halfways to the holidays

It's my half-birthday today (assuming this shows up for you on Wednesday) and the celebratory packages have been rolling in over the past few weeks.

Welp, ok, maybe the senders weren't aware of the timing-- hell, I barely remembered myself-- but let's just pretend for the sake of spicing up a standard "incoming non-purchases roundup" post that these are all half-birthday presents.

First, here's a fun little envelope from overseas. No question as to who sent these cards, but in case there's a newbie reading: they came from Zippy Zappy. It's my understanding that the dude is Munetaka Murakami (Nick also got one of these. [update: Fuji, too!]). The new White Sock got off to a terrific start in MLB this year before an IL stint. Hope he's back at it soon. Akagi Kuro, the lady, is featured on a pretty neat signed photo out of Zippy's cosplayer collection. Love it! (Nick got the more tame ladies, but I don't have any kids in the house to worry about, so I get the naughty getup.)

 

A pair of Star Wars cards also made the journey from Japan. Always welcome in my collection. Thanks, Kenny!

-  - ---o

The spoils from a pair of Maddux Monday victories thanks to the generous Johnny Miller. Hopefully I'll add a couple more W's before he wraps up that extended giveaway series. Then maybe I'll sort out my Greg Maddux PC and figure out which of these I actually need, lol. I try to not enter the drawing if the cards look too familiar.

Thanks, John!

-  - --o 

This was a TCDb trade of Ginter minis going both ways with user mookdaruch back in mid April. I was stressing out when he still hadn't updated "received" after a week and a half, but he was cool and said he sometimes has long lags with his mail. Thankfully the pair of Ginter minis I sent him just finally arrived a month and half later. "Looks like it got ran over by a truck--but miracles do happen! The cards are both fine." Whew, glad that worked out or it would've surely cast a dark cloud over my half-birthday. 

Not to brag, but I've still got the biggest Dick Allen PC on the site. (Hey-oh!)

-   -  - - --o

Last "half birthday gift" for today are some cards from Bob at Best Bubble. 

Gavs representing.

Padres shiny or signed. Very nice.

Closing out with notable Portland Beaver Darren Daulton, a glow-in-the-dark card from inside a 1989 cereal box, and a couple lovely swimsuit models posing for the camera.

Thanks, Bob! Did you get the new "Bubble Gum Baseball" customs I sent you a bit ago? I know Johnny got the set I sent him, but haven't gotten confirmation that yours arrived. If not, I'll print you up a replacement so let me know.

Anyways, thanks for reading, all. Until next time.

plain white envel-NOPE

Heads up for users of the online card marketplace Sportlots that "Loot" (seller-specific store credit) now expires after 90 days, and in case you haven't noticed, it's been about 85 days since that policy went into effect. So if you've ever used Sportlots much, you might want to log in and check out your loot account. Click "My Loot" under the "My Account" menu option in the upper left, and you get a list of sellers with whom you've got loot.

I've got a bunch of sellers listed there where I've only got a few cents of credit with them.. not a big deal to lose out on those few cents, but I've also got a couple sellers with over a buck in credit where it might make sense to at least make a small order from them to apply a discount towards so the loot doesn't go to waste.

Oh wait. They don't want you making small orders anymore:

"...Sportlots has implemented a Minimum Value Fee. Orders under $5.00 will incur a $1.50 fee. The $5.00 minimum is calculated by adding the card values, shipping, sales tax (if applicable), and subtracting any applied loot." 

So after adjusting for the Min Value Fee, my loot discount that should have been $1.68 comes to just 18¢. If I added a 5th card, hoping to get out of "under five bucks" territory, the shipping rate from this seller jumps from $1.50 to $4. So yeah, I'm screwed in this scenario. THANKS, Sportlots. Guess I'll just let all that loot disappear. Lame.

Sure, I make big orders on the site sometimes, but I like to place a small Sportlots order every once in a while, in part because it's nice receiving cards in the mail on the regular, you know? A day without cards in the mail is a downer. PWEs trickling in helps keep the non-card-getting days from piling up. 

Sellers can adjust their minimum shipping rates to deal with their transaction fees, so I don't think a minimum value fee is necessary. Hell, some sellers let you know they don't like doing small orders by having their minimum shipping rate be like $6 or more, even for just 1 card. But other sellers like making sales, the more the better, and don't want to just hold out for the occasional large order.

