Bo, Joe, and more Bo

I've been rethinking my player collections in recent months, namely whether or not I really need so many different ones? And also, if a few choice cards for certain players might work better than just trying to accumulate as many of said players as possible?

I've come to the conclusion the answer to the first question is, no, I don't think I need to be collecting so many different guys at this point. I'm slowly finding that I've lost complete interest in collecting some of the people that I have been, and have started removing their cards from binders. It's been nice in that, not only is freeing up binder space, but also is helping reduce my overall collection; which I had started to think was getting near unmanageable (for me).

As for the latter question, I believe that for certain people, going forward, a few choice cards will be sufficient enough to represent my fandom and/or appreciation of what they've accomplished. The more I think about it, the more I like this idea. To some degree, I already started doing this last year, namely for Ichiro and Mike Alstott; though, that was primarily because I realized that I really don't like the look of most of their cards. I don't know what it is about those two, but they both seem to have an awful lot of cards from sets whose designs I find to be atrocious. After whittling out all of the ugly cards, I was left with like three for Mike, and maybe 15 or so for Ichiro. A more recent example would be, Bill Walton. I can't remember why I was doing so exactly, but less than a week before his passing I found myself going through my collection of his. My favorite cards of his are from his playing days, and those are all in either, completed sets, or set-builds. Not counting those, my collection of his, such as it was, consisted of just a couple of autographs, and some, to be frank, rather ugly modern Panini cards. It took just a few seconds for me to decided that I just wanted to keep the autographs, and ditch all of the other shiny shit. It's funny too, because I got to thinking how neat it would be to have a whole page of autographs from him, and then what happens, he goes and leaves us just a few days later. I don't know if that page idea will still be doable, if it is, I'll probably have to wait awhile before the prices come back down.

With a lot of my player collections now in flux, I decided to take down that page from the blog until I get everything sorted out (it wasn't getting much traction anyway). As it stands, I can think of about a dozen players that will be safe from the coming purge, two of whom just so happen to be featured in today's post.

I was fortunate enough to get a few cards from, Jim, he from the now daily, cards as i see them, earlier this year. The envelope consisted of four cards, two of which were the post playing days Bo's that have been seen thus far. As I told Jim before he sent these, I rarely by modern Bo's (as there's still more than enough from his playing days that I don't have), but I'll gladly accept them if they're being sent to me. Both of these were new to me.

The Bo's were nice enough, but they can't compete with this pair of Joe Rudi's. It looks so strange to see him as a Red Sock. It was probably even weirder for fans at the time. I've mentioned before how neat I think it was that all three of the card companies gave him a final card in 1983, but Topps did him pretty good the year before as well, giving him a card in the base set as a Sock, and another in the Traded set as an Athletic. I already had the base card, so it was to get the Traded one to go with it.

Many thanks to Jim for the cards!

There was a seller on eBay earlier this year that did a "set break" of MSA Holiday Inn discs. The bidding on all of them started at 99¢ with free shipping, and from what I saw, most of them ended at that same price; including Joe.

I probably should've gotten a few other players, but my heart wasn't really in it at the time.

My last COMC shipment had a few Rudi's in there as well. Both of these were got during the Black Friday sale. My interest in autographs has been waning pretty hard, but for five bucks I couldn't pass on this particular one. I think this was either my fourth or fifth autograph of Joe. The buyback was a cheap last minute purchase. It wasn't needed, but obviously I got it anyway. This was my second buyback of his.

This card represents the first Fleer Sticker that I've ever owned. I really like this look of this set and could see myself collecting it someday. I think it's safe to say that this is one set that will never be affected by the boom, so I will not be looking to add anymore stickers to my collection until I'm ready to start working on it. 

I noticed a few months ago that a seller on Sportlots had three copies of Bo's Cyberstats for 20¢ each. As you can tell, I bought all three. The Joe Rudi Sticker came from this seller as well. Knowing how poorly these scan, I tried to get the effect to pop more via a photograph; which didn't really turn out all that well either. I had zero copies of this card prior to the purchase, and now that I have three, I'd kind of like go for a full page's worth.

