Phillies merchandise

We're in Philadelphia for a long weekend. I had an opportunity to stop in a few stores and found some Phillies merchandise.

The first is a 2011 McFarlane Cliff Lee figure. I'm not going to take it out of the package until I get home.

I don't buy a lot of these, mainly because I rarely see them in Texas.

The second item is a box of Upper Deck World Series 2008 featuring the Phillies.

I found this in a K-Mart. 15 of the cards appear to be the regular 2008 Upper Deck Phillies cards with a World Series logo printed on them. The rest are supposed to be cards featuring Phillies players in actual World Series highlights. Knowing Upper Deck, I won't believe the photos are actually from World Series games until I get a good look at them at home. The best part, the box was marked down from $19.99 to $5.99. This was not for sale in Texas in 2008. The K-Mart had 6-7 boxes, which I guess have been sitting on the shelf for nearly 6 years.

2014 Topps Gypsy Queen - Base Cards

I wanted to get in a quick post and I've got enough Gypsy Queen cards scanned to do one. We're heading back to the old home town (Philadelphia, of course) for a long weekend so the site will be dark until next week. Unfortunately we picked a week when the Phillies are on the West Coast. Our scheduling of a trip like this has to do more with when my wife can get off work then the Phillies schedule.

Last year, I was starting to lose my desire for Gypsy Queen. I've always liked the treatment of the photos but the the borders and backs were getting to be a bit much. This year, they've toned back a bit on the curlicues and made the border color more like the 1st year.

In my opinion, much improved over last year. There are, of course, the usual gimmick cards (this year it's reverse negative prints) but I haven't figured out if I have any. I expect not. All I bought this year were 4 3-card packs which have the white framed parallel cards.  I do like the set enough, that if I see a blaster box, I'll buy it.

Here's a few more cards.

Rookie cards have that horrible rookie card logo.

Always one of my favorite kinds of photos.

You might notice a slight difference on the border color.  In person, the cards look more like the Martinez card rather than the Choice card. That's really just due to my scanning. Some of the cards have do have a more saturated border. Here's one.

It's quite noticeable when you hold the cards together. I'm sure it doesn't mean anything but it's interesting.

My biggest disappointment was not getting any present day Phillies or Astros. I did get two retired Phillies, Jim Bunning and Robin Roberts, at least.

Movie Review "Go, Johnny Go!"

Here's an old rock 'n' roll movie I just happened to come across on TV last week.

The 1959 movie goes like this. Alan Freed, "The King of Rock 'n' Roll" (at least until the payola scandal) plays himself, a radio DJ, looking for new talent. He announces a contest to discover "Johnny Melody", the next big thing.

Jimmy Clanton played Johnny, a down-and-out rocker who was determined to win the contest. He scrapes up enough money to record a demo of a song he wrote and sends it into the contest. The movie is mostly about missed connections between Johnny and Freed, as Johnny neglected to supply either an address or phone number.  I'll confess that I never heard of Clanton. He was from Louisiana and known as the "swamp pop R&B teenage idol" with several hit songs, the only one which I know was "Venus in Blue Jeans".  Anyway, Clanton wasn't much of an actor although he was quite engaging in this movie, and he sure could sing.

Sandy Stewart played Julie Arnold, a childhood friend of Johnny's. They bump into each other outside Freed's studio and he blows her off in his desire to speak to Freed. Almost another missed connection for Johnny except when Johnny shows up at the recording studio, Julie had just finished recording her entry into the contest. She agrees to provide backup vocals for Johnny's song. After that, she apparently forgets about her song and wholeheartedly supports Johnny. There are a couple of good scenes between Johnny, Julie and her parents. Her parents, instead of being portrayed as typical rock 'n' roll haters of the period, actually were quite hip. And quite accepting of Johnny even though they first meet him when they interrupt him and Julie in an embrace.

Stewart was also an actual singer who had one moderate hit "My Coloring Book". She was really good in this and cute as a button.

The real selling point of this movie is the music. In addition to performances by Clanton and Stewart, Chuck Berry, playing himself, does two songs. Richie Valens makes his only movie appearance in one song. Between making the movie and it's release he died in a plane crash along with Buddy Holly and The Big Bopper (the day the music died). Eddie Cochran does "Teenage Heaven". The Flamingos and The Cadillacs also perform. Their numbers were performed in a comedy fashion that, in today's world, would have probably been done differently. Think white folks in black face.

Spoiler Alert - Johnny wins the contest and appears in Alan Freed's big Christmas show.

2014 Topps Stickers - Who cares?

I've had these for several weeks and am finally getting around to them.

