Wrapping One Show, Ready For Another

With about a week to go until the Houston TriStar Winter Show, I thought I'd finish posting my meager takings from the last hotel show I attended.

First up, a handful of oddball Rusty Staub cards. I'm buying Rusty stuff without a checklist which is a little like driving around at night with your lights off...you rely a lot on memory.

Swell Gum:

Pacific:

TCMA (from the 12-card All-Time Expos set.

But I was positive that those were new to me.

Unlike this Charles Bender 1913 National Game card. I have a really nice one that is in a slab that I blogged previously. This one was a cheapie. You can never have too many of these, right?

'77 Topps Cloth Sticker Lee May:

I found a small stack of these things and bought a few to pass on to some other bloggers. I didn't realize that I already had one of these. Jim Palmer is the other Orioles guy in the set. I wanted to find a Staub but no luck.

Billy Pierce 1959 Baseball Thrills subset card. I had this one but used it for my '59 build.

1987 Fleer Akeem Olajuwon sticker card. Yes, he was Akeem before he was Hakeem. I have some funny Olajuwon stories from his days at UH but I'll save them for when I have a cool piece to show with them. All I'll say now is that if he crashes a soccer game you are playing in... don't get in the way of one of his shots.

I haven't shown much (anything?) of the '61 Fleer football set. Most because nobody would read it. But I'm almost done with it and I wasn't even half trying. As with the Houston college player photo I had on here recently, this pic has the UH practice fields as the location and the surrounding neighborhood as the background.

'87 Donruss Murray. Part of the bunch of Murray cards that I was gifted at the show. I always liked this design. This is probably the last set that I paid attention to before I lost interest in the hobby a few years later.

1960 Lenny Moore. I had this in my Colts collection but I just love this card. One of these days I might try to chase this set.

Finally a pair of Arm & Hammer Orioles cards from the 1930s. I'm shown the backs in XL so they can be read.

The TriStar show is next weekend. Brooks Robinson is a guest on Sunday. I may take my son to reprise this shot from 20ish years ago:

 Brooks and Brooks!

Card Show Potpourri

I hit the hotel card show on Saturday. Having nothing in the works in terms of set building gave me the chance to just schmooze with some dealers and pick through my friend Darryl's cheap vintage boxes and cherry-pick a few things I thought were nice. I went home with about twenty vintage cards. Here are a few of them. And note that my scanner likes to cut off borders and I'm too lazy to re-scan anything at the moment.

Do I collect Dick Allen? Mmmmmmmaybe. I have plenty of his cards, that's for sure. I bought the '64 because I'd given mine away to a friend who was lamenting losing his childhood Phillies collection. I put together the 1964 Topps Phils team set for him. It was really neat to see how much he enjoyed the cards from his favorite Phils club ever.

This '76 is an upgrade to the one in my set.

'75 Luis Tiant. I have this in my '75 set of course but it's also gonna have a spot in my 'cards I like just because' binder.

Not my favorite Gale Sayers card but it helps fill out his page.

Darryl had lots of '69 Topps football in really nice shape. This set is very condition-sensitive and I could use a bunch of upgrades. I don't yet have a list of cards in my set that could be improved upon but here are three I bought for the simple reason that they were nice enough to buy on spec.

Vintage Giants cards remind me of my father.

I think I already had this Elvin Hayes card. He does UH basketball radio color commentary and walks right by us every game. I still haven't asked him to sign anything. I haven't seen anyone else ask either, so I'll wait.

Artis Gilmore came thru Houston when he played for Jacksonville U. He was part of a 7 foot-ish tandem post with a guy named Pembrook Burrows. Both schools were sort of wild, outlaw programs at the time and the games were a blast. Jacksonville made the NCAA final in 1970. Burrows went on to become a Florida highway patrolman and Gilmore had a long pro career and is in the hoops hall.

Darryl pulled out a huge box of 80s/90s cards that were part of a buy he made a few months back. He had promised me some Eddie Murray cards because of a friendly argument we had over Murray's Hall of Fame credentials. I had the mainstream cards of Eddie with the Orioles but few, if any, of him in other teams' gear. Darryl said I could just take anything I wanted.

The box had all the routine Topps, Fleer, Donruss cards and some oddballs as well. I ended up pulling one of each different card even knowing I had many of them already. I'll post a sampling of them.

I wish Upper Deck was still in the card making game. If they were I might still be in the pack buying game.

Back in 1988 I bought a box of those Topps-issued schoolkid folders that were replicas of this Topps card. There were 15 or twenty in the box. Over time, I gave them away to kids at my school I still have two.

1990 Fleer. Junk wax at it's finest.

'92 Topps something or other. Topps Kids?  I don't remember this.

I normally ignore stuff like this but it's actually sort of fun. The back is cute.

Stickers posing as cards. Why?

Another nice Upper Deck Eddie. At this point in his career, Eddie had decided that appearing to have some fun out there wouldn't kill him.

'93 Fleer. I don't even know if this is the regular issue for that year or not. By '93 I was out of the card hobby and close to being out of the fan business as well. I was hanging on by my fingertips and a year or so later the strike/lockout/stoppage came along and stomped on those fingers.

That's it for tonight. This show was the first one I've attended without a want list in hand. TriStar is coming up so I better get to work on something.

