PWE from Shane

I frequently lament the terrible luck I have in finding Orioles among the new card packs I open. I believe the lack of O's is the hobby gods' way of balancing out the great luck I have at finding cheap vintage at shows.

But I usually come up with the current Orioles cards thanks to boggers who ship them my way through the kindness of their hearts. One such shipment came from Shane who writes one of my favorite blogs, Shoebox Legends.

A couple were from the '17 Heritage set. First up the oft-injured Chris Tillman. If the Birds are to make any noise at all in the AL East CT needs to get back out on the mound and display the 'ace' characteristics he has flashed in the past.

While I'm at it I'm going to state right now that no team has done sleeve patches as well as the Orioles through the years. I think I need to do a post highlighting them soon.

Shane sent me the O's team card as well. The good news..it features the elusive (Topps-wise) Matt Wieters along with slugging stars Manny Machado and Mark Trumbo. The bad news? They are wearing those horrific black softball team jerseys. Oh, and Wieters is now on the Nats. Terrible. #fakenews

I'd love to see the Heritage team cards made with the 'team on the bleachers' style photos of old but they may or may not have access to them and it's possible that teams don't take them nowadays. Googling a couple different ways turned up a few from recent seasons but not as many as I thought it would.

Now with these two, the one I actually pulled last weekend and a few more I picked up here and there I'm at about seven '17 Heritage Orioles. 

I also received this '17 flagship Yovani Gallardo. Nice card, it works with the design but again, those jerseys! Sad. Very sad.

Gallardo came to the O's last season as a free agent signing. He had good numbers in '15 for the Rangers. Orioles paid him $9,000,000 for his six wins. That's 1.5 mil per win. I think I could get my knuckleball going again with a few weeks notice and maybe grab a win with the Orioles lineup behind me. Hell, it was a killer knuckleball 45 years ago, why not now? And I'd take half of that 1.5M for a win. If I made one start and got a win what would my WAR be? Hmmmm.

The O's flipped Gallardo to Seattle for Seth Smith over the winter. He'll probably win the Cy Young this year.

Finally Shane tossed in this hockey gem:

It's the 1972/73 OPC Gord Labossiere. Killer card for an Aeros/Rangers guy like me. I loved the WHA when the Aeros were in their heyday. Labossiere quickly became one of my favorite players, due mostly to the fact that he had a (brief) Rangers history.

I love everything about this card, the pick background and the way he mirrors the player in the Aeros' logo. That almost forgotten first year sweater makes it even more interesting. Shane picked up a second copy as an upgrade and was nice enough to ship this one to me.

I have very few cards from this set. I really need to chase down more. In fact, given the Aeros rather short lifespan and the absence of many cards made for the WHA, I bet I could round up all the mainstream Aeros cards produced. I have a nice stack already. I need to do more research.

Thanks again, Shane. I appreciate your gift and your writing!

Topps Bobby Locke PC

I never thought I would include Bobby Locke in my list of PCs but here he is. Before I pulled his autograph out of a Heritage pack I really had never given him much thought. I had his 1960 Topps card but I haven't featured it yet on that blog. He has no '58 or '59 cards so I had yet to do any looking into his career.

Locke appeared in five different Topps sets during his career. I picked up the ones I didn't have from eBay last week.

This is his 'rookie' card, the 1960. Pretty standard card with a portrait and a b/w 'action' pose. I'm 99% sure this is a picture taken in Municipal Stadium. Those windows over Locke's right shoulder look a lot like the ones in this one of Rocky Colavito.

The back is where this one shines (well it does to me, I love the 1960 cream/orange/black early series cardbacks. Locke had pitched for the Indians in 1959 after nearly five minor league seasons. The pix were likely taken that season.

Second year Bobby Locke, his 1961 card. It's a high number and cost more than the other put together. It's also my favorite. Note that the picture used is the same as the one in the 1960 'action' shot. more of those windows...Municipal Stadium. 

I'm not a fan of the green cardboard but you get full stats and two cartoons.

Now we are up to 1962. Same background. More than likely the same photo-shoot with the photographer getting his cap-less pic, just in case. With Locke now with the Cubs the cap-less shot came in handy. 

