Signature Sundays - Whit Merrifield Gets No Love

Back with another Signature Sundays post this weekend, and since it's projected to be an unseasonably warm 70+ degree day here in New England, we'll go with a recent baseball pick-up.

I'm a fan of the Archives Signature Series product that Topps has put out for the last few years, and have featured quite a few of them here on the blog over time.  While I won't spend the money to gamble on a one-card box of the stuff, I love picking up interesting ones for cheap coin on eBay.  Along those lines...

...here's a nice Whit Merrifield on-card autograph that I recently procured.  I know a few casual fans of baseball who are not very familiar with Whit at all, despite the fact that he led the American League in hits in both 2018 and 2019, the last two full-length MLB seasons.  He also finished third in the AL during the COVID-shortened 2020 season, with 70 hits.  So, why does Whit Merrifield get no love then?

Part of me thinks it's because of the market he plays in with the Royals.  If he played for the Red Sox, Giants, or Yankees for example, I can't help but think he'd be a superstar?  Maybe it's because he got a relatively late start to his MLB career?  He didn't debut until his age-27 season, so could it be that collectors aren't as into him because that negatively impacts his ability to rack up career numbers?

I'm honestly not sure, but what I do know is that I landed this 2018 Topps Chrome card, with Whit's on-card autograph, for less than $10!  I chose this one because the autograph presents nicely, and it's also a card from 2018, which was the first year that Whit led the AL in hits.  Would love to get a 2019 autographed card to accompany this one at some point, to have one from each of his hit-leading seasons.

Here's the back, though there's really not much to see here.  I think we're all familiar with the 2018 Topps/Topps Chrome backs by this point.

This particular card has some dust or junk that you can see along the top left edge.  It's actually inside the magnetic holder, which is odd and bothers my OCD to some degree.  At some point I may temporarily free Whit from his plastic prison, only to entomb him in a new, clean UltraPro OneTouch.

For now though, it's fine as is, and I'm really excited to add Merrifield to my autograph collection at a price point that can't be beat.  One of the more under-rated players in today's game in my humble opinion.  

That's all for today, thanks as always for stopping by, and enjoy your Sunday!

Four New Shiny Cards!

A quick quartet of shiny cards to show this evening, all of which entered my organized collection proper within the past week.  First up, a pair of stars from a set that is really growing on me more and more, and has likely become my favorite unlicensed baseball set of all-time...

Yes, it's Panini's 2017 Donruss Optic release, back for the second time on the blog just recently.  Last week I showed off the Pink parallel of Mookie Betts' card, this week it's the Blue, which is actually numbered to /149.  I actually picked this one up for less than $2 back in the fall of 2017, but it sat in my COMC to-be-posted chest until I plucked it for scanning and inventorying this past week.

As with the Pink, this card is really a stunner in hand.  It's hard to properly describe the holo refraction technology on these cards, but combined with the bright colored borders it really makes them pop.

Around the same time as the Betts card, I also snagged this Jose Altuve Blue.  Obviously he was much more in collectors' good graces back in 2017 when I picked this up, before the sign-stealing controversy in Houston.  Still, I'm excited to pick-up any star player parallels from this set, and recently decided to dedicate a small collecting project to them, which will be covered in another post.  Snagged this one for a dollar even.

The other two cards I'll be showing actually arrived in my mailbox just yesterday, courtesy of Sportlots.  On the paper invoice that the seller included with the cards, he included a note indicating that he clearly noticed that I got a pretty good bargain on one of them, at just 18 cents.  First time I've seen a note like that, I have to say!

Before we get to the 18 cent bargain card though, here's the other one, a beautiful Purple Chrome Refractor of the great Albert Pujols from 2013 Topps Heritage baseball.  This will also be included in a newly-conceived shiny card project, separate from the Optic one mentioned above.  I thought this was a pretty good steal for one of the best hitters of the 21st century so far, and a guy who is a lock for Cooperstown.

