Musing about my five collecting interests: All things Orioles and BALTIMORE Colts, 50's Baseball, team publications, Japanese cards and even some football and hockey.
You might find some beautiful women, soccer stuff, presidential pins and life advice from time to time. I don't charge extra for any of those.
I thought I had my 1975 Topps set completed but no, it can't be that damn easy. I bought the final card for it from a seller on eBay who I've bought from before. One of those folks with tons of sales and positive feedback.
The card I needed was the Yount rookie. Not hard to find but I was doing my usual thing with it...waiting to find one that was in acceptable shape at a decent price. We all do that, right?
Anyway, I found it and as expected it arrived within two days since the dealer is located just northwest of Houston. Here are the pics from the eBay listing.:
As soon as I pulled it from the packaging I knew I had a problem. I've handled enough cards in my time to be able to tell that this one wasn't right. Now, I've accidentally bought 1975 minis on COMC because I sometimes shop too late at night and really should be sleeping, but that wasn't the case here.
Just to be sure I placed my Yount on top of a standard card and sure enough, it was trimmed. Now my standards are not perticularlyhigh, especially in light of how tough it can be to find really great cards for this build (and the 62 and 71, sigh), but I'm not going to put a trimmed '75 in my binder when I can find a 'whole' card at a similar price with a bit more work. If this was the last card star I needed for a tobacco set that would be a whole different story.
So I sent the pic to the dealer and within a few hours, I had a return invoice sent my way with ample apologies. The dealer received the card yesterday and my refund should be here at any time.
I wasn't angry about it. As I mentioned, I have bought from this particular dealer in the past and wouldn't hesitate to do so again. I was just disappointed that the baby I thought I had put to bed was suddenly sitting straight up in the crib and screaming for attention.
The bobblehead below is a S.A.M. Jim Palmer which I picked up last week on eBay. Opening it and putting it on the shelf was a satisfying moment due to the backstory of this thing.
In 1995 or so I was at a big Houston memorabilia show and came across a dealer with lots of display items including many of these high quality SAM bobbleheads. I immediately spotted both the Brooks Robinson and the Jim Palmer. Having named my sons for the two Orioles stars I knew these would be great display items for them. I plunked down more money than I had allocated for the entire show and headed out the door. I don't remember what these things ran but I know it came to almost a hundred dollars total.
These SAM (Sports Accessories Memorabilia) dolls are high quality. They are made of porcelain rather than the usual paper mâché. The two of them were the only items I had on display in the main area of our house. They sat on my desk which then was in our living room and were greatly admired by one and all.
That is until the day a few years later when my nine-year-old James somehow knocked the Palmer bobble off the desk and it shattered into a gazillion pieces. It was one of those moments when you want to reassure your kid that it's not a big deal and you're not really upset with him. But that's a lie. I was sick about it although I managed to (mostly) keep that to myself.
At that point I began looking HARD at shows and in the hobby periodicals for a replacement Palmer bobble. I soon discovered that the Palmer was extremely rare and very expensive when I did find one. These babies were no longer being made and the best I was going to be able to do was pay an exorbitant price on eBay or be happy with some alternate Palmer bobbleheads. After a few years of searching and hoping I gave up.
I still had this guy though:
Then a few weeks back I was rearranging my shelves while listening to the Orioles TV broadcast and heard Jim Palmer mention a Zach Britton bobblehead promotion and I was again reminded of what I needed for my shelves. I found a listing not long afterwards with the expected high price but with a 'Best Offer' option. After a few offers and counteroffers I made the purchase. I then found out through an email from the seller that she was Jim Palmer's ex- and back in 1991 she had a hand in designing/approving the bobble.
JP showed up as promised this past week joining his old friend Brooks after a nearly two decade separation. Ms. Palmer included a signed LOA (LOL) stating that this was part of the shipment she and Jim received and it came from her personal collection. Here they are...reunited and it feels so good.
Yes, this is a gold base Palmer. My original was a red base similar to the Brooksie but who am I to quibble? A bit of research shows that both carry similar price tags.
