McCovey Monday #71 - Willie McCovey 2013 Topps Museum Collection Quad Relic

My favorite player of all time is Hall of Famer Willie McCovey.  I have amassed a collection of over 1200 different  McCovey cards since I started collecting him in the late 1980s.  I will show off one of my favorite cards every Monday.  Stretch was one of the most feared hitters of all time and I am excited to show off my collection.

Today I am going to share a great looking card I picked up a few weeks back from one of my favorite sets from a design perspective, Museum Collection.  I believe Topps has done a great job with this set from the base cards all the way to the hits.  This McCovey comes from the 2013 release:

The quad pieces of bat are circled in silver foil that doesn't quite come through in the scan.  The set name, Primary Pieces Legends label, McCovey's name, position and the Giants logo are all in foil as well.  I like how the picture is incorporated into the middle of the card and while the picture has been used a few times before, it is perfect for a quad bat card with Willie holding multiple bats on his shoulder.  The only small beef I have with the card is listing the position as Outfielder.  He did play some outfield but is better know for his work at first base for the Giants.  Just a great looking card.

Flip it over to the back and Topps gives you 4 "Quad Qualities" to keep with the quad theme.  Nothing new to me here but I like #4, showing that Willie was a classy and respected leader.  With only 25 of these cards in existence, I am very happy to have one in my collection.

I should be posting the winner of my contest later today or tomorrow.  One last chance to enter, a few good guesses buy nobody has nailed is exactly.

A Big Win at the LCS

I have posted a few times about one of my LCSs having $10 Mystery Packs.  They typically have them for Baseball, Football and Basketball.  I typically stick to the baseball and have won some good stuff.  They list odds for winning a 1st prize at 1:50, 2nd prize 1:25 and 3rd prize 1:16.6.

A few weeks back the first prize for the football packs was a card that fit a long time want for me that I had never acquired.  I usually stick to 1-2 packs each trip and had picked up 4 football packs without any wins.  On a recent trip, I decided to pick up 2 baseball packs and 1 football pack.  I started with the baseball packs and didn't win any of the big prizes.  When I opened the football pack I was pleasantly surprised to get a certificate for a win and in looking more closely realized I won the 1st prize!

Here is the card:

This card is a 2011 Topps Legends Relic Auto of former 49er and Hall of Famer Steve Young.  The card is serial numbered 19/25.  A few years back I made a list of football autos I would want to add to my collection and a Steve Young in a 49er uniform was one of my top wants.

I have won a great Roberto Clemente bat card, a Tony Oliva auto card, a Duke Snider auto card, a Josh Hamilton auto card, and also pulled non-win cards with autos of HOFers like Al Kaline and Wade Boggs but I think this card has to rank as my top win from the LCS Mystery Packs.

He's a Beauty

Don't forget to enter my contest.  I plan to keep it open through the weekend. 

I was recently trolling for cheap 2014 National Treasures cards for my Giants collection and ran across a Beauty of a card:

This is a Nickname relic card of New York Giants Hall of Famer Dave Bancroft.  I had heard of Bancroft in some of my Giants and HOF historical reading but didn't know too much about him including his nickname.  When I got this card I turned it over can got the explanation:

Apparently an annoying habit was turned around on him and resulted in a nickname.  I figure that I won't be able to add a Bancroft auto into my HOF collection so this relic fits Beautifully into both the Giants and HOFer collections.

Keeping with the post theme, I leave you with one of my favorite songs and a great video from the 80s:

Happy Topps Day Continued and a Contest!

Time to show the highlights of the rest of my Jumbo Box of 2015 Topps.  I will share a few cards of each of the 9 remaining packs.  If you wait until the end of the post, I will share details of a contest.  I pulled perhaps my best pull ever out of a Topps flagship product and the identification of that card will be tied to the contest.

Here are my favorites from Pack #2:

 A great final tribute to Paul Konerko, glad to see him properly honored as well.  I will include a few base cards in each scan and the Kershaw and Jeter show how the horizontal cards show some action.  The Cron card has the Future Stars designation in foil across the top.  I liked the Gentry based on how far up the handle the bunt seems to be hitting the bat.  The inspired play inserts seem to pair a current and past star of a team, good pairing of Kimbrel and Smoltz.  Topps included some stamped buy back cards and it was cool to get a 60s Senator although the condition isn't great.  The Ted Williams picture has been used quite a bit but it is still a nice card.  Finally a celebration of Jose Canseco's 40-40 season.


