Another Vintage Saturday

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.

retro saturday derailed!!

Saturdays are usually my day to check out the card store or go by the flea market to check out the card selection. Recently I've been pretty busy so I haven't had the chance to really do any leisure activities, but this Saturday I was looking forward taking the day off to look around for old cameras, books and cards. The flea market was lame and the one card shop guy was closed for inventory. Crap!! Why close on a Saturday for inventory when that should be the day that most everybody goes out to get cards. Or at least I would assume that Saturday would be the best day for card shopping.

Anyway, with my card shopping thwarted, I had to go to the "fake" hobby shop to check out what kind of cards they had.

The "fake" shop is a place called Vintage Stock which I believe only has locations in Kansas, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas. It's a used CD, DVD and game store that also has a limited selection of cards and comic books. Over priced cards and comic books.

I needed to satiate my need for cards so I picked up some random packs of stuff.

First off is the Garbage Kid Flashbacks. I didn't know these existed until last night when I read Dayf's posts here ,here, and here.



These are pretty cool. Vintage Stock also has the GPKs from the eighties too, but they are stickers as well as the new ones. I'm not much of a sticker guy. I'd rather have the regular cards instead.

The packs contain 10 stickers and I pulled 4 parallels in my pack.







and two stand alone cards:



These are the Where are They Now? cards.

pretty cool. Sort of like a When they Were Young insert set, but a little more interesting and not so cute. A little creepier take on the Topps flagship set.


I know that I'm not going to try for the Heritage set. Or for that matter any of the Heritage sets. I like them all actually, but I don't really want to actively collect the set, picking up a random pack here and there is cool for me. Having said that, I needed to grab at least one pack to see what they're like.

First up is Okmulgee's own Ron Gardenhire.

Pretty cool for a manager card. It's not a faux vintage miscut card. I just scanned it funny.


I like Ichiro.


I think he's a favorite of a lot of collectors. I have seen "variations" of this card all over the blogs, and by variations I mean why do card companies reuse the same darn photo year after year. I've seen this pose on many different cards. I don't have any of those cards so I guess this'll be going in the binder.


A sleepy frenchy.

It says on the back that after the trade he led the Mets in HRs, doubles, runs scored and RBI's. I'm not sure how big of an accomplishment that was considering,but anyway. "welcome to the team!"

And of course a chrome of a Texas Ranger.


By my estimation I have pulled about 7 to 8 chrome cards and three of them have been Rangers. I'm a Ranger magnet.

Not a bad pack of cards though.

I didn't get much in my two hobby packs of 2010 Topps. This was my first chance to pick up hobby packs of the flagship. I was hoping the odds of pulling something cool like a million card giveaway or the Legendary Lineage cards would be better.

I didn't pull any Million Card giveaway cards, I did pull an LL card that I've had my eye on for a while.




Jose is out for 2-8 weeks with a hyper thyroid problem. I don't know what that means, I just hope he's healthy. I want to watch that guy get busy this year.


Another Met in the pack. This time a backwards Piersall. This is also a really nice insert set. It also sort of fits in to the retro theme today.

Here's a card that doesn't fit in to the retro theme, but I wanted to show it off anyway.

A nice horizontal Kershaw card.


Now for some retro football in the form of Topps Mayo.

This guy had a pretty interesting life.


He has the nickname of "The Father of the American Prohibition." He also was captured in the Spanish-American war and held prisoner for a month in Cuba. According to wikipedia he was a Victorian era Richard Dawson, stopping to kiss admiring young women during speaking engagements.

This was probably the biggest hit of the day.

A Harvard back mini.


Exactly!!


Of Joe Namath. That's cool. I like Broadway Joe. I have this base card, but until now I didn't have the mini.

Alright, I guess that's it for now. In two days it will be time to try and get my Million Cards sent to me. I'm mainly looking to get my lone vintage card sent to me. a 1971 Skip Pitlock.

Thanks for reading.

Ho Ho Holiday Contest entry

Beardy has the entries for the Ho Ho Holiday Contest posted up and I wanted to try and explain my rationale for why I chose the card I entered for Beardy's Ho Ho Contest.

It wasn't hard for me to use Festivus as inspiration for the contest. I really like the show Seinfeld and I've always liked that episode. I also like that somebody really did invent their own holiday especially one that was against onslaught of consumerism in the celebration of our holidays.

When I thought of "Festivus" as a theme, I immediately plopped in the DVD to watch the episode. Something about the word "Festivus" made me think of colored circles with letters inside them. Sort of like the 2008 Topps baseball and football cards.
I don't really like that design much, so I decided on the Heritage design for a few reasons.

