I don't) then please let me know.

In addition to the virtual card he sent over a bunch of "real" cards. Some cards that are just cool and some cards that help me with specific want lists.

I'm down to just 10 cards to finish up the 150 card set of 2009 Turkey Red. I'm so close that I can feel it! I've gone through periods of getting discouraged with this subset, but I'm thinking that pretty soon I'll get this one done.

Gary Sheffield charging the camera.

..and I knew that I've seen this one before. One of the 5 or so short prints that I pulled out of last years product was this really nice card of Rogers Hornsby. Sadly the Turkey Red pales in comparison to the actual photograph card.

This is the main problem with the retro cards; the designers have a tendency to make it so "authentic" looking that they make it too muddy looking or a fake soft focus effect. It's hard to explain, but in my original post I felt that the Hornsby SP was a good example of how sharp and colorful an old film print can be. The Heritage line is a good example of taking a good idea and over doing it to make it look vintage and the main photo itself suffers. I can see where a new crisp photo with an old school border might look ridiculous, but it seems like a happy medium could be found.
Don't get me wrong, despite my reservations I still like Heritage a lot. Also, don't think I'm complaining about getting Turkeys in the mail. I love all the retro stuff, I just think they do every thing with a broad brush and some cards suffer a little in the process.

Okay, enough whining about my cards, let's see what else Dennis sent over.

Here's a few more cards for a set I'm trying to finish:

the 1980 Topps Baseball set.

with a great trio of players.

Joe Morgan on the other side of a mic.

I love this set. There are a lot of nice sets over the years, but I still look at this one fondly from when I was a kid.

And lastly some nice Packers to round out the package.

I hope the Packers do well this year. My Sooners look horrible and the Mets are done so I need some team that can compete for championships this year.

A nice action shot of Ahman Green.

A card depicting Favre showing his touchdown face. He seems so decisive in this photo. I wonder what happened? Soon after this card was released he seemed to have lost his confidence in his decision making ability.

Anyway, nice cards. Thanks again Dennis!

You think you have it bad?

2010-09-21T23:24:00.002-05:00

I read about this guy this morning and the headline blew my mind so much that I had to file it away in the deep recesses of my brain and for my own good I lumped it together with all the stories of Lindsey Lohan being arrested and random political douches douchebagging their way through life and I hoped that I could remember to revisit it at some point.

After some caffeine and a reminder by Colin Cowherd on ESPN radio I knew that I had to make some sort of comment on this story. Obviously I didn't report or break this story, but I think it needs to be mentioned simply because of the subject matter.

Here's the link: NPR

Most of you have probably heard some mention of it or would have heard of it anyway without this blog bringing it to your attention.

In addition to being a humbling and inspirational story wouldn't this be a great A&G card for next year? I hate to try and relate everything to my hobby, but this is so much better than some of the non-sports subjects in this years set. It might be a little gruesome for some people, but really? I mean most collectors have got to be old dudes like myself and this seems like such a positive end to a tragic story.

He said he wanted to undertake swimming the English Channel because he wanted "to inspire all those who think life is nothing but suffering."

Thanks for reading. And be sure to Google Philippe Croizon when you get a chance.

Trade with Drinking the Orange Kool-aid

2010-09-19T10:44:00.002-05:00

Everybody in blogoland seems to be in the doldrums these days and it sucks. I'm guessing some of it has to do with the limited amount of products and possibly the fact that some people's teams might not be doing so well at this time of year. Maybe the reality of their team sucking doesn't inspire people to want to collect cards. I can definitely relate to that aspect of it, but I haven't been bitten by the boredom bug. I must be opposite man.

Seems like lately I've been doing some major damage to the myriad of sets that I'm trying to finish. I'm really close to finishing some of the sets that I've been obsessing on lately. Propaganda, Turkey Red and A&G are close to being finished so maybe that has opened the door to finding some player collections.

One thing that I haven't really focused on until lately is trying to find cards of former OU guys. It's always nice if someone realizes a player is from OU and sends a card my way, but it's really too hard for people I trade with to go looking at the backs of cards to see what college the player is from. I haven't gotten around to coming up with a good want list for that part of my collection.

Occasionally I'll pass by someone's blog and they have a former OU guy up for trade.

Dave from Drinking the Orange Kool-aid posted up a trade bait the other day and he had a couple of cool cards of a former OU player.

Dominique Franks played corner for OU the past couple of years. This is one of the guys that tends to be forgotten pretty quickly when you have Gerald McCoy, Sam Bradford and Jermaine Gresham all being drafted ahead of him.

I haven't forgotten about him though. He was a fun guy to watch.

In addition to the card above, Dave had another auto card of Mr. Franks.

This time a Prestige rookie draft picks card of Dom in his OU uniform.

I guess I have more of a fondness for guys like this because they played hard at OU and also are local guys that are trying to fulfill their dream in the pros.

Here is a link to a Washington Post article about the tragedies in Dom's life. Pretty tough things for a young guy to endure.

Currently he's on the 53 man roster as a 3rd string Cornerback. Hopefully he'll do good things in the NFL.

Thanks for the cards, Dave.

Everybody should check out his blog if they haven't already.

High atop Mt. Fuji

2010-09-16T23:42:00.001-05:00

No, I don't actually want to "mount" Mr. Fuji. He seems like a pretty sexy guy though, but I ain't goin' there. I know he's hot because of his personalized card that he sent with my contest winnings.

I really wish I could come up with something cool like this for my packages that I send out. I think I might have gotten the facismile auto rather than a real 1/1. Maybe if I bribe him with some cards he'll send one over.

As most of you know already, he organized a contest a few weeks ago and decided to give out consolation prizes to multiple winners.

As part of his contest he also had multiple questions that the applicants had to answer. I guess he was influenced by his day job as a teacher. (a noble profession by the way.)

I was awarded some packs of 4400, a TV show that I actually know nothing about.

It didn't matter though, I ripped through them examining each card. Here's a cool subset called "Ripples". I pulled a few of these.

