The 2013 ballot is out and the writer's will get a chance to make their options heard when they cast votes for the players we have marveled over in past years. I've only been on this little stupidity of a blog for less than a year,
so this is the first chance I have had to play god in regard to the Hall
of Fame ballot (if any of you give a rat's behind of my thoughts). So - do any of you care who I would give the nod too for a plaque in Cooperstown? We'll soon find out of you do, cuz if you continue to read, either you are hoping that I will misspell something in epic fashion, or you have drunk enough wine that you think I would be an interesting read.
How does one misspell "and"? Where's that unfollow button?
So, here's a nice, long cut and paste of the ballot. If they get my vote, they get a highlight:
Sandy Alomar Jr.- Jeff Bagwell - Craig Biggio - Barry Bonds - Jeff Cirillo - Royce Clayton - Roger Clemens - Jeff Conine - Steve Finley - Julio Franco - Shawn Green - Roberto Hernandez - Ryan Klesko - Kenny Lofton - Edgar Martinez - Don Mattingly - Fred McGriff - Mark McGwire - Jose Mesa - Jack Morris - Dale Murphy - Rafael Palmeiro - Mike Piazza - Tim Raines - Reggie Sanders - Curt Schilling - Aaron Sele - Lee Smith - Sammy Sosa - Mike Stanton - Alan Trammell - Larry Walker - Todd Walker - David Wells - Rondell White - Bernie Williams - Woody Williams
Yes, I ignored everyone that used steroids. Some of those players may have had a decent chance to make the hall with normal numbers. But they chose to get an illegal advantage over a long period of time, so they get the rest of that time with no vote from me. Some of the others might get a vote for me in different years - just not this one. Maybe I'm cranky today.
Every Thursday, I post a card showing a ballplayer wearing a throwback uniform from my collection. Hopefully, he will be wearing it well, with proper pants blousing. I'll try not to duplicate a uniform. The picture may be from the front of the card, or the back. Enjoy the uniforms from years past.
Edward Mujica - 2012 Topps Update - St. Louis Cardinals
Today's SIL is really a while in the making, and the actual "like" in my hands didn't come but a few days ago. See, Sam over at the Daily Dimwit and I have been working a trade for....crap, let's just say a while. He's held onto a card for me from his trade list in the hope (from my end) that I might find something he wanted for his needs. Well, days, weeks, months and the heck with it. My hope wasn't panning out, but I was able to secure a couple cards he would like. I told Sam I would be sending out his envelope, so just pack up my end of the trade with the loot I pulled from his November break.
Well, wouldn't you know it but I hit it big (in my book) in the break, snagging a 2nd card I have long desired. So this is really a two-fer SIL.
Sale, who should have a good long career ahead of him, and Iguchi, who will become a personal collection project in the future. Why Tadihito? Here's why...
Every Thursday, I post a card showing a ballplayer wearing a throwback uniform from my collection. Hopefully, he will be wearing it well, with proper pants blousing. I'll try not to duplicate a uniform. The picture may be from the front of the card, or the back. Enjoy the uniforms from years past.
Mitch Williams - 1993 Upper Deck - Philadelphia Phillies
For the next PWE trade we hear from Julie.
Usually, I just drop Hallady cards on her every so often.
Now she swings by my blog and hits the PWE page.
Needed some cards, so she sent gave me a quick shout.
Either my want list or some Sox parallels in return, I tell her.
Really simple and quick trade we are putting together.
Hit the post office the other day with my stamped envelope.
Email said that the cards Julie packaged should arrive soon.
Received the cards Julie sent me earlier today.
Enjoy.
Adam at Thoughts and Sox shoots me an email going "Hey man - you got some cards I would like". So I reply with "Cool dude - whacha wanna send back?" And Adam is all like "How 'bout these?"
And then I go "Those would be awesome!" And then Adam says "Righteous, bro."
And that is how trade #2 was completed. See - I like cool White Sox cards. If you got some inserty kinds of cards, or even something you think I don't have, it doesn't hurt to ask.
