Capt'n Crunch

Shiver me timbers.  For those not keeping score at home, today is National Cereal Day.  Like it or not, baseball cards have a long history of being paired with some consumer product.  Whether it's tobacco, gum, or cereal, today's hobby is a far cry from the days of trying to use cards to sell something else.

But my favorite pairing has to be cereal and cards.

There's just something about the two that feels right.  And when paired together, cereal cards pushed the envelope into new hobby territory. 

Whether it's the 50's Post cards or Kellogg's 3-D cards, the designs and style provided a fresh take on cardboard.  Topps' designs are iconic because they had a monopoly through the Golden Age of collecting, and their cards were the most widely and easily attainable.  A kid could save his nickel and go buy a pack of cards.  If you wanted a cereal card, you were probably going to have to wait for mom to go buy another box.

But the cards?  Absolutely amazing.



But it's not just the cards themselves.  Cereal cards touched territory that Topps never made it to, and for a specialty set had a surprisingly deep checklist. 

Want a Goose Gossage Pirates card?  Kellogg's was (and is) your only option.

Want a card of Vinegar Bend Mizell card?  Check Post.  Despite winning 13 games for the World Champ Bucs in 1960 and playing for the team through the '62 season, he never made the cut for Topps.  And with a nickname like Vinegar Bend, you know you want that in your collection.

 Even though I wasn't around for the prime years of cereal cards as Kellogg's pumped out amazing set after amazing set, to me they represent all that was once great about the hobby.  Baseball, and baseball cards, used to be everywhere.  Food issues.  Denny's Grand Slam cards.  Heck, you could even get you own baseball cereal.

The profile of baseball has fallen off the map.  The Commissioner can cite pace of play, commercial breaks, extra-inning games, or anything else he likes.  But in my mind, it comes down to the fact that the average family has been priced out of the game.  Want to go to a game?  Ticket prices are likely to be 100-150% higher than they were at the beginning of the century.  Hell, Pirate tickets are 100% higher than what I was paying at the beginning of the *decade*  Want to watch your team?  You'll need a premium cable package.  Want to watch a game on prime time TV on a major network?  Good luck.

I was discussing the changes to the game on twitter (@battlinbucs, if you don't already follow me), and thought about how often I was able to watch the Cubs on WGN and Braves on TBS as a kid.  I didn't love either team, and outright hated the Braves because of what that one-legged Sid Bream did to my childhood.  But watching games day in and day out was what made me fall in love with the game.  And being able to collect cards just doubled down that excitement.

The last cereal cards I remember were in 2002.  Food issues as a whole barely exist, thanks in large part due to the exclusive licensing that Topps has.  But don't blame Topps.  MLB started the exclusive licensing plague that has run rampant over the hobby.  Again, I'm putting this all at their feet.

While other leagues have taken cross promotion and leveraged it to make their game boom (I'm overlooking the NFL's recent struggles because their  absurd growth over the previous decade couldn't be sustained, and some slideback was inevitable).  MLB has grown their revenue, but the game's overall profile has been lapped by basketball and football. 

I don't know that we'll ever see cereal cards make a true comeback that isn't a one-off mini promotion with 15 or 20 cards.  I doubt it, even though it makes sense.  But for today we celebrate the great cards that used to fall out of our cereal boxes.

Call Me Ishmael

I don't have very much to say that's particularly witty, punny, funny, or anything of the like.  But I just landed one of my whales.  Everybody knows I have a soft spot for early 2000's and late 90's cards.  Especially the ones I would drool over in the pages of Beckett as a kid.  And this guy was definitely right near the top of that list.

It's been a card I have wanted for years.  When I joined ebay in 2005, I remember searching for them religiously.  But copies consistently sold in the $15-20 range.  They've dropped since then, quite significantly really.  But every time I saw a copy pop up on ebay, it either was priced higher than the card's value today or the signature had darkened significantly.

But I had a copy in my watch list last week, and was amazed when it didn't go up past the initial bids.  I landed it for a cool $3.25 shipped.  Better yet, when the card arrived today the signature is a bold, bright blue that looks like it could be pack fresh as if it was just pulled.  Days like this, I love collecting.

Catching Up

As summer kicks into full swing, I've realized I've become terribly out of touch with the world of cardboard.  Prizm and Stadium Club, two of my favorite products, went live and I was blissfully unaware.  It will probably be a while before I start to tackle the cards from either of those sets, but I did spend some time checking ebay to see what I missed.

