COMC football dump

                                          
It's been awfully cold again down here in the land of Sleeves this past week. One would think that being stuck inside because of the cold would be conducive to "writing" blog posts, and it may be for some, but not me. I get restless when I'm stuck inside, and restlessness is the enemy of sitting down and doing anything, hence no posts this week.

I've also been in a bit of a funk again, probably brought on by the cold, but nobody came here to hear about that, so in more positive news, I received two orders from Sportlots this week, and saints be praised, the cards in both orders came in the condition they were described (a rarity for me!). I was so pleased with both orders, that I even went ahead and placed another larger one a couple of nights ago. I also sold a semi-rare DVD within just a few hours of listing it on eBay two days ago, which was extremely nice, if only because the proceeds will pay for my three Sportlots orders, and leave enough to cover the shipping for a couple of bubble mailers that I need to send out. Oh, and a somewhat hard to find Cliff Robinson (from his playing day) popped up on COMC (first one to ever to do so) yesterday, and I scooped it up within hours of it doing so! Now that I'm typing all of this out loud, I guess it wasn't that bad of a week after all, it just seems like it was.

Anyway, I don't know if ya'll have heard or not, but the BiG gAmE is tomorrow, and as per usual, it means very little to me. I have no plans to sit and waste an entire afternoon (especially one that is supposed to be slightly warmer) watching a football game (or any other modern sporting event), and because of political or social justice reasons, I just have other things that I want to do, active moving around things. I will however honor the occasion by doing a football card related post though, but since it's going to be nice outside today too, I'm not gonna waste a lot of time working on it this morning, so I'm gonna go ahead and use this Saturday, when presumably no one will be reading the blogs, to dump my misc. football scan folder; all of which came from my 2019 COMC shipment, yeah, 2019!

I had quite a bit of football in that 2019 shipment, which I broke down into four categories, vintage, 90's, color matching, and misc. The vintage portion made it onto the blog a long time ago (you could probably look for it if you really cared), but I've been extremely slow to cover the other three. The 90's and color matching folders haven't been edited yet, so that only leaves the miscellaneous stuff, which by the way is most certainly the least interesting of the bunch, and looking at them now, I wouldn't have even bothered to show them had I not spent the time scanning, but I did, and I don't want it to be for naught, so...

It seems like years ago now, and I guess technically it was, but geez was I all in on the 2018 Classics set, or more specifically, the parallels. I suppose I'm still big on it, I just haven't gotten any more since this shipment, and don't even recall when I last looked for any was.

Bo Jackson's modern cards don't do a whole lot for me, and looking at it now, I don't think I would've gotten this insert if I had it to do over again. It is die-cut, which is usually fun, but the die-cuttiness on this one is kinda lame.

Before finally becoming more focused on what I'm collecting last year, I had a tendency to fall in and out of love with things, and while I was in with them, I would often go a bit overboard in my attempt to acquire them. I had a brief infatuation with the 2015 Topps Tek purple parallels, and got a few in a very short period (probably over one evening).

Given how cheap they were, well, all except for Tommy here, I don't have any regrets in buying them, but I don't think that I'll be buying too many more (unless I come across some more cheap Barry Sanders', as I kind of want to get a full page of those). I've seen a lot of talk in recent months about acetate cards from the 90's starting to get gross (yellow), and even though none of mine have ever done that, I've still begun to hesitate some when it comes to purchasing any more, just in case. I don't know if modern acetate cards are made any differently, but I'm not looking add to many more of them to the collection either, just in case.

With there being hundreds of parallels in every single set these days, I'm not even bothering for the most part to try and remember and/or learn what is what anymore, I just go by aesthetics. If it looks good, and it's cheap, I'll get it; which is what I did with this nifty Earl Campbell! I know that it comes from the 2018 Black Friday set, but other than that, I just know it as the "199" parallel. 

I don't collect Eli Manning in the least, but I had a blue and a green version of this card, so apparently I had to get a red as well. Make sense?

I had the blue and green versions of this card too, so of course a red was necessary, right? The only difference this time is that while I don't actively collect Gronk, I do set his cards aside when I come across them. 

This one is so-so, but I do have the purple version currently sitting in my COMC account, and that my friends is quite spectacular.

Eric Dickerson is one of those retired guys that seems to have a lot of modern cards, way too many to collect all of, so I just stick to the scraps. Tired of 2015 Prizm yet? I can't hear you of course, but if you answered, yes, well, good news; this was the last of them. 

Staying with Prizm, but going back a year, we've got a couple more ED's. I don't have my cards of his cataloged yet, but I've gotta have at least 6 or 7 of parallels now, and probably duplicates of a few as well.

There are a couple of cards in this post that I wouldn't bought today, but this final 2014 Prizm offering isn't one of them, even after a couple of years I still really dig this card, and wouldn't mind getting a few more copies.

So there it is, definitely not one of my better posts (I did warn you in advance though), but they can't all be sunshine and lollipops. I can however promise that next week's two will be much better, I've got a baseball post planned (but not written) for Tuesday, and McKay's recap for Thursday, so in other words, one for you, and one for me :)

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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Pack Sampling: 1998 Collector's Edge 1st Place

Earlier this year, Andy, from Stadium Fantasium, ran a contest in conjunction with the Rose Bowl. It was a multi-tiered affair, which allowed for multiple winners (these are the best kind of contests IMO). I didn't think that I would do too well, what with the not paying much attention to current sports happenings and all, but it sounded fun, so I entered, and wouldn't you know it... I actually won something!