Speaking of which, the card that I got the bargain on shares pretty much all of those same characteristics...

No, it's not a Mike Trout rookie, or anything that I'd be able to sell and make a mortgage payment with, but nonetheless I was thrilled to locate this Miguel Cabrera Purple Chrome Refractor for the site-minimum 18 cents!  I'd say this might be the best bargain I've found recently while looking for shiny cards for these new projects.  Another guy who will absolutely have a plaque in the HOF someday.

That's a wrap for now.  I've had more great cards coming into the household in 2020 than I've been able to find the time to write about, but with the winter months approaching I'm expecting more time to get through that backlog and to post more frequently.  I hope you'll join me as I do, and for now thanks as always for stopping by!

Shlabotnik Sox - '80s Fleer Boost

Let's take a look at another batch of Red Sox cards that I received in the recent past from friend of the blog Joe Shlabotnik, shall we?

As the post title indicates, this batch is all about crossing off some '80s Fleer needs.  For example, I had just three Red Sox cards from the 1982 Fleer release before receiving this latest package from Joe.

The Fleer cards that Joe tossed into the envelope included both stars (superstars, even!), and some lesser-known players like Tom Burgmeier.

The photography in the '82 release can be fuzzy at times to say the least, as on this Gary Allenson, but it's still cool in a quirky sort of way.  Personally, I'm a fan of cards that contain pictures of trees in the background.

I can't tell if Reid Nichols is watching the base coach for a sign here, or if he just struck out?

Extremely fuzzy photo on Carney Lansford's card...

...and Garry Hancock brings up the rear as far as '82 Fleer is concerned.  I tripled the number of '82 Fleer Sox I have thanks to this delivery, but that's not all...

...as Joe sent along some '83s as well.  Pretty stunning improvement in photograph clarity from one year to the next on Fleer's part.

Tom Burgmeier, in the dark...

Mark Clear, possibly counting votes in Georgia?  ;-)

Here's some real star power, with HOFer Dennis Eckersley showing his famed lengthy locks.  For a simple portrait photograph, I actually really like this card.

Rich Gedman's '83 Fleer card really gives you a sense of how strong this guy was.  Look at those biceps!  Gotta love the glasses on this one too.

Another nice star card here, with staff ace Bruce Hurst!

I'm noticing, at least within this small selection of cards, just how few in-game or action shots there are in '83 Fleer.  Maybe it's just coincidence with these Red Sox shots, but there's a whole lot of hanging on the sidelines posing going on here.

Another HOFer with big Jim Rice!  Jim looks a little angry on this card.  Pretty great to land both he and Eck from this set in one fell swoop.

A couple more sitting around shots...

...but then...

...a huge card for my team set featuring a pair of HOFers, including the great Yaz!  Also, how tall was Mark Clear anyway?!?!  Just looked it up, 6'4" apparently.  That makes sense.  He sure looks like a giant here compared to Eckersley though, who was 6'2" himself.

We'll close out today's post with longtime Red Sox color commentator Jerry Remy.  The Rem-dawg is looking pretty spiffy on this '85 Fleer issue.  Bonus points for that fantastic McDonald's wristband!

These fantastic Fleer cards put another dent in my featuring of all of the great cards Joe sent in his last package, but there's more to the tale even still.  Until next time though, thanks as always for stopping by!

Three from COMC - '54s!

As I mentioned in a previous post, last Saturday I finally received my COMC order that I requested shipment of back in the first week of June.  I was beginning to think I'd never see the cards, so I'm relieved to have these in hand at last.

The day sort of got ahead of me today thanks to a long afternoon nap, but let's spend a couple of minutes looking at a sweet trio of '54 Bowmans that were included in the package...

Karl Drews of the Phillies is up first.  I didn't pick this up for any particular reason other than the fact that it was cheap.  As far as 1954 releases go, I like the Bowman effort better than Topps', so I'm sort of half-heartedly collecting the set.

Drews was an imposing 6'4" presence on the mound over an impressive 21 seasons of professional baseball.  Sadly, he died not long after retiring, at age 43, when he was struck by a drunk driver while trying to flag down a passing car after his own had broken down.

Next up, an interesting facial expression from Sherm Lollar.  Lollar was a very under-rated 9x All-Star and 2x World Series champion backstop.  There are some that make an argument that he should be considered for enshrinement maybe.  I'm not sure I'd go that far personally, but what do I know, I never saw the man play in person.  

This card's a little off-center, but it's a great example of the vibrant color that makes this release so enjoyable to me.

Karl Drews may have been an imposing force on the mound at 6'4", but Bob Rush was every bit as tall as he was.  You can really get a sense for Rush's extended frame on this card.  Strange Cubs uniform here with the red piping below CHICAGO.  Just totally random chance that I ended up with two of the taller hurlers from this age among this grouping of three cards.

This trio puts me at 41 cards and counting now from this release, which is much better progress than I thought I'd be making at this stage given that I don't prioritize picking these up as often as I probably should.  With one or two exceptions, I don't think I've paid more than a dollar or two for any of them, either.  With just 224 cards in the set I'm quickly closing in on 20% complete, so who knows, maybe I will get there someday.

Thanks as always for stopping by, and enjoy your Saturday night!

Mid-Week Draft Folder Fodder

I actually find myself with a little bit of free time for posting tonight, which feels like a minor miracle of late.  I don't have the kind of time it would take to pull some new stuff, scan or photograph it, and post, so instead let's pump out some backlogged images from my drafts folder...

First up, a French Bulldog "Collectible Canines" insert from last year's Allen & Ginter set.  I purchased this card for a very obvious reason...

...and that is the fact that Shoebox Legends' official assistant is indeed a French Bulldog.  This is Leo, who I'm fairly certain made an appearance on the blog when we first brought him home around three years ago now.  He's my favorite pet of all time, so well behaved that he hasn't even chewed a single card yet.  

Seriously, he has free reign of my office/card room, door is always left open and he even goes in there and naps alone sometimes.  There are small stacks of cards everywhere, many of which are within his very limited reach.  Sometimes he's even home alone with access to them, and not a tooth mark or toppled pile yet.  What a good boy!  The trick is that I let him nibble on an unlicensed Panini Prizm baseball card when he was still a puppy, which obviously put a rotten taste in his mouth (totally kidding).

Here's the write-up on the back.  I popped this one into one of those UltraPro OneTouch magnetic holders specifically for minis (which are amazing, by the way), and it's displayed on my home office desk, which has been my work area for coming up on 8 months now.  Nice work with this insert set, Topps!

Here's a really stunning Pedro card that I only got to scanning and adding to my collection formal very recently, even though I purchased it probably close to two years ago, maybe longer.  Everyone fawns over the 1993 Finest Refractors, and it's easy to see why.  To me, though not nearly as coveted, these '94s are equally beautiful.  This card practically glows, easily my new favorite pre-Red Sox Martinez card.

I got an absolute steal on this too, as a Buy-It-Now for $10 flat.  Nowadays, I have a feeling I'd have to drop more than that to acquire one of these.

I've been selling a lot of my soccer cards on eBay these past few months because the market for them went absolutely insane (it's calmed slightly in the past couple of weeks, but overall is still solid).  One that I decided to keep though is this Pitch Kings insert of Leo Messi from 2015 Donruss.  It's not worth enough to bother listing on its own, and besides I like the artwork, even if it is a little spooky.

Last but not least, here's a card that arrived in the mailbox just today.  I've sold a few of my Mookie Betts cards via eBay auction this week, with him being in the World Series again and all he's getting some hobby attention for sure.  Since I was pumping quite a few of them out of the collection, I decided to bring in this new one to offset things just a bit.  Cost me less than $2, with free shipping.  Technically it's a Purple parallel, though it looks very pink both in this scan and in hand.