Pack #3:

 I didn't take a picture of the box or packs but Puig is the cover guy this year.  It appears not every team has a team card in Series 1.  Great insert of Mr. Cub, I am really a fan of all the insert sets this year and look forward to building them.  My second buy back was in this pack, this time from 1979.  These are getting a little old to me.  It is getting late and I am getting tired so I won't be commenting on all the cards but will share 9 per pack for your viewing pleasure.


Pack #4

 The Pineda is my first gold parallel.  The rookie cup makes a return.  The Trout picture is a great one, another horizontal card.  I am a huge fan of the Gallery of Greats inserts and was lucky enough to pull Giant HOFer Willie Mays.  I am guessing these will be the insert set that is hard to track down in Series 1.


Pack #5

 There is card #1 Derek Jeter, not a Yankee fan and while I respect Jeter, I was never a huge fan of his either but this is a great photo and fitting tribute.  The two rookies of the year came in the same pack.  The Pence photo is one of my favorites, gotta love the tongue sticking out.  Look how skinny A-Rod was back in the day.


Pack #6

 Take note of the Adam Jones card, it will come into play later in the break. The inserts in this box are great highlighted by Juan Marichal's high leg kick and a Roberto Clemente Gallery of Greats.  Man do those cards look nice!

Pack #7:

The highlight of Pack #7 was a hit that I am not sharing here.  It will be part of the contest at the bottom.  Still some good cards with a Buster Posey Archetypes, a wonderfully uniformed Nolan Ryan, an ESPN rookie flashback card and a Highlight of Roger Maris' 61 HRs.


Pack #8:

 Some good photos on the base cards here.  Another gold parallel, not real excited about any of the parallels in this box including the Gonzalez.  The Willie Mays insert is a great photo I don't recall seeing before - yeah!  The Roark card is a shiny rainbow parallel that isn't numbered.  The Iron Horse is a good looking card as well.


Pack #9:

 I love the photo of Dioner Navarro getting ready to slide.  I am thinking a disaster is imminent.  Teddy Ballgame, the Georgia Peach and Hawk all make insert appearances.  As teased a little earlier, I pulled an SP parallel of Adam Jones blowing a bubble.

Pack #10:

Here is the final pack of the Jumbo Box and the 3rd hit (although I didn't share hit #2).  The players I got for the Archetypes cards has been as good as good gets.  A great card of the Babe and a Career High relic of Reds right hander Johnny Cueto.


CONTEST DETAILS
The unshared hit I pulled is perhaps the greatest pull I have ever gotten from a Topps flagship box and one of my best pulls ever.  The contest is to guess the card I pulled.  If you know how the Jumbo boxes work, you should know that the card is autographed.  Outside of that I won't give any more hints.  Just leave a comment on this post with your guess of what the hit is and I will send a prize to the person who gets the closest to the right card.  Unless someone hits it right on, there may be some judgement involved but it is my contest so I have the right to use some judgement.

The winner will the the other 2 hits from this box, all my duplicates from this box (should be a solid starter lot) and some other cards I dig up that fit the winner's collecting interests.

It is been a while since I did a contest, hoping for lots of good guesses and fun entries.

Good luck!

Happy Topps Day!

I have decided to declare today as a holiday - Topps Day - in honor of the first release of the new year.  I didn't have the foresight to take the day off work (that will change next year) but I did rearrange my schedule to carve out an hour and a half in the middle of the day to hit the LCS and pick up my Jumbo Box.  I typically get 1 Jumbo Box per release and with only one exception several years back the Jumbo Box gets me the entire set.  I am hopeful for the same outcome this year with the expanded checklist.

Both of my boys had sports this evening and I have some work to do to prepare for a Scouting Leadership meeting tomorrow night so I decided to just crack the first pack tonight and share the entire contents in this post.  If all goes as planned I should have some time tomorrow evening to crack the rest of the box and will post the highlights of each pack in another post.  Sound good?

So which card gets the honor of being my first card of 2015?  Cardinals closer Trevor Rosenthal:

Not the most exciting subject on the card to me but hey it is the first.  I reserved commenting on the design until I had a card in hand.  I have to say that I really like the card fronts.  As you'll see shortly, the coloring around the border changes based on the team which I really like - a great change from the white borders we have been "blessed" with the last several years.  The team logo is well placed.  I like the presence of the position in the circles and those again change color based on the team.  The font used for the player name and team name seems to work well.  My only complaint after looking through my first back is that most of the pictures are zoomed in fairly tight.  I didn't seem much in the way of action shots, most of the photos are cropped from the knees up or the waist up.  I suspect when I share my favorites of future packs you will see the few select cards with zoomed out shots.