And boy was I excited to see the Pirates in Archives this year.  Sid Bream and Kent Tekulve are two of the easier Pirates alumni to get autographs from, even if they don't have a ton of certified issues.  But I was downright giddy to see Jason Kendall in the autograph checklist.

I've soured on Kendall a lot over the years.  He was a fantastic player during some of the darkest years in team history.  But from a purely personal standpoint, Kendall was a jerk to just about everybody he encountered in Pittsburgh from fans to teammates.

Still...nostalgia and all that jazz.  I usually hesitate to pony up for Archives autos, since they often sell for more than similar products, and Kendall does have quite a few autographs from his playing days.  Still, I decided to pull the trigger when I was able to land this silver parallel for $7.  That's actually less than most of the base autographs are selling for, and I like the colored border.  So while I'm not exactly back into the swing of things, I'm getting there.  I have a COMC shipment from the Spring Cleaning promo the past week that is scheduled to be delivered today, so maybe that will get me back into a more regular posting routine.

Hope everyone has a great holiday weekend!

COMC Haul - The Big Boppers

Since I joined COMC in 2010, I have been a pretty cost conscious shopper.  The vast majority of my purchases are of the $.50 and below variety, and I rarely add an card that costs over a buck or two.  It's not that I'm cheap (well, maybe it is...), but with the insane selection of cards, it's never difficult to get bang for my buck.  If a card I'm interested in might be a little more expensive than I'm willing to pay, it only takes a quick search or two to come across something else I can spend that money on that looks like a sweet deal.

But I decided to bend the budget a bit over the last month or two.  There haven't been any card shows, searching ebay is a huge pain compared to the ease of searching by player or team on COMC, and I was lucky enough to see some real gems pop up on the site at prices I considered absolute steals.  So here's the pick of the litter, if you will.

So for an appetizer, I've been after one of these Starling Marte Gypsy Queen autos for a while, but never was able to find one that was at a price I liked.  For $3.75, I was happy to pull the trigger on this one.  Marte still has some room to develop hopefully, and is one of the more exciting Pirates to watch in my opinion.

 This card has actually been sitting in my COMC account for almost a year.  But it was well worth the wait to see it in person.  The 99' Topps Tek Gold is numbered /10, and while I will never had a prayer at completing the entire pattern-maddness I'm happy to just have one copy of a gold.  At about $10, I paid close to the going rate.  But this was one of the few true "wants" I had been eyeing up.

 A few days ago I posted my Jose Guillen Century auto, and the Nunez fell into my lap during the Black Friday deals for about $5.  When the set first came out, you would have had to at least add a zero on the end of that price.  As I mentioned yesterday, I have fallen in love with this set, and the blues may be my favorite background color.

 Leaf has gotten a little redundant with the Valiant autos over the past few years, with no real tweaks to the design from year to year.  However, I have wanted this card since it came out, but was never willing to pay Marte's "prospect" prices.  Now that he's an established and successful major league regular, his prices have magically nosedived.  But that's cool with me.  This only set me back a cool $3.25, which is an absolute steal in my book.

 I love the look of Topps Black cards, but they are such a freaking headache.  I'll never come close to completing a team set, but when I can find a copy in the $2-3 range, it's mine.  Alllll mine!.

 But there two cards are the true unsung heroes of my COMC purchases.  I love the Donruss Stat Line cards, particularly the Season version with a rainbow foil finish.  This Mike Gonzalez card is fairly unsuspecting, until you flip it over and discover it's /10.  For a team set I might actually have a prayer at finishing, this card is basically the lynchpin to the set.  For $3, I couldn't hit the purchase button fast enough.

 And for the uninitiated, do a quick search for Donruss Crusades on ebay.  These are perhaps the hottest insert of the 90's, and for good reason.  The cards are drop dead gorgeous in person, and put any refractor to shame.  The Purple is perhaps the least attractive version in my book, but at 100 copies they can command a pretty penny.  Better yet, this copy was a victim of COMC's database issues, listed as the dreaded ??????.  I was able to wait out a couple price drops during the sales, and ultimately grabbed this for about $3.50.  Recent copies have gone for more than twice that, and it looks great alongside the Abraham Nunez from the same set I picked up last year.

Amusingly enough I now have both the Purple and Red /25 for Nunez and Wright, but am still missing the Green /250 for both.  Collecting is a funny thing.

