Wrapping up my 2016 Ginter X trilogy

I didn't make a spooky Halloween post this year, but here are some black cards on an orange background, so that's kinda festive, right?

These are the highlights from my third/final 2016 Allen & Ginter X box. Well no, the far-and-away highlight was the Griffey auto redemption. But here're the other notable cards from that break.

Modern dudes I collect.

Old-timers.

Prominent rookies.

SPs, highlighted by a Trea Turner RC.

Minis. Chen and Zimmerman are SPs.


After bustin' this box, I collated the cards along with the other 2 boxes I bought of the stuff. And man, the collation was great! I came away with the complete base set (1-300) with minimal doubles and no triples. Topps has gotten a lot of crap in recent years for not "shuffling" the cards in their boxes very well, often giving collectors deja vu ripping the nearly the same exact packs/blasters/boxes. So I was very happy that all 3 of my boxes were unique enough to each other to not have that issue.

I also compiled over half of the SPs, pulling 27 of 50 (with no dupes). I'm thinking I would like to go ahead and try to complete the full 350-card set, so I made a wantlist.

2016 Ginter X Needs (SPs):
301 Tyson Ross
302 Trevor Brown
303 Wei-Yin Chen
306 Yu Darvish
308 Andy Pettitte
309 Yasmany Tomas
311 Welington Castillo
312 Carlos Beltran (found this one cheap on COMC, so I snagged it there)
314 Starlin Castro
316 Ryan Weber
317 Yordano Ventura
318 Pedro Severino
321 Nick Castellanos
323 Victor Martinez
327 Raul Mondesi
329 Andre Ethier
332 Yan Gomes
335 Shawn Tolleson
336 Tom Murphy
339 Salvador Perez
341 Richie Shaffer
344 Ryan Zimmerman
349 Travis d'Arnaud

If you have any of these available, please hit me up for a trade!

I'm not going to bother trying to complete the mini set. I'll pick out PC guys to keep, but the rest of the minis I pulled are available for trade.

Thanks for reading and Happy Halloween!

The Wonder Years, The Wizard, Jenny Lewis, and Rilo Kiley

Here's a big Rocktober post about how one of my favorite bands is linked to one of my favorite movies and one of my favorite TV shows.. and how I've got a few autographs from them to show off.

I recently finished binge watching The Wonder Years on Netflix. It was leaving the streaming service shortly, and I cranked out about 3 seasons I had left within a month or so, marathoning the series' last 5 episodes in the final evening the show was available, just wrapping it up under the wire. (I had "With a Little Help From My Friends" stuck in my head for several days, let me tell you!) It was a show I enjoyed as a kid during its original run, and it was nice to revisit, even if it pissed me off a little sometimes (specifically Kevin Arnold's poor choices, but hey, that's all part of growing up, I guess.)

As I often do when a show or movie really connects with me, I took to eBay to see if there were any autograph cards available, to possibly get some representation in my card collection. As far as I can tell, Fred Savage doesn't have any cards on the market, or at least nothing readily available. But I did find an interesting glossy 8x10 promo photo with his signature on it, and ended up winning the auction for a decent price.

Man, I love this! As a kid in the late 80s, a large chunk of my life was spent playing the original Nintendo Entertainment System. In 1989, a film called The Wizard came out that was little more than a glorified Nintendo commercial (specifically to build hype for impending release of Super Mario Bros. 3), but my friends and I loved it. I remember we saw it in a renovated theater that used to be a XXX theater (The Pussycat Theater), and we thought it was pretty great. I rewatched it again a few months ago, and while it's not exactly a cinematic masterpiece, I still really enjoyed it on a sentimental level.

This glossy photo of the main cast members is not only signed by Fred Savage, but also Beau Bridges and Christian Slater. Of course with things like this, you gotta have some faith that it's authentic, but I feel confident about this being legit. I mean, if you were gonna forge signatures on this, it'd be dumb not to go ahead and finish 'er off with Luke Edwards and Jenny Lewis, right?