They are nice enough. If you look at them from an angle the ripples look like they are 3-D.

Like I said, I haven't seen this show, but from the cards it looks interesting enough. Maybe I'll Youtube it some day.

In addition to the winnings he sent over some random(or not so random) assortment of Packers and Mets cards.

I don't have a lot of these 2006 football cards so it was nice to get some more in trades.

A nice Aaron Rodgers card. I was lucky enough to pick him as my QB in BA Benny's Card Collectors of the Gridiron fantasy football league. In reality Aaron is going to have to do a lot more these days; it looks like running back Ryan Grant is out for the season. Horrible. I really like to watch him play. Actually I like to watch all the RB's play.

The old guy. At least he's wearing the correct uniform. I still can't imagine him in the Vikings uniform. It's weird. But I like the card though.

It wouldn't be a trade post without at least one Mets card.
A 2005 Turkey Red of NY Mets catcher Gary Carter. A pretty nice card. I didn't realize that they had Turkey Red in 2005. I know about 09 and 10 obviously and the 2007 cards, but I didn't realize they were doing this in 2005. Turkey Reds are always cool.

I try to keep up with the Dodgers too, and this is a cool albeit weird card of Darryl Strawberry.

There are a lot of things to like about this card, but the main one for me is that it's a drawn card rather than a photo card.

Thanks for the cool cards. It was nice of you to make us all winners.

Trade with Night Owl

2010-09-15T23:56:00.001-05:00

One of my favorite bloggers and I completed a trade last month. As prolific as he is, he still managed to put up a post detailing the trade before me. Really sad. I'm not blogging much these days, but you think I could at least come up with something especially when it's specific cards that some one has sent over.

I had pulled a bunch of Dodgers that he needed as well as some O-Pee-Chee and the deal was done! O-Pee-Chee was on the downturn here in Norman when I got into collecting cards so I never had a chance to buy any packs, so I jumped at the chance when the discount blasters hit Walmart.

Being a set collector can sometimes be tough. I like certain players and teams, but whenever I see a new product or an old product that's new to me and I like it, it makes me want to own every card in that set. So I have a tendency to want to collect everything which isn't good idea. I've been pretty good lately of finding what is truly important for me to collect, but I still have a lot of sets and subsets that I'm working on. I don't think it' a big deal. I mean someday I'll probably finish those sets. But until I do I'm going to slow down and not go out and buy every new product that comes out.

Of course that doesn't apply to the discount blasters though.

Apparently I pulled a bunch of Dodger cards that blogger extraordinaire Night Owl couldn't resist.

Like me, he has a bunch of sets that he's working on and finally I found some cards in my collection that he didn't have. He's like the sultan of Brunei of card collecting.

1980 Topps baseball is a set that I've been neglecting this summer. I've been focusing on other stuff and haven't had a chance to look for any of these cards.

And a fine pair of Dodgers it is.

I really like the signature on Garvey's card. The uniform S and G is my favorite part of the signature on the card.

Stadium Club is also something I've neglected. All this Million Dollar Giveaway stuff and Gridiron Giveaway is pulling my attention to all the new products and away from the vintage that captured my attention this spring.

Not that it needs to be said again, but Stadium Club has really nice photography.

Here is a local guy Nick Blackburn pitching.

...and a former Cornhusker Joba Chamberlain. He made an appearance before last years OU/Nebraska game.

One element that I get excited about while looking at cards is to see what's going on in the background. Scoreboards always interest me, but also seeing big 400mm lenses poking out is cool too. I'm not sure if I'm going to go out and start another weird personal collection of "cards with Cameras in them" but maybe. I'd probably be the only guy doing a collection like that. No competition would make them easier to collect.

And of course the crown jewel of the trade. I had coveted this card when Night Owl pulled it out of his A&G box, but I had nothing to offer in trade at that time.

It goes great in the A&G binder. Really the only hit that I have from this years set that means anything to me. A different photo is used on these mini relic/auto cards than on the base card. I'm still not so into the red borders though. I thought by now it would grow on me, but not so much. Don't think I'm complaining I really like this card.

Thanks for the cards Night Owl!

Career runner up finally gets a win!

2010-09-14T23:14:00.002-05:00

I haven't had a good history in any sort of contest whether it be popularity, athletic or academic. I've never been motivated to enter many contests until I started blogging and it seemed like every few days somebody was having some sort of giveaway or contest. I never seemed to do well in any of those contests, so I've tried to keep my expectations down when entering them now.

Beardy from the Mojo Beard was holding a National Convention contest. He was asking what his purchases were at the national and I guessed Nick Markakis 2003 Bowman Chrome.

I guess my extra motivation was seeing what he had up for contest winnings. When I saw the names: Bradford, Favre and Griffin I knew I had to pull out some extra brain power and try to win this thing.

Turns out I correctly guess one of his purchases so I got the three cards I wanted. I don't have any experience with this product, so these were the first cards that I've seen of Donruss Elite. They're pretty nice.

This will be my first of hopefully many Blake Griffin cards. I have a Panini sticker that Brian from Play at the Plate sent over, but this is my first "real" card of the former OU and current LA Clippers guard. He's from Edmond, Oklahoma.

Bradford is also a local guy who played for OU and is now doing okay as a rookie with the St. Louis Rams. Like to watch this guy. Hopefully he'll do well for the Rams. I noticed the other day that the Rams traded for former OU wideout Mark Clayton. I liked to watch Mark at OU, but haven't seen many Ravens games so I'm hoping to catch both of them playing for St. Louis soon.

I'm not big on Favre anymore because of his off field nonsense, but he's still a pretty good QB and Peterson needs a competent quarterback to hand him the ball. Notice how everything somehow revolves around the University of Oklahoma?

The three other guys in the prize lot were a mystery to me. I picked Javid Best as my backup running back in B A Benny's fantasy draft mainly because of this card. I couldn't remember anybody else and the clock was ticking. Hopefully he'll do well. I can't imagine the Lions doing anything ever, but who knows?

Thanks for having the contest and thanks for the cool cards.

