Panini Makes Good

This post is overdue, but it’s kind of appropriate given the subject matter. I had the misfortune of dealing with Panini while their customer service and fulfillment departments were in a shambles. They claim that they are in the process of improving this, so until I have to deal with them again, I will give them the benefit of the doubt. Since I don’t buy anything from Panini, that probably won’t be any time soon.

After waiting over a year, dealing with extreme frustration and searching out someone through their personal Twitter, I got the following cards sent to me:

2010-11 Absolute Memorabilia Avery Bradley Rookie Premiere Materials 177/499. When I got this card, it was when there were rumors circulating that the Celtics might trade away Rajon Rondo. I joked that this card could possibly be a good one if that to occur. Rondo didn’t get traded, but a Ray Allen injury and eventual transition to a bench role paved the way for the emergence of Avery Bradley. The Celtics climb to the top of the Atlantic Division and anything they may do in this year’s playoff will be in large part to Bradley and what Rondo can now do in the open court with Bradley and Bass running with him.

2010-11 Gold Standard Kevin Garnett Gold Medalists Prime Patch 5/25. This is a pretty cool card and while I know that the patch in this card is most likely from a Timberwolves jersey, I’d love to think it was from one of KG’s USA jerseys. I don’t think Panini picked up a jersey from the 2000 games though. I’m still not even sure that the jersey swatches in the USA cards from the Basketball Hall of Fame set are from actual Olympic jerseys. One question that I’ve got about this card is concerning the jersey number. Garnett has worn #5 the entire time that he’s been in Boston, but his Olympic jersey number as pictured on the card is #10. So, would this card bring in a jersey number premium on eBay? It doesn’t really matter since I’m pretty sure this card will have a permanent home in my collection.

It was kind of disappointing to have an Avery Bradley autograph take the place of Cheryl Miller, a member of the Hall of Fame. The Garnett patch makes up for it a little bit, but a patch card, even if it is numbered to 25, doesn’t have the same prestige as a HOF auto. I find it hard to believe that Panini didn’t have a high numbered or unnumbered Rondo, Pierce, Allen or Garnett auto to send, but they made a good effort and worked within my request and in the end, I am happy.

Check Out More Cards

I had a couple of big sales on CheckOutMyCards out of the blue and decided to put those funds to good use. It’s interesting to see how my collecting has changed. In the 90s, I would pick up new stuff almost exclusively at card shows. I would pick stuff up at card shops as well, but not as frequently. These days, I might have a new card arrive to become part of my collection every day of the week. It’s always a pleasure to see a package arrive from COMC since a whole bunch of new cards will be added to my collection.

First up are a couple of 2011 Finest Tom Bradys. I’ve been slowly getting back into football due to Panini driving me away from basketball cards. When I saw that this year’s Finest offering pictured Brady in the Patriots throwback uniform, I had to have it. For good measure, I decided to pick up both the base card and refractor version of the card since they were both very affordable.

Whenever I get the chance, I’ve been adding Bryce Brentz autographs to my collection. If I remember correctly, this all started when I pulled one myself and from there things have snowballed. Both of these Brentz cards are from In The Game. The cards look nice even without any logos on them. The autos are on opaque stickers, but they go well with these designs. The only additional thing that I’d like to see on these cards is serial numbering. These days, a little detail like that on a card can make all of the difference. Brentz is currently the 8th ranked prospect in a loaded Boston minor league system.

Here’s a little bit of old and new. I picked up an off-center Dennis Johnson rookie and a black bordered parallel from Panini’s Basketball Hall of Fame set. Like most Panini products, this set is best acquired card-by-card. Every single card in this set with the exception of maybe 1% of the cards produced can be acquired for less than you’d pay buying them by the pack. There seem to be a lot of singles on COMC for around a dollar a card which is perfect for me.

Sticking with off-center 1978-79 Topps cards, here’s a Cedric “Cornbread” Maxwell rookie card. It’s not quite as bad as it looks in the scan. I guess I inadvertently cut off the right edge of the card.

I have to chuckle a little bit at Upper Deck including Dee Brown in the Immortals section of the 2009-10 hoops set. I think these are short printed. Eventually, I’ll need to pick up a second copy of this card since I need one for my set and one for my Dee Brown collection. Dee had one of the best dunks ever in the Slam Dunk Contest, but in no way is he an immortal.

BRAINS! Like a zombie, I’m always on the lookout for Brains. Bobby “The Brain” Heenan was the best thing about wrestling in the 80s and 90s. I probably mention this every time that I post cards of The Brain, but his humor was really the only way to make it through some of the terrible matches from the 80s when half of the WWE roster consisted of jobbers.

These Brains all come from 2010 Topps WWE Platinum. The first two are part of the Platinum Performance insert set with the second being a green parallel numbered to 499 copies. The final card is a green parallel of the base card and it is also numbered to 499 copies.

As a kid in the 80s, my two main player collections were Dwight Evans, who played for the hometown Red Sox and Kent Hrbek who played for the Twins. It was pretty random when it came to deciding to collect Hrbek. I noticed that he popped up in a few of the 44 card retail sets that I had purchased and that I had a good number of his cards already.

Though the selection may have been random, I knew what I was doing when I picked Hrbek to be one of my player collections. Like Evans, Hrbek was insanely popular with the hometown crowd, but his abilities weren’t as widely known to the majority of baseball fans.

