Beauty in the Base

One thing that my yearlong hiatus from collecting has helped me realize is to appreciate the small things.  I've never been a collector that chased high dollar cards or got my highs from breaking wax.  But I always felt like I was racing against something.  Trying to hit as many tables as possible at a show.  Trying to accumulate as many Pirate cards.  Always pushing for more.  And while I love my collection and have no plans on changing course or selling down, one thing got lost in all that rush: THE CARDS.

I would go to a show, come home with 100 or 200 new cards, enter them into my spreadsheet, add them to my binder and then...that's it.  I flip through my Pirates binders fairly often, so it's not like the cards are utterly ignored.  But I guess I just don't appreciate them as much as I'd like.  And as much as I love refractors, and foil, and autographs...base cards are still probably my favorite.

The base card has become a lost art.  Not that I can be mad about it.  The hobby has changed and moved and evolved.  But...look at these things!  The artistry behind the first decade or so of Diamond Kings was some of the best sports art I've seen.  Dick Perez created masterpieces that could and still can be had for pennies.

 And it's not like it's a totally foreign concept these days.  Topps has revived the concept from time to time, but unfortunately seems to have found a happy middle ground with the cheaper art-style photoshopping of photos found on sets like Allen & Ginter and Gypsy Queen.

 There's just something to me about how a baseball card captures a moment in time - the aesthetics of the design, the photo, the style of the card.  You can't help but look at a '75 Topps and have it scream out the themes of an era.  Or look at some of the early 90's sets and wonder why we all loved zebra stripes, zig zags, and neon colors so damn much.

 Cards tell a story.  They're my defacto mental reference point for rosters (because believe me, if not for Topps I would not remember Rafael Belliard on the 1987 Pirates).  Some of the action shots I can place to a specific game or memory.  Not something exciting like a no-hitter or World Series game.  Just an unspectacular 1995 Steelers/Lions game that I remember watching in the living room at a birthday party for one of my parents' friends that popped up on cards in 1996.

While Topps has gotten a little better with photo selection in recent years, I miss seeing more unique photos on cards.  Ultra was always one of my favorite products - they always had to have a lot of unique pre-game and goofy dugout shots.

But the thing I miss the most?  Store exclusive sets.  Sure, there are still some retail-exclusive Target and Walmart retail cards.  But nothing beats the logo-centric store boxed sets of the 90's.  I still miss Hills stores, which was always my top spot for finding Starting Lineup figures as a kid.  After all, it's the small things that are the best.

The Day After

The Pirates postseason, if you even care to call it that, ended with barely a whimper.  I was a bit pessimistic to begin with, expecting a 4-1 score favoring the Cubbies.  But things played out even worse than I could have expected, and the game felt lost by the second batter of the game.

Quite honestly, my feelings on the season are mixed.  I attended a whopping two games in person, unquestionably my lowest total since 1996, if not earlier.  Heck, there were many weekends when I went to more than two Pirate games.  And I watched maybe a dozen more on tv.  After some of the marketing decisions made by the team that rubbed quite a few fellow season ticket holders (wait, they're called ticket memberships now) the wrong way, I made a personal decision that I wasn't going to financially support the team this year.  And I didn't.  Both games I attended were with some of my students.  The tickets were free, but I wouldn't have missed it for the world regardless.  But the fact of the matter is that I can't say I'm overly invested in this year's team.  Nor did I watch the team grind through 98 wins only to essentially be left out of the actual playoffs.

Still, watching last night's game was pretty soul sucking.  Two of my favorite Pirates are going to go out without the postseason stage they so greatly deserved.  Aramis Ramirez was the last real link in the game to the Pirates teams of the early 2000's that made me love baseball and this team.  And the chance to see him in black and gold once again was the only reason I watched most of the games I did.

And A.J. Burnett was the first player I really loved watching play since Jack Wilson retired.  He had a grit and intensity that just fit the personality of the city so well, and loved watching every chance to watch him pitch.  I had just expected to have one or two more shots at that in October.

And those things bother me more than anything.  What's done is done.  While the new wildcard format surely boosts revenue, ratings, and everything else, I think it's laughable that one way or another a 95+ win team was going to never get a chance to sniff actual playoff baseball this year.  It's a disservice to the game, and it's certainly frustrating for anyone involved.  But it is what it is.

Maybe next year will be better, hold something different.  Both for the Bucs and for my connection to the team.  I would have loved to see the team make a real run in the postseason.  Or even just get a chance.  But maybe I'm not as broken up as I could or should be about the way it played out.  Here's to 2016.

Coming Full Circle

When I hopped in the car after work Thursday, I flipped on the radio.  A local sports talk show was on, and I could immediately tell they were discussing a trade the Pirates had made.  Within about 40 seconds, I discovered the Pirates had traded for Aramis Ramirez.

