It's that time again

 

This past fall and part of the winter, I decided to do as I mostly always do, which is skip the football season entirely and obsess over baseball past while looking forward to the future. Sadly, the Pittsburgh Pirates didn’t give me much to look forward to in 2025…so the rest of the MLB will have to do.

            One thing I am excited about is 2025 Topps. I really and truly like the front and back designs and this picture is going to do absolutely nothing to prove way.

            If you’ve seen the cards on videos or in person you know that the colored portions of the borders have foil vibe to them. Something that didn’t really show in photographs. Topps is getting crafty. Last year it was neon. This year it’s bring on the foil. The cards are sharp and crisp, and my only complaint is that it’s not 1990 and we don’t get close up shots of the players just the as always in-action shots.

            Speaking of 1990. If you can believe it, it’s been 35 years since 1990. Thirty-five years since The Simpsons and thirty-five years since Brandon and Brenda Walsh moved from Minnesota to that famous 90210 zip code.

            And thirty-five years since Topps debut this design.

            Boy, this 1990 base design took me back to being a kid. A teen really. Sixteen in 1990. By the summer of that year, I had my driver’s license and there were no more bumming rides from my old man to card shows and flea markets and LCS shops in the malls. Now, there was just him not letting me borrow the car or complaining about me not filling the tank. I always liked the 1990 design. That flashy it’s the 90’s now front, and that taxi cab driver art deco back to the card. The two should’ve been a conflict of interest but they always worked out well together.

            And they look nice as inserts.

            I bought a jumbo box. No, I’m not going back on my word and hand collating sets…not with how many doubles Topps puts in their boxes now.

            (It’s even worse this year)

            (Don’t believe me, go and watch some people open boxes on YouTube)

            But I did want to open some wax. I can’t help but get a thrill out of it still.

            And as always you get your standard bells and whistles.

            The Call to the Hall are cards are bit boring.

            But I can’t complain about the ones I got.

            Got the standard game used (maybe game used) stitch of ballplayer cloth.

            The Ripken is numbered to 50.

            The other inserts veer toward the blah side to me, but I’m always a fan of season highlight inserts.

            Speaking of season highlights. I usually blow off League Leader cards, but 2025’s are sharp.

            My lone gold card.

            And I got no complaints about the autograph card. Baseball economics have dampened the Dodgers for me, but I always love that early 80s era of Los Angeles baseball when Garvey was still playing well, and Fernando-Mania was everywhere.

            When I got back into The Hobby in 2019, Vlady Jr. and Yordan Alvarez were all the rage. For that reason, I do try and get as many of their cards as I can.

            This year’s base models are both bangers.

            Then there are those guys I had high hopes for who’ve kind of fallen off the radar but are still in my PC for sentimental reasons too.

            I usually latch onto one rookie person season. Jhonkensy “Big Christmas” Noel was that guy for me in 2024. So, I was pretty happy that his rookie card wasn’t missing out of the box, like the Dylan Crews rookie was.

            Overall, it was a decent rip. Kind of glad I eliminated the burden of set building. In a strange way it actually made opening packs more fun. I’ve said it here before, but because cards cost what they do I felt compelled to build sets when that wasn’t natural of me as a collector. I don’t feel that way anymore.

 

Thanks for reading! Happy Collecting!

 

           

           

A Thief's Journal

 

It was never my intention to turn to a life of crime.

            I’d always been a good kid. Or I at least tried to be. I did okay in school. I was good to my parents. I was a good and honest friend. I ate everything on my plate and went to bed on time...mostly.

            I loved my pet dog.

            I’m not sure where I went wrong.

            I guess you could say my life of crime started with this baseball card.

            You see, back when I was a kid, I’m talking little kid here, age six or seven, Ed Ott was my favorite Pittsburgh Pirate. Okay, Willie Stargell was my favorite Pittsburgh Pirate. But Willie was Pops. You couldn’t NOT love Willie Stargell. But Ed Ott was my 2^nd favorite, which, behind Stargell, made him my de facto, favorite Pirate.

            That all started when I pull this card (not the original one) out of my very first pack of baseball cards.

            Flash forwards a year later, and my family has moved an hour plus away from Pittsburgh to a town called Wellsburg, West Virginia. In an instant I went from city mouse to country mouse. I went from a neighborhood full of kids to my brother and I being almost the only kids in our neighborhood. There was one kid named Kurt who was my brother’s age, and another kid named Donny…who was twelve. A good five years older than me.

            Donny reluctantly let me pal around with him when none of his friends were around. His house was the first house where I’d ever seen a video game system. Or that cool electric football game. Donny had boxes full of baseball cards, and his bedroom is subsequently where my life of crime began.

