Base Set Calling: Parallel Problem

Showing posts with label Parallel Problem. Show all posts

Friday, February 14, 2020

Anti-Collecting

OK, 1st: I am very Pro-Collecting.

But some of my smaller collections are not compiled, often ever so slowly, because I love the cards involved. Sometimes, I want a baseball card that I can attach to some facet of the history of the game — & sometimes, that can be a facet I definitely don't like.

Recently, a few cards that arrived in a package from the Night Owl fit this profile. He didn't know this when he sent them; he picked them out because he knew I collected certain cards, not that some of those certain cards would fit in one of my few "Anti" collections. I was very glad to receive them.

I almost titled this one "A Disturbance in the Force" because the cards were probably sent a day or so before I posted for the first time in quite a long while, seeking trading partners for the 2019 Archives set. They then arrived a day or two later, with a nice little pile of 2019 Archives cards included, several of which made my Tigers Best-of-2019 post a few days ago. They also came at a great time to be absorbing new cards as work things were kind of like the ole Sid Vicious quote from when someone asked him why he liked to bang his head against a brick wall for seemingly no reason: "Because it feels so good when I stop."

So, yeah, lately my 3.5 x 2.5 cardboard heroes have been an extra handy refuge from the ridiculousness of contracting for a government agency full of, well, nothing to do with baseball cards.

Maybe there would be a more deft way to work gov't employee misadventures into the subject of this first card if I pondered it long enough, but let's get on with the show. I like Manager cards:

Now today would be perhaps a better day to illustrate this collection with an AJ Hinch card, something I still want to acquire to go with this one, rather than the other random Manager cards I stumble across.

For my Managers collection, I don't really care what card it is - a real Manager card the likes of which haven't been created by Topps in several years now, or any card from their playing days, or even a prospect card, like this one. I don't think I have ever had a Manager's prospect card, because until just recently, prospect cards for crusty old baseball Managers weren't an old enough concept. Nowadays, we have shifty young baseball Managers.

I had not thought to assemble a special page of Houston Asterisks cards, though I guess if an AJ Hinch card turns up, and I have a few random Carlos Beltran cards that don't fit anywhere, and I have this Alex Cora card now ... maybe I will assemble such a page now that I think about it. I have been routinely dumping any random Alex Bregman minor 'pulls' I pull for a while now but he still falls out of my packs all the time anyway; I also have some nifty shiny stuff from 2011 Update for Jose Altuve that has probably totally crashed in value now. So, maybe some of those cards will need a home too I guess.

As for my thoughts on the whole scandal, they are incomplete. The big press event today at the opening of Spring Training was rather anti-climactic, in my opinion. I think like many controversial things in baseball, only time will tell. A lot more of the real story will come in the future, though probably a little faster in the everyone's-a-publisher Social Media Age than it would have in the 20th Century, when we wouldn't hear much about it all until a few key people retired and maybe wrote a book.

I think the rather wooden and trite things coming from the mouths of the Houston stars still trace back to the "everybody else was doing it" defense that Beltran has pointed back to some. That is a slippery slope in human affairs; it is far easier to do something wrong when you first convince yourself that other people are doing it too. The next thought is "They made me do it."

What all was happening around the League at the time perhaps remains to be seen. The report on what the Red Sox (and the guy pictured above) were up to in the 2018 season is still in the breathless media @BoringSpringTraining future. I figure that might crash the value of my randomly (packs, man, all the Trout packs I could find) assembled stash of JD Martinez Rookie Cards, including some more shiny goodness.

All that be as it may, or all that as may it be, I now have a baseball card to connect me to Alex Cora, a person who is now far more permanently a part of baseball history than he was six months ago.

Now Night Owl's package had the seeds of another Anti-Collection in it too, but these aren't the funnest of topics so let's check out the fun cards he sent, like this one:

From way downtown!

I haven't blogged about my totally random Octavio Dotel collection in many years. It is not one I go out and work on all that purposely. I discussed it once in a post called Bring Me The Arm of Octavio Dotel, cuz sometimes I think you could carefully photoshop his right arm onto an Andre Dawson card and it might kinda fit. The above card certainly gives that impression. I also wanted his cards because he held the record for playing for the most teams in MLB:

Maybe I should just build a collection of his cards from around the AL Central. But then if I do that, I would probably have to do the same for Joakim Soria, and he always just looked shifty to me. I like Octavio quite a bit better, even though his record has been broken by Edwin Jackson now. I will probably collect his cards right along with Dotel's, but with a simple focus for each: I want a binder page of one player, in 9 different uniforms.

Jackson even appeared seemingly out of nowhere in Detroit (for a 2nd stint as a Tiger, or 3rd, I forget) starting last August, and kind of refuses to announce his retirement right now despite putting up an ERA > 9 with the Tigers for the 2 months. Not surprisingly, no baseball cards resulted. Also not surprisingly, Topps actually did manage to create a few cards for him over the last two years, but since one was a limited Topps Now card and the other was a fairly rare insert in 2019 Big League (I pulled the Ohtani card instead, which is both more valuable, but wanted less, by me at least), Jackson's final 2 cards are hella expensive, from my perspective, considering that very very few people actually want them to celebrate the career of Edwin Jackson. So it goes in this crazy hobby.

Another card the Night Owl sent nicely ticked off an entry on my long neglected Want List over to your right. I did just update it. Way back in 2013, I decided to attempt my first "Master Set." I am still attempting it, but I am in no rush. The COMC card cemetery-warehouse will hold the cards I need in it forever and ever, amen, until I get around to rescuing one of the 19 copies of each still available.

