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 Piazzas

It wouldn’t be a delivery from CheckOutMyCards without some additions to my Piazza collection. There are a ton of sets from the late 90s and early 00s that I don’t have any cards from at all.

First up is the beautiful 1995 Leaf Gold Stars card which is numbered to 10,000 copies. This was a big deal in 1995. I traded away the Kirby Puckett that I had from this set and had to pick up the Piazza so that I’d have at least one of these great looking cards in my collection. That’s followed by a 2006 4-in-1 Bowman sticker card, 1995 Fleer/Panini sticker, Classic promotional phone card and 2005 Cracker Jack sticker.

Anyone else collecting back when card companies starting putting phone cards into packs? Classic/Score Board did it more than anyone else, but I think even Topps got into the act.

Since I’m not really impressed by the big “MOJO” hits that come out of higher end products, I’m perfectly happy just buying singles after other people pay way too much to bust open boxes. Topps Tribute is a good example of that. It’s a beautiful base card, but most people don’t even care about these base cards. Next up is a Sterling parallel that’s numbered to just 50 copies. 2007 Topps Hit Parade is a shiny foilboard insert.

The next row starts off with a couple of Triple Threads parallels. The first one is numbered to 559 and the second to 1350. The 2006 Trading Places insert commemorates Piazzas move from the Mets to the Padres as a free agent.

The bottom row contains a 2006 Fleer Ultra Midsummer Classic Kings card which celebrates his being named the MVP of the 1996 All-Star Game. Rounding things out is an Upper Deck 2006 World Baseball Classic card showing Piazza playing for Italy.

So far, 5 of the 29 cards that will be part of my next shipment are Mike Piazza cards. I picked up some cool stuff including one card that I grabbed as much for nostalgia purposes than anything else.

Check Out My Dewey Cards

My favorite player when growing up, Dwight Evans will probably always be my favorite Red Sox player. Dewey was an amazing fielder with a cannon for an arm. He wasn’t a slouch with the bat either once Walt Hriniak revamped his swing in the early 80s. A few more better offensive years early in his career and he might have gotten a little more Hall of Fame consideration. Maybe if he did somersaults on the field he would have been elected.

Here are three serial numbered cards from an Upper Deck set and two Donruss sets. It’s nice to see that current day Panini is carrying on the tradition of laziness started by Donruss. You didn’t have any other pictures of Evans to use? The design on both of those cards is brutal with the giant spaces looking for relics to be inserted. The final card is perforated and has a logo on it from the final year of Memorial Stadium. None of these cards will be entering the list of my favorite Dwight Evans cards, but I got them cheaply so they’re not part of my collection.

Check Out My Colored Sox Cards

I’ve found that CheckOutMyCards is by far the best place to pick up retail exclusive cards. These cards are no good for purchasing on eBay because the shipping is usually twice the price of the card. So, every now and then I’ll try a search for the various purples and oranges that Topps tucks away inside of retail packs.

The first card here actually isn’t a retail exclusive. This is a purple parallel numbered to 1799 from 2006 Future Stars. Next is an orange refractor from 2010 Topps Curvy Chrome. Batting third is a purple refractor from 2009 Bowman Chrome. In the cleanup spot is an orange Jon Lester refractor that looks really red in this scan.

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.

There’s a Snake In My Boots

It’s always a great thing when two of my interests collide. Collecting Pixar trading cards is a no-brainer. I had already purchased a box of each of the earlier Upper Deck Disney releases, but I didn’t go as all out on any of them as I did this one.

The coolest part of these sets were the Reel Piece of History cards. These cards contained frames from copies of the film that were used in theaters. You can see the soundtrack and sprockets right there on the film strip. Most cards contained two frames from the film, but there were rarer versions that contained four frames.

I have a daily search set up for these things on eBay. Most of the time when they get listed, it’s for too much and they don’t sell. This card was listed for and sold for .99¢ plus $2.00 shipping. That’s a bargain that’s tough to beat.

I tried scanning this with the scanner open so that some light could get through the film, but it wasn’t quite bright enough. If you look closely, you can see the scene that is depicted though. These frames are from the scene where Woody first meets Buzz and Buzz responds by trying to shoot Woody with his laser. Can’t complain about a card with both Buzz and Woody pictured.

 

Technorati Tags: Upper Deck,Disney/Pixar Treasures,Toy Story,Reel Piece of History

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.

Father’s Day Haul – Part 2 – Papi’s Day

You have to buy Big Papi cards on Father’s Day if you’re a fan. So, I figured that I would pick up a few since there were some nice cards at the table for good prices. I’m starting to forget which cards forget exactly how much, but I’ll try and figure it out again as I compose these posts.

Wow, this card scanned very well. It looks like it’s glowing.

The Spectrum sets produced by Upper Deck may have been panned by the majority of collectors, but in small doses you can appreciate it. Sorting through a full box of foil board like that can be hazardous to your health and eyesight. This Ortiz swatch is from 2009 Spectrum and it’s got a nice blue tint to it. I’m pretty sure that this card and the next three were in a box priced $3 each or 4-for-$10. I’ll grab Papi relics at $2.50 all day long.