This is the 4th year of Topps Stickers.  Does anyone care about this product? The answer must be yes because Topps keeps trotting them out there. For me, they were a novelty the first year. Since then, I buy a few packs just to add to my reference album. Admittedly they're cheap - a $1 gets you a pack with 8 stickers. Are kids more attracted to this product than regular cards? I want to see Topps market research!

So here's one. If you want to see more you're just gonna have to buy your own.

2014 Topps Heritage - The Inserts

Just the inserts I got in the 3 rack packs and 2 basters I bought. With one exception, same as in past years (at least what you might expect to get in a blaster.

Topps Heritage Blue Border #444 Yu Darvish

As they've done for a few years, Topps has included a subset of the cards with colored borders. I pulled one blue card from the 3 Walmart rack packs.Topps Heritage Red Border.

Topps Heritage Red Border #500 Miguel Cabrera

 I pulled one red border card from each Target blaster. The backs of the cards look like the normal card and are numbered the same as the regular card, even though there are only 25 cards in the parallel sets.

Topps Heritage Chrome#33 Michael Cuddyer

The Chrome cards are serial numbered on the back to 999. I will confess, that although I like the chrome parallel, it has never made much sense to me in a retro set.

Topps Heritage First Draft #JB2 Johnny Bench

This seems to be a new insert. There are only 4 cards in the set, Nolan Ryan, Grain Nettles and 2 Johnny Bench cards. All three were drafted in 1965. 1965, of course, was the first ever draft. I looked at the players picked in the first few rounds, and I guess these 3 guys were the best.

Topps Heritage News Flashbacks Aleksei Leonon

Quite an achievement. I'm not sure that Topps would have put a Communist on a card in 1965.

Topps Heritage Then and Now

Not to denigrate Darvish's 277 K's in 2013, but Koufax had 382 in 1965!

Topps Heritage New Age Performers

Topps Heritage Clubhouse Collection Relic

I managed to pull a relic from one of the blasters. Remember the good old days when they promised a relic in every blaster?

Movie Review - Captain America: The Winter Soldier

In my opinion, humble or otherwise, this is one of the best Marvel movies.

It's hard to say much about this movie without giving away major plot points. The movie is a direct sequel to the first Captain America movie and doesn't follow at all from, say, the recent Avengers movie. In fact, I'd strongly suggest that you re-watch the first Cap movie before seeing this.

For once, the trailers don't give away the story. The trailers consist of shots from several action set pieces from the movie but really tell you nothing about the story.

Samuel L. Jackson has a lot more to do in this movie then we've seen of him, as Nick Fury. You've probably seen the trailer where he's being shot at by what appear to be the DC police.

The story in a general sense is about how much of our actual freedom are we willing to give up to the people who are supposed to be protecting us. Actually, the movie is about how much of our freedom should the people who are supposed to be protecting us, take from us without our knowledge, to protect us. A very real issue in these days of NSA spying. And then, how can our enemies, who are trying to destroy our freedoms, exploit that tension between us willing (or unwittingly) to give up some freedom for protection and our desire to remain free.

The special effects are just amazing as you would expect. We saw the movie in 3D and I'll say that the 3D was so good that I mostly forgot that I was watching it in 3D.

You don't go to a movie like this expecting to Oscar winning performances and you won't see any here. The acting is adequate to the needs of the movie. Robert Redford is pretty good as Nick Fury's boss (Nick Fury has a boss?). The movie tries desperately to develop some rapport between Chris Evans' Captain American and Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow but pretty much fails at that.  There is much forced banter between them where she suggests girls he can date. Anthony Mackie is pretty good as the Falcon, he does actually provide some comic relief that actually works. The special effects of him flying around however, are probably the weakest in the movie.

There are some pretty intense scenes in the movie, like the scene between Fury and the DC cops (which goes on forever) which I suspect would upset younger children. The movie isn't rated PG-13 for the sex (there isn't any) or the language (remarkably subdued) but the violence. The movie attempts ro interject some moral ambiguity (which I'm sure the ratings people don't care about) that might be confusing to kids. And I'd estimate that about 50,000 people get killed, fortunately most of them off camera.

2014 Topps Heritage (Finally) - Part 1, the base cards

I'm apparently not the only one who's had trouble finding Topps Heritage in the big box stores. Does anybody know the story behind that?

I managed to snag 3 rack packs at Walmart last week and finally over last weekend, 2 blasters from Target. The rack packs yielded 1 Blue parallel and the blasters yielded 2 Red parallels and a Clubhouse Collection relic. I've only got the rack pack cards cataloged so let's look at a few of them.

