I remember distinctly when this set came out when I was just a kid collector. My brothers and I busted quite a few packs of the stuff, but storage was always an issue, as it tends to be with non-standard sized cards like these. Overall, a clean design that focused on being able to provide collectors with an over-sized photograph.
Thanks as always for stopping by!
With the new Blogger "feature" of my images loading backwards, today's blaster break is going to be in abbreviated format. As I rip through this 2019 Topps Stadium Club blaster, which I got online for the amazingly good price of $14 with free shipping, I'll just show my single favorite card from each pack...
Pack 1 yielded this smiling Duke Snider. Love the retired players in Stadium Club each year (get ready for more throughout this post), and especially like Brooklyn Dodgers cards, so this was an easy choice from the first pack. Helped that I needed it for my "I'm sort of casually collecting it" set build.
Pack 2 contained maybe my overall favorite card of the entire blaster. I've long coveted a copy of this fantastic Christy Mathewson sporting some nice fall fashion, and now I finally have one! Just an awesome, awesome card.
Surprise, it's another HOFer, this one of the horizontally-oriented variety. Love the photograph on this one, with a pensive Vlad sitting in a deserted dugout.
Pack 4 provided me with another top-notch HOFer, this beautiful Clemente. I swear I won't simply choose a guy with a plaque in Cooperstown for all eight packs, but I'm a big Clemente fan (who isn't) and this one was too good not to include.
Here's a modern guy! Pack 5 supplied me with a legit Pete Alonso rookie card! This guy still mashed a lot of homers in the shortened 2020 season, but his other offensive statistics fell significantly from his Rookie of the Year campaign. I'm not judging anyone too harshly for their performance in this train wreck of a season in 2020, though. Nice to have this rookie to commemorate his monster 2019 season.
Here's another completely awesome card, with the great Ozzie Smith performing his signature back flip in front of Cooperstown. Ozzie has some serious height going here, almost looks like he must've used a trampoline, or is photo-shopped. Smith was always one of my favorite '80s guys to collect when I was a kid, so I was pleased to pull this one.
Pack 7, and it's another legend of yesteryear, Jim Palmer in mid-delivery. Quite a few empty seats in the upper right of the card there, but still how refreshing is it to see actual fans in the crowd?
For the final pack's top card I went with a modern guy, just because the photograph on this Dee Gordon card is absolutely amazing. Dude looks like Spider-man in action here, and bonus points for the retro Mariners uniform.
A fun blaster there, and I'm now up to 118 cards (or 39%) accumulated in my kinda sorta set build. I actually have a couple more blasters of this stuff on my rainy day pack shelf, so I'm sure I'll rip another and post it in the coming weeks or months here. Maybe there's a Fernando Tatis Jr. rookie waiting to be pulled in one of them.
Until then, enjoy your Sunday and thanks as always for stopping by!
Here's my latest Xander Bogaerts pick-up, a solid and long overdue addition to my one somewhat serious modern player collection...
This beauty is a Chrome Refractor parallel of Xander's 2014 Topps Heritage RC, on which he shares billing with Jonathan Schoop. For some reason, Topps Heritage Refractors really pop to my eyes, even more so than the standard Topps Chrome Refractors. I'm a huge fan of the Purple Refractors as well as these standard ones, which are serial-numbered (to /565 in this case).
Lacking this card has felt like a somewhat significant hole in my Bogaerts collection for years now, and finally being able to nab one for just $12 and change earlier this year felt great.
That's a wrap for now, and I have to say my Bogaerts collection feels much more respectable with this card added to it. Having recently crossed the 200-card threshold in that player collection, this card is a great way to begin the march to 300.
Thanks as always for stopping by, and enjoy your weekend everyone!
There's a myth among certain collectors that collecting graded cards has to be expensive. It sure can be, but it doesn't have to
be! In the 'Cheap Slabs' series here on the blog, we'll look
exclusively at graded cards that cost me $25 or less to add to my
collection...
Today's card is a very cheap rookie card of one of the best offensive players to debut for my hometown Red Sox in the past few years...
It's the standard Bowman rookie card of third baseman Rafael Devers, in a nice PSA 9. I've already got a raw copy of this card, maybe even a couple, but I couldn't resist snatching this one up given that it cost me just $6.25 of COMC store credit!
Devers has had some issues in the field at times, but has been a great hitter in the Boston lineup early in his career. He led the league in both doubles and total bases last year, his age 22 season. While his numbers dipped a bit in 2020, I'm considering this past "season" an anomaly as far as my collecting goes, and am just as excited to pick up new Devers cards now as I ever was.