Contest Closed! Here are the winners!

2010-09-06T16:12:00.003-05:00

Okay. So I guess it's about time to close this baby. It's been about a week and the suspense is killing me. I got about 7 entrants which is about 5 more than I thought would enter so I guess it was a success!! Whoo hoo. I don't really feel like going through with the randomization thing since there were only 7 entrants. So everybody is a winner!!

Here are the winners in no particular order:

Captain Canuck

Night Owl

Play at the Plate

BA Benny

82 Redbirds

Colbey(Flywheels)

It's like Having my Own Card Shop

I really enjoyed reading your favorite sports memories. Thanks for entering. Now all you have to do is let me know what you'd like on your sketch card and also send me an email with your address. My email is jscott3668@aol.com.

As promised I'll add some random packs and try to find some cards from teams that you all collect.

I just ordered some cool sketch card blanks. I haven't used these yet, but a lot of people swear by them so I think they'll work out fine.

Hopefully the card blanks will show up this week and I can get started on the sketch cards.

Thanks for reading!

Gridiron Giveaway at Too Many Grandersons

2010-09-04T11:32:00.004-05:00

The blog Too Many Grandersons is giving away free Gridiron Giveaway codes on his blog. He's also offering up some free football cards so check out his blog! Apparently he is a big Simpsons fan so that's cool too.

Trade with Shot Not Taken

2010-09-02T00:48:00.001-05:00

I'm not sure if ya'll have had the chance to check out the blog Shot Not Taken. I have passed by a few times. I'm not sure if I've commented. I'm a pretty bad commenter sometimes. I feel like saying something, but I know that I really have nothing of note to contribute, so I move on to the next blog or get back to crafting these wonderful blog posts on this here blog that nobody reads.

Anyway, I hope he doesn't mind but I'm going to upload his banner. I love anything to do with art so I'm going to show it off for everybody.

It's from a Lichtenstein painting entitled "Whamm". It was taken from the DC comic All American Men of War. Pretty cool banner. I've been meaning to do a banner for about 8 months now and I haven't gotten around to doing it.

But this isn't all about me, this is about a cool offer of football memorabilia and auto cards that Ray was offering up for trade.

As soon as I saw an Adrian Peterson card up for trade I had to make an offer. After much searching I realize I had absolutely nothing for him in trade.

So as a last ditch effort I offered up the services of my amateurish sketch art skills. He was cool with it and this is what I got in return for my two sketch cards.

My first ever(and probably only) Adrian Peterson relic card.

It's from 2008 Mayo. It's a stark contrast from the '09 version of Mayo that has white borders on the base and relic cards. The Peterson card is the best looking card from that year. I'm probably biased in my opinion because he's one of my favorite all time players, but I think it's really true. Most of the cards that I've pulled or seen online have a weird look to them and they're not all weird in the same way. It's almost like a fake textured look. Sort of the same fakeness you can see on some of the 2008 A&G cards.

But this card looks cool. The swatch is even purple so that's nice. The black border and desaturated colors really make the purple swatch stand out.

It will be the cornerstone of my A.D. collection. This is the card that I will pull out and show off to people when they ask about my cards.

Thanks again for the cool card Ray!!

Ebay shenanigans! Darn it!

2010-08-31T23:48:00.004-05:00

I'm not crazy about the 2010 version of Allen and Ginter. I like it, but I'm not gaga over it like last years set. So I have held off in really trying to finish that set and instead I have shifted my focus elsewhere. I'm chasin' the Chicles both football and baseball and I want to get as much A&G from any year as I can. As much as I complained about the '08 set it's sort of growing on me. There is some good in that years set and I wanted to do some collecting in a easy and quick way. So I grabbed the set on Ebay for not much more than a blaster. He even did the shipping for free.

Little did I know that the "complete set" was short a card.
You'll notice that technically he included card 209, but it's from the wrong year.

I could tell almost immediately that there was a difference. The card back had a little different design and also was a darker color.

So yeah, if anybody has card number 209 of Clete Thomas and could spare it, I could definitely use the help.

The good thing about the transaction is that he sent along a bunch of duplicate cards. So if anybody is looking to build the 2008 set or just needs a few cards let me know.

As you can see from the photo, I have a ton of these 2008 A&G cards that need a home. There are a few other cards in the box from the random pack or two that I've bought. I haven't even thought about the states cards so there is exactly one state card in the box.

I really should email the seller. Who knows, maybe he will find the card and send it over. Maybe he didn't really have that card and was trying to pull a fast one. If anybody out there has one let me know. I'll make it worth your while.

Thanks for reading.

Trade with BA Benny's Baseball Card Buffet

2010-08-31T01:00:00.002-05:00

I completed my first trade with Mike over at BA Benny's Baseball Card Buffet the other day. He had a really nice card or two that he mentioned were up for grabs and I took him up on it. Turns out I had some stuff he needed as well so we made a trade.

He sent over a bunch of nice cards.

Yadda Yadda Yadda and I sent him some cards and that was about it.

Thanks for reading!

Hey wait a minute! You yadda yaddad over the best part!
You can't leave me hanging like that. I need some details.

Give me some details!

Alright! Alright. I've got somethin' that'll blow your mind. A pretty big assortment of Dodgers, Mets, Yankees, Packers and a Giant. Get ready for this Georgie boy!

First up Mike sent over some Dodgers.
This is my one and only Orel Hershiser card and it's a good one. Really cool pose and photograph. Love the clouds in the background. Sort of a natural Obak look to it.

My one and only Nomo card. I wasn't into baseball much in those years, so I missed Nomomania.I still like this card though. One of the nicest 97 cards that I have in the collection.

The back photos are different than the front photo. I wish they would do that more these days.

I don't normally get all excited about preseason NFL, and I haven't had a chance to check out a complete Packers game yet and I was able to watch about 90 % of the game the other night against the Colts. It was quite a game too. I can't recall when a team laid 50+ points on another team in a while. I don't keep up with NFL like I do college football, but still I think it's a little rare these days to completely blow out the other team. Wow. Aaron Rodgers almost made me forget this guy.

