From the Dollar Box - 1992 Upper Deck Williams Baseball Heroes

The Upper Deck Baseball Heroes inserts have always been some of my favorites. I knew I was missing at least a few from the 1992 Ted Williams run, so I couldn't pass up the entire set of 10 for a buck. I don't have much time today so I won't bore you with my commentary. Instead, I'll let the cards do the talking:

#28 - 1939 Rookie of the Year

#29 - 1941 .406!

#30 - 1942 Triple Crown Year

#31 - 1946 & 1949 MVP

#32 - 1947 Second Triple Crown

#33 - 1950s Player of the Decade

#34 - 1960 500 Home Run Club

#35 - 1966 Hall of Fame

#36 - Checklist

Quarter Box Haul

Heading out for the night, not much time for a post. Instead, I scanned in my haul from rummaging through the quarter box at the hobby shop last night. I'll let the pictures do most of the talking:

I grabbed 5 cards from the 1994-95 Parkhurst "Missing Link" set, which is one of my all-time favorites. If you've read the blog you know how I feel about old goalie cards, so in addition to Al Rollins (which is my favorite) I grabbed two others:


The other two cards from the set were the late number "highlight" cards:

I really have to finish that set some day. Next we have some 1980's O-Pee-Chee hockey goodness. I have nearly every hockey card Topps produced from 1979 through 1990, but my O-Pee-Chee collection is seriously lacking, so I felt safe that I didn't have any of these 6. I was right:

The Kurri, Langway and Bossy are from the 1984-85 set, Fuhr and MacInnis are from 87-88, and Stevens is from 86-87.

I couldn't resist this one. I think I've said it before but I love the inserts from early 90's Fleer Ultra hockey. Not to mention, if you were an 11 year old hockey fan in 1993 like I was chances are you liked Eric Lindros.

I grabbed the only two 2008-09 O-Pee-Chee retro cards in the box. I have about 50% of the 600 card set and didn't have my want list with me, but thankfully I needed both. I'll probably never finish this one.

This might be my favorite card in the bunch. Verbeek was always one of my favorite Whalers, and this is the Electric Ice Gold parallel version of his 95-96 Upper Deck card.

I also snagged this 1997-98 Upper Deck SPX Geoff Sanderson. It's actually a die-cut card in case you couldn't tell, and the hologram scanned in very well compared to most. This is pretty cool for a quarter but I shudder to think what packs probably went for back in the day. I'm sort of glad I missed the late 90's/early 2000's period of collecting sometimes.

4 cards from the 2003 Topps All-Time Fan Favorites set. Pretty decent 4 players for a buck.

1994-95 Upper Deck SP Ed Belfour. Great photo!

Also grabbed an SP baseball card of Mattingly. I'm not one of those Red Sox fans that hates the Yankees. I dislike a lot of current day Yankees, but I'll pick up Mattingly, Whitey Ford, Roger Maris, Yogi Berra cards any day.

Finally I grabbed these 9 Pinnacle McDonald's hockey cards. I had never seen these before and thought they were pretty cool. They didn't scan so well, but they use a 3D format that's very similar to the Kellogg's baseball card releases, but slightly more effective. The cards actually look very cool in person.

1953 Topps Project - Post #42

#5 - Joe Dobson - Chicago White Sox

Today's 1953 Topps Project subject is Joe Dobson. At age 9 he lost a couple of fingers on his left hand from playing with a dynamite cap. He was a member of the Chicago White Sox from 1951 through 1953 but actually spent the bulk of his career with the Red Sox (after a brief stint in Cleveland). He was with Boston from 1941 until 1950 (with 1944 and 1945 missed due to military service), and then again to finish his career in 1954 (although he was released early on in the season).

Joe was an All-Star in 1948, however his best single season as a pitcher was probably 1947, when he went 18-8 with a 2.95 ERA. All in all he was a pretty solid starting pitcher for a few years there, amassing 137 career wins, with over 100 of them coming in a Red Sox uniform.

Set Status: 42/274 (15%)

What I Bought Instead of Allen & Ginter - Post #5

Time for the 5th installment of my virtual Allen & Ginter hobby box. You didn't think I would get through this whole thing without some hockey did you? Included in each pack of 1993-94 Upper Deck Series 2 hockey was one Upper Deck SP insert card. They weren't really inserts I guess so much as a separate set comprised of 180 cards, but I don't recall being able to obtain them any other way. Anyway, this set has always been a favorite of mine, and in my opinion still stands as one of the top hockey sets Upper Deck has ever released. I only had 36 of these though (one from each pack of my Series 2 hobby box) so I decided to try to grab a bunch more. Buying them individually through sites like Sportlots seemed to get expensive fast, so I went the eBay route instead and won an auction for 71 of them for a mere $3. Here are a few of my favorites from the lot:

#21 - Theoren Fleury - You've all seen the design I think, I know there was a baseball set that looked the same, and possibly even a football or basketball set as well. Full bleed photo, stripe across the bottom of the card in team color with player's name and position, then the silver foil Upper Deck SP logo in the lower right corner. The design element that the set is best known for though is the foil line that comes up the right side of the card from the SP logo, juts back down and then arcs out over the photo, with the team name written in foil above the arc. This gives the card a very classy look. I generally detest foil and prefer vintage, cardboard cards, but this is a lesson in how it can be done right.

#22 - Al MacInnis - Another thing I'd like to point out about the design is just how good a job Upper Deck did with cropping and placing it's photos in respect to that foil arc. As you read through this post, just take a look at how well they placed every single photo and really made them fit within the framework of the design. This brings the cards together well.

