Gifs Gone Viral!

Here's a roundup of the gif cards I've made over the past couple weeks.

8/6
On this day in 1973, the great Roberto Clemente is posthumously inducted to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY.


The day before, in my previous gif card roundup, back in my post on 8/5, I gave some foreshadowing on this one :

(Update: I've just made what I feel is my best one of these yet and will be tweeting it out tomorrow morning. 8/6 around 8:15 Pacific: @breakdowncards be there. lol. But no, it's a good one! I predict it might even break my Satchel record for most popular tweet. But then again, sometimes things I think will be a huge hit end up falling flat, so who knows.)
(Update to the Update: yeah, it didn't exactly take off. Oh well, I'll tweet it out again on Clemente's birthday coming up in a couple weeks and I bet it'll have more success then.)

Yep, it ended up with 11 retweets and 24 likes. Nothing to complain about, but definitely fell short of my lofty expectations. And guess what, I later tweeted it out again on Roberto's birthday (8/18) and it was definitely more successful!

8/18:
Remembering the legendary Roberto Clemente on what would have been his 84th birthday. This has gotta be my favorite gif card I've made.


That time it got 1.2k likes and 300+ retweets!! Unprecedented for me. I also picked up 250+ new followers in the process. Wow!.. gotta say I'm kinda overwhelmed by the response.

Anyways.. more gifs...

8/14:
On this day in 1991, Dave Winfield blasts his 400th career home run as his Angels beat the Twins. He was just the 23rd player in history to reach the milestone, eventually retiring with 465.

8/16:
The Great Bambino, Babe Ruth passed away on this date back in 1948 at the age of 53.

8/19:
Wishing a Happy 66th Birthday to Tim Blackwell! Never much of a threat with a bat (especially not when facing the likes of Nolan Ryan), but that magnificent mustache was Hall of Fame worthy.

So there are the gif cards I've made over the past couple weeks. Thanks for checking them out. I'll probably have a few more to show off in a week or two.

Tweeting the Bird

I had a crazy Friday morning, waking to see my Twitter blowing up. A tweet of mine from the night before had caught on with a several retweets, including some prominent sports accounts. My tweets usually get "likes" in the single digits, so it's pretty thrilling to tweet something that got hundreds of likes, even impressing ESPN dudes like Darren Rovell and Pedro Gomez.

June 28, 1976: Rookie Mark Fidrych wows the nation in a complete game win over the Yankees on Monday Night Baseball. I made a gif card of it. pic.twitter.com/8Zr87q22q3

— Baseball Card Breakdown (@breakdowncards) June 29, 2018

Funny thing is this was like the 3rd time I've tweeted this gif since making it back in April. I normally don't like repeating myself, but I've noticed a lot of popular accounts like @Super70sSports aren't afraid to post the same pic/joke every few weeks, and nobody seems to mind or even notice. So whatever. Sometimes it goes unnoticed, sometimes it goes viral. If you got something good, don't be afraid to break it out once in a while, I guess. And my custom card gifs tend to get a good response, so I really should whip up more of those.

Oh, the other thing that made my Friday morning eventful is I biffed it during my little morning jog, scrapping up my hands a little. Got an unfortunate cut on my right thumb right where you'd use it for typing the spacebar and dragging/scrolling. So that limited my typing for a day or two (my post on Friday was mostly written the day before), but it's doing better now.

Coincidentally, the recent anniversary of the Bird's big game on June 28th was also the day I received my first certified autograph of the man, having scored this 2003 Topps Retired auto for a bit over a blaster. (There had been a refractor parallel of this card on eBay for a while at a price that was "reaching" [and no "Or Best Offer" though I did send the dude a message trying to work out a deal, but he politely declined], and it finally got boughten the other day.) But yeah, this base auto is pretty cool, too.

Nice back. Love this card. I'm a big Topps Retired guy, as regular readers are well aware, and Fidrych has been a favorite recently-prioritized PC this year.

And the seller was super cool and threw in a great surprise bonus card...

Woah! That's his 1977 Kellogg's rookie card.. nice! It's in awesome condition too. If I were the kind of guy who sent in cards for grading, I'd probably send this one in.

This might be the best bonus card I've ever gotten in an eBay purchase. The cheapest copy of this card on COMC is currently $14. So yeah, great deal and generous seller. Seems to be a Tigers fan slimming down his collection. (Here's a link to his listings.)

Thanks for reading!

Entrants locked in for the Twitter contest

OK, we've got our contestants all set for the 2014 Gypsy Queen auto Twitter contest. Pretty decent turnout. Thanks to everybody who got on board and helped me achieve a modest number of Twitter followers!