I couldn’t remember if I already had the 1982 Topps Traded Hrbek XRC, but for the price it was listed at, I wouldn’t mind picking up another one. This would almost definitely be in better condition than anything I would have had from my collection in the 80s. I knew I already had both the 1982 Topps Future Stars card and Hrbek’s 1982 Donruss rookie, but there purchases were made solely for condition upgrades.

The Starting Lineup Talking Baseball card might be the only new addition to my collection. I remember this game being heavily advertised when it came out, but I never owned it. The game came with the AL and NL All-Star teams, but the rest of the MLB teams could be purchased on additional cartridges. The cartridges came with cards of the players included on the team rosters. These painted cards stand up well next to current releases such as Masterpieces or Chicle.

Not too long ago, I finally picked up a Kevin McHale rookie for my collection, but this isn’t that card. This is a reprint from 1996-97 Topps Basketball. Topps has been doing this rookie reprint thing for a while now and have produced so many iconic basketball cards. It’s a shame that they can no longer produce basketball cards.

Here’s another card from current basketball card serial killer Panini. Panini relies far too much on serial numbering to create value in their products. They are lazy in design and uninspired in execution. I won’t even get into their tremendously horrible customer service because I’m sure that all of you are sick of hearing about it.

This Robert Parish rookie is the real thing, but right below it is the chrome version of his rookie reprint which like the McHale is from 1996-97. The Heritage insert from Studio is one of the nicer looking Panini inserts that I’ve seen. Of course, the player is way over to the side to make room for a jersey swatch that is shoved into some of the cards. The main thing that these cards have going for them is that the autographed versions of these are on-card autographs. Wrapping things up is another Panini Basketball Hall of Fame black bordered parallel. Who knows, I may complete the Panini HOF set by the time that their exclusive license runs out and Topps can (hopefully) make basketball cards again.

You know that any package that comes in the mail from COMC is going to include some Mike Piazza cards. This is one of the better batches that I’ve gotten though.

First up is the 1997 Donruss Preferred X-Ponential Power insert numbered to 3000 copies. I’ve had the Tony Gwynn from this set for a while now and think it’s the coolest card that I’ve ever seen. The background is printed on clear acetate, it’s die cut and there’s a good amount of holofoil accents. Once I obtained this card, I was willing and able to trade away the Gwynn which promptly went into a trade pile that will some day be headed off to Fuji.

Next up was a card that I picked up mainly for nostalgia reasons. Back in the 90s, I was completely hooked on watching Don West pitch sports cards on the Shop At Home network. These Elite Dominators were available exclusively through the network when you purchased a box of 1993 Donruss for $99. That’s a huge markup on those boxes for one extra card numbered to 5000 copies. You did have a chance at autographs of Juan Gonzalez, Nolan Ryan, Don Mattingly or Paul Molitor, but there were only 10,000 autographs out of a total print run of 100,000 Elite Dominators. Not terrible odds, but at $99 a box it wasn’t a great gamble either.

I picked up a couple of cards from great 90s Upper Deck insert sets. The Generation Next Era has a motion hologram on it that moves as you tilt the card. The Mickey Mantle Long Shots is printed on that classic Upper Deck holofoil, not the garbage that Panini uses these days. Both of these sets were retail exclusives, but redemption cards for the complete sets could be found in hobby packs.

To round things out is a 2010 Sterling. It’s a great looking card, but Sterling is ridiculously expensive for what you get. I’m perfectly happy just picking up the singles.

One of the few sets that I liked from Panini last year was Totally Certified. It wasn’t quite the original Certified and it wasn’t quite Dufex, but it was a nice combination of the two. I liked it until I busted open a box which reminded me how bad of a value any Panini product is. I ended up picking up the base card, red parallel, red jersey card and Fabric of the Game card pretty cheaply. To top things off, I also picked up the Crown Royale card which is a great looking base card.

The Totally Certified base card is numbered to 1849, the red parallel is numbered to 499, the red jersey card is numbered to 249 and the Fabric of the Game is numbered to 299. Does anything numbered this high really matter? You can usually pick up a card numbered to 499 for the same price as one numbered to 1849 (and I did). These days, unless the numbered is double digits or lower, it doesn’t seem to have a huge effect on the card.

These jersey cards were were purchased for $3.50 and $4.00 which is about the same as a minimum bid plus shipping on eBay. Does this make you happy if you open a box that sells for over $100 and pull a jersey card of one of the top players in the league? This is $60 box content.

I had already finished this set a while back, but I hadn’t noticed that one of the U cards had a crease from the bottom edge to the “relic.” So, when this one popped up cheaply, I had to grab it. These cards are a perfect example of serial numbering not meaning everything. These cards are numbered to 55 copies and don’t carry a lot of value while this year’s Topps manufactured relics are numbered to over 700 copies and sell very well.

There you go, a pretty big batch of cards. Normally, I would have broken this up into smaller posts, but I hadn’t posted in a while and have a ton of other things to write about so you get a marathon post. Thanks for reading and don’t forget about the Red Sox Frankenset. Where else can you possibly win prizes from trading away Red Sox commons?

