Last week or so I found a PWE from Greg/Night Owl in my mailbox. Inside was a selection of cards which I’m assuming are mostly duplicates and bycatch from various sets that he was working on.
The first pair are from his quest to finish the Laughlin World Series sets. These have been showing up a decent amount in my recent maildays and I’m enjoying them more and more as I get to know them.
I’m actually a bit upset at myself for taking so long to get into these. Where at first I tended to see them as a bit too generic and cartoony* I’ve come to appreciate the mix of styles in the set as well as the challenge of summarizing each World Series in a single image.
*The figures on the 1913 card are a perfect example of this.
Of these two the 1954 is a need which takes me to 9 of 15 for the 1970 set. Is interesting to me that the summary of 1954 is Johnny Antonelli since he’s not the first or second story of that series which I grew up reading about.* But treating the 111 as a carnival game is great fun.
*Dusty Rhodes and Wille Mays.
Greg also included three 2024 Heritage minis since he’s received a huge pile of those from everyone who knows he‘s the 1975 Topps junkie. These pretty much complete my minis team set as well. The only ones I need now are the SPs and the Posey/Cabrera MVPs card. Since I refuse to pay a premium for the SPs so those are literally going to have to fall into my lap but I might be able to snag the MVPs card.
Not much to say about these except to note that as much as this kind of parallel bullshit is generally a waste of time, this is one of the few which I like. The 1975 minis were such a distinct release that honoring that feels appropriate. These all look mostly good too. I don’t like the way Topps put the signatures in the same place on every card and I hate those stupid creamsicle jerseys but everything else looks about right.
And finally, a pair of cards which I’m assuming are bycatch from other acquisitions. I don’t even know where the yellow parallels are from but I think they’re one of those things that only shows up in certain retail settings. Which means that I’m jealous that Greg is able to find cards at retail. Is a nice photo of Thairo on the card. Sort of a shame what happened to him this year since he was legitimately a fan favorite until then.
Pairing the Estrada with a Dubon card is in interesting coincidence. Dubon was also a fan favorite until he was fairly beaten out for the position of middle infield/outfield utility player by Estrada. Was sad to see him leave but it’s been fun to watch him blossom in Houston. His Chrome Rookie autograph is one of those “junk” hits which only team collectors love.
Picking up after vacation as I’ve tossed a couple requests into the pipe and even got a few stragglers back.
The first post-vacation return was a 299 day return from Ricky Horton. He’s currently one of the Cardinals radio broadcasters but he’s also a guy I remember from my youth. Always fun to add a rainbow of uniforms as well.
I got a 19-day return from Jim Lonborg on one of the beat-up cards I got in the big binder of beat up cards. I’m not trying to get all of his cards signed but I’ve enjoyed sending out duplicates when I come across them since he’s one of the few Stanford guys from the 1960s.
I sent to Joh Curtis months ago and got a return to sender thanks to catching him between moves. So I re-sent after summer and got these back in 23 days. He spent three years with the Giants in the late 1970s primarily as a reliever, but put together a 15 year career as mostly a starting pitcher in the Majors.
A 26 day return from Doug Sisk added another 1986 Topps card to the collection. I’m about finished with my duplicates of guys who sign TTM so I don’t expect to get many more than the 132 different signed cards from this set that I have. A good number which represents exactly a seventh of the cards (including Traded) and probably comes very close to the number of 1986 Topps cards I had in my childhood collection. Always fun to add a new one too.
It’s nice to still be able to add a signed 1978 to the collection. I didn’t get thaaat many duplicates from my set build but it’s nice to have a couple pages worth of signed ones. This one from Tom Murphy features an airbrushed original photo of one of the original Blue Jays and came back in 31 days.
And that’s it. I’m still not sending much out but it’s nice to send a few here and there and see what happens.
Inside were the box cards as well as a whole ton of other things but we’ll start with the box cards. One of the coolest things Topps did with Big League was include box cards on the blasters. This was especially great in the early years when blasters were $10 and readily available at Targets nationwide. Ever since 2020 though blasters have gone up to $25* and I have yet to see one available in any store.
*Yes you get twice the cards as in a $10 blaster but it’s still more expensive than flagship.
So yeah these are always cool to get but I’m especially pleased to have the 2021 card which is a set I never got a chance to purchase in the wild or even open any packs of.
The package would’ve been plenty cool with just the box cards but Kerry went super generous and included not only a bunch of Giants cards but a bunch of shiny Giants cards. I had maybe a handful of 2020 Optic cards but none of them are shiny blue refractors. I had all of two 2020 Big League cards and now my colored parallels of those outnumber my base cards.
