Only 3 "big cards"* left for me with this set (*cards I expect to pay over a blaster for): Yankees' Power Hitters (Mantle/Berra), Drysdale RC, and the set's big boy: Brooks Robinson (high number) RC.
I haven't posted since Monday, which is a pretty long dry spell for me. I blame the heat (card room tends to get hot in the summertime), work (playing catch-up after missing a few days while on vacation earlier this month), and the fact that making gif cards has been taking up what little hobby time I've had to spend this week. But hey, looks like the 90 degree days are over for the year (knock on wood), and I'm now pretty well caught up at work, so I should be able to return to cranking out a post every day or every other day.
Just a one-card post for today, but it's a good one.
1957 Topps Sandy Koufax! It's just his 3rd card, after his 1955 rookie and 1956 second-year. This one is graded PSA 1.5, but like the 1964 Koufax I picked up a few days before, also graded PSA 1.5, it looks perfect to me. I'm considering this one as a gift to myself (though aren't they all?).. Had my annual review at work the other day and it went well and I got a nice little cost-of-living raise, so figured I'd celebrate by targeting a special card or two.
Sandy was still just a kid with a lot of promise at the time; it wasn't really until the 60s that he blossomed into a great.
The back has some tape residue in the bottom corners, and the front has a little light creasing, but still, I think it looks damn good for being graded so low. And again, I don't care much about the grade as long as it doesn't look like hell, but I appreciate the peace of mind that it's certified authentic.
Very happy to check this big name off my 1957 Topps setbuild. While I've still got a long way to go– this card brings me to exactly 53% complete– I've been knocking off HOFers here and there (plus another on the way), and feel like I'm starting to get a handle on this set.
(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: @breakdowncardsbe 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.
When I was in third grade, my favorite tv show was Perfect Strangers. And I remember this for a fact because I had to write a little one-paragraph paper about what my favorite show was, and it turned out to be the first of a very small number of times in my academic career when a teacher pulled me aside and said 'good job' on something I wrote. I'll never forget that. Thanks, Mr. Hackett.
I don't think I had seen the show since its original late 80s/ early 90s run, but I've recently been watching through the series again on Hulu. And while it's pretty cheesy and probably not something I'd typically be into today assuming I never saw it before, the sentimental factor is off the charts for me and I've really been enjoying it. Great theme song, too.
Not long ago, I came to a (softball) baseball-themed episode ("The Unnatural", season 2, episode 3). And while it's not a classic on the level of "Homer at the Bat" or anything, it was still a very fun episode and inspired me to whip up a few custom baseball cards using images from the show's big game.
Move over, Junior! There's a new hot rookie in town.
Gotta love Balki, who (spoiler alert) came up with the big hit at the end of the episode, as documented here on a custom in the style of 1989 Upper Deck.
Third grade was also the year I first started noticing girls. My earliest kinda-sorta crush was a cute blonde classmate named Christina, if I recall correctly. And as far as celebrity crushes, I had strange new feelings for both Jennifer and Mary Anne on the show, but I think I'd have to rank Mary Anne narrowly on top. And she looks pretty adorable on this '88 Score style custom.
Me leave out Cousin Larry?! Don't be ridiculous. Had to get a shot of his great "Manager Larry" jersey on this custom in the style of the team leaders subset of 1988 Topps.
To be honest with you, I didn't bother making backs for the above two cards, and so I made them one two-sided custom (Mary Anne is on the other side of the Royals Leaders). But maybe someday I'll get around to making backs for them.
Now here's a real card..
I was happy to see Bronson Pinchot get an autograph card in the 2018 Leaf Pop Century product, and ended up winning this one recently. And if you're a regular reader of my blog, you probably know what's coming next. Yep, I couldn't just leave this boring celebrity auto alone.. I had to make a custom overlay to spice it up...
My own certified autograph Balki Bartokomous baseball card! Love it! Now we are so happy we do the Dance of Joy!
Thanks for reading, and remember to keep on standing tall on the wings of your dreams!
While I was on vacation last weekend walking on the sandy New Hampshire shore, I was comforted by a couple facts.
Fact #1) I installed a security camera in my card room so I could keep an eye on my collection. Is this paranoid of me? Perhaps. But it's reassuring to be able to take a live look in on my babies when I'm across the country and see them safe and sound, plus be notified of any unexpected movement in the room.
Fact #2) Arriving home from a few days with a "vacation hold" on your mail means there's a good chance you've got a sweet mailday in your future. And this trip didn't let me down in that regard.
Here's the card I was most excited about. The great Sandy Koufax! And it's in perfect condition too. "Perfect" meaning it has a flaw to drastically drop the price, but barely takes away from the beauty of the card. Something like a raunchy crease across the face or some dark markings.. those could be deal-breakers for me. But a bad corner that doesn't effect the photo or any text? Hey, if the price is right, I'm totally on board for that. A recent eBay discount code and an accepted Best Offer helped bring down the price even more. Unlike my '56 Hank Aaron, no custom overlay is necessary for this paper loss. Koufax cards are no strangers to counterfeiting, so I wanted to land a graded '64 for my setbuild for peace of mind.
Very clean back, too. Koufax was coming off his monster 1963 season where he won the Cy Young, MVP, and World Series MVP.
I also paired Sandy with the 1964 Topps card of former Dodger cohort, the Duke of Flatbush...
Looks odd to see Duke Snider as a Met, but I guess at least the uniform colors are close enough.
This is Duke's final card from his playing days. After one year back in the Big Apple, he finished up his career with a lackluster '64 season in San Francisco, but did not get a card in 1965 Topps (probably a blessing to Dodgers fans who ache at the sight of their all-time greats suited up for the rival Giants).
Cool to add these two of HOFers to my 1964 Topps setbuild. And that's a fact! :P
I'm now literally just one more card away from crossing the ⅔ complete milestone, so if you've got any '64s available and want to feel the pride of getting a fellow collector to within a third of the set left to chase, please check out my needs and get in touch about a trade. Thanks!
After scoring a blaster of 2018 Topps Archives on its release day Wednesday, I grabbed a Target giftcard from home and went back the next day for another one. Glad I did, as the second one turned out to be better than the first.
An auto! Not exactly Ohtani, but when I saw Bill James listed on the autograph checklist, I made a mental note to track down a copy someday. So I was very happy to have pulled this one. I'm not much of a sabermetrics guy, honestly, as I can barely get my head around the OPS stat much less all the more intricate "cyber stats" or whatever you call 'em, but I can still appreciate his considerable contribution to modern baseball.
Some keepers from the '59 design base cards. Happy to see Hoyt crack the checklist.
And some more keepers. I was happy to not pull any dupes from my two blasters. If my 2 hobby boxes have good collation (not due out till next month.. ugh), I'm thinking I might try to complete the base set. But maybe not. I might decide on just going for the guys I collect plus all the Sandlot stuff.
Pulled some cool kids here. Squints is a good one to get from the Sandlot cards. Plus I was able to call dibs on the available Sandlot stuff Julie pulled (Yes!!), so I should be sitting pretty on my goal there (though it's the autograph set that'll really put a Herculean bite in my wallet, but at least there are no big names like Charlie Sheen and Kevin Costner of past Archives movie auto sets).
The Yount rookie reprint is nice. And the Yankees Future Stars is probably one of the best you can pull, with Torres and Andujar having big rookie seasons. I'm guessing these 3 inserts are 1-per-blaster, as I also pulled one of each in the earlier box I ripped.
To wrap it up... I always look forward to Archives every year. I've accepted that the current design team at Topps isn't gonna nail the classic designs perfectly. Stuff like putting the position as "Outfielder" isn't of just "Outfield" is annoying, but I can get over it. And fonts being a little off and text positioned strangely. But for the most part, they did a fine job this year. Sucks about the hobby version being delayed.. I guess maybe one or two of the Sandlot folks took too long to submit their autographed cards? (I have yet to see any Wendy autos pop up).. but that's just my guess. I probably won't buy anymore Archives this year since I've got those two pre-ordered hobby boxes coming eventually. But yeah, it's a fun product.
Here's an "extra credit" addition to my already-completed 2016 Cryptozoic Ghostbusters autograph set. One of the names sadly missing on the auto checklist was Frank Welker, who was the voice of both Slimer and Ray on the Real Ghostbusters cartoon.
And of course Ghostbusters is what I'm most interested in at the moment, so I whipped up a custom overlay for the Mars Attacks card. A difficulty was presented by the fact that all the Cryptozoic Ghostbusters autos are horizontal. So if I wanted to make a custom that would aesthetically fit in with those, it would take some additional design work on my part. I didn't want to just turn the real card into a "cut signature" since I'd hate to destroy the original. So I had to get a little creative...
It turned out pretty decent! Not perfect, but good enough for my collection. (I'd love to find some kind of diecutting device so I could make better window cutouts. I bet if I went to a big crafting store they could help me out with something.) But yeah, happy to now (kinda) have a certified Slimer auto! And good ol' Ray too, of course. As with all my overlays, the original card remains unaltered, just with a custom resting on top of it in the penny sleeve.
For comparison, here's the clearly INAUTHENTIC custom auto I made a few months ago, along with an actual Ray auto from the set.
Anyways, glad I could shoehorn a certified Frank Welker autograph into my Ghostbusters set, joining Lorenzo Music as someone I added thanks to a custom overlay. I hope to eventually add signatures of other Ghostbusters folks who didn't get real autos in the set. In fact, I just snagged another one on COMC as I finished typing up this post, so expect me to work some magic on that once I eventually pull the trigger on my next shipment.