My Epic New York Adventure – Part 1

I’ve been talking about it enough, but the weekend finally arrived and I made the trip out to New York and the White Plains card show. I hopped on a bus at 1 am to make the trip into New York City. Sleeping most of the way is the best way to make this trip. It took a little longer than scheduled due to snow along the way, but that actually worked in my favor. Upon arrival, I set up camp inside of the McDonald’s on 42nd Street for breakfast and to wait for my friend to get to the city.

It ended up being a good thing that I got to the city nice and early because the roads were a mess. Driving was slow and most of the roads were reduced to just one lane. We still got there in plenty of time though and got to browse through a fairly empty show for a couple of hours until the weather improved. I started off by finding tables that I’d want to return to after checking everything out. I didn’t notice any singles that caught my interest. I’ll start off this recap with some of the individual cards that I picked up.

I won’t post pictures of all of the cards that I picked up for a quarter, but here’s a sampling. The Chief Team MVP is printed on holofoil that can only be seen along the top and on the top right, a Chaunsey Billups stand-up card in the shape of the NBA Championship trophy is a nice addition to the Celtics collection, Piazza Pacific Vanguard High Voltage from 2000, Juan Gonzalez 1996 Fleer Ultra Power Plus followed by the 1997 version and finally a regular sized card made up for 4 Cracker Jack minis including Kent Hrbek.

When I saw these, I couldn’t pass them up. Most were in great shape and for a quarter, I couldn’t pass them up. This is such an iconic set and while I may never have a Bird rookie of my own, it’s nice to have most of the other Celtics. I like how you get a picture of Parish in a Warriors jersey for their scoring leader card and in a Celtics jersey on his regular card.

The same dealer with the quarter cards also had some dollar boxes, so I sorted through those for a little while. Here are a few of the Piazza’s that I pulled out of the box. 99 UD Encore Homer Odyssey, 94 Leaf Gamers, 00 UD Ionix Pyrotechnics (on nice holofoil), 00 UD Ionix Awesome Powers (Yeah baby!), 98 SP Authentic Sheer Dominance gold and 95 UC3 In Motion. I may have already had the In Motion card, but for a buck I’ll grab another one.

This last batch came form a table that had a bunch of dollar boxes. They were well picked through by the time that I got there, but this table was packed every time that I passed by. 07-08 Echelon KG, 07-08 Triple Threads Big Baby RC /99, Delonte West 05-06 Ultimate Collection /50, Chris Slade second year refractor (this is from when refractors were about one per box), 08-09 Topps Sam Jones vintage orange refractor /199 and Jim Edmonds Sportscaster /50.

There was more, but this is the cream of the crop.

Check Out My Satch Sanders

While my pursuit of Celtics players with retired numbers is mainly to collect their autographs, I’ve also been picking up some other Celtics cards here and there to add to the collection. Here are a couple of Tom “Satch” Sanders cards that I picked up from CheckOutMyCards.

The first is a 1970-71 Topps Sanders card. I love the older Topps basketball cards. These taller cards make sense when you’re picturing seven foot tall athletes. The weird thing about these cards is that the team name is airbrushed out and there’s no mention of the Celtics anywhere on the card. It looks like they are licensed by the Players Association, but not the NBA itself. Still very cool cards. The card is a little rough with rounded corners, but the price was right.

The second card is from the Upper Deck Dynasty set that I’m collecting. I had this card already, but I pulled it from the set to get it autographed. Now I have one to put back into the set.

Check Out My Cowens

I always make a note in my head of the first card that I buy on CheckOutMyCards after requesting a batch of cards to be sent to me. The purchase is usually made a day or so after requesting delivery. I had been waiting a while for this card between purchasing it and having it in my possession.

This card adds another to my total for my Celtics Retired Number collection. I think I’ve got around 10 autos now. I think this chase is going to be more of a focus for me this year since there are still a decent number of inexpensive autos that I can add before I start chasing some of the tougher ones such as Bird, Cousy and Auerbach.

Additions To My Celtics Retired Number Collection

Here are a couple of recent additions to my Celtics Retired Number Collection:

I picked up the Bailey Howell at my local card shop towards the end of last year. The best thing about Panini’s Basketball Hall of Fame set was that it provided a lot of affordable autographs of Hall of Famers, many of which didn’t have any autograph available prior to this.

The Tommy Heinsohn I picked up on eBay for a great price due to the fact that it was a Hong Kong auction and that tends to scare many buyers away. The card is serial numbered to 50 and has a great looking on-card autograph. I’m not old enough to have seen Heinsohn play, but he’s all I know as far as Celtics television broadcasts go. He can be hilarious, many times unintentionally so. I was very happy to add this card to my collection.

Anyone out there have any nice Larry Bird or Bob Cousy on-card autographs that they’d be willing to trade? I would make it more than worth your while. Drop me a line.

The Box Before The Case

Every now and then I whack my head on something really hard and buying a box of a Panini product seems like a good idea. The main problem with Panini is that they put out uninspired products and think that an overabundance of serial numbered cards and jersey cards are what people are looking for. Well, not this collector. I don’t think that I’ve been happy with a box of Panini basketball yet. Maybe Classics because that was autograph based and not jersey based.

So, what made me take the plunge on Totally Certified? Well, I was suckered in by cards slightly resembling Dufex. I should have stayed far away and just picked up some singles.

