Topps Archives...late to the party again

I picked up some '16 Archives in Dallas earlier this week while I was up there for a convention, Opening and flipping through the cards on Monday night was a much better idea than subjecting myself to Chris Berman hyperventilating over batting practice dingers in my empty hotel room.

My first impression...well after the initial shock of paying $6 for 18 card 'bonus' packs...was that I like them. But I always do. Not enough to buy more but the throwback designs are fun. I've about given up on ever getting Orioles out of retail packs I buy. But with me keeping a fantasy baseball player binder I can usually find a few cards I can use. Archives provides some variety on those binder pages.

Here are the highlights of my packs. The borders were sliced off by my scanner but I didn't feel the need to re-scan them.

Any Spahnnie card is a welcome sight.

As is a Koufax.

Jim Abbott escaped the wrath of my fickle scanner. He got to keep his border. Probably due to the 1953 design which runs the color to the edges.

And the Kipnis card confirms that. Only these two made it intact thru the scanning process.

A few others:

Rizzo and Cutch make the fantasy binder kicking their Topps base cards to the curb.

And one more thought...when I opened the second pack the first three cards were dupes of those I'd gotten in the first pack. Of course in keeping with my current card karma the dupes were ho-hum ones, current players I was vaguely aware of.

All in all I'm happy with the cards I got but I won't be chasing the set or any part of it. I like the concept and design but the cost per card is just too high for me.

1952 Topps Look 'n See Pt. 2

Here is the other half of my '52 Topps Look 'n See purchase. First up, George Eastman. Hard to imagine the excitement level you'd reach as a kid when you opened the pack of these to find Ol' George staring back at you like your grumpy neighbor when you ask him to retrieve your baseball from his backyard. 

Francis Scott Key looks like Paul McCartney. With some Prince thrown in. I guess. The cards with 'busy' backgrounds are more interesting obviously. I like this one. Key seems unperturbed by the chaos at Fort McHenry.

As you get into this set the fact that each and every one is a portrait begins to wear on you. I've reached that point with Paul Revere.

 

Next man up is Washington Irving. I remember reading some of his short stories many years ago and becoming interested in the Hudson River Valley which was the locale of many of them. Years later I was able to spend time in the area and really fell in love with it. Tarrytown, Sleepy Hollow, Newburgh and other towns along the river just have a charm and feel I don't find in many other places. Upstate New York, particularly the east and central regions of it is my favorite place to be.  Retiring up there is my dream but with my wife's family all in the Houston area it's just not very likely. Sigh.

 

 
Anyway, that's it for my '52 Look 'n See group.  Recently I loaded up some cheapies in my cart at COMC but decided to hold off and maybe just pick up a decent copy of both Abe Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. Time (and funding) will tell what I do with this set.

1952 Topps Look 'n See Pt. 1

Someone posted a card or two from this '52 Topps Look 'n See set back a few months ago and I decided that I needed a few for my collection. I found a small lot on eBay and I picked it up. It's been so long that I can't remember if it was a B-I-N or Best Offer. Whatever, it wasn't costly and I thought I post the best of the bunch in a couple of posts. It's a neat set containing historical figures on 135 cards. There is plenty of info on the set on the net including this page on the PSA website. Another good resource is the Cardboard Connection site. The set is broken down into several subsets, Famous Americans, Military Men, Inventors, etc. Babe Ruth is the only athlete on the checklist and there are some fairly reasonable examples of his card floating around. I'm not planning to chase many more of these but the Abraham Lincoln and a few others are tempting me.

Not much to add to the cards, the write-up on the back is a bio with a trivia question. The answer is revealed by placing the provided sheet of red cellophane on the back of the card. I've seen the cello sheets on eBay before although there doesn't appear to be one up now.

Obviously my little group isn't in very good shape. I'd rate them as "ATACC"...Acceptable To A Casual Collector. That rendering of Whistler makes him look a bit creepy.

P.T. Barnum looks like an actor but I can't quite place who it might be.