Here’s some more foil board from Upper Deck, but this time it’s the non-shiny variety. I like the fact that the picture of Ortiz pops off of this card in the scan, but it makes the rest of the card look terrible. The background isn’t quite so dark in person, but the Ortiz picture doesn’t pop as well either. This is a gray swatch which is a nice change from the usual white swatches that you see far too often.

I don’t think I’ve purchased a pack of 2009 Icons and this card doesn’t really do much to convince me to do more than pick up some singles from the set.

A David Ortiz framed relic from 2006 Allen & Ginter? Yes, please. I was pretty surprised to see this card priced so cheaply, but it’s cards like this that get overlooked by people looking for the latest sick, mojo, autographed, one-of-one, relic, printing plate, rookie card of someone in A ball. I don’t have many cards from the 2006 Ginter set at all. I think I have the Piazza and Ortiz base cards and that’s about it. I didn’t get back into collecting until 2007 when I sold a bunch of my old Transformers, went to a huge card show and caught the bug again.

This last card is the only non-Papi in this post and it’s not a card that I would normally pay $3 for, but I already had the three Ortiz cards picked out so this really only cost me a dollar. That I was fine with.

This card is from 1999 Fleer Ultra. It looks like Fleer took the Season Crowns, which had been an insert set in the past, and made them a subset within the main set. This is the Gold Medallion Edition and it’s nice looking, but one-per-pack gold parallels stopped being exciting back in the mid-90s.

These last two cards were in a box marked $2 with no discounts for quantities which was fine by me given what I pulled out of the box. This first card is just another plain white swatch card, but this is sporting a serial number of 084/150 so it’s got all kinds of mojo all over it.

2006 Artifacts is another Upper Deck set that I’ve never purchased a pack of. The line lasted for a few years, but never really appealed to me. Upper Deck seemed to release a lot of very similar sets that were overpriced, in my opinion, at release. So, I don’t have many of the cards other than a few singles I’ve picked up here and there.

I think this last card was the one that I was most excited about acquiring. The fact that it was costing me just $2 was even better. Even though the packs/boxes are way out of my price range, I’ve always enjoyed Sterling singles. A refractory, bat relic numbered to 199 copies is right up my alley. The Sterling cards have a classy design, nice big pictures of the player and a variety of relics. I’ll pick up the mostly neglected relic cards cheaply all day long.

Some amazing additions to the player collections here. I’m pretty sure that I got the prices right. I added everything up and it came out to be more than what I paid, so it looks like the dealer gave me a little bit bigger of a discount than I thought. There’s one more post of hits to come and then a huge pile of 74 cards from the nickel box. Thanks for reading!

 

Technorati Tags: David Ortiz,Mike Piazza,baseball cards,Topps,Upper Deck

Hero Up!

When I placed my last order of wax boxes from Dave and Adam’s, I also added a box of Upper Deck’s Super Hero Squad trading cards. I watch the show with my daughter and thought it would be fun to open the packs with her. The packs have been a lot of fun to open. The cards are thick with rounded corners which are perfect for kids. You can find tattoos in every pack as well as randomly inserted stickers, foil die cut cards and pop-up cards. Forget all of those cards though, this card from the sports subset beats everything else. I think that the Villains might have the advantage if they’ve got Bullseye playing QB. Anyone want to see a picture of Iron Man posterizing Dr. Doom?

 

Technorati Tags: Super Hero Squad

Father’s Day Haul – Part I

Two great things occurred on Father’s Day. First off, there’s a yearly card show on the day and dads get in for free. Second, my wife gave me some cash and sent me on my way to have some fun. This was great because cash for cards hasn’t been as plentiful since I had to miss time from work for my kidney stone surgery. I looked at a couple of the newer Topps baseball releases, but they didn’t really grab my attention. So, I decided to dig through the boxes there for singles which turned out to be a great decision. Twenty-eight dollars later, I had 99 new cards to add to my collection and to use in various trades.

This is the first card that started me down the road of picking up singles. I’ve had my eye on this card since series one was released, but all of the auctions on eBay ended too high for my tastes once you factored in shipping costs. A dealer had it available for $5 at the show and while I almost passed it up, in the end I decided to pull the trigger and grab the card since it had part of a nice pinstripe. I figured that the chances of me winning this card for $2 - $2.50 on eBay were pretty slim. The weird thing is, if there’s a regular version of this card, I don’t have it yet. That happens to me a lot now that the majority of my Piazza cards come from online purchases.

With the exception of that first card, the other 98 cards all came from the same dealer who had a bunch of great cards available cheaply. This Piazza is the first of the cards that I pulled from the .10¢ box. This is a 1998 SPx Power Explosion that’s numbered to 4,000 copies.