What did I get? Well, there are 16 base cards in the box. They’re silver and numbered to 1849. There were four red parallels in the box. These are numbered to 499. Don’t get me wrong, I like the way that these cards look a lot, but for what this box costs when you’re only getting 23 regular cards, someone like myself is probably better off just buying some singles.

Next up are the blue parallels that are numbered to 299. I really like the look of those a lot and it’s a shame that you only get two per box.

Hit the right player and the right number and you could do well on these cards. Otherwise, they’re not going to be worth all that much.

I only pulled one gold card out of my box. They’re the only parallels that are really limited at 23 copies. I don’t know what kind of attention a gold Turkoglu would draw, but I’ll throw it up on eBay and see what happens. There don’t seem to be as many people chasing Panini parallels are there are chasing Topps parallels.

The first thing that grabs your attention about the rookie autograph cards is the huge piece of jersey included in the card. The only problem is that these are event worn so there’s no shortage of material for Panini to use in these cards. Event worn is nothing special these days.

What is cool about these cards is that they are hard signed and that is something going for this product. This is the base version of the rookie autographs of which there are two per box. This cards is numbered out of 599.

As far as I could see, all of the jersey cards are colored which is nice. Low print runs are one of the few things that can add any value to plain jersey swatches. This Marc Gasol is the Totally Red version and it is numbered to 249 copies which is still pretty high. As long as Panini thinks that 4 plain jersey swatches in a $80 - $100 box is a good value, there’s no way that I can take them seriously as a card manufacturer.

Here’s another red jersey card. Did I pull a big pile of shit out of this box or what?

Seriously, is there any demand at all out there for plain jersey cards of Marc Gasol or Mehmet Okur? These cards won’t even get the .99¢ minimum bid on eBay.

This is the one card out of the box that I was happy with, but it would have been a lot less expensive for me to just buy the card outright. The blue versions of the jersey cards are numbered to 99 copies. It’s lower, but still not all that significant. I’m hoping that at this point the swatches contained in Garnett’s cards are from Celtics jerseys, but you have no way of knowing. In fact, there’s no guarantee that this is even a jersey swatch. The card states that it is “game-worn material.” It could be a sock, undershirt or jock strap by that definition. Gee, thanks Panini.

I pulled a second Totally Blue jersey card of Lamar Odom. This is numbered 1/99 so it might get some attention on eBay where it would normally just sit there. I dislike pulling Lakers even more than I dislike pulling Yankees. This card didn’t make me happy at all, but hopefully some Lakers fans out there will throw some money at this card.

The final card in the box is the Totally Certified Red version of the Evan Turner autographed rookie card. I’d just like to say, that’s a crap autograph Mr. Turner. This is a sharp looking card due to the color coordination though. All of the red goes well together. The red versions of these cards are numbered to 99.

Please, the next time that I start thinking about buying anything produced by Panini please smack me in the head until the thought leaves my mind.

 

Technorati Tags: Panini Totally Certified,box break,basketball cards,Kevin Garnett

Defacing US Currency

One of the many things that I collect are pressed pennies. They’re great mementos of places that you’ve visited and are very inexpensive as far as souvenirs go (unless you are in Disney World where they are at least 100 pennies - .51¢ x 100 = $51). I had a four-day weekend to celebrate my birthday and decided to spend one of the days traveling around Boston with my daughter collecting some new pressed pennies.

16 new pressed pennies for the collection from three different locations. We started off at a new machine at the TD Garden. According to the Penny Collector website, the machine was first spotted in July, but I had no clue that it existed until now. I cranked out a Celtics penny, two Bruins pennies and a Boston: City of Champions penny there.

The next stop was Faneuil Hall where they’ve got two machines. The first one pressed JFK, New England Patriots (not the football team), Boston and Faneuil Hall. The second had a very cool penny commemorating David Ortiz becoming the all-time Red Sox HR leader along with a Red Sox penny, John Adams and another Faneuil Hall penny.

Our final stop was South Station to use a machine we discovered while eating Cheeseboy there before the Weezer concert. That machine was in rough shape. The crank was tough to turn and the pennies didn’t press all that well. You can still see the Lincoln Memorial on the Boston Skyline penny. The other pennies were Paul Revere, Boston Tea Party and a Go BoSox penny with Wally sliding headfirst into a base.

Tuesday, I’ll be adding some pennies from Fenway Park to the collection since I’ve got tickets to the game. There is a Patriots penny at the Patriot Place Bass Pro Shop that I’d like to add to the collection at some point.

Anyone else out there collect pressed pennies? What are some of your most recent additions or all-time favorite pieces?

 

Technorati Tags: pressed pennies,David Ortiz,Boston Celtics,Red Sox

Dino!

I saw this card pop up on another blog and thought that I had already posted it, but that turned out not to be the case. I was a big fan of Dino Radja when he played for the Celtics in 90s. The only problem is that he was drafted in 1989 and didn’t join the Celtics until 1993. Radja was named to the All-Rookie second team and had a decent career with the Celtics. After three and a half seasons, the Celtics attempted to trade Radja to the 76ers for Clarence Weatherspoon, but Radja failed his physical and decided to return to Europe.

This makes Radja just another on a list of Celtics “what if”s. What if Radja had come to the NBA right after getting drafted? Would the better conditioning programs here have led to a longer career? Would learning the NBA game earlier in his career have made him a better player? Would he not have been as good without those years in Europe before coming to the NBA? There’s no way of knowing for sure, but the questions will always be there.

