It's Showtime

After a months-long dry spell, there is yet another card show this weekend.  Nothing too exciting - just another mall show.  But it should keep me occupied for a while tomorrow. 

In the mean time, I had my eye on a few cards on COMC that had been sitting in my cart.  I added some money to my account and...well, that's where things stopped.  Usually the money shows up instantly.  At worst it takes a minute or two.  But two hours in and still no funds in my account.  On a high traffic day like Black Friday I can certainly understand something like this happening.  But 11pm in February?  Paypal says the money went through, so I guess I can either patiently wait or head to bed and hope the cards I was interested in are still there in the morning. This hobby can never be too easy, right?

I Get By With A Little Help From My Friends

Today was a long and frustrating day at work.  I won't bore you with the details, but I caught a pretty big goof that threw off our numbers projections for the entire year.  And in the non-profit world, big goofs mean losing big funding.  Luckily I caught the calculating error early enough that we should be able to adjust accordingly.  But I came home tired, cranky, and hungry.

Luckily there was a wonderful and unexpected package waiting from one of my blog buddies.  I'll save the contents for a post when I have a little more time an energy.  But having a fresh package of cards to crack open and see what the team bags had to offer was more than enough to turn an exhausting day into a fun time.

I just wanted to say thank you to all the great folks out there blogging and reading blogs.  I'm painfully slow in getting to the post office, terrible when it comes to breaking wax of new products, and never have quite as much time as I'd like to devote to quality, lengthy posts.  And yet my number of readers has gone up, not down.  And I have met some great, great folks in the collecting community along the way.  I like to think there are relatively few hobbies where a complete and total stranger can make your day with a piece of mail.

Oh, and in case you were wondering the card at right was hands down the most generous gift I've ever received from another collector.  I can only hope I've done my little part to pay it forward ever since.

Sign Me Up

I've been going on a bit of an autograph binge in recent months.  Maybe I caught a touch of nostalgia, or maybe the dropping prices for 90's and 00's stars set the wheels in motion.  But I've been picking up some nice additions to the autograph collection recently.  And I must say, it's a nice break from adding your 25th Jose Tabata auto or 30th Nyjer Morgan.

Almost without fail the autographs I've added have fallen into at least one of a couple categories: semi-stars from my childhood/teen years, players who came to video game/Starting Lineup fame in my house, or expansion franchises.  And as you can imagine there's plenty of room for cross pollination between those categories.

By far my favorite of the bunch is this Travis Fryman auto.  Fryman's career was cut short by injuries, but he was a pretty good 3B through the 90's, and also a starting outfielder for my Starting Lineup team.  He was positioned in a dreaded fielding pose catching a fly ball, so he spent quite a bit of time standing around in the outfield of our basement carpet as paper baseball after paper baseball sailed overhead in games that would routinely hit triple digits. 

Speaking of fantasy fame, long before most of the country was playing fantasy baseball, video games served as my personal fantasy league.  The results rarely made sense - Ken Griffey, Jr. was notoriously terrible in baseball games, while some bench player would come out of nowhere and post a .400 season.

Internet, meet Mr. Nowhere.  Donnie Sadler lasted nearly a decade as a utility infielder, but never lived up to the expectations that landed him in BA's Top 100 prospects twice.  But in All-Star Baseball for N64?  He was the second coming of Tony Gwynn.  When I came across this card in a $.50 box at a show a few weeks ago, fantasy met reality.

As a 90's kid, there was something awesome about the idea of expansion franchises.  It would take me a few years to realize awesome meant diluting the talent pool and terrible baseball in largely unready markets.  But...the logos sure were awesome. 

I'm still a little peeved that the Devil was taken out of the Rays.  And those Rockies black vests?  No thanks.

I am, however, a little more at peace with the Marlins art deco color explosion in their new ballpark.  Once the Marlins started phasing out teal as their primary color, so went my heart.  So I'll settle for orange.

But I didn't strip out all the star power in favor of low end gems. 

Ok, star power might be a bit strong.  Bud Smith was supposed to be another big name to the 2001 rookie class.  Ichiro and Pujols he is not.  Though I imagine I may be able to add a Roy Oswalt auto on the cheap someday soon. 

Ah, there it is.  Now we have some real hardware.  The Saberhagen came was a redemption from a group break a few months back, and the Kevin Mitchell set me back a whole $1.25.  Not bad for a former MVP.  Their superstar heyday in the late 80's/early 90's predates my baseball fandom a bit, but was more than happy to make an exception.  

Total cost?  Less than $8 for all that 90's goodness.  I certainly can't complain.

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.

Arts & Crafts

 I've been reading Jim Bouton's Ball Four over the last few weeks after picking it up for $1 at a thrift store.  I haven't read a baseball book in years.  Being in grad school for English tends to take away that "leisure" reading time.  Even fun books must serve some larger purpose towards...well, something. 

But I've been really interested in the Seattle Pilots lone season.  So when playing around with some custom cards this weekend, it seemed like a fun project to see how many Pilots autographs I might be able to round up through the mail.

I've always had a bit of a thing for teams that are no more.  And some of my favorite non-Bucco cards in my collection serve as memorials to teams and cities that are no more.

Custom cads are by far one of my favorite ways to toy around with some bygone logos and franchises.  Now I just need to get around to printing off some of these guys and getting them signed.

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.