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.

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.

Super Friends

I've been waiting to post these for about a week.  Over this past weekend, Kate and I drove down to Baltimore for the annual Team Collectors Convention.  No, it's not quite the National.  But the group of team collectors I'm a part of try to have a get together each summer for anyone who can make it.  And at a little over four hours away, it wasn't too far of a drive for us to go check out a city that neither Kate or I had been to since our middle school days.

Better yet, it meant a chance to clean out boxes and dump a bunch of cards on their respective team collectors.  But I wanted to go a little farther.  After all, my customs have opened up a lot of new possibilities when it comes to card giving.

 Shiny, shiny possibilities.

 I held off on posting these cards until after the convention in case any of my team collector buddies read the blog.  It was fun making these customs, and experimenting with what designs and color combinations would look best with the Superfractor paper.

 As I mentioned in my last post, I tried a whiteout technique to make the image stand out that totally backfired.  And with all the packing, card pulling, and planning that needed done for the trip I decided to just go with a more basic look for the cards.  Still, I think they came out pretty well and I hope everybody enjoyed them.  Our Red Sox collector, who has a big Youk collection, even asked what set the card was from, and said he hadn't seen it before.  Then it hit him that it was a custom.

It was fun to put together a unique gift for my collecting buddies.  But let's be honest - the real reason I do these customs is to entertain myself.  And what fun would it be if I only used my newfound custom powers to do good in the world? (*insert evil laugh here*)  I had to make a few for myself as well.  This Jack Wilson is the second of what will probably be an entire run of Jumpin Jack Flash Supers.  Not that I'm compensating for the fact that I don't own a Jack Superfractor or anything...

And by far my favorite of the bunch, I absolutely love how this Clemente RC turned out.  Topps actually produced one in a reprint set last year, but from the scan I saw online I'm honestly partial to my version.  I think eventually I plan to have a full run of rookie cards for all the Pirate HoF'ers done in the Superfractor style.

I'll have a longer writeup on the TC Con later this week.  We broke a mountain of boxes, including a couple of monster pulls, and it was a great weekend just hanging around and bs'ing with a group of collectors with similar interests.

It's Aliveeeee!: A Huge Custom Card Breakthrough

I felt like Dr. Frankenstein (or maybe Doc from Back to the Future) last night, running throgh the house to tell Kate  of my breakthrough.  I finally did it.  I figured out how to get a custom "high end" card looking the way I wanted.  And the answer was literally sitting in front of me the whole time.  But I'll get into that later on when I do some type of tutorial on making these sparkly pieces of goodness.

For those of you who have been following my custom card making adventures, I'm pretty happy with my process for making standard cards.

I started experimenting with some various premium foil versions, but wasn't overly pleased with the results on the cards I made.  They still needed some more pop, since the images just sort of faded into the foil.

Over the last couple months, I have spent way too much time and energy trying to figure out where I was going wrong.  I enjoy solving puzzles, but tend to get really, really frustrated when I can't figure something out.  But...problem solved!  There is still some room for perfecting the process.  And I need to figure out why it looks like the name says Roberto Clfmente.  But I'm really happy with this card, and it's a big breakthrough for my card making.  The colors didn't come through as well on my scanner, but in person the card looks pretty similar to the Topps Canary cards from a few years ago.

Now back to the drawing board to see what else I can come up with.

Budgets? Who Needs Budgets?!?!

I almost stayed within budget.  Almost.  It ended up being a pretty crazy three days at the Robert Morris show, and I'll try to get a few posts up over the course of the week.  Originally I had only planned on attending Friday and Saturday, hoping to spend a little time at home (aka not on my feet on a hard concrete floor).  But the best laid plans are set to fail.  As I was getting ready to head out the door Saturday, a deal caught my eye that was enough in and of itself to pull me back for a third day.

Over the last few years, I have been progressively less impressed with the show on the whole.  Last year, Modern era cards were nearly impossible to find, and there wasn't a single dealer stocking cards from the latest releases.  It wasn't radically better this year - I picked up a few Gypsy Queen minis, but still need entire team sets from 2015 Bowman and GQ - but there were a good number of dealers offering cards from cards that didn't predate the Carter administration.  I jumped in, filling holes in my collection at any turn possible.  There weren't any new Jack Wilsons to be found, but there was some 90's gold to be found in quarter boxes.

