Cards!

Looking back at the last ten posts or so that I've done, I see that not a lot of cards have made it onto the blog in recent months; maybe ten cards or less across those last ten posts. One might think that this was because I didn't have anything "new" coming in to talk about or show off, but it's actually been quite the opposite, where too much has been arriving and I don't even know where to start with it.

I mentioned just recently that I've been spending a lot of time as of late sorting cards, this after not doing so for most of the year. As nice, and relaxing, as it's been to spend some of my nights just listening to music while I put cards in pages, a number of stacks grew up during the year, and it's been slow going as I attempt to reduce their respective heights. And it seems like every time I start to see some progress, more cards show up!

It's amazing how many things have been found so far that I had completely forgotten about, especially those that were only bought in the last couple of months. I think I also pointed out sometime not too long ago that I find it funny how in the early days of the blog, I would post about every single new card that came in, and nowadays only, maybe, 5% of what shows up on my doorstep ever gets covered here. That probably isn't necessarily bad thing though as I would imagine that most of those older posts aren't very good (I certainly won't be going back to read them), lots of cards, yes, but probably very little substance. No soul if you will.

Some of my collecting interests are changing/shifting again, some of which will be discussed below, while others will be covered in future posts. With so few cards making into blog posts in recent months though, I figured that I'd try and make up for it a little today by going all smorgasbord on you, pulling out some of the cards that have recently been "rediscovered" from my stacks. A few cards from a few different orders to give you some idea of where my collecting head has been at this year. Spoiler alert, it's been all over the place!

I rarely remember what the impetus is behind most of the things I do, even in real time, so trying to go back to the summer and figure out why I decided that I needed some of Ray Caldwell's cards in my life is almost impossible. Whatever the reason though, I added a couple of his cards to one of my "larger" (maybe 15 cards worth) orders from Sportlots back in June(?) or July(?), one of which was the really nifty TCMA 1920 Indians card. A lot of people remember solely as the guy who got hit by lightning while out on the mound (you all already know that story, right?), got up after a spell, and then finished pitching the inning/game. It is a pretty great story, but like a lot of guys from his era, he was a character, one that could only exist during that time period, and as such, led a very interesting life. Surviving being struck by lightning was just the cherry on top of the interesting life sundae.

As far as this card itself goes, well, to me it's just about perfect. Action cards are always fun, but if you've got to get a card of someone who isn't in motion, they just don't come too much better than this.

The back is pretty great too. I'm sure some would complain about the lack of stats, but this set was covering the teams 1920 season, so you get everyone's stats for that particular season, nothing more, nothing less.

Again, I don't know why, but a number of my summer Sportlots orders had TCMA cards in them, another of which was this Dick Wakefield from TCMA's War Years set. I don't if I was thinking about doing so at the time, but I've been thinking about starting a Bonus Baby collection. If I do, I've got numero uno covered, as back in 1941,  Dick was the first prospect to be given a check, or bonus, to skip the minor leagues and sign with a team. The term "bonus baby" didn't even exist until a few years later, and as such, Dick, and his contemporary babies, don't even appear on the official list of "bonus babies". In fact, everyone before 1947 is usually absent from the lists that you'll find all over the internet.

I had a shipment of around 250 cards arrive from the Baseball Card Store back in November, right around the time that I finally felt like sorting again. Since these were the newest cards at the time, I started putting them away before even scanning any for the blog. A lot of the order was made up of early 90's Blazers (and former Blazers) and Marvel cards, neither of which are things that blog readers are clamoring to see, so you probably dodged a bullet this time. At some point though, I did think that maybe I should scan a couple of cards for a post, and grabbed a few of the stragglers for your viewing pleasure.

1997-98 Hoops is a much maligned set, but I've always liked it. I dislike sets with replaced backgrounds more and more as I get older, this set however will forever be immune to that hate, as it's got quite a bit of nostalgia for me. Here we have a pair of former Blazers (childhood favorites), which is actually a trio of former Blazers, as Otis Thorpe got a cameo on Cliff's card.

It's been almost 30 years since this set came out, and I still get a kick out of the singles that can be put together to form a scene. It wasn't the first card set to borrow the idea from old sticker albums, but did have the most combo cards at the time.

Shreck, aka Terror, is one of my favorite comic book characters of all time. Originally an Epic character, Marvel convinced his creator to bring him over to the Marvel universe, where the big plans that they had for him evaporated before they even got started, and the character quickly faded from most peoples memory. As a reader of comics, I do wish that Marvel would've never gotten their hands on the character, but as a card collector, I'm glad they did, otherwise no cards of him probably would've ever been produced. I have a couple of copies of "Terror's" "rookie" card, but couldn't pass up another cheap one. 

I thought I already had a copy of this one for the Carnage collection, turns out I didn't. 

I grabbed a number of the hologram variants from the '91-92 UD set, but pictures of tiny holograms on the backs of cards aren't that interesting to most people, so here's one of the fronts. I kind of like the different holograms myself, but will not try to convince anyone that they're more pleasing to the eye than an action shot featuring a rookie Dikembe Mutombo taking it right at Manute Bol.

