Morphing faces + Gwynns from the card show

I love Tony Gwynn. But man, he's got a ton of cards out there. I have no intention of becoming a full-on Gwynn supercollector-- I'd go broke and bored trying to obtain every card he's got-- But I like picking up the occasional neat one that catches my eye, especially when digging in a dimebox. Here are some I got at the card show a little over a week ago.

First off is a Sportflics card.. (and my latest technique for attempting to capture a "non-static" card on the blog.)

I typically stay far away from Sportflics, but there was just too much starpower jam packed onto this card for me to resist.

Pop quiz: Can you name all 6 players on this card?

The top window transitions pretty smoothly since they're all black dudes with mustaches and are directly facing the camera. (Kinda reminds me of the end of that Michael Jackson video.. an excuse to post it above.. Hey, look at Macaulay Culkin making another appearance on my blog in short span!)

But the bottom window of the Sportflics card is all over the place. Too bad the company wasn't better about making smooth face-morphs more often, since it definitely makes for a cooler card. You can look at it at just the correct angle where you get half of one guy and half of another guy and then you get a good idea of what their theoretical offspring would look like. LOL. Sort of like the old "If They Mated" bit on Conan O'Brien.

On a side note, I've always called it "Sportsflics." But no, the sport part is singular, I realize now. Am I the only one who's been saying it wrong this whole time?

Anyways, back to the Gwynns...
I couldn't remember which few of the '92 Ultra "Commemorative Series" inserts I still needed, so when I found these in the dimebox, I said screw it and grabbed them all...

I still need "No. 8 of 10" and an upgrade of the special Casa de Amparo card (which I posted about last year as "the worst-condition card I own"), then I think I'll have the complete set of these emerald marble beauties.

And here are a few more cards..

Lots of cards from the countless "limited edition, etc." 80s Fleer sets. Gotta love 'em. On the bottom, we have a serial numbered card (to something like /4999, but still!) and an oddball disc that likely came from the bottom of a promotional cup, I'm guessing. I miss the long-ago days of getting neat stuff from the bottom of my Slurpee.

And I miss Tony Gwynn, too. Love you, Tony!

That's all for today. Thanks for stopping by.

Refraction Action: Bill Madlock 1987 Sportsflics

Refraction Action is a regular feature here where I whip up a moving gif of a baseball card, usually a refractor (hence the name), but could also be any card that a still image can't quite do justice.

And in that latter category, I present to you my first attempt at capturing a Sportsflics card in action:

Here's Bill Madlock lacing one of his 2,008 career hits on his 1987 Sportsflics card. (BTW, only eleven men have won 4 or more batting titles. All are in the Hall of Fame except Mad Dog here.) You can look at the gif for a couple minutes and think, "Wow, he was really on fire that day! He must have a hundred hits and no sign of slowing down!" Watch long enough and you can probably have all his 2,008 lifetime hits covered.. or at least the 158 hits he got in 166 games as a Dodger near the end of his career. Is that Wrigley, with the brick wall behind him? I'm not great at identifying stadiums from pictures. The fact that the crowd seems to change makes me suspect these pictures might actually be taken from different at-bats.

Honestly, I never really liked liked Sportsflics or any other "lenticular" cards (is that what this technology is called?). They were expensive (to buy packs) but worthless (nobody wanted them). I only reluctantly added a Sportsflics card to my collection if it fell in my lap and featured a player I really collected. Otherwise, all they're really good for is scratching your fingernail on and pretending you're a funky DJ rapper scratching a vinyl record.

This particular lenticular composition above is the best type, though: 3 images from the same action.. Almost like a video clip. That's way better than cards like these that have just 2 images.. or 2 action images plus a headshot.. or the worst: images of 3 different players thrown arbitrarily onto the same Sportsflics card.

But give them some credit for trying something different, I guess, rather than the same ol' typical picture of a player on a piece of cardboard. But yeah, these don't do it for me, generally speaking. The first time you see one of these cards as a kid, you're impressed for a moment, but the novelty fades pretty quickly. Maybe if there was a Joe Morgan card featuring him at bat, and when you moved it, you saw his elbow flapping.. now that would be kinda cool. Or maybe a Kirk Gibson card where he pumps his fist after that big home run in '88. Some iconic movement like that. Maybe Rickey Henderson sliding into second? But most of these cards just feature a grainy-looking swing and sometimes a headshot. The backs were decent though (especially for 1987), featuring full-color and giving us a non-grainy look at the guy, plus full stats and a brief write-up.