Here's the fun part. I put everybody into a spreadsheet (follower = 1 entry, follower who retweeted = 2 additional entries) and alphabetized it, then entered the list into random.org and randomized once.

Now, before the "#1 person" gets too excited, remember that this list is not picking the winner, it's only assigning numbers. The winning number is the total number of hits in the May 2nd Padres vs. Diamondbacks game. (Random!)

For example, if there's a pitchers' duel and the two teams combine for a total of just 3 hits between them, the winner would be T-Train. Get it?

And while it's doubtful the bats will come alive enough for it to be a factor, here's the rest of the list for the heck of it:

If anyone wants to check the math, the month ended with 45 followers and 37 retweets of the contest tweet, but 3 of which weren't followers, sadly, so those three didn't get entered. 45 + (2 x [37-3]) = 113

So keep an eye on Friday's Pads/D-backs boxscore and good luck!

And for those of you who missed out, don't fret, as I plan to do more contests in the not-too-distant future with some pretty sweet prizes.. HOF autos and the like.. so stick around!

Twitter contest.. win a Gypsy Queen auto!

After recently starting up a new Twitter account for the blog, I feel the need to resort to bribery to achieve a respectable number of followers.

You know what that means... CONTEST!

The prize is winner's choice of one (1) of these autos first mentioned in my 2014 Gypsy Queen trade bait a few days ago.

Adam Eaton, Diamondbacks
Ricky Nolasco, Dodgers [red border, #'d 14/49]
David Phelps, Yankees

Again, winner picks 1 of the above, and then it'll be mailed to his or her mailbox for free.

To enter, just follow @breakdowncards on Twitter. Boost your chances by retweeting my tweet about the contest (here). Every follower will automatically get 1 entry. Every follower who retweets will get 2 additional entries (so, a max of 3 entries per person possible).

The contest is open until the end of April 2014 (PDT)*. I'll then randomize once to assign numbers to everyone and post these numbers on May 1st. The winning number will be the total number of hits in the Padres vs. Diamondbacks game on May 2nd. For example, if the two teams combine for 12 hits that night, the winner will be the person random.org had assigned #12. (This way of picking winners adds some excitement, plus makes the contest even more random and obviously not fixed.)

*UPDATE: Ok, it's technically 9:30pm on 4/30.. I'm calling it now, so apologies if anyone was taking it down to the wire and hasn't entered yet in these last few hours, but I don't want to wait till the morning to get it all worked out.

So there you go. Follow and re-tweet!

Getting with the times.. Twitter & Sportlots

I kinda hate Twitter, but I gave in and joined (again). I was on there years ago, but not for any trading card purposes.. Just sucked up freetime reading funny barbs from comedians, mostly. This time around, I started a new account just for card stuff.

So if you're a Twitterer, give me a follow and I'll follow you back.

@breakdowncards

("Baseball Card Breakdown" or any approximation of that is apparently too long for a username.. grrr.)

For the moment, I'll just take it slow and see how it goes. I might do a contest to help build up some followers in the near future, but we'll see.

In other "branching out" / "getting with the times" / "welcome to 2007" news, I placed my first ever order on Sportlots last week. Man, that site is confusing. I still don't know how to search by seller.. as such, shipping doesn't make fiscal sense for me the way it does on COMC or Just Commons. But I found a bunch of 2004 Topps Retired base cards from one seller for good prices, so I picked up several I needed. I should save them for a separate post, but-- spoiler alert!-- after winning the Mike Schmidt on eBay the other day, I'm down to needing just 1 card to finish off the base set: #50 Cal Ripken. I don't suppose anyone has this card to trade? The few copies currently available out there at the moment are more than I'd like to pay, so I'll just have to be patient.

I also ordered several dozen copies of Marquis Grissom 1990 Upper Deck from one seller who happened to have dozens of them cheap.. I cleaned him out! Apparently there's a way to make offers and/or maybe get discounts for buying multiple copies of the same card, but, again, I couldn't figure that out. I had to break my Marquis Mania ground rule by paying over a quarter per card (shipping included), but not by much. Anyways, stay tuned for a future post where I'll do the math and see where I'm at in my quest to collect 792 copies of that card. Or maybe 999 would be a better goal. I haven't really set a number to aim for yet. Who knows. For now, the goal is just to get a shitload of 'em and fill up a binder.

In summary, Sportlots is confusing to me. I might try getting more familiar with it (please feel free to post any tips in the comments), but for the time being, doesn't look like it'll become one of my main sources for picking up cards.

p.s. Here's that Twitter link again @breakdowncards, primed for following!