I’m not a huge fan of colored parallels but team color matches are sort of an exception. Which means that in addition to the 2021 Big Leagues I also really like the 2022 Darin Ruf and 2023 Logan Webb. I’m less a fan of the Easter pattern Estrada card though I do admit that it certainly is something. The sepia Wade Meckler is a little better (though still not my jam) and is most interesting for being the first 2024 Chrome card in my collection. And I have zero idea what even to call that 2024 Bowman parallel.
Of the other cards, the Big League inserts are cool. Since I barely have the base cards I’m similarly thin on any of the inserts. The Stars of MLB is Chrome therefore I don’t have that either. And the 2024 Donruss Will Clark, while a pale imitation of the oversized Action All Stars from my youth is still a design I enjoy seeing again.
There were also three autographs. the 1997 Jacob Cruz goes with my 1998 Jacob Cruz from the same set. The 2021 Anthony Banda is a weird one since he was with the Giants organization for part of that year but only in AAA. He would appear for both the Mets and Pirates that season but never suited up for the Giants, making this one of those interesting mid-career zero-year cards. And Lamonte Wade Jr is a Willie Mac Award winner who’s always good to get an auto of.
Finally there were a handful of Stanford Cardinal and Stanford Cardinals cards. I think I have the Cardinals ones (though I very much appreciate Kerry raiding his Cardinals duplicates for me). I do not have any of the Cardinal ones so those are especially fun to add. . I’m also not at all familiar with Sage as a card manufacturer* so that’s also an interesting addition to the binder.
*This appears to be a post-NIL college football set.
A while ago Johnny posted about a ton of autographs that he’d picked up. These were kind of up for grabs since they consisted of a bunch of guys no one outside of weird team collectors have ever heard of or remembers. As a result I don’t think there was a lot of action.
A bunch of the guys on there were guys like Adam Hyzdu, Calvin Murray, David Bell, Jacob Cruz, Luke Williams, Rob Brantly, and Kervin Castro who I remember for brief tenures in San José or San Francisco. Anyway, the one which jumped out at me was Rikkert Faneyte who for whatever reason I remember particularly distinctly as a Giants fan and made a comment saying as much.
No idea WHY I remember Faneyte so well. Maybe it had something to do with him being from the Netherlands at a time when players who weren’t from the Americas was still somewhat novel? Anyway a week or so later a PWE showed up at my house with the Faneyte card inside. Very cool I have no idea what the hell uniform he’s wearing though.
Johnny also posted about a monster box of cards that he’d bought at a show which he was calling his worst deal of the day. In his second post about this deal he included a signed Gary Carter card, mentioned he’d gotten two of them, and that he’d random the extra off to a commenter. I totally missed him announcing the winner and was very surprised when it showed up at my house.
This is a tract card depicting Carter in his second stint with the Expos at the end of his career in 1992. The back text suggests it was printed after he made it to the Hall of Fame so I’m guessing it was from some time in the mid 2000s.
Carter was with the Giants for only a year and while I don’t remember any particular highlights, he still managed to accumulate the 6th highest WAR on the team that season* despite basically splitting time with Terry Kennedy at catcher. Still, every guy on that team is memorable to me and Carter is one of only two Hall of Famers who I got to see play for the Giants when I was a kid** and the last Hall of Famer who suited up as a Giant until Randy Johnson did it in 2009.
*This was admittedly one of those easily-forgettable years where the team was fine—winning 85 games—but not exciting as it coasted to a 3rd place finish in the division.
**The other is Goose Gossage’s 31 appearances in 1989.
Johnson is to-date the last Hall of Famer to suit up as a Giant. Meaning that since I became a fan back in 1987 there have been only three Hall of Famers who have worn Giants uniforms and all three of them did it for at most a single season.
Continuing from Spring, mostly featuring hanging out in California but including our travel* there in the end of June.
*Hehe delayed plane out of Newark borked our connection so we got rebooked to a direct flight leaving from JFK which was great except for having to get a cab from Newark to JFK.
We’ll start off with probably one of the biggest cards I’ve landed ever. The closest I ever expected to get of a vintage card of John McGraw were my Polo Grounds postcards so I’m very very happy the writing on the back of this one made it actually a feasible acquisition.
I also snagged an Al Bridwell T205 to take me to seven Giants T205 cards total and a full twenty tobacco-sized pre-war cards. I currently have these in cardsavers in four-pocket sheets but am sorely tempted to repage them into a single 20-pager.
