New technology in the collecting game

As mentioned on my previous post, I haven't bought much in the way of trading cards in quite some time. Everything seems a little different now in the collecting word.  I don't seem to see a lot of card packs in the Targets and WalMarts like I used to. Also, place like Vintage Stock don't seem to stock much in the way of cards unless it's Pokeman or Magic the Gathering. 

The one new development that might only be new to me is the invention of the horizontal binder page.

Yep. I'm so starved for hobby related material that I genuinely got excited when I saw these at the Vintage Stock. 

I really didn't want to leave totally empty handed as I couldn't even find a good graphic novel or comic to buy. No packs of non-sports OR sports to be had. No singles, nothing really at the closest Vintage Stock, so I got 4 of these pages for now, and one of those Funko blind boxes. This particular set is from Marvel's What If...? animated show. 

I haven't seen the show, but I do like Marvel related stuff.  I was looking for a cool Zombie Captain America, but pulled an Ice Loki ? 

 

I remember the old "What if... ?" comic books. It was a pretty good premise for an anthology like book back in the day. I'll have to check out this show sometime and see if it's like the old comics, or maybe it's a new "alternate universe" type of concept.

About those binder pages... I really should have bought more. I can totally see using these for my little '74 set that I'm putting together. Honestly they would work good for my favorite horizontal cards too. 

 My '74 "set" that I'm going for is pretty much just the 12 or so cards depicting the World Series from 1973. I found a couple of these at a local card shop years ago, and I forget where the other ones came from. I just remember thinking that having the Met's from the '73 season would be cool as I'm sort of trying to complete that set, and I felt like this would be a nice companion to that. 

The possibilities are somewhat endless.  It wouldn't make sense to use these on a set that has both vertical and horizontal cards, but sometimes those little insert sets would be all horizontal. Of course, the 55 and 56 sets were horizontal, so they make good candidates for the new pages.

I kind of forgot how many of these vintage cards that I had in the vintage box.  These are all from different sets, but it's a lot easier to look at them in pages.

 

Eventually I'm going to use these for my random "Cool Action Shot" set that I'm making out of whatever cards I think looks cool. Since it's been several years since I totally went through my collection it might take a minute to actually find which binder/box. 

10 Years Gone

 Almost 10 years have gone by since I last posted. 10 YEARS!!! How does time fly by so fast? 

So many things that happened. Good and bad. Nothing different from anybody else's life, but still....10 years!!!??? I still can't believe it. I put most of my collecting on hold. Life happens and most of that was more important than my collecting hobby. I have like 5 hobbies going at once, so this one took a back seat for a while.

I would go to the hobby store and grab some singles from the sets I'm collecting, but I pretty much decided I wasn't interested in buying and building new sets anymore. I did grab a few Garbage Pail Kids and a random pack or two of "new stuff", but mostly just a bunch of randomness.

 

Saw these Chrome GPK's online, but they didn't really grab me, but seeing them in person changes my mind a little bit. I do like shiny chrome. Who doesn't? I still haven't seen any A&G in chrome and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't like it as it just doesn't make sense to me. The appeal of A&G is that it is a retro set and as such, probably looks better without all the 21st century snazziness. If I ever see a chrome pack of A&G these days I'd probably buy a pack as I can't seem to find much at the Walmarts and Targets like in the past.

GPK is one of my all time favorites, but they be a little hit or miss on the concept of their new sets. This was from the 35th anniversary set and it was really right up my alley as it more of a homage(I won't say re-hash) of the older sets that I remember from my childhood.

This was from 2017 I think. It was a music based set. It makes me feel old sometimes. Before this post I heard a song by Sting's band and for the life of me I couldn't think of the name of his old band. Took me hours to remember "The Police". I'm getting old.

I don't even remember buying this. I consider myself a Star Wars fan. Actually it was the first ever movie that I watched. I don't see anything of note in this pack.

I got a few cheap boxes from Facebook marketplace. Some Stadium Club, 90's era Football Pro Set, and this really cool box of Series One Mad Magazine. 

 

 

 

Really weird checklist numbering system. I guess keeping up with the concept of "Mad". I was able to build a couple of sets of this stuff and have a few packs left over.  Someday I really need to do a random box break/pack break thing with my random unopened packs. Not that I have a lot of unopened packs. Really hard to resist ripping packs when I have them.

