COMC Sundays: 2012 Panini Golden Age Historic Signatures

As mentioned in my previous post, today will be the start of a new weekly series that will focus solely on items obtained from COMC. For the time being these items will be from last year's 200+ cards that I have fallen woefully behind in showing.

Since I've had all of this stuff for over six months now, I don't imagine that I'll have a ton to say about most of it, so most of these are probably going to be light on words (not this one though).

Before getting started, I also wanted to remind everyone that everything you'll be seeing in these posts was paid for with earned credit from doing the challenges. I mention this because I don't want anyone to see anything here -- especially some of the expensive stuff -- and think "yeah it must be nice Mr. Moneybags", which of course... couldn't be further from the truth. In actuality, I don't have much of a life, so I have plenty of time to do challenges and earn credit, so much so, that I haven't had to add any out of pocket money to my account since they started 3 or 4 years ago now. Sometimes it pays to not have a social life!

If you've ever read my blog before, you shouldn't be too surprised to find out that were quite a few cards from the various years of Golden Age in last year's accumulation. And you also shouldn't be too surprised to hear that that's what I'll be kicking off the series with:

Jim Palmer: Hall of Famer, won three Cy Young's, owner of three championship rings, and as I have just learned... never gave up a grand slam during his 19 years of professional play.

As a quick aside, I can't remember where it was that I read it (probably Twitter), but I saw someone recently complaining about pulling a Jim Palmer auto. They were going on and on about how disappointed they were, which I thought was odd, because I was always under the impression that Jim Palmer was kind of a big deal, but apparently not to this person, or to some of the people that commented on his lament. So I guess it might be an unpopular opinion to the modern collector, but getting this Jim Palmer auto was still considered a pretty big deal to me.

Maury Wills: Led the NL in stolen bases for six straight years, seven All-Star appearances, and owner of three championship rings.

Mickey Lolich: World series Champion, World Series MVP, and is one of the two (Dale Murphy being the other) best players to come out of Portland (OR).

Frank Tanana: His skill on the basketball court led him to be recruited by more than a 100 colleges, #1 overall pick in 1971 MLB draft, and a three time all-star.

Ron Blomberg: First designated hitter in MLB history.

Bobby Allison: I'm not a race fan, and don't much about it's history (reading about racing is terribly boring to me), but I did see that he was a three-time winner of the Daytona 500... so that's something right?

Nancy Lopez: I know even less about golf than I do racing, and reading about it isn't something that I'm going to be able to do much of, even if it is supposed to be for research purposes. A quick scan of her Wikipedia page tells me that she won a bunch of tournaments, of which I have no idea how important any of them were. Her being named the Associated Press female athlete of the year in 1978 is pretty impressive though, as that's not something that a lot of people can say that they have done.

John Dean: I absolutely loathe politics! But Mr. Dean was a part of a fairly significant event in American history, Watergate, so it's still kind of cool to have his autograph. Even though I'm not a fan of racing, golf, or politics, I'm still glad that Panini added all these people to their checklists, as I probably wouldn't have been nearly as interested in the sets had they not had such a diverse group of subjects.

Barbara Eden: Le purr! But seriously though... she's of course best known for her role as Jeannie on I Dream of Jeannie, although she's also got close to a hundred other movie and television credits to her name. Of all the Golden Age autos, she had been the one that I had wanted the most, so when I came across this reasonably priced (and newly listed at the time) copy, I couldn't click that Buy Now button fast enough. I got it for about $10 less than the going rate on eBay too, which made it just that much better.

These first couple of Golden Age posts were going to have some of the memorabilia cards in them as well, but with my recent financial woes, I decided to stop working on that part of the sets. I have already started selling some of them, so it doesn't make much sense to me to show something that has already been sold or is destined for sale. The decision to sell them and focus more on the autographs, wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be, probably because a) The autograph's are much more important to me, and b) I always knew that I wasn't going to be able to complete the 2012 and 2013 memorabilia sets thanks to the Titanic and Hindenburg cards (the last Titanic that came up sold for over $800), and this is one of those sets for me that's either all or nothing.

Looking ahead to next week: 2013 Panini Golden Age Historic Signatures.


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