Like A Hole In My Head

I really should know better than to take on a new project right about now. I am barely posting as it is and I just got caught up on scanned cards over at my 1960 Topps blog. But the 1963 Fleer set jumped into my line of sight at the local card show a couple of weekends back and I couldn't look away.

I recall how my buddies and I loved this one when it hit the stores in New Jersey back in the day. We were amazed that someone other than Topps had put out baseball cards in packs...and with a cookie no less!! I mean we had plenty of Post cereal and Jello cards but these came IN PACKS!

It wasn't that these cards were especially attractive, they are fine as far as that goes, but it was the fact that 1) they weren't Topps and 2) well, they weren't Topps, that held our fascination.

In the back of my mind I've always thought I might one day chase this thing down. I've had the four Orioles cards forever and I have picked up a couple others including the Koufax along the way. Hitting that local show clinched the deal.

I rarely get too far past the very first table at the show. That's the promoter's table and he always has boxes of vintage that he sells cheap. Dime, quarter, dollar boxes, etc. One box he had at the latest show was marked $2 and I dove in. Immediately I found a nice cache of these Fleer cards and heard my wallet screaming to be opened.

I culled out the half dozen dupes and the Orioles in the stack and ended up with 22 cards....one third of the set exactly if you don't count the elusive checklist.

They were in really nice condition for $2 cards. Not mint certainly but they were not 'filler' cards either and none will require upgrading. They were mostly commons with a couple of minor stars like Jim Kaat and Vern Law sprinkled in.

The Leon Wagner up top is among my favorites (we loved his 'Daddy Wags' nickname) and here is a look at the back.

Nothing special about the backs. As usual you could easily mistake them for a Topps product based on the typography Fleer used. But, whatever.

I randomly scanned a few of the others. I think I'll wait until I knock off some of the stars before I post all that I have. I'll post my want list over on the right side column when I get the chance.

Jerry Lumpe in one of the few drab unis in the otherwise colorful Athletics' history.

Lots of Yankee Stadium shots in the set. Here is Jim Landis.

Al Spangler in the Polo Grounds. The Colt .45s  always seemed sort of, I dunno, exotic or something in that era.

Elroy Face in another Polo Grounds setting. I saw maybe two games there as a kid, Mets games not Giants. I hardly remember being there.

Clay Dalrymple at Wrigley. Are his pants split or in that some sort of elastic insert to keep them from splitting?

Awesome Yankee Stadium shot of Tito Francona.

Gene Freese at the Polo Grounds. WABC was the local radio home of the Mets' broadcasts back then. That was also THE station to listen to for rock'n'roll in the 60's. Unless you were a WMCA ("The Good Guys") or WINS ("Murray The K and his Swingin' Soiree") guy.

And finally a very young Jim Kaat.

I've got some snipes in on small lots of cards from this set. I won one last night and was able to pick up five cards (four new) for about $3 a card including the shipping. I'll get there but I'm in no hurry.

Non Sports from the Card Show

I've taken time off from posting but after picking up these non-sports cards at the local card show a week ago I'm inspired to get back into the swing of things.

These first two come from Topps 1956 Roundup set. There were 80 cards total. Eight Old West legends were included, each getting ten cards. 

There is some great artwork on the, front and back. 

The backs form a running bio of the subject. Note the "See Card No. 32" on the back of the Wyatt Earp.

Her's Wild Bill Hickok. This is the #1 card in the set. I didn't realize until now that I have the 'front' card of each of these gentlemen. The rest of each grouping of ten shows more action, not a portrait.

Others in the set are Kit Carson, Daniel Boone, Calamity Jane, Buffalo Bill, Jesse James and Geronimo. Speaking of Geronimo.....

I have a handful of 1930's Goudy baseball cards but this is my first one from the 'Indians' set. There are 260 in this 1933 issue. I'd love to see them all together in a binder. The back is pretty hard to read.....

....and there is no way that write-up would fly today. Interesting stuff to be sure.

The final card is from the 'Flags of the World' set, another Topps issue from 1956. I collect the cards that reflect my family's convoluted heritage and the Italy flag joins Germany, Portugal, Great Britain and France in the binder. Once I pick up the Mexico card I'll be done.

These four cards set me back a total of $7. I'll make that deal all day, every day.

I Feel Guilty...but Grateful

I take a month or so long sabbatical from this blog and yet the card packages keep coming. A week or two ago I got a stack of Orioles from Shane at Shoebox Legends. He didn't 'owe' me anything but sent the Birds just because. 

