90 days to a slimmer, trimmer want list

2016 Ginter is done!! 

You see all the ads on TV for weight loss.  Almost everyday there's something stating "lose weight with such and such product".

It gets monotonous.  "30 days to a slimmer, trimmer waist line."  Leave me alone and let me get back to my program!!

Recently, I saw a couple of fellow bloggers/twitterers (is that the term for someone who uses twitter?) display their disdain for newer products.  It got me to thinking...

"Do I really need to be starting any new sets when I have a boatload of sets from the past that I want to finish?"

Of course, the answer is no.   But to emphasize my point, I went through all my want lists and decided to add up the number of cards that I have on said want lists just to see how big the number is.

The number??

12,172

Wow, that's an eye opener to say the least.  Twelve thousand, one hundred and seventy two.  Try writing that on a check once or twice (for those of you younger readers, checks are what we used to pay for cards on ebay before PayPal came along).

It's tough to fathom really needing that many cards, isn't it?  Yet, with all the sets I have on my want lists, that's what the total is.  So, like any person that needs to trim a few pounds off their frame, I have decided to try and trim a few cards off of the want list. 

How do I do this you ask?  Go on a diet.   A pack diet.

2 copies, one for set and one for PC.  36 cents.  Thank you Sportlots!

That's one of my overdue resolutions this year, which I'm about to present now:

1.  90 days without buying one new product, or one pack of cards.  What I like about the first 3 months of the year (in non-leap years) is that there is a total of 90 days.  Very easy to remember.  Therefore, until March 31st, I will try to buy no new packs of cards.  Anything I buy has to knock cards off of my want list, or someone else's want list. I started this on January 1st, so by the end of March the goal is to have knocked the want list down by going cold turkey.  I'm sure I'll have the shakes by Valentine's Day.

2.  Clean up the Blue Jays/Maple Leafs collection for good.  I've got the Jays started, which will be the bigger project of the two.  Need to get the bulk of the collection sorted by year for easier entry into the Trading Card Database.  Once I get that done, it's only a matter of time.  The only date I'll set for myself is having it done by the 31st of December at 1159 PM. 

3.  Keep the PC blog rolling.  For those of you who do read my Player PC's blog, don't laugh, but I love doing it.  Yes, it's pretty easy when you think about it, writing 3 or 4 bullet points about a card and the player associated with it.  But, it's done a couple of things for me over the past 2 years.
A)  I've really enjoyed adding cards to my original PCs (Sakic and Thome) and B) I'm actually looking at the cards I've bought in the past, not leaving them sitting collecting dust in binders.

My goal is 400 posts on the PC blog this year.  I've come close each of the first two years.

4.  Five and dime contest.  I plan on running a contest during the 1st quarter of 2018, and I promise I will not punish you by making you write posts consisting of less than 100 words (although some of you did quite well with that!!).  I'll probably shoot for February once I get some credit card debt paid off and have a little bit more $$ to spend on your want lists, so be ready to do some hunting...

5.  The National.  It's in Cleveland this year, and I'm itching to go.  So much so that I thought about booking my vacation today at work.  Sadly, August is in our next fiscal year, so I can't do it yet.  But I plan to be there.  I would really enjoy meeting a blogger or two there as well.  I've not met any of you yet, but would love to do so.  More to come on this as it gets closer.

That's it, only 5 resolutions this year instead of my normal 7.  Less pressure....

Thanks for reading, and have a fabulous 2018!  Robert

Unstuck, at least for one day

I haven't written a post on this blog in 10 days.   Largely because I haven't had any inspiration to do so.

Then I looked at the pile of cards to my left on my desk, and this card was on top of the pile.

Stadium Club gold parallel of Matt Duffy.  Nothing inspiring about that, right?   Well what created the inspiration for this post is what's on the padding just to his left on the photo.

Astros.com  

I've never been big on congratulating teams and their fan base when they celebrate championships, but I feel that I do owe a few words for the Astros and their fans.

First, I do want to say that I'm glad that the two best teams in baseball this year made it to the Series.  I honestly thought that the Dodgers were going to steamroll their way to a Series title, but as usual I was wrong (sorry to Greg, Oscar and the other Dodger bloggers, I probably jinxed it for you).

But one thing happened during the summer that really made me wonder about fans these days. 

