Making room for Moyer

It's been another slow week around here on the blog. Apparently I'm incapable of sorting lots of cards and working on blog posts at the same time, not literally at the same time mind you, just on the same days.

Not working on posts has been a bad thing, but by not doing so I've been able to get through about 75% of my cards, or at least the one's that were questionable as far if I wanted to keep or not. So far the sort has gone really well, the boxes of stuff to sell and giveaway continue to outpace the keepers, and since trying to thin the herd was the whole point of doing this, so I've been quite pleased with how it's been turning out.

It's been going a lot quicker than I thought it would too, which is also nice, given how much I hate sorting large volumes of cards. I am definitely getting tired of this big sort, and even though I'm fairly close to finishing, I think I'm gonna take the rest of this week off, and probably next week as well. This will hopefully give me a chance to get a few finished posts stored in the reserve, and go back to the sorting in a few weeks.

Aside from the finding so many cards that I no longer feel the need to keep, the other big thing to come from this endeavor is a bunch of new player collections. Most of those have been of the football variety, but there has been a few baseball players added as well, although only one of them has played semi-recently, that being Jamie Moyer.

I can't imagine that the starting of this collection will be of much interest to too many people, but I haven't been doing very many baseball posts as of late, so any excuse to do one...

The good thing about me starting new player collections is that I'm usually only starting with a couple of cards, so it's pretty easy to get all of them into one post, and Jamie Moyer is no exception!

The idea to start collecting Jamie came when I found his card in a stack of 1995 Score Gold Rush that I was going through, a card that I didn't even recall having -- which by the way, is part of the reason for this big sort, as I'm officially tired of finding things that I didn't remember having! Anyways, at one time I was pretending to work on that set, and had bought a cheap lot or two on eBay, which got inventoried, and then put in a box, where they've been sitting now for at least five years. Jamie ended up being the only card that I'm going to keep, so in my mind that was a very successful go through.

After mulling over the idea of starting a Jamie Moyer collection for a couple of minutes, and then deciding that yes, I did want to do so -- I went in search of other card of his.

Off the top of my head, I could only think of one other card of his that I had, that being a 1987 Topps rookie blank back that I got off of Listia a number of years ago. I can't remember exactly when I got it, but if I had to guess I'd say it was five or six years ago, definitely pre-blog, because I was using that site quite a bit back then... back before greed took hold of the site's creator(s).

I don't have a lot of contemporary baseball cards, so I knew that if I were going to find any more of Jamie's cards, I'd have to turn to my misc. team binders, which is basically where I just stash the random stuff that I like, but doesn't fit anywhere else. Those two binders ended up yielding another two cards, one of which is this bitchin' white Turkey Red.

It's hard to believe that it's been over twenty years since he joined the Mariners, 24 to be exact! I had only seen him pitch a couple of times before he came to Seattle, and honestly didn't think too much about him either way before doing so, but being a die-hard Mariners fan at the time, it didn't take long to warm up to him. His pitching style was unique to say the least, and he had/has a very likable personality, which always make it easier to root for someone. In fact, I liked him so much, that he ended up being one of the few players who's career I tried to actively follow after leaving the team. And I was very happy for him when he was able to get that ring with Philly, although I would've much rather seen him do so back in 2001 with the Mariners.

Though it was found in one of my random team binders, this card comes from yet another abandoned set build, and I believe that this could be considered a sunset card as well, or at least one of his many sunset cards that were released in 2012.

Four cards isn't much of a start, especially since the TCDB says that he has almost 1,200 to his name, but at least these four cards make up for a nice cross section of his career. I would imagine too that some of those almost 1,200 cards are stickers, postcards, etc., so the actual number might be a little closer to 1,100... which is still an awful lot of cards to chase!

