Trade with Bob Walk the Plank

I believe that the postal carriers in Morgantown, West Virginia, must be among the busiest people on the face of the planet.  Matt from the excellent blog Bob Walk the Plank has made trades with about every single blogger I know, including me.  My biggest problem with trading with him is that he inundates me with excellent cards -- tons of relics and autos -- and my return envelopes suffer greatly by comparison. Thankfully, Matt is also a patient person.  He will get good stuff from me soon -- as soon as I can find some to send to him!

Anyway, when I opened the envelope from him, I thought I had some sort of strange repack of all hits, all the time.  It was incredible.  I'm presenting these without comment mainly because I am truly speechless.  And that, folks, is a very rare day.  Like I said in an earlier post, I'm pretty sure that Brewers stuff has been accumulating in baseball card rooms across the country waiting for someone like me -- who needs all that stuff -- to show up on the scene.

Matt, I don't know how you do it, but either you and your friends buy a ton of cards or you are the luckiest pack cracker in 15 states.  Thanks again for a fantastic trade!

I Know Everyone's Moved on to Opening Day...But I've Just Gotten Heritage

Yeah, all the cool kids already have pored over the Topps Heritage cards and cracked their packs.  I'm a little behind.  I put my eBay money toward getting two unopened Hobby boxes from a vendor there.  The boxes arrived today, so like a kid on Christmas morning, I ripped all the packs open.

Hobby boxes come with a blue package included inside which usually is a three-card strip:

Ugh.  This three-card strip is as exciting as serving as the designated grass-growing watcher.  I mean, Frederick Alfred Porcello is still young and showed some very nice growth in his peripherals -- and he has the distinction of being born on my 17th birthday -- while Prado was an all-star one year and appears to be the reincarnation of the not-dead-yet Placido Polanco.  But Asche -- he's young and, um, he hit .235 and had an OBP of .302 and SLG of .389 last  year...at third base and, um, he hit for a high average in the minor leagues, I guess.  But this is pretty uninspiring.

Just for kicks and comparison, here's the strip I got in my recent 2008 Topps Heritage box:

Much nicer.

Okay, enough complaining about Cody Asche.

In my second box of the 2014 Heritage, I got a nice little surprise -- a 1965 buyback of a guy that Baseball-Reference.com ranks as being between Dmitri Young and Billy Butler all-time among hitters...and with a nickname of "EZ" or "The Poet", I like this guy already:

Ladies and gentlemen, Ed Charles.  

Each box had its own insert, of course, and I received two relics:

Chicago Crime Dog

You again?

Nothing against Troy Tulowitzki, but I seem to get relics from him more often than any non-Rockie-loving human being should.  Also, nothing against Fred McGriff either, but I was kind of hoping for a little "better".  

Okay, on to the other stuff, and I'll be briefer, using my best eBay over-enthusiasm, excessive font highlighting and bolding, and at least two more exclamation points per item than is necessary.

SHORT PRINTS!!

The Wacha Action Variation

The Goldschmidt Logo Variation

 CHROME (numbered to 999)!!!

Carlos Beltran...but they didn't update
 him to be on the Yankees?

Jordan Zimmermann, Wisconsin Native

Stephen Strasburg, who is SOOO 2012.

SILVER REFRACTOR (SN/565)!!!!

You can't tell, but this is silver, not white.

Mini!!! SN/100!!

I left this small to highlight its Mini-ness

And, Finally, BLACK REFRACTOR SN/65!!

Comes complete with a coupon for 20% off your first visit to Dr. James Andrews' office in Birmingham

In all seriousness, the Heritage set this year isn't a bad set.  It sticks to the tried-and-true formula from past Heritage sets.  I never really collected the 1965 set before, so the coolness factor of seeing today's players in a set design from yesteryear that I loved just wasn't there for me.  I guess I should go back to the first few sets of Heritage from the early 2000s through 2009 and perhaps to the 2012 set as well -- I had cards in my collection from those sets as a kid and still do.  I may sit out next year's release and the subsequent releases (assuming Topps sticks with the path of releasing cards with the 39-years-ago design) until about 2018 or so.  

It's not bad, but I'm just going to spend my money elsewhere next year.

Enjoying False Nostalgia

Perhaps it's a bit harsh to call the sets using old time designs as false nostalgia, but that is the best terms I can come up with for those sets.  I'm clearly not the only one who likes these sets since Topps keeps putting out the Heritage, Turkey Red, and Allen & Ginter sets each year.

As I mentioned yesterday, I really like the A&G sets.  In my repack adventures, I came across Upper Deck's contribution to the fake nostalgia game -- the Goudey set.  Intrigued, I grabbed a box online.

Overall, I like the product.  My main complaint with the box were the seemingly completely unrelated insert sets.  I got two of the "Hit Parade of Champions" cards -- Carl Yastrzemski and Patrick Roy.

At about half the size of a regular card, they are a neat little photo card.  The problem I have is that they appear entirely unrelated to anything in the regular set, anything harkening back to the regular set, or really anything to do with the pack they came in other than that, well, that's the pack they came in.

The second group of inserts in their design ties back to the popular Goudey Sport Kings set; in 2008, they were called Sport Royalty.  Perhaps the problem with these cards is that they are too updated for their own good -- maybe Upper Deck should have mimicked what Topps does with A&G and make the photos look more like canvas art or lithography.

 

These are not bad looking cards -- well, okay, the pea green with blue swimsuit for Janet Evans is a particularly unattractive color combination -- but the photos are almost too exact or perfect when compared to an original.

