Striking Out On My Cleveland Roadtrip

Last weekend we took a two day trip to Cleveland.  It was Kate's birthday, and she wanted to check

Unfortunately we came home with a newfound appreciation for our fair city.  Cleveland might be ok for a daytrip, but it was far from what I expected.

out a different city.  Even though Cleveland is only about a 2 hour drive, neither of us has spent any real time there.  Growing up in Pittsburgh, the Cleveland/Pittsburgh rivalry goes much deeper than just sports.  You can find "Cleveland Still Sucks" tshirts worn year-round.  But we wanted to give the Mistake on the Lake a fair shot.

Our itinerary for the weekend was pretty wide open - hit some thrift stores, a couple vintage clothing stores for Kate, and try to go to the famed West Side Market and an Indians game on Sunday.

Things went south fast.  We plugged the eastern-most thrift store on our list into the GPS and were on our way.  As we pulled up, the metal gate across the door and handwritten sign listing what they sold were bad signs.  The store had an open sign sitting in the window, but it didn't look like those doors had been unlocked in quite a while.

And that seemed like a fitting metaphor for the entire city.  There were pockets of nice shops, nice homes.  But overall the city just looked beaten and broken down.  From a shopping standpoint, the day was a bust.  Kate found a few things, I found zip.  Half a dozen stops yielded fewer finds than the average trip to the Salvation Army store 5 minutes from our house.

But if there is one thing Cleveland did do well, it was food.  We stopped at Melt, a local restaurant with a few locations.  It was well worth the 45 min wait for a table - I ordered "The Dude Abides" a grilled cheese layered with cheese sticks, marinara, and two huge meatballs.  The sandwich weighed a ton, and I could barely finish half, with the other half heading home with me on Sunday.

The Cleveland art museum was by far the non-edible highlight of the trip, with a pretty impressive collection both in terms of scope and size.  They were lacking in major pieces, but more than made up for it in layout and the sheer size of the collection.

We headed to bed with a gameplan laid out for Sunday: West Side Market in the morning, a flea market stop for some bobblehead redemption, and then an afternoon Tribe game at what I will forever call The Jake.

The thunderstorm we woke up to had other ideas.  To make things worse, the West Side Market is apparently closed on Sundays (seriously, who does that?).  We tried to salvage it by going straight to a flea market.  A line of trucks streamed out as we pulled in; apparently we had just missed a big downpour that cleared everybody out.

We made one last ditch effort to salvage the trip - an indoor flea market about 20 mins away.  It looked as sketchy on the outside as it was inside.  Rows and rows of shelves lined with junk, nothing priced and no vendors in sight.  But I spotted a few pegs of Starting Lineups, so I had to at least get a price.  I wasn't going back to Pittsburgh empty handed.  The customer service/owner/snack stand operator told me $3 each on the SLU's.  Music to my ears.

I picked out three Pirates.  I already have a copy of the Clemente at the beginning of the post, but for that price I figured this one could be an opener.  

The Al Martin brought back fond memories, since my parents humored me by scouring the countryside during a vacation to Niagara Falls in the summer of '95 looking for Pirate SLU's.  We didn't have any luck, but it brought a smile to my face to find one almost 2 decades later on a different vacation.  

 The Gary Sheffield was more of an impulse buy, but I've always had a soft spot for the early Marlins teams.  It's not exactly something I collect aggressively, but I've amassed a nice little Fins collection in recent years.

But perhaps the most interesting part of the weekend was the timing.  We went to Cleveland just a day after The Decision, Part II and LeBron announcing his return to the Cavs.  On another summer afternoon a few years back I was sitting in Columbus with my buddy watching the Pirates and Indians AAA affiliates square off.  As another trip-disrupting thunderstorm came in, the video board streamed LeBron telling the world he was leaving Cleveland for Miami.  You could tangibly see and feel the energy instantly draining from people.  The area felt deflated in a humid, sticky summer rain.

Seeing Cleveland, LeBron jerseys and homemade signs sitting in front of every business we passed, having something to hope for was such an interesting juxtaposition to watching an entire fanbase crumble before your eyes.  It was painfully clear that this is a city hurting economically.  A population that needs, and deserves, something to cheer for in their sports teams.  Don't get me wrong.  Cleveland still sucks.  But I hope the Cavs and Indians give the city something to cheer for.  The city deserves it.

But don't think I'm a bad person if I'm still hoping one of the Steelers knocks Johnny Manziel into the next century this year.

I don't always do group breaks, but when I do...

I pull big hits!