The July 31st trade deadline came and went, and the Astros didn't make a significant trade to bolster their club.  The lynch mob rose in great numbers and wanted the management team run out of town.

Then at the end of August, the Astros pulled off the biggest coup of all.   They added Justin Verlander for 3 minor leagues.  Detroit is even going to pay $8 million of Justin's salary each of the next two years.  Verlander promptly goes 5-0 with a 1.06 ERA and a 0.647 WHIP in September, and then add in a 4-1 postseason and you may have one of the best acquisitions ever for a pennant/championship run.

The guy I was happiest for through all this was Jose Altuve....

I'm putting my vote in for Altuve as the best player in the game offensively over the past 4 years.

• .334 combined average with 845 hits
• averaging 39 steals a year
• 4 silver slugger awards
• Averages 156 games a year, so no DL stints 

Chicks may dig the long ball, but I get a charge out of guys who have 1250 hits in their first 6.5 seasons in MLB, play every day and do it in the relative obscurity that is the southeast coast of Texas.  If he's in Chicago, LA or NY, he's a rock star.

It's time to give this guy some love, seriously.

To the folks of Houston, after seeing what you went through with Hurricane Harvey, I am glad that your team won the Series.  But there are a lot of fans out there that should let the management team run things.

Looking at the season that the 'stros just had, I think they've got an idea what they're doing.

Just my opinion though....

Thanks for reading, Robert

Stuff from last week's card show

I guess yesterday's post was the impetus to get me scanning and telling the story of last week's show.  I have a decent story to tell you as well.  But first, let's get to the goodies.

The first table I hit had several quarter boxes, and I found enough to spend a $10 bill on. 

How many of these Topps Future Stars cards have we seen over the years that have all 3 players on the card go on to have solid MLB careers?  I don't recall too many (although I don't have them all...yet), but this trio all had some quality seasons in the bigs.  Just wanted to throw that out there...

4 quarters.  The Molitor is a dugout collection, and even though the team says Minnesota Twins on the bottom, I'll count it as a Blue Jay card.  The Scott Rolen Topps Co-Signers card is part of a mini sickness that you'll see more of in a minute.   Olerud and Stieb RC's for a quarter?   All day!

I don't know what it is about the Co-Signers cards that has this strange effect on me.  Multiple colors?  Check.  Serial numbering?  Check.  Multiple photos with some serious shading effects on the front.  Check that too.  Not sure why, but I decided to pull these out and give them a home....

84 Topps for a quarter apiece?  3 pretty good ball players as well.  OK, no problem...

I swear that Nolan Ryan has been following me around lately.  Every time I hit a show, I see several cards of his for cheap, and I have no idea why. 
The Dave Parker is my deliberate reminder to get my ass in gear and get a '76T want list on the blog.  I can't even remember how far along I'm into that set.
Fred Lynn from 77T?  Oops, don't know why but I thought that was from another early 80's set.   I guess by this time I was hallucinating and just decided to throw it into the pile.

All 3 for a quarter apiece.

More Blue Jays.   Love the Fleer Futures on the right, it has some Japanese characters on the front which made it look cool to me, plus the fact that I was sure I didn't own it already...

Two cards from two dormant hockey PCs.  I've been doing so well getting my stuff in order lately that maybe I'll do the same for these two collections and get them rolling again.

Now, as all you box hunters know, after a while you get a bit tired sitting there and cruising through the boxes.  By the time I started pulling these cards out, I was feeling a bit restless.  So, I took a big chance on the serial numbered cards, and lucky me, I hit 5 out of the 6 for the SNI hockey set (the only miss was a 99-00 BAP Patrick Marleau card, so not a total loss there either.

The Cam Ward card from the 05-06 Beehive set is for the Goalie Mask set.  Just in case I had gone totally blind, the penny sleeve had the word BLUE in big bold letters. 

OK, now the interesting story...

I hit another table, and this dealer had a bunch of singles from this year's Topps.  10 cents apiece.  I started diving in, had pulled out about 40 cards when I came across this card.

Believing in good karma and not wanting to see a dealer get gypped, I told him "Hey, I think you've got a gold parallel in here among the base cards."  My jaw almost hit the floor when he gave me his response.

"Oh?  My bad, if it's in there, it's 10 cents."

Holy shit.  I am a big believer in karma, and hearing him say this proved it even more for me.  During my digging I found 3 more gold cards, and then I found this card of Mark Rzepczynski the likes of which I haven't seen anywhere on the blogs yet.