National League T205s are my favorite early American Tobacco design with the gold borders, facsimile auto, and large painted portrait. The McGraw looks especially nice with the orange background and I really like the bio on the back.
The T205s came from Anson/pre-war cards and as usual he included some other cards in the packaging. Starting with the vertical cards, the balloon depicting the first parachute is from a 1910 set about Aviation. I really like the colors on this one plus it’s printed in chromolithography.
The GB Shaw is from a 1927 set so it’s a year later than my other Shaw card but, like that card makes no explicit references to his plays or his Nobel Prize in 1925. I do really love the Carreras cat logo and have never seen it before I saw this card.
The 1937 Army Uniforms card shows the 12th Foot Suffolk Regiment in its 1685 uniforms. This unit was formed in 1685 and existed until 1959. This set though seems to be more interested in different units rather than the history of the uniform over time. The back in fact reads more like fashion than utility.
There were a couple of horizontal cards too. The Pont du Gard is from the 1926 Wonders of the Past set which I’ve written about before. It’s a very nice looking card with that golden light. The other horizontal card depicts boxing at the Royal Albert Hall and, while a dramatic photo of the fight (in fact a real photo print with lots of nice shadows), does not show any of the actual interior of the building.
This was an Ebay pickup because I just couldn’t help myself. I already had a few cards from this set so the card was on my radar but at only a couple bucks I couldn’t not get it. This is definitely one of those things where either you know exactly why I got it or the reference makes zero sense.
1938 R323 Goudey Heads-Up
The 1938 Goudey Big Heads set is one of those which took a long time to grow on me. It’s an extraordinarily goofy design but I’ve come to really like it. Unfortunately there’s only one Giants player on the checklist and, while he technically has two cards, the fact that they’re basically identical except for the cartoons on the front mades it very easy for me to just desire the single high number with cartoons.
One finally popped up as a good price and it’s as wonderful as I was hoping. The octopus drawing is particularly fantastic. It’s great to add a new set to the collection and I’m glad the only Giants wasn’t someone who would’ve cost at least an order of magnitude more.
The Topps Chrome Olympics set was one of those releases which looks super interesting but was overpriced and completely inaccessible.* By the time the Olympics ended some of the base and base insert cards had finally showed up on Sportlots so I grabbed a couple dozen of the ten** Stanford athletes in the set.
*People spent way too much money searching for the autograph hits. There were SO MANY Ledecky autos too.
**Well, sort of ten since Claire Curzan transferred fro Stanford to Virginia after her freshman year. I haven’t made a decision about how to deal with alumni athletes in this new era of transfers being so common now.
This set had a mixed bag of athletes since it predated the Olympics and reflected who Topps has licenses for. Some like Claire Curzan failed to make the games at all. Others like Catarina Macario had to pull out due to injury.
A couple also had somewhat disappointing games as well. Alexander Massialas lost in the round of 16 and failed to win a medal in his third straight games while Maggie Steffens was unable to win her fourth gold medal in a row as the US Women’s Water Polo team finished in 4th place.
The rest here did pretty well though. Valarie Allman won her second gold medal in a row on the discus. Torri Huske was a revelation with six total medals, three of them gold. Katie Ledecky is the greatest. Brody Malone stumbled in his individual all-around but was part of the mens team that won bronze. Regan Smith won five medals, two gold. And Sophia Smith was a key member of the gold medal winning soccer team.
I also went on a bit of a Topps Now binge because of their Olympics cards.. This is in part because Stanford Swimming started off the Olympics hot but also my kids were so excited by the Blake Snell No Hitter that I had to get them the card to commemorate it. Yes there’s a lot of Katie Ledecky here but it was really nice to get the other athletes and there’s something very nice about how these are specifically commemorating medal winning performances with their photos.
Bob Boone’s 1978 Hostess card is one of those tricky “short prints” where he must’ve only showed up on boxes of Snoballs or something similarly awful that most kids hate. I’ve been looking for his card for years mainly because I refused to spend the $15 people were asking for for it the few times it surfaced for sale.
Apparently there is zero demand for an autographed version of this card though since I was able to land this one for $3 shipped. Sort of shocked that it happened as cleanly and as cheaply as it did.
And finally I grabbed a card of Tommy Edman from this year’s Cardinals Trading Card Day giveaway. This might be Edman’s last Cardinals card* since he’s now a member of the Dodgers. I already commented a bit about this design last month.The only thing this adds is that the stadium giveaways are foil paper which gives it a nicer feel for a set like this. Very nice to have one for the Stanford album since I don’t have many of this kind of card in there.
