Topps Retired Triad: The Return

Ok, I haven't done one of these in a while. To recap, my favorite high-end product line is Topps Retired Signature Edition, which ran for 3 years, 2003-2005, with the refractor autographs being a top collecting focus of mine. The "Topps Retired Triad" blog series is an excuse for me to show off a trio of recent adds. Good group today-- all PC guys for me, too.

Big Bo Jackson to kick things off. The photo might be familiar to readers because I featured the black parallel (non-auto, non-refractor) leading off the previous Triad post last fall. If it were up to me, the 2005 Retired refractors would be black bordered (like '04), but the white looks fine too. And hey, in a perfect world, this would be in its original "uncirculated" case, but I'll leave it slabbed for now. Hell, I haven't bothered to take it out of the eBay "authenticity guarantee" bag yet.

I wasn't as lucky with efforts to secure a Ryne Sandberg from the set that recently sold for a lot.

I also still need to track down Bo's '03 Retired refractor auto someday.

But one '03 Retired I have tracked down is Tony Perez...

Nice looking card. This makes an even 100 different '03 Retired autos for me, counting both refractors and base autos. That's out of a total of 119 autographs in the set. So completing that in my lifetime might be possible, but probably not an all-refractor set. The guy I know doing that (Dan) is down to only Tommy Lasorda to finish his '03 refractor set, last I touched base with him.

Tony Perez has some extra juice in my collection thanks to his "Pads in the Hall" connection, playing for San Diego back when they were the Reds' top minor league team.

Ron Gant was one of my favorite dudes back during my initial collecting run as a kid in the early 90s when I'd watch lots of Braves games on TBS. I haven't gone after his cards as hard since returning to the hobby, but still have a soft spot for him, and had been waiting years for the chance to land his refractor auto from '05 Retired.

Here's another photo with a little warmer refraction. Like with '03 Retired, I'm down to needing just 19 more autos to complete the set (as a mix of base and refractors), currently with 96 of 115 signers available in 2005 Retired.

Stats are a bit blurry in photo, but he ended up with 321 taters and 1008 ribbies. It was cool for me when Ron had a solid season for my Padres in 2002 near the end of his career.

That'll do it. Until next time!

Junk wax? More like HUNK wax!

Sorry for that post title, I just thought it was funny.

Today's post features the overproduction era cards I scored in the dimebox dig last weekend.

Nice smiles on this pair of Jimmy Dean cards.

That Ron Gant rookie was among my most cherished cards in my early days of collecting.
Cool to hear Randy Johnson get namechecked in a recent Letterkenny episode.

Surprised to find that Michael Jordan "SP1" for just 10¢. That was a very hot card for a while in the early 90s. Still today, looks like the cheapest one on COMC is $2.70. (I think I've got like 4 of them at this point [one I pulled myself back in the day, plus 3 I picked up at card shows because they were too cheap to pass up], so if anyone wants to trade for one, just let me know.)

1993 Topps Black Gold cards are great to find in dimeboxes.

Royals royalty here, with Brett and Bo.

Rickey in the house.

More dime cards for my stack.

Do those 2 oddballs on the bottom look small and shriveled to you? 😉 Sorry, dumb joke.

Note to self: Add "building a full set of 1992 Leaf Black Gold parallels" to my collecting to-do list. These cards are masterpieces! I'm kind of having an epiphany while typing up this post. I already love the 1993 Topps Black Gold inserts, so makes sense that I'd also be a big fan of the Black Gold cards that preceded them. Why have I denied my heart for so long? So yes, let this be my official announcement of the intention to collect a complete set of 1992 Leaf Black Gold!

That's it for now. Next post of these will likely cover late 90s through early 00s.

Scenes from P-town

Plenty of solid dudes on the ol' cardsphere, but none more solid than P-town Tom. He's the type of guy where if he found a 1/1 card in a dimebox, he'd bring it to the dealer's attention. Me? Ain't gonna lie, I'd swiftly and without fanfare add it to my stack.

Anyways, it had been a year or so since we last swapped cards, but we recently made up for that and struck a big trade.

Love this custom Tom whipped up on the Rookies App.

Great to see the Vogelmoster having a breakout season.