This is one way I'd like to remember Favre. Horsing around with teammates on the field. Pretty cool card.

Upper Deck has/had some great photography on their cards.

This is a nice white jersey card of Brian Brohm which will go nicely with another Brian Brohm card that has a green swatch. Brohm used to play at Louisville I think. I recall watching him play, but I'm not that sure about the team he played for.

I didn't forget about the Yankee cards. I'm going to post up one that I was really excited to get. I didn't know he was going to send this card over.

A Sports Royalty Goudey insert. Pretty cool card of one of my childhood favorites.

This was the card that started the trade. He had this cool Lincecum card up for a trade and I love anything with cartoons and cards. I like the Heads Up cards a lot and I'm sort of collecting any cool cards of Timmy so this will go in the binder with his other cards. I didn't realize that the Heads Up cards from 2009 were a smaller size. Pretty cool. This is the only Heads Up card that I have that has smaller cartoons and captions on the front of the card.

I'm no that crazy about the When they Were Young cards, but I still wanted two of these cards. The other was the Daniel McCutchen card that I blogged about earlier and of course this cool David Wright card. Now I'm done with the When They Were Young set.

Definitely a cool first trade between me and Mike. Hopefully their will be many more trades in the future.

AHH!! You just blew my mind!

Thanks for the cards Mike!

Thanks for reading.

Trade with Drew of Drew's Cards

2010-08-27T01:52:00.001-05:00

In the blogging world there are at least two truths about posting: Almost all cards look better than the scans and almost everybody is behind in their trade posts. I have several packages needing to be reported on so in fairness I'll start with the one received first and work my way up.

Here is a trade that was completed at least a week ago, but I'm just now getting around to posting it. Drew of Drew's cards has already posted his half of the trade so that shows how much of a procrastinator that I am.

For me the sad truth about trade posts is that I have a hard time putting into words the excitement that I get when I receive a trade package in the mail. I know that a few of the cards are going to be included in the package, but it's the extra cards that bloggers always throw in that are a pleasant surprise. I'm a little vague when telling people what I collect. I don't want to be too much of a bother and honestly I really just like getting cards. So much the better if those cards happen to be off Packers, Mets, Dodgers and to a lesser degree Yankees.

So lets start off with the non-sports cards.

Shen Kou is a scientist who wrote Dream Pool Essays, which first described the compass. WGWS7 is of course a much needed card for the Worlds Greatest Wordsmiths mini set. This set has influenced me to get out and buy some of these books mentioned on the back of these cards. I'm more into older literature anyway so it isn't too much of a jump to search out older stuff. I guess I should be frank and mention that these books probably won't get bought/read until winter time. I hate the cold and I need good reading material in the dismal cold winter months. Hopefully by then I will have finished this set.

With this card I have both Holliday minis cards. I don't care so much about the different backs. I've got a nice start to a Matt Holliday collection and this will go nicely with the other 2010 minis.

Aaron Kampman chrome. Who doesn't love chrome? I do. It's great. Nice to get a card of a lineman in action. He's actually with the Jaguars now, but the card is still cool.

This is a great shot of Donald Driver against division foes Detroit Lions. Foe isn't much of a description. The Lions almost always seem to be last in the NFC North.

A.J. Hawk returning an interception against the Chiefs in 2007. I did a little sleuthing and the Pack only played in Kansas City one time in A.J.'s career and he had an interception in that game that he returned for ten yards. Or at least I think so based on a quick scan of his stats in 5 seasons. The game was played on Nov. 4th and the Packers won 33-22.

I haven't seen much of the Packers this preseason and I have yet to watch Ryan Grant play. He's one of my favorite RBs to watch.

I don't have any of these UD Spectrum cards. They're nice and shiny and look good juxtaposed together.

Finally the always photogenic Jose Reyes.

... and yes, even though I shouldn't have to say it, the cards look way better in person than they do in the scans. This was only a small sampling of the cards that Drew sent over.

The cards were much appreciated. Thanks for the cards Drew!

Thanks for reading!

Finally, I'm having a contest.

2010-08-24T22:18:00.001-05:00

So I wanted to do a cool contest post commemorating my 1 year anniversary of card blogging. Like with most things that I do I didn't really have a chance to do it right, so I didn't do it at all.
Like most of you I have a job, friends, social life and other interests outside of blogging and card collecting. Those outside forces kept me from focusing on doing the contest in the right way.

One big problem I had with hosting a contest was coming up with something original. A lot of contests on the blogs consist of making a comment, pimping the contest on the contestants blog and/or following the host's blog.

Other contest are pretty creative and ask for entrants to answer a trivia question or give their opinions of HOF ballots, etc.

I think all of those ideas are great, but I was trying to do something different. So finally I gave up and I decided to give in and make my contest a combination of all of those ideas. That's sort of original in a plagiarist sort of way, right?

The only obvious change that I made was that I wanted the contest to not just be all about me, I wanted some info on the other bloggers out there. One of the requirements of the contest is to tell me about your collecting.

So if you're game here's the rules and regulations:

1. Post a comment on this blog post stating what's your most favorite collecting memory. It could be blogging, your first online trade. A trade you completed when you were younger. Pulling your favorite player from a pack of cards for the first time or just a random memory. It seems pretty broad and that's what I like about it; it doesn't have to be about any collection or part of your collection specifically, just a specific memory you have of collecting. (Hopefully a good memory).

If you've already blogged about this, then just leave a link to your blog post in the comment section below. It doesn't have to be really detailed either.

2. Mention this contest on your blog.

Now for the good part: the prizes. It occurred to me after I won one of the prizes in Big D's contest a month ago that I could do something similar. I really like using Photoshop, but I pretty much suck at it. So I thought that instead of doing a custom card that way, I would do a custom sketch card instead. Plus, their aint' no way I'm going to be able to do as good a job as some of the bloggers out there with their cool custom cards.

I'm not a great artist, but I can do okay sometimes with likenesses.

