Box Break: 2011-12 Panini Past & Present Basketball

I love basketball. I started watching sports in the 80s when Bird, Parish and McHale were bringing 3 NBA Championships to Boston. I’ve remained a huge Celtics fans through the terrible teams when the Celtics tanked and had the worst record in the league and got to see three classy veterans unite to bring one more title to Boston. Lately, my NBA fandom has died down a little bit. I went from spending the most money on basketball cards when Topps and Upper Deck were in the game to buying just one box a year once Panini took over. Combine that with the horrible state of officiating in the NBA which takes fun out of watching the games and you’ve got an NBA fan on the decline. What’s worse is that you had the Heat come together in response to Pierce, Garnett and Allen teaming up and this year another superteam or two will be created to take on the Heat. Boring.

The frustrating thing about this hobby is that you can’t just give it up cold turkey. Your purchases might come less frequently, but you still make little purchases here and there even when times are tough. Panini had been talking of change on Twitter and in their blog and so I kept an eye on them. Not having any rookies at all in this year’s hoops releases made me lose interest, but that problem was semi-resolved with redemption cards. The cards that you get won’t be considered rookie cards, but the official rookie designation doesn’t really seem to matter to most collectors. They gravitate towards something early in the player’s career with a low print run and autograph to be a player’s most sought-after card. These cards could end up becoming the best cards for these players, but I have a feeling that the print runs won’t be all that low. I’m getting ahead of myself though.

I was intrigued by Panini’s Past & Present Basketball release. I had my eye on a box, but was waiting until the price fixing period ended so that I could get a box at a reasonable price. Unfortunately, the Father’s Day promotion fell right before the end of that time frame. I made the trek out to a card shop that was participating in the promotion to find out that they were closed…for Father’s Day. I completely understand that, but if you are participating in a Father’s Day promotion then you might want to be around for people to take advantage of that promotion. Luckily, Panini offered boxes on their site that you could purchase to get the special Father’s Day packs and I decided to go that route.

Quick tangent: I would highly advise against ordering from Panini’s online webstore unless you have no other option. First off, I paid for Priority Shipping, but my package was shipped FedEx Ground. It’s not just a speed thing, my local USPS delivery person is much better than their FedEx counterpart. I sent emails about the error with no reply, but luckily the Panini CSR Twitter account was able to assist. When I got the box, it was just the box of cards (in a thin plastic bag), my receipt and the 4 packs of Father’s Day cards. There were no air pouches or packing peanuts to be seen. $100 worth of trading cards and someone at Panini treated it like crap, threw it in a box and sent it off without a care. Now that they’ve improved their customer service, they really need to improve their shipping. I know things were probably busier than usual due to the promotion, but I would have rather had my package ship a day later with proper shipping materials than get this. There’s really no excuse for this. /tangent

On to the good stuff, the cards. I’ve always been a fan of retro and vintage looking sets. While Panini doesn’t have much of a history to draw from when it comes to basketball, they did attempt with this year’s Hoops set. I don’t know if it was just me, but it didn’t feel like a Hoops set at all. This set has base cards with a retro vibe and inserts straight out of 90s Fleer Ultra and Skybox.

The set composition is rather strange. The first 75 cards in the set have the design you see in the top row and are current players. Cards 101-175 have the design that you see in the second row and are also current player. The biggest starts show up in each design as you can see with the Jesus Shuttlesworth, Truth and Rondo cards. The Bird and Russell cards are from the run of veteran cards from 76-100. Cooz can be found in the second run of veteran cards spanning cards 176-200. I’m not a big fan of some players appearing twice unless there’s a good reason. This is Past & Present, give us cards of Ray Allen as a Sonic, KG as a Timberwolf, LeBron as a Cav, etc. That would have made more sense to me than cards that just seem there to inflate the size of the set and get people to buy more packs. I got 67.5% of the set in my box which is a little low. You’ve got to get at least 75% of the set out of a box for me to be happy. This set was a little large for the number of cards that you get per pack. I wonder if 10 cards per pack was feasible?

Set composition aside, I love the look of the cards. This is easily Panini’s strongest effort in a basketball release. These cards are beautiful, are printed on a nice, sturdy card stock and have an interesting gloss on them. It’s somewhere between a matte and a high gloss. There’s definitely a slick surface there, but it’s not like something you’d find on Stadium Club or Ultra cards. There are sticker auto variations of the base set, but at least they don’t seem to be the main autographs that you get out of boxes. Panini claims that they are moving away from this and I know it is something that collectors will welcome with open arms.

Speaking of retro, these cards are based on the 1950 Fischer's Bread for Health labels that came on loaves of bread. You can find a picture of a George Mikan label that sold for just over one thousand dollars here. Panini decided to change the dimensions on these to that of regular cards these days instead of keeping them square. I would have loved square, die-cut cards like the originals, but it wasn’t meant to be. Bread for Health and Bread for Energy are the common versions of these and the Bread for Life inserts come one per box. (Speaking of retro, remember when one per box meant something?)

Changing Times showcases stars in front of the type of basketball that they played with. Players such as Mikan and The Big O have a smooth basketball on their card while modern day players have the textured ball of today’s game. What makes this set phenomenal is that they don’t just stop there. The Julius Erving card? That card has the old ABA red, white and blue basketball on it as do the cards of George McGinnis and Dan Issel. I’ve gotten on Panini’s case for taking the cheap way out before, but they did anything but that with this insert set. The cards have different textures and designs and I love it.

The Breakout insert set is a little cheesy, but they do look good. The brick wall is textured and the result is a really nice looking card. These cards also have autograph parallels, but they also aren’t the main autographs that you would pull out of every box.