I collected Radja’s cards while he was with the Celtics, but once he disappeared from the NBA, my interest disappeared as well. In recent years, I’ve picked up some Radja cards here and there as they pop up. I’ve picked up refractors and some rarer insert cards, but there’s a severe lack of what would be classified as “hits” these days. Radja still doesn’t have a jersey card, but Upper Deck did produce this autographed card in the 2007-08 Chronology set which just might be the best modern basketball card set. I watched this card for a while, waiting for my moment to pounce. A card was posted from the Philippines which tends to drive bidders away. I ended up winning the card for $2.25 plus $4.00 for shipping. The only problem was that the estimated delivery date was past the one month window that you’ve got to dispute an auction. I took a chance though because the price couldn’t be beat. By the time the card arrived, I had forgotten all about it. It turned out that it was worth the chance and the wait. Due to his short career, many basketball fans may not even know who he is, but this card quickly became one of my favorites.

 

Technorati Tags: Dino Radja,Boston Celtics,basketball cards,Upper Deck Chronology

Father’s Day Haul – Part 4 – Everything Else

The majority of the cards that I took home from the Father’s Day Card show came out of the nickel box and most of them were Piazza cards. I probably have most of them already, but for .05¢ a piece, I wasn’t racking my brain as to whether or not I had the card already. Since there are so many other Piazza collectors out there, I’ll have no problem trading any duplicates away. First off, some cards that don’t have Mike Piazza on them. Not pictured is a Greg Maddux 2000 Tek card. I’ll grab any Tek cards for a nickel all day long.

There wasn’t much in the box in terms of basketball, but I did grab some cool cards. There’s a Paul Pierce Showcase that I could possibly need, a Shaq clear acetate card, a cool Barkley die cut card from Upper Deck, a Bird/Magic Stadium insert, 1978-79 Topps Jo Jo White, 80-81 Dr. J All-Star and three cards that I have no clue about. Their foreign and look/feel like playing cards. The back has the NBA logo on it.

Here’s some miscellaneous Piazzas that didn’t fall into any of the other categories that I set up. There’s some Donruss and Leaf, one Playoff and some minis. Nothing too thrilling in this batch.

Fleer! It always seemed like there were so many Fleer sets because they didn’t really do much as far as high end sets went. Their sets mainly different in what you could pull out of them. There was the set with the patches and the set with the box scores and the set with both the pros and the prospects.

Of all of the Fleer sets, I think that I miss Ultra the most. The two inserts here are tame compared to a lot of them, but they did some extremely cool inserts back in the 90s. I was always a fan of the Platinum sets that had a retro look to them. I think I ended up needing 6 of these 9 cards which isn’t bad at all especially since I knew that I already had the Ultra base cards, but again, they were only a nickel.

Here’s some Upper Deck goodness from back when they could put logos on their cards.There was a time when that Platinum Power insert would have cost me more than what I paid for all 74 of these cards. I already have it, but it’ll be great trade bait. Same goes for the Ovation cards. Love the design on those. I needed everything else which adds some very cool cards to my collection.

Topps has been doing retro and following a very similar strategy with their releases for a long time now, so I don’t understand why everyone wants to call them lazy now that they have the exclusive MLB license. Were the Million Card and Diamond Giveaways not some of the best promotions ever done by any company in any sport? Yes, their quality control could be better, but I don’t know if I would call them lazy. They’re nowhere near as lazy as Panini who does the exact same thing in every set.

Ignore the Fleer Tradition card that snuck in masquerading as a Topps Heritage card and the SportFlix card that, well I have no clue why I put that in there. The Topps All-Stars card is a lot shinier than it appears here. I think I had most of these already, but I can’t pass up things like a 2006 Ginter card or a SportFlix insert. Even if I had paid .45¢ for the Topps All-Stars card, it would have been worth it. Everything else is just a bonus.

Last up, as far as the cards that I’m going to show, are the shiny cards. I forget the year already, but the card in the middle of the bottom row was a variation from the card that I already had. My card had a flat back, but this card had an etched back like you’d see on the front of a Chrome or Finest card. Strange. I had all of these already except for one, but you don’t pass up on shiny cards of a future Hall of Fame catcher when they’re just a nickel each.

So, there you go. This is what I chase when I’ve got the time to dig through boxes at a card show. It’s was a fun Father’s Day for sure.

 

Technorati Tags: Mike Piazza,Fleer,Topps,Upper Deck,Donruss,baseball cards

Father’s Day Haul – Part 3 – Wanna Trade?

While digging through the boxes looking for cards for myself, I came across that looking like they would be decent trade bait. As always, if you see something on the blog that you’re interested in, make an offer.

As far as I’m concerned, I can never have too many cards of Larry Legend. Michael Jordan did some amazing things, but when it came to shooting the ball, no one was better than Bird. He walked into the first three point contest, told everyone he was going to win and then backed up his words.

I grew up watching the Bird led Celtics and still prefer that style of play to the current NBA game. With the current NBA lockout, I’ll just pop in my Larry Bird and Celtics DVDs and watch classic games.

When I saw this card sitting in the box, I had to grab it. Finley signed with the Celtics during last season, so it had that appeal to it. It might also be a card that other collectors might be interested in for trading purposes, so it’s a no-risk acquisition.

