I Got Fuji-fied!

Last month San Jose Fuji was one of the winners of my Big Pile Contest.  He posted his haul on his site already.  (I just noticed that I WAS NOT following Fuji!  Huge mistake.  Rectified.......now.)

Well, he was awesome and sent me a very unexpected Thank You present.  First off...I got the Fuji trader card (above).  Way cool.

He also sent these beauties:

On-card autos of Tom Gordon, Mike Macfarlane, and Kevin Appier.  These cards are from the 1991 Kansas City Life Insurance cards set.  They are taller than a regular card, so these will not go in the standard pages...I'll have to find another way to show them off.  Fuji apologized that the Appier was a little bent up, but I think these guys are GREAT!!!  As three guys on the teams of my youth, these are way more treasured by me than anything I would buy in the store today.

Thank you so much, Fuji!!!

Who is a Winner???? THIS GUY.

This guy....meaning me.

Part of what I love about blogging is everyone who gives away cards.  Did you hear me?  PEOPLE JUST GIVE AWAY CARDS. I don't see any of the personal finance bloggers giving me cash or any of the political bloggers giving me extra votes.  To get more than one vote you have to live in Chicago.

I recently won contests on two blogs, JABO and $30 A Week Habit.

JABO sent me this guy:

2008 Allen and Ginter N43 Ryan Braun

 And Robert sent me these two (among others):

2011 Bowman Chrome Mike Montgomery & 2011 Topps 60 Danny Duffy Auto

Thanks so much, guys!  I'm looking forward to winning and running many more contests in the future.

My Cheesiest Trade Ever - Most Wanted List Success!

Chris over at Nachos Grande was running his regular Trade Stack feature, and I decided to go for it.  I was shooting for the Carlos Beltran there, and I got it.  But when I looked at NG's trade bait, I saw something else there...

 

That's the DeJesus card I wanted! It was on my Top 10 and everything!

So I fired an email off to Chris asking if I could get the DeJesus, too.  I had a Barry Larkin purple Classic card to offer.  He was cool with that, so I popped it in the envelope, too...And now I've got it!  That's the first one to cross off of my Most Wanted List.

Here is the Beltran that I really wanted from the Trade Stack, too.  He must have covered a LOT of ground to get to that ball.

2001 Stadium Club #146 - Carlos Beltran

There were a couple of Topps Town cards in there, too.

Thanks, Chris!

Christmas Card(board) - Name's The Same

Colbey over at Cardboard Collections sent me a Christmas card!

  

(What's that you say?  Christmas was 2 weeks ago?  Well...I'm a little behind.)

 

1996 Leaf Signature Series - #138 - Keith Lockhart

That was a very nice gesture -- He tossed this little beauty in there.  This is an on-card auto of Keith Lockhart from the 1996 Leaf Signature Series.  COMC says this was out of 3500(!).  Poor Keith -- his signing hand must have been so tired.  I guess that's not as bad as Marshall Faulk signing all those cards for the Madden game -- that took him months!  But I digress...

I had actually forgotten that Keith Lockhart had played for the Royals.  I remembered him as a Brave. He was mostly an IF platoon guy during his time in KC.

This brings up another thing -- famous people with the same name.  There's lots of them!  Both within sports and sports/non-sports combos.  Baseball Keith Lockhart is not even the #1 Keith Lockhart google result.  It's this guy:

Smug Keith Lockhart

This Keith Lockhart is the conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra.  If you grew up with only 5 TV channels like I did, you inevitably came across PBS showing the Boston Pops on the 4th of July and this guy was front-and-center.  It takes a certain amount of compulsiveness to be a professional orchestra conductor -- worrying about little details that most of your audience doesn't understand or won't notice.  That's gotta wear on a guy.  That and wearing cummerbunds every day... :-)

Do any of you guys remember EITHER of these Keith Lockharts?

Grab Bag Contents

I posted yesterday about my grab-bag....
http://royalsandrandoms.blogspot.com/2012/01/lcs-review-pals-sports-cards-andover-mn.html

 

It was only 50 cents!  How could I lose?!?!  Here's what we got.  It was 30 cards in total...I'm showing half of them.

Verlander Chrome, Berkman Goodwin Champions, Dmitri Young.  That's a nice start.

 I bought this in Minnesota, so they had to include some Twins!  That last guy, Frank Pastore, has one of the top-rated Christian radio programs in the country.  It's big in Los Angeles on KKLA.

