1965 Topps Sandy Koufax and Dodgers friends

Amazing package from gcrl arrived the other day. I was super excited for this card. Apart from a beat-up league leaders card, I don't think I previously had any playing-days Sandy Koufax in my collection. It pairs nicely with the sweet autograph I splurged for last month. But technically, this isn't for the Koufax PC, but rather the 1965 setbuild. It's in the right the condition I like for vintage: just off enough to keep the Slabbing Sect away, but still a fantastic, eye-pleasing specimen of a baseball card.

The back's a beaut, too.

And we're not through with the vintage Koufax...

Jim also included this iconic LL card featuring the one-two punch of Koufax and Don Drysdale.

Jim is the cardsphere's premiere Steve Garvey collector, and looks like he had some dupes available to share with me.

We differ in that my fond memories of Garv are from his Padre days, while I'm sure gcrl would have rather he spent his entire career in Dodger blue.

Nice selection of 80s oddballs.

Here's a card that made my eyes light up. Terrific looking relic card.

Great stuff.. thanks, Jim!

And there's more from the package, too, but I'm going to spread it out over another post or two.

- --o

And since this post is heavy on Dodgers and it happens to be Ron Cey's birthday, here's a bonus card to show off today that I picked up off eBay a little while back:

Ain't that pretty?! You know I'm crazy about Topps Retired, and if I see a refractor auto I don't have pop up with a low opening bid, you can bet I'll throw a bid on it.

He'll always be an Oakland Athletic to me.

Just kidding.

Cey seem like a great guy, and is very generous signing autographs for fans. Got a nice TTM return from him last year.

Happy Birthday, Penguin!

My first time opening a pretty girls box

This month's box of cards from my Black Friday stockpile happens to be the first "cards of beautiful women" product I've opened. I've got a little "Girlie Card" minicollection of attractive ladies on cardboard but those were all from trades or purchases, nothing I pulled myself aside from maybe a random card from A&G or something.

I figured I'd line up this box break with Valentine's Day, since amore is in the air.. and there's nothing quite as romantic as ogling scantily-clad young women who aren't your wife, right?
Er, maybe I didn't fully think this through. LOL

(Per my usual disclaimer with these types of posts: I'm incredibly lucky to have an amazing wife whom I love the hell out of. I have nothing but the utmost respect for women. I'm big on women's rights, and have no doubt that the world would be a better place with less men in charge. I also happen to have a healthy appreciation for attractive ladies, which would be dishonest for me to deny, and that interest has spilled over into my card collection.)

Anyways, this box seemed like a good deal for just the price of a blaster.

This seems to be something of a "repack" type thing from Benchwarmer, clearing out some older inventory. In the box, you get a random hobby box from a previously-released Benchwarmer product, plus a special silver foil pack of 7 good cards.

I ripped open the silver pack first.

Ha, kiss cards are kinda funny. Sherry Goggin and Shay Lyn seem to do a lot of athletic-type modeling. I wasn't familiar with Kerri Kasem, but figured she might be related to radio legend Casey Kasem, and yep, turns out that's her dad.

Speaking of famous last names, Nikki Ziering is somebody I actually already knew of. She was married to Ian Ziering from Beverly Hills, 90210 and the Sharknado film series. Nikki has been in Playboy and a few reality shows, and I seem to remember her being a frequent guest on the Howard Stern show back in the day.

The dual auto is kinda cool. That's not the easiest font to read, but I think this pair is AJ and Laura.

Yowza! My silver pack finished strong with a couple knock-outs. Kara Monaco isn't a name I was familiar with, but she looks super cute. Turns out she was 2006 Playmate of the Year and has since done a little acting and was on Big Brother in 2012.

Cover girl Sara Underwood is looking fine with that ABA basketball. Too bad this card is just a dumb promo.. not an auto or anything interesting.. so it's weak as far as considering it a "hit". But yeah, these 2 cards are definitely both locks for my Girlie Card collection. (The rest of the above autos are available for trade, so just let me know if something caught your eye.)

Now onto the mystery hobby box...

World Cup Soccer. From 2006, I believe. Cool, whatever.

Some of my favorites. Too bad the base cards don't have names on the front.

But the names are on the back, typically along with a "backside" photo, as is usual for Benchwarmer cards. A little bio and/or vitals would have been nice, but oh well.

The Racer Girls inserts are 2 per box. Nice looking cards.