So yeah, just another instance of greed making things worse than they used to be. I know I've been saying it here for a long time, but this year FOR REALS i'm gonna get my for-trade cards logged into TCDB and try to focus more on trading, especially now that COMC and Sportlots have gotten crappier. Let's hope TCDB remains usable for the foreseeable future. I know they've been adding more annoying ads lately as the site owner looks to generate additional revenue, causing some users to grimace, but fingers crossed the site will last a long time before things really go tits up there. (With my luck, the site will be sold to PSA/Fanatics and get gutted the day after I finish logging all the stuff I'm planning on logging, LOL.)

Anyways. on that general topic, my latest TCDB swap netted 3 needs for my Dick Allen PC.

User herkojerko is a prominent Phillies collector on the site who proposed a 3-for-3 card swap, all Phillies, with my return being the above trio of Dick Allen needs. I showed off the Blue Ice parallel of that 2025 Prizm a few posts back, and so now I've got the base card to go with it, plus the 2025 Ginter SP #350 with child. Must've been Phillies dupes for herkojerko. One of the cards I sent his way was one of my Dick Allen dupes, fittingly, and helps him keep place as the #2 (tie) ranked DA collector on the site.

There's your current top 10 leader board. Absolutely fascinating stuff, right? :P

Thanks for the trade, herkojerko.. Good luck with your collection, just don't overtake me on Dick Allen cards, please. ha 

Before wrapping up, I've got another small piece of mail to show, a 1-card (plus a sticker) envelope imported from Japan.

Fun Maggie Simpson sticker along with a signed Royce Lewis card, courtesy of blogger bud Zippy Zappy. Royce seems to be a pretty good ballplayer who'd likely blossom into a star if only he could stay healthy for a while. Cool to add an early autograph of his. And as I said a moment ago, always brightens my day to receive cards in the mail, no matter the quantity. Thanks, Kenny!

a couple cheap cards

I received this Tony Clark card in the mail yesterday, coincidentally the same day he shockingly resigned as executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association. My understanding is that he was being investigated for financial curiosities, and that investigation revealed naughty emails with his wife's sister, whom he had given a job with the MLBPA. These days, it seems powerful people just "ignore/lie/power-thru" after they get caught doing something they really shouldn't have (*cough* Epstein files *cough*), so good for Tony Clark for showing himself out, I guess.

I don't PC the guy, but rather I'm trying to complete the full set of Bowman refractor reprints from 1998. The insert set is 50 cards, featuring highlights from the original run of vintage Bowman, plus the Topps' revival from '89 through '96 (Bowman Chrome began in 1997, so these inserts are like a greatest hits of their pre-Chrome years.. "Refractors that never were (of base cards that were)" if you will, so to speak). Tony Clark is an odd choice to reprint with the hindsight that he was never a big star, though at that point he had just followed up a third-place ROY campaign in '96 with a solid 1997 that saw him garner some down-ballot MVP votes. He was an All-Star in 2001 and also had an impressive 2005 season, but he only accrued a dozen wins above replacement in his career, all said and done.

Anyways, I've still got a ways to go with this set, but will be bumped past the 50% threshold once my latest COMC order arrives later this spring. But yeah, I've still been hunting down refractor reprints from the late 90s and early 00s, actively building various runs that I'm excited to post about after completion.

I'm reluctant to say this is the final COMC order I'm waiting on, but I've definitely been trying to avoid buying from them since this batch. You'd figured after tripling their shipping rates that they would use that extra money to hire an additional order picker or two, but nope, they seem to be backed up again maybe even worse than they got during the pandemic, with shipping estimates pushed out for several months. The vibe I'm getting isn't "wow, COMC is doing lots of business" but rather "wow, COMC is struggling and folks are rushing to get their cards out before the site owners pull the plug and complete the transition to eBay-consignment account only". But I don't really know. Times are bad everywhere, it seems, as society is sapped of humanity and herded into an AI curated existence whether we like it or not. But back to bitching about online card shops, Sportlots keep updating their site to make it harder to use. That Canadian online card shop folded (I never got around to ordering from them, but they seemed to get positive marks from the bloggers who did). I've tried to get more active trading at TCDb but it's been an uphill slog and my successful transactions there seem to be few and far between. (I've recently finished sorting a monster box with my available Archives/Ginter/Heritage that I plan to enter in my "For Trade" list soon and hope that helps improve my trade-matching.)

