You won't Believe What I Bought on eBay -- #4 will Shock You!

Clickbait is everywhere on the internet. It's on the bottom or in the margin on nearly every website -- everywhere from the tabloids where you'd expect to see them to reputable news websites. A number of websites -- like this one -- have even popped up to allow you to generate your own Clickbait Headlines. 

So, the next time you see my blog have the headline of "The Anakin Skywalker of Baseball Cards" or "Baseball Cards: If my tips don't make you money, I'll shave my head," you'll know that my blog got taken over by a clickbait site.

I have done a bit of shopping on eBay recently, though, and I did want to show off those purchases.

1.  1987 Sportflics Team Preview

What a nightmare this card is. I say that for a couple of reasons. The card was sold only to dealers in 1987 as part of a set. That doesn't mean that there are limited quantities necessarily, but in practice they are reasonably difficult to find. 

More importantly, as a player collector and thanks to the Sportflics "Magic Motion," this card contains photos of six different player collections. So, to have a "complete" collection, I feel as if I need seven of these -- one for each of the Rob Deer, Teddy Higuera, Paul Molitor, Dan Plesac, B.J. Surhoff, and Robin Yount player collections as well as one for the team set. 

If this were a 1987 Topps card, it wouldn't be so bad. But, it's Sportflics. Nobody bought these things. It's like Alice Cooper wearing the red protective cup on the outside of his leather pants in this video -- totally unnecessary and totally ridiculous.

So, this one goes into my Yount collection, which has inched up to 912 different cards/items. The next one I find goes in Molitor's collection.

2.  Jonathan Lucroy 2016 Topps Archives Blue Parallel and Base Card

I bought these two from box breaker extraordinaire Brent Williams. Usually, all of Brent's Brewers end up going to another Brewers collector -- a guy out of Texas who is a big Ryan Braun fan -- so either Brent got two of these or that other guy just didn't want Lucroy. I'd be upset with that whole set up if the Texas guy wasn't such a good dude. 

Anyway, I told Brent via Twitter that I'd pay what he was asking for the Lucroy if he'd throw in a base card, figuring Brent would have a few extra. He agreed to it and threw in the base card. 

I am on record saying that I really like this design for the Archives set this year. Topps seems to have put a little bit more work into it by selecting photos that wouldn't look out of place in the 1979 set. 

That song is over 20 years old.  Just saying.

To be honest, though, Lucroy's card would be a little out of place in the 1979 Topps Set. Only seven of the twenty-five Brewers cards in the Topps set that year (not counting the team card or the prospects card) featured the Brewers in their home whites. Most of the others appear to have been taken in Yankee Stadium or spring training. 

Still, I give Topps credit here for doing well with the 1979 portion of Archives.

3.  A 9-card lot of 1975 Brewers Topps Minis



I started looking recently for little lots like this one to fill in gaps in my collection. Sales like that Red Foley sticker collection spurred my thoughts toward trying to find sellers selling several cards like these as a lot rather than individually. All of these are in at least good/very good condition, and there are a few sharp corners as well. 

1975. What a great year in baseball cards.

Plus, I got to add to my player collection of both Jim Slaton (now at 52 cards/items) and Gorman Thomas (now at 61 cards/items) since I already had that Charlie Moore.

4.  1979 Open Pantry/Lake to Lake Milwaukee Set



I'm not quite sure how I missed this set before. In the early part of 1979, the local Open Pantry convenience stores -- which, in Milwaukee, have always been on the south side of town (other than a former location in Oshkosh) -- had a promotion with Lake to Lake Dairies to raise money for the MACC Fund (MACC stands for "Milwaukee Athletes against Childhood Cancer"). The back of the Cecil Cooper card below has the whole deal.

Probably the most interesting to me only thing about this set is the breakdown of Packers, Bucks, and Brewers in the set. There are only two Packers -- Rich McGeorge and Steve Wagner -- the set while there are five members of the Milwaukee Bucks. McGeorge is a member of the College Football Hall of Fame for his career at NAIA Elon, and he went through difficult times battling alcohol abuse. 

Wagner was included, I think, because he was a local boy who attended the University of Wisconsin. He was always a fringe/special teams type player, and he complained a couple of years after leaving Green Bay about how Bart Starr as a coach was a terrible man-manager.

These days, there might be one or two of the Bucks in the set and probably only two Brewers too. The Packers would certainly dominate the numbers. The late 1970s, though, were the dark days. Quarterback Lynn Dickey was hurt regularly, James Lofton had gotten upset and flipped off his own fans, and the team was terrible. In 1979, for instance, the team finished 5-11. It took another 14 years -- 1993 -- for the Packers to begin their run of success that has continued for most of the past 23 seasons.