Spearing a Miniature Whale

I think everybody has that one card on their want list that just seems unreasonably impossible to find.  The mystery only intensifies the hunt.  Where could they all be?  Tucked away in personal collections?  Sitting in the boxes of some dealer that who doesn't use ebay on the other side of the country.  Or little Timmy, whose mom bought him some retail packs that have been stuffed in the garage for the past decade.  Or maybe, just maybe, some fluke printing accident destroyed all of the cards, or they were never packed out at all.

A little paranoid can go a long way for collectors.  Right near the top of the Captain Ahab list is 2002 Fleer Mini.  A lot of collectors probably don't even remember 2002 Fleer.  In 1998, Fleer rebranded their flagship line Fleer Tradition.  I'd assume the rebranding was inspired by lagging sales, likely following the frightening design of the 1995 set and the nearly identical, gloss free releases in '96 and '97.

Fleer Tradition was the flagship brand from '98-2001.  But in 2002 Fleer released a Fleer Tradition set pretty similar to the two previous releases, and then also introduced a standalone Fleer set.  It's a tossup which was the true flagship issue, but my money always went towards Fleer, while Tradition felt more like the a bad Archives knockoff.

Fleer's 2002 set was pretty straightforward, except for the weird parallel configuration.  The set had gold backed parallels, making up 15% of the print run, that were distributed in packs mixed in among the base cards.  The Tiffany parallel was a glossy parallel numbered to 200 in Hobby packs.  And the lowest numbered parallel of the set, Minis, were numbered to 50 and distributed exclusively in Retail packs.  Yep, the rarest insert goes straight to retail.  Oh, 2002.

Simply put, the Mini's are rare squared.  Whatever copies may have been pulled have probably largely gone to casual or non-collectors.  And while they are minis, the scan above gives you an idea that the cards aren't really all thaaaat much smaller than the base cards - maybe about 2/3rds the size.  Easy enough for a casual collector to dismiss.

Completed auctions on ebay are rare, and I have never seen the Jack Wilson from the set listed anywhere.  I was lucky enough to snag a Tony Clark a few months back.  But I was downright floored when I saw a Jason Kendall sitting on Sportlots.  Better yet, it only ran me a mere $3.50 shipped.  It may not be the flashiest parallel out there, but I'm thrilled just to snag one of these.  I wouldn't mind coming across the Jack Wilson one of these days as well...

Minors Monday - Deja Vous

Sometimes cards feel just a little too familiar.  And not in the good way.  I could talk extensively about how much of a jerk Jason Kendall turned out to be his last few years in Pittsburgh, and how wonderfully this UD Minors card captures that spirit as he screams at...someone in 1994.

But alas this card brings up an even more depressing realization.  Minor league cards really picked up steam in the late 90's.  But the middle of the decade was a bit of a testing ground.  Fleer had their Excel minor league brand, which actually did a pretty good job of combing the minor league ranks for prospects and non-prospects.  And of course there were minor league team sets.  And newcomers like Best.

And then there's UD.  Admittedly 1994 UD is one of my least favorite designs all-time (though the 95 set is one of my favorites, so it evens out).  But the 1994 Upper Deck Minors set?  It took a bland and uninspiring design, and threw minor league players into the mix.  Sound familiar?  Sounds like Topps Pro Debut.

Minor league cards, particularly team sets, have become one of my favorite parts of my collection.  They're unique pieces that, and you can literally chronicle a player's rise through the minor league system each season.  It's just a damn shame that the only game in town these days just ends up looking like the kid brothers to Flagship each year.

Prime Patches

Game used and patch cards have largely lost their luster with collectors.  And for good reason, with recent discoveries that non-used jerseys were inserted onto cards and card companies were most likely aware.

At the National, I was pretty surprised to find beautiful game used patch cards for sale anywhere from $3-5.  And some decent names too, though no Pirates.  Still, the hobby landscape has changed significantly.  Not that that has stopped Topps from putting gu swatches on everything...but I dirgress.

Even though gu cards aren't anything I actively seek out anymore, there are still a few that are among my favorite cards in my collection.  The 2005 Prime Patches set lived up to its name as Donruss looked to liquidate its back stock of game used and autographs before losing their MLB license.  The result?  Lots of amazing multi-player items.

This card immediately became a must have for me when it went live in 2005.  The card featured patches from three of my favorite Buccos (missing Jack Wilson, of course).  I had just joined ebay in late '05, and this card instantly became one of my prime targets.  I love the Giles patch the best, and the inclusion of red brings a little life to what are often boring Pirates patches.