 

 

Having not been a collector in the early nineties, I didn't really realize how big these pro sets were. I thought for sure I could get close to finishing up a set with 36 packs, but I didn't. I still got the painted Super Bowl MVP subset finished though. Or at least, I think I did. I need to check again. I have a LOT of dupes from these sets. 

I don't know what to think of the design of this set. I sort of like it, but it doesn't really elicit any excitement for me. Fun to rip open though.  I need to search out more older boxes like this.

Thanks for reading! Hopefully I'll be more proactive in the future with some more posts.

 

Trade with Democratic Roadkill

Quite a few months ago I received another large package from Duane at  Democratic Roadkill.  This is probably the 2nd or 3rd time that we have traded.   He always sends me a huge collection of cards, most of them Allen and Ginter. This time was no different; as you can see from the above photo he obliterated my want lists for the 2011 A&G set.  Duane usually sends over some cool, random Mets cards from vintage to present, but I'm going to focus on the A&G stuff this time out.

If you didn't already know, Duane is quite the Ginteraholic.  More so than me. I thought I could out Ginter him, but nobody can out Ginter the master.  From what I can tell from his blog he is basically putting together master sets of all the Allen and Ginter offerings and doing a much better job than I.  He's been showing off his rip  card collections as of late. 


Most people are probably sick of 2012 and 2013 A&G, but this is 2011 A&G so maybe you guys will like the rediscovery.


Anyway, here we go:

Some nice base cards to start us off.  Non-sports base cards at that. One is known for jumping around like a crazy person and the other is known for being an Iron Chef.  They both look like they are into the extreme area of their professions: extreme running and jumping and extreme chefing.

Here's a video of  Tim "Livewire" Shieff for you to get an idea of what this guy does.  I watched it with the sound off, so it could have language that is NSFW.  The sound does matter unless you can hear his ankles shattering. At least I'm assuming they're shattering,  my ankles and knees hurt just from watching the video.

A few examples of the short prints that Duane sent over. Vermillion is the only person that I haven't heard of.

I didn't realize that Brett Anderson was an Okie.  Both his and Matt Holliday's dads were both OSU baseball coaches.  This is Bedlam week in Oklahoma; the rivalry game between OU and OSU so these cards fit my mindset this week.  With the way OU is playing on offense (badly!) and they way OSU is playing on defense (pretty good) this could be crappy end to the football season for us Okies, I might have to avoid the internet for a while and seek solace in my trading cards.

The Animals in Peril mini set is nice.  A little depressing I guess, but informational.  Who knows, maybe a baseball card collector can some how turn the tide and help out some of these animals. Maybe influence a young person to go into agriculture?

The sketch cards are always nice. I like them because I have an interest in art and drawing myself.  The Twins card is a little odd in that it is a drawing of a drawing.

The David Wright card commemorates his being the youngest Met to reach 1,000 career hits.  This game was played on 4.27.2010.  According to the internet this was a game with the Dodgers and the Mets actually won the game!  With a 79-83 record maybe that should have been the highlight instead.

The Texas flag on Cliff Lee's jersey looks odd in black and white. The hat logo also looks out of place in B&W.  I guess the artist wanted to bring more focus to the player's faces.  The rest of the drawing isn't completely desaturated; the red piping on the catcher's gear is present.  It just seems like those logos would really make the whole drawing stand out more.

The one thing I like about these Worlds Most Mysterious minis from 2011 is that they continue the design on the back. I don't know much about design terminology, so let me show you what I'm talking about.

The World's most Mysterious Figures have this name plate, right?

....and Topps continued the same style of nameplate on the back of the card and just elongated it to hold the text and they added some curly q's. I think the correct term is strikes or keys, but I usually call them curly q's.  But it's still the same basic shape.

I don't think they usually do that even for A&G.  Since I haven't bought a lot of 2012 or 2013 A&G maybe they do now.  I just found it interesting at the time.  Up to this point I'm pretty sure the inserts all had a different border on the fronts and backs.

Some people might call that laziness; I call it continuity.