This is also a cool looking card. The blue borders and jersey swatch match and I love it. You don’t see that often on cards. I don’t know if the rest of this set looks this great, but if it does then I have to give kudos to Upper Deck.

Here’s another Finley card. This one isn’t nearly as good looking as the last card, but since it was in there with the previous two cards, I threw it into the stack.

Feel the Game has been a Fleer insert set for years. Yep, that’s about all I have to say about this card.

This card came home with me for a couple of reasons. The first being that it’s a card of Al Jefferson. I was a huge fan of Big Al when he played for the Celtics and it was sad to see him go even though the deal did bring Kevin Garnett and an NBA Championship to Boston. I still follow Big Al and even bought tickets last season to see the Celtics take on the Jazz so that I could watch Jefferson play in Boston. Once the NBA starts operating again, most likely after a complete lost season, I’d love to see the Celtics work out a deal that brings Big Al back to Boston.

I don’t collect Jefferson’s cards as aggressively as I did when he was here in Boston. If I get a card of his that isn’t going into a set, I’ll toss it into a toploader and put it into my collection. I went all out when Jefferson was a rookie. I’ve got a ton of rookie cards, relics and autographs. That was pre-baby, pre-wife and pre-many other financial responsibilities. I didn’t buy much unopened wax then either. I couldn’t stand the basketball sets with one or two rookies per box. So, I just bought the rookies that I wanted and saved a ton of cash.

The Studio set had a lot of potential and some cool looking insert sets, but it was ruined, as many Panini cards are, by the fact that they design the cards for relics and autographs ruining the base cards. Since this card has a jersey swatch, it looks good. Without the swatch there, it looks terrible.

Speaking of former Celtics, here’s a card of two-time former Celtic, Antoine Walker. ‘Toine never had the best attitude and ruined his career when he fell in love with the three point shot, but he had some flashes of brilliance while in Boston. Check out Pierce and Walker in the 2002 fourth quarter 21-point comeback playoff record performance against the Nets (it’s on YouTube). It was a season where Pierce led the league in fourth quarter points and had double digits in points in the final quarter alone 26 times. Walker did everything down low at the end of that game and he was a dominant player down there when he wanted to be. Once he started heaving up threes and wiggling, his career was done.

(Note: If Pierce were still that kind of closer, the Celtics would be celebrating a three-peat. At the very least, they wouldn’t have lost that game 7 to the Lakers.)

This card is ridiculously thick and contains a piece of a game used ball. It’s an unlicensed Collector’s Edge set so I have no clue if the ball is from an NBA game, college game or a pick-up game in the driveway. I’ll always associate Collector’s Edge with their early football sets where every single card was serial numbered and they were made of a strange, thin, plastic-like material. For a buck, this one was definitely coming home with me.

This is another card that I picked as potential trade bait, but I also wouldn’t be too upset if none of the many Orioles collectors out there wanted it. I haven’t jumped on the hating manufactured patches bandwagon. Plain swatches are tired and boring. I know that I won’t pay a premium for them, but at least these patch cards are nice looking. I’d much rather have a nice looking card than a card that contains a relic that was hopefully touched at one point by the player in question.

So, there you go. That’s it for the “pricey” cards from the break. All that’s left is 72 cards form the nickel box. I don’t think that I’m going to post all of those individually, but I will definitely post some highlights.

The Waiting is the Hardest Part

I found it interesting that Fuji’s latest post talks about a favorite player leaving their team. Granted, his situation involves a trade, but whether by trade or free agency, it always sucks when one of your favorite players leaves your favorite team. This time there’s even more time to fret because the impending lockout could keep free agents from signing with new teams for a long time to come. Given how numerous and severe the current problems with the NBA are, I wouldn’t be surprised if we lost a whole season to the lockout.

The free agent thing I went through just two years ago. Glen Davis was a free agent after a great showing in the playoffs, tested the free agent waters, didn’t get a single offer and re-signed with the Celtics. This year, Davis started the season as a strong contended for the 6th Man Award, but as the season wore on he slowly disappeared, took fewer charges and had a much smaller impact on games when he came off of the bench. He was all but nonexistent in the playoffs and talked about not being mentally strong while Doc Rivers talked about Davis getting more selfish and not playing “his game.” It makes you think that Big Baby won’t be wearing Celtic Green the next time an NBA Season tips off unless they can get him for a huge discount. I don’t see that happening with plenty of teams out there having both salary cap room and the need for role players.

If Davis were to leave the Celtics, I’m not sure if I would continue collecting him or not. I’d have to say that his poor play late last season made him a lot less fun to watch. That was the main thing that drew me to him as a player. David would check into a game, take a charge, hit a big basket or two and bring some energy into the game. Once he started doing nothing but shoot jumpers at a below average rate, he wasn’t any fun to watch. He’s got to be that guy who cuts to the basket, rolls off of picks and fights for those tough rebounds.

If the Celtics were to let Davis walk, I would love to see Danny Ainge do whatever he could to bring Ryan Gomes back to Boston. Gomes is a player who I collected while he was here, but stopped collecting once he was traded away. Gomes is the veteran, mature version of Big Baby. He can score, but doesn’t look for his shot. He gets his points within the flow of the game. He’s got basketball smarts, always seems to be around the ball and is the type of player that you need coming off of the bench on championship teams.

