Santa Sure Was Good To Me

I have decided to poke my head up out of hibernation for a post this evening.  What might you say awoke this sleeping bear after about a 3 month rest?  I got my Secret Santa goods today in the mail.

They might have been a day late but boy it was worth it.  I was lucky enough to draw friend of the blogging community and active twitter Bosox guy Mark Hoyle as my Secret Santa.  Apparently he sent a package to my old mailing address in CA.  He tried rerouting it and it is apparently sleeping somewhere in Kansas trying to find its way to me.  Mark, being the great guy that he is, got another package sent my way and it has to be the best backup gift I have ever received.

 The package contained a variety of Giants items from Gypsy Oak, according to Mark he is a friend of his named Jeff.  I believe I have seen a couple items posted in blogs or on twitter but this is the first time I have gotten a chance to hold any of his creations in my hands - Jeff is one talented dude!

I am going to go biggest to smallest in terms of what I show.  Check out this awesome Christy Mathewson piece.  It is patterned after a vintage Allen & Ginter card and printed on very heavy stock.  The crease and notches you see on the card were designed to feel authentic as well. This is an amazing piece.

 The back is even done up nicely with a sticker and stamp along with some art work.  I placed this standard card sized Willie Mays net to it to show off the Mays and to give you some perspective on the size.  The Mays is great looking as well.

 Next up are a pair of post card sized photos of Mel Ott and Willie Mays.   These really show off the artistic style of Gypsy Oak and are both beautiful pieces.

I also scored a pair of tobacco card replicas of Bugs Raymond and Roger Brenahan.  These are also a very nice design with perforated edges and nice crisp colors.

The final items are this foursome of Giants HOF greats, Monte Irvin, Willie Mays, Willie McCovey and Christy Mathewson.  These are little minis, maybe half the size of the tobacco cards.  There is a perforation in the middle, you can bend them in half if you would like.  I have already paged these up and gotten all these into my vintage Giants binder but had to break up the set a bit.  The Willie Mac made its way into the player collection binder.

Mark, thank you for the amazing gift and the effort to get it to me with the mailing mix up.  If memory serves me correctly, I gifted you last year in the Secret Santa and I think you one upped me this year.  I will have to make it up one of these days.

As for my blogging future, I suspect I may be doing posts more frequent than quarterly but my days of trying to blog daily (never really reached that for a consistent period anyone) are probably behind me.  It is a variety of factors including a job where I have to be in the office every day (used to work at home 1-3 days/week before moving to Kansas), the kids getting older and more demanding (not bad just takes away from "free" hobby time), a large hobby purchase I made that is taking forever to go through (hope to share real soon and probably the primary source of the 3 month break) and a focus on trying to get healthier as I approach the big 5 - 0 (trying to get up early to go the gym each day which requires me to go to bed earlier, hence less hobby time).

I still love the hobby, still love our blogging community, still appreciate the kindness and generosity of all of you.  I know I don't owe you an explanation and heck most of you probably don't even care but just thought I would include an update and hopefully you will see a few more posts in the not too distant future.

Hope you all had a Merry Christmas!

I have solved my issue with oversized cards

I have long had a challenge with how to store my odd sized cards, particularly those that are over sized.  I have picked up a few 4 pocket, 2 pocket and 1 pocket pages over the years but typically I have several different cards stuffed in each pocket. My Rickey Henderson and Willie McCovey binders were the worst.  With regards to my Giants collection, I just had a box that I put them all in unprotected.  In addition to cards, I have picked up quite a few postcard team sets for my Giants collection.

Over the holidays I finally solved my problem.  When I was down visiting some friends near my old house I stopped by my former LCS and bought a complete box of 4 pocket and 2 pocket pages - 100 of each.  I have gone through my player binders and those cards are now displayed much better.  I have started work on my Giants collection as well and hope to have that done in the next couple weeks.

I now feel much more enthusiasm when running across over sized cards and recently picked up two very nice ones.

 First up is a felt pennant feature Giants HOFer Mel Ott. This came out of 2013 Panini Cooperstown.  There was one box topper per hobby box.  I already had a McCovey from this set and am happy to add Master Melvin.  The red color doesn't particularly match the Giants (a Phillie or Red would look pretty cool in this set) but still a decent overall look.

 Turning the pennant over you see a box at the top with the card number and all the legal mumbo jumbo.  I do like the induction year into the HOF as an addition however.  In addition to Ott and McCovey, Christy Mathewson and Carl Hubbell are in this set.  I think I will try to track them down. If I pick up a second McCovey I could have a nice, full 4 pocket page in the Giants binder.

 The second pickup is this excellent Buster Posey card from 2011 Topps Lineage.  This is modeled after the Topps Giants cards from 1964.  I love the image in the the catchers gear and the baseball in the corner with the name/position/team is great.  I already had the Tim Lincecum from this set so I now have the Giants team set.

The back is pretty cool.  It has a newspaper feel.  A nice black and white photo of his swing follow through and some info about Buster's rookie year NL Player of the Week performance.

I am very happy to have added these cards to my collection and even happier I have a proper way to store and display them.