 The haul from the show was the best I've had in terms of quantity and range.  I have probably about 1,000 new cards to sort through between my various team collections and odds and ends, covering everything from serial numbered, autos, and a nice stack of minor league team sets.  But the best part?  It was unquestionably the chance to catch with some collecting acquaintances.

 It was a great chance to catch up with folks I've met over the years.  Some I expected to be there, and a couple others were chance encounters.  But collecting is just so much more enjoyable when you have somebody to share your experiences with.  Kate is more supportive of my hobby than I could ever ask for, but she just can't get the excitement over adding a Bob Veale autograph to my collection the way a fellow longtime season ticket holder can.

 It's that sense of collecting community that I enjoy the most, and I probably spent as much time just standing around and shooting the breeze with dealers and buddies as I did actually digging through boxes this year.  One meetup that sadly fell through was finally getting to meet up with Matt of Bob Walk the Plank infamy.  Matt and I lived within walking distance of each other at one point long before either of us started blogging and collect pretty much the same things, so it's a shame our paths have never crossed.  But sadly he had a full plate during the weekend, and the meetup will have to wait until my next visit to Morgantown.

The big event of the weekend was Tom Barrasso's first US autograph signing since his playing days.  Barrasso has a reputation for being one of the least friendly human beings this side of the Gulag.  And while I ultimately decided not to spring for his autograph, I heard from a few people that he was actually quite pleasant.  I'm guessing the obscene amounts of cash he made over the weekend may have helped.

 The best part about a show this size is that you literally never know what you will find.  The state and zip code parallels from Hometown Heroes have been incredibly tough to track down for me.  And obviously Andrew McCutchen would presumably be the most expensive.  I nearly pulled the trigger on this card on COMC for about $2.50 earlier last week.  And of course there was a copy, sitting in a quarter box on Friday.  Yes, please.

 As a team collector, I love the out of town dealers who roll in with massive rows of quarter boxes are always the best.  I ended up adding about 60 Topps parallels from the past two years, all at roughly a quarter a piece.  When living in Ohio a few dealers always had tons of Wal Mart and Target parallels, but those areas of my collection have been nearly nonexistent since moving back to PA.  I don't think I quite completed the team sets, but I must be darn close.

 I was actually surprised how much trouble I had finding blowout game used and autographs at the show.  Large shows are usually a great place for high quality $1/$2 autographs.  But aside from the Bay and Woodley in this post, which I picked up for about $3 each, there was very little in the way of lower end hits.  It seemed a little strange to me, but I guess it just depends on who sets up and what they bring.

 The score of the day Friday was definitely this Clemente Kellogg's 3-D for a quarter.  It's pretty badly cracked.  But it's Clemente.  For a quarter.

 After being basically MIA at least year's show and the National, I was able to score some decent McCutchen cards this year at what I considered good prices.  This Prizm insert is /99, and was an easy add to my pile for $2.

 It was interesting that my pacing and buying was radically different across the three days.  All these cards in this post came from dealers on Friday.  I was on a buying flurry, spending about $20 with three different dealers and scoring a bunch of nice lower-mid range cards.

 Saturday was a little slower on the card front, and had a lot of standing and chatting.  And Sunday was more or less dominated by memorabilia, and while the additions weren't as jaw dropping as last year, I can't wait to create space for my newest additions.

 Overall the show was a huge win.  I'll be slowly posting over the next few days as I get everything scanned and organized.

Checklists, Checklists, and Checklists

One of the things I have loved (and at times hated) about switching the bulk of my Pirates collection over to binders is that it has given me an excuse to flip through my collection countless times.  It's been slow going, and I sure wish the project would just get finished.  But it has always allowed me to appreciate some cards that otherwise got glossed over in my collection.

Like this one.  It's vintage.  It's technically a Clemente.  But honestly, it was the type of card that I was thrilled to find for about $1 at a show, cross off my list, and move on to the next item to hunt.