*Yeah I know there will be at least one set released next year which claims to be a 2024 set.
As with last year, after visiting the aquarium we took a drive out to Pacific Grove and spent a bit of time at Asilomar before heading back to the Bay Area.
A couple weeks ago I found a bunch of PWEs in my mailbox. The first day I received four, all from San José Fuji, which was kind of a treat. The following day an envelope from Jason arrived.
I combined the four envelopes from Fuji together and am starting off with the highlight of the packages. While all the cards were Giants cards, mixed in were these eight cards which are from Giants team sets. I’d given up on collecting team sets after the Mothers Cookies/Keebler years. I know there have been sets since and it’s great to get a random sample of some of them.
The most exciting card here is the 2002 Coca Cola card of Livan Hernandez. This appears to be a 10 or 12 card set; there are two short prints mentioned and I have no idea how those were distributed. Too small of a set to be exciting compared to the 28-card sets that predated it but I love how this design actually features the Coca Cola wave.
Five Emerald Nuts cards are also very cool.* I’ve been tempted by these sets because they contain cards of the entire team. The 2007 set for example contains 32 cards compared to the 21 cards in 2007 flagship. What’s prevented me from jumping on these is that Topps is reusing the Flagship design and that’s just not that inspiring.** This is especially true when I already have two 2007 Bengie Molina cards because Topps put him in flagship twice. Still, until I make a decision on whether to pursue these or not it’s great to have a few samples.
**The Giant Giants logo on the 2010 Eli Whiteside is a bizarre design choice in terms of changing one thing from the base design.
The last two cards are from the Topps team set of 17 cards. Mark DeRosa’s card is interesting here since it features a photoshopped version of his Cardinals flagship card. He would go on to get a different photo in 2010 Topps Update.
The rest of the cards are pretty duplicate heavy and will end up on the “for the kid” pile. Starting off with the junk wax. I love the 1983 Duane Kuiper and 1993 Toys R Us John Patterson. I hate the awful awful airbrushing on the 1988 Kevin Mitchell. It’s always nice to get a Vida Blue card and I wonder if Fuji likes Atlee as much as I do.
Late 1990s and 2000s cards do a but better in terms of hitting holes in my collection. I didn’t have any of the Jeff Kents, the Robb Nen, the 2009 Heritage Brian Wilson nor the 2010 Ginter Matt Cain. A few of the Kents come from sets I was completely unaware of too so that was cool.
Finally the most-modern stuff. I think the only one here which I didn’t have was the Bumgarner Bowman card. But the kids will like the 2011 Heritage which celebrate the World Series and if they don’t have the Posey/Wilson celebration card yet they’ll love that one as well.
The envelope from Jason contained only three cards. Of those the most exciting to me was another Laughlin. This is also from 1970 and takes me past the halfway point of that team set.* It’s obviously not a great Giants card but it’s fun to put a page** together of every World Series appearance.***
*Eight of fifteen now.
**This actually forced me on to a second page since I’m currently paging the 70s and 71s together.
***Until I get the 1904 “no series” card from 1971.
Two other cards in this envelope were a promotional card for the movie about Dick Perez and a custom featuring Jackie Robinson as a Giant. The Perez will make a nice pairing with my SABR custom and I’m impressed that Jason as a stalwart Dodgers fan actually made a Jackie Giants card.
Summer is not official until we get to visit the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Has been fun to watch how the boys interests have changed over the years. They’re long past the kid exhibits and are finally paying really attention to what’s in the tanks now. There was also a lot of action out in the bay as we saw seals, sea lions, and sea otters
A nice combination of modern Donruss and OG Donruss with a a nice parallel in the Buster Posey and Mike Sadek cards being the same pose and uniform. I was a bit confused by the Posey card since I was unaware of the Giants having ever worn those 1980s pullover uniforms in the last twenty years at least. After some research* I discovered that they were worn twice in 2016, first on June 18 in a fauxback game at Tampa Bay, then on July 20 in a throwback game in Boston.
*Big thanks to the fabulous uniformlineup.com for cataloging uniform usage.
The four 1981s fill in holes in my team set searchlist and take me past the 50% mark for 1981 Donruss. It looks like all four cards feature photos taken at Wrigley Field. Two modern Bowman inserts are always appreciated as this is a set I never purchase. The purple Bowman AI card is actually kind of nice even though I have a visceral bad reaction to anything labeled AI now. The saving grace here is that I’ve been making jokes for years about Bowman being Topps AI.
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