 3 Kirbys!  He looks pretty tired in that first one, but luckily he perked up by 1991.

 A few more oldies.  Can anyone tell me what Todd Worrell is doing in that card?  I've had it since I was 7 years old, but don't know if he is pitching, following-through, fielding, or what!

There were a few newer ones in there, too.  I like the ToppsTown stuff, and especially like the looks on the SP Authentic cards.  The design on those is outstanding.


Finally...what was in the hard case?   A.....rabbit and a turtle??

2010 Topps Tribute GR-100, Tortoise vs. Hare

This is from the "Greatest Rivalries" subset of 2010 Topps Tribute.  I had never seen this card before, so I was STUNNED when I saw this. This is a baseball card?  How awesome is that!!  The scan doesn't show it, but it's SHINY, too.  This was my prize.  50 cents was a small price for one that cool.

LCS Review - Pal's Sports Cards - Andover, MN

I was in Minnesota on vacation visiting some family late in October, and decided to kill some time by hitting one of the Local Card Shops there.  The shop we hit was:

Pal's Sports Cards

14025 Round Lake Boulevard

Andover, MN 55304

http://pals-sportscards.com/

This is in the NW Twin Cities area...just outside of Coon Rapids.  I wasn't expecting much beyond lots of Twins and Vikings stuff (which they had), but when I got in there, I was pleasantly surprised.

First impressions...it was clean, neat, and organized.  It wasn't a pit like some LCS are.  They had the standard glass display cases of higher-end product and a wall of wax (above).  There were small cocktail-style tables where you could leave the stuff you were buying while you sifted through the other boxes.  Baseball, Football, and Basketball were all in abundance.  I'm guessing they had hockey, too, but I honestly didn't check.

What really got me excited was their "low-end" stuff.  They had a "dime box" for each team, as well as "quarter boxes" for recent hall-of-famers.  Additionally, they had lots of miscellaneous cards sorted by set for the set-collectors out there.  I stocked up on a bunch of Royals I still needed on the cheap, and grabbed some George Bretts out of the HOF box.  They also had vintage and recent "high-end" singles, but I passed on most of those. 

Above are some more of their displays.  The woman above owns the shop with her husband.  She was very nice so we chatted for a few minutes when she was ringing me up.  I asked her how business was going, and she said they had been open for about a year and the shop was covering overhead.  They don't sell on ebay, but they sell on Sportlots.com.

Collecting supplies were abundant and very reasonably priced.  I bought a small box to take all my purchases home on the plane.  Locals -- hit this place up for boxes, top-loaders, etc. 

Right before I left, my eyes caught a little basket with this in it:

It's just a brown lunch bag for 50 cents.  "Grab-Bag" style.  I picked it up and it felt sort of heavy.  There was something in a top-loader in there, so I guessed there was one good card and a load of old commons.  But for 50 cents I couldn't pass it up!!  That's cheaper than any retail pack.

You'll have to wait until tomorrow....I'll post what was in there.  It was fun!  :-)

Recommendation:  Anyone in Minneapolis / St. Paul should head up there and give this place a look.  It should be easy to find something you'd like.

Big Pile Shipping and 2011 Spending Total

The BIG PILE has shipped!  That's what the 12 winners envelopes look like, with a little customs form on top for our Canadian winner.  :-)  They went out on New Year's Eve from CA, so should arrive in your neck of the woods sometime later this week.

A lot of people have been talking about collecting goals recently and how they plan to change their behavior in the new year.  I was interested in how much I spent on cards in 2011, so I asked my wife.  My guess was around $175.  I had bought a 2011 Topps Football hobby box ($55), plus a few Ebay purchases, some Sportlots, and some group breaks.  She told me the actual answer...$327.  I had forgotten some supplies, some miscellaneous Target packs, a Craigslist purchase and shipping on trade packages. But that's still a big gap!  Luckily that is not enough to break the bank or cause a problem in our overall financial situation.  However, I do want to be more aware of what I am spending as the year goes on, so I am going to try to track it on the blog to keep it front-and-center in my mind.

I am also going to limit the "accumulating" aspect of my collecting in the first half of 2012 and focus more on organizing and posting things I already have.  I won't pass up a good trade offer or one of my regular group breaks, but will rather try to avoid those days of trolling ebay or Sportlots without a real "need" in mind (none of this is NEEDED, after all).