And then there was 2

'74 Topps has definitely been a work in progress for quite some time now.  But I've managed to whittle the want list down to 2 cards, despite what you see on the blog's want list, which currently says 9.

I have 7 cards in my Sportlots box at the moment and I'm only a couple of orders from pulling the trigger and getting it shipped to my door.  This will be my biggest order yet, 250 cards total from a myriad of sets across 3 different sports.   I'm looking forward to getting my hands on this one!

This post, however, is about the pair of  arrivals that came in Saturday and today, which brought that total down to just a pair.

Every time I see this card, I just can't grasp that its the Bucky Dent that hit the homer in game 163 of the 1978 season to eliminate the Red Sox from the postseason.  I learned a couple things about Bucky while looking up his stats on baseball reference.

He went to Miami Dade College and Hialeah High School down here in South Florida.  He was also drafted in the 1st round, 6th overall by two different teams.  The White Sox were the ones that wound up with Dent after he was drafted twice by the Cardinals in '69 and '70 but did not sign either time.  

Other things I learned.  He was traded to the Yankees by Chicago for LaMarr Hoyt and Oscar Gamble, plus $200,000.  (wow)  Bucky finished 2nd in the 1974 Rookie of the Year voting behind Mike Hargrove, but ahead of George Brett and Rick Burleson.  

I'm now finally the owner of the psychedelic Steve Garvey card.  I've seen it so many times on various blogs over the years; now that I have it hand I realize just how weird this card really looks.  

Thurman Munson appearing late in my set builds is becoming a common theme, as he was one of the last cards in my 73 and 75 sets, and I still have wants for him in both 71 and 72 Topps.  I may have to go out of my way to at least get the '72 copy before the last 10 cards on the list.

Sticking with the theme of not buying just one card from a seller, I grabbed a high number card from the neglected '59 Topps set build, featuring Orioles 1st baseman Bob Hale.  The high numbers are also getting pricey, as I paid about $5 for this card.  It is in pretty good shape though, the centering isn't bad and the corners are a bit soft, but not dinged.

The final two cards I need for the '74 set?  Big names indeed.

#126, the first series checklist and #597 the Manny Trillo rookie.  I'm quite positive you'll see a complete set post for '74 Topps sometime in November.  

No more procrastinating.

Enjoy the hobby!

Robert

It's a start

Been a major slacker on the writing front in October, not sure why that's the case.  But I have been nibbling both at the trade market and the eBay purchases, so I do have some acquisitions to write about.

I've started over the past couple of weeks to finally knock off the remainder of the '74 Topps baseball set, and earlier this past week I took advantage of the 5% eBay bucks promotion to buy a few cards from various sellers.   

For $4 I didn't think I could go wrong with a card featuring a pair of HOF catchers, so the Fisk/Bench combo is now in hand.  The seller (JimAllen) advertised is as EXMT and I don't think he's too far off course with this copy.  

I try not to make it a habit of buying just one card from a seller on eBay if I can and I wound up finding a trio of other cards to make the combined shipping worthwhile.

Eventually, the high number challenge from '72 Topps will need to be tackled, so I figured I'd start off slowly with a couple of cards #'d in the 600s.  I didn't think that $3 a piece for these 2 was bad, they're in really nice shape, so I grabbed them.

This card for me was the one that sealed it.  I've wanted to get a start on the '79 Topps FB set for a few weeks now, but picking up other pieces for sets in trades or on Sportlots has taken priority.

This is definitely a nice start to the set, card #3 featuring a pair of legendary RBs.  For $5 I thought the price was right; now I only need 525 more cards to finish the set.  I'll be sure to keep everyone updated on the progress of this set, as I'm really looking forward to putting it together. The set I'm sure will remind me of the year I really got into NFL football as a 12 year old.

Enjoy the hobby!

Robert

It's been a while

Yes, it's been a while since I've posted (8 days), but that's not the reason for the title.  I was in Target last week picking up some stuff for the house and I decided to make what I thought would be a futile attempt at hitting the card aisle.