Oh, and speaking of the TCDB, I had some time the other morning to play around, and rather than trying to work on a blog post, I instead spent some of that time taking the site for a test run, a test run that ultimately ended with me driving into a metaphoric brick wall. Talk about confusing! I tried to add some cards to a collection list, at least that's what I thought I was trying to do, but it sure didn't turn out so well. I don't know what I was doing wrong, but I think I'm gonna have to hit up the YouTube and see if anyone's made a "TCDB for dum dums" video, before trying again. But seriously though, I will try again, it just might be a few weeks before I feel like failing again.


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COMC Shuffle #14

Another week, another ten randomly selected cards from last year's COMC hoard.

2013-14 Panini Prizm Green Prizms #186 (x3)

I mentioned a few posts back that I've been reorganizing, and have completely changed the way that I sort and store cards. While doing this I've come across a few surprises, one of which is finding out how many cards I have of certain player's, LaMarcus being one of those, granted my "collection" of his consists mostly of Prizm parallels, but still, I didn't realize that I had so many of them/him.

2013-14 Panini Prizm Prizms #251

I generally don't care too much for the Prizm Prizm's, or as they're referred to now, Silver Prizm's -- and sometimes just plain old, Silver's. Up until a few years ago, they were the most common parallel, and yet someone, somewhere, decided that these were going to be the most expensive, and desired, Prizm parallel?!?! I just don't get it, but of course I love colors though, so that might have a little something to do with it. All that being said, I love the look of the black and white photos that were used in the 2013-14 and 2014-15 sets. In my opinion they make for the best looking base cards, B&W on a grey background just pops, and they also look really good on the Silver's, plus if you turn them just right, you'll get a bit of rainbow, which is seen much better on the non-color photo cards.

2013-14 Panini Prizm Red Prizms #205

There's my dude! One of these days I'm gonna have to do a whole post on LJ, go back and talk about when and why my fandom began, you know, that sort of thing.

2014-15 Panini Prizm Yellow and Red Mosaic Prizms #168

One of my all-time favorite Blazers! As a kid, I was all about Uncle Cliffy and Crash Kersey, I met Jerome twice, but never got a chance to meet Cliff... maybe someday.

2014-15 Panini Prizm Yellow and Red Mosaic Prizms #153

It sounds silly given how talented he was, but Hakeem is one of those guys who I've come to appreciate a lot more in recent years than I ever I did while he was playing.

2013 Panini Father's Day #38

After completing my Chris Kreider Progressions rainbow, I decided to take it even further and get the base card, and the Cracked Ice card. I'm only an autograph card - which may or may not even exist - away from completing a true rainbow. I haven't really gone out of my way to try and do this by the way, it's just been a small side project that would be cool to complete, but I'd also be fine with it if I didn't ever get the auto, completing the Progressions was the only thing that really mattered to me.


1971-72 Topps #144 (blank back)

I bought this card during last year's Black Friday sale, then apparently forgot about it within minutes, which caused a bit of a confusion when the shipment arrived a few weeks later. While going through the box to see if everything was there, I spotted a very familiar looking card, and couldn't figure out why I had bought it. I mean I was about 99.9% sure that I already had this checklist, but just in case, I went and found the set binder, started flipping through the pages, couldn't find it, so I flipped it over to see the card number, and guess what? THERE WAS NO CARD NUMBER!!!!! I felt like such a f*cking idiot (even more so than usual)! I wasted like fifteen minutes trying to find the binder, which of course could've been avoided had I just flipped the card over to begin with. And for the record, I do have the regular checklist, and after seeing that this was a blank back, the memory of it's purchase did come back to me.

2013-14 Panini Prizm Red Prizms #230

Remember how I was just saying how much I like the Prizm B&W photos on the grey and silver backgrounds, yeah well, I really like 'em on red too. I also don't hate them...

2014-15 Panini Prizm Gold Prizms #205

... on gold either! And Bill is numbered to /10 by the way, so that's kind of cool.

1972 Topps #511

And finally, one for the "Telstar 4" collection.