It seems like group breaks are all the rage these days (group breaks are the new midnight blaster run?). I've been hesitant to jump in on most.  After all, I can just pick up singles for far less than the average buy in for a case break, and be guaranteed to get cards I want and don't have.  With a group break, the high end potential is there, but the chance of tossing money down the drain is pretty high as well.

But some deals are just too good to pass up.  As anyone who has read a single post here probably knows, I love the 90's.  So when a massive 30+ box 90's break was proposed on a forum, I was all ears.  I had done a similar break a few months back (which I still need to post...doh), and hit the motherload.  When the break was expanded to 70 boxes for a little more than the cost of blaster, I couldn't get that paypal screen up fast enough.

The break was a perfect fit for me.  I pretty much stopped collecting in 1998 and 1999. Even though I have filled some holes from those years, my commons needs alone made the break a worthwhile investment for me.  Anything beyond that was just icing on the cake.

And this cake ended up well iced.

The break had a pretty broad range of boxes, including a few top end boxes.  Nearly twenty years later, it's no small task to come across unopened wax from some of these products.  Some products that were widespread and had investor appeal, like Bowman, seem to be easy to come by.  But 1998 Leaf Fractal Foundations?  Not so much.  The product was pretty limited (for the time) to begin with.  And the cards are big holes in my collection these days.  Same goes for 1998 Donruss Collections, from which the Jose Guillen above hails, which were basically chrome and refractor versions of the primary Donruss sets released that year.  Donruss would be out of baseball later that year, but they put out some interesting products on the way out.

If you're not familiar with the products, I suggest a google search and preparing a flow chart.  They're some doozies.

But of course not all the products can be those upper tier boxes.  The price and rarity makes it tough enough, so many of the boxes were lower end product.  But that's fine by me, since the 90's were great for 1 per pack parallels that leave big, gaping holes in my binder pages.

Like these great '63 Throwback designs from the 1998 Fleer Tradition set.  Fleer would later use the design for their base Tradition set in 2003, but I'm preferential to the parallel version.

There was enough 1998 Bowman (I believe 7 boxes between Series 1, 2, and Chrome) that I hope I don't see any more in my lifetime - though I stilllll have some holes in the International parallel set.  But 2000 Bowman and Chrome were welcomed sights.  The Bucs slot largely struck out on the Bowman boxes, but I did come away with a beauty from 2000 BC's Retro/Future parallel.  It's still one of my favorite parallel sets.

One of my favorite aspects about a break this size is that there is something for everybody.  Some of the more expensive slots may have been disappointed.  But on the whole the break hit some bigtime cards.

But of course one of the biggest perks of participating in a group break is the break itself.  The break was streamed live across two nights, and was a great learning experience.  For example, I now know that telling Kate I'm too busy to do thing X because I'm watching a man open boxes of baseball cards on the computer is probably not a good choice.  It's also about as interesting as watching paint dry when the boxes are from the 90's, where a card numbered out of 3000 may be the hit of the box.

Speaking of hits, they come in all forms during a break.  Sure, there were some big hits.  And a few big dollar cards came out (though never in black and gold).  But as I said, it was the smaller joys, like half a dozen of 90's Pacific product that is nearly nonexistent in my collection, that made the break for me.

The flat rate box that came in yesterday had nearly 400 cards.  Sorting through all of them was a relatively painless process, since I knew which products in the break were my biggest needs and which I probably already had a good deal of the cards.  Some of the boxes were also repeats from the previous 90's break, so I knew those sets were probably already completed.  All told, I added about 160 new cards to the collection.  Not much more than a dime a card.  And considering that many of those were inserts or parallels, not bad at all.

The break yielded some fun cards that I just wouldn't be able to come by with ease otherwise.

It didn't scan well, but this 1999 Bowman Chrome International parallel of Jason Kendall features an awesome California seascape in the background.  And while not a super rare hit, it's also the kind of card that isn't quite rare or valuable enough to make it into a show box or ebay.  Yet hard enough to find that it's not just sitting on sportlots.

Oh, I had been promising hits, hadn't I?

Again the scan leave something to be desired, but this Paramount Platinum Blue parallel falls 1:67 packs.  Not a bad pull, if I do say so myself.

But the monsters of the break...

For the uninitiated, these beauties are 1998 Topps Tek Diffractors.  If that means nothing to you, these are basically the old school Atomic Refractor design on acetate cards.  But there's a catch.  Each player has 90 different patterns.  And the cards came in packs of 4 that carried an astonishingly high price tag of $4 or $5 a pack, which was insane for the time.

The Tek base set alone is an almost insurmountable task.  I think I have 3 or 4 patterns of each player.  But the Diffractors?  They fall about 2 per box on average.  Completing all 90 patterns for one player would be a jawdropping accomplishment.

