Tradin' & Thrifting

                             
Despite never caring much for formal trading, I seem to be doing an awful lot of it as of late. Well, at least a lot by my standards.

Since the beginning of the year, I've completed nine trades on the TCDB, and currently have two in progress. This averages out to just a little over one trade per week, which probably isn't a lot by some peoples standards, but it's exactly my kind of speed. I can move some unwanted cards out, and have some new blood coming in, all while not feeling overwhelmed, or needing to worry about accidently sending someone the wrong thing. Plus too, one trade a week doesn't take away from my blogging in any way (more probably would), so that's a good thing, I guess.

My scanner almost completely washed out the green from this Emerald parallel.

One of my favorite things about using the TCDB, is when I come across a familiar name. Usually it's a fellow blogger, but sometimes it's also just a person that I've had contact with before through the blog, which was the case a month or so ago when I came upon Bizzork, aka Brian, who had participated in a few of my past Free Stuff giveaways. And in his case I know him too from seeing his user name during the COMC Challenges. 

After finding him on the TCDB, I took a quick look to see if we had any compatibility trade-wise, which we did, so I sent of a quick proposal, which was accepted after brief bit of countering.

For someone who never cared much about SI for Kids (the magazine or the cards), I seem to be getting a lot of them all of a sudden (there's more coming in another trade). I never realized too that their size hasn't always been consistent, which is quite evident when looking at these 1993 and 1996 examples side-by-side.

I knew quite a bit of French at one time, and years later started to learn Japanese (that's a long boring story), and thanks to my stamp collecting, can read a little bit of Greek, but I never did pick up any Spanish. Which is kind of odd since my mom was fluent in it (I think that she's lost a little bit of it over the years though), and I would often her here using it to converse with native speakers. We also spent six years living in an area that was heavily populated by Mexicans (and before anyone loses their sh*t, that's how those folks identified themselves at the time). And if that wasn't enough I was friends too with guy from Colombia for about a year during that same time, and he would unintentionally slip into Spanish while speaking on a fairly regular basis -- and yet, with all of that Spanish being spoken around me, aside from a few choice words, I never learned any. Of course I can, and do, still enjoy Pro Set Spanish cards despite not being able to understand the non-English aspects of the set.

1990 Topps isn't terribly exciting, but this Howie is one of the disclaimer backs, so... yeah, I know, still not that interesting.

There were a few more cards involved with this trade, but the post office just had to do what they so often do these days, and try to destroy the contents of everything that makes it's way through their greasy clutches. This particular envelope took quite a beating and a few of the cards, including the best one (of course), weren't salvageable. I don't blame Brian though, it's just one of those things that now happens much more frequently than it used to. Looking at what survived , I'd still call it a pretty good trade though, and wouldn't hesitate to try and do another one with Bizzork.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Despite them being some of my favorite places to go to, I have not found myself visiting very many thrift stores so far this year. There's no real reason why either, I just haven't made much of an effort to go to any. I think I've hit all of two since Christmas. I had occasion to make it three this past week when my mom asked if I could stop and look for something at the Dollar Tree while I was out, the Dollar Tree that just so happens to be next to Serenity Thrift.

Serenity is very hit-or-miss for me, so even though I was gonna be right there, I didn't plan on going in. Then I got there, got in and out of the DT fairly quickly, looked over at Serenity, and figured why not. I'm glad I changed my mind too, as this turned out to be one of those "hit" times, and I was able to get a couple of pretty cool videos/DVD's...

I'm pretty burned out on war pictures, and have been for awhile now, but having never come across a copy of Force 10 in the wild before, I wasn't about to not get it just because I'm tired of the genre.

Apparently whoever Larry gave this to for Christmas back in '97 wasn't to enamored with it, as they never even took the tape out of the plastic. It's been 23+ years, but hopefully Larry will take some solace in knowing (if he reads this) that I would've enjoyed being given this tape, and will open it, and will watch it -- especially since I haven't seen it since I was a kid.

