A Rare Mailday

Mail days have sort of become a rare thing around here.  As we go into full househunting mode, my buying has been scaled back almost to zero.  After all, there are more than enough cards to pack up here when the big move comes as it is.  But I was treated to a pleasant surprise by one of my team collector buddies, who sent along a nice array of Pirates goodies.  

This is easily the biggest single addition to my collection so far this year, and the package was jam packed full of serial numbered cards and inserts.  Better yet, every single card was brand new to me.

Panini's entry into into the prospect game is never quite as well received as the Bowman sets, but I've always been a fan of Elite Extra Edition.  Elite was one of my favorite releases when Donrss was still around, though the Extra Edition was a bit misleading for quite a few years when the standard Elite was MIA.

 It's been almost a year since I've been to a card show, and it's definitely having an impact on my collection.  My 2015 binder is super thin, and aside from the base sets I only have a scattering of parallels here and there.  I've always sworn that one of these days I will complete an entire team set of Topps Gold cards.  And since I'm now at exactly 1 2015 Gold after this package, my bet is that if that ever does happen it won't be with 2015.

 I always love a good oddball card, and this Drabek takes the cake.  It screams Desert Storm.

 My team collector buddies have also been passing along some Marlins cards my way, which have quickly grown to needing their own box.  I have no idea why Jeff Conine has a tennis racked.  But I'm glad he does.

 Getting a package in the mail is always a bit of a reality check for me.  I have north of 16,000 different Pirate cards.  As the mess surrounding me will attest, it's a crapload of cards.  So I'm always taken back a little bit when I see how many cards - parallels, oddballs, and even sometimes entire sets - that I had no idea even existed.  This Pro Sigs card?  Never seen it before.

 Same goes for these two Cutch parallels.  Even though they aren't particularly low numbered, finding almost any McCutchen cards is mission impossible around here.  Add in the fact that these blue framed parallels look awesome and it's just icing on the cake.

While I'm sure it will still be a good while before the mail is regularly flowing into my collection again, it's always great to add a wave of new cards.  Now the cataloging, sorting, and adding to binders?  That part is a little less fun.

Trading from the Dime Boxes

Nick's dimebox digging is well known throughout the blogosphere, and his blog has been right at the top of my "must read" list since I started blogging.

I don't trade very often these days, but I always have a stack going for Nick whenever I see something I think he'll appreciate.  I dumped a package of odds and ends on him the other week, and he returned fire with a real gem.

Without a doubt the highlight of the package was a team set of 1992 Salem Buccaneer cards.  I've been trying to pick up minor league team sets from Pirate affiliates whenever the chance arises.  Unfortunately the Bucs didn't have much star power coming through their minor league system for a long, long time.  Most of the good players they did have (Jack Wilson, Jason Bay, Brian Giles) were acquired via trade and spent little to no time in the minor league system.  For example Jack Wilson played a total of 60 games in the Pirates minor league system between 2000 when he was acquired from the Cardinals and 2001, but didn't have any team set cards in either year.  He did pop up in two Altoona Curve best of sets later in his career.

But the point remains...there weren't exactly a lot of people rushing out to buy these team sets.  The big card in this set?  Midre Cummings.  He looked like a pretty good outfield prospect, but never was able to put it together at the major league level.

Nick always does a great job hitting cards I don't have.  When you're marching towards 15,000 different cards, chances are just as good that I will already have a copy (or ten) as they are that a card will be new to me.  I don't know if Nick was kind enough to take the time to look through my list of cards I already have, or if we simply have some dime box ESP connection.  Either way, he nailed it.  Despite opening 4 boxes of Stadium Club (2 group break boxes, 2 myself), I was still somehow missing both the McCutchen and Polanco base cards.  Cross one off the list.  Now I just need to find another copy for my set.

When it comes to 1/pack parallels, it's a safe bet I might need them.  They're a real pain to put together, especially they typically come in lower end products that aren't widely busted by dealers.  I'm still only about 1/3 of the way done with the OPC black parallels, though they're one of the nicest in recent years.

Speaking of tough to find, this is the second Pirate card from 1994 Pinnacle I have.  It's a pretty fun looking set, but I have absolutely no idea why this product is so tough to find.  Maybe a bunch of it never moved east from the west coast?

You can never go wrong with a Conlon card.

Or a Clemente for that matter.  The painted Combos sets in 2000 and 2001 were some of my favorite inserts of all time.

And Nick topped off the package with a pair of Royals in their Turn Ahead the Clock jersey.  Most consider these works of an art to be an abomination.  Me?  Well, I think my phrasing there makes my position pretty clear.  I love that this Beltran features the back of the jersey with the sideways nameplate.  Pictures from these games are nearly impossible to find.

