10 Cards from the Dollar Box / FLCS review #4

A truly wonderful thing happened in my home town a few years ago, and it is way past time for me to put up a post on this. I guess I didn't want to jinx anything but things are definitely looking great for Baseball Cards in my little ole home town of 8,000 souls. For the first time in my entire life, I have been enjoying the wonderfulness of having a Friendly Local Card Store! 

As much reflection as image I guess, but an authentic picture. Let's see the inside...

Another exciting pic, I know. But I wanted to include the key feature there - tables and chairs. That is the one thing I always most want to see in a card store as then you know you can sit down and either shop cards, or enjoy opening your brand new cards.

Shop: Up North Collectors

Where: 339 River St. Manistee, MI

Website: https://upnorthcollectors.com/

Owner: Luke

Card Inventory: Just exactly perfect. The row of items on the back wall are all boxes for sale, those display cases are full of singles, and not seen in this photo is a set of shelving holding $1 boxes and team sorted $5-ish singles.

Collecting Supplies: Plentiful. Ultra•Pro for the win.

Space to Rip Your Purchases: As seen above.

Baseball Cards : other cards — about 30:70 I think. But that's - a good thing.

21st Century Survival Strategy: Basically, all of them. Luke and his father have a small but active breaking service with its own YouTube channel, are very active selling cards on eBay, and also now semi-routinely set up at card shows within moderate distances. Additionally Luke is clearly an expert not just at all varieties of sports cards, but is probably the most knowledgeable person I have ever met when it comes to gaming cards, about which I know absolutely nothing except one thing: they are a big business and running a Baseball Card store for me to enjoy immensely probably would be a lot more challenging without knowing gaming cards inside/out.

Cool Customer Service: Oh yes. Aside from routinely dispensing excellent, ethical advice while explaining cards to people all day, every day, Up North offers a wonderful service - submission of cards for grading. They get a bit of a bulk discount, passed along to you, and handle all the shipping & receiving for you - no Porch Pirates to worry about, everything insured, etc. This is a ginormous help compared to doing-it-yourself.

Memorable Quote #1: "Oh I hit my number at the casino last night, so I figured I would put it into cards for fun." — A couple months back I watched someone sequentially rip 3 full boxes of Topps Chrome Update, hoping for hits. It was pretty cool to see the whole product at once like that, and a lot of cards I would just never see in-person, otherwise.

Memorable Quote #2: "Damn, another Pitcher Auto." — Same guy as above who did indeed hit a relatively unknown Rookie Pitcher for every single autographed card he pulled.

Treasure Wistfully Not Obtained: Every time I am in this store I see something I would like to own. Today's visit showed me this card:

Which I just cribbed from COMC for you, and for me, to get a better view of it. This is a mini from inside a rip card in the "Topps Rip" product last year.

I quite like this design with a clear nod to Hokusai's immortal "Great Wave" print. Unfortunately because the vast majority of collectors care more about the value of x in the /x serial numbering of rare cards than any bit of imagery on a card, that serial number was stamped on the front of the card which really detracts from such a nice compact little bit of graphic-ness. 

There are no less than 9 different versions of that little card, each with a different production quantity - but each and every one has that serial # stamped on the front. Except one version - the probably even more extra rare "Image Variation" version which swaps out the player photograph for a different tiny photo (exciting, woo) & then drops the serial numbering to make the "Variation" more mysterious. So maybe I can score a couple of those, some day, somewhere.

Treasures Obtained: This year has been wonderful visiting Up North Collectors. They have been increasing their presence at card shows and thus have built up an excellent set of dollar and 50-cent boxes. When I get a rare day off in my very own hometown I can stop by the shop in the morning, bring in an excellent cup of coffee from the coffee shop next door, and sit down with a four-row dollar box jam-packed with random fun. I seriously doubt I could shop for Baseball Cards in a more relaxing setting; certainly not at a card show with a cup of coffee at hand and no one else waiting to see the cards. It makes for an incredible hour+ solidly inside the world of Baseball Cards - real Baseball Cards, held in my hands, not stared at on a screen, with no worries about work or elderly family or the bottomless To Do list, just, Baseball Cards.

Some of the cards in the box I could possibly attain for less than one dollar, if I very carefully shopped for them - but some I definitely could not. But I don't care; they usually cost only 75¢ when the day's bill is read off at the cash register, and I want this store to be within just a few minutes drive away from me forever and ever, basically, so I shop there whenever I can, and probably have about 100 cards purchased this way already.

So I thought I would scan ten cards from today's Dollar Box morning, selected randomly, and share them with y'all; this will make for a nice set of blog posts in the weeks ahead because you don't know what's in those dollar boxes - & neither do I. Let's take a look:

I love Pink baseball cards. They pleasantly remind me of when pink Bubble Gum came with the cards. I wish the parallel in Topps Baseball had a higher print run than /50, but that will never change. 

I used to quite like purchasing hangers of Topps Chrome with their bonus pack of 4 Pink cards, for just $12 or so. But that was olden times. These days, Chrome Pinks arrive just 2 per blaster and those blasters cost $40 where I live - & I only really want the Pink cards. Farewell, Topps Chrome.

So I might or might not put together a "set" of just 9 Pink cards each year; any more I am leaning towards "not." But I do think I will instead assemble an even easier collection: just one Pink card from Chrome every year. I already know that's what I am going to do with those goofy Sapphire versions of these very same cards. If that's what happens between me and 2023 Topps Chrome Pink, this will be the perfect card for the effort. Pink & Powder Blue - quite the combo. Show me another Baseball Card featuring Pink socks. I'll wait.

Deciding to collect any Baseball Cards I like, just 9 at a time, has really freed me to start some collections I would otherwise be far too afraid of. I would immensely enjoy completing a set of 1956 Topps, but that is simply never going to happen in my life unless maybe if I dropped all other hobbies, most particularly enjoying modern Baseball Cards as they appear, brand new, and that is simply never going to happen, either.