Above is a look at what my 'feature' bobble shelf looks like now. JP 'bumped' one of my Koufax dolls over a shelf.
Just because I was taking pics I'll include a few here of what some of my display shelves look like. Please ignore the fact that there are at least three four different styles of shelves. That's what happens when you ignore your wife's advise and buy stuff piecemeal.
Late edit: I switched to a smaller size for these pix so the don't run off the margins of the blog text box. You can click them to enlarge.
And I'll label the items here:
Above pic, left side: Vin Scully, Koufax, Brooks, Cal Jr, another Brooks with his Gold Gloves, Guy Lewis, Frank Robinson, Johnny U, Palmer, Houston Cougar mascot.
Above pic, top right shelf: Brooks fielding statuette, Astros Silver Boot series giveaway, LBJ, Rangers mini Stanley Cup, another Koufax, Brooks Baltimore city statue replica, Ron Kittle.
Above pic, lower right shelf: Jim Nantz, Lil Red the Nebraska mascot, Billy Pierce Comiskey statue replica, Eddie Giacomin signed puck, Elvin Hayes, a Japanese bobble my daughter brought from Tokyo, Bob Boone signed ball.
Above pic, left side: Orioles/Colts glassware above Starbucks You Are Here series mugs (all but the San Diego mug is from a visit to that particular city).
On the right on top are the bronze retired Orioles statue replicas and a Chuck Thompson bobble.
Below are more Starbucks mugs.
Bottom shelf has Guy Lewis, Orioles Bird for 2015 trip to OPACY, Astrodome replica, James Harden, Barack Obama, Robertson Stadium (UH's old campus home) Elvin again and Henrik Lundqvist hiding behind a Rangers' 90th season patch.
I've been trying to sort and organize my Presidential cards, buttons and other memorabilia recently. I posted a few cards last week on Presidents Day. That same day Mark 'Friend of Every Blog' Hoyle threw a few pics up on Twitter featuring some postcards of presidents based on paintings by Morris Katz.
I had been unaware of those postcards but intrigued enough that I figured I'd try to find a few for my targeted presidents, Johnson, Teddy Roosevelt, etc on eBay. While doing that I found a 72 card Presidential postcard lot at a low starting bid. I threw in the minimum ($15) and was lucky enough to win. So for a quarter apiece I landed 72 pieces of Presidential ephemera including some Katz postcards and a whole lot more.
Some of the 72 are either mundane or really cheesy but the majority are very cool. These two Lincoln cards were postmarked in 1909. These two cards are obviously related but the details vary. Both come from the Lincoln Centennial year (1909). The one below is marked with that year on the front (barely visible, top right)
I assume they were part of a series of cards. There is a lot more info on the celebration of Lincoln's Centennial on this webpage.
Here is the back of one of the cards with the one cent stamp and 1909 postmark.
As I mentioned the 72 card lot did indeed contain some of the Morris Katz painting cards. I have not had a chance to go through and sort them out. These two Lincoln cards posted here are the only ones I had a chance to scan out of the whole batch. I'm not going to bore anyone with 70 more presidential postcard scans but I think I can get a couple of interesting posts out of this eBay buy.
BTW...here is one of Mark's Twitter photos showing the Zatz cards. The cards of the earliest Presidents are the most interesting, at least to me. Thanks for setting me off on this path, Mark.
I needed a Derek Norris card for my Fantasy Baseball collection. Well, to be honest I wanted a 'Derek Norris as a Padre' card for my Fantasy Baseball collection. I had a Norris card but it was this one:
Wrong team, wrong year and you can't even see Norris' face.
Off On A Tangent Comment: Lots of folks love these kind of cards but I'd rather that a guy's base card at least show me the player in a way I'd recognize. But that's a debate for someone else's blog.
Back to the the Norris '15 Opening Day card. After my fantasy year was over I went through my binder. I looked for any card I could reasonably 'upgrade' from 'placeholder cards' (minor league card, wrong team, die-cut card, etc) to one with the guy's correct team.