But hey, guess what, I also have Jenny Lewis' autograph...

Pierre de Reeder, Blake Sennett, Jason Boesel, and in the lower right, Jenny Lewis

I was a huge fan of Rilo Kiley in the '00s (and I still am, but not as obsessive as I used to be). How I got into the band was, around 2001, I spent some time on NES message boards (yeah, before I was nostalgic for baseball cards, I was nostalgic for old video games), and through them, I learned that "the girl from The Wizard has a band now."

I checked out some mp3s I could find, and really liked what I heard. I ended up buying the 2 CDs they had available at the time, of which Take Offs and Landings was my favorite. Then their next album The Execution of All Things (2002) really put them on the map. I made a little fansite for the band and ended up as a moderator on a big Rilo Kiley fan message board. At its height, the forum had hundreds of active users and was a really great fan community. I made a lot of cool online friends there. One of the other regulars on there was a sassy teenager in Portland. After three or four years of being an online acquaintance of hers (she was 19 by then), I drunkenly flirted with her in a PM once. And here we are 10 years later and she's my wife.

(This song mentions baseball cards!)

So yeah, for that alone, Rilo Kiley will always be a big part of my life and shaped how things turned out for me. I saw them live many times, and after one show, got the band to sign the above CD, and even snagged one of Jenny's guitar picks from the floor of the stage.

The band went their separate ways later in that decade, and the message board shriveled and died. Needing a new "online community" to get involved in, I wandered around a bit and eventually discovered the cardsphere and got back into the hobby.

While Jenny Lewis was the main focus of Rilo Kiley, the core of the band also included guitarist and sometimes-vocalist Blake Sennett. His other band, The Elected, was another favorite of mine. I saw them live a few times and got his autograph after a show once:

Nice personalization! That's their second CD. My wife (back before she was my wife) got their first CD signed:

The signatures are on the inside of the booklet, so not exactly ideal for displaying, but still pretty cool.

Funny thing about Blake Sennett is that he (under the name Blake Soper), like Jenny Lewis, was also a child actor in the 80s. In fact, he worked with both Savage Brothers, as he had parts on Boy Meets World and.. wait for it.. The Wonder Years!


And circling this post back onto the topic of The Wonder Years, while I wasn't able to find a Fred Savage auto card, I discovered that Danica McKellar ("Winnie") did have a few stickergraphs out there. I scored one on eBay and then kicked it up with a simple custom overlay:

Oh, that's a nice card! Little Winnie is all grown up!

The original card looks something like this. --Which is fine, but I like it better with my overlay.

Thanks a bunch for reading and have a great week!

"We Didn't Start The Fire" binder project kickoff

Rocktober continues with a post focusing on favorite song of mine when I was a kid.

This is a dumb/fun idea I had while lying in bed trying to fall asleep the other night: Putting together a bunch of cards to line up with Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start The Fire" (If someone out there already came up with the idea, I'm sorry for copying it). I just thought it'd be neat to put together a binder that you could look through while the song plays, with cards syncing up to the lyrics, so to speak.

I bet most references in the song have some sort of cardboard representation, though I don't doubt there will be some tough ones to trip me up along the way. I'm going to allow myself to have fun with it and "cheat" a little. For example, I'll use a card of 80s Pirates second baseman Johnny Ray instead of a card of who Joel was actually referencing, 50s musician Johnnie Ray. I suppose I could resort to making customs if I absolutely can't find any applicable cards, but it'll be a last resort and considered only a temporary solution. But yeah, we'll just have to see how far along this project ends up going.

Hey, question for you...
Can anyone recommend a good online shop for cheap non-sport cards? Something like a Non-Sportlots. Because Sportlots and Just Commons don't seem to carry non-sport. COMC does, but their non-sport stuff tends to run a little pricey. And of course there's eBay, but shipping cost will usually get ya there.

So I'll likely end up relying a lot on helpful traders to fill spots in the binder. Please help me out if you can!

Here's a rundown thanks to Wikipedia...