Robert Mitchum! Lee Majors! Saul Rubinek! Where do I sign up!!!! I've read about this film before, and supposedly it's not very good, but it's gonna be pretty difficult for me not to like a movie with those three guys in it.

Here's one that I actually know nothing about. I'm thinking that it's either gonna be really good, or really bad, and I'll probably have to be in a particular mood to wanna watch it. Also, I've ordered a few Archives Collection discs from the WB shop during Black Friday sales in the past, but never found one for sale anywhere before (my mom has found a number of them though), so it was kind of neat to finally do so.

I'm not sure why I didn't already own Moby Dick, as it's a film that I've always enjoyed, granted I only see it once every 7-8 years or so, but still. This is the only one from this group that I watched since getting them, and you know something... it's still good!

I like a lot of Tyrone Power's work, but this isn't one of his better performances (my opinion of course). The supporting cast is what drives this film. Well, that and the story, as that's pretty good too. I've only seen this film once before, many years ago on AMC (back when they were still commercial-free), and am looking forward to seeing it again.

It's looking like it's gonna be a busy week down here in the land of Sleeves, so I think if I can get the rest of the scans edited tonight, I'm just gonna be lazy and blog about my recent Sportlots purchases this week. Due to length, I'll have to break them into two posts. Neither will win any awards for writing, but they should have a few fun, and slightly different, items contained within, and will hopefully still be worth your clicks :)

What's a herko?

                                          
For all intensive purposes, hockey did not exist in my world growing up. 

My only pre-teen hockey experiences consisted of going to two Portland Winterhawks games when I was young, and having absolutely no clue as to what was going on. Then there was the Wheaties free hockey stick promotion (which I've already covered before) to celebrate the coming 1992 Winter Olympics. And even though I got two of those sticks, my brief interest in street hockey that ensued only occurred because I and most of my friends were just getting our first pairs of rollerblades around that time, and we wanted to be in them as much as possible, so toss in some free hockey sticks and pucks, and now you've got a bunch of non-hockey kids playing street hockey -- or at least what we thought street hockey was.

I may not have been a hockey kid growing up, but I was a sports fan, and did know a few hockey names. Well, a "few" may be a bit of a stretch. I knew two names, Wayne Gretzky (everybody knew that name), and Manon Rheaume. I wasn't one to watch Sportscenter, or any other national sport highlights shows, so I'm not exactly sure how I knew of Manon. My best guess though would be that I read about her in an issue of SI for Kids while sitting in a doctors office waiting room. 

It doesn't really matter though how I knew of her, the point is that I did know who she was, and I knew what she was doing/trying to do. Not being a player/person collector at the time, I doubt that I had any intention of collecting her cards, and yet I did have a copy of the 1992 Classic Draft Picks that led off this post, and what's more, it was the only card from that set that I ever owned. Like 99% of my original collection though, it went to a charity auction in the early 2000's, when I was certain that I would never go back to card collecting again (this is why you never say never, kids!).

Most of the show is a fog a now, but I can recall that even though I had no intention of ever collecting autographs, I was quite taken with two that I saw upon returning to my first Mall 205 card show  (Portland, OR) in over a decade, back in 2010. The first was a 2009-10 Bill Russell Panini Hall of Famed Signatures (which I did get one of a few years later), and the second was one of the many Manon Classic autographs (I don't recall which one though). Both were expensive (the Bill Russell being considerably more so), and since I wasn't looking to spend that much at the time, or looking to collect autographs (that started at my second show back a month later), I passed on both... but I was tempted though!

Fast forward a few years to whenever it was that I stumbled upon the card blogs, and I started seeing the occasional Manon Rheaume card pop up here and there, which I always kind of secretly admired, and vowed to try and get a few at some point. As per usual though, I would not remember that want until I saw another one of her cards being blogged about, and would then quickly forget about it again. 

