Is it December 1st yet?

A little bit of sarcasm in the title, but a part of me believes that the Leafs might hold out again on signing another big restricted free agent until right before the deadline of December 1st.

This time it's...

Mitch Marner.   This kid is going to command a king's ransom to play for the foreseeable future in the blue and white, and the telling statement that I heard recently about this contract negotiation was from last year's last minute deadline signing, William Nylander.

Nylander basically came out and said that there's plenty of time to get Marner signed.   Yes there is William, there's just under 5 months to the December 1st deadline.  I hope it doesn't go that long, but it would not surprise me to see the Leafs play hardball again and let it drag out.

On the card side of this post, I've started a small Mitch Marner collection to add to the whole bunch of other things I'm collecting.  Marner will not be a top tier collection, just for the simple fact that I'm not willing to pay a king's ransom to collect him.  It will be mostly base and minor inserts/parallels for this collection.  THat includes the 2018-19 MVP silver signature card you see above.

It's hard to believe it's already been 20 years since the first installment of the faux signature parallels came out, and they're still a staple of the MVP sets today.

Glad to see some things never change in the collecting world....

Thanks for reading, and have a great Friday!

Robert

Attack mode

Happy 4th of July to everyone!  Whatever you do today, have lots of fun but please do it safely.

Still picking apart the latest COMC order (it came in over 2 weeks ago) and decided  to show cards on America's birthday from the '76 Topps set.

I decided on my last order to go into attack mode on the '76 set, and picked up 21 cards, including some stars such as Tiant, Garvey, Seaver and Hank Aaron. 

 

Yaz, Yount and Palmer are all here as well, along with a couple of checklists.  It is a bit depressing that these 2 checklists cost me under a buck apiece, while my '73 set sits unfinished as I can't find a high number checklist card in decent condition that costs less than my monthly cell phone bill. 

A trio of horizontal cards finishes off the 21 cards, including a great looking Astros team checklist with the old rainbow uniforms.  I know that there's a lot of people that wouldn't be too upset to see Houston go back to those unis full time.

This set is definitely on the radar to finish this year, as I have just 47 cards to go, and I'm pretty sure that there aren't any major purchases left.  However, most of the remaining cards are either stars, all time greats (Williams, Hornsby and Traynor) or league leader cards.   As I pick these up through out the rest of 2019 it'll be like showing off a who's who of mid 70's baseball.

I already can't wait...

Thanks for reading, and have a great holiday!

Robert

Many, many sets on the go

I love building sets, and this mission I have to put Topps sets from 1968 to 1986 together has sometimes left me a bit frazzled, but honestly I believe I'm more focused as well.  Having want lists put together has really helped, and being able to take cards off the want lists is a great feeling of accomplishment.  I'm sure many of you have felt the same when you start removing those numbers off of your blog page/spreadsheet/whatever device you use to keep track of your collection.

Keeping the little run of posts I have going today by showing off a handful of 1974 Topps cards.

I find it hard to describe how I feel, or what I think of the '74 set.  Poor man's '73 Topps?  It's an OK design, I don't despise it at all, but for some reason it just doesn't wow me.

As far as 70's sets go, it's probably middle of the pack, maybe just below '78 Topps in the middle of the scale.   Until writing this, I never really thought about how I would rank the Topps sets between 70-79.  Maybe I'll write more about that another day.

One wrong I definitely have to correct is getting this want list on the TCDB.  For some reason, I've never entered this set on the site, and when I went to enter the cards the other day (habit), I only had 5 entered for '74 Topps.   Maybe tomorrow on the nation's birthday I'll fix that.

I have 131 cards remaining on the want list for the '74 set, highly unlikely I'll finish it in 2019, but you never know.

Small Blog Milestone:   Today's post is #1800.   Should have happened two months ago....oh well.

Thanks for reading!

Robert

A little bit of free time on my hands

Working the late shift for a couple of weeks has kind of got me back into the spirit of posting.  Waking up early has afforded me some free time in the morning, so I'm trying (for lack of a better word) to get back into the habit of writing.  I saw this card this morning in my pile of cards to put away and I decided to do a 1 card post...

Manny Fernandez always had the coolest designs

While my goalie mask frankenset has been put on hiatus for the foreseeable future, it doesn't mean that I won't pass up a deal to have something that I like come my way.

This 2002-03 Be A Player mask card of Manny Fernandez was priced at $1.25 which is hard to beat, so I added it to my last COMC order.  This became one of those impulse buys that I make every so often.  Maybe one day down the road I'll chase after more of these, but for now it's nice to have something a little different to go along with the multitude of sets that I'm chasing.

With my self imposed freeze on buying cards until after I return from vacation in early August, it will be interesting to see how many posts I can write without the input of pack purchases.

I guess that means I'll have to work a little harder at trading....

Thanks for reading!

Robert

I'm going to party like it's 1989

First off, just want to send a Happy Canada Day greeting to all that are reading this north of the border today.  Hope everyone up there is enjoying their 3 day weekend!!

Not a huge post today, but a few trades recently helped me knock out a bunch of cards from my 1989 Upper Deck want list.  No major RCs here, I still need the Griffey, Randy Johnson and Smoltz rookies, but it's nice to have this set within striking distance of being completed this year.

I believe that Chris Sabo's card is the only RC out of these 26, but at least there's a bit of star power in the group with Greenwell and Ripken Jr. cards making their way to South Florida.

One of the aspects from the late 80's and early 90's UD set releases that I enjoyed was the art on the team checklist cards.  Both baseball and hockey had some great players represented on them.

A good portion of what I need out of the 103 cards left on this want list is the high number cards.  Roughly 60% of the list is cards numbered over 700.  Thankfully, I have a trade on the way here from the great state of Hawaii (thank you Al!!) that is going to knock off a big portion of this want list. 

Thanks for reading!

Robert