There is some absolutely weird stuff coming out of baseball products at times, but negatives?  I had a look on TCDB, and there hadn't even been any of them posted yet. 

For 10 cents, you better believe it came home, even if it's just for a conversation piece.  I spent 10 bucks at his table, and knocked off almost 50 cards from my Series 2 want list.

So for the past 2 card shows, I've spent a grand total of $25, had a great time at both shows digging through boxes, and had a couple of good stories to tell.

Can't beat that with a stick.

thanks for reading, Robert

Inbound and Down #27: Remember the Astrodome

Sometimes you go quite a while on the blogosphere without communicating with some of your fellow bloggers.  It's just a fact of life, as there's so many card bloggers out there you can't keep up with everyone.  I recently received an email from Marc at the Remember the Astrodome blog saying that he had a few Series 2 cards from '17 Topps to send my way.

It had been quite a while since Marc and I communicated last, since the address he had on file for me was my PA address!  So I sent him the new address and I received a nice windfall in the mail yesterday...

6 more off the list, need just over 100 now.   Hoping that today's card show can knock that list down some more.

A trio of Blue Jays, a welcome addition in any envelope!!  I especially liked the Fond Farewells card of Omar Vizquel which I don't remember seeing in the past.

Marc also chipped away at a couple of other want lists, as he knocked off 4 '89 Upper Deck cards, as well as a 1990 Leaf (not scanned).  Still a long way to go for both of these sets, but every little bit helps, right?

The topping on this envelope, which was totally unexpected, was the '74 Topps cards that Marc included.

Love the horizontal cards, especially the shot of Gary Matthews sliding into 3rd.  Looked at the '73 Giants roster, and that team had a very young and talented OF group, with Matthews (22), Garry Maddox (23) and Bobby Bonds (27) .  The team as a whole was young, with only one regular fielder over 30 (McCovey) and one starting pitcher (Marichal); neither of those two would be on the club the next season.

Another 9 more towards the set, including Barry's dad and Bob Forsch's brother Ken.  These 13 cards put me at just 2 cards shy of having 2/3 of the set in hand.   Maybe I'll be lucky and find a few today to bring home from the show.

Thank you for the cards Marc, they are appreciated!!  I have sent you a friend request on the TCDB (rmitchell6700 is my user ID there).  

Thanks for reading, Robert

2017 Topps Series 1--My top 10

I haven't written one of these posts in a long time, so it feels good to go through an entire set of cards and take a good look at all the photos.  Most of them are the standard in play photos of hitters and pitchers, so they were easy "throw away" cards.  But I did pluck out 13 cards whose photos were worthy of inclusion.

Honorable mention:

Derek Norris #92

Love the look on Derek's face, almost as if he's saying "anyone who tries to cross this plate is dead meat".

Adam Lind #328 and Jesse Hahn #140

It doesn't have to be all about baseball, right?  Love the shot of Adam Lind turning his helmet into a basketball.  Wonder if he sank the J?

Jesse Hahn's card is a great shot of him warming up in the cavernous Oakland Coliseum.

OK, let's get started with #10

#10:  Miguel Sano card  #126

OK, I could go into a big political statement about the players in the No Fans Left league, but that's for another place and time.   Thank you Miguel.

#9:  Chicago Cubs Team Card #72

Great shot of the fans flying the W at Wrigley field after a win.  What better way to honor fans who suffered through a 100+ year WS drought.

#8:  Gregory Polanco card #149

I remember posting this card at the beginning of the year and saying that it would be one of the best.  Yep, it sure is.  The guy in the first row with some good focus on the play adds to the card for me.

#7: Jacoby Ellsbury card #197

Why this one ahead of Polanco?  The shot of the lightning bolt on the ad sign in behind Jacoby just added a little something to the card for me.

#6:  Baltimore Orioles team card #141

Looks better on the screen to me.  The Gatorade shower isn't hitting just one or 2 guys, it's hitting a half dozen!  The reaction of the one player on the left is priceless.

#5:  Jace Peterson card #133

Great, great shot of Jace making the DP turn on Addison Russell and the Cubs.  The shot of the ivy in the background just adds another great touch to this card.

#4:  Daniel Murphy card #62

Those who post vintage cards on the blogs with great shots of stadiums in the background was the inspiration for adding this card.  It is a great shot of Miller Park, showing a couple of the retired numbers in the background.