And every one had a place to reside. The chrome-a-fied Adam Jones, Jim Johnson and Brian Roberts are now making my fantasy baseball player binder a bit more shiny. All three of these guys were represented by common cards. Not anymore.

Here are a couple of new-to-me Brooks Robinson cards. I will never tire of Brooks cards. I'm going to need a bigger binder for him soon.

Stadium Club Bud Norris. I thought I had all the Orioles in the SC set but I keep finding new ones. I liked Norris with the Astros and even more with the Orioles. I saw him chatting up a group of O's faces earlier this year in Houston at a time things were most definitely NOT going his way. I was impressed by that.  He's moved on to the Padres now. I hope things work out for him. He was a real mainstay for the O's in 2014.

An finally a couple of Chris Davis cards. He has a lot of 'following the flight of a long drive' pictures on cards. I hope the O's find a way to resign him.

Shane also sent along a Manny Machado card, the only card I already had. But my original one was in my fantasy binder, the new one goes into my Machado collection.

Thanks again Shane. The cards are much appreciated.

Prize Winnings

A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to win a contest on The Raz Card Blog. The prize was a base set of these colorful and fun True Heart BBM Japanese lady wrestler cards. They are just quirky enough to be right in my wheelhouse.

Raz has already blogged much of the set so I'll just post a few that I like (and a couple I don't!).

What's up with the frying pan?

I think this is one of the Spice Girls. She's rather frightening.

The next one made me shudder. She bears a remarkable resemblance to a former principal at my school. The woman got her jollies by making everyone else's life miserable. But she hung on to her job because her divisive style of micro-management and intimidation somehow produced decent standardized test scores and in today's world of education that's really all that matters. Honestly, that's all that matters. She was moved to another school a couple of years ago and I'm considering sending her this card and asking her to sign it.

Raz didn't just send my winnings. He stuffed the box with what appears to be a full base set of Ignite NASCAR cards. I'm a gearhead and NASCAR is my favorite form of racing. I think it's changed over the last decade or so, and not necessarily for the better but I still follow it almost weekly. Hey, a race weekend at Talledega will make you love racing and weep for the future of humanity. Trust me on this.

The first part of the set consists of drivers. Tony Stewart is a three time champ but recent off the track issues have reduced his on the track performance, or so it appears to me. He remains my favorite current driver. I hope he can get back to being the 'Smoke' of old real soon. Danica Patrick has had more success as a personality than as a driver but I always hold out hope for a good finish for her.

Both Jeff Gordon and Bobby Labonte are long time favorites of mine. It's a sign of how old I am that I remember when both were up and coming drivers. Now Gordon is finishing his final season on the circuit and Labonte is rarely a factor as he fills a seat on one small potatoes race team or another. But both own championships.

Marcos Ambrose is Australian and currently drives in the V8 Supercar Series for the legendary Roger Penske. I miss his always entertaining interviews on Sirius NASCAR radio. Dale Earnhardt Jr. is another driver I pull for.

The second part of the set shows the car line-up. My father worked for Shell for over 45 years. The Shell car always jumps out at me from the pack.

There are a few special cards as well. Danica Patrick became the first female to win a pole when he qualified first at Daytona a few years back. It wasn't the turning point in her career that her fans had hoped it would be.

Overall it's a great set. Like the Japanese wrestlers it looks really neat sitting in sheets in a binder.

Bur Raz didn't stop with those two sets. Nope, he also added in a stack baseball cards including an awesome acetate Sandy Koufax and some super chromey, shiny Orioles including Eddie Murray and Dylan Bundy.

There is no such thing as an un-awesome Eddie Murray card.

Where do these cards come from? When I buy a pack of cards I get, well plain old cards. But these wild and crazy things exist out there because people always send them to me. Where do the come from? Inquiring minds want to know!

Reading Is Fundamental

This is a cautionary tale whose moral is "Do You Homework". But I'm sure all of you do and I'm likely the only one to do something this dumb.

Anyway, that card is from the 2010 Allen & Ginter set obviously. When I was getting back into collecting in 2011 or so I discovered A&G and was instantly enamored. It was so unlike anything Topps had put out. I went back and looked through the checklists of the sets Topps had done beginning in 2006 and made a small want list.