I decided to primarily finish off this set in the "foil" versions because I liked seeing all the Hall of Famers on a bit of shiny for a change. I also appreciated that this design didn't waste so much space where the priceless Relic was supposed to go (in that little area where the cap logo can be seen) as on so many other after-thought insert sets. This one scanned particularly nice:

I liked adding this card to my collection so much I figured I should share the back of it with you too, as it has the perfect baseball detail ending:

Now that is a great insert card. It perfectly celebrates a bit of baseball history in a nicely themed insert set.

As I was cracking the right binder open for it, I decided to re-visit the set and see how Topps did with it as a whole, compared to the above gem. I will complete it eventually and enjoy absorbing the best cards in it, like the above. The other week or so I was pissing and moaning about Topps adding Fernando Tatis Jr. to the "Greatest Players" inserts in 2019 Topps Baseball. But that was not some new Rookie Card mania development:

Bundy was a Hot Rookie back in 2013 when these cards were inserted in packs of Topps Baseball. As a recent first round pick, collectors were impatient to get their hands on their newest retirement plan portfolio. Of course back then, the cards weren't so handily identified with the RC logo outside of the base cards, though it was starting to sneak on to some 'other' cards, like the '71 minis in 2013 Update.

But Topps would do whatever it had to do to make more Hot Rookie cards; this Bundy insert would include an autographed version. What did it have to do for an extra young Rookie to Chase History?

Yup in the same set where I learned that Nolan Ryan's 5,000th Strikeout victim was Rickey Henderson, I learned that Dylan Bundy didn't give up a run in his first 30 innings in class A level Minor League play.

It's that type of thing that leads me to collect just 9 cards from a Topps effort sometimes.

Ahh well, that was a detour from the wonderful package of cards in the mail. It also held several of these:

Most of the rest were posted the other day, but I am glad to include this one. Red+Blue makes for a great '75 card, mostly pleasing to look at. But it does remind me of something really dumb I wrote on here when I first discovered these cards: "it seems like Topps skipped using any kind of weird filter to recreate weird old analog photo and printing technology like they have done on some recent retro releases."

That has got to be the Most Wrong thing I have ever written on this blog.

Even on this simplistic, yet incredibly repetitive back-ground for a Tigers card, Topps deployed one of the worst filters I have seen since the "Raccoon Eyes" filter that obliterated card after card in their most recent attempt at re-creating 1960 style cards in 2017 Archives (which now that I think about it, includes a perfectly horrible Alex Bregman card to pair with that Alex Cora card at the top of this post).

As for the background on the Greene card seen here, that is something Topps has been using for a good 15 years or so. The Tigers players are walked outside to some certain spot at their Spring Training complex in Lakeland (soon to happen again, this year) and asked to stand in front of this lush Florida vegetation, kind of seen behind Greene there. Some years, it kind of looks like a jungle. And the player standing in front of it is a Tiger. Knock me down with a hammer already. Ironically, if they hadn't used the crazy time filter they went with for these in-authentic takes on 1975, it might have been a nice double visual pun to put Greene in front of all that green. Sigh.

Fortunately, not all of the '75s in this year's Archives had that distracting faded background -

Now I hope you were paying attention to the previous card, so all the exciting artificial scarcity of this card gets you so excited you will want to whip out your wallet and buy some. Err, actually, I hope you will forget that silly notion completely.

What is different about this card? It is a parallel. What kind? The purple baseball parallel? Possibly. I have no idea how Topps may have tried to name these. The card also has a black image boundary/frame, rather than a white one. For many collectors, the key detail is actually on the back: 008/175. If it had been 006/175, I probably would have sent it back to Greg, because some nuttier collector than me would want to pay him extra for the super cool Uni # copy of this parallel.

But as it is, I was actually quite happy to receive this card, as I knew there would be parallels of the '75 style cards and really really wanted to see how that turned out. There would of course be a super easy way to make a parallel of a 1975 style Topps baseball card, given the colorful design. It wouldn't be totally historical however, as 1970s Topps didn't fool with such shenanigans.

May as it be, this card will also have a permanent home in my collection, on a binder page still under construction: Parallels Gone Bad.

Here is another one of it's future page-mates, also an All Time Great Face of the Franchise Hall of Famer like good 'ole Al:

Hmmm, what _could_ have been done for this card with a teeny tiny bit of thought and effort?

I think this particular Anti-Collection won't lack for contestants, sadly. Even one of the more iconic Topps parallels of all-time, the /#'d to the current year Golds, will supply a couple cards:

I call that one the Shards of Glass parallel. Looks painful.

And yes, I did just write "a couple", but I am going to wrap this one up and leave you deep in anticipation of all those bad parallels I will show you some day, but I think even for Anti-Collections like that one, the blog can do without re-living the 2018 Urinal Cake Golds more than is absolutely necessary.

I guess sometimes baseball cards results are like baseball results. Pitchers Balk, Hitters collapse on the ground after an epic 3rd Strike, and Fielders drop lazy pop-ups. And those still make the high, err, lowlight reels, just like the cards in my Anti-Collections.

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Beguiling Binder Pages #12 and 13

Finished a page today … I'll change the numbering system again next time. I finally got it figured out. I think. Here 'tis:

Yes, I was glad to see this one. The first page from the Update part of the set.

It was a tough decision to attempt extending this project to the Update cards. Without two key decisions by Topps, it wouldn't really be possible.

What's that Dan Haren card there in the center … what does that logo say? Chrome? Yep. I am using Chrome cards for the all-parallel Update collection.

It really wouldn't be possible without them. Last year, Topps issued a small set of 55 cards from Update done up in the Chrome style, though, surprisingly, without quite the hoopla they put in a regular Chrome set - just two parallels (Gold and Black), and one quite lame insert set. These were the "Mega-Boxes."

