Collection Cornerstones - Ovechkin!

Alex Ovechkin appears from my vantage point to be one of the more polarizing modern athletes in all of sports.  Despite being one of the premier goal-scoring snipers in the National Hockey League for more than a decade now, it seems that he's got two detractors for every one fan.

Well, you can count me as one who's been impressed watching Ovechkin ply his trade over the first 13 years of his NHL career.  As the Capitals were plowing their way through the playoffs this year, and it became apparent that they were going to mow down the storybook Vegas Golden Knights in the Stanley Cup Final with relative ease, I decided it was time to make a play for the one card of "The Great 8" that I've always desired.  I have a feeling now that he got the championship monkey off his back, if he continues to score at the rate that he most likely will for the next few seasons his better cards may be unattainable for me years down the line, so I pounced.

Behold!

Pretty psyched with this solid new addition to my hockey collection.  The 2005-06 Upper Deck flagship set is home to two of the more significant hockey cards of the last couple of decades.  The first, Sidney Crosby's Young Guns RC, remains a pipe dream for me, but it's nice to have finally landed a copy of the other here.

I don't particularly care that the card is graded, but since it's impossible to find these for less than triple digits these days and I was buying online sight unseen I did want to ensure that my copy wasn't going to show up with any surprise "dings" or anything of that nature.

Here's a better look at it.  I don't collect the guy by any means, and honestly with this in hand I don't feel the need to ever acquire another Ovi card again.  Some athletes are just such standouts at their particular sport that I feel compelled to add one awesome card of theirs to my collection even though they don't play for a team I root for or "fit" my collection in any significant way.  This is certainly one such card.

Since PSA-slabbed card backs scan so poorly on my scanner I grabbed this image from the internet.  Little brighter and more contrasted than my scan, but you get the point.

Back to the point about Ovechkin being polarizing, if you know something I don't certainly leave a comment.  As best I can tell his lack of fans compared to his contemporaries like Crosby might be a result of a combination of a variety of factors including the fact that he's from Russia, has been a bit of a show-boater at times (though I question whether he's really any worse than most NHL players these days in that respect), doesn't play good defense, and has never led the Caps to a Cup.

All I know is, the guy can straight up put the puck in the net.  There haven't been many players in the history of the league not named Gretzky, Bossy or Hull who have been able to score as frequently and as consistently as Alex has over the first 13 seasons of his career.  He's already sitting on 607 goals, good for 19th all-time, and at just 32 years old.  Barring a major injury he'll move up another handful of spots on that list next year, and it's not out of the realm of possibility that he could reach top 5 all-time or even higher!

As far as the defense goes, he'll never win a Selke, but I do have to give the man at least some credit for improvement there.  After all, this past playoff season, where play is so tight and every goal is so huge, Ovechkin recorded 27 points in 24 games and finished a +8.  And he wasn't such a defensive liability that he prevented Washington from winning The Cup.  To the contrary, he was a big part of the reason they finally won, as his Conn Smythe Trophy attests to.

If you're a hockey fan, what's your opinion of Ovechkin?  I'd love to hear from you whether you agree with me or not, after all these types of debates are one of the many things that make sports so great...

Collection Cornerstones - Trout!

I'm not exactly sure why this is, but for whatever reason I seem to neglect showing off some of my absolute best cards here on the blog for many months after acquiring them, if not longer.  My best guess is that I have a "save the best for last" mentality generally speaking, and with all the trade packages and many other ways of acquiring new cardboard I just never seem to get to the "last".

As an example of this, the card I've finally got queued up for today was actually acquired well over a year ago now.  Check this one out!

Not too shabby, huh?

Whether you're a sabermetrics stat geek, or just a good ol' fashioned fan of the game, it's hard to dispute the fact that Mike Trout is one of the top players in all of baseball, period.  Hell, even at just 25 years of age he's already accomplished more than many HOFers have in their entire career.

Mike has been named an All-Star and captured a Silver Slugger Award in every one of his five eligible seasons to date, and in those five years he has also either won or placed second for AL MVP.  While it's still early, this year looks to be no different, in fact many people seem to think that 2017 will actually be his single best season to date.

*excuse the fuzziness, my scanner and PSA-graded card backs don't seem to agree

While I would never be crazy enough (or rich enough!) to collect someone with this much notoriety and hobby demand, I decided a year or two ago that I wanted one really significant Trout card for my humble little collection.  After some research I finally settled on what I wanted, and after a few missed opportunities I finally ended up with this gem.  Here's a better look:

To me, this was the perfect Trout card to go after.  I was a kid collector in the early '90s when rookie cards were all the rage, so I definitely wanted a rookie of some sort.  On top of that, I'm a well-documented fan of all things shiny when it comes to sports cards, and the Cognac Diamond Anniversary parallels from 2011 Topps in particular are real favorites of mine.

