Top 10 Countdown - Cards I Won't Throw Out

I recently got a stuffed mailer from JP at Cards My Mom Didn't Throw Out.  If you have Diamondbacks cards to spare (especially Steve Finley, Paul Goldschmidt, and Luis Gonzalez) make sure you drop him a line and get a trade going! 

Anyway, 4 full team bags later, I pulled out some favorites to show off here (in descending order).

Honorable Mention:  The Absolute Memorabilia Sweeney shown above.  Any new Sweeney will make me a happy camper.  However, there were even BETTER Sweeneys in this very package, so keep your eyes peeled.

#10) I already have this Bo Jackson card, but it's the "Grand Slammers" version of 1990 Donruss, showing Bo ready to crush one. 

#9)  Just an unassuming Kevin Seitzer, right?  Non!  It is the O-Pee-Chee version. 

#8)  I sent CMMDTO a few Goldschmidt "Chipz", and he returned the favor with a Salvy chip I didn't have! 

#7)  Gil Meche -- the only guy who would retire and forego $11 million on the last year of his contract because he didn't feel like he had earned it.

#6)  I don't know if any non-Royals-fans remember Mark Teahen, but he was a bit of a fan favorite during the lean years.  Which "lean years" am I talking about (there were so many)?  He was worth 6.0 WAR between 2006 and 2007, but never had another good season in the majors after that, despite hanging around in MLB through 2011.  Here's a chrome Bowman of his.  Maybe he has some of these on display in the new wine bar that he owns in Arizona. 

#5) An auto of Royals farmhand Nolan Watson...originally was a high draft pick, but has not progressed much.  He's was recently promoted to High-A Ball at the end of June.

#4)  Just a cool-looking Mondesi here. 

#3)  I can't believe a Sweeney memorabilia card only made it to #3, but that's how the cookie crumbles sometime.  This "Leather and Lumber" Sweeney is numbered only to 100.  When I pulled it from the package I thought I already had it since it looked so familiar.  But upon checking, what I actually had was the base version with no jersey swatch. 

#2)  The penultimate card is a 2016 Chrome prism refractor of Lo Cain with a very prominent Russell Martin.  Wonder what makes this play special?  Oh, it was only Cain scoring from 1st on a single in the Playoffs.  The Royals coaches KNEW that Bautista would sometimes throw to 2nd on a play like this, so they were ready for it when it actually happened. 

#1)  And, the #1 card in this countdown is....

So graceful.  It's like a ballet..."Sweeney Lake," perhaps?  👦

And with that, I extend one final "Thank you" for all these cards.  Much appreciated!!!

Did any of you have a favorite out of these cards?  Did I get the order wrong?

The OdieGoat

3 months with no posts?!?!  Well, I'm here now!

I have spent most of my card-time in the last few months cataloging my collection over at Trading Card Database after the Zistle collapse, and have almost all of my Royals cards entered over there.  Once that is done I will have a rather comprehensive want-list there that I can use to make trades with the active trading members over there. 

The other avenue that I have been exploring (besides blogging) is Twitter.  See, blogspot.com is blocked at my office, but Twitter is not.  :-)  I am there @DenHartogJ, but I don't tweet much...mostly I use it to look at other people's cards and listen to people whine about the Royals. 

However, one interesting thing that happens there is a "Flash Sale" or "Fire Sale" where someone will post a bunch of cards with a price for each one, and you can claim whatever you want - first come, first served.  One member I have bought from on several occasions is @odiegoat, who hosts his "Odie Sales" every month or so. Last week I bought a few cards from him for both myself and some of my trading partners.  These are my favorite keepers from my haul:


This Bo Jackson is from 2018, and since I have been buying NO new product, this was a great one to pick up.

2018 Topps - Bo Jackson 1983 Topps

 Johnny Cueto -- Put that shimmy in the windup, big boy!   This is a "Prism Refractor" which looks great in-hand.  Cueto's complete-game victory in the 2015 World Series will live on in Royals lore for ages, and keeps him in my good graces even if he did sign with the despised Giants.

