Bad scans from a good trade

I don't know if any of my fellow bloggers can relate to this or not, but sometimes I will scan, or photograph, an item, load it onto my computer, without paying much attention to it's quality, save it to a folder for future use, and then when it comes time to use it; then, and only then, do I finally notice just how poor said saved image was. 

Given my absolute hatred of scanning, I'm a bit surprised that this doesn't happen more often. In the past, I would sometimes go back and try to redo whatever the item was, but again, I hate scanning, and have gotten to the point where I can barely bring myself to do it these days (that's also part of the reason why posting on this blog has slowed down so much). So with that in mind, I not-so-proudly present two poorly scanned cards that made their way East earlier this year, courtesy of a trade with Gavin, resident expert in all things pertaining to Topps Retired Autographs, from Baseball Card Breakdown (and 1991 MusiCards Blog).

Gavin added a trade bait page to his blog a while back, which subsequently saw me reaching out to see if I'd have enough to be able to swing a deal for two of his offerings; and spoiler alert, I did!

Bobby Thomson is a guy that I say I collect, but I'm not sure if my 5-6 cards of him qualify as much of a collection. I only seem to be acquiring about one new card of his about every two years, which doesn't help in building up any kind of real collection. I do, at the very least, now have a really nifty autograph of his though (which isn't speckled btw).

 

While lacking a bit in the 50's department, my Johnny Podres collection is a bit more respectable. Although once again, this card here represents my lone autograph of his. They're a bit hard to see here, but this card features another nice shot (to go along with his '67 Topps card) of the old barracks at the Dodgers Vero Beach training facility (which I already covered a few years ago).

I've talked about both of these guys multiple times before, so I don't really have a lot more to say about them, or these cards (hence my taking so long to cover this trade. Well, that and the bad scans). I really do dig the cards though, and am thankful to Gavin for the trade.

It wasn't too long after this that another, this time somewhat unexpected, PWE showed up from Gavin; and in that was one of my favorite gets this year...

Gavin had told me that he would make one of his sun-bleached '91 Fleer mods (that were all the rage last Christmas) of Bo for me, and as you can clearly see, he did. He didn't say when though, and I thought that he might not be able to do it until summer, so like I said, I was bit surprised that it showed up so soon. 

I don't keep track of my acquisitions throughout the year, so it's not really possible for me to rank them, say in an end of the year post, but if I did/could make such a list, this would definitely rank in the top 5; possibly even top 3. It's just a really neat card, that brings me a lot of joy to look at. I figured the only place in the Bo binder for this would be next to it's original yellow kin, the only problem is, when I went to do so I found, much to my surprise (and chagrin), that I don't have a copy of the original card. I don't know how that was possible, but it was. It'll pain me to do so, but eventually I'll 'breakdown' and get one of those 20¢ copies from Sportlots. Now, if Gavin could just figure out a way to make a blue-bordered version, I'd have one wicked cool looking row for the Bo binder. As it stands, I'll probably just have to get to copies of the original to go on either side of this one in the binder so that it'll balance out the row/page (that's how my collecting OCD works).