Tackling some player collections

I've talked a lot about breaking up set builds to start player collections in recent months, or at least it feels like I have been -- either way, it's a thing that I've been doing.

I don't know if I'm completely sold on player collecting yet, I just know that due to circumstances that arose early last year, circumstances that aren't likely to change anytime soon, I can no longer afford to work on all of the various vintage sets that I had been building, at least not with the hopes of completing any of them in a semi-decent amount of time. I suppose it would be possible to work on just one or two sets, but after spending some time trying to do so, I couldn't narrow down the list to just one or two. So while targeting specific players is still a fairly new concept for me, and is less than ideal, I figure that it'll allow me to still own, and see, a number of cards from the various vintage sets that I love so much, without having to go into debt trying to collect the entire thing. Another thing that I've realized is that if a bad month rolls around, and I only have say $10 to spend on cards, I'd much rather go get myself someone with name recognition and/or someone who's in the HOF, versus some no name who never did anything of note, but who's card still commands top dollar simply because it happens to be one of those mythical "high numbers".

More often than not, when I've mentioned pulling apart sets, it's almost always been baseball related, but I've been doing the same thing to my vintage football set builds as well, albeit very slowly. Much like on the baseball side, I've been surprised at how many cards of certain players that I've had, of course I've also been surprised by how few cards I have of certain players too.

I had a rare stretch of actually wanting to sort cards for about two weeks back in November, which worked out well what with COMC's Black Friday sale approaching and all. I used that time to work on some of the old football sets, to try and figure out who was being kept, and who wasn't. Despite the couple of weeks worth of effort, I only ended up getting through about half of my vintage football cards, but enough was done to still start making some lists, and to know somewhat who to focus on once the sale started.

Thanks to the Challenges being open quite a bit that month, I was able to build up a fairly decent amount of credit heading into the sale, and with some new found focus, as well as some surprisingly decent sales, I think I ended up getting more cards during the actual sale than I had in previous years. Looking back, most of my purchases during the sale ended up being of the vintage variety (baseball, football, and non-sport), all of which will be shown in due time, but in honor of tomorrow's "big game", I'll just be concentrating on the pigskinner's for today.

Being a native Portlander, George Shaw has been on my radar for a long time, but as a set collector, I didn't ever pursue his cards more than anyone else's -- but now that things have changed, I am! George had tremendous success during his amateur career, he led Grant high school to two state championships, before moving on to Oregon, where he would become an All-American in both football and baseball. Unfortunately this success didn't carry over to the pro's, some of that was his fault, and some of it was just bad timing. You see, George has the dubious distinction of being replaced by two rookie quarterbacks, both of whom go on to the Hall of Fame, during his career. He suffered a broken leg during his second season with the Colts, and was replaced by some kid called Johnny Unitas. Not surprisingly, George never got his starting gig back. Three years later he was traded to the Giants where he spent two unproductive seasons, before moving on to Minnesota. After a slow start, he would find himself being replace halfway through the season by another fresh-faced rookie, Fran Tarkenton. He'd go on to play one more season in the AFL with Denver before retiring.

If memory serves, Fred passed away a few days before the Black Friday sale started. His name hadn't been familiar to me, but after reading an obit online, and seeing that he invented the NERF football, well, I knew right then and there that he was gonna have to be added to my list of player collections. I picked up this '65 Philadelphia, his true rookie card, that day. Since his cards are considered to be commons, I didn't feel the need to go crazy with them during the sale, when most can probably be had for fifty cents or less at shows.

I don't pay a lot of attention to the yearly Hall of Fame classes for any sport, and am often surprised by who is, and isn't, already in the Hall of Fame -- as such, I was surprised to see a headline a few weeks ago announcing that Alex Karras was a member of this year's class, which is funny because I had been under the impression that he was already in the HOF, and had been for many years. As great as the front of this card is, the back might be even better:

Cartoons don't get too much better than that.

There aren't a lot of Ducks in the HOF, I can think of five off of the top of my head, so for the purposes of this post, and not wanting to go double check, I'm just gonna go ahead and say that there's five (feel free to Google it and correct me if I'm wrong). Now that I'm focusing on players, it feels only right that I start collecting a few, if not all, of those guys. I found this '66 Philadelphia during the sale, it's a bit off-center, but that's what made it affordable. More gradable copies sell on eBay for at least double the price of what I got mine for... thankfully I don't care about getting cards graded!

I'm not going to consider blank backs as an essential part of my player collections, but if one comes along cheap enough, I'll probably end up buying it anyway. Given it's condition, I don't think that this Bethea ever made it into circulation, making it a lot less interesting to me than a pack pulled blank, but for just a little over a buck I couldn't resist.

Unlike the Bethea, I strongly believe that this card may have come from a pack, as such I was willing to pay a little more for it. This also happens to be my first card featuring the Secretary of Defense.

Before the Black Friday sale I had never owned a card of Roman's before -- after the sale I found...

... myself owning...

... three!

When looking through all of the '77 Csonka's on the site, I noticed a great variety of different shades in sky color... I will not be collecting all of those variations!

Given it's obscenely low price, and despite the lack of any condition notes, I was thoroughly convince that there was going to be something wrong with this card, but to my great surprise, there wasn't (well, other than the crooked scan)! Although COMC did make up for it by having six other cards arrive damaged, but they weren't as important to me as this one was, so I guess it's a decent trade off.

This is my favorite of the bunch right here! Ernie Ladd cards can be had for a lot less than I would've thought, although it's probably just one of those deals where there just isn't a lot of people left who still care about his cards, which is then reflected in the prices. Whatever the reason, I was thrilled to pick up my second card of his, which also happened to be my first 1964 Topps -- I don't know how it is for anyone else, but this is one of those sets that I absolutely never see any of at shows.

Being a wrestling fan growing up, I always knew of him as "The Big Cat", but apparently that wasn't always the case. Although, after doing a quick search, I can no find reference to him as "The Giant Cat", so this might be one of those instances where someone at Topps didn't have all of their facts straight.

I don't know about anyone else, but I have no plans to watch the Super Bowl tomorrow, mostly because I'm not familiar with any of the guys playing, well that and the fact that I don't like how the sport is played these days. Now if the rules weren't so pillowy, and a few of the guys in today's post were still in their prime and playing in tomorrow's big game...


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