Topps Chrome - Johnny Cueto Prism Refractor

 And the main reason I bought cards from The OdieGoat this time was this George Brett:

2017 Topps Silver Pack - George Brett

My favorite player on my favorite Topps card design?  And it's shiny?  YES PLEASE.  This is from the 2017 Silver Packs that came with Topps Hobby Box purchases.  I paid more than I should have for it, but didn't want to risk missing out on this one!  It was still under the price of one retail pack of Ginter or Gypsy Queen. 

There were some other cards too, but those will be finding their way into mailboxes over the next few months. 

While I'm on the topic of flash sales, the other guy that you should follow is @EriksFire.  His prices can't be beat, and he reduces the price on unsold merchandise until it goes.  So a 50-cent card will become 25-30 cents, then 10-15 cents over time.  It's like a virtual dimebox, and he lets you accumulate a stack and just pay/ship once a month. 

That's all for now - Do you have a Twitter handle?  And who are your favorite card-sellers or card-related accounts on there?

Black Friday Shopping and Other Men's Wives

All the big online sites had tons of doorbuster deals on hobby boxes for Black Friday...and I didn't buy from any of them.

Instead, I hit up a LCS with my brother-in-law while we each left our children with Grandma.

The LCS in question was MVP Sports Cards in Laguna Hills, CA.  This is a small shop, but they had some good stuff.  My BIL came out of there with a 1968 Mickey Mantle and a 1973 Nolan Ryan.  Needless to say, he spent a little more money than I did.  :-)  But all my digging yielded some great stuff to add to my collection.

I have felt like I need to focus my Royals collecting a little more to make sure that I have team sets of all the major releases in team history (starting in 1969).  This focus helped me pick up 12 cards for the 1969 Topps team set that I still needed.  Here are my 6 favorites -- Joe Keough can't decide on a bat (the Paradox of Choice) while Dave Wickersham is just happy to be here.  I still need #619 and #662 to finish that one off.

 

I added some oddballs of #5.

  

Bo knows Classic.

Out of the dollar-bin I pulled this 1969 Deckle Edge (#22) of Joe Foy.  Foy was the only Royal in this set during KC's inaugural season.  He's not quite as notable a name as some of the other players on the checklist (Clemente, Carew, Aparicio, Gibson, McCovey, Mays), but I think it's a beautiful card and I was lucky to find it.

 The cards above were all Royals, but let us not forget my affinity for "Randoms," too.  This bad boy caught my eye as I was pawing through some cheaper autographs and he had to go in my pile.

Autographed.  Mascot.  Oddball.  I headed to Google to find out who the Phoenix Firebirds were.  Apparently they were the AAA team for the Giants in the early '90s, but left when the Diamondbacks arrived to become the Tucson Sidewinders (D-Backs AAA Team).  This lead the Tucson Toros to move and become the Fresno Grizzlies.  Mr. Phineas T. Firebird had a few other cards made of him before he rose from the ashes and skipped town.  This one is autographed by a real purple bird, so I'm sure it's worth serious coin.

That's the end of the cards, but I had one other thing that I noticed in this LCS.  The staff here were super-friendly and helpful at letting me know what they had, what was on special, and pulling out boxes from the back for me to look at. It was also pretty obvious that "the staff" were a husband-and-wife team who own the shop.  This is the 3rd shop I have been to with a husband-and-wife running the place (see Valley Sports Cards and Pal's, too), and those shops have always felt more welcoming than the shops I visit who are just run by one guy.  I think the feminine influence helps a lot.  The "lone wolf" shop owners need to get hitched ASAP!  Has anyone else noticed this effect in their LCS?

 

Bountiful Bonus Booty Bestowed by Benevolent Blogger

Who is the Benevolent Blogger?  Why, Bubba's Bangin' Batch of Baseball Bits, of course!