The Jaime Bergman is actually a dupe for me, as I got it in a lot when I bought an auto card of hers back in 2014.

I'm not gonna try building the set, nor do I plan to hang onto cards other than the small stack of my favorites, so I've got a lot of cards headed to my tradeables box, including a dozen or so dupes. Anybody interested in letting me thin out a few of these on you? Let me know!

The hobby box promises one auto. Let's see how I did to wrap things up...

Nice! Not sure who Katarina Van Derham is, but she's very cute, so I'm happy with this auto.

So there you go. Not bad for just under $20.. 7 on-card autos and a bunch of additions to my minicollection of pretty girls. Fun to mix it up a little, but I don't plan to rip much more Benchwarmers product (though I do have another small box also from my Black Friday stockpile scheduled to rip this summer).

Thanks for stopping by and Happy Valentine's Day!

Are you fo' real?? (Buybacks 'n' Bunt)

I haven't bought any 2017 Topps, neither unopened nor on the secondary market, yet as you can clearly see, somehow I was able to obtain some of those buybacks all the kids are crazy for. But wait! Take a closer look at the above photo. These are homemade buybacks! Pretty ingenious, right?! You can literally turn every card in your collection into a homemade buyback! All it takes is a pen and a dash of danger.

Sorry, guys, these ones aren't for sale, so don't even bother trying to talk me out of them. But feel free to make you own.

Switching gears to something slightly less stupid.. I've still been hopping on the Bunt app just about everyday since getting a smartphone around Christmas. While I still think it's crazy to consider paying for a picture of a card, it's kind of a fun way to kill a couple minutes during my morning public transportation commute. I wonder when they're gonna get 2017 digital cards on there.. still flogging the old 2016 design. Maybe I'll even try to figure out how to play the game aspect of the app once the season starts. It's my understanding it's sort of like a fantasy baseball thing?

But I suppose my true goal with Bunt is to score some rare cards on there that I can sell for a few bucks, then use that money to buy actual cards. I haven't attempted any sales yet, but maybe one of these days if/when I pull something big.

This might be my favorite digital card I've pulled so far. These were a special 1987 Topps Football insert set briefly available during Super Bowl weekend. I scored the Trout and the Braun. There's one on eBay right now for 99¢, so I guess this isn't gonna be the card to monetize my Bunt experience.

Some of my other favorite inserts:

Wound up with 3 of these Altuves somehow.

I believe this Gwynn was gifted to me by a cardsphere buddy.

And I also typically jump on the Star Wars Card Trader app most days after I check in with Bunt. It's pretty similar, though seems tough to pull anything special, and I have no idea what's up with the "game" aspect to it, I just open packs and hope for something cool. Again, it'd be nice to eventually be able to sell some of those fake cards to fund the purchase of real cards, but yeah, I like Star Wars so it's kinda fun to rip a digital pack. Here are some highlights from my lil' virtual SW card collection:

Cool.

I'm not necessarily trying to convince anyone to get in on the action, just scraping a post together out of some of my favorite digital cards. Don't worry, traditional cardboard collectors, I won't make a frequent habit out of posts like this.

While I'm not a huge hockey fan, I've also tried to find the Upper Deck ePack app, but couldn't find it. Is it not available on Android or something?

But yeah, Bunt, SWCT, and Twitter are mainly what I mess around on my phone with. I've resisted any dumb, addictive games as I don't want to get sucked into them. I used to play Mafia Wars back in the day and I got borderline unhealthy about it, pointlessly leveling up all the time. I can barely keep up with my Twitter feed. And yeah, I actually try to keep up with my Twitter feed. It might make me look like a jerk when I don't follow back someone who follows me, but damn, I can barely keep up with the accounts I follow already.


I'll end the post with a half-hearted plea...

I think Bunt "free digital pack" code cards like above were inserted in 2016 Bunt (physical) packs, and they're due to expire at the end of February 2017. If any of you readers have any of these sitting around unused on the cusp of being wasted, I'd be grateful if you could hook me up with them. Whether physically by snail mail or just scratch it off and email me the code, I'd be happy to put them to good use. I don't want them enough to, like, trade you good cards just for them, but if you're thinking of sending me cards before the month's out and have a couple to throw in, go for it. Or if you have a bunch and email me the codes, I'd definitely mark you down for future considerations.

Anyways, yeah if you have any of the expiring Bunt code cards you're not gonna use, let me know. Thanks!