But I can certainly aspire to completing a purdy binder page of just 9 1956 Topps Baseball Cards, so I just bought my first one, for one whole dollar, sorta. Although, this is card #4 in the set, so we'll see what happens, later, when I win the Lottery. 

For this card though, I was happy to learn about this player, who hit .299 in 1955 - very respectable. Additionally I learned that Paula was born in Havana and thus I began to wonder about the history of Cuban baseball players; I would not have guessed they started reaching the Bigs in the mid-1950s already. I was also happy to obtain an original Washington Nationals card.

This was a less triumphant purchase but will help fill a binder slot, for a while. For the most expensive RCs, I look for a reprint to keep with all the 59 At Bat RCs around them on the checklist. I think there are other reprint versions of this card, or the "Factory Set" version, or that 3rd version, that won't have TOPPS ROOKIE HISTORY stamped on the front for no real purpose - stamp up the reprints on the back, dummies. But for now this will help keep me from forgetting why there is an empty slot in the binder, which always makes me think I need to track down yet another one of those 59 AB RCs that I forgot about, instead of forgetting that superstars have Rookie Card cards, too.

I very casually collect Topps Rookie Cup cards. By casually I mean I almost never buy them, deliberately, but soon have to order a few from 2012. So I never really thought about collecting the inaugural run of them - until today. To start out at just a buck, sure, what the

2023's "Mr. Mysterious," as I think of him. After a rookie campaign so not memorable I first learned who this player was in the first week of October, it seemed like pitching very well in the playoffs was just another whatevs for this guy. So this card's 100% nonchalant expression seemed to fit him perfectly and you can probably guess about how many 1988/2023 Topps cards I am going to collect. I always like seeing what Topps has to do with the longest team name on designs that didn't originally contend with it.

A Bowman card? There is probably no other way I would ever obtain any more Bowman Baseball Cards than this. Maybe I would try a few more of them if I could still buy "packs" of them instead of $25 mini-boxes, but the days of basically cheap hanger packs are probably never going to return.

There is a pretty good chance this might be the only "Third Baseman" Baseball Card for Torkelson, so I thought it would be neat to see a reminder of that, many years from now. Torkelson has never played a single 1/3 of an Inning at Third Base in the Major Leagues, and never will. But the Tigers thought it could happen, & on Bowman Baseball Cards, things like this do happen.

My almost-but-not-quite thinking on 2023 Topps Baseball really made me appreciate 1983 Topps all the more, so I recently decided to collect the full run of them issued in 2018. This card would only cost me 20¢ on Sportlots, which is where I will head to finish the little (150 cards) project, someday. But not today.

The modern topps logo up there should make you realize as quickly as the perfect whiteness that this is just a simple re-print. Thankfully the only thing added to the front of this 2010 card is the word topps. 

But that shoulder patch - that I had to have on a card.

Another day, another Mike Trout card. At least it's a basically brand new Mike Trout card where he doesn't look Un-happy. And there aren't too many Red, White, and Blue Mike Trout cards. So for a brief look at 1988, this will fit quite pleasingly.

More Bowman, what up? Riley Greene had one of the most disappointing Topps Baseball Rookie Cards I can recall in a minute - he looks like he just banged one straight into the ground in front of home plate and he is definitely going to be Out. 

So I decided I needed many other Riley Greene Rookie Card cards to help wash the memory of that one right a ways away from me. With my recent success at creating a page of 9 different Jazz Chisholm RCs, I realized I could easily do the same for Riley. Thanks, Bowman.

So I had such a pleasant Baseball Card day (more treasures to share with you some other evening), I can't count right, tonight. This isn't just a card showing the poor little children how to fit their Hank Aaron puzzle pieces together - it is an actual die-cut puzzle at regulation Baseball Card size of 2.5" x 3.5" which is something I can't recall ever owning before. I know somewhere I have a Clemente card showing what the Donruss puzzle pieces are supposed to look like all assembled, but that one isn't an actual working puzzle. Though this one would probably take longer to take all apart than it would to put back together. This "card" might or might not fit into a little Hank Aaron project I have on my perpetually expanding Baseball Card horizon, we'll see. But for just a buck...

...Life is good when you have a good LCS like Up North Collectors.

 

1992 Redux, redacted

 

I quite like the 1992 Topps Baseball design. Clean, efficient, colorful. Maybe a feint ehco of Art Deco with the rounded ends on the smaller 'fader bars,' for lack of an accurate term to describe them. Nicely double framed image but with the image given permission to break that inner frame. I never did care for the weirdly pointless, stretched rectangle photo of a baseball diamond on the very plain-jane card back though.

Back at the time I did not collect this one; I was still casually working on the beautiful 1991 Topps design and 1992 was a peak summer of my touring with a famous band — Baseball Cards are eternal, so I knew I could always come back to these, if I wanted. I occasionally dream of buying a "vending box" of these, which would not be difficult. There is a massive supply of the cards and no expensive ones in that set. So, maybe, someday.

In 2017, 1992 finally made it to Archives but few noticed, probably because of some guy named Judge. I look forward to extracting that box of cards from a stack and working on those 92s — again, someday, but that day is probably closer than some attempt at doing 1992 Topps Baseball up completely right.

So in the fall of 2021 I was quite pleased to see that 1992 had been selected for the 3rd installment of these "Redux" sets after 1952 and 1965 had graced packs of S1 and S2 that year. I quickly dreamed of putting the 50 card checklist together as I was still slowly placing cards in stacks of those first two. All the sweet players were there, it seemed...

...but things got off to a very slow start as I was purchasing "hanger packs" to build up a nice stash of 2021 Update. Those yielded four of these redux cards per "pack" - so far, so good. Except I then proceeded to hit the same four cards - four times in a row. I had 16 of these cards, but really I only had 4.