Artist and custom card maker extraordinaire, Gavin, who of course, also helms Baseball Card Breakdown, sent out some of his creations to a few folks earlier this year, ostensibly in thanks for supporting his MusiCards blog. I was fortunate enough to have been included. I don't really like the idea of getting things just for commenting on a blog, as I'm of the opinion that folks should be doing that whenever they can anyway (if you can spend your whole day commenting on every single thing that comes across your Twitter feed, I see no reason why you can't do the same for a few blogs here and there), so instead, I prefer to think that these two cards were sent to me for no other reason other than that Gavin thought I would enjoy them. And he was right, I did.

It took me longer than it should've to realize that the Bowman Bo had been arted up. The background looked so natural that I didn't even notice it right away. I initially thought that I had been sent just a regular Bowman to keep the other custom company. Obviously that wasn't the case. It's artiness is more subdued than a lot of Gavin's other cards, but I think it works really well on this card.

The Score (blue superfractor?) appeared in one of Gavin's posts quite awhile ago, and was much coveted by me. At the time, I thought about inquiring as to it's price, but figured he'd be able to get more for it on the eBay than he would from me, so I held off on sending the inquiry. Fast forward a bunch of months and look what showed up in the mail, my much coveted Bo! I really appreciate Gavin sending this one, not only because of how cool it looks, but also because I know that he could've easily sold this one for a decent sum.

Being a pretend artist myself, I can really appreciate how much effort that Gavin puts into his customs, and am always grateful for the opportunity to add a few more to my collection.

Celebrating Opening Day with a scan dump (Part 1)

I've already mentioned a few times that one of, or rather, my only, unofficial goal for this blog, this year, is to empty all of my old scan folders -- and with it being so hard for me to post right now, the only way that I'm gonna be able to achieve this goal is to do some scan dumps throughout the year.

So far I've been able to get the football portion of my old scans done, and with Opening Day fast approaching, I figure that this is as good of a time as any to get the baseball dumped.

Part 1 will cover stuff from Sportlots, most of which was gotten early last year, and Part 2 will feature items from COMC, most of which has now been sitting in folders for 3-4 years. A lot of the cards, especially in today's post, were intended to be shown in more elaborate posts, so most of them weren't scanned together, as one would normally do with cards of this sort.

I've flip-flopped many times over the years about whether or not I like the '86 Donruss/Leaf border design. My current opinion is that I don't like it very much, but if asked again this same time next year, it'll probably have gone back the other way.

I bought quite a few card over the years at Kay-Bee (and even more at the Kay-Bee Toy Liquidators outlet store in Troutdale), and yet, I don't recall ever seeing any of their branded sets during all that time. In fact, I'm pretty sure that I didn't even know that they ever had their own cards until after I started reading the blogs. I might go back and collect those sets someday, but in the meantime, I'm all for adding cards like this to player collections.

This is a good looking card. The only way that it could've been better is if Topps would've let the image breathe a bit more (i.e. not cropped it down quite so much).

One nice thing about collecting Gene Tenace is that all of his playing days cards are plentiful, and aside from his rookie in OPC form, all are very cheap. It's hard to believe that Fleer could not find a better image for their '84 set. That one is really bad.

I'm usually a little less excited to get cards from after someone's playing days, but this one from the '87 Mother's Cookies set was an exception. It's just such a great looking card. And as an extra added bonus, I'm fairly certain that that's Joe Rudi there in the cage behind Gene. 

I knew when I bought this one that I a couple of Gene's Hostess cards, but didn't think I had this one, and didn't double-check before purchasing. Turns out that I did in fact have one already, but it worked out okay as I've since decided to put my Hostess set builds back together, and since my other copy is cut better it went towards the set, while this one was able to replace that one in my Tenace pages.

I'm not far enough along with the '77 set to justify buying singles, as I should be looking for a nice lot, but Bert was awfully hard to pass up for a quarter.

I've really cooled on Topps Coins in recent years, so much so that I rarely ever even look to add them to player collections. Obviously, I made an exception for Boog. Now if I could just remember to stop trying to scan coins, as the result is always the same, that being that the scanner focuses on the rim and ends up blurring the image below it.

It's funny how much joy a crappy looking card can bring me. Bones Ely is notable for many things, but for this blogger, he and his brother purchasing, and then selling, the Portland Browns (the Beavers before they were the Beavers) during the 1904 season is what made this particular card, his only card, so desirable. And for such a cheap thing, it sure proved difficult for me to get. I feel like I've been trying to do so for more than a few years now. At some point, I hope to do a much longer write-up about him over on my Beavers blog.