The back of this card is pretty cool. It lists HR and RBI hit at home and on the road by month. There’s also a chart that shows how many home runs were hit to each field both home and away. Piazza loved right field in Los Angeles hitting 10 of his home runs there. He also hit 8 home runs to center on the road. He only hit 4 home runs to right on the road. Piazza hit 40 home runs in 2007.

Next up from the dime box is a David Ortiz 2006 Turkey Red red bordered parallel with the ad back. Sure, he’s in a Twins jersey here and I don’t really collect cards of Ortiz with the Twins, but for the ad back parallel, I couldn’t pass it up for a dime.

While the Turkey Red insert sets were nice, I really liked the full sets for the the colored border parallels and ad back variants. I could have done without the chrome versions of the cards in a retro set, but Topps isn’t going to stop that any time soon. I would have liked for the colored parallels to have been numbered similar to what you’d see in Upper Deck’s Masterpieces sets. I’ve got some Turkey Red rainbows, but unless you do some research, there’s no telling which colors are rarer than others.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, one of the best things about other card blogs is seeing cards that I never knew existed. Whether it’s a Fleer Diamond Cut Piazza, Fenway Favorites or some of the very cool Stadium Club Basketball inserts from when I wasn’t collecting.

Here’s a great example of that. I saw these Stadium Club Triumvirate cards on another blog and made a note that I wanted to pick at least one of them up. When I saw this Barkley for a dime, I knew that I was buying this card. There are two other Rockets players and the three cards fit together like a puzzle. The backgrounds of these cards are translucent which gives them a very cool look.

What I really need to do is track down the Celtics/Red Sox/Patriots pairings. There’s a complete set from one year listed on SportLots.com from two different sellers, but it’ll cost me $12 with shipping to get all three of them and that’s a little much for me.

Next up is another cool 90s insert set that I first saw on another blog (which was either Hoopography or Hupe Royalty, but I can’t remember at the moment). The die cut at the top of these cards is what makes that so great. The fact that it’s a refractor makes it even cooler. It’s listed as a refractor on the back, so I’m guessing that there are non-shiny versions of these cards as well. For a dime, I would have picked up any version of this card, they’re just that cool. This insert set is a great example of the crazy themed insert sets that companies came up with. You can find both old and new insert cards in the dime box, but I’d rather have cards that are visually appealing such as this one.

Why pick up just one Rock Star when you can pick up two. Here’s a card of Timmy Hardaway in his later days with the Heat. Hardaway became a huge star while paired up with Chris Mullin and Mitch Richmond in the exciting trio nicknamed Run TMC.

If you saw my jumbo shoeboxes, you’d see that they are filled with all kinds of oddball inserts from the 90s just like this. Most of them would probably go into dollar boxes today, but they’re worth a whole lot more than that to me.

I love how well these Rock Stars cards scanned. You can see the texture in the background and the shininess of the card.

This card was one that I picked up just for the novelty of it. I had seen these Authentix upgradable cards before, but never owned one before. This is a Leandro Barbosa rookie that is numbered to 1250 copies. It’s an interesting card and I think that I definitely need to track down the card and upgrade tickets for my Paul Pierce collection. Such a strange concept that isn’t nearly as cool as the inserts above. The whole ticket theme hasn’t gone over well whether done by Fleer or Topps.

After the tragic death of Nick Adenhart at the hands of a drunk driver, I’m surprised that Miguel Cabrera didn’t get more crap after his DUI conviction. I don’t see how people could be stupid enough to drink and drive in the first place, but to do it after one of your peers had recently been killed that way is even stupider.

This card didn’t deserve to be in the dime box so I added it to my stack so that it could be rescued. Dump cards because players got injured, never made it to the majors or have dropped in popularity, but don’t dump cards due to a player dying. That just doesn’t seem right to me.

This is a 1996 Playoff Illusions Terry Glenn rookie card. This appears to be Playoff’s version of chrome. It’s embossed with patterns that look like a topography map. There are rainbow colors all over the place and a giant flying Elvis head Patriots logo. It’s by far one of the most gaudy cards that I’ve ever seen. There’s no way that I could pass this one up for a dime. Many times, the really bad inserts are just as fun as the really good ones. It’s like a cardboard train wreck.

Normally, I wouldn’t go anywhere near a Curtis Martin card where he was in a Jets uniform, but I had to make an exception for this card. I love the vintage Vegas look to this card. It’s a simple design, but it looks great. A refractor version of this card would look even sweeter.

I also picked up a Brett Tomko 1996 Best on-card autographed card that I’m assuming was in the dime box due to a dinged corner, a 1981 Topps Coke Carl Yastrzemski, a couple of Sandbergs for a friend and a 2008 SPx Jerod Mayo rookie numbered to 999.

15 cards down and 84 to go. I’m pretty sure that the deal gave me these 14 dime cards for one dollar so that’s $6 spent for these 15 cards.

 

Technorati Tags: Mike Piazza,David Ortiz,Curtis Martin,Upper Deck,Topps,baseball cards,basketball cards,football cards