One insert set that I really liked was the Step Right Up set.  From what I can remember reading on the blogs a lot of people really liked this set.  It's colorful and who doesn't like a circus?

The subject matter is cool, but the design of the card fronts is what really drew me in. The background/border is really cool.  The font on the bottom is nice. I'm no font nerd, but it actually reminds me of the Oklahoma font that I've seen online. I'm sure their are many variations of fonts and they all have different names, but that's what I've always heard it called.

 A blogging legend makes an appearance on the Portraits in Penultimate set: Mr. Mike Gellner.

I'm spacing out on what the name of his blog was.  I'm pretty sure it was named after his kid (the little dude in the photo).

Thanks for the cards, Duane.  If you all have a chance go over and check out the dude's want list/trade list and help a guy out!

Thanks for reading!

The best card I received last year

I’ve been meaning to write this post for, well about a year and a half now.  

I had many different ideas that I wanted to write about, but for some reason I couldn’t get motivated to actually DO it.   It’s funny, when I was I regularly blogging it was pretty easy for me to come up with ideas and get them on (virtual) paper.   I could keep the momentum going and always had ideas to flesh out on the old blog.  Not that many of those ideas were gold, but at least it was something and I could knock out a post somewhat quickly.  In the past year or so I really have gotten out of the habit of blogging and it's been really hard to get back into writing. I still read the blogs though, I just can't get around to writing about cards.  

One of the distractions that we all have to go through are the same personal things going on in anyone's life. Of course my life isn't any different, so I've also go my personal issues to get through as well.  Good things mostly. Not the bad things people usually mean when they bring up “personal issues”; but real life did take precedent on blogging. 

In this particular case I had many ideas on how I wanted to thank Dayf for his sketch card that he sent me.  I was pretty sure that no matter what I came up with, it wouldn't adequately reflect how much I like the cards that he sent over. The sketch of Sam Bradford above is the best of the package.  The other cards in the package were nice, but weren't expected.

 

 The Dream,  Matisse

One of my early ideas for this post was to compare me and Dayf’s trade as a modern day Matisse and Picasso arrangement. 

 

I went to the Kimball Museum many years ago to see the exhibit and bought this cool book.  Skimming through the book for photos to scan for this post also contributed to my procrastination.

I don’t quite remember all the details of their friendship. Basically I think they were influenced by one another and at some point they became friends and started a correspondence by mail.  In their correspondence they started to work on a few themes; mentioning to the other via letters what they were working on.  I might be misremembering what went on; it might be a good time to actually re-read the book rather than just look at the pretty pictures.  Many books have been written on the similarities between each artists work even though they belonged to two different schools of art. Picasso being more famous for his Cubist works and Mattisse being part of the Fauvist movement.

Woman with Yellow Hair, Picasso

Probably seems a little arrogant to compare either one of us to two of the masters of the art world, but it's the first thing that came to mind when he sent out his missive to the blogging community to trade pony sketches for Dayf originals.  

Trading sketch cards is a really cool idea and I've only been able to trade with our fellow bloggers a few times so far. It's something I'd like to do more often.

Sketch cards themselves would be the easiest to transport via PWE to one another with blogs and email being way more accessible than the old fashion postal system.  The problem isn’t with technology, it’s with the humans to stop being lazy and being overcome with the ease of looking at stuff online all day and just get to creating and of course writing about it later on the blog.

Anyway, that’s a long winded way of saying sorry to Dayf that it took me this long to thank him for the cool sketch card and also the cards he sent.   It's actually a painted card rather than just a sketch. Makes me feel a little cheap that I only sent him a sketch done with pencil and markers. 

This is the card that he used as inspiration for the art card.

Pretty good likeness.  I don't do helmets very well myself so I know how hard it is to draw them well. The face is really well done too, I like his representation better than the original photograph. 

Since it could be a long while until I blog again I’ll go ahead and show the other cards that Dayf sent over.

This is my first (hopefully not last) Crown Royale card. Pretty nice die cut card of Dorsey Levens. One of my favs on Madden 05 I believe.

I'm not exactly sure why or where Dayf got these uncut University of Oklahoma "cards". I'm glad he procured them and sent them over. They seem to be commemorating the 6 (at that time) national championships that OU has won in football.  