To end this post, I'll give you a little trivia -- the Packers were the first NFL team with their own fight song. This song was first played at a game in 1931.

Thanks for reading -- more eBay wins and more trade posts are on the way!

The One-Man Acoustical Jam Vintage Card Show

Thanks to Dave, the Cardboard Junkie, I was able to find out about the very cool one-man traveling card show operated by a gentleman out of Norman, Oklahoma named Roger. Roger really doesn't keep his website all that up to date -- it hasn't been updated since 2011 -- but that's kind of unsurprising. Roger's very much a paper-and-postcard kind of guy.

He has a loyal following around the country. People hear about his shows initially like I did -- by word of mouth. Once you go, you get on his mailing list. He then drops you a postcard -- always green, I'm told -- that you look forward to seeing three or four times a year which gives you the heads up that he's coming to town with his boxes and boxes of cards.

It's a hell of a lot better than a mailbox full of realtor flyers.

Roger caters to the high-end collector, in many respects. In the boxes I saw there, he had top-of-the-line tobacco cards, rookie cards for multiple sports, and top condition commons and stars from the 1940s through the early 1970s. The box I flipped through is probably the same one Dave focuses on, though -- the more reasonably priced cards that Roger has bought over the years that have writing, or minor creases, or not quite perfect centering, or not quite perfect corners.

The cool thing to me was just sitting there chatting with Roger and the other guys who stopped in. This is a regulars-type crowd, but it's an incredibly welcoming crowd.

I added to a number of my player collections, so let's start with the Joe Adcock cards:

Thanks, Joe, for talking to the good folks in Tulsa. That interview was, I believe, done in 1957, as Adcock said that "this" season would be his eighth in the majors. Joe says that he was feeling great and hadn't missed many games the previous year (he played 133 in 1956). Unfortunately, he played only 84 in the Braves World Series season. Still, he was only 29 years old at the time. But for those injuries he encountered, it's entirely possible that he would have hit 400 HR in his career.

These two Adcocks were among the most expensive cards I bought. The one on the bottom is the 1954 Johnston Cookies issue, a Milwaukee Braves oddball that fits well with the city of Milwaukee. The one on the top is the 1953 Bowman Color set. I bought this one and left behind a bunch of other Braves from that set thinking, "why do I have them listed on my wantlist? They're all Boston Braves!"

Then I get home and see that Joe is listed on the back as a Milwaukee Brave. The moral of the story is that I should always trust my wantlist.

For the life of me, I can't find a YouTube interview with Harvey Kuenn anywhere. Just for that, I'll turn to this fantastic Shepherd Express article for a great photo of Harvey with Sy Berger.

Harvey deserves that respect. Just like these two cards give him:

Yup, two oddballs. I can't help myself. Of course, I also am not 100% sure whether the top card is a Jell-O or a Post card from 1963. The bottom one is definitely a 1961 Nu-Card Scoops with sharpish corners.

I picked up a couple of Eddie Mathews cards too. Let's turn to the official Hall of Fame biography video for Eddie:

I haven't picked up the first ever Sports Illustrated with Mathews on the cover, but it is on my list of things that I definitely want. A 1954 Bowman, though, is not on that list any more.

Well, okay, it still is because I need another one for my Braves team set, but man is that card a nice card for what I paid for it. Again, other than the Kuenn Nu-Card Scoop and the Adcock Johnston Cookie card, these all came out of the "bargain" bin with few cards costing more than $5 each.

One last video introduction:



The coolest little fact in this vignette comes from Joe Torre, who said that he had the distinction of pinch-hitting one time for Spahn and also having Spahn pinch-hit one time for him.

Roger told a story about Spahn while I was there. He met Spahn and got to know him a bit. Spahn, though, was one of those guys who never remembered a guy's name but remembered a face. To Spahn, Roger was always known as "Oklahoma." Since Spahn settled there and, eventually, passed away in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, Roger felt that Spahn just liked him for being a fellow Oklahoman on the baseball card circuit.

Okay, two more cards to talk about, and then it's a scan dump for the rest.

I actually purchased two whole Milwaukee Brewers cards from Roger, and one of them was one of the more expensive cards I got.

Here's the one that was cheap:

Mini team card! Straight into the Yount collection with that one, seeing as I needed it there. You can see Robin in the second row from the top dead center -- right behind Charlie Moore and Jim Slaton.

Here's the one that was not:

What a fantastic Kellogg's card! It's a 1971 Kellogg's card of Danny Walton. I suppose I could update my "Meet the Brewers" page for him with this. Maybe another time.

Finally, I got a ton more Milwaukee Braves for my Braves collection. I think I'll save them for later rather than just dump them.

Thanks for stopping by.