I actually ended up picking up two copies of this card, and I think both were had for around $10-12.  I saw a copy up on ebay a few months back that sold for more than that, so maybe game used isn't totally dead after all.

Less Binder, More Wall

I realize I have been posting a lot more memorabilia than cards in recent months.  For better or worse, my card pickups have been slowing down significantly.  There just aren't that many Bucco cards out there that a) I really, really want and b) are at a price I'm willing to pay.  

At current prices I won't touch most Cutch cards, and even secondary players like Marte or Alvarez go for more than I'm willing to spend.  

In the mean time, I've been able to pick up some awesome future wall decorations.  I'm sure the card bug will bite me soon (the National should be a good cure), but for less than a Cutch auto that would just go straight to a binder or box, I can pick up awesome pieces that I'll be able to see and enjoy day in and day out.

This bad boy came from my pickups at the Robert Morris show.  I don't know that I'm in love with the Fleer World Series cards on the sides, but otherwise this pieces is great.  If you look closely at the artwork you'll notice...not much worth capturing from the mid-late 90's.  Jason Kendall in the bottom right corner and Ricardo Rincon and Francisco Cordova commemorating their no-hitter.  Otherwise, lots of bumblebee uniforms.  

They Just Keep Multiplying

My card time has pretty much bottomed out to zero over the last couple weeks.  And my posting and collecting habits have reflected that.  Aside from some sorting last weekend, my piles of cards have remained virtually untouched for a while now.

But that hasn't completely stopped my from the occasional ebay search during some down time at work.  And while those searches have mostly been fruitless, I did hit one gem.

A lot of 16 1999 Topps Tek Jason Kendall cards.

If you weren't collecting in '99, you're probably asking why I just excited about a lot of 16 of the same card.  And you'd be right.  Sort of.

Tek was perhaps the single most infuriating sets ever produced.  It made Moments & Milestones look reasonable.  The '99 set consisted of 45 cards, with 30 different background patterns available for each player.  Oh, and each player had two different photos, an A & B version.  For those keeping score at home that's 60 possible patten combinations *for the base cards.*  Don't even get me started on the gold parallel, numbered to 10.

So a lot of 16 cards?  That's 27% of the set!  Considering I had a whopping two cards before picking up the lot, not a bad dent in a nearly impossible to find release.

Somewhere out there I imagine there are boxes upon boxes of Tek commons sitting around, patiently waiting to fill in the rest of the open slots in my binder pages.  But in the mean time?  Not a bad start.

Pitchers and Catchers

The Pirates have a long and stories history, even if you set aside that two decade long void we just climbed out of.  And the club has been fortunate enough to host some of the greatest players the game has seen.  The all-time roster is particularly deep at shortstop and the outfield.  But across the diamond the Bucs have had their fair share of star power.

Well, sort of.  As pitchers and catchers make their way to complexes across Florida and Arizona it's a reminder of two of the voids in Pirate history.  For a team that has had some of the game's greatest hitters, the Pirates have had downright terrible luck with pitchers.

The club's pitching leaders is like a who's who of the deadball era.  But modern history?  Sure, the Pirates have had their fair share of Doug Drabeks and Vern Law standout seasons.  But sustained success?  Meh.

But Pirate pitchers aren't going to leave out their battery mates.  The Pirates have turned to defense first catchers, and as we saw with Russell Martin last year that isn't a bad decision.  But aside from that?  Jason Kendall looked on track to outshine the rest before a thumb injury turned him into a singles hitter. 

But the backstops haven't exactly set the world on fire either.  So as we head into spring training we can only hope the new crop of Pirate pitchers may finally yield that standout starter.  Or perhaps just as important, that star that the Pirates can afford.  Catcher?  Well, we'll get back to you on that one.

Minor Matters

If you're looking for some entertainment from your cardboard, pick up some minor league cards from the 80's or 90's.  Team sets, pack issued - it doesn't really matter.

A couple things will become obviously pretty fast.  Card design folks at the major companies were worth their weight in gold when you see some of the minor league creations.  And while most of the country wasn't too great at recycling, baseball clubs were absolute experts.

Minor league uniforms were an exercise in penny pinching.  The old unis would get kicked down into the minors to be worn by whoever would fit them for.  The result are both some incredibly lame team names and uniform looks, especially in the low minors where...well, they just aren't allowed nice things yet.