The opportunity to finally acquire a few of her cards presented itself a few weeks ago when I noticed that my new favorite person to trade with on the TCDB, herkojerko (also known as, John), had a couple on his trade list. 

As great as these cards are, I still have no plans to do hockey, but going forward, will be doing Manon. Wait! That didn't come out right (or did it 😎). What I 'meant' to say is that I think I'll add her to my list of player collections, she can be my lone hockey representative.

This particular trade, which was our second (the first can be seen further down), did contain a few more cards, so if you've got a minute...

These three guys have shown up in pretty much every trade I've made so far. A lot of folks seem to have extras of Steve Atwater, Dennis Smith, and Ronnie Lott; most of which I seem to need. I don't know why, but receiving Action Packed cards in the year 2021 is just awesome!

I've spoken about some of the negatives that have come from this boom that we're now in, but one of the positives that I haven't covered yet, is that I've really started to appreciate base cards again. This isn't to say that I was anti-base card before last year, I just didn't go out of my way to seek them out, unless of course they were of the vintage variety. These days though, I'm acquiring more of them than I had in decades, and am enjoying doing so. I feel like this is me zigging while everyone else is zagging. The good news too is that I still need an awful lot of base cards, so if things get even crazier, I'll have something to occupy my time until the prices on the more expensive stuff start to come back down to Mars.

College cards aren't normally of much interest to me, and yet here we are! The Penny and Baby Jordan are from a McDonald's set. I don't even remember there ever being a McDonald's Classic set? 

This might ruffle a few feathers, but I've come to realize that I kind of hate Topps Finest, and I think that I always have. The packs were so expensive way back when, too expensive for me. And in my mind they weren't attractive enough to warrant such high prices. I don't think that I've ever opened a Finest pack from any sport. I despised the peels when they started doing them, and still do. I loathe the peel vs. don't peel debates (do whatever the f*ck you want, their your cards!). I hate that I can't take the ugly peels off of old cards for fear that the front of the card will come off with it. And if all that wasn't bad enough, a lot of cards from the early sets are prone to greening. I like the color green, it's probably my favorite color, but blotchy green skin is not a good look. It annoys me too that I need a lot of cards from these 'green' sets, cards that I'm not willing to pay very much, if anything, for. And don't even get me started on the green refractors!

As mentioned, that was actually my second trade with John, I decided to show them out of order if only because it would allow me to lead off the post with something a little different. I liked that trade, of course our first one was pretty good too...

It was about time that Reggie made an appearance! According to the TCDB, my Reggie Roby collection is now 39% complete. I think that it might actually be a tad higher, as they do have a cut signature listed, and I will never buy one of those, so that's one card less that'll be needed to complete his collection, thus raising my percentage a tad.

This is a fun scan, it's like a mini retrospective of Steve Atwater's Stadium Club cards.

I didn't realize how many playing card sets had been made until I started actively using the TCDB. This particular Ditka's Picks is a sunset card, so that's kind of neat.

And here's when I started to have some issues with static during this scan session. Anybody else ever have that problem? If so, do you have any tips on getting rid of it? If it is going to happen, it usually starts doing so when I'm almost done, but is still terribly annoying to deal with for those last couple of scans.

Besides packaging his cards really well, the thing that stands out to me the most about John's cards, is just the overall great condition of his stuff, especially the base cards. He obviously takes pride in not sending out crap, and I really appreciate that.

So in conclusion, I don't know what a "herko" is, but can say that John is certainly no "jerko". And if you ever get the chance to trade with him, I'd highly recommend it.

Wheelin' and dealin'

I can never remember the name of the site, but back when I first started reading the blogs, I often saw people mention a site that they used to track their collections. Then at some point, something happened to the site (unless I'm getting my wires crossed, I believe that Beckett had a hand in their demise), and people were sad. The sadness didn't seem to last though, as a new site (new for users, not new to existence) began to be mentioned shortly afterwards, this being the Trading Card Database.