More cards from earlier years will be going up soon. Just watch that date I added to the button and keep coming back. No limit on how many times you can put in a claim.
Every Thursday, I post a card showing a ballplayer wearing a throwback uniform from my collection. Hopefully, he will be wearing it well, with proper pants blousing. I'll try not to duplicate a uniform. The picture may be from the front of the card, or the back. Enjoy the uniforms from years past.
Charles Nagy - 1993 Upper Deck - Cleveland Indians
Stopped by my LCS today, cuz I have been jonesing about hockey and the only cards in the retail stores are Score.
When I sleepwalk I bid on wax boxes of Pinnacle.
Bought the few packs UD Hockey they had left. Four hits in a box, but I only got one of them.
Looks like Upper Deck is recycling relic swatches like A&G did this year. Shattenkirk last wore the burgundy of the Avalanche 20 months ago before he was traded to the Blues. He has 107 games played in a St. Louis sweater, Upper Deck. Ain't got one laying around?
I've been working my tail off the past few days, getting my duplicates separated from sets, organizing my keep cards that go into binders from the keep cards that are not yet ready for binders. I've been getting wants lists updated and posted, and I've been getting ready to add earlier years of serial and parallel cards to the PWE trade page.
In all that, I was working through getting cards from the repack boxes where they belong when I noticed these two cards. I ask you: what's wrong with them?
Now, I know these are 2011 Topps, and I may be really late to the party on this one, but are there a lot of these out there?
Everyone has what they would consider the best card they have ever pulled. I am not talking vintage here. Others may have a different definition, but to me, a "pull" in sports card collecting is something you find in a pack. If I'm wrong...well, tough crap, this is my blog! Seriously, I would think most would consider a pull something you get from a pack you open. There are two kinds of great pulls I have. On the one hand, I get a great pull if I hit a card I just like - say a short print or something that meets an official or unofficial collection. On the other hand, a great pull is also something that has rarity. And here I am talking serialed (or known rares like 1/1 canary sparkles, etc.). For a long time, the "rarest" cards I had were a couple of 2011 GQ sepia minis, numbered to 99. Soon, as I understood some of the special cards, my rares became a few (and now more) no number Allen and Ginter minis, which you may know are numbered to 50.
Hmm - it also seems that the sky is blue. Interesting.
As we move down (or up) in rarity, the next rarest card that replaced the no numbers was a Reggie Jackson Goudey I pulled from a repack box, numbered 19/34.
It's MISTER October. No, no....I don't care what your name is.
Luckily, if you read a month or so ago, I found a card I was missing that kicked Reginald to the curb - a hand numbered Allen & Ginter 15/25.
Ok...ok. So where the hell am I going? Well, as the title suggests, the number has dropped again. Picked up a couple packs of Topps Update from Walmart, and pack one gave me this.
Sparkle auto, number 9/10. I hope the numbers keep going lower.
There can be lulls in our hobby. We wait for the next release. We wait for a sport to pass by that maybe we don't follow enough that we collect. Our finances can cause us to step back from being too hard into our collection. We can be so focused on one aspect, being a specific player or set, that we do nothing towards anything else.
When the lull hits me, I like to hit the repack box. Depending on the size you get, you are talking about a buck to a buck twenty a pack. The joy I find in the repack box is you have 10 to 20 pack openings just wanting for your grubby hands. A twenty at my LCS might get me 4 or 5 packs to open. And those packs are as much a crap shoot as a repack box.
Someone say "shoot"?
Even though I hit the card show yesterday, I didn't get a lot of pack ripping in, and my local Walmart just refilled their repack row, so I plunked down $20 on a box. I dug through and found a box that had a pack of 07 UD Masterpieces showing. The rest of the packs in the box? Two 2010 Ginter, two 2008 UD Baseball Heroes, two 2008 UD Timeline, two 2011 Topps series 1, two 2011 Topps series 2, one 2011 Topps update, one 2010 Topps series 1, one 2010 Topps series 2, one 2007 Topps update, one 2012 Topps series 1, one 2011 Topps Heritage, one 2008 UD X, one 2009 O-Pee-Chee and one 2000 UD Ultimate Victory.