One of the reasons was the episode itself.



When Frank Costanza and Kramer walk into Monk's Diner to confront George about the rebirth of Festivus, Frank tells George it's his "heritage" to celebrate Festivus.


Also in the coffee shop scene George and Jerry are talking about Jerry's new girlfriend who they dub "two face" because she looks completely different depending on the lighting.


Like the Batman villan Harvey Dent aka: "Two Face".



Jerry mentions that she's like a baseball card where the player moves when you turn it a certain way.



George responds: "I see, tilt it one way and the player is on base, turn it another way and advancing the runner."



So those two reasons made me think I was on the right track to do a cool holiday card in the 1960 design.

The fact that they mentioned baseball cards in this episode made me think...


... that maybe it's another Festivus Miracle!!!


Now on with the card:

Here is the front.



I tried doing a Heritage style chrome card. I like the chromes better in real life anyway. (Who doesn't like shiny chrome!?), so I tried deasturating the background in the screen shot and adding a silver color overlay. Neither of them really made it look authentic. I tried a few other filters, but I never could get it to work out right. I did want to make the foreground characters to stand out better so I left them alone and edited the background to my liking.

I also did a slightly different version with a Frank Constanza character pointing upward as he tells Kramer about his creation of Festivus.



I ended up keeping the simpler design of the Festivus Pole instead of a "player" cutout.

Here is the back of the card.

I tried "roughing it up" a little to make it seem like the rough backs like the Heritage cards.

Here is a real Heritage back for comparison.


I'm not sure if the back looks authentic either, but I like it okay. I decided to not include any sort of Topps logo or legal stuff on the back or front. I probably should have to make it look more like a real card, but it looks fine to me.

In retrospect though, I probably should've changed the background of the card back to a light brownish color to make it look a little more like the real card.



I kept referring to my Jose Reyes chrome card as a reference.


I noticed when looking at the card I missed one important thing: I didn't put a silver border around the card. Another strike against me. I'm hoping that I'm not screwing myself by posting up my mistakes.

All in all it was a fun contest to enter. Hopefully I will at least place in the top three or get an honorable mention.

I really do like all the other entries. I had noticed that Mark's Ephemera had already posted up his entry and I was starting to feel a lot less confident in my card entry. Looking at everybody's entries makes me feel a whole lot less confident. Oh well. It was fun to make the card and it'll be fun to see who wins it.

Trade with Carl Crawford cards

I've been knee deep in work, water and card trades these past few weeks and with all the work and dodging puddles I haven't had a chance to post about the cool trades going on in my life.

Paul from Carl Crawford Cards was cool enough to send some stuff over in trade for a Tampa Bay Price card I pulled from Goodwin Champions.

He sent me a few Mets for my collection. These are from around the time that I stopped collecting, so that's nice to have a bunch of "new" stuff.




It's funny that these older cards seem so thin compared to the newer cards. It's true, some of the newer cards are kind of thin, but that's only in comparison to some of the thicker card sets. Makes you wonder if we've just become too spoiled. Maybe it's the fact that they've aged, I'm not sure if cardboard becomes weaker with age.





He sent me my first Heritage Chrome card.
It's interesting that the front is all new and shiny and the backs are rough like an older card.



I didn't realize that they were serial numbered. I don't know much about Heritage. The few I have are from trades and the occasional repack. The repacks were from '07 or '08 I think and they don't look as good as these 2009s' do. I might have to pick up a blaster or two of these if I can find any.

He sent me a couple of Yankees cards specifically Derek Jeter. He and Mariano are my two favorite current Yankees.

These cards didn't really come out so good in the scans.

This is a 2002 Bowman Chrome. I like that the ball is captured on the card. Jeter looks pretty young on this one.

Here's another Jeter 2000 Bowman Chrome.
The player window is pretty nice. I like the curved top and the drop shadow on the right of the window. Bowman cards all seem to have many little horizontal stripes on the front.

2001 Topps Finest.


Crazy design behind a pretty nice action shot of Jeter batting. I like the stylized baseball diamond directly behind him with the Yankees logo at home plate.

I mentioned before about how young he looks in these cards. Look at this back.


The photos on all these card backs are different than the ones on the front. That's cool. The stat window on this appears to be a gold plate on a rough rock-like background. It's kind of nice. It makes the text stand out.

Thanks again for the cards, I'll keep an eye out for any Carl Crawford cards to send out.

