trade with too many grandersons

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!

What is your favorite card set?

When I think of baseball cards the first thing that comes to mind is the colorful banners and round borders of the 1980 Topps baseball set. For me it's the quintessential baseball set. I wasn't up on baseball much in 1980. I would rather be outside playing baseball or soccer or playing army or Star Wars rather than watching games or keeping up with certain players.

But when I was watching Magnum P.I. with my mom and felt like going through my cards I always held the 1980 Topps cards in much higher esteem than the 84 and 85 Donruss or the Fleer cards. That doesn't mean that I didn't hold them together with a rubber band or stuff them in a shoe box, because I did. This was before the days of highly profitable error cards or penny sleeves or plastic toploaders. Maybe their was this technology available, but not in a small town in south east Oklahoma. And to my recollection it was a couple of years later that everybody was trying to keep their comics and baseball cards hermetically sealed so they would be worth something someday.

Since I got back into collecting I have thought to try and finish this set. I could only rescue about 5 badly dinged up cards from that set.


You can see how the years of being lost in the attic with a rubber band wrapped around them has taken a toll on the cards.

A good example of this is the Roy Thomas card.


I tried positioning the card in such a way that you could tell how disfigured it is.

Besides the few cards that I've seen online and the 5 that I have in the shoe box, I really haven't searched out many examples to see what they look like. I wanted to surprise myself when I finally got around to trying to collect the set. I wanted each card to be new to me even if I had already seen it before.

So that brings me back to the present.

I'm pretty excited to have "won" an auction on ebay for about half the 1980 set. Part of me feels like it's cheating the other part of me thinks that this is an easy and somewhat affordable way to get started on the set. It's definitely not a complete set so I still have a way to go to finish it and some of the cards are well worn which is fine by me. I'm just interested in seeing all the cool cards from this year finally.


I don't remember there being many action shots and so far I'm right. Out of the 300 or so cards that I've gone through only a handful are "cool" action shots.


My guesses are usually wrong, but I believe that is Joel Youngblood sliding into Foli on this card. Foli has a great "OH CRAP!" expression on his face.


This what I mean by cool action shots.




This is a somewhat pedestrian action shot. Their are loads of these in this set so far. Or at least from what I've seen. Still a cool shot: it's definitely from a game and you can see emotion and the ball is in the frame.

Most of the cards seem to be of the posed shot or candid shot variety. Like this one of Tony Scott.

This is one of the few underexposed cards that I've seen so far in the set. Besides that it's pretty indicative of the type of candid head shot found in these cards.


Here's one of the more goofy candid shots in the set:

"Hey look who's down there takin' my picture. Hello photo boy!"


I'm guessing every baseball set pretty much recaps the previous year in some form. Here we have a Manny Mota highlight.


I'll be lazy and let the card back do the talking.



It's got the ripped out of a newspaper and fake headline theme on the back.


On the other end of the spectrum would be the Future Stars cards:

I'm not sure if Tim's hat is airbrushed. It looks a little weird. He played for the Padres his entire career with a few years of minor league ball so I don't know why it would be airbrushed. I'm also not sure why they felt the need to airbrush his face. It's a little disconcerting that his head looks so cartoonish.


A Victory Leader stat card.
This card features two brothers that led the N.L. with 21 wins apiece. Flanagan led the A.L. with 23 wins. Runner up was Tommy John with 21 wins.


This is atypical of the team checklist cards. Most of them are outside shots with the entire team and managers sitting in rows like we all expect. Going through my stack of cards I came across this floating head Cubs team card. It's weird enough for me to want to show it off. I've seen floating head manager cards, but not floating head team cards.


Going back to the backs.


I didn't realize how blue all the backs were. I mean to say that I realized that their were no variations in the backs, but I didn't realize how the two shades of blue really make the card backs kind of bland.

The backs do have a pretty nice layout though.


And of course they have the cool cartoons with a little home plate looking emblem containing the card number. Gotta love cartoons on the card backs.

Alright! That's it for now for my trip down 1980 Topps memory lane. I'm still not quite sure how many more cards I need, but it's roughly half of the set. I'm pretty excited to try and finish my favorite baseball card set. In the next few days I'm going to stick them in the binder so I can look at them easier. I don't want to have them cluttered all over my coffee table.

Thanks for reading.