The insert that made the least sense in terms of its inclusion in Goudey packs -- though I'm sure it made perfect sense in the climate that was 2008's closing of the House that Ruth Built  -- were the Yankee Legacy cards.  I think the reason several of these appeared was because Upper Deck had too many of the cards and dumped them into the Goudey sorters.

These are reasonably decent looking cards, but they have nothing to do with Goudey other than (a) Upper Deck was printing both in 2008 and (b) the 1934 Goudey had the "Lou Gehrig Says" (and "Chuck Klein Says") banners on the card front.  

Yet another insert within this box was the appearance of a single presidential card.

James Buchanan is not a superstar card in the world of Presidents.  Indeed, if the roster of American presidents can be likened to baseball players, we would probably look at George Washington as being something like Cy Young -- setting the bar so high for future generations that no one can reach those heights. Abraham Lincoln could be seen as akin to Babe Ruth or Lou Gehrig, in that he changed the way people thought about the Presidency in a way that Ruth changed the way that baseball people thought about how scoring runs should or could be accomplished (and, his life ended tragically much in the same way that Lou Gehrig's life did).

But Buchanan?  Well, he's sort of like a Jim Gantner type to me.  He spent 8 years in office -- so long career -- but no one ever mistook either one for being a superstar.

That's a long, tortured analogy to say that I wasn't impressed with getting the Buchanan card.

Oh, there were some baseball cards in these packs too.  I got a nice PED soaked relic:

"Look at the size of that syringe!"

To be fair to Tejada, he's tested positive twice for amphetamines (Adderall, to be exact), and he said he never used the HGH that he bought.  Yeah, surrrrrrrrrre.

I also ripped a nice Braves autograph:

I never understood why Bobby Cox and John Schuerholz didn't like Johnson more than they did.  Johnson has good pop in his bat and has a pretty good batting eye.  He's with the Yankees this year, so maybe his cards will enjoy a New York bounce.  

Finally, I also got a couple of serial numbered cards.  It took me a while to figure out what the variation was here, but it's the color of the print on the backs of the cards.  First, the Hall of Famer:

In my head, Hunter is a Yankee because that was who he played for in my first baseball memories.  But, here he is with the A's on a card numbered 8 of 88.

The other cards is one for the Dodger crowd, and it's numbered 18 of 34:

Billingsley is coming off Tommy John surgery (RIP, Dr. Jobe) last year and is suffering from a little soreness in his elbow after bringing his curve ball back into his repertoire.  

All in all, I like the Goudey base set.  I'm not a fan of all the randomness that Upper Deck included within the packs besides the Goudey base set.  But, I'd probably buy a box again if a cheap one came up.

Hit Parade Part II

Yeah, I know -- those "trips to Toppstown.com" cards are about as common as the base set.  So here are a couple of better hits from that 2010 Topps set.

1.  Cards Your Mom Threw Out Original Back MTO 22: 1973 Johnny Bench

2.  Peak Performance Relic Nick Swisher ("Game Worn" Pants)

Again, same thing applies -- if you are interested in a trade, hit me up in the comments or e-mail me at off(dot)hiatus(dot)baseball(at)gmail(dot)com with an offer.

Thanks again.

Thursday Hit Parade: We've Got Lovely Pre-Owned Cards Here

The first time I opened up a more recent pack of a base set of cards in my post-college life, it was 2010. On a lark of sorts, I bought three or four boxes of 2010 Series 1 Topps on Amazon.  As I started opening the packs, I kept getting these "Toppstown.com" inserts.  Every so often, I'd get some other kind of card -- "History of the Game", "Turkey Red", and "Million Card Giveaway" inserts, among others.  I even got an autographed card from some Minnesota Twins pitcher I'd never heard of at the time (and I've barely heard of now, Jose Mijares, who is already in the "non-roster-invite" stage of his career).

Here it is:

If you like this card, it's available.

Getting the inserts was sort of cool.  I'm still trying to figure out whether these "hit" cards are worth anything other than to individual player collectors, though.  I mean, I worked through my Robin Yount need list over the past day or so of being off work thanks to the Great Biblical Atlanta Ice Storm of Feburary 2014(R) and I am blown away at the ridiculous number of alternate versions of cards that the folks at Upper Deck, Donruss, and Topps were putting out in the early '00s -- especially 2005.  I think as many Younts exist from 2005 as there are for the entire period that Yount was an active player -- 1973 through 1993.

At any rate, rather than be a curmudgeon and complain about the "good old days" of the junk wax era when kids would take the star cards and leave the rest in piles on the counter of the ubiquitous corner baseball card store, I'm going to embrace these "hits."  Maybe it's like karaoke -- you sing the hits of the Topps Turkey Red! -- but it's at least a way for me to get your attention and try to get some cards I need off my want lists.

So, with no further adieu, I'm singing the hits today of the First Class Trip to Topps Town Inserts.  I have a few of these that I'd love to trade to a good home in return for some good Robin Yount, or Paul Molitor, or Gary Carter, or other Milwaukee Brewer cards.  

Here's three for today:

1.  Albert Pujols: FCTTT14

2.  Brian McCann FCTTT11

3.  CC Sabathia FCTTT23

If you're interested in a trade for one or more of these guys, leave a comment in the comments below or e-mail me at off (dot) hiatus (dot) baseball (at) gmail (dot) com.  

Thanks for reading and hope to hear from you.