Sunday, June 29, 2014

This and that, Billy Pierce Style

Seemed like a good day to try to clear out some of the backlog of scanned cards I've been saving. Let's start with these. 

Top card is a Bill Pierce Topps Archives from 2001. I didn't really know Topps was doing these 'throwback' cards 13 years ago. Anyway it's obviously just a reprinted '64 with a gold stamp. I like the original '64 card, love that the color compliments the Giants' colors. But having said that I rally don't pursue these 'modern' Pierce cards wholeheartedly. I keep a list of the ones I have but I'm not tracking down a 'wantlist'. There are so many variations of these sorts of things I'm not sure a wantlist is even possible. 

There is a Heritage Pierce card on COMC that is signed. It is supposedly a 2013 card and it has a number of 18/64. I can't tell if its a 'signed through the mail' card of if it was issued like that. Either way for $25 the guy can keep it. I made him an offer of about half the asking price since the card has been there f-o-r-e-v-e-r but, just as I figured, it was rejected.

Next is another 99 cent Pierce card, this one is a variation of something I already had. It's an Upper Deck All Time Heroes card from 1994. I posted my original one awhile back but this one is "special"... it has a gold stamp reading 'Major League Baseball 125th Anniversary' along the right side. Why? I don't know. And I wouldn't have bothered with it had it cost more than a dollar or so. 



But along with the Pierce Upper Deck the seller included an extra card (don't you love it when sellers do that?). He stuck an '89 Fleer Tony Gwynn into the same case. I'm sure I have this card someplace and, yes, the '89 Fleer set isn't anything to be excited about but a Gwynn is a Gwynn. If nothing else it gave me the chance to flip over a card and be astounded at some player's stats.


I blew up the scan of the back, just because. Here are a couple of things I found out when this card prompted me to look at TG's Baseball Reference page: he was second in the NL in triples three times. Triples!  

In 1994 he won the batting title with a just plain silly .394 average but he also led the league by grounding into 20 double plays. He was in the top four in putouts by a rightfielder eight times and top five in fielding eight times. 

Mr. Padre, indeed.


3 comments:

  1. A couple of things about that Heritage card on COMC...

    First off, it is a legit Heritage issue; if you look at the orange box at the bottom of the card, you can see it says "TOPPS CERTIFIED AUTOGRAPH ISSUE". I pulled similar cards in 2013 and 2012, and both were on-card signatures. I'd like to think they all are, but I'm not the most knowledgeable person in these areas.

    Second, that particular card is a red ink signature, which is numbered to 64 and scarcer - I presume - than a similar blue ink, unnumbered signature. Since you've got a limit on how much you want to spend, you might want to keep an eye out for the blue ink ones.

    Finally, I'm familiar with the COMC seller in question, and he's among the top volume sellers. He may not realize how long the card has been out there... or more likely does so much volume that he's content to wait on someone to come along and give him his price.

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    1. Good points all. My knowledge of these types of cards is very much lacking so I ought to just shut up I guess. When I saw that card on COMC I wasn't aware of that autographed sort of subset. Thanks for the info. I was basing my view on what I think to be a fair price for a Pierce autograph'd card. I know now it's a limited sort of thing.

      I don't think I've ever looked into sellers on COMC, my usual modus operandiis to just grab enough dollar cards to make the $3 shipping worthwhile. I never think to look at the seller. I checked just now and that guy has some serious stuff on there!

      That's not you is it? ;-)

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    2. You just happened to catch me on some autographed cards that I know something about; I'm not much of an auto collector, and if I hadn't had pulled similar autos before, I wouldn't have known anything about them. I will say that I kept the two I pulled because they're neat enough to hang on to even though they're not anybody I would normally collect (Jim Brosnan and Glen Hobbie).

      As a COMC seller, I tend to be more aware of other sellers because I see some business practices I don't particularly care for... Also, as part of a "do unto others" mindset, I try to support smaller sellers like myself rather than the WalMarts of the COMC world.

      I'm not the one selling the Billy Pierce card. My user ID is easy to remember: JoeShlabotnik.

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