Best case scenario would see Ainge bring back a different former Celtic, Al Jefferson. The Celtics don’t currently have a center, have a bunch of expiring contracts and need another star to play with Rondo once Pierce, Allen and Garnett decide to hang it up. Big Al would be the perfect choice. I wouldn’t mind shipping Garnett out to Utah in order to bring Jefferson back. I don’t think that a deal such as that one is very likely though.

Big Baby or no Big Baby in Boston what I really want is basketball in Boston. It would be a shame if a season were to be lost, but unlike the NFL where owners are trying to make sure that they get more money from a league that’s flourishing, NBA owners are trying to make changes to keep their franchises from losing money. It doesn’t look good for the NBA at the moment.

 

Technorati Tags: Glen Davis,Boston Celtics,lockout

A Loss and a Gain

One of the many insert sets that I’m slowly putting together at the moment is the Boston Celtics Dynasty set from 2008-09 Upper Deck Basketball. It hasn’t been a particularly easy set to put together just because the cards aren’t all that easy to find and many times when they are listed, the $3 shipping fee on eBay is enough to send me running for the hills. I’m only going to pick these cards up if I can do so for the right price.

I was up to 16 out of the 30 cards, but I backtracked a little while I was recovering from my kidney stone surgery. Now I only have 15 cards in the set.

Due to a last minute cancellation by Jose Canseco (due to health issues) the Memorial Day card show in Mansfield brought in Celtics Legend and 2011 Hall of Fame Inductee Tom “Satch” Sanders to the card show. Since this would be a perfect addition to my Celtics HOF/Retired Number autograph collection, I had to go.

There was just one problem. I was out of work due to the surgery, wasn’t feeling very well and wasn’t moving around very well either. I decided that this would be a good opportunity to test my body and see how I was doing. We could turn around at any point and the day wouldn’t be that taxing.

Well, that’s what I thought. Just walking from the house to the car, from the car to the hotel and then to the card show inside already had me hurting a little. I bought my ticket and got into line and that’s when things got rough.

The best thing about this show is that they bring in affordable players who are popular with fans. They give you time to interact with the athletes as long as they’re not against it and it makes it a better experience for everyone. Everyone, that is, except people standing in line with a tube sticking out of their back and a drainage bag strapped to their thigh. The waiting in line really wore me down.

Even though I was 10th or so in line, I had to wait around 20 minutes to arrive at the front due to people talking and having multiple items to be signed (at $11 an autograph, I can’t blame them). I got my autograph and spoke with Mr. Sanders for a couple of minutes. He liked the card, stating that he hadn’t ever seen it before, and wished that he had been a member of all of the teams listed on the front of the card.

I hobbled back to the rest of my family in the lobby and we made our way back to the car. Once I got home, I crashed on the couch for a couple of hours which was a regular occurrence during my recovery. When I woke up, I got to admire this brand new gem in my collection.

When it comes down to it, I’ll always enjoy an in-person autograph a heck of a lot more than any card company produced autograph. As far as this collection goes, I’ve gotten autographs of Robert Parrish, Bill Russell, Tom Sanders and future Hall of Famer Paul Pierce as well as Slam Dunk champ Dee Brown. This was probably the worst time that I’ve ever had acquiring an autograph for my collection, but it’s one of the better ones due to the unique story that goes along with it.

 

Technorati Tags: Tom Sanders

A Card So Nice, I Acquired it Twice

Those of you who watched the video of my first replacement package that I received from Upper Deck might recognize this card. Well, it’s not this exact card, but it’s pretty darn close. I ended up taking a liking to the Jeff Green card that I was sent, but it wasn’t anywhere near close to what I should have been sent for the Michael Johnson. In retrospect, I should have asked Upper Deck if I could have held onto the Green and just sent back the other card in exchange for the Pierce.

That being said, I ended up with this card cheaply on eBay ($7) and I think I like it even better than the card that Upper Deck sent me. That card had green foil which kind of got lost in all of the other green on the card. This card has gold foil which I like with these colors a lot. The only other difference is the numbering. The card that I was sent was numbered to 49 and this card is numbered to 199. Really not a huge difference. Everything else about the card is the same. I’m just glad they didn’t pull an SPx with this card and have one of the windows empty on a lower numbered version of the card. This is an event used jersey so they could wrap the whole card in material and still have plenty.

I know this is a higher numbered version of the card, but I think that the acquisition cost of this card helps back up my feelings that Upper Deck didn’t send me enough for the Michael Johnson redemption card.

 

Technorati Tags: basketball cards,Jeff Green,Upper Deck

A Bunch of Babies

I’m going to stick with the parallel theme for one more post. I’m all for picking up parallels cheaply, but I won’t break the bank for them. I definitely enjoy picking them up in batches because it makes the whole process a whole lot easier.

Here’s a trio of 2007-08 Topps Luxury Box Glen “Big Baby” Davis rookies. First up is what I think is the base card which is numbered to 699. The base card has some nice team color stuff going on in the design. I’m guessing that the other two parallels are the bronze (/249) and silver (/75) which leads me to believe that there is also a gold version out there as well.