As my major league pickups have trailed off, I've been focusing more funds toward picking up minor league team sets.  Some are harder to find than others, but for the most part the Pirates' lack of success over the past two decades means finding complete team sets for most of the minor league affiliates isn't all that difficult.

And while I get pretty excited about minor league cards of Tim Wakefield or Moises Alou, the sets also tend to offer up some unexpected gems of mascots, batboys, and team staff in some godawful fashions of the day.

I still need to actually get around to scanning said cards though.  So until then, enjoy Jason Kendall wearing some duds that look like they came straight from a high school team's storage room.

Forever Young

Anyone who has been reading my blog for a while should know when I write - really write - I tend to take the scenic route.  But I've added a decent number of readers in recent weeks, so I thought a warning was needed.  If you don't like the long way there, just look out the car window and enjoy the pretty pictures.

When I got married this past October, there weren't a lot of decisions put squarely on my shoulders.  Which isn't to say I wasn't involved (I was).  Or that I wasn't opinionated (I am).  But for the most part Kate and I saw the wedding the same way, and the decisions in regards to food, themes, and overall ambiance reflected who we are as people.  And since we've been damn near attached at the hip since we were 19, the fact that most of these big, sweeping decisions could be made with a few glances and a facial gesture or two didn't come as any great surprise.

But the music?  That was all my kingdom. The playlist was masterfully crafted in a way that I could only trust myself with.  I wouldn't dare entrust the music, the soul of the evening both literally and figuratively, to some total stranger.  I was not about the spend my wedding night watching distant relatives gyrate to the Electric Slide or hear the latest Beyonce tune.  The playlist was as eclectic and expansive as my taste - some early punk smoothly transitioned into some smooth Memphis soul.  The night told the story of my growth as a person and as a music fan, and much like the grandiose combining of the record and dvd collections years earlier, Kate and I moving from two very separate people to one incongruous entity.

But while my initial playlist was pared from 8 hours down to a more reasonable three, one spot was completely blank.  The mother-daughter dance.  I just couldn't find a song that fit what I wanted to express.  And just as important - couldn't find a song that was short enough to get my uncoordinated ass off the dance floor at the most mercifully short length possible.

But as I made list after list of options, I couldn't get away from Bob Dylan's Forever Young.  All 5:01 of it.  Dylan changed the way I listen to music.  Driving on vacation to the beach in the summer of 1999 or 2000 I heard Like a Rolling Stone on the local oldies station.  They didn't play Dylan on any of the Pittsburgh stations we listened to.  And suddenly this music was unlike anything my teenage self had ever heard.  A few years later my mom bought me Dylan's Greatest Hits, which stayed in constant rotation throughout high school.  A Dylan poster hung over my bed.  And as I worked backwards, moving from loving more "classic" rock to being immersed in folk.  It may not have as monumental as Dylan going electric to the rest of the world, but for me it changed the way I looked at the world.

Which is the long way of saying that as I stood there for four and a half minutes (I found a slightly shorter live version in my massive Dylan library) waddling side to side with my mother in a pseudo slow dance, I spent what felt like a great deal of time thinking about...well, time.

For many of us cards are, in one way or another, a way of staying timeless.  Our critics call it a childhood hobby.  And at best our collections are attempts to cling onto passing memories and seasons.  When people find out that I'm married, it leads to natural assumptions.  That I'm older.  Or deeply religious.  Or desperately want a family.  Cause really, I'm well aware that I don't really fit the mold for the "married at 25" category.  And while it all fits together just fine and dandy in my little intellectual and ideological bubble, the "well we've been together nonstop since we were teenagers anyway" argument just doesn't seem quite gratifying enough for most folks.

But isn't that life?  Whether it's baseball cards, or music, or people, we mark out lives with these mileposts.  Ways of breaking down and understanding the passing of time.  And perhaps I'm not too good at playing by the conventions in that regard.  I'm 26, look like I'm 36, behave like I'm 86, and collect cards like I'm just plain old 6.

Flipping through my 1991 binder instantly transports me to my dad buying me a pack or two and a slurpee every time he took me to the gas station with him.  Or 2000, and my dad buying me 20 packs of Topps before dropping me off at grandma and grandpa's for the night before they went for a rare evening out.  Or registering for a Beckett account, feeling like a rebel because I clicked the terms of service saying I was 13 almost a whole half year before my actual 13th birthday.  Or hearing "Like a Rolling Stone" and being taken back to the backseat of our minivan, salty shore air cutting through the windows and the tightly woven lyrics ripping through me and pulling out a kid wanting more than what his boring suburban life could offer.

