Quick Trivia Question

I haven't posted the past two weeks as a result of a long family vacation, followed by a dead computer.  After much interweb consultation, I successfully tracked down the problem to a faulty power-supply, replaced it, and now am fully operational.

Here's a quick trivia question...I just prepared two baseball card trade packages - one for Night Owl and one for Robert @ $30/week Habit. As I was putting all the cards in there, I remarked to those in the room, "Man, there sure are a lot of ____________ cards in these stacks."  What player's name fills in that blank?

Make your guess in the comments below.  The first correct answer will get something from me sometime.  :-)

Classic Cards - Garage Sale Finds

I LOVE Garage Sales.  Good garage sales, that is, not the junky ones with old furniture and paperbacks from the '70s.  Good garage sales have BASEBALL CARDS.  Luckily, my wife is always looking for a deal, so we hit our fair share of garage sales together.  Last Saturday the local high school sports teams were having a garage sale fundraiser so we drove down there.

At this sale LAST YEAR, I picked up a complete starter set of "MLB Showdown 2002" cards.  This alerted me to the "cards IN games" niche that is out there.  I was hoping to find something similar this year...and find it I did.

It was the 1991 Classic Trivia Board Game.  How much would you pay for such a thing?  $50??  $25??  $10??  No ladies and gentlemen, I was able to purchase this game for the low price of ONE dollar.  The school  was happy to have the money, I was happy to have the cards, and some mother was happy to have this out of her closet. 

But wait, there's more!  This game was apparently so special that it needed to be serial-numbered:

 004759/100000

I'm glad it wasn't some common thing that just anyone could buy....

Inside the box was a game-board, a bunch of pieces, some fake money (likely from a different game), and these two boxes of cards:

I cracked open those bad boys and found about 200 of the purple 1991 player cards.  The boxes were full, so I am assuming most of the set is there.  This set was nothing too special, but it did have a few interesting features.

Just like Johnny Cash sang "Ain't No Grave Can Hold My Body Down," Lenny Dykstra is singing, "Ain't No Frame Can Hold My Body Down."  He is busting out of the frame, spitting, and trampling upon his family name.  That just ain't right!!  And he's not the only one -- many players are doing such violent actions that they thrust themselves out of the frame.  Roger Clemens is having an on-mound chat with his catcher and coach while sticking his elbows out across the border.  What an action shot!

Classic did include one cheesy shot (awesome):

Because his NAME is Justice!  I get it now.  :-)

All in all, a great find for a buck.  Except for the Royals, all of these cards are FOR TRADE.  The checklist is here, so see what you want and send me an offer.  I'll probably take it, as long as it gets approved by our benevolent judge above...

Spankee's Group Break

One of my favorite bloggers is Spankee over at My Cardboard Mistress.  He is running a group break with a CRAZY amount of recent packs.  See the stack:

You can bid on all the teams through the end of this week.  Here's the link:
http://mycardboardmistress.blogspot.com/p/group-break.html

Month in Review - September 2011

First off, I now have 15 followers/subscribers, whooo!!!  Thanks for getting in on the ground floor. I will be running a contest for my followers before the year is over that will have 10+ winners and should have some fun elements (by which I mean mystery cards and stealing things from other people). 

There are so many great blogs out there, and it is hard to keep up with all the opinions, insight, and just plain fun that some of these blogs are providing.  Out of the 300+ active blogs on the Sports Card Blogroll, I follow around 40...any more than that and I fall behind, then delete my reader queue and just start over.  I wish I could get all the best articles from one source, but "best" is clearly subjective.

However, I can share my "best" with you guys.  I came up with the idea to do a "Month in Review" of my favorite posts from other blogs over the past month (I thought about this last week, so this is more like 1/3-month in review).  Here were the ones that I found significantly helpful, insightful, funny, or creative.

September 2011
1) Great Sports Name Hall of Fame -- Card Finding Tips: Online Stores
GSNHOF lists 13 different e-commerce sites for buying cards.  Had I already heard of several of these?  Yes.  Had I heard of them all?  Definitely not.

2) Indians Baseball Cards -- "Diminished Capacity" movie
IBC's post introduced us to this movie, which was new to me.  It's on my shortlist "to-see" for the near future.  I still haven't seen "The Blind Side" yet (really, Josh?  Yes, REALLY), so this will have to wait until after that.

3) Sewingmachineguy -- Jason Hanson is Great
This post has a ProLine NFL card.  I loved those things when they came out and still do.  They were weirder than usual, but still "normal" enough to get printed.

4) Napkin Doon -- "Doonboggle"
Anyone who is adding new a new word(play) to the collector's lexicon gets mad props from me.

There you have it.  That's what caught my eye in the last 10 days.  I'll be back with a bigger list at the end of October.  If anyone sees a post somewhere that you think is exceptional, please let me know.  I will try to keep my eyes open to get a broader range of excellent posting on here next month.