TGI Mailday

Got cards in the mail from a few different sources today, helping it shape up into a pretty nice Friday afternoon. Let's whip up a quick post out of 'em.

As mentioned a couple weeks ago in the Tony Clark post, I'm working on a set of 1998 Bowman refractor reprints. Here we see a couple young sluggers from 1990 Bowman, secured from different ebay sellers coincidentally showing up at the same time.

On the topic of refractin' reprints, I've also been working on my ARMS.. Yep, my quest for an Archives Reverse Master Set is still slowly chugging away. I only have 109 cards left to go, which doesn't seem like such a huge number, but it's all autos and relics left, which leads to financial complexity, as I don't need to tell you readers. I'll likely not complete the football portion in my lifetime at current rate of acquisition, but maybe if I focus on the 2 baseball releases...?

TOP PRIORITY alert! 1972 Topps high numbers. I've been racing Crocodile to see who can finish our '72 Topps sets first. I'm down to 22 needs remaining, but I think he's gonna pass me. One of these was from a tcdb trade and the other was a Greg Morris ebay win (the only one of many '72s I bid on from that particular setbreak that I actually ended up with, grrr).

Here's the rest of the TCDb trade. I reached out to user ejholmes76 because I was after the '72 Traded Cardenal he had available, and our trade matching shook out nicely to a PWE swap of cards changing hands, to which he agreed, and that also netted me a '64 need (108 cards left, 81.66% complete on 1964 Topps). The '75s I already had in my set (surprisingly still down to only needing only a Reds team card [Sparky Anderson] but out of spite I haven't bought one yet, choosing to hold my breath until I get one by sheer luck), but I needed this pair of '75 dupes for PCs. (Thanks for the trade, Eric, if you're reading.)

And finally, here's the rest of the Greg Morris spoils: a double blast of Hoyt! I realized the other day that I should make a point of completing his Topps run. Well, the '52 Topps high number rookie card is unlikely to ever grace my collection in non-reprint form, but otherwise this goal is within reach, especially after landing this '62 Topps. Now really just need 1958 Topps and 1960 Topps (An extra '72 Topps for the PC would be nice, but it's a dang high number, so I might be content to "share" with the setbuild because who cares at the end of the day as long as I got one in the greater collectionscape.)

Oh, and the other card is my first 1953 Red Man. Looks good! I don't normally go after oversized pieces such as this, but ya gotta stretch outside your comfort zone for your top PC guys sometimes. And hey, does anyone have a running list of baseball cards where they put eyeliner on the player? You can put this one on it along with Dave Winfield's 1980 Topps plus several of the 3-player prospects at the end of 1979 Topps. Seriously, have you taken a close look at them? It's kinda weird, right? But yeah, whatever. Neat card and nice addition to the Wilhelm PC.

Enjoy the weekend, all!

Some cards I've been meaning to post

With this pair of notable former Dodgers, my 2004 Chrome Black setbuild is down to just 20 cards remaining.

My longterm dream of putting together a run of Topps playing days Mantles sorta faded away with the covid boom, so now I'm pivoting to a frankenset of vintage and refractor reprints filling in the gaps where I don't have the original. Hopefully I finish that someday and get a blog post out of it. After these shiny revisions from '96, my current needs are 1952, 1953, 1956, 1960, 1961, 1962, and 1967.

Baby Dave Winfield. The '73 is a WTHB custom.

1970 Topps is probably the vintage design that benefits the most from refractorification.

Turns out Mr. Show is in my baseball card collection.

My ARMS is on the cusp of 75% complete, with 122 cards remaining.

A couple recent Topps Retired auto pickups.

I also got a Parker Posey autograph.

I know I just showed that Jim Abbott, but turns out it completed the 2-card Angels team set for me, meaning I've got an excuse to show off the Nolan Ryan I bought in Hawaii years ago.

Bob at Best Bubble has been generous with me lately, first was a package with a couple Gavins and a couple girls..

..and a bunch of 1992 Leaf black gold. Some big name, too! And then more recently, a ton more of these showed up from him in a pair of flat-rate boxes.. and when the dust settled, I'm left with just 21 missing cards to finish the parallel set. Nice!

Also a new Gavin for my collection-- I believe the first basketballing Gavin I've got-- plus some PC guys and many duplicate "bubble" cards from Bob's collection, some of which I plan to do crafty cardart stuff to and then send back to Bob.

Plus a stack of Glow Stars and several more gals.

Big thanks, Bob! Much appreciated.

That'll do it for today. Thanks for reading. Sorry I haven't posted for about a month, but I should be back with more cards to show off soon. (Padrographs Rod dropped off a few hundred various cards this past weekend that I'm excited to check out.)

Remembering Willie Mays

Like many collectors, I took a moment to appreciate Willie Mays in the wake of his passing by looking through my cards of his.

I watched the Willie Mays doc on HBO a while ago and really enjoyed it. He's got solid representation in my collection, but Mays is a bittersweet figure in my personal hobby history, with a couple questionable decisions on my part regarding good cards of his that I parted with.