Basketball Cards, c'mon, grab your friends

I got some basketball cards in recently. Growing up in San Diego, I was out in the cold as far as having a hometown NBA team to root for, so I never really got into the sport too heavily. But I'm still a casual fan, and keep a passing familiarity with what's going on in the game, especially since I started watching ESPN's Pardon The Interruption with some regularity again (I try to schedule hitting the work gym around the time it comes on so I can watch it while I'm on the stationary bike or treadmill.) While I don't have a favorite team, I've grown to feel a particular appreciation for the San Antonio Spurs, just because they seem like a classy organization who wins a lot with minimal drama bullshit. And because of this I kinda-sorta have little player collections for Tim Duncan and Tony Parker.

This sharp relic #'d /99 was a recent contest win from Sport Card Collectors. He runs a bunch of contests, many of which I enter, and every so often I end up on top of the randomized list. He's had a couple issues lately with contest relics he sent out getting damaged in the PWE (sending relics in a PWE can be risky, as the relic hole makes the card more susceptible to creasing when slightly bent than a standard card), but lucky for me, this one arrived safe and sound.

Thanks, SCC!

-  -- ---o

Keeping the Spurs theme going, I just got a surprise trade package from Billy at Cardboard History that gave my recently-begun Tim Duncan PC a huge boost.

When I decided to officially add Tim Duncan to the list of guys I collect, I gave Billy a heads-up, figuring he likely had a few dupes he could share with me, and sure enough, he hit me with a baker's dozen of great cards.

Billy is one of the rare guys on the cardsphere who doesn't really collect baseball, but he still managed to scrape up 3 baseball cards for me. Ha, I'm not sure why the emphasis on Giants, but I'm not going to complain about a Willie Mays insert and a couple shiny Buster Posey cards.

I feel like Topps ripped off Panini for that particular refractor parallel design used on the Fearless card on their new 1987 Topps "silver pack" parallels. Judge for yourself:

NOT MY CARD. Picture snagged from eBay.

Very similar looking background pattern.. sort of a Transformers logo type design. Not sure why Topps couldn't have come up with something fresh. Almost as bad as naming their fishfractors "Prism" refractors even though Panini is obviously the card company most associated with the term.

But back to the trade package..

Billy also included a magnetic one-touch for me (a little Goo Gone should get that price tag off without much trouble) and a Jason Collins card for my Pride PC.

Big thanks, Billy! Much appreciated.

- - - --o

This last one for today is from a recent combined-shipping eBay order, but it fits in with this post...

Just a plain white swatch, but nice to add a hit to my sprouting Tim Duncan PC. He doesn't seem to have many auto cards out there, and the ones he has are very expensive, so I probably won't be landing one anytime soon. But hopefully with his extra free time in retirement, he'll sign an autograph contract with Panini and get some more autos on the market.

So that's it for now. Basketball cards aren't a priority for my collection, but it's nice to add a few once in a while. Have a great weekend, everybody!

Adventure Time, c'mon, grab your friends

Just a quick post today featuring a couple autos I picked up recently from the Adventure Time card product that Cryptozoic put out a few years ago.

While I like the show, really I just wanted these comedians' autographs, so these cards were the best vehicles for that. Each ran me about $11 shipped.

Maria Bamford is really funny and weird. If you have Netflix, I'd recommend her show Lady Dynamite as well as the few stand-up specials of hers on there. She does a lot of ancillary voices on Adventure Time, with Wildberry Princess being the one they chose for the card. Her signature kinda looks like it says "REDO" but it works for me.

Brian Posehn is a really funny guy who guested on Adventure Time for an episode. Dig the "...business" inscription. My wife and I caught a live performance from him last October, which was filmed for a special called 25x2 which is now available to stream on Amazon if you subscribe to a service called Seeso. I'd kinda like to check out how it turned out, but probably not enough to pay for it, especially since I already saw it live. To copy and past what I said about Posehn last year, he's that big ogre monotone comedian. He's been in some of my favorite shows over the years, such as The Sarah Silverman Program, Mr. Show, and Mission Hill.

We just watched through Mission Hill again last month. Really underappreciated animated comedy. It was like the 3rd or 4th time through for me, but first for my wife. I think she liked it.

She's a big standup comedy fan, and as such these are a couple cards that I can use to almost impress her with a little (She doesn't really care about cards or sports, so it's opportunities like this and when I got that Carrie Brownstein First Pitch insert [she loves the band Sleater-Kinney] when I can try to share the hobby with her, even the tiniest bit.) She's got a birthday coming up, and for her present asked for tickets to a big comedy festival happening here this spring. $165 for 2 tickets! Shit better be funny! haha.