To drive the point home that it's been a long time since I traded with Tom, he had a bunch of '90 UD Marquis Grissoms set aside for me... and he apologized for being a bit late, as I announced the conclusion of this project back in January. Oh well, I can probably squeeze in a couple more pages to the binder!

A few needs from my '88 Fleer wantlist, plus a nice little lot of '87 Fleer, which I haven't made a wantlist for yet-- still rounding up whatever I can, but I almost have enough now to sort out what I've got and put up a list. If anyone has any surplus '87 Fleer to dump, maybe we can swing a trade.

And a big lot of 50 Ron Gant cards! Looks like Tom had a PC of him going but decided to cut bait. I'll happily take them. I'm likely past the magic 100-card milestone for my Gant PC now thanks to this lot.

But the bulk of Tom's big box was FIVE complete (or near-complete) sets from the overproduction era that I had been wanting to add to my collection. I'm thinking I'll do a post on each of these to give them proper love-- highlighting favorite cards and whatnot. So look for those in the not too distant future.

Great stuff, Tom!! I'll get cracking on your return very soon.

Thanks for reading and have a great weekend, everybody!

Prospecting from my childhood

I recently stumbled upon some draft pick / minor league sets from my childhood collection that were boxed away. Let's check 'em out.

It's draft day, so let's go back 27 years to the 1992 draft. Looks like I've kept this box sealed the whole time, but I wouldn't put it past younger me to slyly try keeping the sticker seal intact while peeling it back.. just trying to sneak a peek at the cards before resealing.

But now I think I'll just look up 1992 Front Row Draft Picks on TCDB.

The big name here is Derek Jeter. That's pretty much it. There's also Jason Giambi. Jason Kendall is another familiar name. Eric Owens is a fan favorite of mine, though I think I've already got that card in the PC.

Bonus Card (#39) is a send-in offer for another card of a '92 top ten draft pick, though it doesn't specify who, and TCDB doesn't seem to have the possible redemptions listed. Perhaps you just got one of the silver or gold parallels.. I'm not sure. There are apparently also autographs, though I'm not sure how they were distributed. Sure would be nice if there was a randomly inserted Jeter auto hiding in my box, but I wouldn't bet on it.

I just looked at the completed listings on eBay, and was a little surprised these sealed sets seem to sell for around $25-30 these days-- more than I was expecting. Not sure how much of my allowance I spent on this set back in 1992, but it was most likely less than $25-- or at least in that ballpark-- so I'll consider this a wash as an investment, but that's alright as far as overproduction era cards go.

And a PSA 10 specimen of the Jeter sold for $200 back in April. So I suppose if you can buy a sealed box for $25 and turn around and get the Jeter graded, you could make a tidy profit assuming it grades out to a 10.

But I don't mess with getting cards graded. There's apparently a big stink going on in that part of the hobby the past week or two with it being revealed that big eBay seller PWCC allegedly worked with a dude who would trim/alter cards so they would grade higher, with PSA also possibly being in on it in the allegations. So that could get ugly. I've never been one to hunt down PSA 10s, so it's not as big of a deal to me than it is to guys out there spending thousands on big cards.

Anyways, on with the sets.

I loved minor league team sets as a kid. I guess I was kinda prospecting-- trying to get in on the ground floor of a future star. But it wasn't about the money, as I never had any intentions to sell my cards.

I had a handful of mid 80s TCMA minor league sets, including one I remember with Danny Jackson and another with Kal Daniels. These instances definitely weren't prospecting, as they were already established major leaguers at that point. Their careers petered off after I ponied up for their minor league sets at the LCS, and I lost interest in those guys, so the sets were among the cards I purged when I moved out of San Diego over a decade ago.

But among the very few minor league team sets I kept was this 1990 St. Catharines Blue Jays team set. Looks like this set can be bought for around $10 today, so didn't exactly appreciate much. At the time, Steve Karsay got the coveted "front card of the case" billing, and while he went onto a respectable MLB career, getting into 357 games over 11 seasons, he never became the top-of-the-order starter the Blue Jays were hoping when they drafted him 22nd overall in 1990. He's a bullpen coach with the Brewers now.