Strike one on completing this checklist. Nevertheless, I persisted:

You didn't think I could let a Miggy entry on a checklist go by, did you? This would be just about the next-to-last time he appeared on an insert checklist.

By the time a checklist theme is being used in Update after previous S1/S2 efforts, things start to get a little strange, and this checklist is no exception. The Super Stars have already been added to such lists, often multiple times, as with these first 3 players, who also have 1952 and 1965 cards, as well as probably 1986 style cards that year too. I am not collecting those, unfortunately — a pet accident wiped out the beginning of that particular effort and I doubt I will re-start it.

So by Update we start seeing more B-listers:

I still quite like this card with it's always apropos combo of red, white & blue.

The KB card is one of the four that I started out with four copies of. 'round about the time I got around to creating a final want list for the 1952 cards from Series One, I started reading the 1992 checklist more closely. Any checklist in Update is going to have the most Rookie Card cards because, Mike Trout, or something. This one features about 1/3 RCs and many a FAIL there. It also has some big Stars who just simply hardly play Baseball any more (Giancarlo Stanton, Jacob DeGrom) even though they still earn millions upon millions of dollars annually anyway; and then some post-checklist-creation FAILs such as cards for Trevor Bauer and Fernando Tatis.

The whole thing started seeming more like a deliberate send-up celebration of aging All-Stars now on sad, fan-disappointing fat chunky contracts - eh, Colorado? But then there are the Naturals, in this case the basic Trinity of Super Stars who debuted in 2018, who basically make every Topps checklist, ever, just as these players seen so far did in the mid-2010s. So, I went with the concept, and paid out an entire whole Dollar for a real deal 2020s ★ all these 2010 fade-aways could orbit -

Now this train is bound for glory. I like the perfectly placed Logo Man there, and it is also nice to see Shohei without the words "State Farm" scrolling through the background for the 129th time.

I passed on adding his regular mates named Ronnie and Juan; they get plenty of binder slots elsewhere. So I went back to the glory of the '10s:

I really want to declare this one "on the bubble" and I can tell you that the Mookie Betts card on this checklist is a perfect Baseball Card, though I do not own one. But I can't cut a Bubble Gum card from a Baseball Card collection, no matter how much it bums me out to watch my very own favorite team light 23 Million Dollars on fire annually. 

Sometimes, you just gotta keep 'clectin -

Ahh, a nice Update to a nice career. This might be my only non-Pirates Cutch card to make it to my Hall of Binders, though maybe he will sneak onto another page in an Archives checklist from some other design I like, or on those nice 2018 cards, we'll see.

Who you callin' faded?

Another nice Update to close this one out, for a nice second act in a career. This was one of Arenado's first Cardinals cards; it would be nice to see him get some October playing time for a change but the Central Divisions have such an uphil climb to that concept any more.

The Result

1992 Redux

Miggy Waves Goodbye / Nifty Nine #7

Today I got started on a couple too-long-delayed projects, both of which were quite enjoyable. I built my first binder page of Miguel Cabrera cards from an impressive (to me) stack of the things I have accumulated; there will be many more of these in the future.

I also am composing this post on a brand new laptop. Hooray Me! Technology is always the most enjoyable when it is cutting-edge bright & shiny. This is my first laptop with a solid-state drive so I am hoping it will be an extra extra long time before I need to migrate into an expense like this one - I would rather be buying Baseball Cards, natch. This will also help out quite a bit with Blogger as I am back to using my preferred browser after The Google declared my preferred browser on my previous laptop to now be too old, for "safety."

OK, now that we have all hands and feet inside the vehicle again, let's see some cards!

The Card That Started It All

2012 Topps

This little project has a more uncertain origin in that it took me a while to build up the stack of Miggy cards enough to notice these; so there is no way to know which exact card I saw first. My best guess is this one. I knew this image was recurring in that stack and finally way back last year I managed to pull these cards from the stack and get started, though when I did that I discovered I was a few cards short of Nifty-Nine-ness so I snagged a couple more on Black Friday to get this one across the finish line. I'm looking forward to these results...

2006 Topps Updates & Highlights

This was a lucky find as I have very few Miggy Marlins cards. This is a "Home Run Derby" card in case the lack of a batting helmet doesn't make that clear - scanner no like-y the foil printing, once again.

It was even a lucky acquisition - way back in the way back I pulled a /50 Yasiel Puig Rookie Card card of some kind right while I was simultaneously participating in my first (and so far, only) "group break," which worked out poorly - for me. However the breaker had a card I didn't want to keep but could sell for a few dollars credit towards another upcoming break and since that was way before I got into selling on COMC, having him sell it for me was a convenient little plan. Just as that trigger was about to be pulled, I pulled the Puig card and asked him to sell that also and then just as the credits were going to roll in for me, he offered me a lot from another customer: some 150-ish assorted Miguel Cabrera cards. So rather than us both fooling with sending electronic "money" back and forth it just became a simple trade. One Yasiel Puig card for 150 Miguel Cabrera cards, E-Z Pea-Z. I think I "won" that one pretty handily.

2011 Heritage

I'll bet you didn't know Miggy has a tattoo on his hand. It is pretty rarely photographed, I think, and I'm not sure it can be seen on any other Baseball Cards. The photographer sent to Lakeland for 2010 Photo Day must have hit it off well with Miggy that day, to get him to re-create his iconic Home Run pause like this.

2013 Opening Day "Opening Day Stars"

I was looking forward to scanning this one, has been a while since I put a 3-D card on the glass. I knew it wouldn't come out that great, but that's great - makes me appreciate the 3-D card in 3-D, all the more.

Disqualified

2013 Topps Update "Post-Season Heroes"

This is going to happen from time to time building a little collection like this: repeats. Though I have to give this card props for the insert set theme more well revealing the World Series patch on Miggy's right shoulder there, something more difficult to notice on the 3-D card. Luckily I admired my 2 purchases so much before purchasing them that they got to me to 10 of these cards, so discovering that one had to go still worked out just exactly perfectly.