Oh, and the USPS has been sucking lately, too. I had a Nolan Ryan reprint refractor show up in the tracking as delivered that I never got. :( And that Tony Clark card that arrived yesterday took 2 whole weeks to get to me from Florida.

And back to that. the eBay seller had a promotional discount offer to entice you to buy more than one card from him, so I took a quick browse of his inventory and found another card that caught my eye at a good price:

This is the 102nd Dick Allen card of mine to be logged at TCDb, and forgive the language but I'm still downright tickled pink to be his #1 ranked collector there, even now a ways into his HOF inclusion, causing him to default into being a guy that Hall of Fame collectors now collect. I figured a more focused supercollector would have knocked me off the top spot by now. But nope, second-place is currently a 3-way tie with 84.

Back to the card, this is a Blue Ice Prizm parallel of Dick Allen's 2025 Panini Prizm card. It's my first of the 33-card rainbow, though I also have a Red Pulsar Prizm and Ruby Wave Prizm pending in that eventual COMC shipment. I didn't remind myself of that fact until after snagging the Blue Ice one, so I got lucky not to double up. I like that the card shows Dick in his later Phillies stint, something you don't see on many of his cards, especially an action shot. On the downside, lawyers have instructed the cardmakers to remove logos and wordmarks from the photo due to the fact that another cardmaker paid a lot of money to have lawyers say that only they can make cards that have those special logos and words. Man, everything bad in this world always boils down to greed. Humans be greedy, put that on our headstone.

LOL, I'm sorry this quick post showing off a 2-card mailday turned into a lot of negative ranting! I just thought it was a crazy coincidence the random Tony Clark card showed up in my mailbox the very day his career took a sudden tumble. 

For a more positive coincidence, I'll mention that this past Monday I was out walking the dog making our way home and I saw what I first figured might be a crow with a big piece of bread in its beak (lots of crows around here), but as it flew closer, it became clear that, no, it was a bald eagle! Came in kinda low but it was quick and I didn't want to take my eyes off it to fiddle with my phone, so no photos. Don't see those very often in my neighborhood, and so to get a bald eagle flyover, on Presidents' Day no less, was a neat experience.

Oh, and another happy thing to mention.. I was supposed to have jury duty today, but thankfully I got an email yesterday saying nevermind I'm not needed. I wouldn't mind being on a jury, but what had me stressed is waking up early enough to get downtown by 8am. I'm a night owl like Night Owl and don't usually get to bed until around/after midnight. But instead of being sleep-deprived waiting to see if I get called in, I got to sleep in and then ramble out a blog post with my morning. So that's cool! :)

Incomings and Outgoings

Got some incoming cards to round up into a post.

I did a quick swap of unofficial cards with reader David B. who fancied a copy of the Willie Stargell - Braves custom I made recently. In return, I got this pair of old school customs somebody made circa 1970. David didn't have a ton of background into on them, but he had bought a larger lot with several of them on eBay in 2021. The person who originally made them must've gotten pictures from a periodical or book, affixing them onto cardboard and turning them into cards, or close enough. They're just a hair too big to fit in a standard top-loader.

Looks they had been intended to have stats on the back, but the data entry must've ended up being too tedious-- you couldn't just copy & paste back then-- so that section got a purple overhaul instead. But yeah, happy to spice up my Wampum and Hoot PCs with these.

Thanks for the trade, David! Fun stuff.

- - --o

I fielded my first trade request on TCDB in quite a while, which is mostly my fault because I haven't added squat to my FT/FS cards there in a long time. But apparently I had a few '72 Topps on there (that I had forgotten about-- in fact I've got a couple different '72 "starter lots" from my dupes that I've been meaning to put on eBay), and a friendly guy with the username aint56cool needed one, offering this pair of 1970 Topps. I gotta admit I haven't been tracking my '70 setbuild on TCDB, I just blanketly added all the semi/high numbers to my wants a couple years back since I needed most of them. And I did in fact need these two. Now just 310 cards left to go. Maybe by the time my retirement benefits kick in, assuming I live that long, I can use that 401k to finance landing a Nolan Ryan and Johnny Bench. lol

- - --o

Next up is a surprise mailing I received from Japan.