In scanning the 2010 checklist the name Gary Stewart jumped out at me. As a long time fan of country music (well, old school country anyway) the name invoked some great memories. Gary Stewart was one of my favorite artists, a 70's icon for me. His songs of drinking, lost loves, sitting on barstools and the 'honky tonk life' combined with his incredible and distinctive vibrato voice made him someone whose albums I never tired of.

His Out of Hand album may be one of the best country albums ever recorded, it's certainly among my top three. I figure I saw him perform a dozen times in clubs large and small around Texas. Like almost all the country singers of that era his popularity waned as the genre got 'homogenized'. And, like a lot of the other artists of that generation, he fell victim to the demons of addiction and faded from the scene except to his hardcore fans (like me).

He was married for 43 years which would surprise anyone who heard his lyrics. But he was certainly a devoted husband. When his wife died in November of 2003 Gary Stewart decided he couldn't live without her and took his own life six days later. I've never stopped listening to his music.

When I saw what I thought was my Gary Stewart's name on that checklist I went online and found, not only the base card but a relic card as well!!! A piece of Gary Stewart's shirt. On a card! I was still sort of new to the concept of relics and I bought the card from one of the online stores (Dean's Cards maybe) that lists prices but doesn't show the card. I never did my due diligence and try to find it on eBay. If I had I would have seen immediately what I didn't find out until it was too late...
....that's a different Gary Stewart!

I'd never considered the possibility of there being another Gary Stewart, much less one who holds some sort of record for jumping on pogo sticks of all things. What a disappointment. But I stuck the card away in a box and forgot about it until I read Nacho Grande's post about his 2010 A&G relics collection. There was pogo sticking Gary on the list so this card will be on it's way to him. My mistake is Nacho's gain I guess.

BTW...here is Gary Stewart and his wife Mary Lou.

And here is 'Whisky Trip', the one song I would sing if you held a gun on me and forced me to do karaoke.

RIP, Gary Stewart. You were the best.

More Picking the Best Card

While I await the discovery of a mystical cure for my scanner woes I present a few more cards from my Fantasy baseball binder and the cards they bumped. I had these scanned for my original post but they didn't make the cut. So please ignore the fact that you are getting second string scans.

Here is what I said in the first post a few weeks back:

I put one card of each of my players in my binder. I have certain criterion in mind when I hunt up a player's card. I prefer a vertical card, one that shows the player on the correct team, and one from a year I had him. The whole thing forms a hierarchy with a card fitting the above description at the top, and a horizontal, multi-player, die-cut, minor league, different organization card from a previous year at the bottom. But I'll ignore all that to add variety or to spice up the binder with a card I really like. 

I had this minor league card of Freddy Galvis in the binder. I had Galvis a couple of years ago and he only had minor league cards so I had to overpay for one.

It's not bad as MiLB cards go but it gives no indication of his MLB team so it got the boot....

 ...for a 2015 Topps. The weird number of the back makes me think it was from one of those team sets that you see on cardboard hangers in stores. Wrong year but it shows him in the Phils' gear.

Nearly the same holds true for Yasiel Puig. I don't make many smart moves in fantasy baseball but drafting him before he made the Dodgers was one. He hasn't turned out to be the second coming of Willie Mays but he really made a nice impact on my club when he broke in two seasons back.

This card wasn'y hugely expensive but it cost more than the card I replaced it with for sure. No Dodger logos? No good in the binder!

I waited for a nice card to come along and this year I liked the Archives Puig. So there ya go.

But my Archives Maikel Franco which I picked up when I claimed him made way for a better '15 card.

I just got this one in a couple of weeks back. Stadium Club > Archives, at least in this case.

Kyle Seager on a Bowman card. I don't remember when I had this guy but that Bowman card, even if it was from the correct year, yuck. Dark and unreadable.

'15 Stadium Club, wrong year, better card!

But SC doesn't trump all. I really like this next one. James McCann chats behind his glove with his pitcher. Unique and really cool. But I can't get around the fact that either of them could be the card's subject. Aesthetically, it's a sweet card. But for the binder it's like a two player card. Unacceptable.

2015 Topps gives it the bump.

Finally we have the case of Jordan Zimmermann. I like the 2012 Archives. that's even the year I had him.

But I bounced it for a '15 Stadium Club. And I'm having second thoughts. I may switch back. that Archives may not be as pretty but it is from the right year, right team and it's the only one of that set in my binder so it ticks the 'unique' box. I need to think more on this.