I don't remember what place I came in, but I did do well enough to get one of the main prizes, as well as two picks from the long list of secondary prizes, one of which was used to get today's pack of 1998 Collector's Edge 1st Place.

I hadn't ever heard of the 1st Place line before, and still don't know anything about it, but I saw "pack" and "Collector's Edge", and that was good enough for me.

1998 saw the big Leaf/Manning draft, so I would imagine that a pack like this could yield plenty of interesting things, although with only six cards in the pack, one has to work a little harder to find said interesting things. From a personal standpoint though, when it comes to a pack like this, I'm just happy with getting the opportunity to open one -- especially since I have never done so before, and the odds are pretty low that I'll ever come across any more.

The first card out of pack... and I've never heard of him! A quick search of the old interwebz tells me that he was drafted by the Oilers in 1990, made a Pro Bowl in '96, and played his final season in 1998, with the Carolina Panthers, which just so happened to be their inaugural season.

Not a hit per se, but I always enjoy coming across Jeff Blake cards. He was one of the few players that I actually tried to keep up with during the 90's, and if he didn't have so many darn cards (well over a thousand), I'd probably actively seek out his cards more often.

The backs certainly have a lot going on, but I like it. The notes here mention Neil O'Donnell's signing, which is a bit funny because, well, you'll see why in a second.

If hadn't been for series of injuries, David LaFleur probably would've been a more familiar name, but as most of us know, things don't always go as planned.

See! The pack told me what was coming #PropheticPack. Unfortunately Neil was stuck to the back of David LaFleur, the results of which can be seen at the top of the image, but no worries...

... because there was another Neil right behind the damaged Neil! It's been long time since I last pulled two of the same card from a pack, I don't really mind it in this instance though, as I was a fan of his, and now I can add the undamaged copy to my team binders.

Woot? This is kind of a weird looking card, to me it would've been a little more visually appealing had the logo been centered properly, the logo being bigger wouldn't have hurt either, but no matter, I'll still be keeping it. Don't know if anyone cares or not, but flipping it over reveals that it's a...

... checklist! Even after a brief search, I still don't know if this is supposed to be an insert, or if it's just part of the set? I did see that COMC has individual cards with this number that feature both the Chiefs logo, and the Seahawks logo, but again, I don't know if that was intentional, or if it's an uncorrected error of some sort.

This wasn't too bad of a pack overall, ended up with three keepers, and had fun opening a pack from a set that was new to me -- can't ask for too much more than that! Many thanks again to Andy, not only for the fun contest, but also for adding this pack to the list of prizes.


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Forgotten football cards from Fuji

                    
I know that it happens to my fellow bloggers all the time, but still, I didn't think that it would ever happen to me. I guess it was inevitable though, that at some point I'd go ahead and forgot all about some cards that somebody sent me!

Just forgetting about something that someone sent me is bad enough, but it's even worse when that someone is, Fuji, aka the person who is responsible for this blog's very existence, my blogfather if you will :)

I know that I started a post for the cards almost right after I received them back in October? Geez, I really hope it wasn't in September. Anyway, I started the post, got stymied pretty quickly, then decided to come back to it in a day or two... and apparently never did :(

This really was a most unfortunate occurrence, especially since this was the first time that Fuji had ever sent me anything before, hopefully after this bout of forgetfulness becomes publicly known, it won't end up being the last time that a package from San Jose shows up in my mailbox.

Not only was this the first time that Fuji had sent anything my way, but it was also the first time that anyone had sent me vintage football cards.

At the time that these were sent, I still had a football want list at the top of the blog, set needs for both 1967 and 1969 Topps were on that list, which I'm assuming is why I ended up with this smattering of '67 and '69 Topps. I have since removed that football tab, but...

... that doesn't mean that I still wouldn't have wanted these, no, it just means that I'm not working on the sets anymore. My interest in set collecting has diminished considerably in the last couple of months, and continues to do so on an almost daily basis, I have instead started organizing my cards from the three major sports by team, and have begun to put them into binders. This style of collecting has already proven to be most fun, and has sort of reenergized my interest in card collecting as a whole. This will all be discussed further in an upcoming post, so like I said, I may not be working on the sets anymore, but I'm still very much interested in cards from both of these sets, especially the 67's (the first two cards in this post), because I only come across those in person maybe once or twice a year.

And now here I am at the end and I haven't even really talked about the cards themselves, oh well, they're all really great, and very much appreciated! Two things that I thought were a bit curious though -- Two of the above '69 Al Denson were included, is it because of the different skin tones? I don't really know, but that's okay, because since these were sent, I've also really gotten into collecting duplicates of cards that I like, and I like this card, so...

The other thing that caught my eye, and I don't know if anybody else noticed it or not, but all of these cards are Broncos! Is that just a coincidence? I don't really don't know, if it isn't, Fuji didn't say anything to the contrary in the note that was included. Again, not a big deal, if I came across all of these at a show, and they were the right price, I would've bought 'em all no matter what team was being represented.

Fuji, my sincerest apologies for this mental gaffe of mine, I don't really know what to say, other than it was just one those things that happens. It may have taken me a couple of months to get to them, but I'm still most grateful for your choice of cards sent.


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