Here's a look at the back, way too busy if you ask me. In fact, I'm not generally a huge fan of Bowman sets for this very reason, but in this case it was a cheap enough rookie of a player I like a good deal.
So, there's my latest cheap slab. I actually picked this up many months ago, as evidenced by the fact that I actually have it in hand despite not receiving either of the two COMC orders I've had shipped to me this year yet.
I've got plenty more cheap PSA-graded cards to share in future iterations of this series, but until then thanks as always for stopping by!
Yes, it's 1995-96 Pinnacle Rink Collection! The short-lived Rink Collection parallels are some of my absolute favorites of the entire decade that was the '90s, and I was totally pumped to find a handful of these in the package for my ever-growing Whalers collection.
Always loved this shot of defenseman Adam Burt taking an awkward puck to the face!
These are so appreciated, because I've mainly focused on the inaugural '94-95 Rink Collection parallels to date, and only had one lone Whaler from this '95-96 set prior to receiving Mark's generous package.
Great shot of the Whalers uniforms of the era here, as Robert Kron engages in discussion with the referee.
I've mentioned many times before how Hartford fans were conflicted about Glen Wesley. He was a despised member of the rival Bruins for many years before donning the Whalers green and blue.
Unfortunately, as we now know, the team was just a couple of seasons from its demise move to Carolina when these cards were issued.
Love this Geoff Sanderson, the blue uniform looks great on these particular parallels. As is always the case with Dufex or foil cards, these look infinitely better in hand than they do in scans.
Lastly, my favorite card of the bunch, Darren Turcotte posing with (presumably) his son in front of the net. Pinnacle had some great photographs in their mid-'90s hockey releases, quirky portraits like this one included among them.
What's especially great about the eight cards I showed in this post is that they complete my '95-96 Rink Collection Whalers team set! I'm really starting to feel like a serious team collector now, with not just team sets completed but team sets in parallel format as well. With these added to my collection on TCDB I'm now up to 1,836 Whalers cards and counting, good enough for third place on the site as far as largest Hartford Whalers collections go.
Mark, thanks for these great cards, they are very much appreciated! Everyone else, enjoy the rest of your Tuesday and I'll be back soon with more goodies from Mark's package. Thanks as always for stopping by!
Living in a part of the country that's ripe with antiques and country stores, I'm always on the lookout for card storage mechanisms that look a little more attractive than the white cardboard boxes much of my collection is stored in. Recently, I stumbled into a couple of cool items on this front, so I thought they might make for an interesting post and a nice break from the stream of "look what cards I got" posts.
First up, this Wilson's Certified processed cheese box. Yes, it's exactly what it sounds like; back in the day these little wooden boxes were used to ship about 5 lbs each of processed cheese! Quite a few of these survived to the modern age, and they're not all that rare to find to be honest. I just love the worn look and history of the thing, certainly more aesthetically pleasing in my home office/card room than some of the alternatives like I said.
Here's a look at one of the front panels, great shot of the Wilson & Co logo. American-made, in Wisconsin baby! Those of you with a keen eye have probably already picked up on why I brought this box home with me. I had a sneaking suspicion, which proved to be correct...
...that the box is the absolute perfect size to hold PSA slabs! This little box will secure between 40 and 50 PSA-graded cards by my estimation. Of course, it'll do just fine for penny sleeved or top-loaded cards as well, and would hold even more of those. Best of all, it set me back only $10 or so, no more than one of the assemble-yourself BCW cardboard boxes would have cost me most likely.
Believe it or not, I found another storage mechanism in recent weeks though that is even cooler than that. Check out this ornate beauty!
This box absolutely intrigued me the moment that I saw it. I've never really seen another box like it. It's got some serious weight to it, and is felt-lined along the bottom, as well as throughout the interior. The craftsmanship is actually pretty stunning, really nice solid wood with some cool little touches like the striping down the sides and the design on top to really give it a luxurious feel.
Here's a look at it from the side. There are a pair of hinges on the back, and the top actually folds back on those to reveal the inside, as opposed to coming all the way off. Any guesses as to what this was? Give up? Well, it turns out it was some type of display piece for a high-end retail store that was used to display a cutlery set that was for sale!
Obviously, since it's being featured here, you know what I thought of right away. There are three divided sections inside, all felt-lined as I mentioned, and if I removed a couple of modular inserts that were in place above each to hold the cutlery, they looked like they may be the perfect little cubbies to store some cards in!
Here it is opened up with some of my graded baseball cards stored inside...