2013 Topps

2014 Topps "saberstars"

One of Topps' very first efforts at using "sabremetric" stats in any way. They picked a big one for The Big Man.

2017 Topps "Mother's Day"

I thought about declaring this one "on the bubble" but it keeps growing on me. Even without the pink bat it is one of my better Mother's Day cards so I was tempted to hunt up another one of these and let this shine on a pink page someday. But eventually I did realize this different vantage on the action here is well worth keeping it included.

2018 Topps "Legends in the Making"

These inserts have been increasing their appeal to me some years after they appeared, particularly with the variety of colors they appear in, both on the different cards and then in different colored parallels of them. Unfortunately I already got rid of many of them. The overall result only works well, for me, with the younger/newer players - putting Shohei Ohtani on a couple (iirc) of these was a seemingly bold choice but then we all know Rookies are included in everything regardless of their chance of becoming a "Legend." Here, I think Miguel was a wee bit past the "in the making" part of the concept but the explosion of ink works pretty well for a Home Run pose. Am kicking the inkwell on a thought of maybe assembling 9 more of these, will probably depend on if any manage to appear somewhere around the card desk still; not sure that is still possible.

2022 Topps Fire "To The Moon"

This was also a lucky find - on COMC, as was the Heritage card. Being able to scroll through every Baseball Card ever made can be purdy handy sometimes.

Odd trivia factoid about that last card there - it is the only one in this collection which repeats the same batting glove from another image.

The Result

511 Home Runs, one iconic image.

Nifty Nine #6

Baseball Card to the rescue! Day 2 of a good ole-time Blizzard here, where the Great Lakes keep dumping snow that doesn't even appear on radar screens at times. I am feeling a little better during my first visit with humanity's newest endemic corona virus, enough to pull binders from shelves and stick completed pages in them, so for today's get-some-exercise project, I completed a page. Still on tap is a wonderful bit of placing cards in empty slots in the Sea Turtle project, probably tomorrow, but that won't appear via Blogger for many many weeks, most likely.

Today's project grew out of a collecting theme I enjoy of simply keeping the cards from players that have appeared on the most total teams in their career - guys who put the journey in journeyman, like Octavio Dotel or Edwin Jackson. That little project will make it over a certain finish line and onto a Nifty Nine binder page sometime in the coming weeks; it just supplied a certain theme to this little effort.

The Card That Started It All

I definitely would have never figured out this little assemblage if it wasn't for this card. As a brand new issue of my favorite recent Topps design, I had to acquire this. It is one of 3 representatives of 2013 in 70 card sets inserted in 2021 Topps Baseball S1, S2, & Update, one card per Topps design.

I had no particular knowledge of Jazz Chisholm when I first learned of these cards and for the most part, I don't much care for this particular Sea Turtle card. The Marlins are a team never happy in it's own skin with their constant uniform and iconography changes, so the 2013 design is changed/updated here, with the most recent team logo and seemingly a new "team color" of basic black, though perhaps it is just a dark blue. I somewhat doubt even the Marlins know whether it is blue or black. The result of the black graphics + photo selected with a black batting helmet and black (or blue?) uniform is like looking into a miniature black hole of a Baseball Card. The best thing I can say about this card is that I like the view of the Pine Tar on the bat. Yet if this bonus Jazz Rookie Card card had been placed on one of the other 69 Topps designs instead, I might have never started following this player, though another of his cards caught my eye a year later -

The Card That Started It All, Runner-Up

Art By: Jason Drumheller

This card appeared in 2022, the final year of Topps Gallery - where Topps just ditched the original all artwork concept of the set and just slapped photos onto cards, some of them those turrible, just turrible fake backdrop photos plaguing multiple Topps products of late. 

Except for this neat little "Modern Artists" insert checklist, which has a very interesting composition in that each card shares some fixed design elements, but each card is also different. I can't think of another checklist like it, and I am ever so slowly collecting it now. 

The Jazz Chisholm card seen here drew me in with the graphics and the nice dynamic inset photo of a Shortstop about to "range to his left" as much as Jazz' unique look; before deciding to go for the whole small "set" I thought this card could just anchor a fun page of cards for such a visually interesting player. 

It also has a fun basic write-up courtesy of Topps Card Back Writer: "The finish of Chisholm's swing is a thing of both ferocity and beauty. At contact, he keeps both hands on the handle while catapulting the barrel over his back shoulder so forcefully that it almost hits his backside. This full commitment to the cut helps Jazz produce elite exit velos despite his modest size."

I'm telling yas, someday these Baseball Cards are going to finally make me pay up for a year of MLB TV. If, I could just slow down a little on buying the Baseball Cards, I guess?

I like that Modern Artists card so much I will definitely 'clect a 2nd copy of it, for that set - & a Jazz Chisholm page. Which, will be separate from this one. I will probably end up with a 3rd Jazz page too, because I like his horizontal cards a lot also. While looking for candidates to help with the horizontals in particular, I realized something about all the Baseball Card options available for him. And, it being Black Friday weekend when I discovered this, it was the perfect time to pull a trigger and create a unique page of Baseball Cards. I think you'll figure it out as we go:

Topps "Living Set"

Art by: Mayumi Seto

This was a bittersweet but still happy purchase for me; it is my first card from this ongoing project which I basically admire a great deal. Once upon a time I even wrote Topps a letter and sent it to 1 Whitehall St., asking them to produce a new 1953 set, "the right way" - just like this, with true/original/new hand-made illustration work for each player. I would surely enjoy having an ongoing complete collection of this. Except of course, at $5 and well upwards for each and every card in the set, I know that will never ever happen in my life, and that's just kinda depressing. Someday I will make a curated page of just these and again be both happy to have them, and simultaneously bummed out a little. Not the emotions one wants from Baseball Cards.