The classic 1965 Topps design. I was 13 years old in the summer of 1965. I wasn't that much into baseball (although I sort of followed the Phillies) and didn't collect baseball cards. I only have a handful of actual 1965 Topps, mostly Phillies.  Looking at those old cards I can see some have cartoons on the back some don't. This Jeff Locke card features a classic pitcher's pose and no cartoon.

Here's one with a cartoon, illustrating a rather impressive stat.  I really like the lettering on the back, especially the capitals.

Rally cap or horrible scalp wound?

Rookie Stars. Some cards feature a team's rookie stars, some feature players from 2 teams.

I'm always happy to get Phillies cards.

Here's a 1965 Topps Phillies 2nd baseman card. The hat logo is similar but the team logo on the card is entirely different.

Manager Mike Matheny looking for divine guidance? I always liked manager cards. Topps hasn't had straight up manager cards since 2009.

It's great to get a card featuring a play you remember seeing live.

This is the hitter equivalent to the Locke card above.

Jedd, about to be poked in the eye by the giant All-Star Rookie cup.

I'm willing to bet that 2013 was the hairiest year in baseball history. And, I doubt that anybody on the 1965 Topps cards had a beard or hair longer than about an inch.

What 90,000 cards looks like

Last Friday I posted my 90,000 card. The majority of the commenters (2 out of the 3) wanted to know how I organize these cards. We have a spare bedroom which has been designated as my den that has a nice sized walk-in closet. about 2/5ths of the available space in the closet is devoted to baseball cards.

I actually did a post on this topic back in December 2008 here. But that was a lot of cards ago. My organization hasn't really changed but here are some updated photos.

Here's a better view of the closet.

 Common cards and players I don't collect are in the boxes. Here's a better view.

There's 40 boxes arranged by year and set (in alphabetical order). I don't arrange the cards in sets in anyway. There is only so much time in a day. I estimate there are about 75,000 cards in boxes. There's no room here for 2014 or later. The other side of the closet has a shelf as well and I'm going to have to do some major rearrangement of the stuff there at the end of the year.

Players I Collect go in 3 and 4-inch binders. I've acquired a lot of binders over the years. Some I've bought, some were discards from where I used to work. I prefer D-ring binders because you can stuff them pretty good without the edges of the pages getting curled into the rings. And I prefer 3-inch binders because a full 4-inch binder is really heavy.  Here's just a short row.

These have been labeled and re-labeled over the years as the amount of cards I have of each player increases or I add more players. There are 22 of these holding holding about 18,000 cards.

I keep one card of each type I have in what I call my reference binders. These also contain all the relic and auto cards I have. Except for Phillies and Astros. These I keep in the Phillies or Astros binders.

I have 9 binders of reference cards holding about 6500 cards.

Finally, I keep Phillies cards and Astros cards since 1995 in binders. Here's most of the Phillies binders.

Eventually I want to replace most of these with newer binders. I have about 8400 Phillies cards and 3700 Astros cards in binders.

These are all stored on some cheap shelving units I bought from Ikea. I'm surprised they haven't collapsed by now.

So that's what my 90,000 cards look like.

My 90,000th card

I've been collecting baseball cards since 1985, when I was 34 years old. I didn't collect cards as a kid. In 1985 I bought some packs of Topps and I was hooked. I really don't know which is the first card I bought, but I'm sure it's a 1985 Topps card.

I really have no sense of what is considered a large collection but I guess I have a large collection. I'm a pretty eclectic collector and I never discard a card I've bought, unless it is a duplicate of a player I don't care for. When I say this is my 90,000th card, I actually mean I own 90,000 different cards. My collection, counting duplicates amounts to 103,898 cards. And I know this because I'm a careful collector who catalogs each card into a database. I'm not counting the pile of cards that I have waiting to catalog, including 2 blasters of Topps Heritage I found yesterday (one with a relic).

Yes, I am a nerd with an engineering degree. What's the point of having a collection if you don't know what you have? Better than that, I can put my hand on any one of these cards within maybe 10 minutes of being asked to produce it. What's the point of having a collection if you don't know where it is? And for a lot of these cards I can tell you when I bought, where I bought it and how much I paid for it. For me, a large part of the enjoyment of collecting cards is in cataloging them and maintaining the collection.


So without any further ado, my 90,000 card!

 I'm sorry it wasn't more exciting than a 2014 Topps Opening Day. At least it's Tim Lincecum, a Player I Collect. And it's a good photo. The other day I posted the Blue version of this card (which is a little more interesting).