It's actually a little selfish of me to do a contest like this as I would like the opportunity to practice my art. I can't guarantee a perfect likeness of the player/person that you want me to sketch, but I'll do my best. Doing a specific person for the winners will be sort of like a school assignment and will force me to do something or someone that I ordinarily wouldn't draw.

Like in Big D's contest I'm going to have 5 winners. I think contests with multiple winners are the best. If there weren't contests with multiple winners I would have never won anything. The only negative to having multiple winners is that maybe their is only one or two entrants. That would be a little depressing!!

So if you're interested please check it out.

I'll leave the contest open until I think they're enough entrants.

Then I'll randomize to find the five winners and then the winners can tell me what they would like sketched as a prize. They will all receive a sketch card of a player/person of their choosing as well as some random packs of current and past products. I'm not sure exactly what I'll include, but I'll try to round up some cards from their favorite team(s) as well as the custom sketch card and the packs.

Here's some examples of my drawing prowess. Not the best examples, but at least an indication of my style.

I'll start with the most recent drawing.

I wanted to do a Roberto Clemente drawing for a while now. I only have one card of his; the 1989 Pacific card shown below.

You can see how I tried a few different sketches before coming up with the final drawing. The sketch in the bottom right makes Clemente look a little bit like a hobo.

The finished product.

Here he is without the cropping. You can see a faint pencil line where I drew the border. I always draw outside the lines and then crop later. I've never tried to draw on a pre-cropped card. That will be interesting to try sometime when I'm more comfortable doing these types of cards.

The card above is an example of a Roberto gone wrong. I like it, but it ain't him. It sort of looks like what he might look like if he had a chance to age.

Here are a few studies of David Wright.

This is me trying to do a somewhat realistic portrait of him.

.. and this is me going a little more cartoony with his facial features trying to capture something that looks like him.

And finally a colorized version of him swinging a bat. Still a little off in the face, but oh well.

I'm not a heavily political guy, but I like to draw people in the public eye from time to time.

I thought that Glenn Beck would be easier to draw what with his over the top weirdness. I had to try and do a somewhat subdued drawing of him just to get the shape of his face right. It's still a work in progress.

I think the drawing above sort of captures his features a little bit better, but still not where I want it.
Larry King.

This is supposed to be Bill Murray. Seems like an easy guy to draw, but I could never get it quite right.

This is the only card that I've done so far in watercolor. I need to do more of these. I like the look, but it takes a little more effort. I took this from the scene in Shaun of the Dead where all the zombies were attacking Shaun in front of the Winchester bar. I really regret not drawing the zombie hands in the foreground attacking him.

Some random Office workers. I don't know where my Jim sketch ran off to, but here are some of the cast from the show. I'm not sure why Meredith is in color, I guess I was trying to figure out her hair color?

Alright, so their you go. Don't laugh too hard at my crappy artwork.

My stupidity astounds me sometimes.

2010-08-21T17:47:00.003-05:00

Like many people I pride myself on my intelligence. I realize that I'm not the most intelligent person on Earth, but I feel like I'm not the stupidest either.

I do have a tendency to make stupid comments on blog posts. I don't try to offend or be vague, but I feel like I'm not the best at make lucid comments especially on the fly. I don't think I have offended anybody yet so that's good. If the subject is something I feel strongly about I have a tendency to jump right in and comment without thinking.

One subject that gets me excited is Allen and Ginter. Specifically 2009 Allen and Ginter. That was one of the first sets that I tried to complete and after one year I'm still looking for a few select cards. I am also going after the black border and regular minis which has not been as easy as the rest of the set.

About a month ago Duane at Democratic Roadkill posted up a want/trade list on his blog and I thought it was just a trade list. Immediately after posting that I wanted some cards I realized that it wasn't just a trade list. My reading comprehension was lacking that day and I thought he was trading away the Pujols N43. He wasn't trading it away, he was looking for it. After a few emails and some apologies we came up with a trade for some minis and some random 09/10 A&G stuff. He mentioned he had some cool stuff for me, but he didn't mention how much.

As you can tell from the photo, avalanche is the perfect description of the amount of cards that he sent over. Every one of the cards was a new card to me. Literally no doubles at all.

He mentioned having some stuff to send over that might help me out with my quest to finish the regular border and black border minis from 2009 A&G. He sent over a good chunk to get me back on track to finish that set.

I don't have enough time to go over every card, which for me is a good thing. Having a bunch of cards to go through and collate is great. Collate is great is a nice slogan. I wish I had more free time to scan every one of these cards to show them off.

They look really good in a binder don't they? I don't have any one page finished so I just took a quick picture to show off the minis. You can tell there are some holes to be filled, but that's okay. I'll finish this thing off one of these days.

I pulled one Celestial Star of Mark Teixiera out of my box, but I wasn't really into that card. I liked the set, but I knew it would be a hard one to finish. I was just interested in the Johan and Wright cards. He traded me his Johan for my Teixeira! Definitely a good trade for me. Puts me halfway to finishing my goal for this subset.

Here are some of the cool Mets minis he sent over:

A nice Ruben Tejada. Rookie Short stop. The rookie card logo looks nice this year. I think it blends in with the design of these cards better than last years rookie logo. It's still a little weird for a new 21st century logo on a retro design.

The always photogenic Reyes.

... and a couple of Wright minis. Last year David Wright was depicted in a game action shot vertically, this year horizontally. Pretty cool even if the picture on the card is a little small.

I'm not doing the entire set in mini form this year, I'm just looking for a few sports and non-sports minis.

Sacagawea is one of two must haves for the non-sports subjects. The other would be a Leonardo Da Vinci black border card to go with the regular mini that I already pulled.

Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in getting up every time we do.
Appropriate Confucius quote considering how much falling (and failing) I've done in regards to finishing that black border mini set.

Reading the back of this card reminds me that I've always wanted to read Don Quixote. I always get that mixed up with the Cisco Kid.

The Water Buffalo peeking up from the bottom of the card is funny. I guess they designed it that way to make sure that the yellow star was visible. It looks good.