Matt ran a contest last summer to see who could identify a player that he had selected, based on a series of clues that were increasingly specific.  When all was said and done, I narrowed down the answer to just a few players, then finally down to one - Wilson Ramos!  That qualified me for a prize, and when the randomizer was done spinning, I came out of it with a whole lot of 2017 Ginter cards!  Knowing his affinity for Ginter cards, I figured it would be something good.  It was.  :-)

Here you can see the box that hit my mailbox.

 

To be specific, that box had a full base set of 2017 Ginter (Cards 1-300), and then half of the short-prints (301-350).  1987 Topps (favorite set!) were used as filler.  No respect for the classics!  :-)

Here's the full team set of 2017 Royals (non-SP). 

 

He also included one SP (LoCain), and a mini of Hosmer and black mini of LoCain.  

It didn't seem like the Ginter base set had as many interesting non-baseball cards in it as it has in past years, but there were still a few good ones.  All of the cards in the next two pictures are other cards from the base set that I wanted to keep. 4 Ex-Royals (Kendrys, Manaea, Zobrist, Cueto), guys from my earlier days (Canseco, Smith, Banks, Johnson, Dawson), Random current guys I like (Ichiro, Werth, Wilson Ramos(!), then the miscellaneous ones.  Vashti Cunningham and Laurie Hernandez were Olympians.  I watched a Crossfit documentary on Netflix and Ben Smith was the winner of that (Spoiler!).  There was no "Revolving Door" or "X-Ray" card in this set, so a Panda and a Waterfall will have to fill that gap. 

As I mentioned, there were also half of the Short-Prints from this set.  Those are shown below and are all available (except for Lorenzo) since they don't fit my PC.  If anyone still is working on this set and needs one of these, let me know and I can get that to you.  I have a lot of base to trade/give, too.

I really only need one more full-size base card from this set -
Base SP #313 - Matt Strahm. 

Do any of you have that one for me?

Thanks so much, Matt!  You might be wondering why it took me 3 months to post this.  Well....this package hit my mailbox the same week my wife gave birth to our daughter.  Between her and my two older boys, I've had limited card-blogging time since then.  But these were all much appreciated and will be given a good home!  

Bo Knows Shoes

1) If you've been into baseball for awhile, then you know that Bo Jackson could break his bats over his knee.

2) If you've been into baseball cards for awhile, then you know that Score made a card of Bo breaking bats over his knee.

1991 Score - "Bo Breaker" - Bo Jackson

3) If you've been into sneakers for awhile, you know that now there is a sneaker of Bo Jackson breaking bats over his knee.

Wait?  What?  A sneaker of Bo breaking a bat???  Yes.  Yes it exists.

Nike recently made this sneaker.  Here's their website.

Here's the tops:

And here's the bottoms:

Currently the ones on Ebay in my size are going for over $250.  I guess that means I won't be buying any of them.  I guess I'll have to get my 8-bit Bo Jackson fix in some other way.  Tecmo Bowl anyone?

Bombs Away - #2 - Bo

Seek Shelter???? Why the heck would I do that?

Des Moines, Iowa Baseball Card Show

I was back home in Iowa in October to visit my parents and my little sister.  I knew I was going to be in Des Moines one weekend, so I just checked the Beckett Show Calendar to see if there were any card shows happening then.  It turns out that there was!  Here's what the listing said :

Urbandale American Legion Hall, 6805 Douglas Avenue, 8-3, 80T
Ryan Grother 515-491-8403 ryancardz@gmail.com

Based upon that, I was pretty stoked.  80 TABLES?!?  This thing is going to be massive!!!!  Well.........not so much. When I got there I counted 8 or 9 dealers (10% of the advertised amount).  I only had to go about 4 miles from my sister's house to this show, so it was no biggie for me, but if I'd made a longer trip based on that info I'd be pretty ticked.

However, this show DID redeem itself.  6 of the 8 dealers had either dime or quarter boxes to sift through, and I was able to find a bunch of "treasures" for myself.  Some of them were also willing to negotiate on bulk pricing on those dime/quarter cards, helping me to stretch my budget a little farther.  All-in-all, I came home with a 250-count box nearly full.  It was all cards I wanted for myself or for trades, and I think my total spending was under $30.

