COMC Black Friday #6: Robin Yount

One of my collecting goals last year on my Blog-oversary (celebrated 1 year ago tomorrow, by the way...tomorrow is the three-year mark for me) was to reach 1000 Robin Yount items in my Yount collection. 

As of February 8, 2016, my Yount collection stood at 875 items. When I hit November, though, I thought it would be tough to get to 1000 without a massive infusion of Younts into my collection. But, due in many respects to this COMC purchase, I got over the 1000 item mark and as it stands on January 22, 2017 (the date of the last new item), the Younts clock in at 1,041 items.

I will tell you, though, that using Blogger to organize them has become massively frustrating. I am not an HTML genius. Not at all. I don't understand all the stupid formatting stuff that gets put into an HTML page. The problem I keep having is that the formatting gets entirely screwed up when I add to or revise a page. I can't copy and paste things easily -- it throws off the spacing and, at times, a bunch of extra hard returns get added in. So, the formatting on the Yount page is really basic and, at times, the font gets big or small with no apparent reason. 

Perhaps it's frustrating only to me. But I notice it and it makes me upset. I like consistent formatting. I want text to be clean. 

Am I the only one who cares about this?

I still have a difficult time thinking that Dierks Bentley graduated from the same university -- Vanderbilt -- that I did. Of course, he's helping bring up our average salary data more than I am, for what that's worth.

Anyway, Robin Yount. 

I picked up literally dozens of Robin Younts from COMC on Black Friday. I plunked down my money for credit and did the old Wheel of Fortune shopping spree.

"I can't go home without the pig."

I thought the same thing when I saw these two cards:

As with most things Panini, I completely neglected the Donruss 1982 rip-off, er, parallels until it came time to cash out at COMC. I swear -- I rarely see Panini in the wild at card shows except for the Diamond Kings set from this past year. That one is plentiful (so if you have a want list, perhaps you could direct me in purchasing for you out of the dime boxes and, in return, you could add to my Yount list).

This intro has put me into a weird mood. So, let's use 1980s game shows to intro the Yount cards.

Like I said. Weird.

In the early 1980s, I really liked Press Your Luck. It put the phrase "Big Money, no Whammies, and STOP!" into my lexicon. I liked it so much that I tried to design a program for my old Commodore 64 computer to replicate it. Seriously, that was the craziest idea I ever had. Mainly because trying to program an animated game using basic in the early 1980s was simply impossible for me as an 11-year-old.

Drawing on the the idea of impossibility, I'm still working on my quixotic efforts to get at least one of every police card. Winneconne, for instance. Winneconne is in Winnebago County with a population of about 2,400 people and it is in the midst of the Wolf River lake chains -- pretty much on the skinny part of the river between Lake Buttes des Morts and Lake Winneconne. I've never been to Winneconne, as best I can tell. 

Almost as quixotic might be trying to put together a master set of the 1981 scratch-offs. There are at least three front variations, and there may be some back variations for the Younts too (I forget whether the Yount does or not).

Who didn't love Chuck Woolery and this game called Scrabble, which shares with the Scrabble board the colored tiles on the board and that's really it. Otherwise, it's basically Wheel of Fortune without the wheel or having to pick your own letter. 

Oddly enough, it's still sort of fun to watch and guess along with the clues.

It's like bookending Robin's career here. 1978 Hostess and 1993 Mosinee Police, showing his 3000th hit. Mosinee is in Marathon County, near Wausau. I've never been there either. I missed out, I suppose. It's on the Wisconsin River. Water is everywhere in Wisconsin, after all.

The $25,000 Pyramid was always fun to watch. Billy Crystal was like some sort of guru on there, as was Betty White. Dick Clark was a great host as well. The weird thing I recall about this was that it was not always easy to find on TV for me as a kid. I think the local Milwaukee TV stations simply didn't always carry it -- and I could never figure out why. 

Some cards I can never figure out. It's Panini, of course. The Cooperstown sets that Panini tried out for a few years. Bunch of strange parallels going on here. For instance, what the hell is that "Crusade" thing? What do the Crusades have to do with baseball? I thought the Crusades were about Christians killing Muslims and trying to retake land in Jerusalem and the Middle East from the Arabs that had lived there for years.

But what do I know?

Another of the quiz-show games that I watched all the time as a kid. My grandpa loved this show and loved Bill Cullen and, before him, Jack Berry (who was the real host in my mind). 

Maybe all these quiz shows (along with Jeopardy!) are why I have always loved trivia. 

What is humorous, though, is watching the former teacher on this episode trying to figure out how many questions on "Bid: Television" he needed to answer at $50 a piece to catch up with the guy who had already scored $500 to win the game. The guy had $50 already, and he bid six. 

Bill Cullen immediately interrupted him and said, "sorry, you lose." Or something similar.



Here are 4 disparate cards from a range of years. Pacific Prisms -- the originals from 1995 -- to the early Topps Tribute card, an early Amber Topps Triple Threads card, and then a Topps Hi Tech from 2015. All over the place. But all of them are really cool.

I didn't lose here.

Last one:

We have to have the real Price Is Right with Bob Barker. Plus, it's great to see the ads, like trying to get people to buy Nissan's Cup O Noodles by selling it as a Japanese tradition -- but not calling it Ramen. Oops.

And the ad for the Ice Capades. Wow.

It's not quite the Ice Capades, but a jersey card with two pinstripes in it is tough to beat. I don't think I paid more than a couple of bucks for it either. 

While my COMC purchase included over 80 Yount cards, I just don't think I could show them all in good conscience. After all, I have to let my pages load up too.

Thanks for reading, and hey -- No Whammys!