The best part of this acquisition is the story. This package was mailed from the Philippines back in January. It got lost somewhere along the way and then had another postmark from April 29th when it got back on track and then it arrived to me in May. I had long given up on these cards so it was a total surprise when they showed up. I’m usually not a fan of buying cards from the Philippines for this very reason, but I took a shot when the three cards sold for a dollar plus three dollars shipping.

 

Technorati Tags: Basketball cards,Glen Davis,Big Baby,Topps Luxury Box

A Cool Upper Deck Mailday

So, I busted a box of 2009/10 Upper Deck Basketball Draft Edition back in December. That was the awesome case that produced a Michael Jordan autograph and a ton of base cards that nobody wants. Some of the autographs did very well on eBay and then I was surprised when some of the autographs that wouldn’t sell for a dollar on eBay went for a few bucks on CheckOutMyCards. Well, that case produced a few cards to be determined. There were seven Jordan Classic jersey cards that took four months to be redeemed and my Michael Johnson /99 non-existent card that had to be replaced twice. Wanna see what I got in the mail? I had a lot of fun opening these up. Each envelope had an advertisement for Evolution so now I’ve got enough of those to wallpaper my mancave.

I’ll start off with the Brandon Jennings card because he’s the only player that I only pulled one redemption card of. It was slightly frustrating to pull seven redemption cards and only get 4 different players, but at least I got some good players.

The downside of this set was that many of the top rookies from this set aren’t included in the base set and also don’t have autographs to be pulled. You won’t find Blake Griffin, Tyreke Evans, DeMar DeRozen or Brandon Jennings, but three of those players were included in the jersey card set. Of the 13 cards in the set, there are three different Brandon Jennings, three B.J. Mullens, three DeRozans, two Evans and two Jrue Holidays. So, chances are that you’re going to get good players since there aren’t many options. The frustrating thing for me was that I got the exact same number card for each of the players that I got duplicates of. It would have been nice to get different cards from the players that I pulled twice, but that wasn’t the case.

Here’s DeMar DeRozen with a teal swatch. When I searched eBay, every card from this set that I saw listed had one of these teal swatches and so I assumed that they all looked like this, but there are more ot these jerseys than just teal. I would find that out fairly quickly.

Bank error in your favor. Collect $100. In my case, collect a different DeMar DeRozen card that I wasn’t supposed to get. As you can see, there’s a different picture on this card and a very cool jersey swatch with a couple of different colors. I guess this is the closest you can get to a patch on something like this.

Here’s a plain teal card of B.J. Mullens. It kind of seems strange that there appear to be so many teal jersey swatches out there because when you look at the jerseys that are in the pictures, there sure seems to be a lot more dark blue or black then teal in the jerseys.

Oh, hello darker jersey swatch. Yes, it’s the same picture as the other card, but it has a completely different colored swatch within the card. It might make for an interesting lot on eBay if I list both cards together or I can just publicize one auction in the other’s listing.

Here’s a different looking card of Tyreke Evans. He’s the only player from this year that ended up playing for the red and white team. There’s no guarantee that there players all participated in the Jordan Brand Classic in the same year since different amounts of time spent in college would put them in different JBC games.

Here’s another card with the same picture, but a different jersey swatch. This one is mostly red with a little bit of white in the bottom left corner.

It’s pretty cool that even though I pulled a lot of duplicate jersey cards, I didn’t end up with any similar looking cards. Whoever picked out my redemption cards at Upper Deck did a good job of making sure that I got a variety in my redemptions. I’m pretty happy with what I ended up getting.

Here’s the first card out of the two that Upper Deck sent me the second time around as a replacement for the Michael Johnson autograph. I figured that if the Bulls end up winning the NBA Championship this year then this card could do pretty well on eBay. I’m not really a big fan of Noah and he seems like a bit of a crybaby complaining about Garnett, but he is a monster on the boards.

Then I turned the card over and saw the following. The bottom left of this card is completely folded up on the back. There’s also a notch in the middle of the bottom edge, but only on the back. The damage to this card is strange. The corner damage isn’t like what you’d get from dropping the card since only one layer of the card is wrecked. You can’t even notice the damage when looking at the front of the card. So, I’ve contacted Upper Deck about sending this card back for replacement.

When Upper Deck offered me this card over the phone, I wondered why they didn’t just send this originally since Pierce was on my list of players that I sent them. I guess there was some disagreement originally on what the value of the Michael Johnson card would be. I explained to them that you couldn’t base the value on a Beckett price because that would be based on the fact that the card was never produced. You have to base it on what the card would be worth if it had been produced. I suggested a value of $100 and they ended up agreeing with me. I guess this Pierce card books for $60 which isn’t too shabby.

Book value aside, this is a great card because it is hard signed and well designed. What do I love on cards? Team colors. These cards have team colors. There’s a big picture of the player and plenty of space for the player to sign the card. This is the gold version of the Pierce card and it is numbered to just 34 copies. The Noah card is the silver version and is numbered to 50.

That’s one more beautiful looking Paul Pierce autograph card in my collection. This is the first one that I’ve picked up in a long time. Most of them were acquired before I was a dad and had given up on busting boxes and spent my trading card money solely on singles.

The Draft case is now finished for the most part. I’m very happy with these final additions. I get a great card to add to my collection and some cards that might sell for a few bucks on eBay or COMC. Right now, I’m leaning towards COMC since there aren’t any of these cards on there.

Thanks Upper Deck. Bok Bok.