Jamie Moyer in Dufex? Yes, please! 

I have a page of post-playing days Chuck Connors, which this was a fun addition to.

I started out the post with a Big Bo, so I might as well close out the post with a handful of regular sized Bo's. These two were long-time wants as well. The blue Classis is, well... classic!

I thought I had already had a couple of copies of this Traded card, and bought this one thinking that it would get me closer to a page's worth. As it turned out, I had none. I must've been having a flashback to my original collecting run.

Did you know that were cards on the bottom of 1990 Fleer boxes? I didn't.

I bought more packs from this set as kid than I'd like to admit to, but never got a box, and apparently never saw the bottom of a box, so I had no idea that there were cards under there. I never know what the going rate is for something like this, but I think that this card was around a buck, which seemed reasonable. It was cut well, and isn't wrinkled, so that's about the best I could hope for a "card" of this sort.

That's it for this one. If all goes well, I should have part two up by Wednesday or Thursday.

Chilly Willie

After closing out last year with a trade that netted me nineteen new 1962 Canadian Post's, I foolishly thought that this year might be the year that I'd make some serious progress on that set. Silly me! 

Turns out that I couldn't have been more wrong if I tried. I started the year with 20 cards for the set, and I'm ending it with 21. That's right, despite my best attempts, I've managed to add all of one card to the set this year. Willie Davis here is that lone addition. 

1962 was Willie's third season in the bigs (second full-time), and he ended up setting what would be career bests in runs (103) and home runs (21) for a Dodgers team that won 102 games; but still finished one game back in the N.L.

It was a pretty disappointing year as far as this set was concerned, but thanks to Sportlots seller champion and the very reasonable price that he attached to this card, I didn't have to finish the year by laying an egg.

Scaring up something for Halloween

I've been trying to come up with something fun to do on here for Halloween this year, but me and fun don't seem to be on the same wavelength as of late.

I hate to be yet another blogger using 'I've been busy' as an excuse, but I'm gonna have to in this instance. Things have been go, go, go since summer started, and have somehow managed to move into an even higher gear over the last few weeks. I don't expect this pace to continue much longer; which will be nice, because I. Am. Tired. Mentally and physically. In the meantime though, all of my blogs have suffered. Creativity and desire have been on back order for many months now, and I don't know when the supply chain will get caught up.

Between a couple of COMC orders (that now go back at least three years), some select items from the Sportlots box I got earlier this year, and about half a dozen eBay wins from last year, I'm sitting on quite the stockpile of scans. Not being able to think of anything else, I decided to look through all of my scan folders and see if there was anything that would be appropriate for a Halloween post. To my surprise, there was; quite a bit in fact. So, as it turns out, I guess I'm doing an old-fashioned scan dump for Halloween. And while isn't creative in the least, I think I can honestly say that there's a few things in here that you don't see on the blogs very often, if ever, so that's something, I guess.

Starting with the COMC folders...

Ray Milland garnered a bit of a reputation later in life for accepting pretty much any role he was offered, and as such ended up appearing in a number of low budget horror films; often times being the best part of said low-budget horror films. He did make a few earlier in his career as well, including one of my all-time favorites, The Uninvited. 

This "card" is from my oldest COMC scan folder of unshown items. I think it was purchased during the height of Corona-mania, back when we had to wait years to get our items shipped. Ah, good times! I really like the old Dixie ice cream lids, but rarely think to search for them. This one is from '42, and I wanna say that I paid around two bucks for it, which I thought was pretty good considering it's immaculate condition.

Elsa Lanchester appeared in a number of horror films as well, none more famous than The Bride of Frankenstein, which incidentally was the first Frankenstein picture that I ever saw. Conversely, she also appeared in my second favorite Christmas film, The Bishop's Wife. This card was actually gotten for a themed Bishop's page that's still in progress.

I like the '75 and '76 Marvel sticker sets quite a bit, and if I didn't have a so many other things to collect already, I'd probably try to complete the sets. As it stands as of now though, I'm only really trying to get a few choice ones, this Dracula being one of them. If I recall correctly, Dracula has three total stickers from those two sets. This one is my favorite of those three.