Our collections, if you'll forgive the drawn out analogy, are our playlists.  These pieces of ourselves placed in time and space.  Memories being made and remade constantly.  At times impossible to explain away to friends, or family, or coworkers.  But the very things that make us who we are, and how we see ourselves.  Whether you're 16 or 66 reading or writing about cards, those memories and connections are at their most basic quite the same.  And either way, may you stay forever young.

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!

Mail Call!

A few weeks ago Baseball Dad commented on an oddball Nolan Ryan prototype I posted.  I ended up with a stack of various players in a lot I picked up a few years back, and was thrilled to find a good home for one to decrease the pile ever so slightly.  I threw in a few other Tribe cards, because single card packages look pretty lonely.

I found out that we didn't live all that far apart when I was living in Lima.  And by not that far apart, I mean that in western Ohio, the smallest towns and villages are 30 miles apart, and the roads get such esteemed and thoughtful names as County Road 371, or Bluffton Road, which would, amazingly, go to Bluffton, Ohio.  So we were practically neighbors, and I wouldn't be surprised if our paths crossed at some point at one of the many card shows in the area.

While I was just happy to give some cards a good home, I certainly couldn't complain when a PWE arrived last week with some fantastic Pirate cards.

Jason Kendall is one of those guys whose early career greatness is overshadowed by a lengthy career that just sort of...exists.  Kendall was a perennial all-star for the Bucs (admittedly not a tough task for most of the 90's when there were really no other deserving candidates on the team).  But his time in Oakland, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Kansas City after leaving the Burgh were far less memorable.  Still, this card is an awesome minor league issue I've never seen before.

Speaking of the minors, I'm a little irritated with Topps' parallel-a-palooza the last few years.  The Bowman Toys R Us Purple parallel is just one more headache to chase.  Toys R Us?  Really?

As my anger with Topps grows, I've become increasingly appreciative of Panini's releases.  I know many aren't for one reason or another.  Well, two reasons, really.  No logos.  Boxes that don't come close to delivering their SRP value.  No logos.

But I like 'em.  But with the limited number of parallels that I'm seeing listed, I imagine there is a ton of unopened Panini product these days.

And now we have our MVP of the PWE.  Gerrit Cole cards in my collection are few and far between right now.  I think I have his base Bowman and possible a Chrome rookie, and one of his cards from Topps Heritage.  So I guess my Cole Train just added another car.

There was one last addition to my collection in the PWE, but it deserves its own post.  This package was a ton of fun to open, and I'm sure we'll have to strike up a bigger trade in the near future.  I had been stockpiling Indians, Reds, and Tigers cards in preparation to do a show right before we moved out of Ohio, and I'm getting really sick of finding stacks of Victor Martinez parallels in my card boxes.

Baseball Cards (In Motion!)

I came across a news story talking about a new site that posts animated gif's of baseball cards in motion sequences. Any time cards make the mainstream media it's at least worth a read.  Cool concept, though it seems pretty clear the author may be a little overly impressed.  You can check the site out at http://inskidaoustandslow.com, which promises a new gif each day.  It's not the first time I've seen it done, and when I read the initial story I was expecting something unique - perhaps sequences of the same player, or cards from the same set. 

Not so much.  Instead they seem to just take a pile of junk wax in similar poses, and gif them together.  Still interesting, but surely anything with a decent sized stack of cards could replicate, right?

Well, I put that theory to the test.

I pulled out a box of commons that has slowly been migrating to binders.  The box had cards from 1996-2006, but had mostly been pillaged of everything except for doubles.  Flipping through the cards, I quickly decided I would try to do one of poses: either a player running, or a right handed batter being photographed from the left side of the plate.

This was actually a lot easier than I had suspected.  By the time I hit my 2001 cards, I had put together enough cards to roughly make both poses work.  If I expanded my search to include more years, I'm sure I could have made the transitions a little smoother.

Scan, crop, and put together with a free online gif maker, and the entire process took about 10 minutes.  Given the number of Jason Kendall cards in this sequence, I could probably make an entire gif just of Kendall.

It's a fun novelty trick, and something that I think anyone in the blogosphere could easily replicate.  If I get really motivated, I may try to fine tune this one a bit - I know there are some early 90's cards that are in similar poses, as well as some early 80's Topps sets that seem to photograph every batter from the exact same angle.