I know what you may be thinking.  Earlier in this post I made a crack about unlicensed Panini sets being terrible, why would I buy this?  Well, the reason I don't enjoy most Panini baseball products is simply the fact that they don't have a license.  I think they should have an MLB license, because exclusivity seems to breed laziness at Topps sometimes.

In particular, I really love the 2017 Donruss Optic set.  If these had proper team names and logos this might be my favorite baseball release of the 2010s, not even kidding.  Just look at the Optic basketball or football sets that use this design, both of which are licensed, and you'll see what I mean.  In hand, the parallels from this Optic set are some of the shiniest baseball cards in my entire collection.

I'm not even doing it justice here, trust me, but just look at how this card catches and refracts the light.  Tilting it around side to side I almost get lost in the rainbow reflection.  Just beautiful.  In fact, I have a project in mind involving some of the parallels from this set, but that's for another post on another day.

That's all for tonight, here's Leo one more time, doing his best impression of the year 2020.

Thanks for stopping by!  Until next time, stay safe out there.

Grabbing Gretzkys - The '90-91 Point King!

Wayne Gretzky is, in my personal opinion, the greatest player ever to take the ice in National Hockey League history.  Although I have too many other collecting interests, and too limited a collecting budget, to become an insane Gretzky super-collector, I'm nonetheless making an attempt to pickup much of his 1980s Topps and O-Pee-Chee run in PSA-graded form.

The two cards I have to show today fall just outside of that scope by definition, but are still from the era when Topps was producing a flagship hockey set, and also were cheap enough that I simply could not resist picking them up for my collection of The Great One!

First up, a concept that is very familiar to Gretzky fans and collectors, the League Leaders subset card.  Wayne absolutely dominated the sport of hockey for a period of close to two decades, and as a result appeared on so many of these leader cards throughout that time.

#99 earned this particular card in the 1991-92 Topps set by scoring a league-best 163 points in the 1990-91 campaign.  That was more than 30 points higher than the next best scorer (Brett Hull), and nearly 50 points higher than third place Adam Oates.

The back gives you a look at the top ten scorers in 1990-91, and to me the most surprising name on the list is John Cullen of the Penguins/Whalers.

How impressive a feat was this 163-point total?  Well, not a single player has bested it in the nearly 30 years since.  Mario Lemieux came close once or twice, but nobody has eclipsed 163 points since Wayne's '90-91 season.  Amazing.

Leading the league in points in '90-91 actually got Wayne a second card in the '91-92 Topps release, as scoring the most points in the league wins you the Art Ross Trophy, of course.  Even though Gretzky is pictured in a practice sweater here, I actually like the layout of the card, with the Art Ross hardware super-imposed.

Perhaps the best thing about this pair of cards is that they're actually from a COMC order that I requested shipment for back in the first week of June that finally reached my doorstop this past Saturday!  It was a couple hundred cards in size too, so I've got plenty of great content now for posting through the dark and dreary winter months.

Really happy to have this pair of slabbed cards in my Great One collection, commemorating the amazing age-30 season Wayne enjoyed in 1990-91.  There are plenty more Gretzky cards out there that I'm still hunting for this project, in fact he was featured on eight cards in the 1991-92 Topps set alone.  Yep, I'm going to be at this a while, but I don't mind because I love the thrill of the hunt.  Two cards closer after today's post, anyway.

Thanks as always for stopping by, and I'll be back with more great cardboard later this week.  Stay safe out there, and mask up!

Cheap Slabs - Kirby RC

Time for the next installment of Cheap Slabs, a series dedicated to proving that collecting graded cards does not necessarily have to be expensive.  Each slabbed card featured in this series was had for less than $25.

Today's card is an iconic '80s baseball rookie card, and one that I can hardly believe took me a full 35 years to finally own a copy of...

