Mailday, A Shiny Mailday

I almost had a good reason for my extended blogging absence.  Almost.  I'm quickly learning that house hunting is a funny thing.  We saw a place we loved, we're lining up everything to put in an offer only to be told that there were some issues with getting the disclosure from a previous real estate agent.  So we waited, wanting to see if there were any issues that we couldn't see with the naked eye before moving forward.  So it wasn't fun to see that the house had gone contingent...apparently somebody else was able to get the mysterious missing disclosure form.  But live and learn, right?  The search goes on!

Meanwhile, I received a couple awesome cards in the mail from Jay at Cards My Mother Didn't Throw Out.  He graciously dug up a couple 2000 refractors toward my set (I'm still trying to dig up some worthy return fire).


Better yet, Jay included a note with a very cool story.  He attended school with Kevin Young's kids, but never quite worked up the nerve to ask Young for an autograph.

Ironically enough, the subject of the other card actually lives right up the road from me.  Matt Clement coaches the boys high school basketball team.  Kate interviewed him a couple times when she was covering education for the newspaper, and I could never quite talk her into putting aside those pesky things like journalistic ethics and dignity to ask for an autograph for her dear husband.

A tale of two unfulfilled autographs, I suppose.  Either way, I'm thrilled to knock out two more needs for my refractor set.  I've actually made some good progress on the set recently, though that just means I'm closed to 80% incomplete instead of 90%.  But they sure are great looking cards.

Trade Time: Waiting til Next Year

My cardboard activity has been sporadic at best lately.  But I was going through my email a couple weeks ago when I saw I had an email from Tom over at Waiting 'til Next Year.  I've been reading Tom's blog for a couple years now, but we had never traded before.  In fact, I think this is my first trade in many months.  Tom was interested in having a couple cards of Cubs catcher David Ross made.  He offered to pay me for them, but instead we agreed on him just sending me some cardboard.  After all, I get too much enjoyment out of making the custom cards, and I was thrilled that another collector liked them enough that he wanted my work for his own collection.
When a packed arrived in my mail box the other day, I couldn't wait to rip into it.  And boy am I glad Tom and I connected for a trade.

 Inside was a big stack of Post cards.  I think my total number of Post cards literally doubled thanks to Tom.  Like the Kellogg's 3D cards, for whatever reason these just never seem to show up in any real quantities at shows around here.

 And Tom also tossed in some modern cards I needed.  I ended up with my first few cards from this year's Finest.  I really like the design to the base cards, and I'm excited to see what the refractors look like.  But tell me this design wouldn't look a million times more amazing as an acetate card.  Good try Topps, but so much wasted potential.

 You can never go wrong with the 1960's Bucs.  And having not traded in months, it was exciting to have a package show up in the mail box.  Most importantly, I'm thrilled Tom like the custom cards I made for him.  They were a ton of fun to put together, and I really liked that I was able to use two unique pictures for the cards.  Thanks, Tom!  I was able to dig through some of my boxes and pull some Cubbies for you, so I hope this is the first of many trades.

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!

I Walked the Plank: Trade with Bob Walk the Plank

The Pirate online collecting community is a pretty small group.  I'm not sure whether it's because there just aren't that many Pirate collectors, if most of the Pirate collectors just don't share their collections with the web, of somewhere in between.  But the what Pirate collectors there are are a great group of people, some of whom I've been online pals with for the better part of a decade now.  And it's always nice to see to see a new member added to that rank.

By now I think everybody knows about Matt from Bob Walk the Plank, trading extraordinaire.  I found out about Matt's blog early on, maybe two or three posts into his newly founded blog.  I dropped him an email to welcome him to the blogosphere, and suggested striking up a trade.

And then...I dropped off the face of the planet.  This year has been a series of crazy ups and downs, and my irregular posting can vouch for that.  I was pretty bad about posting and reading blogs for a few months, and even worse about having the time to work out trades and send packages.  By the time I got my shit together?  Matt had made quite the name for himself.

A couple weeks ago I sent another email suggesting we revisit a trade.  We both have pretty similar collections, since we're both huge Pirate and WVU fans.  A few days later, a package was in my mailbox.

Matt has made a name for himself as a great trader, and I can see why.  

The package was full of hits, mostly of former Mountaineers.  My WVU collection has been slowly growing since I moved to Morgantown for grad school in 2010, and my arrival just happened to coincide with some amazingly exciting teams and players.  Unfortunately, that time period also overlaps with the college football license consolidation, pushing companies like Press Pass and Sage out of the game.  As you can see, they produced some absolutely beautiful cards of players who were college favorites, but likely to do very little in the pros.

But Matt wasn't done there.  This beautiful Jason Grilli auto was smack dab in the middle of the package, and made my jaw drop.  It has a beautiful refractor finish that doesn't show up in the scan, and the blue ink on blue background looks great.  The man has some serious trade bait sitting around.

Kay Jay Harris was another guy who predated my arrival in Morgantown, and I think this is my first autograph of his.  The Dolphins were my favorite team growing up because of Dan Marino, so this is a cool bit of collection overlap as well.

And last but not least, a great jersey card of the Pirates ace (future ace?).  I'm hoping Cole will get off high high horse and appear at Piratefest this winter so I can try to get this bad boy signed.

Talk about instantly beefing up the collection.  Thanks Matt!

PWE Bomb from 2X3 Heroes

I haven't been very active in the trade market this year.  Life's kept me pretty busy, and way too stressed.  I've tried to keep up a fairly regular posting schedule, but there just isn't as much time for cards as I'd like most weeks.  Incoming packages have been more rare than in the past, so when a surprise comes in it's much appreciated.