I enjoy my project as it moves along, but for the Update cards, several possible parallels don't exist - Toys R Us purple, Factory Set Orange, Wrapper Redemption Blue Sparkle, and Wrapper Redemption Silver Slate. and Opening Day Blue Foil. Wait. Opening Day is a different set. So is Topps Chrome. That helped me rationalize a little, since I do use Opening Day Blue Foil in the Series 1 and 2 pages where I can. The only thing different are the card #s and a logo on the front; the photo and the Turtle remain the same on the vast majority of cards. Shin-Soo Choo, though, got the most different Sea Turtles last year, with 4 different photos.

But this begs a certain question - why don't I use all sorts of the various Chrome parallels for this project? I considered it. With these Update cards though, the only two parallels, Gold and Black, were the same as two of the base parallels. This is also basically true of the standard 220 card Chrome set, excepting at least the Sepia and Atomic parallels I still hope to obtain an example of one day, perhaps a few others.

And overall, I'm not a big fan of Chrome cards at all. For fun and to complete my full look at the Sea Turtle design, I have a set of the 2013 Topps Chrome base, mostly to look for image variations from Series 1 and 2. And in the long run, I am going for a collection of the Xfractor versions of those cards as you can see there on your right or through this link.

The use of the Update Chrome cards led to a different problem - there are a few pages that don't have a card from Update Chrome. A pickle. I can complete such a page, but it's not easy. I'll show you one day, I hope. I do have a couple that are over the difficult part….

Of course another Topps decision aside from the Update Chrome set also made that page possible - the introduction of a new parallel - the Sapphire. I quite like them, a pretty baseball card. The first thing I have to do completing an Update page is find the Sapphire, before I can worry about the Pink, Black, or Camo (I also need one of each on each Update page - ugggh. Tough project.)

These come in an edition of /25, which is quite unfortunate. In 2011, the Update release also included a new parallel that was extended back to the Series 1 and 2 cards already released - the Hope Diamond, which came in an edition of /60. Much easier to get a hold of.

Incidentally, I have been trading some with a collector who is not only putting together a complete set of this year's Sapphires, but is only 3 cards away from a set of the 2011 Hope Diamonds - 280 Andrew Bailey, 497 Alex Avila, and US207 Frank Robinson. If you might know where any of those three cards are, I can get you in touch with him.

OK, OK, the cards have done scrolled off the screen again. Let's see some more baseball cards….here's page 13:

This was indeed a lucky 13 page. For the first time, I have run into a page of 9 cards with 7 blue teams.

And out the window go my color-choice goals for this project. Where? What? There on the Chris Johnson card. A blue Sea Turtle on a blue parallel. I picked him because at least his team logo has the most red of the possibilities here.

There is no escape. A blue Emerald looks terrible. A blue Sapphire would be the very problem I am describing - blue-on-blue. Yet this page almost holds one example of each possible parallel I can use for the Update cards, save two: printing plates, Silks, and Platinum 1/1.

So now I have finally been pulled all the way into the bizarre world of 21st Century baseball card collecting, which for so many is no longer about completing a simple set of baseball cards, or obtaining a desirable Rookie Card of their favorite baseball player. I've questioned it before, but what, ultimately, is really the point of owning a 1/1 baseball card? Particularly when the 1/1 cards are just a color variation from an otherwise identical edition of that same baseball card? Yes, it makes people happy to own one. I shouldn't criticize that. But I just can't wrap my mind around such a pleasure I find so strange - I own this, and you can't.

And now I want one. It would give me my own strange pleasure to replace that Chris Johnson card with the Platinum 1/1 version. Or any of the other 6 blue cards on this page. I could settle for a Printing Plate I guess, though that is not my first choice. I have one on another page, though at least I pulled that one from a pack myself - my first 1/1. You never forget your first one. And I have purchased one other Printing Plate, for one of those pages with no Update Chrome available.

Silks, ahh, another topic for another night. I should probably wrap this up and click over to eBay. There might be some new 2013 Topps parallels listed...

Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Beam Me Up, Scotty

I've been half-heartedly looking for this card for a long time. I knew I would find it, but I had no way to know which card it would actually be:

I think you can probably connect this card to the title of this post. Unless, perhaps, you are also too young to not understand the reference when a bald guy says "Make it so."

That's Strike-Out King Mark Reynolds starring on this card as he is about to be whisked aboard the USS Enterprise, from back in the days when he played for the Diamondbacks. Reynolds surfaced on First Base in Milwaukee this year, another marcher in the long parade of nothing at the position for them, outside of the years it was manned by someone named Cecil, or the son of someone named Cecil. Lately the ennui of that carousel is even affecting the guy just across the chalk line attempting to guide the players from the Coaches Box, as they told their 1B Coach to hit the road recently. Though when you think about it, how you can screw up relaying signs from the home dug-out to right-handed hitters bad enough to get fired? What else does a First Base Coach even do?

But I digress. I'm sure you're not surprised. Of course, this is actually a David Eckstein card, and the last thing I ever want to collect, or one of the oh so many such things these days, is David Eckstein cards. The man who seemingly single-handedly destroyed my beloved Tigers during the only World Series this century where they managed to win a single game. It's not easy watching your team being beaten by a guy who is only 5' 7" tall. When Jose Altuve finally achieves his Free Agent freedom from Houston and does this to your team in some future World Series somewhere, you'll know what I mean.

So I like how the 60th Anniversary Diamond Parallel is soooooo sparkly and shiny with lots of shiny colors, too, and you are starting to wonder just what Reynolds will say to Captain Kirk when he meets him, that you forget all about David Eckstein on this card. Well done, Topps. Or, perhaps, Scotty picked the wrong guy, though by 2010 it was too late for Scotty to fix things for me. Unless he activated some sort of time-space flux distortion field….the Enterprise was always good for messing around with Time. Maybe there's hope for the 2006 Tigers yet.