I don't know if the person formerly known as Twitch was the first person to do it, I'm assuming not, but they were the first person that I saw do one player collections. I've since seen some folks on Twitter who do it, and as of late, Gavin has been doing it too. I always liked this concept, but could never commit to it... until now! I continue to want to pare down my collection, and I feel like this sort of thing will help do so. There's still gonna be a bunch of guys and gals who I want everything from, but there's also plenty of people who I'd be content to have just one page's worth of stuff from. As I've already started doing this, I'm finding that most of the one page heroes are of names that would have been recognizable to younger me, or rather folks who I regularly pulled from packs as a kid. Orel is just such one of those guys. I've never had a desire to collect him before, but at the same time it feels like he was in every single pack of baseball cards that I opened as a kid. I'm gonna try to get a good mix on these pages (base, inserts, parallels, etc.), but all will be hand chosen for one reason or another. This particular card was picked because I can't imagine that he was shown batting on too many cards, which is kind of neat, and the color matching border just put it over the top. I also grabbed a Fernando card from this set for his page, if only because he's shown as an Oriole.

This card checks off so many 90's boxes: Sticker, check! Neon colors, check! Crazy squiggles all over the place, check! Glow in the dark, double check! It just doesn't get too much more 90's than this! Tim is getting the one page treatment as well, and so far I've got some pretty dope cards for him. Depending on the five more cards that I get to fill it, his page might end up being the most interesting.

I had about 30 Hollywood Starline cards in this box, about half of which I was hoping would be upgrades, and thankfully they were. 

I'm still undecided as to whether or not I actually like the various Senior League cards. On one hand it's nice to get a few more "playing days" cards for player collections, but on the other, some of the cards are terribly depressing.

I had never seen Donruss' 2001 release before. From what I can gather, it looks like at least for part of the set that the borders are color matching, some of which are more attractive than others. I haven't gone through the checklist yet, but I did see a nifty red Junior that I'd like to get at some point. As for Cal, he's getting a page too. So far this is it for the page though. I do have a few inserts that I was going to add to it, but upon recent reviewing, I decided that I didn't care much for those and will now need to find a new home for them.

I took advantage of the Baseball Card Store's free shipping offer on Black Friday, but haven't heard anything about the order since. I should have about a hundred more cards coming, but don't know when that will be. Hopefully I'll get a few more things put away by then, and won't have to just show a couple of the leavings from it.

My two years worth of accumulation from COMC came in November, and aside from making sure that everything was there, haven't done much with it's contents since. For the sake of this post though, I did pull out a couple of cards, one of which was one of these; the other two came from TCDB trades earlier this year. I've talked about it on a couple of separate occasions already, and won't go into it again, but this is my favorite modern parallel of someone who I don't collect. These were #'s 5, 6, and 7. Ideally I'd love to get enough to fill a couple of pages, but for now I'll be content if I can just get two more to fill up a page.

Speaking of duplicates! This is '61 Billy Muffett #27. God, I love this card! Prices for decent looking copies have gone up a tad on the site, so I probably won't be getting too many more from there. Most of the other online prices aren't very cost effective either. One of these days I really need to start going to shows again.

Color shifts are so damn hard to find on COMC that I feel like I've struck gold every time I do actually encounter one. I just recently put this mini collection into a page finally. I was a bit disappointed to find that I only had six of them though, I thought I had more. But again, hard to find, so I guess six is better than none.

I had built up 72 cards in my COMC account since I requested my two years worth to be shipped back in May. I then bought a little over 30 cards during all of the Black Friday sales, which put me over 100, and qualified me for their free shipping promotion, which I did take advantage of. I just got notified on Friday that my cards had shipped, one week before their original estimate. I think it's safe to say that things have greatly improved over there in Auburn. Between the last shipment and this one, if I wanted to get lazy here on the blog, I'd probably have next years content already covered. I won't be doing that, but the thought is somewhat appealing.

This card appeared in a recent Diamond King post that I commented on, and to my great surprise, showed up just a few days later in my mailbox. All I said was that it was a pretty cool card and that I couldn't believe that Kevin had found at a sow there in Portland, and then like magic, here it was! Oh, and it is a pretty cool card - a '61 Dutch Gum for those that care - my first 'playing days' Kirk Douglas. Many thanks again to Kevin for the very unexpected gift.

The final duo for today are the most recent cards to grace my mailbox, a pair of wonderful customs from Greg's most recent giveaway over on Nine Pockets. This is my second batch of Greg's customs, and there every bit as neat as the last ones. I don't know who prints them, but I still can't get over how good these cards feel in hand, I mean they actually feel like real cards. Desperado is a film that I will forever associate with my teens. I saw it in the theatre with a friend and his family when I was either 12 or 13 (depending on what month it was released that year), and can distinctly remember buying it on VHS at a Target about two years later. That video got a lot of viewings, as it was always a popular option when friends were over. I can't say with absolute certainty, but I believe that if we didn't rent anything, this and The Lost Boys were the two videos that got watched the most when friends were staying the night. An odd combo for sure, but I certainly wasn't going to complain. Thanks to Greg for the giveaway! 

One good thing about spending a bunch of time handling cards again has been that now I feel like blogging about cards again. Feeling and doing are of course two different things entirely, and whether or not this want to do so will actually translate into more posts with cards in them, remains to be seen. I could do posts like this for the foreseeable future, but I suspect that they might get a little old, very quickly. Who knows, just typing out loud, as usual. I can at least say that the next post will be card related, although it also include some crafting as well... yes, crafting!