About 10 years ago, I bought a Mays 2003 Retired refractor auto for a whopping $300. A guy who read my blog post about it offered me double for it. I couldn't resist that ROI and agreed to part with it, though I've since come to regret the decision in hindsight, still chugging away on a run of Retired refractors as perhaps my #1 collecting goal. With part of the proceeds from the sale, I picked up a replacement Mays auto (more modestly priced at $160 shipped) for another ambitious collecting project of mine: the "Archives Reserve Master Set" I've been slowly building over the years..

It's a nice consolation prize, for sure-- they don't sell for anywhere near $160 anymore!-- though I still miss the '03 Retired refractor. I'm still in touch with the buyer, Dan, and we've done more swaps since. Last time I checked in with him, he was 8 cards away from his goal of completing the 2003 Retired refractor autos. (I'm going for all 3 Retired releases, with 2004 my priority, but Dan doesn't mess much with '04 or '05, instead laser focused on 2003.)

But my initial $300 purchase had a nice bonus included in the lot, and I still own that one:

I call these "charcoal" parallels of 2003 Retired, though officially they are called black borders (despite clearly being speckled dark gray). It's a nice looking card, even if not refractorized. 

It's got the "ebay 1/1" distinction of being jersey number 24 out of 99. You get a nice back of complete career stats, with the black and red text easy to read against a white background, which is appreciated even more in these days of Topps making Archives backs harder to read than the originals they mimic. If you want to check for typos-- I've noticed Retired cards often have uncorrected errors in the stats-- here's his baseball-ref page.

The other bonehead move I made with Willie Mays cards is a few years back when I forgot I had bought his 1957 Topps card for my setbuild and then bought another one. Hey, I was drinking too much in those days. I ended up trading the extra to blogger bud The Diamond King for a Cody Bellinger SSP photo variation RC. Of course, like clockwork, Cody then instantly fell off from the MVP numbers he had been consistently putting up to start his career. LOL. At least he's bounced back somewhat now. Anyways, the card pictured above is the one I still have in my set. Man, I should really prioritize the last 79 cards I need to finally complete a basic set 1957 Topps to hang my hat on.

Ten years ago I was in Hawaii getting hitched. Yep, Willie Mays died on my 10th wedding anniversary. I'm weirdly honored to share a special day with the legendary Willie Mays. It's sad he passed, but he made it to the impressive age of 93. An incredible life to be celebrated for years and years.

Not letting my ARMS atrophy (Archives Reserve Master Set additions)

It's not a great time for fans of modern baseball. Oakland is getting their team snatched away. Wander has a wandering eye for little girls. Ohtani looks to be in for a second Tommy John surgery. Mike Trout still can't stay healthy anymore. Advertising on jerseys. Tinkering with the rules. And then looking at the current card manufacturer landscape, one giant company is taking control of everything, aiming to get more out of customers while giving them less, focusing in on high-rolling investors/breakers without thinking much about the majority of collectors.

But thankfully this hobby has been around a long time and you can spend every second of your time and money on old cards and still not scratch the surface.

With that intro rant out of the way, I'm still trying to get every single Archives Reserve card that Topps put out back in the early days of the millennium. I guess I'm just a sucker for refractor reprints of vintage cards. With zero parallels or numbered cards released, an Archives Reserve Master Set is not out of the realm of possibility. All I have left now are hits. I still have several big name autographs on my wantlist, and whether I truly ever get close to finishing this ARMS race might depend on how dramatically the sports card bubble bursts in the next few years.

But even if the "inner circle" guys are too pricey for me to target at the moment, I've been going after the lower-hanging fruit, hunting for "less than a blaster" autos I still need. 

Ready to check out some shiny hits in classic Topps designs?

Gaylord Perry is the only card in this post that cost more than the old school definition of "price of a blaster" (but works under the current definition), so I'll give him top billing. I remember when I first returned to the hobby as an adult, I decided Perry would be a top PC guy of mine (former Padres great in the HOF; played a long time, lots of cards out there; and pretty much a "household name" yet not much collector competition, relatively speaking). He hasn't exactly remained a primary focus for me since, but I've got a solid PC and he reminds me of those early days getting back into collecting.

Happy to cross this 2002 auto off my Archives Reserve needs. The rest of the cards in this post are rookie reprints from 2001, but for '02 they picked the "best year" for each player as the card design to use, choosing '72 Topps for Perry. And they do the odd but thoughtful practice of adding 1972 stats on the back so you can get an idea why that year was big for him.

Don Larsen is another notable figure in baseball history whose autographed cards won't set you back too much. He's got a rookie card in '54 Bowman, but his first Topps card was '55.

So weird to flip over a Don Larsen card and not read about his perfect game in the World Series. But you get a depiction of Satan, I guess?

Mickey Lolich put together a fine career highlighted by 3 complete game victories in the 1968 World Series and 25 wins in '71.

I prefer 1964 Topps reprints that show you the cartoon rather than the blank space. Obviously Topps doesn't actually re-print old sheets from the dusty archives but rather their graphic designers put together recreations, and sometimes it's kinda dumb when they tell you to rub a nickel on your card.