I found the Padre Norris card with a "$1.15 BIN or Best Offer" price on eBay. I usually try to limit my fantasy cards to no more than a buck including postage but this was the cheapest one I saw. (Yes, cards are cheaper on COMC and SportsLots but with those I have to wait to buy enough to make the shipping worthwhile). Just for grins I offered the guy $1. He declined and counter-offered with $1.08 (LOL). So here we were, a dealer and I in a showdown over a crummy 2015 card and 7 or 8 cents at stake.
My online poker days are behind me so I just folded to his bluff and paid the $1.08.
I really like how bad ass Norris looks in this shot. Too bad he did nothing for my team in the week or so I had him.
Please allow me to pat myself on the back (and after the debacle of my last post I need it). What you see above is the photo of the cards contained in the eBay listing that fell into my lap for $21 over the weekend.
Nine 1960 Topps cards that cost me $2 and change apiece with shipping factored in. Even when you take into account that I had the Nellie Fox card already that's quite a deal. Now the Gibson and Mathews cards have creases, and the Colavito isn't great but the others more than make up for it. The Whitey Ford card is in at least excellent condition and the Robin Roberts and Nellie Fox cards are close. The Fox will be an upgrade over the one in my binder now.
I'm saving the actual scans for my 1960 Topps blog but I was so pleased with the cards when they arrived I wanted to show them off.
I recently did something that I didn't think I ever would. I went on eBay and spent money to buy money.
After finishing my long, slow collection of the US State Quarters a year or so ago I decided to go after the followup version, the National Parks Quarters. I found most of the first three years' sets pretty quickly and by the end of 2014 I had come across the five that were issued in 2013. But I had only one of the 2014s. My school's cafeteria cashiers will let me go through their coins when I ask , so I see a lot of coins, but for some reason the 2014s were very elusive.
I finally gave in and ordered the five 2014 coins on eBay and paid almost $3 for $1.25 worth of coins. Now I am caught up and can wait for the next release, the NebraskaHomestead National Monument of America Site Quarter which goes into circulation in early February.
This is the folder/book that houses my coins.
Here is how it looked before the eBay package came on Saturday.
On the one hand I feel like I 'cheated' to knock out a year's worth of the quarters. But when I was putting my '59 set together 'one f/g card at a time' I actually bought several 'lots' along the way. So I'm looking at this as a 'lot' purchase.
I've had the 1958 Billy Pierce Topps 'yellow letter' variation on my radar for quite some time. Have it as an eBay 'saved search' with email alerts and check other sites for it periodically. (Raise your hand as soon as you see where this is going.)
I woke up to an email a few weeks ago that said a 1958 Pierce variation was newly listed. On my phone, and still half asleep I followed the link to the listing and saw that the BIN price was lower than any I'd seen for the card, and it was graded (granted, that means little) so it had to be fairly nice. I went ahead and bought it and marked it as 'pending arrival' on my wantlist.
One problem. It wasn't the 'yellow letter' variation. The seller had it listed as 'white letter variation' and my search picked up the variation part of it along with the other basics. I just whiffed on looking at it real close.
It's really a nice card, far nicer than the '58 Pierce I already had, but it doesn't fill that long time hole in my wantlist. I scanned it in the holder and I'll be cracking it open pretty soon and adding it to my Pierce binder. The image at the top is a cropped version of the one below.
So I'm still on the hunt for the yellow letter '58 Pierce. And I have nobody to blame but me. As the old school book promotion said: "Reading Is Fun-dimental!"
I joined eBay in 2000 and the first thing I did was start tracking down the Orioles and Baltimore Colts publications I needed. And there were plenty of holes in my collection. I'd chase things in fits and spurts but in the last year I got really serious about the last dozen or so guides/yearbooks I lacked.