When I first saw this card I thought of Diplo. I didn't realize until now that the DJ Diplo took his name from the Diplodocus. Apparently he has a huge interest in dinosaurs.

Which would explain this album cover.

If you are so inclined, here is a song of his that is pretty repetitive, but it's catchy. Not one of his best, but I like it.

Duane didn't just send over the Ginter, he had some Mets for me.

I like these Unique cards. They look a little like 2010 Topps at first glance, but if you look a little closer they resemble 2002 Topps Post a little bit more.

Night Owl had a great post about the Post set. I found a two card pack of these recently when I was looking for a screwdriver. The pack was in a kitchen drawer. Pretty cool to find mint cards laying around your house.

The "wave" and the player are glossy, but the background has a matte finish just like in the Topps Post cards. It's a really nice look on these Topps Unique cards especially with the black border. I haven't seen any of these for sale locally. I need to search out some packs.

He sent over two Ticket to Stardom cards. I have had a few bloggers send me a few cards, but not these two. If it's not noticeable from the scan this card is the perforated parallel of the base card. This makes 5 cards of the Mets team set that I own without buying a pack. They're not as people made them out to be, but I'm still not buying. The nice thing about these cards is that Topps put the card number on the back and front. That would make collating the set easier for people chasing the set.

I don't know if this has to be said, but this was a great trade. Thanks again Duane. If anyone is still reading this go check out his blog. He's so close to finishing up 2008 Masterpieces and 2010 A&G. I'm sure he'll help you out with some cards.

The lure of the discount blasters part two

2010-08-18T19:50:00.001-05:00

I didn't know what to expect with the O-Pee-Chee blaster. I really only have about two or three of these cards. In the first pack I pulled a team card.

I like these cards. I wouldn't mind trying to get more of these if all of the team checklist cards are all like this.

I pulled a few black border cards. They look cool.

Hendrickson always seems to be in this same pose on his cards. I think I have pulled three of his cards and they seem to be about the same. I think he once he posed with two balls. This time only one ball. I guess he's mixing things up a bit. I like the dramatic lighting too.

The backs are a yellowish color and that's about the only tangible difference in this parallel.

This John Maine card is a little more creative with the pitcher posing with a ball pose.

I pulled two cool horizontal cards in this blaster:

A nice portrait...

....and a decent action shot card.

He looks like he's completely alone out there. Actually the fact that there isn't any disembodied legs, feet or elbows in the shot makes for a really clean photo.

I guess they didn't do all the team checklist cards as stadium shots.

That's okay too. The disembodied head thing is a nice retro touch.

Cool rookie card. I like the "rookie" banner and the interesting angle of the photo.

This pack only had one damaged card, unfortunately it's one of the nicest cards in the box. He doesn't look like he's 40 years old in this card. Pretty youthful looking guy. Keiichi currently plays for the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles in Japan.

I have a big fixation regarding cards with a stadium scoreboard in the background. I have a few binder pages in the "Random Binder" with my scoreboards in the background cards. I probably need to trim those down a little. This is one of the cards that's definitely staying though. This ranks right up with the 1992 Stadium Card of Anthony Young that I blogged about here. (It's down at the bottom of the page.)

This was a big highlight for me.

This is one of the insert cards commemorating the new Yankee and Mets stadiums. It's numbered NY-19. The New York skyline on the front and back of the card is cool.

Lastly two of those 20th anniversary cards.

Did anyone cut out the two cards featured on the side of the box?

I did. Turned out pretty good. I wanted to pull the Jeter card as it's a cool action shot of a player that I like. I didn't pull one, but this is just as good though.

Thanks for reading.

Oh the lure of the discounted blasters

2010-08-18T01:05:00.001-05:00

You've probably seen the big news on all the blogs lately. Well, maybe not all blogs, but at least two of my daily reads have mentioned that the huge retail chain Walmart has a ton of old blasters on discount. Locally there hasn't been much of note in the card aisle. A little Ginter, some series two baseball. Some X something or other.

I had to stop by and see if we were so lucky here in little Norman, OK. I was really hoping to find some of those 2007 Turkey Red blasters. Turned out not to be the case. I basically had to choose between 2009 O-Pee-Chee and 2009 Topps Series Two Baseball.

I picked one of each simply because I love last years baseball and I'm still trying to finish that set as well as the 2009 Turkey Red set. I have received a few O-Pee-Chee cards in trades, but I never really saw any for sale when they were new, so I never had a chance to buy any packs.

First off the Series Two box was full of Dodgers. That was cool.

I pulled four "hits". Two gold cards and the patch card was of an old Brooklyn Dodger.

I really liked this Kershaw card last year. I still do of course. I like how it shows the pitcher, batter and ball all in the same shot.

I had almost forgotten how nice the action shots in last years set were.

This is a nice one of Kenji Johjima.

Out of the whole blaster I only pulled one base card that I needed.

A "Power Jays" card.

I also pulled a cool Pee Wee Reese Turkey Red.

This is another card I need to fill the Turkey Red binder.

Getting back to the gold cards is this nice Blake DeWitt card.

I can't believe I never noticed the scoreboard in the background. I'm not sure if there is enough info for me to try and figure out the games in the background, but it's a nice card. I'm not quite the super sleuth that Night Owl or this guy is when it comes to figuring out stuff from old photographs.

This is nice Career Best George Sisler card.

He looks a bit perturbed in this photo, but I still like it.

And now for the manufactured patch card.

It's a cool hat relic of Roy Campanella. On the back it says that it's a patch commemorating the 1955 World Series. Nice. The other patches that I've seen have all been from All-Star Games. Kind of weird.

Also, on another note I saw that Bobby Thompson had passed away today. I was just looking through my cards the other day when I came across the duplicate on an Action Packed card of his. I remember noticing for the first time that he was born in Glasgow, Scotland.

The scan looks horrible, but I like this card a lot. Here's a Youtube video of "the Shot Heard Round the World". You'll have probably already seen it, but if you haven't here it is:

Thanks for reading!

Contest over at The Chronicles of Fuji!