Alien was one of the first modern scary horror/sci-fi pictures that I saw. As such, I don't think I'll ever forget a couple of those jump scares. There pretty ingrained in my head. This card is part of my Kolchak

collection. I don't expect anyone reading this to care, but he starred in the episode "The Devil's Platform"

There was nothing scary about Irwin Allen's Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, but without any context, this card could appear to be of a scary nature. Horrors of the deep? Most of the cards in this set are surprisingly boring, mostly because they're all just from the first season. Had they made any follow-up sets, cards based on future seasons would've been a lot more interesting, as the fun stuff really picked up after that first year. This is by far the best card in the set, and had been a want of mine for many years. And at around $4, it's also the third most expensive card in this post.

Seems like another time when pictures like Alien and Jaws 2 got card sets that were marketed towards children, though Jaws 2 was a PG film. I don't think it would get a PG rating in 2023. It would've been a lot neater if the first film hadn't gotten a card set, but the set for Jaws 2 did provide a couple of cool cards, like this sticker. I'd like to fill a whole page with this one, but I'm a ways away, as I think that this was only my second or third copy.

Like a lot of folks my age, I grew up with GPK; for better or worse. I think I might have lost interest in them a lot sooner than most kids though. One can see a Cabbage Patch kid vomiting or being maimed in some terrible way only so many times before it becomes repetitive and/or repulsive. That being said, I bought these two strictly because of their theme (and because they weren't gross). Had the sets been more like this, I might've stuck around a little longer. 

[Note: I can never remember which way to scan things side by side so that they appear in order, hence these being backwards]

Despite my having seen all of the original Nightmare on Elm Street films, mostly at parties or sleepovers, I am not a fan. I couldn't tell you why, they just never did anything for me. That being said, I am a fan of Robert Englund's other work, and of him as a person. I have a page in a binder just for him. I've never watched any iteration of Babylon 5, so this card of his flew under my radar for a long time.

Bo Diddley's "Bo Meets the Monster" has been appeared on a few Halloween compilations over the years, and is probably on a million internet playlists these days, so I think that's enough to warrant his inclusion into this post.

Another 70's set from Topps to target a slightly older audience was 1976's Shock Theatre. It was marketed as set celebrating all things Hammer (Films), but instead focused very heavily on their Dracula pictures. It's still an awesome set , albeit a little expensive, if you're into their Dracula series, but could've been a lot more interesting had they featured scenes from the studios entire horror catalogue. And I think I've mentioned it before, but I'm not big on assigning "rookie card" status to non-sport subjects. That being said, for those that are into that sort of thing, despite not being mentioned anywhere, the card on the right could be considered Caroline Munro's "rookie card". Oh, and Caroline Munro 😍. She was one of my early crushes.

It's not very impressive, but I do have a bit of a Jack O' Lantern collection going. I probably could've save myself a bunch of time and just showed for today.

If it were even remotely possible to collect all of the dozens (hundreds?) of Dutch Gum sets that came out from the 50's through the 70's, I would probably try to do so. That'd be a lifetime endeavor, and I'm much too old to start such a pursuit at this point, but that's okay, I'm more than content to just pick up a few choice cards here and there. I have a bit of a Yvonne De Carlo collection going, which, like a lot of my collections, probably wouldn't impress many, but I thought that this was a nice add. The Munsters were a staple of my childhood, and I'm a big fan of her earlier, non-horror, pictures. Like Ray Milland, she didn't seem to turn down anything later in life, and as such appeared in a ton of bad horror films; much more than Ray.

Bonanza was on, and extremely popular, during most of the time that Dutch Gum were producing sets. Knowing that, it should come as no surprise that it's stars appeared on dozens of cards over the years. And given that sets were marketed to young people at the time, it's even less of surprise that of the show's stars, Michael Landon seems to have appeared the most. To me, he'll always be Tony Rivers in I Was a Teenage Werewolf, and to a slightly lesser extent, Jonathan Smith in Highway to Heaven.

There's nothing that I can say about Boris Karloff that hasn't been said by many people before. He and Bela Lugosi were a major part of my childhood, as 30's and 40's horror was a mainstay on our television. Boris had a much more successful career, thus he appeared on considerably more trading cards than Bela. It's not very often that I can add a "playing days" card of Boris to my collection, so it's always kind of a big deal when I do.

That's the end of the COMC portion of the post. I guess if I'm trying to go chronologically, scan-wise, a pair of eBay gets from late last year should go next.