I finished off my Orioles checklist earlier this year and knocked off nearly all of my Colts needs. But this '77 Media Guide had eluded me. For a long time. I'd generally been targeting guides from cheapest to most expensive which is why I pulled in some 1950s Colts guides a few months ago after years of looking for reasonably priced ones.
But for some reason the 1977 Colts guide was super elusive. My eBay saved search email alert has sent me dozens of false positives through the years. The infrequent copies that showed up went for more than I thought they were worth and I never won a bid. So last week when I got another alert I was expecting that it was pointing me to the same tired 'TV Guide preview' of a Colts-Broncos game.'
But it turned out to be the real McCoy and for $15 I jumped on it. It showed up yesterday and took its place on my shelves. I would scan the insides but I don't want to fold the spine that much.
And there is a postmortem to this little episode. I received another email alert last night. I checked it and remembered that I needed to delete the alert. Lo and behold there is ANOTHER 1977 Colts media guide on eBay BIN. For $9. Free shipping. Grrrrrrrr. Years of losing bids and two of these come up within a week. And I buy the more expensive one. What can I say?
First up is what was described to me as a White Sox blank season ticket. I'm not sure what that means exactly but it just appears to be a game ticket that hadn't yet been printed with the game info. Hey, if I can add an oddball Pierce item for 99 cents, I'm all over it.
Next is one of the umpteen different re-packaged versions of the 1956 Topps Pierce card. This one masquerades as a 2002 Heritage certified autograph card. My scanner likes to delete the white borders on Topps cards and I didn't feel it was worth re-scanning this so here it is in all it's shrunken glory.
Topps has milked this image, and the 1952, for all they are worth. Sparkly ones, shiny ones signed ones, ones with stamped gold logos on the front, ones with hologram stickers on the back. This shit makes me dizzy. I don't have a 'want list' for the repackaged pierce cards. I just keep track of what I have and pick up some I lack if I stumble across something. I don't even bother with all the 'modern' cards of my other lefty pitcher collecting subject, Sandy Koufax. It seems to me that Topps put a Koufax card into every pack of every one of their cards and sub-brands that I opened.
And finally here's one I DO NOT have, but I thought you may enjoy checking it out. You'll need to click the picture to appreciate it. The listing is for a "1957 Billy Pierce Tampon Case; ID Cash Condoms Coins".
Better yet, check out the actual listing. And the same seller has a flask for sale that features the same image! So, a flask and a condom holder. Not sure why he doesn't combine the two and list it as a Saturday Night Billy Pierce Party Pack.
Please write your own joke and leave it in the comments. Thanks.
Well, tonite either Captain Canuck or I am going to be pretty damn happy, but not both. LOL. I was hoping the Rangers would win Tuesday night so I could go the the Orioles games without having to track the hockey game from the stands at Minute Maid Park but it wasn't to be. If I'm lucky the MMP wifi connection will be as good as it was last season when I was able to watch MLB.com feeds in there.
I'm posting my latest Henrik Lunqvist card here today. I don't believe in jinxes or omens so the fact it arrived on the day of The King's Game Five meltdown has no meaning. The post title refers to the transaction that involved it. The 'good news' is I won the auction pretty cheap for it being his rookie card (or one of them I suppose). The 'more good news' was that the seller included about eight other hockey cards. It's always cool to get a surprise with an eBay transaction. The 'bad news' is that he used scotch tape to attach the 'bonus' cards to the outside of the hard case the Lundqvist card was in and one card was ruined. The 'good news again' is that the ruined card was that of a Canadiens player.
Hey, I'm kidding (sort of... had the card been a Ranger I'd have been kind of annoyed).
The rest of the cards were pretty cool actually. They were all Panini cards from 2011 or Upper deck Victory cards from the same year. For all I know about modern that may all be the same set somehow.
The Paninis were kind of different, at least to my eye. They had some unusual pictures. Here's the best one:
It shows Radim Vrbata of Phoenix working on his stick with a hacksaw. The write-up says the photo was taken before a Coyotes win in Los Angeles over the Kings. But... isn't that a home sweater he's wearing?