1940s

1949

• Harry Truman was inaugurated as U.S. president after being elected in 1948 to his second and final presidential term; previously he was sworn in following the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He authorized the use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan during World War II, on August 6 and August 9, 1945, respectively.
• Doris Day enters the public spotlight with the films My Dream Is Yours and It's a Great Feeling as well as popular songs like "It's Magic".
• Red China: The Communist Party of China wins the Chinese Civil War, establishing the People's Republic of China.
• Johnnie Ray signs his first recording contract with Okeh Records, although he would not become popular for another two years.
• South Pacific, the prize-winning musical, opens on Broadway on April 7.
• Walter Winchell is an aggressive radio and newspaper journalist credited with inventing the gossip column.
• Joe DiMaggio and the New York Yankees go to five World Series in the 1940s, winning four of them.

1950s

1950

• Joe McCarthy, the U.S. Senator, gains national attention and begins his anti-Communism crusade with his Lincoln Day speech.
• Richard Nixon is first elected to the United States Senate.
• Studebaker, a popular car company, begins its financial downfall.
• Television is becoming widespread throughout Europe and North America.
• North Korea and South Korea declare war after Northern forces stream south on June 25.
• Marilyn Monroe soars in popularity with five new movies, including The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve.

1951

• Rosenbergs, married couple Ethel and Julius, convicted on June 19 of espionage.
• H-Bomb: The United States is in the middle of developing the hydrogen bomb as a nuclear weapon; it would be first tested in late 1952.
• Sugar Ray Robinson, a champion boxer, defeats Jake LaMotta in the "St. Valentine's Day Massacre".
• Panmunjom, the border village in Korea, is the location of truce talks between the parties of the Korean War.
• Marlon Brando is nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in A Streetcar Named Desire.
• The King and I, the musical by Rodgers and Hammerstein, opens on Broadway on March 29.
• The Catcher in the Rye, a controversial novel by J. D. Salinger, is published.

1952

• Dwight D. Eisenhower is first elected as President of the United States, winning by a landslide margin of 442 to 89 electoral votes.
• Vaccine for polio is privately tested by Jonas Salk.
• England's got a new queen: Queen Elizabeth II succeeds to the throne upon the death of her father, George VI, and is crowned the next year.
• Rocky Marciano defeats Jersey Joe Walcott, becoming the world heavyweight boxing champion.
• Liberace has a popular 1950s television show for his musical entertainment.
• Santayana goodbye: George Santayana, philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist, dies on September 26.

1953

• Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union, dies on March 5.
• Georgy Maksimilianovich Malenkov succeeds Stalin for six months following his death. Malenkov had presided over Stalin's purges, but would be spared a similar fate by his successorNikita Khrushchev.
• Gamal Abdel Nasser acts as the true power behind the new Egyptian nation as Muhammad Naguib's minister of the interior.
• Sergei Prokofiev, the composer, dies on March 5, the same day as Stalin.
• Winthrop Rockefeller and his wife Barbara are involved in a highly publicized divorce, culminating in 1954 with a record-breaking $5.5 million settlement.^[15]
• Roy Campanella, an African-American baseball catcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers, receives the National League's Most Valuable Player award for the second time.
• Communist bloc: The uprising of 1953 in East Germany is crushed by the Volkspolizei and the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany.

1954

• Roy Cohn resigns as Joseph McCarthy's chief counsel and enters private practice with the fall of McCarthy.
• Juan Perón spends his last full year as President of Argentina before a September 1955 coup.
• Arturo Toscanini is at the height of his fame as a conductor, performing regularly with the NBC Symphony Orchestra on national radio.
• Dacron is an early artificial fiber made from the same plastic as polyester.
• Dien Bien Phu falls. A French/Vietnamese camp falls to Viet Minh forces under Vo Nguyen Giap, signaling the end of French Indochina and leading to the creation of North Vietnam andSouth Vietnam as separate states.
• "Rock Around the Clock" is a hit single released by Bill Haley & His Comets in May, spurring worldwide interest in rock and roll music.

