We Take a Break From the Playoffs to Check Out Some Cards

It's time for another CheckOutMyCards quasi-blaster. Flush with some PayPal funds and the need to polish off the 1983 Topps set I fired up the browser and went searching for some more cards to make the shipping worth it. Since you'll see pictures of the front, let's also highlight some notes on the back.

1983 Topps George Brett All Star

The back of the card recounts the 1935 All-Star Game held in Cleveland. Jimmy Foxx drove in 3 of the AL's runs in the 4-1 win. Lefty Gomez picked up the win by pitching 6 innings. Imagine a starter in the All Star game going six innings nowadays? The internet would lose its collective mind. Also, we need more people named “Arky” in pro sports. Arky (given name Joseph Floyd) Vaughn scored the lone National League run.

1983 Topps Rickey Henderson

Hey, Rickey was born in Chicago! Didn't know that. Also, through the 1982 season, his 4^th in the majors, he already had successfully stolen 319 bases. The current active stolen bases leader in the majors right now is Ichiro with 500. However, it took the Japanese superstar 16 seasons to get there. Which means he should tie Henderson's record of 1,406 sometime around 2045.

1983 Topps Pete Rose Super Veteran

In '83, Rose had 20 years of service time in the major leagues. Right now the only active players to eclipse that mark are Alex Rodriguez (22 years) and David Ortiz (20 years). Ortiz is planning on retiring after this year and Rodriguez after next. Who knows if anyone else will get close to that number anytime soon?

1983 Topps Randy Jones

In 1974 Jones lost 22 games for the San Diego Padres. The next two years he won a combined 42 and pitched 600 innings and won the Cy Young award in 1976. That workload took a toll on his arm and he never recovered from a nerve injury he suffered in the last start of that year. In fact, he never posted a winning record in his remaining 6 seasons and finished with an overall losing record of 100-123.

2012 Topps Heritage James Shields

Shields had 11 complete games in 2011. He is still the franchise leader for the Rays with a total of 19 (also with 8 shutouts). The closest current Ray is Chris Archer with 3. Shields is currently tied with Clayton Kershaw for 4^th among active leaders with 22. If you're looking for records that are never going to be broken Cy Young's 749 complete games has to be number one.

2015-16 Nikita Kucherov O-Pee-Chee Retro Variant

The information is a little sparse on the back of this one despite the fact that everything is in English and French. Kucherov is listed as being born in Maikop,Russia. It appears to be a small typo as a quick search lists the town name as “Maykop”. The name translates to “Valley of apple trees”. That's nice.

1983 Topps Ozzie Smith

Woo-hoo! Set complete! Ozzie is shown in a Cardinals uniform as he was picked up from the Padres in a trade on 2-11-1982. The trade was Smith, Steve Mura, Luis DeLeon to the Padres for Sixto Lezcano, Gary Templeton and Al Olmsted. According to The Sporting News the trade almost fell apart due to Smith's demand for a higher salary. The negotiations led to a great quote from then St. Louis manager Whitey Herzog, “Ozzie is a great fielder and baserunner. I'd like to have him. But if he doesn't want to come to St. Louis, I don't want him. No .220 hitter is worth what he's asking [$750,000]”. Restrosimba has a great post on the troubled trade.

(ed note – Upon further review. The set is not complete. Apparently I still need a Robin Yount. Damn my fading memory.)

2012 Topps Heritage Eric Hosmer

Hosmer played two seasons in the Carolina League for the Wilmington Blue Rocks. My parents live in Wilmington, North Carolina. It's a nice little city just a hop, skip and a jump from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Another awesome fact – it was where Dawson's Creek was filmed.

2013-14 Panini Contenders NHL Link Ondrej Palat Autograph

A poorly worded anecdote on the back:

Palat was on a road trip with his AHL club in Hershey, Pa., when he received a call on March 3, 2013 telling him he'd be playing WITH the Penguins that night. His team had a casual dress code, so Palat had to run to a store in Hershey to buy a suit before jumping in a car for the three-plus-hour drive.