            It happened when, you guessed it, I stole this card from Donny.

            I didn’t mean to.

            It just happened.

            Donny left his bedroom to use the bathroom, and the 1981 Ed Ott somehow ended up hidden underneath my clammy leg, where I’d been sitting cross-legged on Donny’s floor. Another trip to bathroom later by Donny, and the 1981 Topps Ed Ott card had made it safely into the pocket of my shorts, later to join the collection of 1981 cards that I’d been building at home.

            It wasn’t a proud moment for me.

            But Donny had so many 1981 Topps cards he wouldn’t miss an Ed Ott?

            Besides, Ed Ott was my favorite Pirate and not Donny’s.

            Of course, there’s a sad irony to being a seven-year-old kid with a favorite player on your favorite team. And that’s being a seven-year-old kid who recognizes players on cards more than he does on TV or scorecards. Ed Ott wasn’t even playing for the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1981. He’d been traded that April to the California Angels with Mickey Mahler for first baseman Jason Thompson.

            And behind the plate in Pittsburgh, there was a new sherif in town.

            Sadly, 1981 was Ed Ott’s last year in Major League Baseball. He spent the 1982 season injured. The 1983 season mostly injured. And after a stint with the Angels PCL AAA team Edmonton in 1984, Ed Ott was out of baseball. At least as a player. He’s coached in the pros, the independent league and something called the Canadian-American Association of Professional Baseball.

            And, sadly, Ed Ott passed away on March 3, 2024.

            RIP OTTER.

            As for me, my life of crime last throughout the 1980s. A random, opened pack of 1983 Fleer from the RevCo Drug Store. A Super Powers D.C. Comics Robin doll from Hills department store. Couch change whenever I could get my hands on it. Handfuls of chips from someone else’s bag.

            That kind of stuff.

            But it all started that summer of 1981 in Donny’s bedroom.

            Thankfully I've been on the straight and narrow for years now.

Thanks for reading! Happy collecting!

 

 

Finally...

 

Once upon a time,

             I was a fifteen-year-old kid with a paper route, and the occasional money burning a hole in my pocket. This would be 1989. Yes, I’m old. And most of that money was being spent on baseball cards and football cards, although some was now being allocated to buy cassette tapes of music that I liked.

            That’s right…no more taping songs off the radio for me.

            I grew up in the eastern suburbs of Pittsburgh. A place called Penn Hills. It was your standard landscape of strip malls, fast food restaurants, and other assorted business associated with having to mostly use a car to get from point A to point B. One thing that was unique about Penn Hills was that way out in the outer part of the suburb, we had a place called City Limits. City Limits mostly acted as music venue, something that wasn’t very common to tony suburbs in the 1980s. Most of the bands that played at City Limits were punk and hardcore bands. I was too young to attend any concerts at City Limits, and to be perfectly honest, to this day punk and hardcore music really aren’t my cup of tea.

            But City Limits hosted another kind of event that was more akin to my interests at the time.

            A flea market.

            Every Saturday and Sunday morning from 8am to 12pm or 1pm I believe.

            Flea markets attracted local sports card dealers. If it wasn’t a card show, the American Coin at the Monroeville Mall or, more importantly, my local Thrift Drug or RevCo; I was probably buying my baseball cards at the flea market at City Limits.

            Provided the old man was willing to drive me and my brother there.

            On one particular late spring/maybe early summer day when I was at City Limits, I came across a dealer who was selling this.

            Yep.

            I didn’t see a lot of Upper Deck in 1989. Maybe at the Coin or at card shows. Packs certainly weren’t showing up at Thrift Drug. And when I did see 1989 Upper Deck, the inclination wasn’t there for me to buy them. I believe Upper Deck retailed for 99-cents a pack, which was more than double what a pack of Topps, Fleer, Donruss and Score were going for in 1989. Why buy one pack of Upper Deck, when I could get two of the other brands?

            And I still had a couple chances of scoring me a Griffey Jr.

            But that 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr. card was already legend in 1989. It was already classic, and the kid was barely beginning his career. And the dealer at that flea market knew what he had on him. He was selling that Griffey Jr. card for $25. Cheap in comparison to now. And I had the money on me. It was a weekend after I collected for the paper route. I was flush…for a fifteen-year-old. But I couldn’t buy that Griffey card. Could I? I mean I’d never spent more than a few dollars for a single card before in my life. And this was $25. For a guy who hadn’t even proven himself yet.

            But I wanted that Griffey Jr. card.

            My how I wanted it.

            But all I could picture in my head was my old man saying, you paid WHAT for that card?

            All I could picture was me having little to no money until it was time for me to go collecting on the paper route again.