References on the blogs to the TCDB were few and far between at first, but have grown steadily in recent years, so much so that it's now virtually impossible to go a single week without seeing mention of it. 

I didn't have much use for, or interest in, the TCDB when people first started extolling it's virtues, for I was still a set collector then, and had no trouble keeping track of my haves/needs via pen and paper. Things change however, and I switched from set collecting, to player collecting. All of a sudden pen and paper became useless as tools for making checklists, or maybe not useless, but were considerably more difficult to use, especially when a player hundreds of cards to track. I knew that I now needed something new for checklist making, and whether I liked it or not, there was really only one option, the TCDB.

My first couple of foray's onto the site didn't go well, but only because I couldn't figure out how to do anything (this is what happens when you're part luddite on your father's side). Towards of the end of last year I did finally start to figure things out though, and have been using it off and on for about two months now. The checklist part of the site seems to work well enough, but like many others, I find myself being drawn to the possibility of trading more than the checklists. Despite never being a huge fan of formal trading, I'm starting to get the hang of it, and have completed a few in recent weeks. 

I'm not sure yet if I'll be recapping every single future trade on here or not, but did want to show off this first batch, if only for the sake of posterity. 

Before I get to the trades, I wanted to first acknowledge a RAK from Randy, aka RefsInTheBack, who I have exchanged cards with via Twitter (you can find him on there by adding an @ to his handle) before, and am quite familiar with his collection. He offered up a couple of cards right after I started adding a want list to the site, and wasn't looking for anything in return. That's a hard deal to pass up!

I've probably owned a dozen+ copies of this 1991-92 Fleer Uncle Cliffy over the years, but with my propensity for giving cards away, I didn't hang on to any, and I found myself needing one for the first time in almost 30 years. 

This 1993-94 Franz  may look a bit gunky, but it's still in it's original wrapper, so that bread residue is thankfully on the outside. At one time I had almost the complete Franz Blazers run, but it, along with most of the rest of my collection, was donated to a charity auction in the early 2000's. Since I didn't think that I was ever coming back to card collecting, the donation seemed like a good thing at the time, and I guess it still was, but in retrospect I do kind of wish that I had held a few more things out, my Franz cards being one of them.

Thanks again to Randy for the RAK, it was a really nice gesture.

Next up is my first official trade on the site, this coming courtesy of budler, who I already knew from his participation in the Secret Santa two years ago. This was a 1-3 deal, which included a pair of Classic bruisers (my first cards ever from this set too btw), and...

... the destroyer of worlds himself, this time on a playing card! They may not be anything fancy these days, but I really dig these three cards, many thanks to Jim for making it happen.

A 3-13 trade with ravensray52 brought this next group. If you've been following along with the blog for any length of time, you had to know that there would be some Reggie's in this post somewhere.

It'll never not be weird to see Ronnie as a Jet.

I've probably owned more than a few copies of the Pro Set and Score cards here, but I wasn't collecting Dennis at the time, and big surprise, got a rid of them all.

Having never seen a 1996 Gilt Edge before, I never knew that their dimensions were slightly smaller than your average sized card. It would be curious to know the reasoning behind that move on Topps part?

Even with his shoulder problems, Steve was still dropping them until the very end. Love this sunset card, the refractor of which I currently have sitting in my COMC account.

This was a good trade too, as I was able to add cards of the my four main footballers. Thanks, John!

A 12-2 deal with AUTOGRAPHS2000 netted bunch of Cliff's, unfortunately four of them came unstowed at some point during their journey, which must've triggered some postal workers Spidey-sense, because that just had to be the corner of the envelope that got mushed. All four were base cards so it's not like it's the end of the world or nothing, but it still was a little disappointing.