2010-08-12T10:48:00.003-05:00

I'm a little late promoting this contest, but if you haven't already checked it out Fuji is having an interesting contest on his blog.

It's based on a question of the day format. Pretty interesting stuff.

Get ready, it's another vintage Saturday!!!

2010-08-08T01:43:00.002-05:00

It's time for another vintage Saturday. This actually is more like a vintage Wednesday, but I didn't have a chance to post then so I'll do it now.

I found a new hobby shop in OKC that has a lot of cool stuff. Mainly they have 15 card pages designed for the basic size minis that come in A&G etc. I was really happy to find a shop that has those pages since I've been too lazy to go online and order some.

They even threw in a mini that they were using as a display for the pages. Free stuff is good, even if it's something I'm not collecting.

If anybody is interested Amazon has 20 and 15 card pages available. I have no info on the 20 pages so you'll have to try those for yourself.

Here's my Joy of a Completed Page mini style. It's a pretty bad scan, but you get the idea. You don't know how happy I am to get these pages. So far I've bought around 76 of these pages and I'm still needing more. I bought the shop out the other day, so hopefully they'll get more in soon.

Enough of that. Let's get on with the "vintage". I've got real vintage and psuedo vintage to show off today. I picked up a couple of these Bowman packs. They're from 1989 . So not really vintage, but older stuff. I haven't seen packs of Bowman baseball so this'll be cool.

I grabbed these two packs off the top and I'm glad I did.

When I got home I noticed that one of the packs has what appears to be a Brooklyn Dodger. . .

... and the other a New York Giant/Met. I couldn't tell at first because of the packaging. I'll get to those later, but first a couple of cards of guys that I knew from when I was younger:

A Mattingly..

A Mike Schmidt.

...and a 75 year old Robin Yount.

This is a local sports talk radio guy, Jim Trabor. Pretty entertaining guy sometimes.

The two cards that I saw on the front were of:

a 1949 Gil Hodges and...

.... a 1951 Willie Mays. It looks like he's playing in front of a tarp with a barracks in the background. The older players really had to pay their dues in the old days it seems. Playing center field on the front lines must have been tough.

I now know where I saw these before. Baseball dad had sent me a Duke Snider card like this once in a trade.

They're pretty nice, but these cards are slightly oversized. There's even a mail in offer for Bowman pages on the back of these packs. I'm wondering if I should try to cut them down to size. That's probably too much trouble. Actually I'm wondering if I should even be looking at these cards. I pulled a lot of cool players, but it's frustrating not being able to store them properly. I like to put the cool cards in binders so that I can look at them better. The cards that don't fit into binders go into a "good box" that all contain cards in a toploader. These cards are too big for either. Crap!! I solved one problem with the mini card pages and now this.

Too much angst for me, let's get on with the true vintage.

A 1971 Dock Ellis card. This is the first '71 that I have in hand. The other is a card that I redeemed on the Topps website, but I haven't had sent to me yet. I think this card will go in oddball folder in between Sparky Lyle and Bake McBride. He he. Wink wink. It's actually in really great shape. I checked it a few times to make sure it isn't some sort of reprint and I think it's legit.

Anyway, that's about it for today. I have some more cool stuff coming up soon to celebrate my sort of one year anniversary so be on the look out for that.

Thanks for reading.

Why do I still buy this stuff?

2010-08-04T19:10:00.001-05:00

From time to time I ask myself this question. Lately I've been asking myself that question a lot while standing in front of the card aisle at Walmart and Target.

I know that I want to buy something, but nothing out there right now really grabs me. So instead of trying to exercise some sort of self-control I pick up something, anything to appease my pack ripping desire.

I grabbed another blaster of Philadelphia. This makes two times I've tricked myself into buying a blaster of this product. It sort of fits into the "stuff I don't really collect and yet I still keep buying it" category. I'm not sure how to explain it. I'm not into it, and yet I still keep buying it hoping for some reason to like it. It helps that it's now discounted 40%.

So far I've pulled two Obamas. Cool. The colors on these cards are pretty nice. If these photos were taken by Pete Souza, he's probably using a 5DmarkII. I'm not sure of the lens. I remember him using a 50 1.2 a lot when I was checking his stuff on flickr.

These two will go nicely in the binder with my political stuff.

Speaking of photographers; the card on the right highlights something else I find cool in these cards and that's the sports photographer in the background.

It also highlights the really cool horizontal shots in Philadelphia. I especially like the fact that there isn't any extra space dedicated to the name, position and team on these horizontal cards.

Here is an excellent shot of Farve in the correct uniform.

I'm so used to seeing Aaron Rodgers as a QB in the Packers uniform, I almost, almost thought this was him instead of Farve. I wasn't prepared for him to be shown in his older uniform.

That shows how disinterested I am in this set.

More historical stuff. As I write this Dwight and Micheal have both shouted "Good Morning Vietnam!" in the TV show the Office. I'm not exactly sure why. Actually I'm not sure why I'm telling you this, but it's interesting to me and it sort of relates to these next two cards.

Kind of sad that I'm only excited about the political figures and historical subjects rather than the sports stars, but I guess that's why they include them in these sets.

Any mini is a good mini in my book.

I liked Kurt a lot when he was in St. Louis. I also liked to watch all those guys around 00 to like 03. Marc Bulger was cool too. I'm hoping my guy Bradford keeps it up. He won't have Holt, Faulk or Bruce to help him out though. I don't watch St. Louis that much anymore, so I really don't know who they have at receiver or running back.

And lastly the saving grace for both blasters:

A Juaquin Iglesias card with him in an OU uniform!! Pulling a former OU player in his college uniform is the best.

Yay!! A nice action shot. He's wearing a home uniform, but there is no brick wall behind him so it's either a bowl which is highly unlikely because bowl games are usually played at night so it must be the OU/Texas game which is held in Dallas.

Their are a ton of photographers on the sidelines in this game so it stands to reason that this photo was taken from that game. Also there's a lot of burnt orange in the stands.