1955

• Albert Einstein dies on April 18 at the age of 76.
• James Dean achieves success with East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause, gets nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor, and dies in a car accident on September 30 at the age of 24.
• Brooklyn's got a winning team: The Brooklyn Dodgers win their first and only World Series before their move to Los Angeles.
• Davy Crockett is a Disney television miniseries about the legendary frontiersman of the same name. The show was a huge hit with young boys and inspired a short-lived "coonskin cap" craze.
• Peter Pan: A year after Walt Disney Animation Studios released an animated adaption of the play by J. M. Barrie, the 1954 stage musical of the same name starring Mary Martin is broadcast on NBC live and in color.
• Elvis Presley signs with RCA Records on November 21, beginning his pop career.
• Disneyland opens on July 17, 1955 as Walt Disney's first theme park.

1956

• Brigitte Bardot appears in her first mainstream film And God Created Woman and establishes an international reputation as a French "sex kitten".
• Budapest is the capital city of Hungary and site of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.
• Alabama is the site of the Montgomery Bus Boycott which ultimately led to the removal of the last race laws in the USA. Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr figure prominently.
• Nikita Khrushchev makes his famous Secret Speech denouncing Stalin's "Cult of personality" on February 25.
• Princess Grace Kelly releases her last film, High Society, and marries Prince Rainier III of Monaco.
• Peyton Place, the best-selling novel by Grace Metalious, is published. Though mild compared to today's standards, it shocked the reserved values of the 1950s.
• Trouble in the Suez: The Suez Crisis boils as Egypt nationalizes the Suez Canal on October 29.

1957

• Little Rock, Arkansas is the site of an anti-integration standoff, as Governor Orval Faubus stops the Little Rock Nine from attending Little Rock Central High School and President Eisenhower deploys the 101st Airborne Division to counteract him.
• Boris Pasternak, the Russian author, publishes his novel Doctor Zhivago.
• Mickey Mantle is in the middle of his career as a famous New York Yankees outfielder and American League All-Star for the sixth year in a row.
• Jack Kerouac publishes his first novel in seven years, On the Road.
• Sputnik becomes the first artificial satellite, launched by the Soviet Union on October 4, marking the start of the space race.
• Chou En-Lai, Premier of the People's Republic of China, survives an assassination attempt on the charter airliner Kashmir Princess.
• The Bridge on the River Kwai, an adaptation of a the 1954 novel, is released and receives seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture.^[16]

1958

• Lebanon is engulfed in a political and religious crisis that eventually involves U.S. intervention.
• Charles de Gaulle is elected first president of the French Fifth Republic following the Algerian Crisis.
• California baseball begins as the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants move to California and become the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants, respectively. They are the first teams in Major League Baseball west of Kansas City.
• Charles Starkweather Homicide: Starkweather's murder spree, in which he kills eleven people between January 25 and 29 before being caught in a massive manhunt in Douglas, Wyoming, captures the attention of Americans.
• Children of Thalidomide: Many pregnant women taking the drug Thalidomide had children born with congenital birth defects.

1959

• Buddy Holly dies in a plane crash on February 3 with Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper, in a day that had a devastating impact on the country and youth culture. Joel prefaces the lyric with a Holly signature vocal hiccup: "Uh-huh, uh-huh."
• Ben-Hur, a film adapted from Lew Wallace's 1880 novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ starring Charlton Heston, wins eleven Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
• Space Monkey: Aboard the flight Jupiter AM-18, Able and Miss Baker become the first two animals to be launched by NASA into space that returned to Earth alive.
• Mafia organizations are the center of attention for the FBI and public attention builds to this organized crime society with a historically Italian-American origin.
• Hula hoops reach 100 million in sales as the latest toy fad.
• Fidel Castro comes to power after a revolution in Cuba and visits the United States later that year on an unofficial twelve-day tour.
• Edsel is a no-go: Production of this car marque ends after only three years due to poor sales.