And since there aren't many remnants of the late 90's/early 00's collecting nostalgia still alive and kicking in MLB, let me ramble down Memory Lane for a bit.

For a long, long time, Aramis Ramirez was the picture of everything that was wrong with the Pirates.  And it had absolutely nothing to do with Aramis Ramirez.

The Pirates signed Ramirez out of the Dominican, and he absolutely tore up the minors, being ranked as the 5th best prospect in the game heading into 1998.  The Pirates had been mired in a losing slump for 5 years, had just come improbably close to winning the division with a losing record, and were committed to a youth movement after dealing off 90's stalwarts Jay Bell and Orlando Merced before the '97 season.

In the days where you never heard the term "service time" and few teams fretted over when players would become arbitration eligible, the Pirates aggressively promoted Aramis to the majors in 1998 at the tender age of 20.  He struggled.  The team struggled.  And over the next three seasons, the Pirates would bounce him between AAA and the Majors.  It was a pattern that did nothing to help the development of Ramirez or fellow yo-yo victim Jose Guillen.  Both players would go on to long and successful major league careers, but their best baseball would be spent outside Pittsburgh.

But here's the thing:  good is good.  Despite the erratic development, Ramirez busted out in a big way for a forgettable 2001 Pirates team.  300/335/536.  Today, that would easily boost him into the MVP conversation.  But at just 23, as a Pirate fan it felt like he was already 33.  Despite his growth at the plate, it was easy to remember that he was far from a finished product defensively.  To this day my dad still remembers Ramirez throwing balls into the stands along the first base line, and us joking that we weren't safe in our seats in the upper right field grandstand from an errant ARam throw.

As was the Pirate way of the day, in '02 Ramirez slumped and slumped hard.  The team would have been bad either way, but I think he may have gotten an unfair share of the blame, over then fan favorites Jason Kendall or Brian Giles.

And then 2003 happened.  The Pirates, with the help of some collusion, plucked some great free agents off the market for dirt cheap, filling in some actual talent around their younger roster.  The team played surprisingly well.  But the debt from their new ballpark exceeded MLB's debt to equity ratio.  Simply put, they needed to shed salary and shed it quick.

And Kris Benson was that guy.  Or at least he should have been.  Both players made $6M.  Ramirez was a breakout star with a controllable contract.  Benson would never post an ERA under 4 after his 2000 breakout year where Peter Gammons predicted him to win the Cy Young.  But coming up to the trade deadline, Benson missed a start due to arm fatigue, killing any hopes of dealing him.  The most tradable asset?  Ramirez.  The yo-yo act had made him a pricey player still in his early 20's.  One the Pirates couldn't keep, but any team would gladly have taken.  Except for the fact that every other team knew that the Pirates desperately needed to shed dollars.  The return was...let's just not speak of Bobby Hill again.  Ever.


To this day, Ramirez was booed every game I saw him play in Pittsburgh for something well beyond his control.  It wasn't his fault the Pirates management burned up valuable service time when he clearly wasn't yet major league ready.  It wasn't his fault the team couldn't effectively manage their finances.  And it sure as hell wasn't his fault the team dealt him to a division rival for a literal bag of peanuts, and he would continue to crush Pirates pitchers for the next decade.

I couldn't be happier to see ARam back in Pittsburgh.  I'm thrilled he might finally get the chance to play on that young, growing Pirates club that he was supposed to join in 1998.  But forgive me if I don't still duck my head a little every time I see him throwing over to first.  Old habits die hard.

My COMC Haul, Black and Gold Edition

Round one of my COMC packages came in yesterday, with part two still not shipped.  I ended up with 201 new cards headed my way.  About half of those were purchased between Thanksgiving and the last free shipping special sometime last Spring.

And there was certainly no shortage of shiny cards in this order.  I was finally able to snag a few cards I have been after for quite some time.  In 2002, Topps colored refractors to Chrome.  The base refractors were gold bordered, to match the Flagship set that year.  The set also had a black refractor parallel, which I had absolutely no idea existed until years later.  In 2002 Topps Traded, the Black refractors were /100, and I actually pulled a couple from the boxes I opened back in the day.  But I had no idea the main Chrome set also included the black parallels, limited to 50 copies.

The Black Refractors look great for the Pirates cards, but seemed insanely tough to come across.  But after years of chasing even a single copy, I was able to snag two of the black ref's /50 off of COMC in recent months, both for around $3 each.  While Pat Meares doesn't exactly evoke warm and fuzzies among Pirate fans, I love the dugout shot that shows PNC park in the background.  

 I keep telling myself I'm going to stop buying Bowman prospect cards unless the player actually reaches the majors.  And then I see a card on the cheap, and the cycle begins anew.  Trae Arbet is just one of many shortstop prospects that will probably never hit enough to reach the majors.  But I paid $1.35 for a card numbered /35.  And it's shiny.  And I'm a weak willed collector.