Gift from Justin at Is this a Wasteland, no it's Tampa Bay sports

Justin, who runs the blog Is this a Wastland, no It's Tampa Bay Sports recently made an announcement about wanting to cull his collection of football cards and was going to give them away for free! Everybody loves free stuff, right? So I signed up for some Vikings cards.

As far as the NFL goes I love the NFC north the best. The Packers, Bears, Vikings are all fun to watch for different reasons. I root for the Packers mostly and I was really excited to see them win last week against the Bears. I especially loved the third down play for a touchdown. I love it when teams play action pass or just pass on third and one. Especially when it works. When it doesn't work I really hate them and their offensive coordinator. Ha Ha. I also love it more when they throw deep on that play. Totally unexpected in that situation.

The Bears have Tommy Harris from OU as well as a couple of other guys that I like to watch. (I really don't like Cutler). I like the Vikings for the obvious reason that A.D. plays for them. And the Lions, well every team needs a rest during a long season, and the recently the Lions have been that patsy...I mean team for the NFC North.

Anyway, on with the cards...


As you can tell from the photo, quite a generous stack of cards. This package was really heavy when I picked it up. Like a brick of cards.

I can't scan and show you all the cards, so I'm picking out the highlights.


Here is a nice card from a guy that I had forgotten about. Actually I haven't forgotten him completely, but I forgot he had been drafted a few years ago by the Vikings.

He was quite a star at OU, leading the team in tackles in '05 and '06. Those weren't very good years for us especially offensively, but with guys like Rufus we didn't have much of a drop off defensively after guys like Tommie Harris, Dan Cody and Dusty Dvorachek were drafted.


A few years ago during an ill-fated return to college I took a lot of journalism classes, and found myself more interested in print rather than broadcast media. I stopped by the newspaper offices and one of my friends was hanging out with Rufus. Really a nice guy. I never know what to say in those situations, I just try to treat them like any other person instead of some star.

He seemed completely different from his on-field persona. Seemed like a really quiet and educated person. I really was hoping he would make the cut with the Vikings, but injuries really screwed him up. Fans used to always yell out "roooooo" for Rufus after each tackle he made.


Looking through the stack of cards my eye usually finds the retro sets first and the shiny stuff later.


Michael Bennett from the 2005 Heritage.


These cards also have the backs that have trivia questions with answers that you can rub off. This always seems to be a football thing, I wonder if they've ever done this same thing for baseball cards?


Bowman Heritage of Fason. I remember this guy from his Florida Gator days. Love the horizontal card and the fact that he's looking straight into the camera.


2005 Heritage card of Culpepper. I always associate him with Randy Moss.



2005 Donruss Game Day Jerseys card. "The enclosed piece of Jersey was cut from an Authentic Jersey personally worn by Randy Moss in an official NFL Game. The authentic Game-Worn Jersey was obtained and is guaranteed by Donruss Playoff LP."

Cool. I wonder if "an Official NFL Game" could also mean a pre-season game as well? Doesn't really matter I guess, it's still game-worn.



Every time I hear "Randy Moss" I don't think about him as a receiver or even his off the field exploits like trying to run over a parking attendant. I always have this song lyric in my head. "the whole world loves it when you make that sound. wha wha. whawhawhawha." .... something about "flossing like Randy Moss." It might be Outkast, but I'm not sure. Catchy song.



Shiny card of Kelly Campbell. Currently with the Buccaneers.




A shiny Fason from 2005 Topps Finest.


2007 Score Chester Taylor



A 2004 Gus Frerotte. This guy played at Tulsa University. He was most known (at least to me) for being the guy that headbutted the goal post after throwing a touchdown pass. He was on the DL for the rest of the season. In the words of David Letterman, "a real bonehead."

Now for the grand finale.

Three awesome Peterson cards.



I almost bought a blaster of 2007 Topps football at Walmart on Friday. Mainly to see if I could get this exact card. Also, so that I could just have something to rip open. I chose a cereal box of 2009 Topps football instead. Still waiting to open that one. Nice card too, I don't even mind the Gatorade jug in the background. Actually the jug makes it better to me.



2007 Upper Deck NFL Players Rookie Premiere. It says on the back that despite injuries A.D. should be on the brink of stardom. I think that's been proven, even though the guys at Sports Illustrated are just now figuring that out. They have a pretty goodd story on Peterson this month about his production against the teams that drafted players ahead of him.


To finish off, a nice horizontal action shot of A.D.

Thanks again, Justin. And if anybody hasn't stopped by yet, check out his blog over at: Is this a Wastland, no It's Tampa Bay Sports. I'm putting together some sort of Orioles, Tampa Bay Rays card selection to send over to you soon.