1960s

1960

• U-2: An American U-2 spy plane piloted by Francis Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union, causing the U-2 Crisis of 1960.
• Syngman Rhee was rescued by the CIA after being forced to resign as leader of South Korea for allegedly fixing an election and embezzling more than US $20 million.
• Payola, illegal payments for radio broadcasting of songs, was publicized due to Dick Clark's testimony before Congress and Alan Freed's public disgrace.
• John F. Kennedy beats Richard Nixon in the November 8 general election.
• Chubby Checker popularizes the dance The Twist with his cover of the song of the same name.
• Psycho: An Alfred Hitchcock thriller, based on a pulp novel by Robert Bloch and adapted by Joseph Stefano, which becomes a landmark in graphic violence and cinema sensationalism. The screeching violins heard at this point in the song are a trademark of the film's soundtrack.
• Belgians in the Congo: The Republic of the Congo (Leopoldville) was declared independent of Belgium on June 30, with Joseph Kasavubu as President and Patrice Lumumba as Prime Minister.

1961

• Ernest Hemingway commits suicide on July 2 after a long battle with depression.
• Adolf Eichmann, a "most wanted" Nazi war criminal, is traced to Argentina and captured by Mossad agents. He is covertly taken to Israel where he is put on trial for crimes against humanityduring World War II, convicted in 1961, and hanged the following year, 1962.
• Stranger in a Strange Land, written by Robert A. Heinlein, is a breakthrough best-seller with themes of sexual freedom and liberation.
• Bob Dylan is signed to Columbia Records after a New York Times review by critic Robert Shelton.
• Berlin is separated into West Berlin and East Berlin, and from the rest of East Germany, when the Berlin Wall is erected on August 13 to prevent citizens escaping to the West.
• Bay of Pigs Invasion, an attempt by United States-trained Cuban exiles to invade Cuba and overthrow Fidel Castro, fails.

1962

• Lawrence of Arabia: The Academy Award-winning film based on the life of T. E. Lawrence starring Peter O'Toole premieres in America on December 16.
• British Beatlemania: The Beatles, a British rock group, gain Ringo Starr as drummer and Brian Epstein as manager, and join the EMI's Parlophone label. They soon become the world's most famous rock band, with the word "Beatlemania" adopted by the press for their fans' unprecedented enthusiasm. It also began the British Invasion in the United States.
• Ole Miss: A riot was fought between Southern segregationist civilians and federal and state forces as a result of the forced enrollment of black student James Meredith at the University of Mississippi.
• John Glenn: Flew the first American manned orbital mission termed "Friendship 7" on February 20.
• Liston beats Patterson: Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson fight for the world heavyweight championship on September 25, ending in a first-round knockout. This match marked the first time Patterson had ever been knocked out and one of only eight losses in his 20-year professional career.

1963

• Pope Paul VI: Cardinal Giovanni Montini is elected to the papacy and takes the papal name of Paul VI.
• Malcolm X makes his infamous statement "The chickens have come home to roost" about the Kennedy assassination, thus causing the Nation of Islam to censor him; about fifteen months later, he himself is assassinated while preparing to make a speech.
• British politician sex: The British Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, has a relationship with a showgirl, and then lies when questioned about it before the House of Commons. When the truth came out, it led to his own resignation and undermined the credibility of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan.
• JFK blown away: President John F. Kennedy is assassinated on November 22 while riding in an open convertible through Dallas.

1965

• Birth control: In the early 1960s, oral contraceptives, popularly known as "the pill", first go on the market and are extremely popular. Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 challenged a Connecticut law prohibiting contraceptives. In 1968, Pope Paul VI released a papal encyclical titled Humanae vitae which reaffirmed Catholic teaching that artificial birth control was a sin.
• Ho Chi Minh: A Vietnamese Communist, who served as President of Vietnam from 1954–1969. March 2 Operation Rolling Thunder begins bombing of the Ho Chi Minh Trail supply line from North Vietnam to the Vietcong rebels in the south. On March 8, the first U.S. combat troops, 3,500 marines, land in South Vietnam.

1968

• Richard Nixon back again: Former Vice President Nixon is elected President in 1968.