 

Pretty cool. They come from the Love's stores. I didn't realize they had those in Georgia, but I guess they do.  

Mark Clayton and Mark Bradley were really good standouts at receiver, which is saying something because in the Bob Stoops era we have been pretty deep at the wideout position. It's always nice to get cards of players in their college uniforms.

Thanks again for the cards and Happy Thanksgiving everbody!

Oklahoma vs Notre Dame game

I hear they’re organizing a football game tonight here in little ole Norman, Oklahoma.  #5 Notre Dame is coming to town to play the #8 ranked Sooners.  Notre Dame owns an 8-1 record against us.  They were responsible for ending our 47 game winning streak.  OU only lost 3 times between 1953 and 1957 and all three losses were at the hands of the Irish.

Games like this are why I get excited for college football.  We don’t normally have a lot of ranked non-conference games here.  In the past we have scheduled some nice non-conference games, but only a few times have the teams been competitive on the years that they’ve visited our stadium.  We’ve played host to Miami, Florida State, Alabama, UCLA and Oregon. Only FSU, Alabama and Oregon were ranked. 

ESPN is set up outside Memorial Stadium and is bringing the whole world with them.  You’ll notice that I don’t refer to our stadium as Gaylord Family Memorial Stadium. “Gaylord Stadium” sounds like an insult that you hear on the playground in 5^th grade. “Hey nice going Gaylords, you lost to an unranked Texas Tech team at home!”  Also, I don’t like how the University decided to change the name without consulting or notifying the fan base or alumni.  I guess if you donate enough money (and own the local newspaper) you can do whatever you want.  Too bad they forgot the original reason it was named Memorial Stadium in the first place which is to honor the World War I heroes.  Bob Stoops has a 79-4  home record so you think we could rename it something more appropriate like Warlord Stadium.

I really don’t think that having the World Wide Leader in town really does anything for the game except make traffic a little more congested. Games like this don’t need any more hype.  College football fans will probably tune in to this game regardless if they are fans of the two teams or not.  Whoever wins this game has a good shot of appearing in the national title game; or at least staying in the national title conversation. 

I was going to do a statistical breakdown of the two teams, but I realized that for the most part stats are meaningless.  I looked at the Longhorn and Sooner stats prior to the Red River Shootout and looked as if both teams were evenly matched.  Maybe with the numbers people we were even, but in reality we beat them 63-21 and it wasn’t really that close. Texas scored 12 points in the last 5 minutes of the game.  The stat people almost fooled me into thinking that the two teams were evenly matched. I won’t make that same mistake twice.

Another thing that bothers me about stats is that they have too many teams tied in those spots.  Too many teams are tied at 17 for example so if you can just average a few more yards or restrict your opponent by a few less yards you could move several spots.

People who are familiar with Notre Dame say that they are good on defense and bland on offense with an indifferent special teams unit.  I’d like to think that OU is pretty good offensively and defensively and we have a really nice returner in Penn State transfer Justin Brown.  Brown has also been a pretty nice target for Landry Jones these past few weeks.  They seem to really have their timing worked out. 

According to MY stats OU’s defense looks to be giving up about 10 points per game.  Notre Dame is doing pretty badly offensively. I haven’t looked into too much, but as a team they are scoring 26 points per game.  Most of those points were scored on Miami and Navy, but OU scored most of our points on Kansas and Texas so I shouldn’t gloat too much.  Speaking of Texas how is it that the biggest athletic department in the nation has fallen so far?  They have good coaches and good players.  I don’t get why they suck so much.  63-21.  Wow. I know it has nothing to do with this game, but I’m still in awe of how well we played against them. Sorry. I sometimes get sidetracked and like to reminisce about how much I dislike the Longhorns.

I hope we can play that well tonight on Owen Field in Memorial Stadium.  The turnover margin will be key. ND has a great D-line and a somewhat inexperience secondary.  OU looks pretty good in the secondary, but sometimes doesn’t get enough pressure on the QB.  Tonight should be different though. ND quarterback Golston has his issues at QB. I don’t think he’s quite there yet, so hopefully we will be able to get to him early and get his timing off.

I’m not going to give out a prediction as I’m usually about 50% on my predictions. Don’t want to embarrass myself, I’m just going to enjoy the day.  And the media circus.  Hopefully I’ll enjoy the outcome.