Here's a sampling of the stuff I picked up.

The greatest athlete to ever come out of Iowa State.

2007 Allen and Ginter - Cael Sanderson - #23

The last two "State" Royals that I needed from that Ginter Subset.  I am still looking for the Iowa card (Casey Blake) if anyone has that.

Three more MINDS.  Now I want to go do electro-magnetic experiments on a steamboat...

One guy there had a whole mess of Panini Americana.  He must have just busted a few boxes and was looking to dump cards.  He had Presidents with lovely facial hair:

A Married Couple (The Yale card will go in my wife's binder):

And some gentlemen with VERY unique leaping styles:

I always liked Barbara Bush.  She felt like "America's Grandma" to me.  She was the REAL Barbara Bush...not like that fake one.  :-)

Here were a few dime-box cards I grabbed for trade.  Do any of my Dodger-blogger friends need any of these?  The "Invincible" card is half-cardboard/half-plastic.  The Goodwins are minis.

After that I was just looking to pick up miscellaneous Royals cards.  Neither of these gents are with KC anymore, though. 

Some randoms....Bo Knows Archery!  Don Denkinger is the favorite umpire of all Royals fans everywhere. 

Finally, I grabbed a card off my "Most-Wanted" list for just 10 cents.  Justin Maxwell taking BP in the construction site.

2008 Upper Deck - Justin Maxwell - #326

Just think what I could have come back with from an 80-table show!  Probably 10 of each of those cards above....

History of the World, Part II

Look out, Christopher Columbus!  Martin Luther is burning indulgences and John Hancock is going quill-pen CRAY-ZAY!

These all came to me from Blogger-of-the-Year, Night Owl.  I had been begging him for the "Reformation" card, and he finally relented and sent it my way.  :-)  Gotta get my fill of Reformation History.  As they say, "I've got 95 Theses, but a Pope ain't one."  Go ahead and watch that video.  I'll wait.  (Shout-out to Johann Guttenberg)

In his abundant generosity, NO sent me two more of the Historical Turning Points cards seen below.

That is not the mental image I have of the Berlin Wall coming down.  My mental snapshot is all the people on top of it during that first wave of history.  By the time the cranes came around, the "turning point" was over and industrious businessmen were selling the wall chunks to Americans for 20 bucks a pop. 

He tossed in one Royal (this blog isn't just called "Randoms", after all), and Iowan pitcher Joel Hanrahan doing his best Bo Jackson impression.

Yep.  I see the resemblance.  :-)

Thanks, Night Owl!!!

History of the World, Part I

No Mel Brooks movies here.  This is all cards, baby.  I've had the good fortune of recently receiving three history-themed trades and I'm going to show them off.  This first set of cards came to me from Laurie at LV's TTM Autographs.  She and I actually made this trade happen over Zistle.  Her profile is here.

She and I worked out a great deal where she sent me the two cards above..."Minds That Made The Future" from 2011 Allen and Ginter.  I think that this is a subset that I am going to chase.  I'll have a few more of those coming up in the next few posts, then I'll post a want-list. 
 

The other subset that I want to chase is the "Historical Turning Points" set from 2012 Allen and Ginter.  Laurie included one of those for me, too.

2012 Allen and Ginter - Culinary Curiosities - Kopi Luwak

Yep.  That's poop coffee.  Kopi Luwak. 

We've got a flashy pink Bo, a Pacquaio, and an old Willie Wilson.

Sweeney blocking the plate.  There's that Bo!  If you remember my sealed box post, then that was the main card I wanted from that box.  I'm definitely not cracking open that box now.

2011 Topps Diamond Anniversary - David DeJesus

Here was the favorite card she sent me.  Even though DDJ was no longer with the Royals, he's still one of my favorites, and that sparkly card is beautiful.

Thanks again, LV!