So yeah, Carlos Delgado eventually broke out as the big name on this low-A squad. Funny to see him as a baby catcher, as he played the vast majority of his career at first base. Delgado and his 473 career home runs were overshadowed by heavy hitters of the day such as Barry Bonds, and unfairly got overlooked for HOF consideration. Maybe if he could have stayed healthy for a couple more seasons and reached 500 dingers, but he was battling a bad hip at the end.

Looking through the set now as an adult, one name I know now (that I didn't know as a kid) is manager Doug Ault. He's got that cool '78 Topps card with Thurman Munson making a cameo. He's best known for playing in the first Blue Jays game on April 7, 1977 and hitting the first two home runs in franchise history that day. After his playing days, he went into coaching, and later ran into life trouble and is no longer with us.

The other familiar name I was pleasantly surprised to see on this coaching staff is Darren Balsley-- a happier story-- current long-time Padres pitching coach. This here is his very first coaching card, having just retired as a player the previous season, so that's kinda cool.

Here's another neat one. I remember having several different team sets from 1988 CMC back in the day, though the Richmond Braves were the only ones I kept. It hasn't turned out to be much of an investment, as a similar set recently sold for $1.25 (+$4.50 shipping) on eBay. But I still always think it's cool to have a minor league card of a Hall of Famer, like young John Smoltz here.

Ron Gant is another guy I collect, and so that card helped me make the choice circa 2008 to hang onto this set and not throw it into the big lot I ended up selling on Craigslist for a very fair price because I didn't want to worry about trying to move it all or bothering trying to break it up into many smaller sales. A few other guys had MLB success in this bunch, too.


Last set for today...

Now this 1991 Classic Best Minors factory set was among my prized possessions during my initial time in the hobby. Loved it! So chock full of promise! I expected a lot of big stars to rise from this set over the mid 90s. And hey, there were Cooperstown-bound Pedro Martinez and Ivan Rodriguez, and future All-Stars such as Reggie Sanders and Brian Giles (my boy Carlos Delgado is in this one, too, and probably other good players I'm leaving out), but the vast majority of the guys in the set never made the big leagues, much less became a star.

I guess Classic Best made of ton of these because now you can find the factory set for under $20 shipped (and much of that price is covering postage). Maybe I should break up this set, keeping my PC guys and getting rid of the rest. But then I'd probably get sentimental over it a few years down the line and have to re-complete the set.

I didn't thumb through the whole set when picking out highlights, but here are a few of the better-known young dudes in there.

And card #1, the retro Mike Schmidt minor league card sans mustache is pretty cool.


So there are a few sets I bought as a kid with an eye toward the future. And while they were failures as far as investments, I sure had fun with them and still like 'em today, so no regrets.

Will our blogs outlive us?

I heard about how recently MySpace ended up losing all the old music artists had uploaded to the site back in its heyday. They said it was a server migration error or something, but rumors are they just wanted to free up the space all those files were taking up. It was a bummer for me since I had a couple artist profiles there: my main "band" page, and a secret alter-ego rap/hip-hop joke project. There was also a page for a little wannabe "record label" I started with some online musician friends back then. I know MySpace is essentially dead and those songs probably only got like maybe 1 or 2 real human listens per year, but it was still nice to know they were out there.

And of course when something like this happens, as a blogger you can't help but to think about Blogger (and/or WordPress) and how quickly our blogs and their archives could be wiped away forever, either on purpose or accident. That would suck. Hell, I frequently use my own blog as a resource.. looking up when/how I got a certain card.. what I need.. what I have... stuff like that. And our blogs are basically journals of our collection (sometimes branching out into real life stuff too), and it's nice to think they'll be around a long time, perhaps even tell our stories after we're gone.


Anyways, something to ponder, but that was basically just a click-bait intro to trick you into checking out some new 2005 Topps Retired auto pickups of mine...

This Don Mattingly refractor has a story behind it. When I opened up the package from the seller, there was a David Ortiz stickergraph/relic instead. The seller was apologetic and cool about correcting the mixup. Thankfully the guy who accidentally got the Mattingly was cool about returning it. Chances are he was a Red Sox fan, so the Donnie Baseball probably grossed him out. But it all worked out and the correct cards made it to the correct people.