A nice play on his last name in the cartoon caption. Locke didn't make it out of Spring Training as a Cub. He had issues with the the weird 'College of Coaches' idea and he was dealt to the Cardinals in April. He was with them for three weeks before being traded to the Phils. He spent most of the season in the minors.

The '63 and '64 seasons were also mostly minor league years for Locke although he was around in September of '64 to watch the club blow it's big lead in the NL. After a couple of years off Topps' radar in October of '64 he was sold to the Angels. Topps pulled out their 'Locke' file and made him another card. He is listed with the Angels but he never played for them, at least in 1965. He was in the minors before he went to the Reds in a July deal. He pitched a bit in Cincinnati the second half of the year. 

He is obviously in his old Indians uni again here. Only the cap logo is scrubbed out. The pose is also exactly the same as his 1960 'action' shot. This picture is obviously from that same photo session. 

The '65 set rightfully holds a place dear to the hearts of many vintage collectors. It's about damn perfect.

After a couple more seasons spent mostly in the minors Locke appeared in the 1968 set. This is the same photo they'd used in 1962.  It's well within the range of possibility that Topps issued five separate Locke cards over the course of nine years using the pictures taken at one 1959 photo shoot!

He'd returned to the Angels' organization about a year after they had traded him to the Reds and in 1968 he pitched in 29 games, easily his most since 1961. Topps crammed a lot onto the backs of these '68s.

I have two more Locke cards from Topps. This is the 2017 signed Heritage done in the '68 style.

And I picked up another version of the '68, a buyback issued in 2015.

So that's my Bobby Locke 'rainbow'. I know that's not the right term for whatever you call a complete run of a guy's cards but whatever. Bobby turned 83 earlier this month. Here's to many more years of health and happiness with his family.

I found a few other Bobby Locke items including a couple of cool minor league oddballs. Those will hold for another day. Here is a montage of his Topps cardback cartoons:

Let's wrap this up with a handful of off-the-wall facts I found on his SABR bio page.:...

• He debuted in the big leagues with a starting assignment against the Boston Red Sox on June 18 [1959], and in his second at-bat he hit his only major-league home run, a three-run shot off Frank Sullivan over Fenway Park’s Green Monster wall in left field. 
• Locke was born on March 3, 1934, in the little town of Rowes Run in the rough mining country of Southwestern Pennsylvania about 40 miles southwest of Pittsburgh. He was one of ten kids in the family.
• [In high school] he played fullback and defensive back in football and made several all-star teams. He excelled in baseball as a pitcher, throwing two no-hitters and averaging 13 strikeouts a game. His 1952 team went undefeated, and he pitched a one-hitter with 13 strikeouts to win the state championship. Locke played in the Sandlot Classic at the Polo Grounds in New York City as a member of the 1952 USA Baseball All-Star team.
• Locke accepted a football scholarship to Arizona State University but returned home to focus on baseball early in his first gridiron season.

You can read the rest here.

Bad Ideas

OK, I'm the 99 Cent store on Monday (everyone does that on their first day of Spring Break, right?) and as soon as I walk in I see a display of these:

Yup, Root Beer flavored Pop Tarts. C'mon man! I'm guessing that these didn't sell well in the regular groceries since there were so many 99 cent boxes available Monday. I'm thinking that two folks at Kellogg's lost their jobs over this....the person in R&D who dreamed them up and the dumbass in Battle Creek who signed off on them. 

Late last year I was in there and they had Maple Bacon flavor. I can almost understand Maple Bacon Pop Tarts, but Root Beer? Nope. That was a bad idea.

A little later I saw this display:

Look, I'm not a wine snob. I enjoy it at Italian restaurants but as a regular thing, I'll pass. But even I know that buying wine at the 99 Cent Store is probably undoubtedly a bad idea. Yes, the bottles were mostly $2.99 and $3.99 but still. 