So why are repacks stuff I like? Well, sometimes you pull nice minis.
Boy kings and rookies.
Sparkles, shinies, original backs and other short prints.
Personal collections.
Oh, and relics.
Yup. Two out of the 20 packs had decent hits. Right now, I would like to take the time to completely make fun of another blogger. See, Greg from Plaschke is drooling so much over that Kemp that he stopped reading and is firing me off an email to ask for a trade on the Kemp. So let me just make fun of the guy since he is not here. I hear he has bad flatulence and can't count above 50. Oh crap...he's coming back. Act natural....
So yeah....um.... repacks can be your friend. Not saying you will always get something good, but some do contain very good things.
Today was the bi-ish weekly card show that I attend about 40 min from my house. I don't get there often enough, but I really wanted to go today. And my wife wanted to tag along, mainly to go shopping after, and I won't complain about that. At the end of a day with breakfast, a card show, lunch, a few stores of shopping and a whole lot of us acting stupid between it all, it was great fun. But enough swooning about my lovely wife, you wanna see the goods, don't ya?
So like the title reads, this is mostly dime box pulls. There are a couple things I won't show, like the Jason Bay mini relic I pulled from a pack of Lineage (up for trade), or a couple vintage cards I bought (70 Aparicio and a 68 blue back Bill Freehan). Those two vintage, plus a couple other cards I'll share later set me back $20, but I think I did okay. First, though, let's see what $6 spent on the dime box garnered me. Can you do the math to guess how many cards I got?
60, alright? Will you untie my parents NOW?
We only had time to hit one dime box, but it was pretty good for 10 cents a card. For starters, I ended up finding two cards for my Ben Petrick PC.
Found a couple very nice cards from the early 80's that were photos from Spring Training.
How frigging huge are those A's numbers? Now, I just pull and collect what I like. In that vein, I am not a Randy Johnson collector, but when you see a card like this (from a Pinnacle set called Zenith) for a dime, you buy it.
I shared on one edition of SIL of a card from the 2000 Fleer Great of the Game set. I found a dozen in the box, so I will work on getting the complete 108 card set. Isn't this a pretty card?
Out of the 60 cards I have two that mention both players pictured. And nice cards they are.
Father/son of the Ripkens, and Kirby with Bo. I think they spotted a couple hotties in the stands.
So, my two big purchases (that my wife egged me on to buy). First, I bought this nice auto of the recently passed Moose Skowron.
Numbered 75 of 199. It was marked $20, but I got it for $10. Maybe I overpaid a little, but look at what the other half of the Jackson got me.
And we now have 10 cards in the Pierce Project. The corners are rounded a bit, but otherwise the card is very clean with no creases.
Well, that's it. A good time spent at the show. Got some great cards for the binders. So I am going to sign off here and I will not be talking about any more cards that I got out of the dime boxes. Yup - not going to make mention about any of the other 60 cards that my wife and I found.
Don't be so sad, Gaylord. You'll find somewhere else to hide the Vaseline.
Here's a hopefully quick post on a pretty quick trade. Adam, the World Series Champions Giants fan who runs ARPSmith's Sportscard Obsession, posted about a jumbo box break of Topps update. Lot of stuff for trade, but nothing that showed my boys. At the bottom, though, he commented that his only relic hit was of a Red and he would have preferred one of his beloved Giants swatches from the All Star game. Conveniently, about two hours prior, I had pulled a Sandoval relic card he sought. Easiest trade ever. After the standard emails, I pulled a few extra cards and got ready to pack it up. Good timing by Adam, though, in taking a day or so to get me his mailing address. I picked up a couple rack packs and damned if I didn't pull a Matt Cain relic for him as well. So the two relics, and a few Giants cards are off to Adam. Just received his package, and those two AS relics transformed into...