OK. So there are two issues with that description. The glaringly obvious one being that Palat played against the Penguins not with them. Also, the game was played on the 4^th, not the 3^rd. Tighten your fact checking game, Panini.

In case you were wondering, Palat picked up an assist on a Tom Pyatt goal in the 4-3 loss to the Penguins.

2014-15 Upper Deck Premier Rinks of Honor Autographed Booklets #RH-JD

Not a bad card for less than a lunch in the city. I didn't realize it was an autograph until I read the back of the card. Drouin signed it in gold ink and it looks really, really nice. It doesn't show up on the scan, but in person it's quite nice.  Now I just have to figure out if I want to display it or just throw it in the Lightning box. I'm going to say that depends on what happens in the offseason with young Mr. Drouin.

According to the back of the card the official seating capacity of the Amalie Arena is 19,204. Upper Deck did check it's facts as the official Amalie Arena website confirms that number. For the 2015-16 season the Lightning averaged 19,092 fans for their home games, good enough for 8^th in the league. And they said hockey wouldn't work in Florida.....

1983 Topps Pete Rose Super Veteran

Wait, what? Yup. I managed to order the same card twice in one order from COMC. Looks like it was left in my cart from a previous visit to the site. Make sure to check your orders, kids. That's $.60 I could have spent on another card.

So that's another quasi-blaster break from our friends at Check Out My Cards. Seriously, check them out and buy something.

https://retrosimba.com/2012/02/12/how-the-cardinals-deal-for-ozzie-smith-almost-fell-apart/

http://scores.espn.go.com/nhl/recap?gameId=400442795

http://espn.go.com/nhl/attendance

Hockey Season is Here - why not get some new cards

There are days that I wish I could live a little closer to Target so that I can fulfill those daily urges for more cards. Most days I'm glad that I don't. It helps keep me from flinging money away on blasters and packs of cards that end up in the back of the closet. Laziness trumps collecting desire 99 percent of the time.

However, there are times when I really, really want some cards and I don't feel like buying an entire box or organizing a trade. So I journey out to COMC (check out my cards) and put a personalized “blaster” together. Keeping the total (without shipping) to somewhere around $20 I pick and choose some cards that I need. Here is the latest “blaster” I put together:

Heritage needs:

I'm probably never going to complete either the 2009 or 2012 sets, but it's always nice to plug away. Rizzo and Posey pretty much finish off the non-short print needs. I ended up picking up only one 2009 Heritage and it's another Cub – Ryan Theriot. For some reason, scores of women in their young to mid-twenties wear Theriot jerseys to Wrigley even up to this season despite the fact he hasn't sported the pinstripes since 2010.

1983 Topps:

The Cal Ripken, Jr. was the first card to go into the shopping cart. Love the orange and white uniform collection (along with the no belt look). The Wade Boggs rookie card is one of the bigger priced cards in the set. Since I'm not looking for huge value I settled with an off-center version with a really good price.

Vinny Lecavalier Personal Collection:

Through six games this season, Vincent has yet to make the line-up in Philadelphia. It's beginning to look like his career in the NHL is almost over (although you wonder if his old coach/nemesis John Tortorella might be able to find a use for him in Columbus).

I went with a theme for these three – Stanley Cup. It's always nice to see your favorite player's name associated with the Holy Grail.

The Russian Rookies:

One shiny Namestnikov, a retro of MY BOY NIKITA KUCHEROV and a Young Guns of the recently suspended Nikita Nesterov. The Lightning kind of shot the wad with rookies over the last few years. This year, it's probably just going to be Slater Koekkoek and Jonathan Marchessault.

The autograph hit:

JT Brown Artifacts Auto Facts. Whenever you can get a fourth-liner's autograph for around a dollar you gotta do it!

The memorabilia hit:

2014-15 Jonathan Drouin Trilogy Tryptics.

A very nice card from Jo Drouin's rookie year. It's numbered to 400 and is a two-color swatch. Can't really get much better than that!

So there ya go. Fourteen cards, all killer – no filler!

The Hopeful Chase 2014 Collecting Goals

Arrggghh.  So far 2014 has gotten off to a grinding start in the writing department.  One post in 24 days is not good.  It’s not good at all. I can blame it on the weather (so very cold), the job (lots of weird hours), being sick (so many over the counter drugs), but it is mostly my inability to carve out a consistent time to write (so very lazy).  Just to let you know, I’m shooting for at least one post a week for the rest of the year. 

Today, it’s the 2014 Collecting Goals Post!  It’s good to have goals. Without goals we are directionless, wandering aimlessly though our existence without a plan.  If being with the Duchess over the last ten years has taught me anything – it’s that you have to have plan if you want to be successful.  So this year’s plan is…….

Finish off some god damn sets.

That’s right, 2014 is the year of the set completion.  And I’m not talking about recent sets like 2012 Heritage or 2012 O-Pee-Chee Hockey.  I’m looking to complete sets from all eras of my collecting days.  So that spans three-and-a-half decades (yup I’m old). 

Does that mean I’m not buying any new product? Wellllllll. Let’s not get crazy.  Of course I will.  We all get bored and need new stuff.  I’ll probably dabble in the Topps flagship product.  Every year I say I won’t but I do.  So there’s that.  There is also Upper Deck Series II Hockey. So there are two new products on the radar. 

Since I’m older I’m more responsible now.  Responsible people have budgets. Therefore I have a budget.  My budget for 2014 -$300. Of course, because I am me, there is wiggle room.  That $300 can be supplemented by eBay sales. So, if I sell something then I can buy something.  Winner, winner chicken dinner.

Let’s get back to the initial goal – finishing sets.  Throughout my 30-odd years of collecting I’ve started a lot of sets.  Unfortunately I haven’t finished a lot of sets.  It’s time to rectify that situation.  It’s time to finish off some sets.  It’s time to go back into the 90s and face the junk era. 

That’s where I’m starting. I have a lot of cards from the early 90s, yet I don’t have many complete sets.  This year I’m going to change that fact.  I’ve already knocked off the last two cards I needed for the 1990 Topps set and now I’m moving on to the 1992 Topps set.  I think 1991 Fleer will be next (so yellow, so awesome).

I’ll still go after my personal collection cards and various Lightning/Orioles cards as well, but my laser like focus (look, squirrel!) will be on finishing off sets.  We’ll see how that goes.

With that in mind, I did a little shopping on COMC last week.  For less than the price of a blaster I picked up thirteen new cards.  Here they are:

The Starting Point:

1983 Ryne Sandberg Topps

Yes, 1983 Topps is one of those sets I’m working on.  So with a little money in the PayPal account I decided to knock off one of the bigger cards of the set.  I saw a lot of Cubs fans this weekend.  They all want Sandberg as their manager.  They were also irrationally upset that the Cubs moved Bingo night from Friday to Saturday.

The Set Needs 

2012-13 O-Pee-Chee Hockey.

The Tom Pyatt doubles as a Lightning need as well so it killed two birds with one stone.  I have no idea who Brandon Manning is, but it’s one less Rookie card that I need.

Personal Collection

Late 90s Pacific cards were so shiny and unnecessary.  Bonus points for the greatest uniform in the history of Tampa Bay. The Upper Deck Trilogy is probably one of the last cards to be produced with Vinny in a Lightning uniform.  I’m going to be so sad when I get my first “Vinny in a Flyers uniform” card.  Lecavalier in a Ak Bars Kazan uniform?  Yes please!

Random Lightning Cards

Mike Commodore played in a handful of games for the Lightning, you think they would have made a bigger deal of a having a one-legged player on the team. The J.T. Brown collection grows by one and a Steven Stamkos Panini Toronto Expo card round out the bunch.

The Hits

Another jersey swatch for Vincent.  Pretty soon I’ll be able to sew together an entire sweater out of Vinny jersey cards.  That would be awesome.  A Keith Aulie signature?  It was less than two bucks.  I mean I think that’s his signature….

The Super Awesome Bonus Card

Favorite Team – check

Favorite Goalie –check

Favorite Jersey – check

If I ever pony up for a true throwback jersey it will be a Zac Bierk 3^rd jersey.  Although I would go with the All Star patch over the John Cullen patch.

Good times!