1962 Topps / 2021 Archives 

Sometimes he's Jazz Chisholm, sometimes he's Jazz Chisholm Jr.

This card also has a great entry from Topps Card Back Writer: "Jazz announced himself to the Baseball world as a rookie by taking Jacob DeGrom deep. And it wasn't on just any pitch, but a 101-mph fastball so high in the zone that no pitch like it was ever previously hit for a Home Run."

"1965 Redux" / 2021 Series Two

1972 Topps / 2021 Heritage High Numbers

As classic as the '62 image, this one made me start wondering if I could make it across the goal line without a repeat. Card #665 by the way, that was close.

1980 Topps / 2021 Throwback Thursday

This one, along with the Living Set card, had to be more "deliberately" acquired - i.e. I had to explicitly purchase them for a few dollars more than a couple three quarters. But I love 1980 Topps. And hey, two different color compression sleeves and a two-tone glove — whaddya expect from a guy named "Jazz" anyway?

1986 Topps / 2021 Topps Series 2 insert

A great fielding shot, though again getting nervous about repeats wrecking the plan...

"1992 Redux" / 2021 Update

A "Tattooine" card just technically, but that is another small thing that caught my eye initially about Jazz Chisholm cards as I got this in a pack not long after his most traditional/regulation Rookie Card card -

2021 Topps

A great Rookie Card image, though I will never care for this design, which so routinely entangles itself in the image - the exact opposite of what graphic design added to photography is supposed to do, if you ask me. This is also a "Blowfish" card which are mostly famous on Shohei Ohtani cards, but probably an occasional other player, and could probably be collected that way, if you like to laugh at Baseball Cards.

The Result

So there you have it. 9 Rookie Card cards, 9 Topps designs, just one player.

Baseball always loves a power hitting middle Infielder, and Baseball Cards love Rookie Card cards, so perhaps this result was inevitable for a Topps anniversary year even though Chisholm was not one of what I call "The Five" - the RCs that get photo variations issued with the complete Factory Sets. Those players will be on every Topps checklist of the entire year in most cases.

Still I would doubt this could be achieved for a player in any year aside from 2021, which featured those 70 Years of Topps sets as well as 3 of the "Redux" inserts (52, 65, 92 - JC Jr. did not make the 52 checklist which appeared with S1). There might could probably be some other 2021 Rookies this would be possible with via those "Redux" checklists though I am not going to repeat this particular effort.

A kinda nutty factoid about these 9 cards is that I could have done this without using the 2021 card at all as there actually is a 1952 Topps style Jazz Chisholm Jr. Rookie Card card as well - in 2021 Topps Chrome Platinum: 10 Topps RC designs. However I decided to complete this without selecting from Chrome versions of cards, or the "Mojo" version of the 1986s, nor by using photo variations - there are still quite a few more Topps Baseball design JC Jr. RC cards than just these.

Let's hope this sublime example of Rookie Card card mania might generate a little good news for Jazz this year, i.e. that he can avoid the injury bug, play > 140 games, and makes lots more checklists. Cuz Rookie Card cards are cool and all, but they will be even cooler if they are just the front-end to a long career in Baseball Cards. Here's hopin'

The Waiting is the Hardest Part

There is a lot of waiting involved in collecting cards. And even, multiple kinds of waiting. I am experiencing a whole bunch of them right, now.

The most routine wait in collecting is for the new Baseball Cards. I entered that wait yesterday, when I saw from a (fortunately) text headline that the 2024 Topps Baseball design has been released. I always try as hard as I can to avoid seeing that until I rip a pack of the cards, which is not always easy. So until I rip that pack, I have to be very much more careful about where I peek at online Baseball Card sites. And thus there will be a lot of waiting involved, until next month some time.

The 2nd most routine wait is the never-ending search for a not-so-new card you want for your collection. That’s just a permanent part of the collecting deal. Working on a project involving cards now > 10 years old involves a whole lot of waiting. Some of that waiting is about to end, but first, there will be more waiting.

The best way for me to work on that project is to send cards I don’t want to COMC to put them up for sale, and then use the proceeds to buy the cards I do want. But that involves a metric ton of waiting. First you send in the cards, but you have to wait a long time for them to be processed before you can put a price on them. Then, you have to wait for them to sell.

Now for me, always operating in cheapskate mode in an all-too-easily-becomes-expensive hobby, each year I add a whole lot more waiting to this whole process by only shopping during the Black Friday sale. The vast majority of the cards I want to buy aren’t going to sell to anyone else anyway, so I might as well wait till there is the best chance their price is reduced.

But after all that waiting, buying cards at the same time as oodles of other collectors means, you guessed it, more waiting. I really messed up this year by not requesting a shipment until well after dark on “Cyber Monday,” which put my shipping request at the end of a very long line.

So there has been a whole, whole lot of waiting involved in that package up there which I received yesterday, one which I was very, very glad to see. That package owes its existence to a bunch of collecting work I did an entire year ago, when I managed to get a package sent to COMC.

It had a lot of cards for my all-parallel set build of 2013 Topps Baseball:

That’s a lot of Sea Turtles.

That will make for a long enjoyable bit of binder page flipping and wantlist editing, very soon. Another big snowstorm is just firing up outside and the best thing to have for a snowstorm is some Baseball Cards, if you ask me.

If you squint, you just might be able to tell that some of those are not parallels. I have always been ever-so-slowly collecting the 2013 Topps Baseball photo variations as well. I took a serious plunge this year, when I picked up one of the, in my view, four most difficult (not just expensive) cards to acquire from the set. To give you at least one regulation Baseball Card to gaze upon in this post, here ‘tis:

This is a big step for me, because it kind of commits me to looking for the other most difficult cards, which I feel will be even more difficult to find or afford. (Those are the Gerrit Cole RC SSP, the Baby King George Card, and most especially the Teddy Kremmer card.)