But yeah, back to the cards, here are the backs. I already had the Erik Estrada from this set, which I posted about last December. While there are several more autos from it that I wouldn't mind picking up someday, the one I'm specifically keeping an eye out for at a good price on is Neil Patrick Harris. Gotta love NPH.

That's it for today. See you next time.

Sparkly 1/1 and a trade roundup for the books

I'd been keeping an eye on reasonably priced "canary diamond" (sparkly yellow) parallels from 2011 Topps to add to my frankenset. There're 1/1, so, not cheap, but they look good and would add some variety to my frankenbuild. This one popped up and I was able to land it for a decent price.

Matt Garza hasn't had a winning record in a while, but he's still a decent pitcher (or active, at least), so to score such a 1/1 for a price comfortably sub-blaster was a solid deal (shipping from Japan was more than the winning bid). But really, I didn't care who it was, just wanted one of those rare yellow diamond cards to add to my ridiculous parallel setbuild. Garza could end up being opening day starter for the 2017 Brewers, so let's hope he regains his no-hit form and makes this a shrewd pickup for me. But regardless, it adds a splash of sparkly yellow and some one-of-oneness to my frankenset.

And speaking of 2011 Topps parallels, I recently got a sweet lot of them from Chris at Nachos Grande.

Among the highlights here are a Mark Trumbo RC, Andrew McCutchen, and Trevor Hoffman sporting Brewers duds from the end of his career. This lot helps me get passed the 30% complete point. Chris is also working on a 2011 Topps parallel set, but his is Diamond-only. So these must've have been dupes he wound up with. Very nice of him to hook me up with these.

Big thanks, Chris! Unfortunately, your wantlist and my tradebox don't have much common ground, but I'll do my best to round up a hearty return package for you soon.

-  -  - - ---o

Next up in last week's incoming trade packages is Tony Burbs from Wrigley Roster Jenga, hitting me back for the Holiday Blast PWE I sent him a while back.

The Steph is actually a Valentine's Day card Tony used to write his note on.. cute. The other 2 are Sports Illustrated cards of the 2 current Astros I collect.. awesome! I think these are the first SI For Kids cards in my collection.

Ha, Tony knows I'm a sucker for pretty ladies, and threw in a bunch of swimsuit cards from 1994. I think Kelly and Hana are my favorites of the lot.

And Tony's latest batch of cards wraps up with a nice score from a 2016 Topps Holiday box, including a metallic snowflake Bryce Harper and a Chris Sale jersey card.

Great stuff.. thanks, Tony!

-  -  - - ---o

Last up for today is Matt from Bob Walk The Plank, and you know he goes big. I already showed off the Trout rookie from him a few days ago, but here are the other cards in his impressive mailer, heavy on Panini National Treasures hits.

Alex Dickerson had a solid half-season in San Diego after tearing up the minors to start 2016, and I'm hoping he can build on that in 2017. This is now easily the best piece in my little collection of his cards, boasting an on-card auto and 3 different jersey swatches, with a /99 serial number.

And gotta love the Wil Myers relic featuring bits of patches, all under the watchful eye of Jackie Robinson. And it isn't just a random gimmick for a card design; the back certifies the memorabilia was worn by Wil on Jackie Robinson Day (April 15), 2015. Numbered 22/25. Neat card!

Ha, I think this is the first time I've gotten a brand new magnetic one-touch in a trade. Very appreciated!

Just one last card to show.. but if you want to get technical about it, it isn't really a card...

It's a book!

This is the very first booklet card in my collection.

Crackin 'er open reveals an exquisite specimen of Wil Myers' world-renowned penmanship paired with a massive chunk of wood. Love it!

Been a while since I've read a book cover-to-cover. I thoroughly enjoyed Squiggle Man Gazes Into The Wooden Mirror and would call it a must-read!

The tricky thing with these is storing it. Guess I'll keep it closed in a thick one-touch for now, but hope to land a special case for book cards one of these days.

Thanks a ton, Matt! Hope you like the cards I sent your way, as well. (I dropped them in the mail Saturday afternoon and incredibly, they showed up across the country on Monday. Didn't even send them Priority. I wish the post office would always be that fast!)


Thanks again to Chris, Tony, and Matt for the great trade packages, and thanks to the rest of you for checking out the goods with me.