Not bad for $4.01

I'm not an autograph collector per se but I do add them to my collection when I come across ones that fit and are not too costly. Case in point the six Orioles signed items I nabbed for four bucks and a penny on eBay.

Half my 'saved searches' are Orioles related so I guess that's why the listing turned up on my eBay feed (that row of stuff they tempt you with on the bottom of your pages). I'd probably have ignored it but six pieces with a $2 start price caught my eye. I tossed in a small bid and ended up winning. When you look at them they are really not that much of a bargain but the 8x10's will be fine on the walls over my desk at work. I can spend my last year there repping the Birds.

The Frank Robinson photo had a stain but in a cheap from from Dollar Tree it'll hang just fine.

The 1960 Topps Ron Hansen comes from one of my favorite subsets ever. That's 57-year-old gum residue on the front. I've been pretty successful at removing that gunk so I'll give it a whirl. I'll stick this one in my 1960 set after I clean it up a bit.

Ken Singleton was a class act with the Orioles. Signed '83 Donruss Singleton? I have a spot for it.

Here is a slightly abused Orioles team postcard of one of my all time favorites. Ellie was a fan friendly as they come. RIP

Finally a couple of flawed photos. One from Boog Powell.....personalized to someone whose name isn't readable (I'll make believe it's to me) and.....

...my umpteenth Brooks Robinson sig. Looks like the Sharpie was petering out. Oh well.

All in all a decent buy for the price. Hey I spent a dollar more than this on a hanging pack of '17 Topps Series 2 and got nothing I was remotely interested in. When I look at it that way I figure this buy was a real bargain!

Pierce-related GQ Minis

Before we made our trip to Chicago Jedi Jeff of 2x3 Heroes sent me a handful of cards. Three of them were 2016 Gypsy Queen minis of White Sox players and they will make it into my Billy Pierce collection. Or at least into the 'Pierce-related' pages I keep in the back of my Pierce binder.

All three display the player in a way that shows off the #19 memorial patch they wore following Pierce's death last July. The Minnie Minoso patch (#9) is visible as well. They re a little hard to see in the scans so I blew up a part of the Rondon card above. Take a look:

I've been trying to find one of those patches since they were used last year. I see plenty of team uni patches for sale on the net but not this one. I poked around every kiosk and team store I could find in Comiskey but they don't seem to be available. I'll keep looking though because sometimes I'm surprised by what turns up on eBay.

Jeff also tossed in a couple of Orioles. This is a 2005 Topps something or other of Boog Powell. Any card with a Topps Rookie trophy is worth having. I'm not sure why the back scanned so poorly though.

Speaking of Boog Powell....here is a headline from ESPN a few weeks back that gave me pause:

Mariners minor leaguer Boog Powell gets 80-game suspension for PEDs

I had no idea there was another Boog Powell in baseball. But there is. And he's in trouble.

Finally here's an SP card of one of those Orioles whose career was totally eclipsed by my 'baseball boycott' of the late 90s. It's Curtis Goodwin and this shiny chromified die-cut beauty just screams '1990s hobby cards'. 

Goodwin stole 22 bases for the '95 Orioles and repeated that number for the '97 Reds but never was able to grab himself a full time job as he bounced around to a handful of other clubs. I learn a lot from these cards of guys I never knew existed.

Thanks again Jeff. I'm on the lookout for a '19' patch for BOTH of us.

Happy Football Season

I recently took a look at the 'views' for this blog (I'm slow on the uptake sometimes) and I noticed that my Monday Morning Quarterback posts draw very little interest. Less than even my other posts LOL. But that's OK. I think that I'm no different than other bloggers, we all post what we like, right?

And, in addition to hockey, baseball, actresses and chicken fried steak, I like football. I DO understand that baseball drives the card/memorabilia blogging world. But I'm an NFL fan and I love my fantasy league. I've run it for 35 years and it's kept me close with friends from college that otherwise I might have lost contact with. Plus the MMQ posts give me an excuse to look through my fantasy team player binder and also to go back and dig into my team's history and stats. Those are two things I love.

And all that rambling brings us to today. It's the NFL's real Opening Day, Thursday Night Football notwithstanding. I'll be at the stadium watching the Texans play Washington at noon and hopefully enjoying it. So to mark the occasion I'm posting a Sports Illustrated issue that was sent to me some months ago by Mark Hoyle. 

Don't bail out now, there is a baseball treat at the end, I promise. 

The cover story covers my main man, Johnny Unitas. It tries to explain his rather unique mechanics as a quarterback. His game and his style were unmistakable.  He was one of a kind and I truly believe he's the best football player to ever take the field.

The last page of the Unitas article contains a home movie camera ad that features Boog Powell. Kind of neat, but a even better ad comes later.