I also broke down and bought a rack pack and single pack of A&G. I also found a 12 card pack of 2009 A&G. I thought why not? Since I'm buying the new stuff I might as well grab an older pack for old times sake.
As far as the Ginter: I didn't pull any base, minis or NP cards that I need, but I still managed to grab a relic.

Pretty nice for retail. I think this makes 2 or 3 relics in the 12 card retail packs and like 5 or 6 overall that I've pulled from retail. Not bad. I have one or possibly two more A&G posts left in me,but I'll save those for later.

Alright. Thanks for staying 'till the end. I wish I had an alarm that I could embed at the end of the post to wake people up so they could go back to reading other peoples' blogs.

Rollin' on 73's

2010-07-20T18:51:00.001-05:00

Playing with my cards as an adult usually leads to me doing everything but actually "playing" with them. Or at least play with them how I would have as a child.

Currently my card-"playing" is basically updating spreadsheets, writing some blog posts, listing my want/trade lists, and occasionally pulling something cool from packs or from an envelope from a blogger. Sort of the adult version of playing. Pretty fun in a boring grown up way.

I look over the card before relegating it to it's home, be it binder or box. Mostly I don't play with cards these days. My trading is done online. My selling and purchasing is done mostly online. I do like to buy random stuff at the hobby shops and Walmart and Target but my face to face interaction with other collectors is basically nil.

When the weather started to get warmer this spring I wanted to change all that and take my cards out for a little spin. I took my "good box" of cards with the random relics, inserts and of course my new (to me) 1973 cards that I got from ebay and the flea market.

Turned out to be a bad idea.

I found this card while weed eating a few months after the rains and tornadoes had passed through Norman.

I remember some of the cards blowing away, but I thought I had retrieved all of them.

Kind of sad, but I got another Cardenas in another lot later so I'm good. Just kind of funny that I've already got a casualty this early in my quest to collect the 1973 set.

In addition to the other current stuff out there, I'm working on finishing the 1980 and 1973 sets.

The 1980 set was my favorite when I was a kid and 1973 is my birth year. I thought it'd be fun to try and collect those two sets as a reprieve from all the chrome and auto relic cards that are found in the newer sets. Not to mention the insert intensive sets of the past few months. A&G and Topps series two comes to mind.

What originally drew me to the set was all the cool action shots.

Not only really cool horizontal action shots like the three above, but also cool vertical shots.

They also look good as photos without the borders and logos.

I like horizontal and I like tight shots. I wanted to play around with this shot and turn a vertical card into a horizontal shot. The newspaper and photo editors out there will probably not like my creativity with the cropping, but it looks good to me.

I probably cropped this one a little too tight.

Here is the original for reference.

Obviously a vertical shot so I didn't have a lot to work with. I probably should have left in a little more glove, but I really wanted to highlight his expression. It's a great candid shot. This out performs the wacky "Photo Day" card in last years updates and highlights.

Here is Oklahoma's own Lindy McDaniel as a Yankee. He spent most of his career with the Cardinals, but by this time he was in the Yankee system.

He's doing the tried and true fake windup pose in his card.

A strong chin, pointy little noise. He reminds me of someone....

Can you see the resemblance? A little Quagmire-esque.

This post is all over the place, but I'm too tired to do a more thorough post on the 1973 set.

Let me know what you think of the '73 set. Oh yeah and as for the title. When I first starting writing this I had come across a Weird Al video that I thought was funny. I thought it related to the dirt that I found on the backs of these cards.

I was originally looking for the song "Riding Dirty", but found this one instead.

I can sort of see me as the "white and nerdy" guy hangin' wit my cards in the backyard. Just being white and nerdy. Mowing the yard and seeing my crumpled up card in the dirt. Rollin' on '73's. Getting durty wit the '73's. I'm actually too white for this song. I'm so white, I'm actually translucent. You get the picture.

Thanks for reading.

Another Vintage Saturday

2010-07-18T00:21:00.001-05:00

Well it's time for another installment of Retro/Vintage Saturday. I've done about 3 or 4 of these the past year and I'm going to wow you with another exciting blog post about my purchases. Whoo Hoo! I didn't have a chance to check out the flea market today, but I went over the fake card shop to get some supplies and random packs.

I'm never prepared to see box toppers on sale at this store. I should be used to it by now as I've seen (and bought)some box toppers on one other occasion. I really wish they would have these available more often.

I picked up two 2008 Heritage High Numbers box toppers.

One an ad panel. Not really vintage more like retro vintage or faux vintage.

... and the other a 1959 Buyback card. Hence the Vintage in the post title.

Okay first the ad panel.

Pretty nice. I think I actually have owned or currently own these three cards. Now I have the uncut versions.

In fact, I think I have about 2 or three copies of the Clete Thomas card. Would have rather opened something with some players that I collect, but still cool.

Now for the buyback card.

A little worn, but still nice and firm. Not a flimsy piece of cardboard.

A little bit smudged, but that's okay. I've been slowly brainwashed by Topps to think that faux smudge cards ala Turkey Red, 206 and A&G are acceptable so I guess real vintage smudging is okay.

As you can tell from the cartoon he was a "Yankee Killer". He beat them 6 straight times in 1954 and 1955. According to his wikipedia article 1958 was his last year.

The front shows a pretty close up head shot though. Actually an extreme head shot.

It sort of reminds me of this old Buddy Bell card that I picked out of my parents attic last summer. This was one of the cards that I never got around to posting.

A little too close for comfort for me. Also technically more of a full profile pic rather than a slight 3/4 shot in the Nixon card, but close enough for my brain to make a quick connection. At least Buddy is smiling in his card; Willard looks confused or disoriented on his.

Not a lot of cards to show off this Saturday. Wish I could've pulled in a big haul o' vintage to show off, but not this weekend. The real shop is closed tomorrow. Maybe I'll make a surprise visit during the week and look for something cool. I'll have to hold off the urge to buy random packs of Ginter and look for something less Gintery.

Thanks for reading. If any of these cards are something that you can't live without let me know. They're up for trade if anybody is interested.