And Jeff from 2X3 Heroes was kind enough to dig through my list to see what I didn't have, or is just a really good card picker.  But either way, he knocked it out of the park.  The package had some awesome new additions to my collection.  The Gold Sparkle cards are actually one of the few Topps parallels I've really enjoyed in recent years, and I've slowly been plugging away at the team set.  I think I have most of Series 1, but Update and S2 are still a work in progress.

 And if you want to talk about awesome pickups, this Cutch card takes the cake.  This is probably one of the coolest cards I've received in a trade all-time.  I'm thrilled Topps has brought back die cuts, and is actually keeping the concept fresh year to year.

 And keeping the theme going, this Cole Chrome base card goes great with the Refractor I got from the group break I posted yesterday.

Rounding out the package, this finishes my Pirates GOTG team set.  The 2000 GOTG set is hands down one of the most visually stunning sets ever produced.

And finally a card of two time Pirates minor league pitcher of the year Tyler Glasnow.  He's been blowing through the minors, and hopefully will continue that success right on to the majors in the next couple years.

Thanks, Jeff!

Trade Post: The Angels, In Order

I've been sluggish on the blogging of late.  Blame the summer heat, or something like that.  Tom over at The Angels, In Order emailed me a while back after he saw a comment I left about my modest Charles Johnson collection.  He had a stack of cards that needed a good home, and I was happy to oblige.

For the early part of my collecting life, I collected just about anything but Pirates cards.  Steelers, basketball, and some meager player collections of my favorite players - Charles Johnson, Ripken, Jeff Bagwell, and Junior.  He wasn't a star by any means, but I learned to appreciate CJ's amazing defense.  My dad had been a catcher playing up through high school, and any time we were watching a game I was sure to get a dissertation on how well or poorly the catcher did his job behind the plate.

The Marlins became an expansion franchise the year I started playing t-ball.  Something about the ridiculously 90's color scheme stuck with me even as I grew up, and I've always loved the jersey sets the Marlins wore before they introduced black and screwed the whole thing up.

While I haven't been very active on this blog or in trades this year, blogging has helped me revitalize my interest in the random, cool, and otherwise amusing cards I collected as a kid but tried to shy away from as a an adult collector just focusing on "my team."  I give major credit to this for Dimebox Nick in particular.  It has been fun remembering that it's ok if the focus of your collection is that it has no focus.

The down side?  I now have another 10 binders of random cards, on top of the 13,000 Pirate cards I have.  Thanks guys, thanks a lot.

But revisiting my Charles Johnson collection is just part of my expanded collecting interests.  I haven't had the chance to really talk a lot about the great side collection pickups I've made from the National due to my lack of posting, but I'm hoping to have a new page up soon listing my various non-Pittsburgh collections.

Tom also threw in a few great Pirate cards, which were much appreciated.  I've been slacking in adding Pirates from 2014 for a variety of reasons, so they were much appreciated.

Better yet, the trade lined up with my trip to the National, giving me an excuse to pick up some cool Halos cards for Tom while digging through boxes.  I always enjoy finding cards for others when digging through a box, and it makes the dig go faster in my opinion.

Thanks for the great trade, Tom!

Trade Time

After finally unleashing the queue of overdue trade packages that I needed to send out, it only seemed fitting to get hit with another trade package.  Duff at Bleedin' Brown and Gold dropped a wonderful package on me after I expressed interest in the Bucs from his Prizm break. 

But it wasn't just faux chrome goodness.

In all I added about 30 new Bucco cards to the collection, which I think is the single largest addition to the collection so far this year.  Coming off of a year that saw my Pirates collection grow by leaps and bounds (a few thousand of them), additions have been slow this year.  But then again my needs list is also slowly shrinking.

But one area I always have a ton of needs from?

 Those obnoxious one per pack parallels.  Ultra Gold Medallion.  Score Gold Rush.  Collector's Choice Silver Signature.  Bazooka Blue Fortune.  The list goes on.  They're great cards.  And I imagine somewhere is a basement with 4 row boxes full of the things.  But they never show up around here.  Ever.  For how relatively "common" they should be, the things prove quite elusive in my dime box searches.

 But hey, trades are about the big and small additions alike.  And Duff's package wasn't without some hitty goodness.  A copy of this Iwamura Orange had been sitting in my COMC card for quite some time, though I wasn't quite ready to commit to the $.50 price tag.  I'm sure glad I waited.

 This Gorzelanny auto is another one I had recently almost purchased, but passed on.  For whatever reason some of these Topps Highlights are tough to find, while others are seemingly quite common.  This is the more common version, though Gorzo has another in the set that is a little tougher to come by.

 Gypsy Queen was the lone set that Topps put out last year that I really enjoyed.  I have been working on the black mini parallel team set with relative luck.  The Maz is one of the cards I'm missing, but I won't complain about adding the rarer green mini.  It's a sharp looking set, and may be my next project if I ever finish the black.

And coming full circle some more Prizm.  I may be in the minority, but I like the Panini knockoff chrome cards better than the actual Chrome stuff Topps is releasing these days.  Nice thick cardstock, true chrome color, and a nice shine and etching that Topps has become too lazy to include.  It's a damn shame that these cards are seemingly impossible to find.

A great package with some nice surprise additions.  And better yet, I get to empty out the large pile of Padres that had been building up.