I've tried on two separate occasions over the years to get into Twin Peaks, but I just can't seem to do so. As the kids might say, it's apparently not my jam. Never getting past the first two episodes, I have no idea how large of a role Everett McGill played in the series, but I do know that he had a major role in Silver Bullet, as Reverend Lowe; which is why this had been yet another card that I had wanted for a few years before finally winning this semi-cheap copy (I think it was around $15 at the time). Silver Bullet had a big impact on me as a child, and not in a good way. I love the film as an adult, but that wasn't always the case. This post is already getting longer than most of you would want, so I'll save my Silver Bullet story for another time. That'll probably be one for my Nonsense blog, as there'll be no cards involved.

Forever Knight was one of my favorite shows as a kid/teen. The first run of episodes were part of CBS' Crimetime after Primetime. They were on pretty late, so we used to record them to watch the next day (I wish I still had some of those original recordings, but tapes were usually reused until they started showing signs of wear). Things were made easier a few years later when the show went into syndication on the Sci-Fi channel. The marathons were especially appreciated, what with the show still being some years away from being released on DVD and all. Only three people from the show have official autographed cards out there, John Kapelos being the biggest name of the bunch. He played Nick Knight's (the main character) partner, Det. Schanke, for the first two seasons. None of the vampires from the show have autographs, or even any commercially produced cards; which is terribly annoying. I've thought about trying to get one of the blogosphere's custom makers to make me cards of them, to either try to get signed through the mail, or to just have for a binder page -- but haven't gone any further with the idea yet.

Earlier this year I got my first box shipment from Sportlots, which was mildly exciting at the time. I thought that its contents were gonna provide at least a few posts worth of, well, content -- but after getting it, and seeing that there was around 200 cards to potentially scan, my plan to post about them kind of fell by the wayside. That's just too many cards for me to scan anymore. I think I ended up doing about a quarter of them, and so far, maybe 3-4 of those have appeared on the blog. The good news is though, of those 50 or so scanned cards, I actually found 8 that were appropriate for this post, so...

Another Robert Englund card for his page, this time from one of the Charmed sets, which is another show that I never watched. The cards in this sets done on some kind of greenish/aqua colored foil, and look really good in person, not so much in this scan though.

This one is a bit of a stretch for this post, but the 1985 Garfield Halloween special has been amongst my favorite Halloween things for basically as far back as I can remember. I can't remember every specific year, but I do know for a fact that I've seen it every year since it's original airing (the same goes for the Thanksgiving and Christmas specials as well). I got a few cards from this set to make up a page for my childhood binder, this one being my favorite. And with Jim in a costume, it seemed like the appropriate card to use in this post.

The two Cornerstone Hammer Films sets that came out in '95 and '96, are in many ways what Topps' Shock Theatre should've been. They could've been a tad more expansive, but they did cover more than just the Dracula pictures. Here we get a second sighting of both Christopher Lee and Caroline Munro.

I got like 20 cards from the first series, but only scanned three, as I didn't think there'd be much interest in them. I really like the movie poster cards in the set, which if I recall correctly, I got all of them. The Gorgon is my favorite Hammer film, although depending on what day you asked me, I might also say that it's tied with Captain Kronos for my favorite (rounding out the top 3 would be The Mummy). The other card here features a wonderful shot of Peter Cushing and Susan Denberg from Frankenstein Created Woman, in what I believe is the best looking card in the first series.

Here's another one for the Jack O' Lantern collection. I don't know if anyone remembers this set, but if you don't, each card is basically a small Where's Waldo. There's a few more cards in the set that might work in a Halloween post, but this is the only one that I have so far.

Even though they weren't what he was best known for, Glenn Strange did make a few horror pictures, most notably as Frankenstein's Monster in House of Frankenstein, House of Dracula, and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.

I bet you weren't expecting to see Two ALF cards in a Halloween post. To be honest, I wasn't expecting to find two Halloweeny (Halloweenie?) ALF cards amongst my scans for this post. This one makes the post for Lon Chaney Jr. era Mummy Punch Me, or Bop Bag (those blow-up punching bags were sold under many different names over the decades). I liked ALF a lot back when it was new, and I still like ALF a lot now that it's old. Even after all of these years, it's still just as funny to me, possibly even more so.

That's it, you've reached the end of my Halloween scan dump. If you made it this far, congratulations! If you didn't, I understand; it was a bit long and wordy. Though, if you didn't, I guess you wouldn't be reading this part, would you?

Happy Halloween!