YUMMY! My only relic at this point of Thome is as a Phillie. No offense, Julie, but it sucks (in a sense). Now I have a Sox Thome, and the card looks better in hand than from the scan. Check out the pinstripe peeking out on the Quentin.
Thanks Adam. Pretty cool how a couple emails magically change relics from blue to white/gray.
Every Thursday, I post a card showing a ballplayer wearing a throwback uniform from my collection. Hopefully, he will be wearing it well, with proper pants blousing. I'll try not to duplicate a uniform. The picture may be from the front of the card, or the back. Enjoy the uniforms from years past.
Jacque Jones - 2005 Topps Opening Day - Minnesota Twins
So, have you seen my PWE trade page? It's like right there in the bar above. You really should click on it. Nick from Dime Boxes was all over it just a couple hours after I created it. He has a PC of Casey Kotchman, and I had a gold serial I pulled from a pack of Update that I wished would display a White Sox player. Nick said he has a gold sparkle of AJ. I said "deal!" Three days later....
BOOM! This is a card that goes in my binder. That Kotchman just sat in a card box with the rest of the Update set. Nick = win. Jeff = win. Check out the PWE page and be a winner too.
I was on eBay the other day checking out stuff. You know you all do it. Anyway - in one of my searches it displayed an auction for Sergio Santos' update card. He was traded from the White Sox to the Blue Jays. So here he is in Jay blue.
Man....that card looks really familiar. Let's grab his 2012 Topps Series 1 card in ChiSox black.
So I guess in the Topps world, Sergio really isn't a good pitcher, but can he has mad skillz to high five his battery mate.
There are a bunch of perks when you work from home. Start with being able to sleep later. You have easy access to healthier food. Less hassle in rush hour traffic. There is the savings in your pocket from gas and tolls. Hell - I don't even shower somedays!
Let me correct that last statement: I do shower. Just not at 5:30am which is the time I am getting ready for the day I go into the office.
One last perk: I know right when the mail arrives, so I get my hands on trade items pretty quick. Today my mailbox rewarded me with two packages. Both were trades that sent a lot of Allen and Ginter between the parties involved, but in the final tally...well, let's get to that later. First, the goods.
Trade #20 (first package I saw) came from everyone's favorite Dutch (except Nigel Powers), Jeroen from Dutch Card Guy. He needed Ginter and GQ; I needed Ginter and Topps. And as always, there are a few bonus cards. Jeroen, I hope you like the extra cards I added (and hope you don't have many of them). Now, I am not going to post the Ginter base he sent, but here are three of the many cards Jeroen sent to fill the "any White Sox will do" mantra. The best part is not only are these three cards I don't own, so are all the other cards he added. Sooner or later I am going to get some junk wax dupes, won't I?
More Crede. I love me some Crede. And a nice 89 UD Ozzie. I think that makes just 2 or 3 89 UD White Sox. I missed the boat that year. But thanks a ton, Jeroen, for the cards. You have left me just 14 cards from completing Topps Series 2 and ..well....close to A&G, until I opened the other trade.
Trade #21 came from Duane at Democratic Roadkill, which is a site I frigging love already, and then he likes to collect cards, so that's two in his favor. If only he looked like Kate Upton.
Gratuitous Kate Upton picture - Hi Greg!
Well, I still like the guy, and after I opened the box, I love the guy. For what Jeroen missed on my wants list, Duane took out back and beat it like a rented mule. After the dust settled, I have only 3 A&G short prints needed to finished the set. And the minis I desire have been more than halved. Here's a little eye candy from the trade.
Duane - can't thank you enough for the wonderful damage to my wants list. Keep up the good fight in Ohio, buddy. I'll bring the beers in 48 hours.