Shockingly, there were a few fat packs of 2020-21 O-Pee-Chee hockey hanging there.  The first time since before March that I'd seen anything on my local big box store card shelves.

There were 5 packs there, but for some reason I only bought 4.  All I really was happy about was getting started on the set build for the latest OPC release.  

I'm very happy with how the set looks...

I decided to scan a couple of Sabres as they were part of one of the 2 big off season free agent signings, as the Sabres nabbed Taylor Hall to a contract, even if only for 1 year.  Hall and Eichel on the PP together should be fun to watch.  

I like the design of the set, it's simple and clean, and there's something a little new this year!

The backs are a nice bright white this year, not the normal card stock based back which had been a staple for the past decade and a half.  For this guy whos sight wasn't what it once was, being able to see the card #'s nice and easy was a very good thing.

The SPs are the same, rookies, team checklists, season highlights, marquee legends and league leaders.  The Jagr card threw me off for a bit, thinking I may have pulled a gold parallel, but there are no gold parallels, just the borders of the Legends cards all feature the gold. 

Similar looking in size and shape to the previous year's caramel inserts, this year I pulled one of what OPC is calling the "Premier Tall Boys" insert.  Not sure why UD felt they had to get their Premier name on their base OPC set, but that's not my call.

Each year OPC features their "retro" parallel, one per pack, or two per fat pack.  I can honestly say that there has been no middle ground with these each year for me.  I either love them, or I can't wait to get them out of my hands.

This year, it's the latter.  The only redeeming quality is the players name is in a stripe that features a team color.  To me, there was no imagination used this year in the design.  Even the color on the back, a purplish pink, isn't very inspiring.  

I managed to pull one of the red bordered parallels, nicely done featuring a team who's predominant color is red.  These are seeded 1:18 packs (not sure what the fat pack ratio is), and there's a blue parallel that's 1:3, but I didn't snag one of those.

I really do want to rip a box or two of this set, as I haven't ripped much in the last few years except a handful of fat packs from the big box store in order to get sets started.  

It has been a while...

Enjoy the hobby!

Robert

One Piece at a Time

Another musical inspired post, this time featuring a song that my dad would play constantly when I was in my early teens.  

One Piece At A Time is a song by the great Johnny Cash which tells the story of a young assembly line worker at a GM plant who proceeds to build a car by taking parts out of the factory, as you might have guessed, one piece at a time.  

I've never been a fan of country music, but there's something about this song that makes me sing along with it each time I hear it, whether on my phone while I'm walking or on my iTunes when I'm writing posts.

I'm trying to assimilate the song to my quest to finish off the 2018-19 OPC hockey set.  A recently completed trade with Sean (TCDB ID: Broadway) netted me 8 cards for the build, including the final 4 non-SP cards.  

I don't know why it seems this way, but putting this set together seems to be taking a long time.  It's only been a couple years since the set came out and I'm down to 40 cards on the want list.  I've also knocked off big chunks of the set a couple of times in trades, but for some reason it seems like I'm building the set one piece at a time.

Everything left on the want list now are all short prints, so the hunt is on for the cheapest copies I can find.  

Just like every other modern OPC set that I'm putting together.  Here's the song for your listening pleasure.

Enjoy the hobby!

Robert

Dominance

 I found it interesting that a trade envelope that I was waiting for arrived on Saturday, with the first 10 cards of the '85 All-Star insert set from this years Series 2 flagship.   One of the 10 cards of the trade inside is a gentleman that passed away on Friday, Bob Gibson.

Since it's an All Star card, I'll focus on the 8 seasons that Bob was an All-Star.

1962--Just his second full season as a starter, he went 15-13 with a 2.85 ERA

He missed the team in 63-64, and then went on a 6 season run between 1965-70 which featured...