Although this package sort of arrived at a very good spot in my life and cheered me up immensely, I have only partially been able to enjoy it, so far. I have been delightedly flipping through the contents and imagining all the holes it will fill in various collections, or new collections it will start. But I haven’t been able to start those delightful processes just yet. First, there will be a little more waiting.

That’s because I am on day 3 of my first experience having Covid. It seems like this will be a semi-routine part of our lives now, one I had managed to duck away from previously. Typing out this post is simple enough, but hauling binders off shelves and flipping through them and just generally moving around very much is more energy expenditure than I feel up for right now. My whole upper body feels like it got hit by a truck while simultaneously, I seem to be moving around in super slo-mo. The respiratory symptoms with this respiratory virus are barely evidencing themselves, but the bonus features with this are quite a doozy. At least the headaches of day 1 and day 2 are gone.

So, too sick to Baseball Card. Never thought I would experience that reality, but here I am. I know I am fortunate that this isn’t more serious, for me, or my loved ones. And I know the symptoms peak, and then taper off. So soon enough I will have my scanner in action, enabling some fun posts to share with you all.

Until then, there is still just a little bit more, waiting.

Re-Arranging / Checklist Rule #2

Happy New Year everyone! One of my favorite Baseball Card collecting things to do,  

though decidedly in second place to finding brand new Baseball Cards, is to flip through my card binders. One of my favorite such flips is of a small binder that holds a single set: 2014 Stadium Club.

GOAT

I can no longer recall if this was the first release in the product's "re-boot" after a hiatus of a little more than a decade or so. It might be it's first year back, or second, but that matters little. Nor do the particularities of the design, another matters little on this "full bleed" set that is all about the baseball photography. And usually, I don't even care for the design choices made for it, with it's seemingly permanent love affair with foil printing — which I like even less / dislike even more, with each passing year. These 2014 cards are one that improve greatly via scanner views. But that also, matters little. Squinting at tiny foil printing just isn't necessary for a Babe Ruth Baseball Card.

I somewhat wish I owned a run of Stadium Club sets from every year since it came back. Maybe if I did I would have figured out the project I have been working on recently, way earlier. But Stadium Club is not generally a cheap set to acquire, more of a 'mid-tier' set than a 'low end' set. Ultimately I do enjoy assembling a 9 or 18-best-of page(s) from the different sets, a kind of permanent collecting activity whenever I stumble across discounted Stadium Club cards, one or more years after release. Or when I (rarely) summon up the energy to deliberately scroll through the cards from years needing anywhere from 1 to 7 more cards to complete a page — which is most of them.

In 2014 however, I did a (rare) smart thing in acquiring brand new Baseball Cards: I simply purchased a copy of the whole Stadium Club set, all at once, in a single box, all correctly sequentially collated by someone else. Oh how simple Baseball Card life would be if I could just do that more often. And, possibly/probably cheaper.

And it was very enjoyable to place it in binder pages, a long time ago, and also enjoyable to do it all over again less long ago, in order to cut down the space the pages take up by doubling it up to 18 cards per page, despite the nice inset photo on the back of each card. And like a dutiful collector of Baseball Cards, each time I kept all the cards in their sequential checklist order, because, well, at this point ... because, Why? I can no longer answer that question, or even explain why I would keep Baseball Picture Cards in some sort of random order made up at Topps HQ.

Baseball is played with a definite "line-up" at all times, the teams have officially defined rosters and the teams are always in order in the "standings" as well, but the order of the cards themselves in a set are almost always just totally random, with just an occasional checklist where all the cards from each team are in sequentially numbered order — one would think that lots and lots of collectors would prefer things that team orientated way, but that is the exception, not the general rule. Random, the cards must be. Why?

I think it has been this binder in particular which really moved along my interest in re-building my binders based on several things. Though when I first "bindered" it I even declared otherwise. Firstly, the far, far better visual appeal of pages of all horizontal cards, and all vertical cards. And, some other concerns. Let's take a look at the starting condition:

Page 1

6 verticals, 3 horizontals. Job one.

But even this first page in the set shows off odd things about checklist construction, such as a near instant Who Dat? problem and I don't mean the way it is virtually impossible to know which exact Boston Red Sock is individually named on the checklist. Rather my man Ricky Williams, err, uhh, I mean Jon Singleton, he of the GOAT RC Logo card in my collection. 

Son of GOAT RC Logo card

This Stadium Club RC fits his Baseball oeuvre just exactly perfectly, telling us there's 2 Outs so he won't be needing his glove now. Singleton actually returned to the Major Leagues this year after a lot of hard work on his part, which lead to a rehabilitation in the Mexican Leagues (oh how I wish those had Baseball Cards as I expect they would be ¡fantastico!), but in yet more just exactly perfectness he played for two different MLB clubs in the 2023 season and did not receive a new Baseball Card for his efforts; more's the pity. Maybe this particular RC foreshadowed the future ingeniously.

But this combo of Babe Ruth, GOAT, at card #3 in the set and Jon Singleton, 488 MLB career At Bats RC Logo GOAT right next to him at card #4 also illustrates a key reason I want to re-arrange this set. Now I do like finding Babe Ruth Baseball Cards in new products mostly featuring contemporary players; however later on the incongruities inherent in these checklists just create LOLs rather than awe, check out this cool new Babe Ruth Baseball Picture Card I found back in the year 2014. I hate to dis my guy here, but Singleton's card simply lessens the enjoyment of The Babe card right (almost) next door.

Let's check out some more of these cards for a little more context -

Page 2

Hey, there's The Babe again, with yet more all-wrong horizontal mixing. Although that is a fantastic Elvis Andrus card, an exciting player (named Elvis, how cool is that?) who had a very good MLB career, there is no possible way to connect him to Babe Ruth & Lou Gehrig. And we get a little more Who Dat? issue with the appearance of Matt Adams, who had a respectable but more Journeyman type career. While Andrus looks to have Triple in his eyes, Adams looks like he is the Outside Tackle setting up a Screen.

Now I do quite like Stadium Club's inclusion of Black & White Baseball Cards without making them a foolish parallel nor printing them in a special set of online-sales-only, $3.89/card, buy now or forever be locked out of /412 cards if you don't order in the next 39 hours, so, hurry. Black & White cards are nice, but that particular fine example loses a fair bit of gravity there when Elvis is rockin' his great solid color Road (or Home, one can never tell with those sneaky Texas unis) Alternate Uniform there right alongside. The Babe and Lou Gehrig didn't have those.

So that's just some of the material I have to work with. Let's see how things turned out.

New Page 1

Ahh, now that is sooooo much better.

I quite like that the set now starts with that Matt Holliday card which I have always found to be a painterly-like Picture Card. And I am a bit pleased that I didn't end up attempting to start a Horizontal collection for Anthony Rizzo; I have a few of those going for other players. Assembling 9 Horizontals on a specific theme is not easy. But pulling them all from a mixed Horizontal/Vertical set is very easy.

Note also that those are in a sequential checklist order. Just, because, I guess. I am actually fine with the contemporary players, i.e. the ones that actually played Baseball against each other (that year), appearing in random order on a checklist. That's how Baseball Cards arrive in packs after all.

And you may notice the nice Black & White Ruth/Gehrig card is not included in the sequence. That will re-appear a little later in the project. These assemblages of 9 Horizontal Stadium Clubs are so nice, let's check out Page 2:

That's gotta be the happiest Mike Trout card I can recall. Don't see too many of those lately. Manny Machado is again Mr. Inscrutable while he is playing; that card is a like a re-run of his Rookie Card from a year earlier. And it sure seems like the Topps Setlist Constructor might have known I would be filing all the horizontals together with that fun look at the Giants' starting rotation there.

Regular 'ole vertical Baseball Cards are no slouches in Stadium Club either. How'd that go?

Ahh.

But....what happened to The Kid, who quite nicely lead-off this famously 1990s-associated product?

That is another bit of the Re-Arranging - I would rather see cards of players that played together, all together, on their binder pages. Mixing cards of players from different eras is a routine part of these re-booted Stadium Club checklists, but also happens in Archives and many insert checklists as well. I can't explain why I prefer this; it just seems more natural to look at Baseball Cards this way. For an effort like this I have gone with placing the cards by date of the players' debuts, so the baseball history kind of flows along on the page(s).

On these new arrangements you might notice that I have the Todd Helton and Roy Halladay cards still there with the 2014 players though each played their last game in 2013. That could become useful as I work through this project. 

The Clemens > Bo page is actually the 2nd page of 20th Century color veterans; page 1 is also great -

I thought about spotting Tom Seaver there in between the of-a-pair Schmidt and Murray cards just for the giggles but I think I will leave that one for my next re-arrangement of these some other cold crappy day outside in the distant future. The Ripken card also seems to possibly call out for some Sunset Card neighbors, like the Helton card back up there on the first Horizontals page, or the Mariano Rivera card deep in the unscanned Verticals of contemporary players. More, options.

And what happened to The Babe? Don't worry, he is in very, very good company:

There, no more young whippersnappers with their riotous color uniforms making Grandpa all upset in his non-technicolor memories. I quite like how the Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson photos complement each other, something which would be lost mixing them in with 2014 All-Stars and some Rookies no one can remember now.

That page was actually the very first one I assembled for this project, and it quickly reminded me of a key problem with placing a set of Baseball Cards in binder pages: I have yet to find a checklist that is perfectly divisible by 9. There in a pocket in the inner cover surface of the binder, I found this card, #200, hanging out in a penny sleeve all by itself -

Where have you gone?

Shazzzz-bot. Now I have 10 wonderful Black & White Baseball Cards. What to do?

I have a few options here. Being a Tigers collector, I have what feels like piles and piles of Ty Cobb and Al Kaline cards, from sets that I am not going to be placing in binder pages. (Topps: 1984 Tigers? Who Dat?) But, neither am I going to put those in a find-a-new-home-somehow-somewhere, else box, either. That Cobb card looks suspiciously familiar in that if I were to crack open the box of Tigers cards needing attention, I think I might see that picture again in there, possibly in a colorized version. And if I pull the Cobb card so I can put Joltin' Joe in there between The Babe and Bob Feller, I won't have quite the harmonious Ruth/Robinson duo in the middle of the page any more either. So maybe Al Kaline's many pages (yet to be built) might could use a B&W card. Hmmm. It's also not a terrible thing to leave Your Team's cards mixed in with the rest of MLB in a set, either. A Stadium Club "Team Set" is only going to be a handful of cards anyway and it is nice to see Your Team in every binder.

This all reveals a key problem with keeping a Complete Set while also generally always building Team &/or Player collections. Sometimes, the solution is simple: use a duplicate card, one in each particular binder page. But for this set, I have zero duplicates — a slight disadvantage of just purchasing a set, if you ask me.

And....wasn't there another cool Babe Ruth Black & White card on the original page 2 for this set?

There was. How'd that work out?

Not too good.

Now that will be a perfectly good looking triumvirate of classic mid-Century Baseball, eventually. But in the short run, this it-was-a-simple-plan bit of Baseball Card re-arranging has gotten complicated in a hurry. Those are the only 3 Horizontal B&W cards in 2014 Stadium Club.

For that dilemma I have a most excellent, simple solution, one no collector would disagree with:

More Baseball Cards

(mostly) 2018 Stadium Club

That is another page that lead to some of the conclusions I am now putting into practice here with 2014 SC; it was my first pass at selecting 9 favorites from miscellaneous purchases of '18 SC. All 9 cards I quite like, but not a binder page I quite like. That Nolan Ryan plus B&W? Nope. And I am really going to need to find another Horizontal Yankee Stadium card, somehow, somewhere.

Those Black & Whites plus the ones I have assembled here back in 2014 made me realize I just want to collect all (as in: all of them) B&W Stadium Club Baseball Cards. Problem solved. I don't know exactly how I will flow them along from one year's set to another, but that will be a pleasant chore for another day, probably not long after a fresh box of funzies arrives from COMC.

So that takes care of bindering the vintage photos in SC at least - a perpetually growing set of pages of them. This post is now making me start to regret not snagging a pair of $17 blasters of 2022 SC I saw on the shelves recently during another B1G1 50% off sale, which would have made the pair cost just $12.75 each. Bummer. Discounted Stadium Club cards never last long and I won't make that mistake again. But then it still will be cheaper to just cherry pick the singles I want from '22 SC. When will I ever learn?

This set might have helped show me The Way, however. Part of the reason I say that is the Rookie Card cards. How could I get this far into a post about a Complete Set and still have shown only one RC? The only cards people collect, right?

I did find some quite endearing Rookie Card cards in 2014 Stadium Club:

A classic Baseball Card, seemingly posed in an old-time dug-out, probably in Port St. Lucie. d'Arnaud has been a bit of a late bloomer, compared to the breathless chase of Rookie Card cards of 20 year old phenoms. A bit like his Mets RC team-mate in the set -

This Flores card is headed towards another fun page, made up of interesting Mets uniforms. I can't recall Mr. Met making such a great shoulder patch appearance on any other card, just yet at least. That goes back to the angst of holding a Complete Set together --- but also making fun side collections. This next card magnified that quite a bit as well:

This has to go with my Detroit Stars collection; I haven't pulled them all into their own little pile but I know there will be other Horizontals in there to assemble. Recently I pulled a brand new Phillies Baseball Card of Nicholas, which once again sends a definite Slugging-First player back to the field for his official Baseball Card appearances. Topps just can't help themselves with this guy.

For the most part, Rookie Card cards in Stadium Club aren't quite so why, why, Why? as in other, bigger sets. I think the lowest how-low-can-we-go in the RCs assembled here is around 200 At Bats, which is a far more sensible figure than the occasional 4 At Bat RC found in Topps Baseball sets. And not far short of half of the 2014 Stadium Club Rookie Card card class are still around the Major Leagues ten years later, which is a lot more than can be said for so many other checklists. These cards should not be overlooked, and I am fine with Rookie Card cards being on my checklists (I collect an entire binder of nothing but Topps Baseball RCs), as long as they are kept in their proper place, which is, all together -

Ultimately, Stadium Club Rookie Card cards shouldn't be overlooked. And, perhaps, placed directly into toploaders after opening the packages. CJ Cron, like ALL Rookie Card cards, still had Babe-esque potential back in the day of his sweet "That Mountain in Arizona" RC there, after all. However I probably should have placed this next card straight into The Vault:

This one has several upsides. It is a sweet reminder that Betts came up as a middle infielder, something that surprised many a baseball fan this past year. I was also pleasantly surprised to discover that this card is now worth about as much as what I paid for this entire Complete Set of Baseball Cards, which was $40. I like that card too much to ever sell it, but it is a cool thing to think that just this one Baseball Card made the other 199 cards kinda sorta free. The downside of this one is that I don't have more Complete Sets of Stadium Club.

This set ends (well, at least of the 2014 players) on an excellent note with another card that was just forlornly hanging out in the binder's inner sleeve -

Hypnotic

I always love this First Baseman card trope. This card appeared to me after nicely filling up 4 pages of Vertical cards of 2014 Major League Baseball players, with no slots left over. To do that I had selected one for a Player Collection which needs a bit of help to reach the finish line:

Which is needed for one of those player collections started up after pulling a pretty cool card, in this case an on-card auto in the all-illustrated National Chicle set which both has minimal resale value and is just too nice of a card and signature to not keep anyway. You'll see it here, some day.

So after all this page re-assembly and delightful like-likes-like harmony, the end result is more ragged than I am going to scan for you. I have a couple Horizontal RCs not placed, 3 Horizontal 2014 MLBers stranded, and a half-dozen or so Horizontal and Vertical 90s/00s Stars still needing some page-mates, somehow, somewhere, someday. Maybe some of those will end up like the Ryan Braun card, which is now perfectly hidden between 2 other cards in this binder, helping maintain Complete Set integrity while not bothering to remind me of a lack of integrity amidst a great set of Baseball Cards. Or maybe possibly launching yet another Theme collection, of Sunset/Farewell images, might help free up just enough page slots to get this probably a bit overthought project over the finish line — Topps didn't have all these thematic worries when they issued these cards and their checklist finished with just 2 extra cards, quite unlike my sequencing now.

Along the way over the past week I discovered a possibly hidden photo selection theme in this set that I will be watching out for, now, going forward. That might someday also help with a few of those ragged edges to 9 card page harmony. The discovery was of some Absolutely Fabulous Fans -

I feel like I should absolutely know who is the guy with the on-point street cred Dodgers fan look there in the front row. It can't be cheap to sit there and the Dodgers generally have the most famous fans. But I just can't place him - except in my Baseball Card binder.

This next one I have a dim memory of a remark or two when this set was new:

Most Beautiful Hair, 2014 Stadium Club

Ultimately Stadium Club cards are almost too good to keep all together when one collects Teams, Players, and Themes, like I do, so about a half-dozen of these are leaving Complete Set behind and moving along the bookshelf somewhere else. One type of card I like to collect together features Wrigley Field's famous Ivy, so I have always enjoyed this last card in particular. But I also enjoy Andre Dawson cards, so, I guess, I will just need another copy to enjoy, twice -

Or, thrice?