These are 2"x 3", smaller than what we now consider the standard card size. I've scanned one next to a '58 Topps to demonstrate the difference.

One more for this post, Ol Jeff Davis. His name has adorned a bunch of schools and a hospital in my neck of the woods. But little by little that is changing. 

I've got a few more to post. These things are growing on me.

 

Wacky Packages....they served their purpose

One of last month's eBay purchases came with a few 'extras'. The seller stuffed the small plastic case with filer in the form of Wacky Package cards stickers. I think these are the first time I've ever actually had things like this in my hand. According to this WP 'fan site' they were introduced by Topps in 1967. 

I vaguely remember them but they came after my die-hard collecting days of the early to mid 60s. I'm pretty sure my younger siblings had these things plastered to their school notebooks and binders.

These kind of things never appealed to me anyway so it's not surprising that I don't have any memories of them. When it came to non-sports I was more of a Civil War News and Mars Attacks guy. 

But here are some of what the guy sent. These Awful Apps cards are actually pretty clever. I got a grin out of them.

The rest are the typical Wacky Packages stickers. I scanned the reverse of the first two. No further explanation needed.

I know a bunch of fifth graders that would find this next one hysterical.

This one had tape damage. I'm guessing that these were received by the guy that sent them to me from someone else who likewise had used them as 'package stuffing'.

That's it. You were expecting something classy for the Fourth?

Archives Bull Durham Card of Robert Wuhl

I bought two 'jumbo' packs of 2016 Archives, paid too much for them and picked up a couple of mildly interesting cards. But that's a subject that'll I discuss in another post.

What we have here is an eBay purchase. That's Robert Wuhl, my long time friend and college roommate at The University of Houston on his '16 Archive subset card. The subset consists of  seven cards including one of screenwriter/director (and one-time Orioles farmhand) Ron Shelton.

Robert played pitching coach Larry Hockett as seen here drinking a beer, something Robert has never done (or admitted to) in real life.

The card back alludes to the 'candlesticks' quote that occurs during a mound meeting with catcher Crash Davis played by Kevin Costner and pitcher Nuke Laloosh, played by Tim Robbins;

(quoted at IMDb)
Larry: [Larry jogs out to the mound to break up a players' conference] Excuse me, but what the hell's going on out here?
Crash Davis: Well, Nuke's scared because his eyelids are jammed and his old man's here. We need a live... is it a live rooster?
[Jose nods]
Crash Davis: . We need a live rooster to take the curse off Jose's glove and nobody seems to know what to get Millie or Jimmy for their wedding present.
[to the players]
Crash Davis: Is that about right?
[the players nod]
Crash Davis: We're dealing with a lot of shit.
Larry: Okay, well, uh... candlesticks always make a nice gift, and uh, maybe you could find out where she's registered and maybe a place-setting or maybe a silverware pattern. Okay, let's get two! Go get 'em.

Robert pretty much ad-libbed the scene from a real life conversation he had just prior to filming with another college friend of ours. He had asked her for wedding gift suggestions and her response was pretty what you see in the quote above. To bring this full circle, that friend, Barbara, passed away quite unexpectedly this past February. In May Robert came to speak at the University of Houston Alumni Gala at which she was to be honored for her volunteer work in the community. The honor, of course, became a posthumous award. It was a bittersweet night. 

He's a huge baseball fan and picked up some sweet seats for an Astros-Mariners game through Roger Clemens. Here we are, right behind the catcher with my wife already checking her phone three pitches into the night. LOL

I also snagged a red-bordered variation. The prices for signed versions of these cards were kind of silly. When they first hit eBay I saw a red border sig card with an asking price pushing $400. They are down to the $85 range now. That kind of kills my plan to buy up all the ones I could find, get them signed and sell them. Robert was all for it. I was only half serious when we discussed it. LOL

Robert doesn't have any of the cards and said Topps paid him $20 for each card he signed. 

As for my Archives pack purchase.....I got no Orioles. I NEVER get any Orioles. But, as I noted I got a couple of keepers. I need to scan and post them soon.

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.