This pair of Bruise Brothers completed the envelope. Now that I know what his entire checklist looks like, I think it'll be possible to complete Dennis Smith's entire run, this is due in large part to Panini not getting their hooks in him yet. Unfortunately the same can't be said about Steve Atwater, now that he's a HOFer, Panini is cranking out cards of him like there's no tomorrow. In fact if nothing changes by the end of this year, Panini is on track to have produced more cards of him in the last four years than he had during ten years of playing. Because of this, I'm really only focusing on cards from his playing days.

I can't remember the name behind the handle on this trade (and TCDB isn't showing the address details anymore), so I'll just have to say thank you to AUTOGRAPHS2000.

It's not talked about much on the blogs, but if you look around, you'll find some real horror stories involving trades on the TCDB. Having read a number of these cautionary tales, I've been extra cautious with who I'll trade with. 49ants is a user name that I seen many times on the blogs, so when he proposed a trade, I had absolutely no concern about making the exchange; what's good enough for my fellow bloggers, is certainly good enough for me!

I had been planning on adding a most wanted list for each of the sports to the blog, and even started to fill out those lists, but eventually thought better of it and scrapped the idea. I mention this only because Dennis Smith's rookie had been #2 on the football list, as it turns out a most wanted list wasn't even necessary to acquire this particular card.

As far as scanning cards goes, Topps' 1994-95 Embossed Golden Idols suffer the same fate as their 1965 Embossed set, no matter how nice the card is, the scans always come out looking like someone had been using the card to sand something. For the record though, despite it's poor showing, this card arrived minty fresh.

1996-97 Stadium Club Matrix is one of my all time favorite parallel sets, it's just too bad that the 3D-ish effect doesn't show up in the scans, and has proven quite difficult to photograph as well.

I couldn't resist! This was #100 and something. I really need to put a counter on the side of the blog, that way I wouldn't have to keep re-counting this collection every single time I add new card to it.

Thanks to 49ants for the great group of cards, I couldn't have asked for a better quartet.

So there you have it, my first three trades (with a RAK tossed in for good measure), dare I pull an Ed Koch, and ask how'm I doin'? That's rhetorical by the way, as I already know how I did with these :)

Thanks for taking a moment to look at my page.

My first Twitter trade

Twitter... it's a thing. Some people love it, some people hate it, some people love and hate it. Some people can't live without it, some people live just fine without it. Love it or hate it though, it's not going away anytime soon.

Personally speaking, I'm not very good at the social media, and it often makes me feel considerably older than I actually am, which isn't a good thing. Twitter has been good for the blog, and it's allowed me to get to know a few fellow bloggers a little better (in one particular case, a lot better), both of which have been good things. On the flip side though, there's a lot of rabble rousing going on, arguments over extremely trivial things, plenty of name calling, and lots of politics -- and all of the propaganda and misinformation that goes hand-in-hand with politics on social media as well.

Another popular thing on the Twitter, at least amongst card collector's, is trading. There seems to be a lot of good and bad with that as well, more good than bad though (at least from what I've been able to gather). I think I've been using the site for about a year and a half now, and up until two weeks ago, had never used it for trading before. This is mostly because a) formal trading isn't something that I enjoy doing a lot of, and b) most of the stuff I see people wanting to trade away tends to be of the higher end variety, which is something that I don't collect -- and even if I was interested in any of it, I wouldn't have anything to trade for it, as usually folks are looking for other high end stuff in return, which is the kind of stuff that I don't have for trade.

A few weeks ago though, Adam, who goes by the handle Alindz99, tweeted out that he had gotten a binder of 90's basketball cards, all (or least the majority of them) of which were going to be available for trade... 90's?.. Basketball?... My interest was officially piqued!

I don't collect a lot of base cards anymore, even stuff from the 90's, I've already seen it all way too many times, or I already have what I want (for the most part) -- but I do love me some 90's inserts and parallels, so I went ahead and asked if this binder contained any such things.

The binder did contain such things, I have pictures to prove it, speaking of pictures, Adam really went above and beyond by sending me literally dozens of binder page pictures via DM, it seemed like an awful lot of effort considering how small the trade ended up being, but it was an effort that I very much appreciated nonetheless.

Anyways, I got lots of pictures sent to me, most of the inserts were one's that I already had, and didn't really need any duplicates of, but there were two that stood out -- and not because they're crazy rare and valuable or anything, no, in fact they're both cards that can routinely be found in dime boxes. Instead they stood out because I didn't already have one of them, and the other is a card that I'm trying to get an entire pages worth of.

First up is the "new to me" card:



1994-95 Fleer 1st Year Phenom #8

It seems like it's been a lifetime since Big Dog's rookie season! Drafted in the #1 spot, Glenn had a ton of hype coming into the NBA, which I think he did a pretty good of living up to, or at least as good as anyone could playing for Milwaukee at that time.

1994-95 Fleer Super Star #4

Did anyone have more inserts than Fleer during the mid 90's? I don't think so! I have found four copies of this card in dime boxes during the last year or so, which is fine by me, because I absolutely love this card, enough so to chase an entire page's worth. With this latest acquisition, I am now more than halfway towards completing this goal. I feel the need to note too, that the card isn't miscut or anything, it was just a really bad picture by me, the cracked screen on my phone is really making the act of taking well centered pictures quite difficult (I know, first world problem).

So that's it, a two-card trade, certainly not the biggest Twitter trade ever, nothing like the one's that Matt routinely pulls off, but I'm still pretty happy with it, I might even have to try it again sometime.

I only spend about ten minutes a day on the site (there just isn't that much for me), so I'm glad that I saw this trade opportunity during one of those short stints, kind of makes me want to spend a little more time on there, just in case something else similar ever arises (kind of).

Thanks again for the trade, Adam! And to everybody else, go give him a follow, you certainly could do worse :)


Thanks for taking a moment to look at my page.

I need fewer hobbies

For someone who generally doesn't like formal trading, I sure have been doing a lot of it lately. Okay, technically I've only been involved in two (with a third possibly in the works), but it sure feels like a lot!

Scott, of I need new hobbies., and I, recently concluded a trade that had been in the works for almost six months. Thanks to me, there was a four-month gap between the beginning, and the end of the trade -- Scott, being the stand up fellow that he is, didn't hold that delay against me.

The above Ron Fairly buyback is what set the trade in motion. It's hard to believe that that one card would lead to such a large trade -- a trade by the way, that would see me ending up with cards from three different sports (gotta love variety).

Near the end of our back and forth, I asked Scott if he had any copies of Warren Moon's 1990 Score Hot Gun card (I'll save the "why" for a future post), he ended up having one, as well as quite a few other Moon's available for trade. The Collector's Edge die-cut and the UD Team Trio were the two that really caught my attention.

"Moon, the moon, the funkin' moon". A small prize to the first person who can identify the song that those lyrics came from.

All of these were extras that Scott ended up throwing in. There is a nice assortment of base, inserts, and parallels.

One more Moon, and a really great Shoeless Joe from the Kramer set.

Now we're starting to get into the meat of the trade. Not only does Billy McCool have a "cool" last name, but his last stop in baseball was spent with the Portland Beavers (1971).

Have you ever seen a card that you don't have so many times, that you start believing that have the card? The '69 Drabowsky just happens to be one of those cards for me, but now I do have it, so...

The bulk of the trade, as far as what I got, ended up being for 1971 Topps.

Even though the scans don't show it, most of these are in really great shape.

In my mind, these three are baseball card perfection! Great action shots, that couldn't be framed any better if you tried. I had seen the Severson many times, but the other two are completely new to me.

It's not often that you'll find somebody that has a '61-62 Fleer for trade, let alone one that features a true Hall of Famer. I still have a few of these from last year's COMC stockpile to get to, but this is the first card from the set that I've gotten this year.

Scott, thank you again for the trade, hopefully we can do it again sometime in the near future.


Thanks for taking a moment to look at my page.