While it certainly wasn't a cheap pick-up, I feel like my patience really paid off here as I was able to reel in (wow, that was a horrible play on words) this PSA 9 copy for under $200 with free shipping.  Sounds like a lot to pay for a single card, and it is, but it's not something I do often and I felt in this case that it was totally worth it.

With that transaction a good 14 months in the rear view mirror at this point I'm very pleased, as the cheapest copy on eBay (graded or not) is going for around four times what I shelled out.  Nice to know I could easily re-coup my money if it ever came to it, but I don't plan on parting with this one for a good long time!

Have any of you invested in a card like this that doesn't necessarily feature a player or team that you collect, but that you just had to have?  If so, I'd love to hear about it in the comments. 

Thanks as always for taking a few minutes of your day to stop by!

Collection Cornerstones - Plante!

When I finished paying off my car loan a couple of years ago now, I began taking the money that I'd been paying towards the car each month and splitting the pot in half.  One half went into savings for the next car, the other half I'd use to shop for a "cornerstone" card for my collection.  The basic idea here was to treat myself to some more significant pieces of cardboard that would normally fall outside of my monthly allotted collection budget.

I got off to a good start and showed off some nice acquisitions early on in the experiment, including a vintage Yogi Berra and a vintage Hank Aaron, a super old hockey card, and even an authentic Cracker Jack baseball card.  After that things came to a crawl, but I'm back today with a hockey card that I was fortunate enough to pick up with last month's spare funds...

Jacques Plante is one of the most legendary goaltenders in hockey history.  I've had a couple of his cards in my collection for some time, including this one from his final professional season with the Oilers of the WHA...

...and this one from his late-career stint with the Leafs.

While both of them are nice enough cards, it was with the Canadiens where Plante really made his mark.  I've been after a Canadiens card from his time with the franchise for some time now, but they're not exactly cheap to acquire.  At long last I found one that fit the bill, and with the card now in hand I honestly could not be happier:

Not bad huh?!?!  This beauty is from the '57-58 Parkhurst release.  I'm pretty much enamored with it, easily one of my favorite hockey single pick-ups of the past few years.  Parkhurst did quite a few of these types of poses with goalies throughout their '50s releases and I think they make for fantastic looking pieces of cardboard.

Here's the back, which is admittedly nowhere near as exciting as the front.  I can't say I knew (or if I did at one point I'd forgotten) that Jacques was ever referred to as "Jake".  At the time this card was printed up Plante was right smack in the middle of a run of five straight Stanley Cup championships with Montreal!

Here's one last look at the front, simply glorious!  I hope my 2006 Honda Civic, which now has 190,000+ miles on it, keeps running for a couple more years here!

Collection Cornerstones - My Oldest Hockey Card

It's been a while since I did one of these "Collection Cornerstone" posts.  The general premise is as follows...for the past year I've had my car paid off, which means a little extra cash in pocket each month.  I take 2/3 of that and stash it away for the next car, and the other 1/3 goes to a significant new pick-up for my collection.  The idea here is not to blow the card portion on a hobby box or something (not that I'm knocking that in any way), but to use it to land just one or two cards that are significant and stand out from the tens of thousands of other cards I have; cornerstones.

For this round I've got what is now, by a long shot, the oldest hockey card in my collection:

This one will always be one of the oldest hockey cards I own no matter what, as the "C55" tobacco set is among the first few hockey card sets ever released.  I've drooled over these miniature-sized beauties since I first received a reprint set as a kid well over two decades ago now, but never thought I'd be lucky enough to land a real one.

There's not a whole lot to the design, a basic color drawing of the subject framed by a couple of hockey sticks, with a nameplate along the bottom.  Simple, yet effective.  The hockey sticks give the cards a little more character than their T206 baseball contemporaries in my opinion.

In terms of subject, I certainly could have done a lot worse.  I was honestly just looking for the cheapest, certified authentic copy I could get my hands on at the time.  In fact, I didn't even bother to research Marty Walsh before I pulled the trigger on the transaction, but as it turns out he was a really solid player.

After his college hockey career came to an end, Marty signed with the Ottawa Senators, the team he's depicted with here.  During his five seasons with Ottawa, the club won three Stanley Cups, including one the year this card was printed up (1911), which is kinda cool. 