It's always nice to have a trade partner who has similar collecting interests.  Nick always seems to hit the perfect balance in his packages, and I hope I do them justice on my end.
 
Life has been a little more hectic lately.  I try to carve out time to write my own posts and to read the bloggers on my reading list.  But there just hasn't been much time to strike up trades, or even to discover new blogs.  I can't tell you how many times I've seen a trade post on a blog I follow from a blogger I've never heard of, only to discover they're been around for some while.  Of course I promptly toss them in my reading list, but it's those less obvious demands of time and energy when it comes to blogging that have simply fallen by the wayside lately for me.

Hopefully I'll get back into the swing of thing sooner than later.  In the mean time, I'll stick to dropping bricks of dime cards on people.  Thanks again for the great additions, Nick!

No Cardboard, No Cry

The 4th of July usually means fireworks and baseball, but we decided to switch it up a bit and head to Rogers, OH for some flea market shopping.  We actually went last year over the 4th weekend as well, which was our first trip there.  It's a good flea market, but with any market it can be hit or miss.  For the number of vendors and the insane traffic and crowds, it wasn't a home run.  But I picked up some very nice pieces.

We walked around for quite a while until something stood out to me.  But when it did, it did in a big way.  I've been on a bit of a print/litho kick lately, if you've been reading over the last few months.  This piece features Maz, Stargell, and Clemente on the left, and the Pirates 1994 schedule on the right.  It's a little smaller than your average movie poster, so it would take up a good chunk of wall space.  I'm not sure that I want to dedicate that much room to an overblown pocket schedule that's 2 decades outdated.  I may cut/fold it down to just display the art portion, though that Iron City ad in the lower right corner may give me just cause to show off the whole thing.  And besides, maybe someday my future children and their friends can learn of a wonderful world before freaking interleague games every. single. day.  But I digress...
  The seller initially asked $10 on the piece.  Within a matter of seconds of me not responding to his initial offer, he had made 3 separate counteroffers, landing at $5.  I managed to bundle in a couple of 70's Pirate scorecards he had, getting the trio for $10

It was a program kind of day apparently.  A couple rows over I came across a regular dealer who usually has Pittsburgh sports memorabilia.  He had a stack of pennants, and some odds and ends photos, programs, and the like.  I picked up a 1962 Pirates yearbook with some slight damage for $10, and got him down to $5 on an awesome looking 2006 ASG pennant.

I've amassed a pretty nice pennant collection over the last year or so courtesy of local flea markets.  But the fragile tips and general flimsiness of them has me worried.  Pennant toploaders seem like a pretty pricey investment, but also seems like the only real option for longterm display/safety.  I'd hate to just ram a couple thumbtacks through them and stick them to the wall.

If anyone is more well versed in pennants than I, any tips on display/storage would be greatly appreciated.

What I had lacked in quantity, I easily made up for at the end of the day.  Kate was looking through a vendor with a few boxes of postcards (her first foray into collecting), and I wandered around a bit nearby.  I saw a dealer with some Penguins shirts in front of his table, where I snagged an awesome argyle print shirt with the 90's Pens logo complete with new tags for only $3.  Further back in his cove of tables he had some Pirate magazines - yearbooks, programs, some random stuff.

Nothing was priced, but he said they were $2 a piece.  At that price, I quickly grabbed up a half dozen or so that I was interested in.  The dealer came over and said I could take all the programs for $10.  Considering I already had more than $10 in my pile, I eagerly pulled out a ten while he boxed up the lot for me.

The vendor said that the collection came from an estate sale, and that the owner had worked for the Pirates in some office capacity.  Cool story, and I figured I could go through things in a bit more depth when we got home.

And boy was I pleased.  The box contained magazines, scorecards, and promotional materials from the mid 80's through 2001.  There was a business card attached to one - apparently this guy had been in the Pirates front office doing financial work for the team.  There were relatively common items - the On Deck Magazine, four media guides from the 90's, a couple 80's scorecards (seriously, can anything scream "We're in trouble this year!" more than Steve Kemp, Sixto Lezcano, and George Hendrick on your scorecard?).

But the real treasures for me were the oddball items - a couple Pirates' investor reports, magazines from the late 90's touting the future PNC Park, a merchandise catalogue (does anybody else remember those?) from the 1994 All-Star game, and what appears to be a back-area pass from the 1992 Stanley Cup finals.

 

I guess this only adds to my problem of having way too much stuff and no idea how/where to display it.  But if nothing else there is some awesomely dated reading material in here.  I think I've been slowly building an unofficial Pittsburgh sports archive.  Even in this day and age of everything being digitalized and nothing ever really leaving the internet, it seems kind of cool to preserve some of these things that probably rarely got a second glance after they were published.

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.  