These cards both came out of the box that was the highlight of the break.  A Diffractor hot box that yielded I believe 8 or 9 Diffractors in the box.  Talk about killing the odds.  If I wanted to sell them, these two would probably just about pay for my slot.  But I couldn't dare let such amazing cards leave my collection.

But the breakin' fun isn't over yet.  I went with the hot hand and bought into another, much smaller, break that just came in the mail today.  And the results were even better!

A Picture's Worth However Many Words I Just Typed

There isn't much down time nowadays with the wedding two weeks away (eek!), but I've been slowly working on getting some more Pirate team sets into binder pages.  It's fun to see to see an entire team set come together on a page (you know, when a large part of the team was actually represented in a set, unlike today's star only 100 card base sets).

And the photography?  Topps has stepped its game up in the last few years, but only because photo quality crashed and burned during the 2000's.

This 1998 Stadium Club set is just...wow.

The photo variety alone makes the set (well, partial set - there's another binder page still missing a couple cards).  Different angles, eye levels, and a variety of poses.  Even an awesome Jason Kendall play at the plate shot.  And the Tony Womack photo next to it is an excellent action shot.

Simple design, great photos, and even some high value cards from the Co-Signers inserts.

As the binders slowly take shape, I may scan some more full pages.  I love inserts, and parallels, and all that good stuff.  But great photos?  You can't beat that.

I Love the 90's, An Addendum

I don't always post regularly, but when I do, I prefer the 90's.

My I Love the 90's posts have become a semi-regular feature here, mostly because a large portion of my additions have been 90's cards.  But it's great to see some other blog-love for the decade that gave us Pogs and Furby.  Nick and his wonderful Dimebox wrote up a great post on some of the great cardboard that came out of the 90's.

Aside from my love of all things autographed our collecting tastes are pretty much in sync, so it didn't surprise me to see him write the post.  But I thought I'd delve a little deeper into why many collectors view it as a lost decade, and include some additional points illustrating (pun intended) why they're dead wrong.

One major trend I've noticed among the 90's Deniers is that most of them either fall into one of two camps: either they didn't collect during that time, or they collected heavily and got burned.

The hobby, and baseball as a whole, were in a major transitional phase.  Insert sets blew up in the early 90's, while simultaneously the burst of the investment bubble that had fueled the 80's collecting (read: prospecting) market and baseball's strike drove collectors out of the hobby in droves.  The result is that the hobby quite literally shifted over night, moving from a relatively passive collecting landscape with limited numbers of sets and inserts in '93 and '94 to a boom in both inserts and numbered cards in '95 and '96.  Hot base cards, which had once driven products, were now largely secondary to the insert craze and rare serial numbered cards.


Add in autographs and later in the decade the white hot game used cards, and the hobby landscape had changed rapidly in just a couple short years.  And simply put, some people don't like change.

The business model as a whole changed, with companies moving from producing just a handful of sets in insanely large quantities to the model we see today, where there are more releases printed in much smaller quantities.  Again, some people loved the added competition and added variety, where companies tried to offer something for every type of collector, while others preferred the old "3 sets a year" days.

Some releases, like Metal Universe, were unique approaches to expand the market.

But there were also a lot of one-and-done sets.

Though they gave us some quirky releases, like 1998's New Pinnacle.  Not to be confused with the regular release of Pinnacle the same year.

But we can't avoid addressing the elephant in the room any longer.

Why do a lot of people think 90's cards are junk?  Because they got burned.  Bad.

The mid to late 90's were still largely operating on the shop/card show model, where you could really only find a card if it somehow magically found its way right in front of your face, or if you pulled it from a pack.  While there were collectors, traders, and sellers online, the online card community was very small.

And the cards that were coming out were very rare.  This wasn't an 84 Topps Mattingly, where if you passed on one there would undoubtedly be three dealers with the same card at the next show.  These cards were tough pulls, and they were numbered to tell you just how few of them were out there.

It's hard to fathom, in these days where numbered cards fall out of boxes by the stack.  But you could bust boxes of a product and not even hit a single card numbered to a few thousand.

People paid hundreds or in some cases thousands of dollars for rare cards.  Those cards are still rare.  And they're still valuable.  But those rare cards that sold for $800 at a show in '98?  It might sell for $95 on ebay now.  The growth of the online sales market opened tons of doors for collectors and radically reshaped the way we value (and the values of) cards.  If a card was numbered /150, seeing it at a show was no longer a once in a lifetime buy or pass situation.  Odds were that someone, somewhere would be selling that same card.  And at some point that card would make its way online.