Walsh was a prolific goal scorer, even pacing the ECHA in scoring during his first season.  What is the ECHA?  Well, this card is so old that the NHL didn't even exist yet when it was printed up!  ECHA, the Eastern Canada Hockey Association, is one of the many predecessors to the modern day NHL that emerged just as ice hockey was really starting to take form as a profitable spectator sport.

In a nutshell, Marty Walsh was one of the best goal-scorers in the game just before the formation of the NHL.  He's enshrined in the Hockey Hall of Fame, having been inducted back in 1962.  If Wikipedia can be believed, which in this case I think it can, he left the game of hockey to start a cattle ranch, and sadly passed away from Tuberculosis at just 30 years of age.

Here's a look at the back, got a little glare going on in the scan from the PSA slab.  This one is in pretty great shape if you ask me.  Here's a better look at it:

Again, I'm digging the simple design here.  You're getting the player's name, a list of the teams he's played for, and some ornate border design.  All in all, a nice looking back for something that was printed up before World War I started.

This instantly becomes one of the more interesting cards in my hockey collection, and one I'll certainly cherish for a long time to come!

Collection Cornerstones - Yogi!

Another month without a car payment, another cornerstone card added to my collection. This time, it's Yogi!

Classic set, legendary name, legendary face.  Throw in some pretty great centering for a card that's nearing 60 years old and I'm sold!

I've been meaning to land a card of Berra from his catching days for what seems like forever now, and this one fits the bill quite nicely.  Yogi was 32 years old in the 1957 season, yet still caught over 120 games and appeared in over 130 overall.  He was an All-Star for the 10th straight season, and garnered some MVP votes for the 10th straight season as well.

The Yankees would lose the World Series to the Braves in 1957, but Yogi and his teammates would avenge that loss the very next season, beating Milwaukee in the '58 World Series 4 games to 3.

Very happy to add this beautiful card of one of the best players ever to don the tools of ignorance to my vintage collection!

Collection Cornerstones - Another Cracker Jack!

I've decided that, for as long as I can hold out with my car loan paid off, I'm going to save 2/3 of the money I was using for this monthly towards my next car. The other 1/3 will hopefully be used to add a significant new card to my collection.  Things started off well with a 1964 Topps Hank Aaron in my first month, but I got so busy in March that I never posted my pick-up last month.  Here it is, a few weeks delayed...

I've talked a few times before about my love for the 1914/1915 Cracker Jack sets.  These might be my favorite design out of all the pre-war baseball sets that exist out there.  Al Demaree here is the fourth authentic Cracker Jack card I've picked up so far.  Despite being the first non-Red Sox card in that small group, it might actually be my favorite of the bunch.  I really like that this one uses a horizontal layout, unlike the majority of the set.  Despite its worn corners and creases, the 100-year-old image of Al following through on his pitch still looks great.

Al actually became a successful sports cartoonist after his baseball days were done.  I wonder what he'd think of this work himself?

Here's the back, upside down as many of these are.  What a fantastic piece of cardboard.  There's something about acquiring a card this old that gives me a feeling of satisfaction that nothing from the 21st century seems to be able to replicate.  Here's hoping my car holds out at least a few more months!

Collection Cornerstones - Hammerin' Hank

Recently I paid off my car loan, which for the time being has provided me with a little extra cash in my pocket each month.  I'm not a big car guy, and generally view them as a bad investment, so we're not talking a ton of extra money (I drive a nearly 10-year-old Honda Civic), but every little bit helps.  I decided that for as long as my current car holds out, I'll take the money I was spending on a car payment each month and divide it into thirds.  Two thirds will go into savings for a down payment on the next car, the other third will be used to buy myself a sports card!

The goal of this isn't to blow the card portion of the money on packs or something I'll instantly forget, but rather to add some significant "cornerstone" cards to my collection.  The type of cards I normally can't afford on my self-imposed monthly collecting budget.  The type of cards that make my jaw drop, or make me smile every time I hold them in hand.  Today I've got the results of month one of this experiment to show you, and I have to say I'm very pleased.  Behold!

This is exactly the kind of card I had in mind when I decided to try this out.  An absolute beauty from one of my favorite vintage sets.  A classic portrait of one of the game's all-time sluggers on a sunny summer day.

Here's a better look at the front.  In the humble opinion of this blogger Aaron still is, and likely always will be, the true Home Run King.

My only wish is that '64 Topps had some more thoughtfully designed card backs.  A real shame that a card with such a beautiful front displays this disaster when turned over.  Oh well...

Look for more of these "Collection Cornerstone" posts in coming months.  Hopefully my car holds out for a while here!