1969

• Moonshot: Apollo 11, the first manned lunar landing, successfully lands on the moon.
• Woodstock: Famous rock and roll festival of 1969 that came to be the epitome of the counterculture movement.

1970s

1974–75

• Watergate: Political scandal that began when the Democratic National Committee's headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C. was broken into. After the break-in, word began to spread that President Richard Nixon may have known about the break-in, and tried to cover it up. The scandal would ultimately result in the resignation of President Nixon; to date, this remains the only time that anyone has ever resigned the United States Presidency.
• Punk rock: Blondie and The Ramones form, with the Sex Pistols following in 1975, ushering in the punk era.

1976–77

• Menachem Begin becomes Prime Minister of Israel in 1977 and negotiates the Camp David Accords with Egypt's president in 1978.
• Ronald Reagan, former Governor of California, begins his second Presidential campaign in 1976. He eventually wins in the next election in 1980.
• Palestine: The ongoing Israeli–Palestinian conflict escalates as Israelis establish settlements in the West Bank, previously held by Jordan for non-Jewish Palestinians after the 1948 war, beginning shortly after Begin's election.
• Terror on the air line: Numerous aircraft hijackings take place, specifically, the Palestinian hijack of Air France Flight 139 and the subsequent Operation Entebbe in Uganda.

1979

• Ayatollah's in Iran: During the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the West-backed and secular Shah is overthrown as the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini gains power after years in exile and creates an Islamic society
• Russians in Afghanistan: Following their move into Afghanistan on December 24, Soviet forces fight a ten-year war up until 1989.

1980s

1981

• Wheel of Fortune: The hit television game show, on air since 1975, underwent several changes in the early 1980s, including the hiring of Pat Sajak as host in 1981, Vanna White as hostess in 1982, and a move to syndication in 1983, all three of which were still in effect by the time of the song (and remained through the 1990s, 2000s and much of the 2010s as well).

1983

• Sally Ride: On June 18, she became the first American woman in space by flying aboard Challenger on the STS-7 shuttle mission.
• Heavy metal suicide: In the 1970s and 80s, heavy metal bands became popular. Ozzy Osbourne and Judas Priest in particular were sued for fans' suicides after listening to their songs "Suicide Solution" and "Better By You, Better Than Me", respectively.
• Foreign debts: Persistent U.S. trade and budget deficits
• Homeless vets: Veterans of the Vietnam War, including many disabled ex-military, are reported to be left homeless and impoverished.
• AIDS: A collection of symptoms and infections in humans resulting from the specific damage to the immune system caused by infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). It is first detected and recognized in the 1980s, and was on its way to becoming a pandemic.
• Crack cocaine use surged in the mid-to-late 1980s.

1984

• Bernie Goetz: On December 22, Goetz shot four young men who he said were threatening him on a New York City subway. Goetz was charged with attempted murder but was acquitted of the charges, though convicted of carrying an unlicensed gun.

1988

• Hypodermics on the shore: Medical waste was found washed up on the beaches of Long Island, New Jersey, and Connecticut after being illegally dumped at sea. Before this event, waste dumped in the oceans was an "out of sight, out of mind" affair. This has been cited as one of the crucial turning points in popular opinion on environmentalism.

1989

• China's under martial law: On May 20, China declares martial law, resulting in the use of military forces against protesting students to end the Tiananmen Square protests.
• Rock-and-roller cola wars: Soft drink giants Coke and Pepsi each run marketing campaigns using rock & roll and popular music stars to reach the teenage and young adult demographic.

Ok, yeah, there's gonna be some tough ones here, for sure. Looks like there will be 135 or so different cards needed. If I can get better than 50/50 with a real card to custom ratio, I'll be happy. ("Hypodermics on the shore"? What am I supposed to do with that?! Perhaps a hockey card of NHL player Nick Shore, I guess?)

Some low-hanging fruit already out of the way. These 4 are all mentioned by name in the song.

Again, if you can help me out with anything in trade, that'd be nice. Thanks for reading!