And of course there was a trickle down effect.  It wasn't just the deep pocketed collectors that got burned. 

There were the guys who were able to sell common inserts of star players for $3, or parallels for $1 who just can't seem to admit that those same cards probably belong in the $.25 box now.  You know the type.  There's at least one at every show or flea market, trying to peddle their 1992 Frank Thomas Score cards, Don West style, telling you what a great buy it is for just $2.

To top things off, the entire rookie crop for the decade absolutely imploded.  Maybe that 89 UD Griffey you spent $50 on stings a little, but it's still.  But it's still an iconic card or one of baseball's greatest players.  And you can laugh at that stack of Danny Tartabull rookies you paid $1 each for. 

But that Kerry Wood Bowman Chrome you spent $45 on?  That still burns.  Ben Greive, Karim Garcia, Kris Benson, anyone that came out of '99 Bowman.  The mid-late 90's rookie crops are a virtual prospect grave yard.  And it's not just the prospects that flamed out in AA.  ROY winners.  Guys that spent a couple years fast tracked for stardom and then...poof.  The cards built, and built, and built.  The hype pushed prices up and up for year after year.  And now the cards are worth pennies on the dollar.  It's not that collectors had never been burned on bad investments before.  It's that the 90's burned collectors in ways that I don't think any group of rookies ever had or has since.

And I can't totally blame them (laughing, meanwhile, is a different story. That I can do with ease).  A lot of people spent a lot of money on cards that just weren't nearly as rare or special as they wanted to believe.  Some people just got left in the dust of the changing hobby landscape.  And some collectors, as always seems to happen, just continue to move on to the newest, shiniest trend, considering anything that isn't that "thing" to be worthless simply because it isn't what they want.

So feel free to continue to ignore cards from the 90's.  My collection sincerely appreciates it if you do.  But as they say, don't knock it til you tried it.

Card Show Pickups...A Month Late

Well, it's official.  I'm a full month behind on my collecting. 

This past Saturday, I drove down to Dayton for the monthly show.  I came home with a nice stack of beautiful cards, including a huge dent in my remaining 60's vintage needs.  And then I realized I had nowhere to put this cardboard goodness (save for the living room table, which would not go over well with the little lady).  So I finally decided to get around to scanning and cropping all my pickups from last month to clear some space in what has quickly become s a cardboard disaster zone. 

Life has been pretty hectic recently, and coupled with some lots of minor league team sets that I recently purchased, the stack of cards in need of entering and scanning has become a major backlog.  With a show last weekend and the biggest show of the year (for me) coming up this weekend, I better make at least some dent in things this week before it gets any worse.

Card shows have become very hit or miss for me.  I used to be able to go into any show, dig through dime boxes, and come away with around 100 new Pirate cards each and every time.  But my commons needs have dwindled down quite a bit.  That isn't to say I don't need a truckload of commons.  It's just that the stuff I need never seems to make it into the dime box: either those all too common mid-late 80's overproduction era sets that people presume every collector in the world already has (I have more needs in the '86 Topps set than I do in the 2012 Topps Black team set), or the more obscure sets from the mid 90's through mid 00's that set builders and dealers never took an interest in.  Somewhere out there are boxes and boxes of Stadium Club and Ultra, Fleer Authentix and Donruss Team Heroes.  Cause I can assure they are not in any of the hundreds of dime boxes I've been through!

So with the dime boxes yielding limited potential, my show hopes have been bumped up to the $.25 and $.50 boxes.  This is quite a hit or miss prospect.  When there are dealers with such boxes (and I mean ones populated with serial numbered cards, inserts, etc rather than a host of Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds base cards) it's paydirt.  If those dealers don't show up that weekend, I'm usually spending an hour plus driving home while muttering to myself how I just wasted a bunch of gas and should have just ordered some cards off COMC.

While I wouldn't say I hit paydirt last month (this month was a different story), I think I found enough to make it worth the trip.

A quarter box yielded a nice mixture of 90's shiny goodness and some more recent numbered cards.  Nothing that made my jaw drop, but I gladly gobbled up all the Bucs I could find.

There's a bit of paranoia any time I hit one of these boxes.  I'm always convinced some Pirate collector has come before me, wiping out all the Pirate goodies in the box.  I've spent enough time digging through 4000 count boxes that only yield 3 or 4 Pirate cards to have faith in that theory.  Maybe it's because there just aren't a lot of Pirate players in most sets.  Maybe the Bucs are more heavily collected than the blogosphere and online collecting communities have caused me to believe.  Or maybe I just have plain bad luck. 