• 119-60 record
• Combined 2.44 ERA over those seasons
• Started 198 games, and completed 128 of them!!  That's just under 65% 
• 7.8K/9 innings, 2.5BB/9 innings
• 17 K's in a world series game, which still stands as the most by a pitcher in a WS game.
• 2 Cy Young awards
• 6 Gold Gloves
• 1968 MVP

That 1968 season, where his dominance likely changed the game forever as his 1.12 ERA helped the MLB braintrust come up with the idea of lowering the mound in order to level the playing field between hitter and pitcher.  

Some more fun stats about his dominance in 1968.  Everybody asks, how did he lose 9 times in 1968 with a 1.12 ERA?

• Some of the names he lost games to.  Drysdale.  Jenkins,  Gaylord Perry (twice, including a no hitter), Sutton, Fyman, Dierker
• His ERA in those 9 losses was 2.50.
• He lost one game in the 10th inning, 1-0
• He actually gave up 6 runs to the Pirates, in a complete game.  Take away this game and his other 8 losses he had a 2.09 ERA
• In those 9 losses, the Cardinals managed 12 runs total, including 4 in the 6-4 loss to the Pirates.

1972--His final AS Game at age 36, was the 10th season out of 11 where he won 15+ games.  He went 19-11 with a 2.46 ERA and finished ninth in Cy Young voting

Fantastic stuff to look up.  His was an arm like no other.  The tributes on TV and social media have been endless.  Mr. Gibson certainly earned them.

RIP Bob

Enjoy the hobby!

Robert

I won't Lourdes this over anyones head

Spoiling myself lately with the one card posts.  This card has been sitting on my desk for a while now; you may remember when I posted about starting the '86 Topps football set a few weeks ago, at that time I bought this Lourdes Gurriel Jr. jersey card from the same seller at that time, for a nice price of $2.

Nothing fancy, which is OK since I only spent a couple of bucks.  The swatch is blue, perfect for a Jays collector.

It was nice to add something to the hits page on the blog, as I hadn't done that in a few months.  My collecting focus has gone far away from adding any Jays (the bulk of it was just getting too much), so I've limited myself to cheap jerseys and autos to add to the collection.

I won't buy them very often, and usually for cheap, so it's the perfect way for me to stick to the focus which is now set building.  

Maybe my next post will have more than 1 card....

Enjoy the hobby!

Robert

Last is first

I received not one, but two boxes of cards in the mail today.  The one that I was expecting was from Kin, or to many of you @beansbcardblog on Twitter.  There was a boatload of great stuff inside, but there was one card that I grabbed during his stack sale a couple weeks back that sparked this one card post.

I was instantly attracted to this card as its a checklist that's marked up, but marked up fairly neatly.

1966 Topps football #132 for your consideration.

OK.  Lots of things to notice on the card.  Creases.  For some reason I'm not minding them on this card.  To each his own right?

Whomever marked the boxes didn't have Len Dawson yet.  Shucks.

The wood grain border.  Boy did Topps do a few sets with this type of border.  Had no idea of any football sets that did this.  So had to do a bit of searching to find out a bit more information.

Back is in really decent shape, boxes colored in reasonably well.  But then I start to look a little closer.

Chiefs on the front, Dolphins, Jets, Raiders, Chargers on the back.  All AFL teams!  So I look up the set on TCDB and find that the other teams in the set (Patriots, Bills, Broncos and Oilers) comprise the rest of the AFL.  

Remember I know next to nothing about vintage football cards, so this was kind of a cool discovery for me.  The only other set in 1966 was Philadelphia, and sure enough that set featured all the NFL teams on it.  

I decided to hit eBay and see how much the Joe Namath card was going for, as I know it's one of his earlier releases ('65 Topps is his RC), and I was surprised to find raw copies on eBay between $70-200.  Not a surprising range considering the varying card conditions, but I thought the prices might be a bit higher.  

Maybe....one day.....the '66 Topps FB set will get added to the list of stuff to work on.  What would make me even consider putting it together is it's a reasonable 132 card set.  I accidently have bought the last one first.  But for now I consider it a cool find for the sport that is a distant 3rd on my collecting radar.

Enjoy the hobby!!

Robert