Sidebar: My wife and I attended a friend's wine/dinner party a few weekends back. Everyone was supposed to bring a bottle of wine and tell the rest of the guests the story behind it. I kid you not. We brought a bottle of the stuff we served at my son and daughter-in-laws' rehearsal dinner last spring. Everyone seemed to like it. It wasn't from a bag or a box, It was like $17 a bottle. And that was the story......"We served this at our son and daughter-in-laws' rehearsal dinner last spring. The End". Other folks' stories mostly involved being served this particular wine at a Chef's Table experience in France, being given a bottle by the Prime Minister of Bolivia, discovering a wine on a bicycle tour of Napa Valley vineyards, and so on and so forth. To paraphrase the immortal George Gobel...that party was a tuxedo and my wife and I were a pair of brown shoes. /Sidebar

All that is a long way around to the subject of this post....the bad idea I had later on Monday....

Heritage isn't the bad idea...me buying it is. Hey, I like the cards just fine. I got a nice autograph out of my first purchase but I have no need to buy a hanger box of something I'm not going to collect. But like the guy in Battle Creek who knew in his heart that Root Beer Pop Tarts was a stupid concept I went ahead with buying that box.

I actually did OK with the 20 cards I got. First of all I had no dupes. That's unusual for me. Normally I buy a pack of something and a month later buy another one and half the cards are dupes.

Second of all I got this card:

It was the first one in the cello I think. And it instantly made me think of this card:

Well done Topps! A Heritage that mimics the original set. I suspect a lot of the '17 Heritage are supposed to. I like when it's pretty obvious.

I also got this which is supposed to be some kind of disk.But it's square which sort of ruins the effect. It would make a cool button and I may use the button maker at work to try it. Maybe not.
.

I don't know why my scanner makes these game cards square. And cuts off the top. I tried a couple of times with the same result.

Most shocking of all was the fact that I got an Oriole!!! My only out-of-a-pack Oriole for 2017. Mike Bourn is out awhile with a broken finger but he's an Oriole! Plus he's a Houston Cougar. Doubly nice.

I'm showing Buster Posey just to see if Night Owl reads this far.

And I'm showing Hernan Perez because the Photoshop'd pic with him in front of that sky makes him appear to be in one of those '3-D Jesus' pictures my wife's grandmother had on her wall in San Antonio.

Yea, this one...

And finally I'm showing the Sean Doolittle card because it's a mini. I didn't know they were doing minis. Chris Carter is there for perspective. And because if he swings he's not likely to hit anything.

Everyone's doing it, doing it

I bought two 30-card packs of '17 Heritage today. I'm not gonna collect this but I'm sure I'll need at least some of the guys I got for my fantasy baseball binder this year so it's not really a waste of money. 

And I got an autographed card. No, it's not a star card but a signed card out of a pack is good nonetheless. This is only the second time I remember getting a signed card through a pack purchase. The other was an Eric Davis card from 2015 Stadium Club. In that instance I had bought a box in the misguided belief I'd try to collect that set. I think a signed card was guaranteed in that box purchase so this Bobby Locke is my first random auto 'pull'.

Bobby Locke played in parts of nine seasons from 1959 thru 1968. And I do mean 'parts'. Looking at his Baseball Reference page I noticed how often he bounced from the minors to the bigs and back.

Anyway he had cards several Topps during the 60s beginning with the 1960 set. His '68 card, which of course is replicated for this Heritage set, was his last one. The photo was the same one Topps used in 1962.

He won 16 games in his career against 15 losses. While with the Indians early in his career he was a part time starter. He pitched a couple of shutouts in 1960.

Other than the Locke autograph I received nothing of note. I will say Topps did a nice job of replicating a few of the little details of the '68 set including the variation in the 'burlap' pattern.

I don't know what cards are short prints and don't care either. I looked at the backs of these and didn't see any gum stains. I got one of those in one of these Topps non-flagship sets a couple of years ago. Not this time.

This 'game' card is a nice touch. I liked the original insert set. These are bigger though.

One thing I didn't like is that of 60 cards not one was an Oriole. Not one. I got four White Sox guys though. These packs were misdirected I guess. They were meant for Jedi Jeff.

So all in all I liked the cards and I hope to get some use out of them. One weird card though is this one of Matt Holliday. He just looks creepy. Like a toy or movie character I've seen but can't put my finger on. I guess he's photoshopped into a Yankee uni, too.

And I got five team cards. I like Photo Day shots of guys standing on bleachers a lot more than team 'action' shots. Now get the hell off my lawn.