Dick Groat was NL MVP in 1960, winning the batting title for the eventual champs. Picked up another ring with the Cardinals in '64.

Groat was one of those guys who never played in the minors. There were some nice tributes to him after he passed away last April.

Sneaking in a football card, Terry Metcalf is probably the cheapest of the Archives Reserve football autos. Finally pulled the trigger on one, but somewhere the devil must have yelled "JINX!" at me as I finalized the transaction...

Unfortunately this card got folded longwise while in the mail, creasing it up something fierce. And it was in a freakin' top loader, so the USPS either ignored the "non-machinable" label and it had a dustup with the sorting machines, or maybe just some asshole mail handler "going postal" on a random envelope to blow off steam or something. At least it was only a few bucks so I won't bother making a fuss, but wouldn't mind upgrading someday. But when you consider I've got some huge NFL names to pick up still (like Montana and Namath, just to name a couple joes), I probably won't ever finish the football portion of this collecting goal unless I really stick with it for the long haul. So yeah, no rush, lol.

I haven't been hitting the relics very hard yet, but scored this Johnny Mize bat chip card for a good price.

Funny that you get hair and eye color on the back of '52 Topps. Mize was in '51 Topps, but they usually ignore that set when it comes to putting out rookie ("first Topps card") reprints. 

A couple more autographs to show off quickly. Nice looking Frank Howard here.

Fun comic.

Tommy John wraps up the post. Multiplayer rookies always look weird when reimagined as solo cards, but what are you gonna do?

Shiny cards in various sizes

More highlights from my big COMCOVID shipment.

After getting shut out for comments in my previous post, I'd better bring out the big guns.

Well, a big card and a tiny card. One shiny, one shiny and also sparkly. Two greats of the game.

At $14.99, the SuperVlad refractor was my priciest pickup of the order. I don't consider it an addition to my card collection as much as an addition to my fine art collection.

It's going up on the wall where it will serve as a motivational poster. "Fully extend for your dreams."

Here's a closer look at the sparkly micro Kirby along with his proud papa. 

The oversized bat further confounds the image and is really messing with my sense of scale! Somehow tiny Kirby is even tinier and regular Kirby is ginormous.

A few different micro cards of stars were created as prism parallels and included as a bonus with the 1993 micro factory set. At least that's my understanding of the proto-Atomic Refractor/Cracked Ice little fella's origins. Does that make it the very first sparkly parallel? I know there were sparkly baseball stickers in the late 80s; not sure if they count. But anyways, yeah, I found out about these cool things and had to pick up one for myself. Cost me a buck.

I picked up a few needs from my foolish quest of a black refractor parallel set of 2004 Topps Chrome. Three commons for around a buck each, and then splurged on Mad Dog for $10.25. Nice to cross another big'un off my wants-- 223 cards left to go-- plus he's a PC guy for me, so I can appreciate it on that level too.

Mr. Elroy Face was the lone pickup in this shipment for my ARMS (Archives Reserve Master Set). A gracious man when it comes to his signature, this card cost me what shipping alone would have cost me on eBay. Man, I sure hope COMC eventually returns to being a convenient place to purchase-and-then-soon-receive cards for decent prices. Anyways, just 136 cards left to go until I have a full master set of Topps Archives Reserve cards.

See ya next time

Happy Holidays from your friends at Baseball Card Breakdown

Happy Holidays, everybody. 2020 is almost over and odds are 2021 will be at least a tiny bit better.

Among the toughest parts of 2020 for me was losing several baseball legends, such as Tom Seaver. I guess we all gotta go sometime, but still sucks. They'll live on in our collections, like this recent pickup for my Archives Reserve Master Set. A beauty!

Hey, a new autoGav! Gavin Stone is the latest Gavin-ograph added to my collection. The Central Arkansas right-hander was drafted 159th overall in the 2020 draft by the Dodgers, joining Gavin Lux as a dynamic duo of LA Gavins.

Numbered 12/25! Ho ho ho!

Following that up with another 12/25 Gavin I picked up earlier this year.

I also ended up with a pair of 1/1 autos, for what that's worth. Gavin Casas decided to withdraw his name from the 2020 draft and instead honor his commitment to Vanderbilt. Can't blame him. Wishing him a great collegiate career, and hopefully we see him as a high draft pick a little ways down the line. 

One more card to share today. Former Dodgers/Rays prospect Jose DeLeon. He got into 5 games for the Reds this past season, though he didn't have great results. But he seems like a good dude on social media. Hopefully he rebounds next year. Most interesting thing about this card for me....

Numbered 12/24! Christmas Eve Cards aren't too common, but it's nice to snag one cheap from time to time. It's my birthday, after all.

Ruby says Merry Christmas, too.

This has been a rough year for me, as for most folks. Haven't had the energy to be a very good trading partner (lagging on sending out cards) or blogger (post count way down this year, no contests/giveaways)-- between trying to figure out working from home during a pandemic and raising an exhausting pupper, I've been stretched a little thin. This coming year should be better, though.

Thanks for reading and wishing you all the happiest of holidays.