The Fireworks insert set is another great looking set and I’m bummed that I only got one card out of my box when the average is two. At least the card that I did pull was that of KG which will be going right into my collection. The player and the fire have a hologram-like design that moves as you tilt the card. These are really sharp looking cards.

The final insert set is Raining 3s. The graphic design department did a very nice job on these cards. The players have a liquid look to them and the cards are only glossy on the player which helps the colors on these cards to pop. These cards fall 2 per box on average, but I got an extra one in place of the Fireworks card that the averages say I should have gotten. All of the inserts from this set are cards that you want to hold on to rather than junky afterthoughts like many Panini inserts of the past.

The final card is a Tim Duncan SP variant. These fall one per box and are variations of 50 cards from the base set. Variants are so much better than short prints that are part of the set. I wish that this became the norm when companies try to add value to boxes because short prints in the main set take a lot of the fun out of collecting.

Hit Time!

From what I’ve seen, the majority of the autographs that come out of these boxes are from the Elusive Ink set. It’s a given in this day and age that you’ve got to have minor stars sign things if you want a chance at pulling autographs of big stars, especially in lower end products. ($100 is low end? Kill me now.) It’s always nice when the autographs have a theme and get autographs out there of players who don’t have a lot of autographed cards already. Sure, they may not have a ton of value, but they can be invaluable additions to player and team collections. I still can’t believe that Panini didn’t include Dee Brown in their Slam Dunk Contest insert set, but they did include him in the Elusive Ink set. I’ve only been able to track down one other autographed card from a Fleer set and that’s about it. I don’t think he has any jersey cards. (Are you listening Panini?)

Speaking of jersey cards, the only ones you’ll find are these Gamers. You won’t find floating swatches in the middle of the base cards. I love it. Jersey cards are a little played out, but these cards give you nice big swatches and a nice design. It’s different from the norm and again I have to compliment Panini on that. They also didn’t put a lame die-cut window in front of the swatch to try and make it 3 swatches. Thank you.

Last, but certainly not least since it was the best card in the box, is the 2011 NBA Rookie Redemption Autograph card. There are 39 different redemption cards that right now don’t mean anything. This October, Panini will have a random draft to assign each redemption card to one of the 39 rookies from 2011. Yes, you could end up with Kyrie Irving, but you could also end up with a third autograph that you could pick up for .99¢ on eBay. Lots of people are currently trying to put together complete sets of the redemption cards and the chance at Irving has these cards selling for $30-$40 on eBay. Seems like a no-brainer to me since the majority of the 39 cards that you have a chance at getting are going to sell below $30. These cards will not have low print runs.

To sum things up quickly, love the look of the cards. Boxes were overpriced at $100. They’ve come down to around $85 now that the price fixing period is over. I think they’ll eventually settle at $75 and will be a good value at that price. This is a huge change for Panini. There were some exceptions such as Classics, but the majority of their releases would have 4 relic cards and one auto and now they’re giving you three autos and one relic card. That’s a nice change. The change from the reliance on cookie cutter design is a great change as well. Panini flexed some creative muscle with this release and I hope that it continues with future sets.

Greatest Of All Time

When Panini released their Basketball Hall of Fame set, it could have been the greatest basketball set of all time, but there were a few things preventing that from happening. The first was that they had no access to Michael Jordan due to his exclusive contract with Upper Deck. The second problem was that it costs a heck of a lot more to get the autographs of the big stars than it does everyone else. That resulted in poor collation with the same common autographs showing up again and again.

One good thing that did come out of this set was the very first autographed card of Tennessee women’s basketball coach Pat Summitt. I actually pulled two of these out of the boxes that I opened, but I sold one right away which helped to pay for another box. I think this is by far the best card that I pulled out of my boxes. Even though there are 599 copies of this card, it sells for around $50-$60 on eBay and will probably spike a little with the recent news of Summitt’s retirement.

It’s not often that you can an autograph of someone who is the greatest at what they do. I know coaches aren’t as glamorous as players, but Pat Summitt is to college basketball coaching what Michael Jordan is to NBA Basketball. They are both, inarguably, the best in what they did and that’s a huge thing. So, while the Panini Basketball Hall of Fame set did not have the greatest basketball player of all time, they did manage to succeed in a cardboard first for the best colligate coach.

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.

Check Out My Bowman Basketball Cards – Finishing Move

Nothing too exciting about these cards except that they finish off my 2009-10 Bowman ‘48 set. The two rookies, DeMar DeRozan and Jordan Hill are serial numbered on the back to 2009 copies (as are all of the rookies) and the Double Post is numbered to 1948 (as are all of the plays).

I was a fan of this set right from the release. The autographed cards were sticker autos, but the checklist was very strong and there were three autographs to a box. I ended up pulling Dwyane Wade, Derek Rose and O.J. Mayo out of my box. Selling the Rose towards the end of his MVP season almost paid for the box on its own. There were blue parallels one per pack (numbered to 1948) and rarer black parallels that fell one per box. Then there were some rarer cards such as red autos (1 of 1), black bordered autographs (numbered to 48), printing plates, auto relics numbered to 1 and 8 and auto dual patch autos there were 1 of 1.

This is one set that I think can retain some decent value. It’s got a limited Blake Griffin rookie and there can only be 1948 complete sets due to the short printed play cards. So, I might be able to put this away with my ‘92 Bowman, ‘93 SP Baseball and ‘94 SP Baseball as the only sets that I own that are actually worth something.

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

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 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 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