Yes, it's the '85 Donruss Kirby Puckett RC!  For whatever reason, I've largely ignored the 1985 baseball releases for most of my collecting timeline.  I've long had it in the back of my mind though that I'd like to snag '85 Donruss Puckett and Clemens rookies though, and when the opportunity presented itself recently for me to grab this Puckett in a PSA 8.5 for just $12.62, I jumped at it.

Though his career was relatively brief at just a dozen MLB seasons, Kirby was a 10x All-Star who brought two World Series championships to Minnesota.  He was certainly one of the most effective hitters of his generation, and arguably the best hitter in the history of the Twins organization.  He's certainly in the discussion, anyway.

Here's the back, standard fare for Donruss throughout most of the '80s, other than the color changing and some minor cosmetic tweaks here and there...

A really great card here.  Typically I go for PSA 9s when it comes to cards from the '80s and newer, but in this case, like I said just stumbled upon this one and the price was right.  Someday maybe I'll pick up a PSA 9 and sell this one to offset some of the upgrade cost, but those are expensive enough that they wouldn't make the cut for this Cheap Slabs series anyway!  This set is really tough for grading due to those black borders, so this example is just fine for my purposes.  For much less than the cost of a retail blaster (even with shipping and tax included), color me satisfied.

What I'd really like is to get an '85 Leaf version of this one (and Clemens, too).  I enjoy the Leaf logo in that '85 set, but they're quite a bit scarcer and more valuable than their Donruss counterparts from what I can tell.  Maybe someday...

For now, thanks as always for stopping by my little corner of the internet!

Signature Sundays - Three More '89-90 OPCs!

In today's Signature Sundays post, let's take a look at the other three 1989-90 O-Pee-Chee autograph cards that came in my recent lot of six, purchased from a reputable seller on eBay.  If you missed the first trio and want to check them out, you can find those here.

Anyway, this is the first set of sports cards that I ever collected as a young lad, so I've been casually accumulating autographed cards from the set.  Let's dive right into today's trio...

From the Calgary Flames, it's goaltender Rick Wamsley.  What I associate Rick with most is being part of the trade (headed to Calgary) that brought sniper Brett Hull to the Blues.  That's probably not fair to Rick, who had a lengthy NHL career supporting a few different franchises, but it is what it is.

Wamsley sure has a great signature, I'll give him that.

Here's the back, with evidence of that '87-88 trade that sent Wamsley north of the border, and Hull south of it...

Next up, Robert Picard of the Nordiques.  While I'm grateful to land any Nordiques player for this project, Picard is not one that I've got a lot of memories of from childhood.  In fairness to me, he was wrapping up his NHL career just as I became a fan.

Big, loopy signature here, complete with jersey number!

Robert bounced around quite a bit, though in most cases he did last multiple seasons wherever he landed.

The final card is the one that drew me to this seller to begin with, and my absolute favorite of this order...

Oh yeah!  What a great autograph of the "Little Ball of Hate", Pat Verbeek.  Pat was one of my younger brother's favorite players growing up, and he was the kind of guy who you absolutely despised if he wasn't on your team, but absolutely adored if he was.  Very much Brad Marchand before Brad Marchand.

I always liked Verbeek's distinct signature, with jersey number included in the opening 'P' of his first name.  This has always been a very recognizable card as well, due to the atrocious airbrushing used to convert Pat from his Devils gear into Whaler garb.  So happy to have an autographed copy of this childhood favorite!

I wish Verbeek would get the call to the HOF someday.  His 522 career goals are just about the most of anyone not enshrined, and he's right on that line with guys like Pierre Turgeon and Jeremy Roenick.  Maybe someday!

That's a wrap for this week's autograph post.  I'm actually up to 23 different on-card autographs from this set now, if you count my Topps and O-Pee-Chee cards combined.  If you're interested, you can see the entire collection here; it's starting to look quite nice if I do say so myself.

Thanks as always for stopping by!