I hope to find more of these cards. Normally the baseball players that get sent to some bizarre tale in outer cheese-fi movies all in the mind of some demented baseball card collector, well they are much more anonymous, as on another recent acquisition:

Though I must admit that lurking Pirate center fielder is pretty much completely amorphous on the regular issue base card as well.

Other times, Scotty can't seem to lock onto just one baseball player amongst all the oh, the humanity on a baseball card, and their baseball kidnapping victim has to stay in another mundane baseball game watched by the Topps photographer:

And then still other times, no matter how much Spock re-modulates the tri-corder or Jeordi re-configures the deflector array (writing a Star Trek episode must be the easiest thing ever - when the characters get painted into a plot corner, you can just make up new technology to solve their problems), they absolutely can not seem to even detect an Umpire, who I guess have pretty much always seemed to be fairly impervious to modern technology:

Maybe after this season and the success of instant re-play, they should try again.

Now I must confess I have been a bad blogger and I haven't even perused my ever increasing stacks of these cards for the best examples of these. Which has many reasons - my collection of recent cards that I actually have access to as I type, is in an extreme state of disarray as I prepare it for hibernation again in the coming off-season, and I select cards to finally beam-up to COMC and make all that ripping the last several years be a little more worthwhile. And thus I will soon have some more trade list pages for you to peruse over there to your right. So I did happen to have all my Lineage inserts and parallels sitting around when the wonderful Mark Reynolds Beam-Up card showed up recently. Err, the David Eck .. no, screw it. Hands down, the best Mark Reynolds card evah.

And I have had all this fun tonight with just a baker's dozen of these diamonds at hand, while declining to share a totally faaaaahbulous example of a Diamond Tatooine Card, because that would be the wrong parallel universe for this post, and I'm saving that up for a possible homage to a Legend of Cardboard.

Imagine what I could do with hundreds of these things sitting around. Oh yes, I can imagine that….

Sometimes, these cards don't make me wander off into my relatively minor affair with sci-fi make believe. I've never actually watched all the episodes of Star Trek (I heard that gasp from the hardcore Trekkies that wandered in here at random). I did that on purpose as I watched friends obsess over the whole deal, so I could always enjoy the idea of catching an episode I've never seen before, knowing this TV show would be "on" the entire rest of my life. And now more than ever I suppose, when I could summon the complete checklist of episodes with just a few clicks on the track-pad and check off all the missing boxes whenever I wish.

So please don't think I will be wandering off into the many worlds of cards with aliens on them (though I do pull the very best ones from some of the stacks I do have), nor will I be getting into ordering up printed Customs like this one:

With that one, I am content to enjoy a cribbed digital version from this neat-O blog: http://metsfantasycards.blogspot.com

These Diamond Anniversay cards don't always whisper "sci-fi" to me because sometimes, they are straight-up magnificent baseball cards:

And this from a collector who's just not that into Chrome, or Rainbows (despite building a Rainbow Set, go figure) or especially anything Bowman, where this kind of stuff is all the rave, though I know I probably I like these because I like actual Rave accessories quite a bit. Sometimes Ooohhh, Shiny + Hall of Fame just simply works.

As I sort my acquisitions of the last several years I have reached one conclusion about these chimerical diamonds of relaxation, and that is: I'm keeping all the ones I have. I had thought I could make a wicked cool looking binder page of the very best ones. Then I thought what the hey, I could make a couple three of those pages. I mean, with 2011 Series 1, Series 2, Update, and Lineage, I would have 1,190 of these to pick from. But soon I realized what would be coming….something to do with that COMC credit left over the glorious day I finish the Rainbow Sea Turtle project. A way to help all my fellow bloggers who have their own little stacks of these, quietly curling their way towards making the stack fall over, who could instead send them to me for safe-keeping, and proper straightness training bound up properly, in an Ultra-Pro Platinum binder page.

Yes, there have been a few things I have found useful in life I learned watching Star Trek. Such as this one:

Collect Long, and Complete

Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Beguiling Binder Page #5

So good to be at home - where I can get baseball cards delivered.

A few came the other day, a small lot of 2013 purple parallels. It filled 2 crucial slots in my ongoing Parallel Project as well as one in a small side project, and included a David Price card that will likely pay for the whole lot when ever I finally find the time to assemble a box to send off to COMC.

How is the project coming along, you ask? This is my 7th page completed for a 990 card set. I have reneged on declaring a Series One page completed due to dislike of the Kevin Millwood card I used for reasons illustrated below. I have a whole lot of other pages waiting for either a single keystone card to complete the page, or one difficult card to appear to release a mishmash of possibilities amongst the retail parallels I could use on the page, especially in Series 2. I know doing the Update set this way will be a years long slog, needing a /25 Sapphire on every page just as a starting point, but I'm not too worried about that with the baseball card buyer's resources of ebay and COMC available to help.

One of those slots filled yesterday (the Ryan Dempster) completed a page, card #s 395 ~ 403:

This page has one of my favorite parallels of my whole project so far, the David Wright card. That edition there is the Opening Day 'blue foil' version, which works just exactly perfectly for the Mets' cards. Well, last year it did at least. This year's cards don't have enough orange on them to keep you awake while perusing the Mets cards, which is a comment on the main 2014 design, not the current Mets team. I like colorful baseball cards, obviously.

It took me a while to decide on some rules / preferences for which parallel to use of which player. The Wright card was a bit of a no-brainer, as that was pack pulled. The black and pink on this page, well, that mostly depends on what shows up available cheaply as part of a lot, which is how I ended up with a really nice teal-on-pink card of a great Mariners pitcher who generally mows down hitters in the shadows of a more famous rotation mate in an obscure corner of baseball country.

It also didn't take me long to realize I didn't want red teams on Target cards, or blue teams on Wal•Mart cards. And the basic combination of red-on-blue looks so nice on the 2013 design that I tend to select it for favorite cards, or favorite players, such as for this example of my general like of Aroldis Chapman 'In Action' cards, even though so many of them are basically the same.

For the wrapper redemption 'Blue Sparkle' cards, obviously I nixed the blue teams, though that leaves plenty of options on this page. Generally I like the cards with a mix of tones to the background, as then you end up with green sparkles in the image contrasting nicely with the blue sparkles of the border. Thus, images with infield dirt or vibrant turf work best; I'm sure the Dempster card or the Aviles card would be very nice as a Blue Sparkler. But sometimes I just have to go with what is on hand in the stacks of cards before they head off to a hopefully friendly not local internet re-seller.

All those selections left just a decision on the mysterious Tom Wilhelmsen, card #402, perhaps a sly bit of dyslexia on the part of the Topps set editor, and a footnote for a future blog post.

But really, for the Ricky Williams of MLB, what other parallel could be used but the green one?

Wednesday, May 14, 2014

A Lot Going On #2 / What IS That? #9

I've been wanting to post this card for a while. Heck, I've been wanting to just post at all for a while. That job in the Town Without Baseball Cards became a 16-days-straight marathon.

But I made it all the way home finally, for the first time in 5 months. To where the bulk of my baseball cards live.

And my scanner, as in an actual sheet of glass with a cover real-deal scanner. So I scanned a card for you to ponder:

I have loved this card since the day I pulled one from a pack. Because of course, it has A Lot Going On.

At this point though, I have to stop and acknowledge a source I borrowed for the format of my blog; awhile back I noticed one of my other main card blog reads just over to your right there doing this. Repeating a post title with a sequential # is of course borrowed from the card blog that got me blogging, which else but the inimitable Night Owl Cards.

I really liked 2012 Update for some reason. I put it together by simply purchasing pack after pack. I can't remember what I was chasing in it, or why, but looking back on the binder pages now, well that is an enjoyable activity. It is definitely binder worthy. I am starting to have my doubts about that on a few other collecting efforts I have ongoing.

That's Brian Bogusevic there on that card, as even my sorta pro scanner can't handle foil-on-black. Bogusevic had been traded to the Cubs not long after '12 Update was released, though of course he still ended up on an Astros card in 2013 Series One. Which begat him a Cubs card in '13 Update. Perhaps that created the mojo that had him shipped to the Miami Marlins last November, in exchange for the ice-card man Justin Ruggiano. Topps seemed to know the future on his career as he was left out of '14 Series One and he reportedly had a tough go of it in Spring Training this year. He is currently "raking", as they call it, back down in AAA, but Miami is loaded with young outfield talent and I'm not quite sure why they felt the need to trade for Bogusevic to start with.

Be that as it may, this will always be one of my favorite surfboard cards. I always like cards showing the railings in the stands - they set up a great sense of the lines of the image.

And what a menagerie this image contains. Quick, name another baseball card that features two different uniforms of the same team on the same card. Or one that features two player uniforms AND a team executive get-up too.

What is that exec up to anyways? Drinking a beer in the stands? How many baseball cards show an actual container of beer? It looks like a tall-boy of Heineken to me, but let's go to the Zoom and find out:

Hmm, could be one of those energy drink things the kids today are all so addicted to that they can't figure out why they don't have any money to spend on sensible things like baseball cards. I'll just always presume this is a can of beer though. Beer and baseball, mmm-mmm.

But that is just ho-hum compared to what else is happening on this card. Over to the left of the would-be drinkin' exec, it appears a now somewhat frightened fan brought her dog to the game. A dog on a baseball card? I know that happened in those wacky 90s, but in the stands? Let's make this laptop in my lap earn it's keep:

Rover's arm looks a little stiff there, must be … stuffed. ? A stuffed animal on a baseball card? Surely even the 90s couldn't have accomplished that?

And what is going on with that stuffed dog anyway, it appears to be wearing something. It has multiple colors and some sort of number or icon, much like a … baseball uniform. Four uniforms?

And that older gentleman calmly checking out this sweet catch by Bogusevic (the baseball appears on this great card too - it is snagged safely in the glove), he is wearing something that sure looks to have an S-T-R-O on it - A-S-T-R-O-S = another uniform. Five different uniforms on one card? That has to be some sort of record. Four from the same team, even an All-Star Game card couldn't achieve that.

Then we have a final mysterious element:

So What IS That? A coat? A purse? And what's in there? If Bogusevic doesn't make this catch, is this person going to bring the pain down upon him somehow?

And Who IS That? Looks nicely "Chinese-Eyed", an expression from my youth which had nothing to do with ethnicity. Is there a bong in that coat-purse thing? Is Lindsay Lohan a let's-go-to-the-stadium baseball fan? Nice hat.

I like cards with lots of mystery elements; I still like the very first one I found, and I must admit one reason I finally got around to blogging up this 2012 card is that I want to simply show-off a recent acquisition of a special edition of the card I wrote up in the first installment of this series. I didn't make it on time for an apropos anniversary posting a few days ago, but I am just tickled, of course, pink:

Friday, April 25, 2014

I can start buying my retail Heritage now

At least when I am able to get near a Target at least, which is not always easy for me. I am currently working in the Town Without Baseball Cards again, but I had to make a run to a freight terminal today to pick up a load of seedlings.

And I did not pass the red bullseye along the way without stopping for some baseball cards.

My first little cellophane pack inside the blister pack was very, very unique in my baseball card pack ripping experience:

3-for-3 there as you can see. You might have to take off your sunglasses to see the cards in this post, sorry about that. No time to hook up the so-so little mobile scanner I bought, or to re-shoot these cards with the cellphone camera.

I like black border cards. The more people I read crying about how they hate them because they "chip" so easily, the more I like them. Here is a handy tip: a black Sharpie type felt-tip pen can erase those durn little white "chips" right quick. Will this make me eventually be prosecuted as if I trimmed a mega-valuable T206 card and then lied about it? Hahaha.

So I have been looking forward to these cards. They snuck up on me last year, after I had decided to stop purchasing Heritage. This year I have been waiting, which has worked out well enough so far, as I am almost always in towns without baseball cards, when I am even in an actual town.

Except the Target I visited today had only three of these blister packs. I am wondering how often I will be able to find these…

Ugh. Too much black? None more black? Perhaps. This might well be the baseball card with the most black ink surface area of all-time. The crappy photograph I am presenting just makes it look darker, but it's a poorly lit card to start with. Normally I like 'sunset' cards - the ones shot when the sun is going down - but I won't be saving an extra copy of the normal white-border version of this card either.

Thankfully, I also pulled this card:

I love this card; the looking back pose isn't used that much, and I always like seeing the MLB logo on a baseball card. There is a much better scan of it on Night Owl's blog.

Hey, wait … this means I pulled almost the same pack as Night Owl. I can't remember the third card in that pack, but it wasn't Chris Sale; I do know Cole and Ramirez waited for me together on that shelf at Target.

This happened to me last year as well - I picked up 9 of these parallels, and 2 of the 9 were doubles (both Tigers, as it happened). And three blisters were all I could ever find, like today. Uhh-oh.

And those 2 doubles were also from the high number > #425 / 'short-print' section of the Heritage checklist. Indeed, of the 9 cards I picked up tonight, 6 are high-numbers. This makes me think assembling a set of the #1-425 would be quite difficult. You would think collation of a 3 card pack would be a piece of … bubble gum? But of course, this is Topps, In Action. Speaking of Action, it appears that some Topps employee (or a contractor) had to individually tape over the top of each pack with Scotch-tape to get them to fit into the new, single-panel blister pack these appear in this year. Wonderful product planning there.

I won't be trying that. I do hope to assemble a set of 30 of these cards, one from each team. But I won't be real particular about which player makes my exclusive set. Well, that Gerrit Cole won't make the cut, that's for sure. So probably I will be a little picky.

But perhaps not, and that's where you come in. All of the cards pictured above are up for trade, save perhaps the Ramirez, unless you want to trade me the white border version. I also pulled Jay Bruce, Carlos Gomez, Domonic Brown and James Shields (hmm, a nice overcast Cloud Card looks very nice on the black border, I will be keeping that one too). I can definitely let 2 Cards cards go.

So if you pick up some of these parallels, keep me in mind. I'm also particularly on the lookout for the Jeff Samardzija card.

I am enjoying the Heritage cards I've been acquiring. They are so nice to paw through, card-by-card, in a stack. I have found lots of fun ones to share with you, in a little prettier way than bad cellphone pictures, and they are even scanned in already….type at you soon, I hope….

Thursday, November 21, 2013

Beguiling Binder Pages #3

A great mail day evening. A binder page is complete!

You can probably guess which was the hardest card on that page, which arrived today from blog reader Jimmy, who is building complete sets of the red-border cards from Target. I tend to select cards of perennial All-Stars from the East Coast, such as Cano, on the cheapest parallels possible to try and stay at least a little fiscally prudent in this completely imprudent project. I won't use a blue turtle on an emerald or a Wal•Mart blue-border, so that left a Bullseye card for Cano there.

It was also a challenging page due to an early acquisition of Koji Uehara on the hobby-only black border edition, which probably came in a lot of several such cards, well before the postseason. Uehara had such a stealth season until the playoffs, with some incredible stats this year. But then the pre-2013 #s on the back of his card look darn good too. There were probably 3 American League GMs kicking themselves during the games in October this year.

So that was a pretty nice pick-up for the project by this GM typing at you now. But it created a problem...5 more blue Sea Turtles to find pigment for. With Leprechaun and Wally-World-cards ruled out, that meant finding a 3rd low # parallel after the Uehara card, as only 3 cheap parallels were left to use for the blue teams - one from Geoffrey the Giraffe (Toys-R-Me purple), the pretty young things at Target, and a Topps Gold.

That's where the first of what I call the Hunter Safety cards was a handy find - the B.J. Upton /230 Factory Set Orange parallel. Those look sharp if you like bright things....if you are one of those boring people that think the world should be pastel everywhere, this isn't the project for you.

So finally trading with a second person building a parallel set was a big help. A number of Target Reds and a few emeralds from Jimmy came in for some of my Targets and 2012 Gold Foils. Jimmy also sent along enough Octavio Dotel and Miguel Cabrera base cards for me to finally start up some Player Collection lists to avoid duplicates. Thanks, Jimmy!

The haul of parallels also let me improve a page I had initially thought to be finished:

This involved a 3 team swap, something always exciting in Major League Baseball. It seems Drew Pomeranz really had a tough 2013 going on his baseball card. Photo/scanning/printing errors of some type on Topps' part just simply gave him an unattractive card; even a parallel couldn't save it.

But once I initially finished the page, I realized a foil parallel would cover for Topps. So with Jimmie's help Target Red was traded to Ryan Doumit, who then shipped off his camouflaged duds to Jason Hamel, who was glad to escape from the obscured world of Emerald Foil and let his vivid green background shine once again. This also got a blogger's card back on to the page as camo-Hamel had originally arrived from Ryan @ "O" No!!! Another Orioles Blog.

Confused yet? Don't worry, the Hot Stove Parallel League is just getting warmed up.

Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Let's Trade ... Blue Sparklers?

These are probably the ultimate scanner cards, though I only have a single season of scanning under my belt and I am a long way from making the big $ leagues to scan a "SuperFractor." I'm not sure I would recover from gazing into all those little circles, if I scanned one and checked the results, full-screen, the way I like to look at these cards. One of my next collecting goals is to buy a SuperFractor of some 2000-whenever draft pick who never even made it to AA ball. You can send me yours if you'd like, so you can quit thinking about how much $ you blew on that hot prospecting tip that just couldn't miss.

Fortunately, these cards have a million points of light for the scanner to bounce their laser off, and I just drool over the results like a tourist come morning after being transported to a Colorado ski town over night, i.e. a "gaper."

Here, gape with me now:

This is one of my favorites, though it would be darn near impossible for me to make anything less than a top 50 list of these, all tied for first. I think the aliens are sneaking up on Scott there while he is busy trying to play baseball. Watch out, Scott - The Blob is coming to get ya! You just have to think something bad is going to happen on a Poltergeist card.

I'll tell you right now, the best way to enjoy this post is to click on Mr. Sizemore, and let Blogger take you on a scroll-show of the results of my scanning efforts this evening. If I could find a Complete Set of only the high-quality scans of these cards, I would probably buy one.

Go ahead, mix up a drink, take your tablet over to your extra comfy recliner, and get lost in the stars for a little while. I'll wait.

That's the closest I got to a star card, for now though. Now that you have already scrolled through 'em, lazy side-to-side style, you can scroll along down the screen with me while I babble on about these a little bit. Any card that has both dirt and grass on it turns out fantastic on these. So do all of the New York Mets cards. I like the rosin bag picking up a best supporting prop there on this card, and the Mets' logo on the back of the mound too.

These "Reverse Tatooine" cards that have an all-grass background, of which there are plenty in the zoomed-in 2013 set, turn out very well, making me likely to pick them for use in my parallel project. But this card breaks one of the rules of the project - no blue Sea Turtles on a blue border parallel. So my trade stack of these tends to have a lot of the blue teams in it.

A lot depends on the image though...some grass is better than other grass, and we get to see lots more of those little shiny points of light twinkling at us, and who doesn't like that in their grass? This card was actually set up in a permanent home in my project for a little while, until I picked up a Camo border version of this card in a lot purchase, and this Blue Sparkler got bumped. And there is an even better entry in the weird world of parallels on that page anyhows - a Sparkler Error card that is pretty neat. I think someone at Topps was checking out the grass too much perhaps the night those were printed. There is actually a series of those across several different parallels. Naturally, I'm working on a special binder page of those, for future reference after I cut the grass some evening. Don't worry, I like to share.

Of course as the man sang one time back in the 90s, 'what is from the earth is of the greatest worth.' So the actual Tatooine cards in the set this year make the very best sparkler cards this side of, oh, I don't know, Labrador perhaps. Houston Astro cards always pose an existential question for me though. If you didn't have their players on your baseball cards, would they even exist?

I mean, if I had started this post with a "Quick, name a Houston Astro without looking at your baseball cards!", how long would it take you to do it?

That card is an example of how the various outfield walls around MLB can appear somewhat randomly on these cards, sometimes knocking the buzz out of these. I always wonder whenever I see this card if that is some sort of mark the Astros put on the outfield wall to help all their AA players trying to hit actual Major League pitching, gently telling them "look out there, aim at the crosshairs."

Other times though, the outfield wall becomes the star of the card:

This card was Designated For Permanent Assignment in the Parallel Project, until the Commissioner came along and starting dreaming up Franken-rules, like the second rule I already mentioned - that the back of the Turtle can't match the color of the card it is swimming through. We wouldn't want the players to get confused about which part is their Turtle-shell home and which part is off the edge of their world when things get bumpy. So the Commissioner had to tell this card it was to be Designated For Assignment, back to the trade pile, which happened to the equally cool Jeff Francouer card that didn't show up on time to be scanned for this post, and this one too:

... even though it didn't break the all-important No Matching Colors Rule #2. The Commissioner had to rule out cards that disrespected the other players enjoying their Cameo on someone else's cards (I know from my Base Card of this one that we see Torii Hunter and Albert Pujols here - quite telling how far apart they are in the dug-out on this 2012 shot, pretty sneaky there Topps - can't lose that in the Project).

It wasn't long before the Commish was summoned from his post-3-martini-lunch siesta, heard to mumble something about not actually wanting to let that cool slice of grass go to waste, to rule on another multi-player mash-up card:

That decision came quickly though: Ope! Which is baseball-ese for "NO." Not enough sparkly action for the high standards of this project, though the scanner revealed another entry in a new, not-yet-revealed-to-the-collecting-public Frankenset - This Card Is Watching Me, since Topps let a TV cameraman sneak onto the card.

No more multi-player cards allowed. "But what about that Todd Helton card you let in, Commish?", asked the Press Corps that is always bothering the Commissioner wherever he goes. The Commissioner again ruled nimbly on his somewhat wobbly martini and sparkly grass feet - Grandfather Clause. Helton is in. He's beaming out of the League this year anyway. "But that one looks like his teammates are beaming up, not Helton," some wag was quick to point out. Err, Reverse Psychology Grandfather Clause. Helton stays in. "But what about that Baltimore Oriole Wild Card Blue Sparkler card you let in? That one isn't very 'wild'." Would these reporters ever leave the poor Commissioner alone to find some more of those sweet organic grass cards? The Commissioner decided to give the Press Corps something to chew on. Baltimore Oriole Sparkler would be replaced. Page entry to the project revoked. Start over....and that was the first one completed from Series One too. This Commissioner is tough; maybe he should be given more time to look for grass cards.

Ahh, now there is a classic of the genre. The wall and that ever sweet shiny grass combine just exactly perfectly. Why, this card should be a #1 draft pick in the Project. And indeed it is. It seems the Commissioner has short-term memory loss at times, and he drafts the same player twice sometimes. No one can convince him to just give up those grass cards. He needs them when conflicts with Rule #1 arise, like when Reimold's set-neighbor, Zack Greinke, had such potentially potent looking grass on his card. But that type of grass is extra-expensive, so the card scouts looking for a Greinke entry for the project were directed down towards Target, which made them happy, because Target has better customer scenery inside than a bunch of baseball cards.

What? You forgot Rule #1 already? It was only 59 posts back now, you should really try and keep up in class better. Don't let that grass up there distract you so much. Rule #1 in the Parallel Project is that only one border color can be found on each page. Rule #1 and Rule #2 don't get along very well as a result, especially when Rule #1 trumps Rule #2 and an extra, more expensive parallel has to be acquired because Topps put 5 or even 6 blue cards on the same page. Maybe Topps lingers too long with the grass cards too. The Commissioner has heard rumors. How else do you explain Topps .998 batting average on the 89,420 different baseball cards they make every year, making a .002 strike-out rate of switched autograph stickers, letters not die-cut correctly, and the various other incessant complaints from their OCD customer base, who obviously aren't into the grass cards enough.

But it was darn nice of Topps to print these just simply beautiful sparkly cards this year. They even gave them away to their loyal customers, in spite of how much they whine about them.

The shadowy cards = nice.

When I first found more than a few of these cards in the same place, I thought they would make an incredible set of cards to own later on down the grassy road. But then my sometimes stupid let's-kick-it-up-a-notch impulse kicked in and I went for the greater glory of the all-Parallel Project. Then these cards could only be 1/9th, or perhaps 10/99ths of the set, as occasionally other from-the-Topps-factory-only parallels take their place, like the basically boring Silver Slate cards, and the outrageous, in a good way, Hunter Safety cards. Or even the also boring but oh-so-wonderfully-ego-stroking Platinum 1/1 cards, of which I scored the one of only one such card the Commissioner would allow in the project (all parallels must be represented by at least one card, even those extra dull printing plates, which is part of Rule 1, subsection b, as in boring), just the other day, finally.

Overall these cards can have a lot going on, and I sure enjoy them. The idea of building a whole set of them has sailed however, as easy pick-up lots on the ole eBay dried up some time ago, and the resellers here and there will only let you have one for a buck or three, plus shipping. So you could still do it if you really wanted, and you could afford the Bryce Trout editions. Luckily, or unluckily, in my case, there wouldn't be a Puig to chase on these. I really wish these had been manufactured for Update, but Topps has bigger customers to worry about than one goofy blogger with an over-fondness for the ultimate twinkly baseball cards.

The good news for you is that every card I scanned here is up for trade. And really, what player or team rainbow is complete without a boat-load of Blue Sparkles at the end of it? That grass is better than gold sometimes.

The bad news is that I am quickly approaching Last Call on trading season. An actual, no-Super Bowl-eligibility-for-this-card Trading Deadline. So if you are still reading this far down a blog post and you have been thinking you might have some parallels I need, well, it's time. In a few short weeks I will be leaving home and my beloved baseball cards behind for several months.

In the world of the Blue Sparklers, I need these cards:

(6 R. Howard or 10 A. Jones), 17 (Choo), 24 (Haren), (59 Rauch or 60 Bauer); 79 (Eaton), 89 (J. Santana checklist), (112 Reynolds or 118 Matsuzaka); (120, 122, 125); 157 (C. Capps), (192, 193, 194-197); (211 Parker or 215 Beckham); 235 (Westbrook), 271 (Familia), 277 (B. Ryan), (287 or 288); 312 (S. Hairston), 326 (Andruw Jones)

(368, 371, 372); 412 (E. Cabrera), (476, 478, 481, 483, 484), 490 (C. Ross), (508 Doubront or 510 McLouth or 511 Brantly); 545 (Presley); (548 Lackey or 555 Hanrahan); 597 (M. Scutaro), 646 (Aumont)

And the Commissioner's free agent negotiations resulted in a slight over-supply of these, all up for trade, though you'll have to know your favorite player's card # to see if I have that one you just have to have, somehow. It's November, you should know your favorite player's card # by now, geez:

Series One: 12, 16, 18, 30, 48, 51, 52, 53, 57, 66, 79, 100, 103, 105, 106, 116, 121, 126, 133, 144, 145, 149, 150, 154, 156, 160, 177, 182, 194, 206, 209, 214, 216, 218, 220, 226, 236, 239, 240, 257, 258, 259, 262, 283, 285, 304, 327, 328

Series Two: 341, 347, 348, 354, 363, 364, 367, 377, 381, 384, 400, 404, 408, 429, 432, 436, 438, 444, 450, 451, 471, 479, 482, 485, 492, 496, 497, 516, 518, 520, 524, 525, 534, 539, 542, 550, 557, 558, 560, 567, 574, 590, 601, 619, 623, 630, 632, 659

The other good news on these is that you don't need an actual Blue Sparkle card to pry one of these away from me, before they all get shipped off to COMC when Base Set's base gets way, way smaller come December. Any contribution to my Parallel Project or my other random set needs would probably work.

Now thinking card #s might lead you eagle-eye types to spot a Hero # card in there, and it's been so much boring old alpha-numerics scrolling along your screen for a while now that I figure I should hook you up with one last hit of that sweet shiny grass before the withdrawal symptoms get any worse.

My scanner just loves these cards, so much so that for this one (when it "automagically" detected the borders of the item I was scanning), for the first time ever it reported the dimensions of said item to be exactly 3.5" x 2.5", even though all I ever do with the machine is scan baseball cards that are all exactly that same size.

That's how perfect this card is:

Kinda puts anything in Topps Chrome to shame, if you ask me. Shiny? I call trump on shiny when I get lost looking at these.

This card already made the Project. And it's duplicate sitting around gathering dust here at Base Set can be yours. Whaddya got?

Base Set Calling