Just like checklists, so much of my collecting seems to revolve around tracking down the cards I don't have rather enjoying the piles and piles I have.  I guess it's fairly natural in this hobby.  Or at least I hope it is.

One of my goals for this year is to enjoy the cards I have just a little bit more, and shift some of that time spent shopping for new ones into flipping through what I already have (and saving a bit of change in the process).

So I'm happy I was able to check this card off my needs list.  I'm thankful some 8 year old kid didn't feel the need to put this checklist to use.  But I'm also damn happy that I can enjoy this piece of cardboard in my collection.

A Great Start to the Weekend

Nothing tops coming home and and finding cards waiting in your mailbox.  My trading has nearly ground to a half in recent months, and my buying has largely been via COMC and in person at shows and flea markets.  Trips to the mailbox have been a little less exciting.

But it looks like we're starting the weekend off right, with not one but two packages waiting for me today.  Shane from Shoebox Legends and I both had some stacks sitting around that could use a warm, loving home.

 Shane sent me a great assortment of cards, and a good majority of them were new to me.

 Maybe it's just for me, but some of the most "common" parallels are always the hardest to track down for me.  The Diamond Sparkle parallels are still my favorite of the various foil variations Topps has done in recent years.  Slowly but surely, I'm closing in on the team set.  Very, very slowly apparently.

And while I'm pretty sure it wasn't intentional, Shane even managed to send me a couple new PC cards with his protective fillers.  I've been stockpiling a small collection of League Leader cards.  It's not a full blown mini collection (yet), but any time I see one of the big stat caterogies - homers, batting average, era, strikeouts - it's been working its way into a small pile that will probably get its own binder.  What can I say, while I consider myself pretty in touch with the new stat metrics, I'm still a sucker for counting stats.

And I had no idea Mike Sweeney was the Royals captain.  Then again, it's the Royals.

 

But hopefully this stack of cardboard goodness is just a precursor to the weekend.

 There's a (kinda) local mall show this weekend.  Ok, in reality it's about an hour away...not really that local.  And I really should be saving up my budget for the big Robert Morris show in May.  But...well, hi, my name is Mark and I'm an addict.  But the mall is in the direction we'll be headed tomorrow, so I can totally justify a stop.

 Kate and I are headed to my parent's tomorrow to make some Easter candy.  Every year my grandma made chocolate covered fondant eggs.  They're lightyears better than anything you'll find at the store.  And on Easter day, everybody got an egg when they went to visit.  Since I was grandma's favorite, she would usually let me pick which flavor I wanted ahead of time.  But they were all good.  

 I would bite off the smallest bites I could manage, trying to make the egg last as long as I could.  They were that good.  And grandma only made enough for everybody to have one, which always made picking my flavor that much harder.

Grandma passed the family recipe to my mom.  It's been three years since she died, and probably 5 or 6 since she was well enough to make the eggs.  So this will be the first years we've made the eggs since she died.  It's not meant to be nearly as sentimental as it sounds.  These are chocolate coated goodness, and I'm really looking forward to seeing if we can make them anything close to grandma's.

And, hypothetically, speaking, I may be looking forward to not being limited to one egg!

 There should also be some flea market shopping in store for me this weekend.  I'm planning to make a trip Sunday morning to the flea market up the street that I discovered last weekend.  Kate is hanging out with a high school friend that day, so I'll be free to dig through dimeboxes to my heart's content.

The last card of this post that came in the mail today was an ebay purchase.  One of the things I like about Donruss has been the number of parallels and numbered cards that you hit in a box.  This Neil Walker is the gold parallel /49, though it didn't show up very well in the scan.

I won the card for a whopping $1.04 with free shipping.  I was a little surprised when I ripped open the bubble mailer to find this card inside.  The seller paid $2.25 for shipping the card in a bubble mailer, even it sold for less than half that.  I appreciate the gesture, but I would have been perfectly find with a PWE.  I kind of feel bad the poor guy took a loss on selling the card, especially on a card I already felt like I won dirt cheap.  But at least I'll leave him nice feedback.

 

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!