 I am not a major inspector of the backs of cards but thought I would share this one card back and share my thoughts.

 The color scheme of the front border flows onto the back, I like it.  Also the same team logo, font for the player name and team and circle for the position are used.  The card number is nice and white and easy to read against the colored background.  I am not sure why the Series One is included, that is pretty easy to decipher based on the card number.  The stats are just big enough for me to read pretty easily and seem to include the right stats.  Once again WAR is included which I like.  I find it interesting that Rosenthal had a WAR of 2.2 in 2013 as a set up guy then shifted to the closers role and had a pretty solid year but only had a WAR of 1.0.  I also like the 3 lines of info about the player.  Those with fewer years of service get the same treatment.  The only small issue I have is the white font with the biographical data, it is so small that even though it is white on color it is a little challenging to read.

Overall I give Topps high marks for this year's design, one of the best in recent history in my humble opinion.  On to the rest of Pack #1:

 This pack did not start off strong for me. The best I can say is 10 different teams so I got a good opportunity to view the different color schemes.

The next group of 9 heated up.  A rookie of possible Dodger phenom Joc Pederson and two great cards of my World Champion Giants.  We have the same old league leaders cards of the last few years, I wish they would change those up a bit.  The horizontal cards are bringing the action to the base set, very cool!

 A few more of the waste/knee and up cards and a little star power with Yu and Hamilton.  This is probably Matsuzaka's last MLB Topps card with a career of stats since he decided to sign with a Japanese team for next season.

 A couple more rookies and a really nice shot of Yordano Ventura.  Every time I see a Zack Wheeler card I am haunted by the trade that sent him away. I think in about 5 years that will haunt the Giants.

Here are the final 2 base cards and the inserts from the pack.  I am a fan of the archetypes inserts and very glad to have scored the Jeter.  For the last few years I have built all the insert sets and will do so again this year and Jeter is always a challenging and expensive pick up.  The back of the card celebrates Derek's "clutchness", nice pickup.  The First Pitch insert is a nice new idea by Topps. I am not super connected to pop culture and probably won't recognize some of the people but I like the idea.  The Fisk celebrates the 40 year anniversary of Free Agency in baseball.  A nice tribute to a fairly recent part of baseball history.  The Clinton card is from an insert set that I believe will match one famous news event from a particular year with a baseball event.  The card is numbered 15A so I assume 15B will be of a player from 1992.  Finally the Highlight of the Year insert of Fergie Jenkins.  Again a pretty cool idea and a solid looking design.  I suspect there are a couple more inserts to discover in the rest of the packs but I have to say that in my opinion Topps did a great job on the inserts this year.

 The final card in my first Jumbo pack was hit number 1 out of 3 in the box:

This is an MLB Silhouetted Batter Logo Pin of  Cubs prospect Javier Baez.  The logo is made of metal and the card is fairly think and pretty heavy.  I have learned to accept these manufactured cards as "relic" hits in the jumbo boxes.  I think this is a solid design. I wish I would have pulled Buster Posey but you can't win them all.

There you have it, pack 1 of my Jumbo Box.  My goal will be to bust the other 9 packs and share some highlight sometime tomorrow.

Happy Topps Day!

What Do You Think About Topps Base Parallel SPs?

As best as I can tell, Topps started a new practice back in 2009 of paralleling some of the base cards with short print alternatives.  I don't recall this being done before other than the Jeter/Mantle/Bush card from 2007, maybe the collector craze of that card gave them the idea two days later.  The subject of the SPs has ranged from long retired superstars to gatorade baths to sunglasses to different stat backs.

I did some research and found the following counts and types by year.  These are the base card parallels contained in the 2 Topps Flagship releases and the Update set.

2009 - 61 Total
59 SPs of retired legends, 1 SP of Barak Obama, 1 SP of current player (CC Sabathia) in alternate jersey

2010 - 75 Total
55 SPs of retired legends, 1 SP of current player (Curtis Granderson), 7 SPs of teams of the past, 5 SPs with rookie cup logo variations, 4 SPs with Abe Lincoln in the background, and 3 SPs with Pies in the Face

2011 - 76 Total
74 SPs of retired legends, 2 SPs of new Red Sox in new uniforms (Carl Crawford and Adrian Gonzalez)

2012 - 81 Total
12 SPs with teammates, 9 SPs in suit/dress shirts, 9 SPs with players in dugouts, 8 SPs with new teams, 6 SPs of retired legends, 4 SPs of players with mascots, 3 SPs each with Gatorade, with Pies in the Face and with throwback/alt jerseys; 2 SPs each of players celebrating, featuring squirrels, rookie cup variations and with fans; and 1 SP each Bryce Harper 661 Rookie, flag in background, with a trophy, wearing glasses, with gumballs, back of jersey, beastmode shirt, with glove, at press conference, with no hitter ball, on trolley, throwing left-handed, with All-Star game jersey, with George Brett, with sign and bowing.