#3:  Kevin Pillar card #6

I'm sure that Topps probably has enough photos of Kevin making diving catches in the outfield to cover 10 products each season for the next 10 seasons.  Finding a shot of him diving into home plate is even more outstanding.

#2:  Mookie Betts card #161

I had this card at #1 for a few minutes, but I dropped it to #2 just because of the bend in Ben Revere's body, which you'll see in a minute.  Whomever took this photo should be congratulated, because snapping this picture right at the moment the ball entered the glove is fantastic.

#1:  Ben Revere card #324

Two things that made this photo #1 for me over the Mookie Betts card.  First, the bend in Revere's body, that looks painful (OK, well it would be painful for me to do that).  Second, catching the yellow home run line shows that Ben is bringing a home run back onto the field for his pitcher.

Looking forward to seeing what series 2 has in store photo wise.

thanks for reading, Robert

Knocking down some want lists, COMC style

The latest push of card purchases came around my birthday late last week.  I decided to splurge on myself  a little (you only turn 50 once), and I also wanted to hit the $5 bonus so I decided to hit a bunch of different want lists.  Variety is the spice of life and all that....

So series 1 is finally complete, only 3 days after the World Series has concluded.  It's been a long time since I've been able to do a complete set post, so I'm looking forward to going through series 1 and picking out my favorite cards to show off.

I also put my Series 2 want list up today, 108 cards in total to put 2017 Topps to bed for good.

Here's the list, just in case you don't feel like hunting for it on my many want list pages...

355,356,357,359,360,364,368,374,380,381,389,391,395,396,403,407,408,
414,415,416,417,421,423,428,433,439,443,444,446,450,451,452,459,461,
463,465,469,470,473,475,476,480,482,487,488,489,490,491,498,502,503,
504,507,509,511,513,515,517,522,524,526,529,536,537,538,539,542,543,
544,550,551,555,561,565,568,571,573,579,580,581,589,592,597,599,601,
604,611,612,624,628,635,638,639,643,648,650,654,655,656,662,673,674,
679,681,686,688,694,695

15 cards from the almost completed 2016 Allen & Ginter set made their way to my door today.  I'm down to just 9 cards to finish the set, and knock off one of my 2017 'resolutions'.  Will be glad to get this one off the want lists as well.

In hindsight, buying a couple of '82 Topps cards as part of this last order might not have been the best idea, as I'm sure I can hunt around and find them a bit cheaper.  Plucking a few '68 and '69 Topps cards for less than 50 cents apiece was something that I didn't mind doing though.  I'm closing in on 100 cards in hand for the '69 set, and every time I see one of the pink or salmon colored backs I fall in love with the set just a bit more.

I've never really written much about the '74 Topps set on the blog, largely because I bought one large lot of it a couple years ago, and never chased it much since.  I'm 15 cards shy of having 2/3 of the set in hand, and could honestly say I could count on one hand the number of times I've mentioned it.

To show you how little I know about the set, I wondered during my shopping spree last week why I didn't have the first 6 cards of the '74 set.  Dopey me had no idea that the first 6 were a tribute to the great Hank Aaron.  So, I found a couple of the tribute cards for less than a buck apiece and added them to my order.  Surprising that I could only find one blog dedicated to the '74 set, and unfortunately that effort appears abandoned after approximately 90 posts. 

Well, that's the baseball half of the purchase.  Tomorrow, we'll go over the hockey portion, a little bit less but still it fills some holes in the collection.

Thanks for reading, Robert

Inbound and Down #23: Night Owl Cards

We've been doing this a long time.  One of us sends an envelope, the other sends one back in kind.  There's no real trading between myself and the Night Owl, we just send each other envelopes with cards that are on the other's want list. 

This time I received cards from 4 different want set want lists...

Greg actually sent me more Series 1 Topps cards than this, but while this package was in transit I had already placed an order from Sportlots and knocked my want list down to 6.  So these 2 drop the needs to just 4.

I should be able to finish this years Heritage set sometime in 2022, based on the length of previous Heritage set completions. 

I still don't have 10% of the 1980 Topps set in hand, but these 5 cards surely provide a bit of room in the Night Owl's Dodgers duplicates box.  Sometime soon I'm going to try and find a starter set of these on ebay to get this set going.