My Trip to Cooperstown - Part 3 - The Oversized and Oddball

Here is my 3rd of 4 posts about my trip to Cooperstown a little ways back.  I had intended to do these back to back to back to back but my posting has been sporadic at best.  In addition to the normal work and home duties, we hosted Thanksgiving and my wonderful little girl's first birthday party over the past couple week.  Also, I have been working to get my card room in order now that most of the rest of the house is in order.  Once it is fully done, I will get some pics up share the set up - however I am still hours and hours away from being done.

The cards to share tonight are all over-sized oddballs.  Most were purchased from a store that is located in the parking lot of the baseball diamond on Main St. in Cooperstown.  I had missed it on my first trip but will not miss it again. The guy has been there for decades and specializes in oddballs.  He had team bags hanging throughout the store with TCMA sets, lots of little box sets and odd sized cards in all the nooks and crannies.  I was the only person in the store for most of my visit and the guy was really friendly.  He gave me a gift at checkout that will be part of my final post.

On to the cards:

The first 6 scans are All-Time Greats postcards put out by TCMA in the early 70s.  I really enjoy the black and white photography captured on these.   Based on the checklist I was able to find, I still need 3 more to finish off a Giants team set.

 Here are some additional postcards with, in my opinion even better photography.  These 4 were printed in 1978 by Dover Publishing and are perforated and were taken from a book titled Great Baseball Players of the Past: Thirty-Two Picture Postcards.  There are 2 more Giants to track down and I can't wait to see what they look like.  The old time photography is just amazing.

This card features rivals Willie Mays and Don Drysdale and was printed in 1984 by TCMA.  It is a nice photo paying tribute to two Hall of Famers.

This is another TCMA Postcard issue from 1985 of Willie Mays from back in the New York days solo.  Somewhat of an odd photo but a pleasant add to the Giants collection.

This next card is an oddball Exhibit card of Catcher Roger Bresnahan.  As I kid I had a solid stack of these cards from a swap meet purchase, I need to see if I can track those down.  In the meantime this card will have to tide me over.

This item is a flip book of Barry Bonds.  I haven't cracked the cellophane yet and I am not sure if I will. I am kind of being stupid as this isn't something I would ever sell, it is now part of my collection so I should just crack it open and enjoy the flipping.
 

 My only non-Giants card of this purchase is the Jumbo Topps Finest card for my Rickey Henderson collection.  This card has been elusive for me and I was very happy to run across in across the country and bring it home.

The final item is the Willie McCovey item.  It appears to be some sort of a pencil sketch.  It is signed Amore '90 in the bottom right corner. It has a pretty strong resemblance to Stretch, my only challenge is going to be how to display it in my binder.  It may end up in its own single page as I think it is too big to fit into a double page.

There you have it, all my odd sized purchase for that trip to Cooperstown.  My last post will display a couple items that aren't card related (but baseball related) during my Cooperstown trip.

Mail Day - The Joys of Combined Shipping

I really like to take advantage of combined shipping on eBay. It is tough for me to pay $3 to ship one card but when you can get a decent stack for $3-5 it makes it much more palatable.  I ran across a single card I really wanted from a seller recently and did some searching in his inventory and picked up a pretty nice stack of cards.

 First up is this nice card featuring two HOF Giants, Johnny Mize and Mel Ott, although Mize is in a Yankee uniform.  This is from the Rival Factions insert set and is numbered 0309/1000.  This is kind of an interesting choice of players as Mize and Ott were teammates during the last couple years of Ott's career and Mize didn't play on the Yankees until after Ott was retired.  Regardless, I like the card and the Ott picture is pretty cool featuring the Giants across his chest.

 A couple of cards from my favorite Giants 3B of all time, Matt Williams.  Although the bottom card doesn't look it, these are both gold. I love the photography in the Collector's Choice set, for a low end set, Upper Deck sure did it right.  Williams is stretching out to snag a grounder and in the Flair insert he is honored for his Hot Glove.

Speaking of Collector's Choice and great photography, I was able to pick up 7 Gold Signature parallels from the 1996 set.  I was surprised to find these all with one seller as I thought the Gold Sigs were pretty tough pulls.  The photography on these is great, particularly the 4 horizontal cards. One day I am going to have to pull a bunch of Kirt Manwarings cards for a post, the man has some great looking cards - gotta love catchers.

 I also scored 3 Barry Bonds cards.  I am tempted to peel the Finest insert but the coating has been in place for 14 years so I am not sure I can actually pull the trigger. I am sure it would look much Finer in a peeled state.  The UD Ionix insert looks great in person and actually scanned better than I suspected. The final card is an SPx Radiance parallel from 1998.  I really like these cards but there are somewhat hard to come by.  This one is serial numbered to 1000. I knew these cards held high book values from my days of trading on the forums so I looked this one up - $50!  That is crazy for a card /1000.  I am happy to add it to my collection.

The final card is the only non-Giant and the card that started it all. I don't know if I had even seen this card but I needed it for my Rickey Henderson collection.  When marking it off my checklist I noticed that I only need 3 more cards of his that were released in 1993.  The only years I have all his cards are 1979 and 1980 where he had only 1 card in each year and 1983 - with 40 cards.  Adding those final 3 cards might be a fun side goal, there are a total of 51 of his cards in 1993.

I was pretty happy with this package, thank goodness for combined shipping to allow me to put together packages like this.