Imported fresh! Love the early Darvish, and always down for an attractive lady on a trading card.

Zippy Zappy didn't include a note this time, but I'm assuming these were some leftover stragglers from the tail end of his through-the-mail autograph acquiring activity, with his budding Rockies fandom apparent with his lot of fellas. You may recall ZZ decided to tighten up his collection a while back before escaping America, jettisoning his non-personalized TTM returns, much of which has been entrusted to me. Happy to add these to the hoard.

Thanks as always, Zippy!

-  - --o

Ok, those were the "incomings", now for the "outgoings".

The Mark Fidrych Memorial Bird Feeder (a.k.a. The Bird Birdfeeder) has closed for the time being after about 2 years serving neighborhood feathered friends. Squirrels had occasionally been a nuisance in the feeder, but a recent late night rat sighting forced the closure, as I don't want to be supporting unwanted rodents on my property. I'm hoping to "reopen the restaurant" at some point, perhaps in a different spot. Anyways, the above card was the featured entertainment for the birds to enjoy while they ate. It's faded in the sun somewhat, but there's still some yellow hanging on.

- - --o

Sad to hear Val Kilmer passed away the other day, though I know his health had been in the toilet for the past several years. He did a lot of great work, from his early quirky films to the big-budget stuff. I watched his documentary a couple years back and he really was a fascinating dude. Anyways, this above Ginter auto is a cherished piece of my collection, scored in a blogger trade back in 2016. (Bubba, are you still out there?)

 - - --o

Now an update on my "latest art drop".. the silhouette cards from my previous post. Happy to report I sold out the Rickey Henderson cards within 48 hours! Interest was not nearly as robust with the other two featured athletes, however. So far I've moved just one Bo Jackson and zero Jordans.. kinda surprising to me, as I think they're super cool, but that's just how it goes sometimes. (Update: just sold 4 more Bo cards to one guy but don't feel like rewriting this paragraph.) Both Jordan listings had a weird thing where the listing didn't show up on the site until a day later, despite showing as active on my end. Not sure if that was a technical hiccup, or if perhaps listings mentioning 1986-87 Fleer Michael Jordan have a higher rate of getting flagged for moderation since counterfeits are so rampant with that card. But anyways, they're available now and we'll see if folks eventually start coming around to them. 

But my takeaway is that the market for Rickey cardart/custom stuff is strong, which is cool with me. I already had more Rickey stuff in the works anyways, so I'll continue that route, and spend less time on making new Bo and Jordan cards. (I also have plans for more subjects-- already made a Tim Flannery '88 Fleer silhouette card for Rod, plus a few Barry Bonds ideas for my guy who buys most Bonds cardart I whip up. [Though he passed on the pair of Christmas tree ornament cards. Maybe he doesn't celebrate? Fair enough!])

Also, the glowing cards did well-- they seemed to be among the quickest Rickeys to go, and the first Bo sale was a glower-- so I'll likely focus on more g.i.t.d. cards, which are my personal favorite anyway.

In fact, here's a sneak peek of my latest finished item with the lights out...

I'm still coming up with new ideas, as well as sitting on some good ideas that have been brewing on the backburner for years, so even if you don't dig the silhouette vibe, your boy Gav has more tricks up his sleeve, don't you fret. Thanks for following along!

COMC haul misc

Happy Opening Day, everybody. I recently got another shipment from COMC and I've been meaning to show off some highlights.

Some refractors that caught my eye. I sorted Juan Soto refractors cheapest-first and grabbed that Béisbol one. I wanted an All-Etch logofractor, and ended up with Austin Riley, whom I've kinda fell into PCing, I guess. The blue 2008 Adrian Gonzalez pickup was inspired by a gcrl post. I haven't logged my Brian Giles PC yet, but I probably needed at least most of this trio of Bowman refractors.

Grabbed a few parallel Gavins. (Not pictured, but I'm happy to see that Gavin Sheets secured a spot on the Padres' OD roster! The first Padre named Gavin!) Gavin Sawchuk, a gridiron Gavin, is a new name for my collection. I don't have much use for modern football cards these days, having detached myself from the NFL over the past 15 years (and never really getting into college sports), but I guess I don't mind an excuse to sample some of the new designs and parallels Fanatics uses for football products, but I won't go trying to "rainbow" any of his cards or go nuts with building a PC (The previous notable Gavin football player, Gavin Escobar, I collected a lot, but he had the added connection of being a fellow SDSU alum). Sawchuk is still a running back for the Oklahoma Sooners-- oh yeah, Bowman U is for college kids; kind of a weird thing to get used to-- so we'll see if he eventually goes pro.