I didn't bother to scan all the 1989 Upper Deck cards that Greg sent; there were 48 in total putting a nice dent into the want list.  I still need almost 600 more, a long way to go for sure, but it's been great seeing these come in. 

Check out the first scan.  I scanned these cards in numerical order, but the first scan wound up with 6 left handed pitchers on it.  Not intentional for sure, just a happy coincidence. 

The second scan also reminded me that Willie Upshaw wound up in Cleveland after being replaced at 1st base in Toronto by Fred McGriff.

5 out of 6 base cards from the Opening Day set, plus the Jays mascot Ace also found their way to this Jays fan.

Some other miscellaneous Jays needs came my way.  The two Allen & Ginter cards I need for my set build, so I'm going to put them in there.  I need the Bautista Bunt Blue parallel, and the Tulo Programs card from this year's Bunt also.  The Tony Fernandez card is an interesting one; it has a 1985 front, and the back is in the 1975 style. 

What a great envelope of cards, thank you very much Greg, they are very much appreciated!!

Thanks for reading, Robert

1249: A mixed bag

Decided to hit Target on the weekend, largely because I hadn't bought myself any packs of cards in what seemed to be quite a while.  Part of the purchase was a couple of packs of Topps stickers, something I hadn't bought any of since I posted about starting the sticker set back in July.  No doubles!  I didn't bother scanning of them however, I just went ahead and put them right in the album.

I also bought a couple of packs of cards that I'm going to show off in a pair of "Try a Pack" posts over the next few days.  One hockey, one baseball.

I did buy one 3-pack of Allen & Ginter, hitting a couple of doubles (including the SP of Adam Wainwright), but knocking 9 cards off the 2017 needs list...

I also made a small purchase on Sportlots a week or so back, but had to wait until today to get them, as we had no mailbox last week due to the hurricane.  I spent my Saturday taking a sledge hammer to the old concrete post we had (it was hideous, so I was glad to do it believe me) and myself along with the missus put up a new mailbox.

The post office caught up today and brought a nice stack of Series 1 Topps for my troubles...

Here are the 6 horizontal cards out of the block.  It's almost not going to be a Kevin Pillar card unless it's showing him diving in some form.  Usually it's for an amazing catch in the outfield, this time it's trying to beat a tag at the plate.  The entire group that I bought leaves me needing just 6 cards to finish series 1.   These numbers are the last that I need...7,20,238,283,319,341.  Hopefully by the end of the week I'll have a want list up for series 2.

I also bought a couple of Andrew McCutchen cards for that PC, I'll show those off sometime this week on my player collection blog.

I spent $35 total between the Sportlots purchase and the packs from Target, leaving me with $1249 for this year's budget.

It's going to be tough to get 1/2 way through that budget this year.  

Thanks for reading, Robert

1426: Sportlots

It had been quite a while since I placed an order from Sportlots.  September of 2016 was the last time I bought anything off the site, and it makes me wonder why since I have so many modern sets on my want list that I haven't chipped more of those off with orders from the site.

I decided a week and a half ago to try and knock down a couple of baseball sets.  First up was this years flagship:

Only 5 of the 29 cards were horizontal.  I especially like the Blue Jays team card (of course), even more so because Topps managed to include a picture of last years "Big 4", Donaldson, Bautista, Tulo and Encarnacion.  Anyone else out there noticing the big numbers that Mark Reynolds is putting up so far in Colorado this year?  Might get his first all star nod if he keeps it going. 

Still need a little over 100 cards to finish off series 1.  With series 2 on shelves, I don't know if I can hold off buying packs before completing the first 350....

Another set that I'm trying to complete is the 2016 A&G release.  Still have 81 cards to go; I'd like to finish this set off before the end of summer so I can work on some other want lists that have been on my list for quite a while.

Finally, I added 4 more cards to my Andrew McCutchen collection.  At 18 cents each, it was easy to add them to the cart.  I'll have to start doing this more with Sportlots, as it's a lot cheaper to add to my PCs this way than always using COMC or ebay. 

The best part about this order was I received a 5 dollar credit from Paypal, so the whole thing only cost me 12 dollars! 

$1438-$12=$1426 left to spend in 2017.  June is the halfway point of the year, and I'd have to spend 426 dollars on cards in the next two weeks in order to be exactly half way to my 2017 budget. 

It looks as if I'll be ahead of the game for the next little while....

thanks for reading, Robert