Speaking of 48 hours: remember tomorrow is the day we need to use our right and vote. In the recent months, there have been far too many attempts to limit or deny our right to vote. Voting is one of the most important jobs we can do. I am not going to tell you who to vote for. If you want to take the time or pay attention, you can determine which spot I will be marking on my ballot. While I hope you match mine, I really just want you to take advantage of your rights as a citizen of voting age and make your voice heard. You have that duty, so please take advantage of it. (Off soapbox).
Been a few weeks since I have done an SIL. Mainly, I have been busy with life, and by the time I get to the computer, it's so late I hate to post anything that will just get buried in the blog roll. Not saying any of my writing is amazing, but I wouldn't write if I didn't hope someone gets some enjoyment out of reading my words.
Two by three what? Who bookmarked this crap?
So let's do a pretty quick SIL. If you see the tabs at the top, or if you know my site enough, I am working on Billy Pierce's complete set of cards issued while playing. Not saying I may not pick up one's issued after he retired, but those are not part of the project. I just added card #9 to the group.
Here is his first issued baseball card - 1951 Topps Blue Back. I nabbed this really nice copy for 75% the cost of a blaster. All four corners are perfect. The only real issue is the blue back is a little off center.
Welcome to part 3. For the past three days we have taken a glance at a crapload of cards my wife had packed away during one of her cleaning frenzies. This is one of the better kind of repack boxes because everything in it is pretty frigging awesome. Ok - maybe day 1 was a little lame. Yesterday was a move in the right direction. But today, let's look at a little of the bestest part of these cards - Allen and Ginter.
Among all the card packs and blaster boxes I found 8 packs of 2006 Allen and Ginter, a couple blasters and a bunch of 2007 A&G, and a blaster and a few packs of 2008. The best part, though? A couple of the blaster boxes were not "blaster boxes" in that I had started sorting the cards and the boxes were loaded with cards. I devised a way to turn a blaster in a storage box, so I found a good 200 '07 and about the same in '08 A&G in these "storage boxes", along with the random packs. Needless to say, all this drastically ramped up the amount of these cards from what I previously had.
A quick look at the cards to a checklist, I find while I had maybe a dozen 2006 A&G and 4 mini, I now have a dozen minis (one black border) and about 5 short prints. Much better than I had before. Nothing too exciting to show, so I won't bother to scan anything.
Lemme finish one more chapter and then I'll scan something.
2007. After sorting, I am probably a good 80% through a complete set. And doubles? Boy do I have doubles. However, we have highlights to share. A while back I talked about no number A&Gs. Total at that time was 3 - one from 2007, one from 2010 and one from 2012. Well, I just doubled that total.
You saw that Elijah Dukes black border. Now look to the left in that image. It's ANOTHER Elijah Dukes. This is a regular border. Something is screwy. What are the odds I have two no numbers of the same player? I won't complain. Anyway - my minis for 2007 reproduced like rabbits with this find. I have 5 pages now in my binder. Just has a single page before. Here's a couple more mini highlights.
Love the gloves with the Frazier. And the Crede looks lust like the Thome that would appear in 2008. How beautiful are those flag cards, though? I have 4. I want the set. If you have any, let's talk trade.
Finally, 2008. I had even less 2008 than I had 2007. Well, I am probably over 50% towards a complete set. To think I have been trading away some of these cards. Let's hope I replaced all I traded away. 2008 has a super special surprise (my English teacher appreciate that alliteration), but first, some prime minis.
Man - they truly did do 2008 Allen and Ginter right. It's a close call between 07 and 08, but I think 2008 just edges all other sets out. It's beautiful and simple, yet classy.
And now, the prize of the box. In that link about where I talked about the no number cards a few months back, I mention a Bazooka back card I misplaced. Well.....misplaced no more!
I knew I had one. I just knew it! I remember pulling it and thinking "Ah crap - who wrote on this thing?" I will say this - that card will only be traded for a replacement Bazooka back from the same year with a White Sox player. Otherwise, it stays in my binder. So if you have one, or can get your hands on one, we'll talk.
Ok - I have to run to my LCS for storage boxes and binder pages for all these cards. Oh I am SOOOOOO upset that I have to go.