Look for me in the stands.  Actually don’t try to look for me, just watch the game. The cameras never pan up that high anyway.

Thanks for reading.

Perseverance

For the first home game this season OU celebrated one of it's favorite players on the ticket stub.  This is the second year that people have voted on their favorite players and the 6 chosen appear on the home game ticket stubs.  I never really think about these things much. I think it's a good idea, but I never really go to the OU website to vote.  It would be hard for me to find just a few players to nominate, much less vote on. They're all special in their own way. No matter the team or sport I'm sure most people have their favorites that never won a lot of post season awards or were recognized for what they did for the team.

Rocky was recruited out of Jenks high school in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1997. He played one season for John Blake's last team that went 5-6.  They played 3 ranked teams all season 15th ranked Colorado. (I believe this one was broadcast on ESPN in the days before 24/7 football coverage. Why, I have no idea.) 20th ranked Missouri and 7th ranked Texas A&M.  I don't remember the exact quote, but Rocky mentioned the crying in the locker room and the depression of being blanked by A&M 0-29 and the humiliation of giving up 41 points to OSU in a loss. Players like Rocky and Roy Williams confessed that they had a fleeting urge to transfer, but decided to stay with what they had started. 


At this point in his career nobody thought he or the team would do much.  Things looked bleak. The program was being surpassed by Nebraska, Kansas State, Colorado, Texas, Texas A&M. Heck, even OSU and Kansas was having more success in those days than OU.Colorado and Nebraska had both won National Championships recently and most of the teams in the new Big XII looked pretty tough.

Things started to pick up in 1999.  The team would finish with a 7-5 record in Bob Stoops first season.  The defense was stout against  13th ranked Texas A&M allowing 6 points in a lop-sided 51-6 win.  OU would hover around the bottom of the AP 25 that year and would lose in the Independence bowl to Mississippi State.  Most of the losses were because of the defense giving up leads in the fourth quarter. That could be a partly because of an offense that couldn't run out the clock and specials teams; not just the defensive deficiencies.  Still some work to go if you're the leader on defense. Nobody on defense wants to lose the game in the fourth quarter and defensive mistakes.


2000 would see the Sooners return to national prominence with an Orange Bowl win over Florida State. OU had the benefit of starting out the season ranked 20th and having three teams ranked above them: Texas, Kansas State and Nebraska were all conference foes that had enjoyed recent successes against OU and possibly took the Sooners too lightly. Beating those three ranked teams helped a lot in the rankings and gave the team immediate and concrete goals to look forward to each week.  In previous seasons the higher ranked opponent might intimidate the team, but not this particular group of guys. They were hungry to show what they could do and looked forward to the opportunity to see how they matched up to the competition.


Here's an bligatory Youtube clip.  This is of Rocky forcing a fumble and the subsequent score in the National Championship game.


Rocky would force the fumble that would lead to a touchdown by Quentin Griffin that effectively sealed the win for OU.  The offense hadn't done much in the red zone that night, but having the ball on the 15 yard line helped a lot.

This is the best screen shot I could find of the forced fumble.

Rocky finished his career as a National Champion, Big XII Conference champion, Butkus award finalist (2000) winner(2001) and a finalist for the Nagurski and Bednarik awards and a 3 time first team All-Big XII selection.  He did all this with a fractured bone in his leg and a broken thumb.

Guys like Rocky are the backbone of any team. The tough, smart guy who keeps his head up and keeps at it.  Unfortunately it doesn't always work out for a guy, but hopefully better things are in the horizon for some of these players. Rocky was drafted in the third round by the Tennessee Titans and finished his career in Indianapolis.

This particular card was sent over to me by Brian the Play at the Plate Dude. We've traded many times and this was a really nice card he sent over.  He sent over a lot more than this. Hopefully I'll get around to posting up those cards soon, but for now I wanted to give a special post to this card.

I still can't believe that somebody would see a card that they knew I would like and picked it up for me. I'm not so sure I would have done the same thing.

I don't know how the perseverance theme applies to me to personally as a card blogger, but in life I guess we all should be positive and keep at it.

Thanks for the cards, Brian.