I'm not feeling too optimistic about my Padres this season, but hoping Jackson Merrill continues developing into a star.

Dick Allen PC got kicked up with this four. The Kmart card is a blank-front, so it's an oddity that doesn't count in my quest to hit 100 cards in the TCDb-leading PC.

Unrelated to my latest COMC haul, but here's a photo from the other day when I rounded up all my Dick Allen cards that featured the 1972 Topps design.. including Topps, OPC, customs, and a couple Topps Vault pieces. Dick's card seems to have usually been the last one packaged into the '82 Kmart box set, touching the gum, so it's very common to find with a gum stain on the back. If the stain is raunchy enough, I consider it somewhat of an unofficial variation and add it to the keepers.

Also grabbed some additions for my glowing card collection.

The Harry Potter one and all the Upper Deck Space Patches were new sets to me, and I've since updated my Glow-In-The-Dark Cards page to include them.

Found a couple cheap Project 2020 cards for the Big Hurt PC. This is where COMC's flat shipping comes in handy, since those bulky plastic cases otherwise ratchet up postage. Flippers went nuts back then, so now some of those cards with high print runs can be snagged on COMC for less than they'd cost to ship alone. The artists are Naturel (left) and Matt Taylor (right). Matt Taylor's version of the Rickey rookie is the only Project 2020 card I actually bought "live". I also ended up with his Gwynn thanks to Rod a couple years later. So it seems I've got myself a little Matt Taylor art collection going. But as far as 1990 Topps Frank Thomas, I think I prefer Naturel's colorful rendition here.

I'm embarrassed to admit but when I first saw 1992 Leaf black gold cards come out of the package, I was like, "WTF, I thought I already completed this set last year!?" But duh, I momentarily forgot I'm now trying to complement that set with the tougher "of 33" preview cards. This lot helps get me to 21 of 33.

1964 and 1972 needs, including some notable names and a pair of '72 Cubs variations (green under the "C" and "S" instead of yellow).

And I've now completed 1980 Kellogg's thanks to Garv and Yaz here. Probably. I still need to sort through my set to confirm, but it's tricky because I sort my Kellogg's cards by curvaceousness, not card number. lol

Thanks for reading and best of luck to your favorite team this MLB season.

some COMC highlights

Showing off some various pickups from my latest COMC order.

I was happy to hear Dick Allen and Dave Parker got the "Call to the Hall" the other day, though in Allen's case, it was bittersweet since they jacked him around so much when he was still with us. But being honored posthumously is better than not being honored at all, I suppose.

It's kinda surprising to me, but I'm still the #1 ranked Dick Allen collector on TCDB. I'm also ranked #1 for a couple obscure guys who most people don't remember, but to be ranked #1 for a HOFer isn't so easy. The rankings can change quickly, but whatever happens in the future, it's neat to have been the top-rated Dick Allen collector per TCDB on the day he made the Hall of Fame.

Thanks to the above modern parallels (btw, screw Topps for waiting until the moment he died to start putting him in new releases again), I'm up to 91 unique Dick Allen cards (2nd place collector is at 84). Call it an unofficial New Years resolution to break triple digits by the end of 2025.

Some vintage pickups. Mike Reinbach has a whopping 13 cards in the 1975-76 Calbee set, which as I understand it were distributed via packs of chips in Japan. And this one with the fielding shot was the last one of the 13 that I needed. So that makes for a nice little accomplishment. But he has several later Calbee cards from 1977-1980 still out there, so the search for Reinbach will continue unabated.

Nolan Ryan takes me to the cusp of completing my first Kellogg's set, now down to only Yaz and Garvey to wrap up the set from 1980. Back in 2020, I wanted to expand my wantlist to facilitate more trading, and I decided to take a run at all the vintage Kellogg's baseball sets (1970-1983). These few years later, trading has slowed for me and my collecting mindset is more on wrapping things up than finding new things to chase. Most of those Kellogg's sets are out of my reach unless I really prioritize them at some point, but I sure would love to at least knock out one or two years. Besides '80, the only other set I'm anywhere close with is '81 Kellogg's, with 16 cards remaining.

As for the 1974 Rookie Pitchers, thanks to this card I can claim to have a complete base set of 1974 Topps. See, my previous copy of this card erroneously assigned Dave Freisleben to Washington, and so it was technically an error variation taking the slot in my set. So with a correct San Diego designation on this card, my set is now a complete base set including some variations. For a master set, I'm lacking 9 Washington variations, the "Apodaco" typo of #608, and another version of the above #599 (I still need the small print variation, where the "S" in Padres aligns with "B" in Freisleben).

Bobby Richardson is a new refractor for my 2005 Retired auto set. That's at over 71% complete as a mix of base and refractors. That's just behind my 2003 Retired auto set that's at 79%. And of course 2004 Retired is still just waiting for a Trammell refractor. (*sigh* Will 2025 be the year I finally land that whale?)

My 1975 Topps needs are the same as they were last time I posted them on the blog, but now I've got these in-hand that had been "pending". Looks like my half-assed goal of completing the set during its Heritage Year won't come to pass, but luckily for me that doesn't really mean shit to anyone anyway so I'll just complete it next year instead. I spent like an hour trying to come up with a trade return for fellow blogger S.A. 75, but it was one of those frustrating experiences where like you go through a stack of cards checking numbers, and after a while of misses you get excited when you find a card that's one number off-- oh, so close!-- lol, and at the end of the stack you're lucky to have one need for the guy. But hopefully we're able to swing a trade one of these days if I can scrounge up more needs of his.

[In better news, I did complete a couple sets thanks to this COMC order, but I'll do separate "Joy of a Completed Set" posts for them soon rather than cover them here.]

Another set knocking at the door of completion. Just 38 cards left to go with 1972 Topps.

Shiny Bips.

Just one Christmas Card in the order, a rookie auto of a guy named Xavier Grimble. Sometimes I just browse looking for 12/25 cards that catch my eye. It was cheap and "Xavier Grimble" is a fun name. He had a decent little NFL career, seeing action in 47 games with the Steelers in the latter part of the previous decade.

Here's a Kevin Mitchell minor league card. I don't have much to say about it, but it's a Mets card, or close enough, so I wanted to take a moment to pay my respects to bloggin' buddy "Warren Zvon" of the blog Mets Baseball Cards Like They Ought To Be (a.k.a. Mets Fantasy Cards). Turns out he was one of the many people globally who didn't make it through 2020 alive, though I only recently found out about his passing thanks to Blogger being weird and bumping up some old posts in the reading list. But yeah, I loved his blog. His outside-the-box thinking with his digital customs helped inspire creativity with my own customs and cardart stuff. Lots of really cool ideas and animated gifs among the hundreds of Mets customs he featured on his blog. Good guy. Sad he's gone. RIP Warren.

Also sad to see Chris The Collector not just stop blogging but delete his blog too. Hopefully he comes out the other side of what he's going through and eventually returns to the cardsphere. We're rooting for you, Chris!

And sad that Nick at Dimeboxes is taking another leave of blogging duty. Him and Night Owl and Fuji have always been the "big 3" that I looked up to as a card blogger. It's a bummer when he goes quiet.

Best of luck out there, Nick! Hope to see you back to blogging before long.

As for me, my post total for the year will shake out around 30-something posts, vying with last year as my least-ever number of blog posts. But don't worry, guys, I'm not planning on closing up Baseball Card Breakdown any time soon. I don't get around to typing up posts as often as I'd like-- other things distract me from typing away for the hour or two or more it takes me for a typical post-- but I do have plenty left I want to blog about, in addition to the usual "check out these cards I got from Check Out My Cards" and trade recaps, etc. As the world accelerates its burning, I've been trying to wean myself off social media for my mental health's benefit. I'd rather just hang out on my little chunk of the cardsphere with my head in the sand than stress out over all the bullshit and injustice going on, you know? Easier said than done. But yeah, expect more blogging from me in 2025, not less.

Closing out with a Jose Canseco 1986 Donruss Rated Rookie. Just an iconic junk wax era card I've never owned but always kinda wanted. And now I have one. Had hoped to find someone to trade me one for the past few years, but finally gave in and bought the cheapest one on COMC.

That's it for today. Thanks for reading!

Catching up

Lots to blog about but I just haven't gotten the urge to type much lately. However, my guilt won't let me go too long without acknowledging cards received from a fellow cardblogger, so let's check out what John Miller surprised me with recently.

Photo came out blurry, but here are a bunch of Gavins. Mr. Williams has the biggest start of his life tonight for Cleveland. Good luck to him, but it's looking like it will be a Yankees vs. Dodgers World Series where I'm not sure who I'd root against hardest. The curse of rooting for the underdog is all the pain of defeat you have to deal with. By the way, did you notice my Padres bowed out of the playoffs in embarrassing fashion? Sad fact: I have never in my life seen a championship by a sports team I actively followed and rooted for. Granted I've really only followed the Padres (and Chargers for a while in the 90s-00s). I'm not saying it's gonna eat me up on my deathbed to have been a Lifelong Loser as a sports fan, but man, it sucks. I hate sports!

Here we go, some nonsport ladies. Sorry again for the blurry picture. I took these at night and my phone's camera needs natural light, I guess.

Lastly from John is a nice bunch of Dick Allen cards (and a tiny Ken Caminiti, too). I already had most of these, but there were enough needs to help push me back to being the #1 ranked Dick Allen collector on TCDB for the moment (Woo!). And that encouraged me to snag a few cheap refractor parallels of that Chome Anniversary card in the lower right.. so that should help pad my lead a little when they show up.

Thanks, Johnny! I'll be getting a return your way soon hopefully.

Now for some recent photographs to fill out the post.

I complain about my camera, but happy to see it capture the supermoon halo or whatever you call it from last night. That's a lense flare below it.

My dog Ruby wants nothing more than to get a catfriend, but the local felines want nothing to do with her. Excitedly lunging at them to play/chase probably isn't the best strategy, but she doesn't get that. There's one Siamese that isn't afraid to get close, but it's more of a "bully" situation, and I'm wary of the claws coming out, so I've got to keep some space between them. I snapped this pic when the cat was following behind us but Ruby didn't seem to notice.

And here's a selfie from a recent walk with a nice view.

Ok, let's hope this post helped "break the seal" and I get more frequent blogs posted to close out the year. Gotta hit the annual Vintage Frankenset post soon, plus a major setbuild of mine is coming to a close with the final card currently out-for-delivery. Oh, and I've got a bunch of new cardart stuff I want to show off. So yeah, lots to talk about soon. Thanks as always for stopping by.

Catching up with the late Dick Allen

When I was a kid, I got Dick Allen to autograph a baseball for me at the 1992 All-Star FanFest. I didn't own any of his cards or really know who he was, but I just knew he was a badass old ballplayer there to sign autographs, so why not.

I could count the number of in-person autographs I got as a kid on one hand, so I guess I'm a little sentimental about those interactions and when I returned to the hobby as an adult, Mr. Allen became one of my favorite before-my-time guys to collect.

I've built up a solid Dick Allen PC that's among the best logged at TCDB (ranked 2nd at last check), and have picked up a few old oddballs and unique items from the Topps Vault. I'd stop short at calling myself a supercollector because I'm not going to go nuts on big-money items. I'm sure there's plenty of obscure old stuff out there that I don't even bother looking for. And then there's modern cards with all the many parallels that a true supercollector would be compelled to rainbow.

So I like to think of myself as a semi-supercollector when it comes to Dick Allen. I don't try to get everything, but I'll round up a good sampling of what's out there. And this post will take a look at some recent pickups.

Dick Allen sadly passed away December 2020 at age 78. He remained a popular sports chat topic in 2021 as his Hall of Fame candidacy came up again. Unfortunately his posthumous run for the hall ended like his previous attempt, falling a single vote short of induction. Ouch. But oh well, I'll still keep on collecting him and have less competition than I would have had he gotten the "HOF" label applied to his legacy.

On the cardboard front, Topps basically ignored Dick Allen for over 15 years before finally giving him some love in 2021, showing up on a few checklists among the other stars of the past. While I'm chagrined Topps waited until Dick was no longer with us to start giving him modern cards again, at least there aren't a ton of certified autographs for me to track down and spend money on, to try to look on the bright side about it. 

But yeah, I had been clamoring for years for Topps to put Dick in sets like Archives and Ginter, and it sucks that they wait till he dies to include him. Chances are he signed a new contract with Topps in 2020, possibly even got sent a box of cards to autograph and return for inclusion in 2021 products but his failing health scuttled those plans. Who knows?

But anyways, let's take a look at some new Dick Allen cards I've added in recent months.

Took me a while of searching, but finally added a rip card. I believe it's my first ever real rip card-- some of my trader buds might recall a holiday surprise a few years back when I made my own rip cards to share using 1987 Topps Tony Gwynn cards with a custom magnet card hiding in the middle. There had been a couple already-ripped rip cards for sale, but took a while for me to find one intact, despite being numbered to 99 which isn't all that low by today's standards. I don't want to rip it, but maybe someday I'll find another one and then I'd rip the dupe.

Dick's also featured in the main 2021 Allen & Ginter checklist, though I haven't bothered chasing all the parallels of that one, only owning the base card so far. It features a similar photo to the rip card, but no visible glove and he isn't smiling.. kinda boring, honestly.

Here's that same smiling photo from the rip card, but made up in a pre-war style for a line of 206 cards put out in overpriced, online-only waves. Of course Topps is gonna throw in a bunch of scarce, unnecessary parallels into the mix too. They're just dumb back variations, though.

I grabbed the base and the Sovereign variation, whatever that's supposed to mean (tobacco company?). There are 6 more backs according to TCDB and I threw them in my wantlist there in case a prospective trade partner might have one available, but I don't plan to put much more effort than that into landing additional 206 Dicks. But yeah, it's a nice enough card at its core.

We've seen this photo in the Ginter style and tobacco mini style, and now here's a sparkly 1952 Topps style card using it. Geez, Topps.. It's a nice photo, but howbout giving another look to the many other available options? This 2021 Topps Chrome Platinum Anniversary product has some things going for it, such as a solid vintage-meets-modern look and a deep checklist with some interesting players, and it's gotten a positive response from collectors, best I can tell. I broke my vow of not doing anymore (non-blogger) group breaks and won a couple D.A. slots on eBay for multi-case player breaks. But unfortunately it's a big checklist and not a lot of cards per unit.. and welp, I got the shaft. Oof. Yep, several boxes of the stuff was busted on my behalf and I didn't even end up with one lousy base card of my guy, much less a nice parallel.

But yeah, sticking to buying singles, I picked up this parallel.

First off the line!

I should also give an update on Dick's 2021 Topps Archives rainbow that I spent some time and money chasing in the months after that product's release.

I'm missing the following:

base variation: 70 Years of Baseball Emblem (instead of 50)
Red Hot Foil /50 variation: 70 Years of Baseball Emblem (instead of 50)
Blue Foil /25
Blank Back 1/1
FoilFractor 1/1
FoilFractor 1/1 variation: 70 Years of Baseball Emblem (instead of 50)

I'd like to eventually pick up a Blue Foil parallel-- preferably the christmas card-- but other than that I don't plan to sweat the 1/1s and dumb 70 Years variations, so this rainbow isn't likely to ever reach its pot of gold. But I'd say that's a fine looking run of cards above that I'm happy to have in the PC.

While drafting this post, I learned Dick's in 2022 Topps Pristine, too. Gotta say I hadn't expected Topps to continue putting him in their new products, not after the epic HOF diss, so that's cool.

I just scored this encased refractor for $1.50 plus shipping. Kind of disappointing Topps picked such a similar shot to the Archives photo, but at least now Dick's in the road uni. I might try picking up a parallel or two, but don't plan to hit the rainbow hard this time out.

Looks like the same photo from Pristine had been used in a WTHBalls custom not long before. This was a cool little "club member" bonus throw-in. As a custom card maker, a nemesis of mine is the top font of 1972 Topps. I've never been able to replicate it like Gio has here. So while I'm ok at making customs overall, seasoned pros like Gio are on a whole 'nother level.

And I had never gotten around to making my own custom from Allen's time in Oakland (despite longing for such a card), so I was very pleased to see that '78 that-should've-been enter the physical realm in a recent WTHB release. Authentically off-center, lol.

That wraps up the update to my Dick Allen semi-supercollection. My interest in today's cards continues to dwindle, but as long as he keeps getting new cards, I'll at least try to sprinkle some examples in the ol' PC. Thanks for stopping by.