With all of the Prizm parallels that were gotten last year (which is something that I didn't realize until I started scanning/photographing everything), I have been half-expecting the randomizer (shuffle button) to fill up one of these ten-card posts with nothing but Prizm. With seven of the ten spots being occupied by Prizm, it almost did so this week, probably much to the chagrin of everybody but me!


Thanks for taking a moment to look at my page.

COMC Shuffle #13

Another week, another ten randomly selected cards from last year's COMC hoard!


1970 Topps #380 (Error)

No need to adjust your eyeballs, as this card is as off as it looks. When it comes to errors, I usually am only interested in blank backs, but I made an exception for this one. Tony showed up in a batch of Challenges that I was doing, and I immediately fell in like with him (do people still say that?). I added the card to my watch list, and then spent the next month checking in on it every single day, just impatiently waiting for it to be added to the site. Such efforts rarely pay off for me, but in this instance it did, as I logged in one morning to find that it had been added to the site during the previous night -- and not only had it not already been bought, but the price attached was considerably lower than I had expected it to be. When I saw that it was there, and that it was only $0.95, well, as you can probably imagine (especially after that build up), I could not hit that buy it now button fast enough!

2015 Topps High Tek Pattern 1 Grass/Waves Confetti Diffractor #18

I haven't been pursuing it as much as I was last year, but I have the want to fill up a page of these Tim Brown's. I'm no matholigist, but I believe that once the goal is completed I would then own roughly 10% of the to /99 print run. Without looking, I think I'm sitting at seven right now (4 from COMC, 2 from a card show, and 1 from eBay).


2014 Panini Prizm Red, White, & Blue Prizms #12

I got a mention from Trevor a few weeks ago in connection with this card, and now that's it come up in the Shuffle, the least I could do is reciprocate the shoutout :)

Also, I have no idea why that middle card scanned so poorly, but it don't look like that in person.


1952 Bowman #72

This was just one of those "it's too cheap not to get" kind of purchases. It doesn't really fit into any particular collection right now, but I'm hoping that inspiration will strike at some point, and I'll find a use for it.


2009-10 Upper Deck 3D Stars #3D-AR

I don't what the deal is with this set (and I don't really care), but some of the cards have just one player, while other's, like this LaMarcus Aldridge and Brandon Roy, have two. LaMarcus is who you see when the card is at rest, which I'm assuming is just because his last name comes first alphabetically, as Brandon was a much bigger name at the time.


1998-99 Topps Stadium Club Triumvirate - Luminous #T11c

One of my favorite players of all-time, on a card from one of my favorite insert sets of all-time... I believe that's called a "win-win"!


2012 Panini Golden Age Historic Signatures #JO

Fun fact: John went to the same high school (different years though) as Otis Redding and Little Richard. Fun fact #2: Otis Redding and Little Richard went to the same high school!?!?


1968 Topps Game #15 blank back

Here's a bit of a rarity. Not only is this the first blank backed Topps Game that I've ever seen, but it also appears to be the only one that COMC has ever had. For the longest time I was buying blank back lots of say, 1975 Topps baseball, with the goal of trying to get as many from specific sets as I could, but also still picking up the occasional outlier like this. Like everything else card related, my focus has shifted quite a bit, now when it comes to blank backs I'm primarily interested in trying to get just one example from as many sets as I can.


1954 Topps #23

I had never heard of Luke Easter until I read an article about him last year (which I of course can no longer find). He seemed like a really interesting person, and was probably one of the great "what could've been if it hadn't been for injuries" guys. Because of these things, I decided to try and get a few (or all) of his cards. I got this one during last year's Spring Sale, and haven't gotten any more since. I have found that other than his '54 Topps, COMC is not a good place to get his cards, and I just never think to look on eBay, hence the owning of only one card.

2014 Panini Prizm Orange Prizms #105

It looks like Dan wasn't too impressed with today's post. I guess I'll just have to try harder next week then!


Thanks for taking a moment to look at my page.