And what do you know? The main baseball article was about Earl Weaver and the Orioles. Coming off the AL title winning team of 1971 the O's finished third in the AL East. They bounced back with a 97 win season in '73 and the featured players in this article were a big part of that.

Check out the articles listed on the contents page of this SI....chess, rowing, bridge, body building. But if you read SI back then that isn't unusual.

Here is the baseball prize I promised. You have to love this killer Killer ad for Johnson & Johnson's baby powder.. 

Orioles from the '64 Topps Stand-Ups set

These are a pretty neat little item. The '64 Topps Stand-ups are not an 'insert' but a 'stand alone' product (no pun intended). They came in one cent and five cent packs or so I've read. I have no recollection of ever seeing them for sale but I have vague memories of seeing them back in the day.

I picked up the four Orioles from the 77 card set at shows or through the mail back in the 80s when I was buying anything and everything that said 'Orioles'. Looking quickly online I can see that these are far more costly than the other 'secondary' Topps products I've been chasing. I wouldn't mind having a couple of the others off the checklist, Johnny Callison and Rocky Colavito for starters, but it is no priority.

Of the 77 cards 22 were single printed and more scarce. None of the Orioles are in that category.

Yes, my Norm Siebern has colors that appear 'off' when compared with the others. I don't know if that is a result of the printing or age. He had just come over from Kansas City prior to the '64 season and so he is airbrushed into orioles gear sort of haphazardly.

The backs of these are blank cardboard, like cards cut from cereal boxes. Brooks Robinson's card is by far my favorite of the group. It's got the best picture, best pose and well, it's Brooks!!!

Oddball Orioles, Milton Bradley Game Cards and Dell Stamps

These first two 'cards' are from what was the Dell Stamp albums issued in 1971. I don't know much about them other than the fact that each team had an 'album and these 'stamps' or cards were what made up the pages of the albums, 12 to a page. There was also an All Star Album and from what I understand these two Orioles were part of the AL All Star album. The team name under the player name of the reverse is the distinguishing factor in determining that these were All Star album stamps.

It's hard to tell in the individual scans but these two are laminated. That seems to be very common but why they were laminated or who did that is unknown to me. The lamination is easy to see in the picture down the page that I took with my camera. You can see in that shot that the lamination surrounding the Robinson has rounded shoulders while Powell is inside square plastic. Again, I'm clueless as to why. 

I found some photos of a page from the Orioles album as well as the cover. Including the All Stars the checklist for this set runs 600 pieces!

Next up we have some Milton Bradley game cards. From the 1969 game I have Moe Drabowsky and Steve Barber. Of course by 1969 Barber had left the Orioles and was pitching for the Seattle Pilots but hey, Once an Oriole....  The truth is I probably just saw it was Barber and bought it without thinking of the time line.

I never owned the Milton Bradley game but a look at the card backs tells me that a pair of dice were rolled to get game results.

Here is a pic of the game box (supposedly the 1970 version) from eBay where the asking price is about $60.

I also have a 1970 Boog Powell MB card. It's similar to the 1969s but not quite the same. The size is closer to a standard playing card. Here is the '69 next to a regular Topps card. The 1970 Powell is as tall as the Topps card but about a quarter inch narrower.

EDIT: I meant to include the scan of the 1970 Powell but for some reason it didn't stick. Here it is:

I searched and found some pics on the net of the game. The game looks very familiar now that I see these but I don't think I owned it. By 1970 I had been a devoted Strat-O-Matic fanatic for quite a few years.

Time Magazine w/Hank Bauer Cover 1964

I wish I had kept more of my magazines through the years. But they take up so much room that over time I'd pared them down to the point I only had a handful left. I have a few Sports and Sports Illustrated with Orioles/Colts/Rangers covers. A couple of others with Billy Pierce covers as well.

One mag I don't think I ever owned was this Time from September of 1964 with the Oriole and manager Hank Bauer on the cover. I remember it from when my parents subscribed. I knew that one day I'd pick it but doing so took awhile. I'd seen a bunch of them on eBay, and pretty cheap, too. But they all had mailing labels. I'm fine with that for a mag in my collection but I had always thought I'd like to put the Bauer/Bird Time cover on display. 

This one was available a couple of weeks ago. On the plus side it was label-free and it was even signed by Hank Bauer which is a bit of a bonus. On the other hand it has a significant crease and it cost more than I thought it was worth.  

But I went ahead and bid on it and I won. In the scan the 'crease' looks more like a scratch. It's certainly visible in person but not nearly as distracting as it appears here. I haven't scanned much of the mag because frankly Time isn't very colorful. It's meant as a news and information source unlike the popular picture mags of the day, Look and Life. 

Since there isn't much in the way of eye candy here I figured I'd put up a few 1964 Topps cards, just for grins.