2013 - 100 Total
25 SPs with great catches, 17 SPs with Sunglasses, 15 SPs of retired legends, 10 SPs in different colored jerseys, 9 SPs signing autos, 7 SPs with group photos, 2 SPs of teammates, 2 SPs with players from other teams, and 1 SP each of with award, blue cap, giving speech, pitcher batting, giving a high 5, a horizontal card, in the dugout, running, coming out of the pen, arms up, big glove, sliding and Prince George of Cambridge

2014 - 327 Total
151 Sparkle SPs, 110 SPs with SABRmetrics on back, 23 SPs with Future Stars, 13 SPs with different jerseys, 12 SPs celebrating, 4 SPs in the dugout, 3 SPs with players fielding, 2 SPs each of players looking up, with glove and goggles, 1 SP each of Gatorade, Snoopy, hands on hips, in front of fans, press conference, post season sweatshirt, making a fist, throwing, with teammates with a bat, tossing a bat, with water, throwing underhand and on deck

I am a big fan of the Retired Legend SPs. Back in 2009 I did contemplate whether or not they should be part of my Topps set run and quickly decided against it.  I am glad because what started as 61-76 SP parallels of mostly retired stars for the first three years has ballooned to 327 different SP parallels.  (I believe there were the sparkle parallels before 2014  but couldn't track down a checklist, if you can direct me to one I would happily update the numbers.)  Seems like Topps took a solid idea and blew it up under control.

 I have several of the Retired Legends in my player and Giants collections and love hunting those down.  I have been picking up the other types of Giants when I can find them at a reasonable price.  Here are 3 recent pick ups:

This is a Jake Peavy SABRmetrics stat back card. The front is identical to his regular base card but the back features advanced stats.  These types of parallels drive me crazy.  I typically review a few card backs to get a feel for the cards then only look at the back for the card number to put my set together.   These cards have required me to look through all my card backs carefully to not miss a short print.

 This Tim Lincecum is the sunglasses version.  I am in the middle on cards like this.  There were 17 sunglasses in the 2013 set with two Giants amongst the 17 (Pablo Sandoval is the other). Themes like this and the great catches and the Gatorade celebration are okay but quickly become a little monotonous to me.

This SP base parallel is one of my favorite cards in my collection, I am so happy I was able to pick it up.  This is Buster Posey celebrating a World Series victory riding a cable car during the victory parade.  I grew up about 2 hours away from San Francisco and spent a lot of weekends attending games and visiting the city - it is my favorite city to visit. This card brings back great memories of my visits to The City and also the excitement of winning a World Series.  It is hard for me to mock the inclusion of these SPs when they can be executed this well.

As I was putting this post together, I realized why I like the 2014 Stadium Club release so much, it is a 200 card base set of cards that would fit into one of these SP releases.

So, what are your thoughts on these Topps base parallel SPs?

McCovey Monday #70 - 1971 Topps Coins

My favorite player of all time is Hall of Famer Willie McCovey.  I have amassed a collection of over 1200 different  McCovey cards since I started collecting him in the late 1980s.  I will show off one of my favorite cards every Monday.  Stretch was one of the most feared hitters of all time and I am excited to show off my collection.

I have had this scan in my folder for more than a year so time to finally show off this oddball item of Willie McCovey.  This is a Topps Coin released in 1971.  These aren't super rare or very costly but I think they are a pretty nice oddball.  They aren't very big, about the same size as a poker chip and the Topps Chipz cards from the last couple years.

I can't recall after a year where I got this coin, I think it was part of a trade package.  I have had one in my McCovey collection for quite a while so this one slid into my Giants collection.  I like the up close picture and the green seems to work for the coin even though Green and Yellow are A's colors and about as far away from Orange and Black that you can get.

My one struggle is trying to figure out the best way to store and display these, other coins I have and the Chipz coins.  The slide around in 9 pocket pages and seem like they would damage some cards surrounding them in the binder.  I would assume there are some pages for coins that would work, if you have tried some out let me know if they work.