The next one shows a playoff ending handshake between Pekka Rinne and Roberto Loungo.
I first thought this was going to be a shot taken at a skills contest (do they still do that?) but it turns out Vernette and Gerber are old friends, at least according to be card back.
Here is the now retired Teemu Selanne. I failed to scan the back but the pucks he's holding are from a hat trick against the Avs in 2011.
And finally it's the highly skilled Ryan Getzlaf on another Upper Deck card. Both Selanne and Getzlaf are west coast guys and I don't know much about them.
Nice cards. I don't collect this sort of thing but I'll put them in my hockey box.
I mentioned in this post a few weeks back how I was getting close to finishing my Orioles yearbook run and the only one I lacked was the 2008 edition. I discussed the guy on eBay who had one for sale for the exorbitant sum of $18 which I was willing to pay to finish my collection. Turned out he had me blocked as a buyer. Why he blocked me I'll never know because I had no records of what he claims was bad feedback I left for him. Whatever.
So with a bit of patience I found another one. As you can see my 2008 Orioles yearbook arrived yesterday. Cost me $6 delivered. Six bucks. Meanwhile Mr. Smug (I ought to post his emails here...but that would be chickensh*t) has re-listed his $18 book over and over.
But the important thing is that I'm done. From 1954 through 2013 I have all the yearbooks the Orioles have published. They skipped some years during the last few decades but if they issued a yearbook, I have it. I've been working on this collection since I returned to collecting a few years ago and had to play 'catch-up' with the ten books they published since 2002. Glad to have it done.
Just a handful of Orioles and Baltimore Colts publications remain on my want list. I'll get them soon enough.
I recently mentioned that I had bid on and won a '62 Orioles yearbook for the grand sum of $2.50 plus shipping. I picked it up at the post office today and I'm pretty happy with it.
Here is a look at both my 'new' and 'old' copies of the '62:
The old one had been 'updated' by an unknown (but obviously detail oriented) Orioles fan sometime in 1963. The coaches page had been edited with 'fired' notations on the write-ups of a couple of the staff. My upgrade copy is on the right.
Here is a closer look at the one with the notations:
And every player had his 1962 stats added. LOL And in some cases his new team. Here are the two books for comparison sake.
Both these pages are from my upgrade. First the Jim Gentile entry:
And the obligatory staff/behind the scenes page. I like how the photos attempt to capture the folks 'in action' as it were..... on the phone, conferring seriously. Good stuff.
Sorry for the pics. This is one of the Orioles' early 60s over-sized yearbooks and is far to big to place on a scanner. So I had to take phone pics. I knew you couldn't live without seeing my latest 'prize'.
Harry Truman ran shoestring presidential campaigns and as a result his pins are pretty scarce and can be costly. I've passed up quite a few on eBay and elsewhere because I thought the pin was too expensive or the dealer wasn't sharp enough to know if he actually had an original.
A week before Christmas I found one on eBay that looked pretty nice, was not too expensive (about $24 IIRC), claimed to be original and came from a dealer with near perfect feedback (lots of it).
The pin arrived the other day, I pulled it out and it looked like this:
The scan doesn't do it justice. It's shiny and just perfect. Flawless celluloid surface. I thought it was the nicest 40's era pin I'd ever owned. And then I turned it over. Again, flawless. And that's the problem.
I've been collecting these pins for a long time. I can't remember ever seeing a supposedly 60+ year old pin with a perfect back side and pin. Never. These babies were made with the cheapest possible alloy and they stain and tarnish over the years no matter now well they are kept.
So now I have a question in to the seller. He seems like a very nice guy, emailing me about sending the pin out after Christmas if it wasn't something I needed for a gift. And his feedback is almost perfect. I asked him if he was certain that the pin was an original and not a reproduction. And I was very polite about it. So I'll be interested in hearing what he has to say.
UPDATE:
I was contacted by the seller today (Monday) and he provided me with enough info and a backstory on his pins that I'm pretty sure the pin is original. Looks like I made a pretty good deal.