As you can see, each of the three sections neatly holds two rows of graded cards, with enough room down the middle to make flipping through and pulling cards out a breeze. The bonus shelf in the back works perfectly for horizontally-oriented cards like my Nolan Ryan RC there.
For now, I'm storing all of the cards from my Cardboard Keepers experiment in this case, but at some point there will be too many of them to contain in here. At that stage I might re-dedicate this as my spot for a valued graded player collection, like Nolan Ryan or Wayne Gretzky. Whatever it stores though, it looks absolutely awesome in my office and is a great way to display my collection with pride.
With these now in use, my working desk is so much more pleasant a place to sit and sort, and blog about cards. What used to look like this...
...now looks like this...
Ah, much better!
Put these together with my card chest that I use for COMC yet-to-be-posted cards, and things are looking nice in my home office here. Of course, I still have way more cards than I do cool and unique places to store them like this. Hopefully, as I keep my eye out for more interesting storage mechanisms while simultaneously reducing the size of my collection, I can increase the percentage of my cards that are stored in something cool like these boxes.
How about you, have you ever used or do you currently use any non-standard storage mechanisms for your collection? If so, I'd love to hear about them in the comments. Thanks as always for stopping by!
Time for the next installment of Cardboard Keepers, a thought experiment
in which I theoretically whittle my entire collection down to just
2,000 cards; 1,000 baseball keepers, and 1,000 "other" keepers.
Today's entry into this project is not only the first football card to be selected, but it's also brand spankin' new to me, as I just picked it up a couple of days ago...
Always wanted a Johnny Unitas card, and always loved the simplistic design of the 1964 Philadelphia football set. This one is made even cooler by the fact that the Golden Arm was named NFL MVP in '64, his second of three career MVP awards.
I scored this copy at a small antiques store in my neck of the woods for the very reasonable price of $15. It's in remarkably good shape, and I'm thrilled to have this be my lone representation of Unitas in my collection to date.
Here's a look at the back, nice and clean as well. Pretty rough cartoon if you're a Steelers fan!
That's really all for today, just seemed like NFL football Sunday was the perfect day to unveil this beauty. I may not have many football cards, but I sure am glad to have this one, and it's certainly a worthy card to be the first football representation in this project!
The non-baseball Cardboard Keepers collection is up to 28 cards in size now, and can be viewed here.
I've still got a long way to go, with 972 cards remaining to be
selected. I'll be back soon with the next card or group of cards for
the project, but until then thanks as always for stopping by!
I'm so behind on thanking people for the wonderful cards they've sent me, mostly thanks to two considerably large packages that arrived these past few weeks.
Since getting through large volumes like these two packages is what often delays me, I figured I'll break them up into a series of smaller posts in the interest of making at least some headway here. Along those lines, here are ten random Red Sox cards I got a while back from my now longtime hobby friend Joe Shlabotnik!
Because the new Blogger is awful, these ten cards are once again in the reverse order that I scanned them for this post. Not the end of the world here, but this is really going to put a crimp in the way I process certain posts, including my Buyback Franken-set posts.
Anyway, cool Bazooka Johnny Damon!
If you're a Red Sox fan and the name Stefan Bailie doesn't ring a bell, don't be too hard on yourself. He topped out at AA about 15 years ago.
I certainly recognize this Jose Vaquedano card, but it must be because I have a Chrome version or some parallel, because this base card is new to my collection according to TCDB.com.
Rounding out the trio of prospects, Jeremy West. Again, never made the show to my knowledge.
How about some more familiar players? Great action photograph on this early-career Kevin Youkilis. Not really a fan of this particular uniform/hat combo I have to say.
Really nice photograph on this Derek Lowe. I miss Upper Deck baseball cards (and Topps hockey cards, for that matter!).
Metal Universe! Saberhagen was certainly in the twilight of his career when this set was issued, but this is a great card (even if it scanned terribly).
An interesting foil Stadium Club card here. The design is a little busy for my liking, but what a great shot of Eck's signature delivery. A couple of fantastic pitchers there who are not typically associated with Boston.
Joe hooked me up with a need for my 1984 Fleer team set, in the form of this checklist. This is actually the back of the card, as you can see the card number in the lower left corner there.
Here's the front, occupied by the White Sox and the great Tony LaRussa.
We'll close it out with my newest Nomar, a Record Numbers Topps card featuring a whole lot of fireworks. This is the 132nd Nomar Garciaparra card in my catalogued collection, though I certainly have more to catalog.
Some solid new additions there, thanks Joe! As I said, this is just a small portion of the Red Sox that were found in this package, so I'll be back soon with more. Hope everyone is enjoying the fall, and staying safe!
.jpg)