Either way, I can't help imagining that most shows play out as a comedy of errors, with some Steeler jersey wearing middle aged man with a mischievous grin and pencil mustache clearing out all the Pirate cards just moments before I enter the show.

Build-a-Buc

I've realized one simple thing in my short time blogging: I rarely write about what I intend to write about. 

That's not something new to me.  I've been a writer, in some way, shape, or form pretty much since I can remember.  My dad is in the newspaper business (yes, kids, they still make those), and I can remember writing a sports "newsletter" about player stats and my oh-so-well formed sports opinions almost as soon as I learned my letters.  Needless to say my analysis was not particularly complex at 5 or 6, but I'm pretty sure I was adept enough to realize that the Pirates weren't particularly good.  My writing has (I hope) grown since then, and I've found my writing see the light of day as a published journalist, essayist, historian, literary critic, and occasional poet.  And if there's one thing that's always held true it's that my writing takes on a life of its own.

I opened up my laptop intending to post some awesome cards from an ebay lot I won last week, to be followed up tomorrow by my show pickups from this weekend.  I guess those posts are getting pushed back a day.  Sorry blogosphere.

Before writing, I was drawn in by two fantastic posts about tangentially related topics.  Night Owl posted on his multifaceted interests while Nick strayed from the Dime Box to work through his relationship with Gypsy Queen.  Both posts took me to the same place: set building.

When I lived in Pittsburgh, the dime boxes were my solitary playground.  I never saw anyone else dig through them; set builders were nowhere to be found at local shows.  Since moving to Ohio, I've been lucky enough to be close to a fairly large monthly show outside of Dayton that seems to attract a large crowd of set builders.  Every month I see a dozen or so guys digging through the dime boxes of Heritage or Gypsy Queen looking to finish off their sets or pick up a few more SP's.  But it's not just the new stuff.  Their binders of checklists have countless sets, and any stray dime box might yield that elusive 2001 Topps Fusion common.

But I'll be honest.  I just don't get set building.

I mean I get it.  I get how it works (pretty straightforward).  I get the appeal of having every single base card from a single set, of a single year all neatly organized in your binder (a little less straightforward).  But I just don't get where the fun is.

That isn't a dig at set builders.  I've built a few sets myself, and enjoyed the journey.  But I was always left with the feeling of "Now what?" after finishing the set.  Maybe that's the appeal of Heritage, Qypsy, and Ginter, which I have often bemoaned are almost the exact same set.  Topps has generously answered that now what question for set builders.  "Here, this is pretty much the same.  You like that.  But it's different.  Go build, my child."

And the finality certainly has undeniable appeal.  Under no circumstances, even with a Powerball jackpot or two, could I ever call my Pirate collection complete.  There will always be cards to chase.  The closure of completing a set would be nice at times.

I find myself in a position where I am surrounded by set builders.  Or at least I feel like I am.  At the monthly show, countless blogs devoted to a single set or people chasing many sets, and autograph collecting, which has its own large community of dedicated (read: frighteningly obsessed) autographed set builders.  But I just don't get it.

It feels so confining.  Buy these cards, put them in this order, they all have this design.  I'm a rebel, dammit!  If I want to own a random Andy Benes auto, then I will, and I reuse to feel as if that card is out of place in my collection.  I like the freedom to always have a new Pirate card to chase, to have he flexibility to be as excited about picking up a new Kordell Stewart dime card as I would be about a $45 Lynn Swann auto.

Maybe it's just a matter of picking your poison.  Instead of collecting a full set, I collect just a portion of it, one specific team instead of all 30. 

And quite honestly, I could see a time where I might collect sets in the future.  Not exclusively, of course.  But I would enjoy building a set or two.  They might just be a little more off the wall, a little less conventional than the typical set builder.  Like Topps Fusion.  But in the mean time, I'll enjoy the flexibility.  And the insanity.  And the madness.

I enjoy being able to say that I both collect very specific things, while also collecting just about everything.  My collecting mindset has always been simple:  If I like it, it's in my collection.  It's never that simple, of course.  But where's the fun in that?

So, where are you from?

Over the years, there have been quite a few card sets and inserts that have played up players' nation of origin.  After all, baseball is one of the most international games (though the other major sports are quickly expanding).  Some are exponentially more exciting than others, but a team collector mustn't love all his cards equally.  Though I must admit I love the annoyingly elusive 2003 UD 40-Man Red White and Blue parallels, of which I still have yet to see a copy of the Jack Wilson.  I imagine thousands of these sit in dime boxes somewhere.

There isn't a ton to say about most of these cards, so perhaps we'll just call it an avant garde photo essay.