            So, I didn’t buy the 1989 Ken Griffey Jr. card.

            I don’t even know what I bought that day at City Limits.

            And as for the value of the card…

            You all know the rest.

            Flash forward 36 years later and I’m on my way to the Dave & Adam’s pop-up sports card store outside the Empire State Building. The quest was to get myself a few blasters of 2024 Topps Archives to try and start building that set. Or, at least, to start considering whether or not it was worth it for me to build that set. Well, Dave & Adam’s had those 2024 Archives blasters. And under a glass case at the register, they also had this at a price I told myself I was willing to pay, should I ever come across that card again.

            Fate had struck for a second time.

            Only this time I wasn’t passing it up.

            It looks good in its One-Touch.

            And it looks good with the rest of my Ken Griffey Jr. rookie family.

 

Thanks for reading! Happy collecting!

 

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...

 

I recently got on a kick.

            It happens every few years around Thanksgiving.

            I get a kick for this.

            And this.

            And this.

            And...

            I think you get the picture.

            And no, I don’t think the Star Wars movies are the end all be all. But I don’t have the problem with them that some childhood into adult fandom do. I like the prequels. I enjoy Jar Jark Binks. I think The Rise of the Skywalker is the worst of the bunch. The Solo movie is a blast. I’ve been enjoying the TV shows…at least the ones that I’ve seen.

            I still lovingly look at action figure packages when in toy stores.

            Star Wars t-shirts a vital part of my weekly ensemble.

            I even read the comic books that Marvel has been putting out there for a decade now.

            But I was never really into the trading card aspect of Star Wars. I mean I was, a little bit, as a kid. I was too young for Star Wars cards. And when Empire came out I was just discovering baseball cards and cards in general. Return of the Jedi were the cards I remember buying and buying sparingly. Money doesn’t come easy to nine-year-olds. At least it didn’t in my neighborhood. If I had some change and the choice was between buying baseball cards or football cards, or a pack of Jedi cards.

           Baseball and football would've won handily.

            I got my fix on Star Wars with the action figures. I played with them incessantly. My friend Ray-Ray and I made up our own Star Wars TV show with the figures with scripts and plots and seasons.

            Star Wars cards would’ve paled in comparison.

            Although I do have one old Jedi card in my collection.

            While in the midst of re-watching the Star Wars, the adult collector in me got to wondering what kinds of Stars Wars card products were out there. And there’s a good many from low-end to high-end, to those weekly print-on-demand cards that Topps puts out on the regular. The one product that struck me was this one.

            2023’s Star Wars Flagship.

            It seemed like a good place for me to really dip my toes into the world of Star Wars card collecting.

            But there was a problem.

            The cards had mostly, if not completely, sold out in the market. And anything I was finding on the secondary market was overpriced. A case of the “oh well” and “que sera sera” set in, and I generally forgot about Star Wars cards.

            Until I went to my local LCS.

            I guess I wouldn’t call this place and LCS. They have cards. A lot of cards. But the store is kind of a kaleidoscope of hobby interests. There’re toys. There’s those POPZ. Old comic books. Records and CDS. Etc. The place is near my job so I regularly go in there to snoop around. I happened to be a stand featuring a bunch of random blaster boxes, and what did my wandering eye come upon.

            You guessed it.

            So, I had to buy one.

            I had to buy two.

            If you don’t know Star Wars Flagship here’s the gist of the cards, front and back.

            Pretty standard and pretty basic.

            A few more cards for your perusal.

            2023 Star Wars Flagship is a small 100-card base set. With two blasters I was able to make up nearly 4/5 of the base set. Flagship features cards for characters in every Star Wars movie, some of the TV shows, and even some of the animated series that are out there. Regrettably Star Wars animated programming is the one real blind spot that I have in my Galaxy viewing.

            Your standard Topps insert cards are in Star Wars flagship.

            You have your foil cards.

            Your gold foil cards.

            Your parallel cards.

            Your numbered parallel cards.

            And some pretty cool inserts.

            My favorite of the bunch are the lightsaber dye-cut cards.

            But I wasn’t stingy with them. I gave this one to my wife.

            Rey is her favorite.

            Overall, I had a pretty good time opening packs of Star Wars flagship. I don’t often non-sports, but I think I should dip my toes in further. It’s just harder to find out what kind of products are being released for what kinds of movies and TV shows. Or I’m just not looking the right places and need to connect with more non-sports folks.  I’m a pretty big fan of the latest Star Wars program Skeleton Crew. I thought it was a lot of fun. Be nice to see some card product for that.

            Anyway, thanks for reading. Happy Collecting.

            …And MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU.