Well Winter has certainly arrived where I live; instead of a classic Great Lakes "3 Day Blow" (a common expression here, immortalized in the title of a Hemingway short story), I have a a 5 day blow in my weather forecast - 5 days of lake effect snows and wind speeds above 10mph, straight off the Lake - for 5 days, straight.
For me, this means: Baseball Cards. November was already a good Baseball Card month for me but I am still some distance away from taming the Card Desk into a clean, usable surface. One of the projects cluttering the desk is an intriguing stack of, yup, cards from the $1 box at my LCS. I love stopping in there on a crappy winter morning and just shopping Baseball Cards, drinking a truly quality cup of coffee from the shop next door. Although I still dream of the majesty of some day seeing an actual Baseball Card Show, my wonderful LCS just keeps chugging right along in about its 7th year of operations, and that is perhaps better than the next best thing to an actual festival like meet-up of multiple card dealers.
But these delightful objects, which typically clock in at 75¢ or less in reality, need to finally reach their permanent bindered-up, 9 cell homes now. It's a lot of fun finding what randomly appears in the boxes otherwise not-organized by team, player, or set. And now some of the loot from such expeditions has sat on the desk for nigh of a year or so, so....I don't always remember what's in this stack of treasure. Thus I will be re-discovering the cards as I scan them, starting at the bottom of the stack. I'll start with the Kaline card...
Why I selected it: I have fond memories of listening to Al Kaline for many years, -after- his playing days when he was the Tigers TV announcer, along with George Kell. Back then, the Tigers appeared on my television set 100% for free, without even cable. Imagine that.
I don't often pick up Al Kaline cards deliberately, because Topps never seems to tire of printing up new ones and then delivering them to me. And that's just fine. As is owning a re-print of his true 1954 Rookie Card, from some sort of effort described on the back as "* Topps Baseball Archives * The Ultimate 1954 Series *" - it will look mighty fine as the lead-off card on a page, or likely 2, of random Kaline cards acquired over many years.
Why I selected it: This card has appeared on the blog before, though I wish I would have remembered that before I scanned it again. I already own a copy of this card, which I luckily pulled from a blaster of 2021 Stadium Club. But I knew I will need an extra copy for a possibly challenging effort to obtain 9 different Shohei-Ohtani-on-the-basepaths cards; I think that is already up to 4 cards however. This was a few years before Baseball's new rules made base stealing a little easier, but also before Ohtani's new 2024 Manager really turned him loose. I expect the dramatic 50/50 season will lead to at least a few new Base-Running cards for Ohtani in 2025, but his imminent return to the mound will likely lead to a new set of Pitching cards, too, in late-season products. This card will likely anchor the key center slot of a 9 card page of those run, Shohei, run cards, but it will also look great on a page of my 9 favorite 2021 Stadium Club cards...
Why I selected it: ...this card will not appear on the same page as the Ohtani card despite being from the same set, because I now assemble a separate page of my 9 favorite horizontal Stadium Club cards. SC is the perfect set to supply cards to my All-Horizontal binder, and this card could well win out in the selection process, we'll see. It would almost certainly cost me more than 75¢, anywhere else.
Why I selected it: I like these now standard components of the Topps Baseball set packs every year. I have always liked 1986 Topps but have no desire to ever finish and "binder" up a complete set beyond the 3-400 cards I already have, as the atrocious printing quality back then would lead me to shopping the cards all over again, looking not for high grade cards, but simply well printed ones, which is completely ignored by the grading ecosystem. So when 1986 cards appear in Archives, I am a fan of 21st century 86s. And then also with these 2021 versions. Mountcastle appears to be just a solid Major Leaguer and thus no longer of interest to the financially obsessed collectors. But I do know that the Orioles are the perfect team for the 1986 design, along with any other that incorporates black as one of their "team colors." This portrait card will also fit nice in a 9 best-of-2021-86s when mixed in with some action shots on the rest of the cards - a set design concept seemingly now abandoned after many decades of pleasing use.
Why I selected it: I collect Hank Aaron cards. I will go a little further out of my way to pick up cheap examples of such, as compared to say Al Kaline cards. But not all that far, in actual dollars. Topps serves these up routinely with no additional hard work required on my part. Making "Debut" cards for players was a thing for Topps in the later 2010s; I think these appeared in packs for at least two years. The simple design more befits an All-Timer than making futuristic cosmic-sonic-lava-wave bling-bling cards, and this will look great with some other Hammerin' Hank cards I have been setting aside for many years now.
Why I selected it: For modern players I sometimes like the bling-bling. But, only sometimes. Overall I am not much of a fan of the "mojo" pattern that now is a routine inclusion in the "Silver Packs" that arrive inside each Hobby Box of lottery tickets these days. However I collect both Salvador Perez cards, and Powder Blue cards. This card then creates a bit of a dilemma - which collection keeps this one, forever and ever? Two copies? No, the "mojo" is just not the bling-bling for me. But a set of Powder Blue catcher's gear, PLUS the team name in Powder Blue - how cool is that? No dilemma, at all.
Why I selected it: I collect Miggy cards. I have no desire to chase thousands of such cards, so I keep things to manageable small efforts of, you guessed it, 9 cards. One such theme is any and all "duals" I can assemble featuring Miggy and another player; these are usually other Tigers players. So to stumble across one of another star was a helpful future slot-filler. The back of this card surprised me in noting that Mike Trout is only 9 years younger than Cabrera, a bit of trivia probably not easily guessed/remembered.
Why I selected it: I am not very familiar with Miggy's years in Miami. So another 9 card theme will certainly be Marlins Miggy cards. I was also intrigued by the printing of "20Cabrera" on the card, which is repeated on the back. Was that his uni # in Miami? Seems likely, but the back of the card doesn't answer that question. If this Upper Deck set, which I am completely unfamiliar with, prints the player uniform # on the front like that on every card, I will definitely be hunting up some more of these. Cabrera will always be #24 to Tigers fans of course, but I like the (possible) concept here, for some other players that would be in a ... 2004? set, too.
Why I selected it: I ultimately chose not to complete the 2023 Topps Baseball set, though I really really wanted to, due to its on-point re-use of the bonus head-shot photo on the correct 10th anniversary of such a set design component. I never like "squashed" team iconography; nor did I care for all the distractingly-not-particularly-baseball-esque geometry on what I call the "Parallelogram" set. Plus most cards have that odd wasted space that is here actually an exception-proves-rule deal with the placement of the Rookie Cup, which neatly uses up that space. And I do collect a set of Rookie Cup cards each year, because I am still a part of the Youth of America which is wowed by this annual effort by Topps. Although since I was only medium-sure I did not pull one of these from packs back in '23, maybe that means I am not quite "youth" any more, as young Base Set would have known within milliseconds whether this was a "got it" or a "need it." Modern Base Set felt it best to plunk down the 3 or so quarters for a copy, just in case.
Why I selected it: This is probably a "bust" of a Baseball Card investment, it now appears, much to the chagrin of Tigers fans sadly watching the slow demise of yet another 1-1 draft pick for the club (Casey Mize being the other). But it made me laugh to see Topps once again showing off the fielding of a highly anticipated Tigers rook, which in this case is just not all that great, and is something they did a decade ago with Nick Castellanos. I recently picked up a cheap copy of Castellanos' short print photo variation 2014 Topps Baseball Rookie Card card, and that one too is a Fielding card! Anyhow this Torkelson RC was giving me big flashback vibes, and not in a good way. But what I liked about it was the inclusion of the rarely-seen-on-card Tigers sorta secondary Team Color - orange. So I thought a team set of these cards from Finest might be a nice little collection.
Now cards in the $1 box are never 10-for-$10, so I'll add a bonus card just like my dealer would, if I could ever limit myself to just 10 cards from these boxes, which I can not. But the rest of the stack will await another snowy day, of which there will be plenty.
Why I selected it: I think it was in 2017 when I randomly pulled a "Rainbow Foil" parallel from a pack that was a horizontal card, and it just suddenly worked, as a pleasing Baseball Card. I generally find the rainbow foils to be an utter waste of a slot in my packs, and they have essentially neither use nor value. But I have set aside horizontal foil cards ever since. Somehow, they appeal to me sooo much more than the vertical foils. I can't explain that. Can you?
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