I had to look it up, but seems Mattingly is still currently the manager for the Miami Marlins. It's a living.

Hall of Famer Monte Irvin was a fun one to get. There's a little story behind this pickup, too. When this card originally popped up on eBay, I made a reasonable best offer that was declined. A month or so later, the seller came back with his tail between his legs asking if he could have a do-over and accept my old offer. I took my time.. even considered making a slightly lower offer than before.. but ultimately took the high road and went ahead and re-submitted the same offer.

Ok, so we've had a New York Yankee and a New York Giant.. time for a New York Met...

This Gregg Jefferies refractor had been sitting on eBay for a while, and I finally pulled the trigger on it with the help from a discount code. Great looking card. Seems even extra shiny.

Casual baseball fans who hoarded hot rookie cards in the late 80s/early 90s often consider Gregg Jefferies one of the game's biggest busts due to how crazy-hyped he was around 1988/89. And while he didn't live up to his "future all-time great" promise, looking at his numbers, he still had a very fine career that pretty much any ballplayer working their way up would kill to have.

Here's a base auto, not a refractor, as you can probably tell by lack of rainbow shine, but still happy to snag this Ron Gant, a favorite player of mine since I first got into baseball back in 1990.

Like Jefferies, not quite a HOF career, but still some impressive numbers on the back of his card.


That wraps up this batch of 2005 Topps Retired autos.
Have a great weekend!

1994 Carolina League 50th Anniversary All-Time Set

I've been emailing with Alex T. (the reader who kindly traded me the George Brett and Robin Yount rookie cards recently). He's an interesting dude whose collection is focused on older minor league sets. This post will take a look at a set Alex gave me a tip on: 1994 Carolina League 50th Anniversary All-Time Set (sometimes also referred to as being from 1995). As many of the cards in the customs revue from my last post show, I get a kick out of seeing my favorite players in unfamiliar uniforms. This set features several PC guys of mine in their minor league duds. Right up my alley! Luckily there was one for auction on eBay for a solid price and I ended up winning as the lone bidder.

Young Yaz and Stretch.

Carew and Bench. So weird seeing Bench in anything other than a Reds uniform.

Speaking of strange sights.. Howbout Teke without his trademark glasses?! Also here are li'l Dave Parker, Barry Bonds, and Ron Gant.

And the rest. I'm torn between keeping the set intact or perhaps trading off the non-PC guys.

Solid, simple backs with stats and an occasional highlight mentioned. Including nicknames is a nice touch.

So there you go. A fun minor league set with a few big names.

Ready, Set, Bo!

Bo (Baseball Cards Come To Life) recently had a tradeathon/Little Fun Game and I ended up with a big batch of cards graciously sent my way from his abode in the Big Apple.

Vlad! One more lot like this and I'll reach the 100-card mark with this future HOFer, whom, I should mention, was a beast in his prime.

Carlos Delgado! The greatest player to ever fall off the HOF ballot on his first try. I'm probably close to 100 cards of him, too.

Brian Giles! I'm pretty sure I've already passed 100 different cards of his, but still happy to add more of the all-time greatest baseball player from my high school. I really need to sort my B. Giles PC one of these days. But who has the time for that?

And Bo didn't forget Brian's lil bro Marcus, either.

Ron Gant! A fav of mine from back in the day. Gotta love those 30/30 guys. Forgot he was ever an Angel.

Another power/speed guy from the 90s, Reggie Sanders is represented on a nice mix of cards here.

Great lot of Adam Jones.

Marquis!

I've been pranked! Too Many Gavins!

Fan favorites Rod Beck, Pat Neshek, and Eric Owens.

Just one each of these guys, but good stuff. Vide Blue from the blurry '82 Fleer set. Great Dave Henderson card. Early Francisco Lindor card. A Brent Gretzky for my Black Sheep minicollection. And a Molitor. Very cool.

And the prize I came away with in Bo's contest game was a 100-card set of 2007 UD Future Stars. Lots of big names in here. I'll probably break up this set for my PCs.

Big thanks, Bo! I'll try to round up a respectable return for you soon!