Shablotnik Sent Me Stuff

Well, this is discouraging. I had this post completed on my iPad with the Blogger Pro app and I come over here to post it and boom, it's gone except for most of the images. OK, I'll re-do it here since I don't trust that app anymore.


I was gifted with a package from Joe Shlabotnik last week, the second one he's sent in less than a month. The star this time was this 1971 Lou Brock. Perfect card? Nope. But it fits perfectly into my set build.

I can't think of Lou Brock without thinking of his semi-famous 'invention', the Brockabrella.

I actually wore one of those once thanks to my friend Sam whose Cardinals love runs very, very deep. I'm jealous of that ice cream Sundae that Lou is about to enjoy. I wonder if it came from Ted Drewes.

The Brockabrella appeared in the 1984 Fleer set. I've put that card at the bottom of this post. BTW...Joe also included another '71, Al Fitzmorris, but that image went 'poof' and I don't think I need to go dig it up from my files. Brock can rep the set without any help for sure.

This next card is a Heritage Hi# SP (or so I'm told). So it's as rare as Orioles wins in Minute Maid Park. But unlike watching the O's lose I can get some use out of this baby. It's going in my fantasy player binder.

As is his want, Joe sent along a stack of Orioles from sets gone by, mostly from the 90s and 2000s.

And a new-to-me Cal Jr.

Arthur Rhodes bulked up a bit as his career evolved. He looks almost slim here. Eric Davis had a short (two season) tenue in Birdland as he made his comeback from his cancer fight. Unfortunately for me, it came at a low ebb in my baseball fandom.

Andrew Cashner has had for bright (and not so bright) moment for the O's this year. He was beaten up on Opening Day when I saw him pitch at Yankee Stadium. He was much better Saturday night here in Houston against a depleted Astros team. 

Mancini had a lousy weekend against Astros pitching. But I'm glad to have this card. I don't fully understand what the purpose of  Topps' Opening Day set. Seems pointless.

1981 Fleer Eddie Murray.  I loved collecting this set.

I don't think I had this Drake's Murray. When I delivered the Newark Evening News in Nutley, NJ back in the day a package of Drake's Yankee Doodles and an RC Cola was the usual post-route treat.

Union Craft Brewing in B-more is producing a beer they call Steady Eddie. I'd love to give it a try, or at least grab a can to display.

Mike Mussina..welcome to the Hall of Fame! I hold no grudges.

Joe always tosses in a NY Ranger card or two and this time was no exception. I'm fired up about the return of John Davidson. With JD manning the tiller I think good things are ahead for my Blueshirts.

Here are a few more shots of Lou and his Brockabrella.

And the Fleer card of Jay Johnstone. I'm mildly surprised that the Bud logo made it thru the approval process at Fleer.

There were more cards but these are the ones I scanned. All are much appreciated. Thanks, Joe!!

Catching Up

I'm a bit 😎 ok..really far behind in posting some stuff I've received over the past month or so from other bloggers, both in the mail and in person. Time to fix that.

I can always count on Joe Shlabotnik to remind me that, for better or for worse, I'm an Orioles fan. And these days it's for worse but that's OK. I'm far enough along in life to realize that the outcome of games isn't all that important. The sun still rises every day. But enough schmaltz, let's look at cards.

I was happy for Chris Davis when he finally got the huge monkey off his back last month. He handled the whole hitless streak about as well as any player could. He seems like a very good guy and it's nice to see that he's even begun to swing the bat better and have some luck as well. He deserves it.

Nothing says 90s baseball card like gold foil. That's actually the front of the Norm Charlton card.  The 'Online' bit reminds me of my mother-in-law who uses that term for everything internet-related. As in "Can you come over and see why my online isn't working?" and "Can I see the online on my phone?" Hmmmm.

I had no idea who Bryan Bass was but his card has some nice bronze foil. It's from 2001 but UD was still in 90s mode.  BTW...Bass was a prospect out of Florida who banged around the Orioles chain for about seven years. His career, which began in 2001, came entirely during my time away from paying attention to baseball.

Speaking of my time away from baseball...

I came in at the end of Brian Roberts' career.  I had seen him play in Baltimore in 2005 in my first trip to Camden Yards and it was a 'who are these guys?' night.

Joe included some really great cards of recently and not-so-recently departed Orioles...

Has anyone gone from good guy to dispised as quickly as Manny Machado?  That's OK, I'm still a Machado guy.

I watched a bit of an Arizona game the other day. Looked odd with Adam Jones in that terrible dark gray uniform.

With modern card designs that mimic old designs nowadays, I frequently have to turn them over to see if they are actually older cards. This Leaf Eddie Murray is original.

Well, obviously this Heritage one is modern.

Did Topps sue UD over this.....

Either way, UD did a nice job of mimicking the '71 design.


There were plenty more baseball cards in Joe's envelope but let's skip to hockey and another of my teams that is in a rough patch, the New York Rangers.

I don't think I've scanned cards that were partially clear plastic before. These two Upper Deck cards didn't scan half bad but they are much nicer in hand.

And let's wrap it up with the most fun card in the bunch...it's my favorite mascot, Orbit!

All that adds up to about a third of what Joe sent. I'm getting some stuff together for a return and I'll try not to procrastinate much longer.