 Remember how for a few years Topps insisted on inserting boxtoppers with those obnoxious Uncirculated cases?  Topps was pretty indecisive with the numbering of the gold refractors in the early 00's.  There were 99 copies in 2001, 50 in 2002, and 330 in 2003.  For whatever reason, 2003 has been the hardest to track down.  I blame the damn uncirculated cases.

 Remember how big of a deal people were making about the Holiday Mega Boxes with exclusive Update Chrome cards last year?  What you probably don't remember is how quick prices fell off a cliff.  The first copies on ebay for this Liriano were going for $10-15.  I think I paid $2-something for mine.  Jeff over at 2X3 Heroes was gracious enough to trade me the Black Refractor, so this makes for one shiny mini rainbow.

 And in case you needed a reminder of how fickle the baseball gods can be, HR Derby and home run crown one year, bench bat that can't throw the baseball to the nice man with a glove the next.  Hopefully Pedro can do more hitting and less throwing in 2015.

 This scan came out looking orange, but I swear it's a gold.  Jim Negrych played at Pitt before being drafted by the Bucs.  He moved up the system pretty quickly as a high average/on base guy who didn't really have a true position.  I know I wasn't the only Pirate fan hoping he could end up a multi-position bench bat ala Rob Mackowiak and Josh Harrison.  But he ultimately topped out at AAA, and played independent ball last season.

 Quinton Miller was one of those projectable bonus babies that the Pirates loved.  He signed for somewhere around $1M as a 20th round pick.  He made it up to AA as a reliever last year, but he's nothing more than organizational fodder at this point.  But for a mere $4, I couldn't pass up the chance to add a gold refractor auto.  This makes me a prospector, right?

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!

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.  

Too Many Card Shows, Too Little Space

Right now the backlog of cards I need to scan is right around the 700 mark.  A couple card shows, a few ebay purchases, and two lots of minor league team sets can cause the number to pile up pretty fast.  Coupled with the fact that wedding planning has taken up much of our free time with just 5 months left and there hasn't been a lot of time for cards.

Or more accurately there's been time for buying new cards, but little time for the rest of the stuff that needs to happen to prevent small mountain ranges of stacked cards from forming.

Last month I heavily debated whether to go down to Dayton or not.  The Robert Morris show was just a week later, and being a monthly show I may or may not miss much.  But since we may not be in the area much longer, depending on how some job prospects play out, I figured it was worth the trip.  The show is a bargain box dream, and I know the opportunities to beef up my Steelers and Pens collections at such low prices wouldn't exist if we move back to PA.

And boy am I glad I went.  I didn't find what I had expected, but there were two dealers with some great discount vintage boxes.

One dealer had glorious 12/$10 and 12/$5 boxes.  The two cards above came from the dollar box, while the $.50 box filled in some holes in my late 60's needs, as well as a few low grade high numbers.

 And of course I had to dig around for some more modern cards.  I came home with a nice pile of numbered cards.  For as high numbered as they are, the Topps Gold cards are always a pain.  I don't think I'm anywhere close to completing a single year's team set out of the decade plus that they've been around.  In short, topps parallels annoy me.

The Bowman parallels are perhaps the most annoying of the modern parallels to me.  The colors always look so drab, especially when compared to their Chrome counterparts.  Couple in the fact that so few players from the sets ever actually make it in the bigs and the price gauging prospectors, and they're something I prefer to leave for quarter blowout boxes 5 years down the road. 

 But of course it wouldn't be a proper show without some time spent in the dime boxes.  This Best beauty captures former #1 overall pick Kris Benson during his time with A-ball Carolina.  I always enjoy picking up minor league cards when possible, and the range of minor league cards released in the 90's was vastly superior to what Topps has put out the past few years.

 I also came away with a nice stack of seven or eight Josh Gibson HR History cards.  The run of Home Run History sets Topps put out for Bonds, Mantle, ARod and Gibson may be the most annoying and bland insert set ever.  The Gibson is particularly bad due to its incoherent skip numbering, speculative home run totals, and generic front and back that remains unchanged on each and every card.  I frequently find these cards in the dime box, so I suspect I may be able to put a set together eventually.

 Of course digging through common boxes can occasionally yield something a little more exciting.  These ended up costing a little more than a dime, but who can pass up Cutch or a much thinner Bonds.

 The find of the day may have been 5 or 6 Topps Tek cards from the 99 and 2000 sets.  The additions gave me a grand total of...5 or 6 Tek cards.  There have to be piles and piles of these cards somewhere.  But where appears to be a mystery to collectors everywhere.  6/180 possible patterns?  I'm on my way!

 Overall the show was well worth the drive, even if it meant diverting some funds from Robert Morris the next weekend.  Writing in retrospect, it was a great decision, because the Robert Morris show was below average compared to past years, and I was able to fill vintage needs at or below the costs I would see the next weekend.

But seriously.  I need to stop going to so many shows.

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.