#23 - Joe Nieuwendyk - Upper Deck's wonderful photography is present throughout this set as well. I don't know if this was done on purpose or not, but there are quite a few cards in the set for which they chose a shot where even the advertisements on the rink boards mesh will with the player's jersey. The Yellow Pages ad on this Nieuwendyk card for example really makes the player pop out, but is also complimented by the golds and yellows on Joe's equipment/jersey.

#37 - Derian Hatcher - I like this one just because Derian is in the midst of a sea of Blackhawks, and it's a good pic of Eddie Belfour as well.

#41 - Dino Ciccarelli - I believe that's a blood smear on Ciccarelli's left shoulder.

#45 - Keith Primeau

#65 - Geoff Sanderson - I had to show at least one Whaler, and Geoff was the best of the 3 I received.

#71 - Kelly Hrudey - I really don't see how you could make this card any better than it is.

#77 - Vincent Damphousse - A card where great photography and great cropping/placement come together. I really like the photo, with the ref and the Blues bench all watching from the background. The picture is cropped like all the others so that the foil arc bends nicely over Damphousse's head, and best of all they even got the floating puck in the lower right corner. You could almost flip by this in a stack without even noticing, but what a fantastic looking card.

#99 - Adam Graves - Here's another example of how Upper Deck even took background scenery into account while selecting their photos. Like the Nieuwendyk card above the boards match up nicely with the Rangers' blue and red, and the striped jerseys and red pants above the boards add to it even more.

#106 - Robert Burakovsky - I don't really know a thing about this guy, but thought it was an interesting photo.

#116 - Eric Lindros

#118 - Mikael Renberg

#125 - Martin Straka - Goal!!!!!!!!!!

#128 - Owen Nolan - Please bring back the Nordiques. Please!

#140 - Brendan Shanahan - The best thing about this card is the toothless, scary looking Ken Daneyko bearing down on Shanahan:


#148 - Brian Bradley - Swing...and a miss!

#153 - Denis Savard - I always forget that Savard played for Tampa Bay. Look at the determination in his face on this one!

#158 - Doug Gilmour

#161 - Greg Adams

#164 - Trevor Linden

#177 - Teemu Selanne - Another good photo where once again the board ad kind of jives with the player uniform. I can't believe this guy is still in the league (and is still an effective goal scorer too!).

Well there you have it, not too bad for $3 huh? I definitely want to finish this set. I'm more than halfway there thanks to this lot and I have about a dozen doubles to trade if anyone's interested.

Cost: $3
Running Total: $58

Package from Puck Junk

On Friday I received a package at work from Sal, proprietor of the outstanding hockey blog Puck Junk. Sal is a nice guy and a great trader, so if you haven't wandered over to check out Puck Junk yet (which I'm sure you have!) I highly recommend doing so. From time to time we exchange packages, in fact just this week I sent over nearly all of the mini cards from my Champs hobby box. I had no idea what was coming in this package, but Sal sent some great stuff:

Probably my favorite item in the package was this awesome 5 X 7 photo card of Tony Esposito. Very cool! Sal even included a 5 X 7 toploader for it, which was greatly appreciated. I have a feeling this is something he may have picked up at this year's Blackhawks Convention.

Sal also included a few cards, including these three Tony Esposito cards which are from the 2003-04 Parkhurst Original Six Blackhawks set. I wasn't collecting at all in 2003, so I had no idea that Parkhurst released a separate set for each of the Original Six teams. I like the concept, and I'm assuming the sets did fairly well as I can't seem to find a hobby box for sale anywhere, other than a Red Wings box for nearly $200 on Ebay. Here are the other Esposito cards he sent, from the Franchise Leaders subset:



Also in the package was this 1997-98 Donruss Jean-Sebastien Giguere rookie, which I did not have and which will immediately make its way into my Whalers binder. Rounding out the lot we have one more great card:

An autographed 1992-93 Pinnacle Steve Konroyd! Steve is now affiliated with the Blackhawks TV broadcast team, and I have a feeling Sal got this one signed for me at the Hawks Convention as well. That would be two years in a row that he's added to my autographed Whalers card collection, thank you Sal!!!

From the Dollar Box - 1965 Topps Russ Nixon

A few weeks ago I actually discovered a decent local hobby shop, which is something I've never had access to before. The highlight for me is definitely their dollar box, which is a gigantic monster box overflowing with cards from the 4 major sports, each in a brand new penny sleeve and top loader. I've been back to the shop two or three times since and have accumulated a few dollar cards in a small bag in my card closet. Every once in a while I plan to grab one from the stack to post.

1965 Topps Russ Nixon

I've really been focusing on picking up cards from the 60's, particularly Red Sox so this was an easy decision. 1965 Topps is easily in the mix for design of the decade, along with the 1960 and 1963 releases in my opinion. I picked up an Earl Wilson over a year ago, so it's about time I added another to the collection. Let's take a look at the back:

As you can see, Russ had been around for a few years by 1965, although I guess he can best be described as just an average player. Not the most interesting cartoon by any means either. Russ lasted 12 seasons in the majors, but was one of those guys who dedicated his life to the game even when his playing days were behind him, coaching and managing at almost every professional level. In fact, Nolan Ryan gave him a position within the Rangers organization in 2008 at age 73!

Russ was also the last person to manage the Braves before Bobby Cox took over...in 1990! I can't believe just how long Bobby's been at it down there in Atlanta.