Odds and Ends from the Show

The long weekend has gotten in the way of my posting schedule, but hopefully some odds and ends from last weeks card show will keep the crowds at bay (pun intended).  There's just so much stuff here, it's taken me the better part of my free time this week trying to get cards entered into their respective spreadsheets and hopefully find their way to a binder soon.

I like to think of myself as the kind of guy who goes into a card show without any expectations.  Hit the tables, see what their is to see, and work within your budget from there.  Sure, there are always specific pieces or cards that I want.  But more often than not I need to hit ebay or another online retailer if I'm looking for a *specific* item.

But once in a blue moon, the item comes to you.

Last week I wrote about Jim, my new best friend from Bahston.  He rolled into the show with a van full of small and oddball items, and I ended up scoring some really cool pieces from him.   Everything in this post (and then some) came from Jim's table.

As we were wrapping up our deal on Friday, he asked if I had seen his signed balls.  When he pulled out the ball cube, I had a tough time keeping my tongue in my mouth.  One of the items on my most wanted list has been an '06 All-Star ball.  A signed one?  Icing.

A dual signed ball?  Collector heaven.  When Jim quoted me a price at $20, no haggling needed.  That beauty was coming home with me.   The 06 ASG was a pretty special time for me, coming during the summer between graduating hs and starting college .  But those weren't the end to the all-star festivities.

Though the 1994 ASG doesn't hold such fond memories for me (or any memories, since I think I had just started t-ball that year), I've been coming across a lot of '94 memorabilia lately.  The chance to have an all-star ball from '94 was too good to pass up, even without any autographs on this one.  The ball has some slight yellowing, but the black and gold stitching really looks fantastic in my opinion.

For a couple bucks extra, Jim threw in a '94 all-star hat.  Did I need it?  No.  Will I wear it?  Doubtful.  Jim was quite the masterful salesman.

But some items just sold themselves.  These mini-figures have been on my want-list since childhood.  I still have the team sets for the Patriots, Packers, Cowboys, Chieft, and 49'ers at my parents house from when these came out around 1997.  But all those toy store trips never yielded a Steelers set.  I've seen a few locally, but the price was always more than I was willing to pay.  For a couple dollars, into the bundle!

But the odds and ends didn't stop there.  I picked up two Pirate patches with the old logo, which may eventually find their way into some kind of framing project.  On top of that, I came home with a full array of Pirates shot glasses (I rarely drink, but they always seem to come in handy) and other odds and ends.

Perhaps the coolest of which was this Pirates pin set.  Remember when Blockbuster video used to...exist?  The set is from late 91/early 92, and features the major stars of a post-Bonilla Bucs team, along with rising star Orlando Merced.  Not sure what I'll do with them, but I do really like these pins.  For the time being I'll probably leave them bagged though, for the vintage advertising nostalgia along.

A Little Bit of 1992 Left in Ya

We're about 10 hours away from the first pitch of the NL Wild Card game, and I think everyone knows the narratives by now.  Most of the civilized world, anyone with a heart not made of stone, is rooting for the Bucs.  Except Reds fans.  And perhaps some spiteful folks in the city of Baltimore. 

I'm going to enjoy this day for what it is, because regardless of whether the Pirates revisit the post season any time soon or not, there will never be another game quite like this.  As one Pirates blogger wrote, your first time is always special.  And this, for an entire generation of Pirates fans, is the first.

But there are some remnants of the heartbroken 1992 team still lingering around Pittsburgh.

Perhaps the most notable is new hitting coach Jay Bell.  Bell was a mainstay at short for the Pirates through most of the 90's, and one of the better shortstops in franchise history.  And that's saying something for a franchise that has some of the best to ever play the position.

It's undoubtedly tough to judge the effectiveness of a coach.  But Bell came to Pirates as a well regarded minor league hitting coach, and the results seem to speak for themselves.  While there have been players who regressed this season, the overall approach of the team at the plate looks more measured and effective than in years past.

Bell is the only 92 holdover still in uniform, but it's not the end of the line.

The broadcast booth carries a pair of 92's finest.

Bob Walk is one of the top color guys in the game, and had a pretty nice season in '92.  His 3.20 ERA  was good for 10 wins while splitting time between the pen and the rotation.

And of course no post is complete without the obligatory John Wehner reference.  Wehner only broadcasts road games, with longtime Pirate Steve Blass calling home games.  His role on the '92 team was fairly limited, and he didn't perform well in his 137 plate appearances.  But...playoffs!

And the honorary mention goes to the guy throwing out tonight's first pitch, former Cy Young winner Doug Drabek.

Drabek was the top of the rotation arm that the Buccos have been lacking ever since. 

I may try to get one more post up before heading to the park.  Win or lose, this season has been awesome, and this night should be great.