Random cards from my collection #69

Card #10124
2008 Topps Stars #11 Derek Jeter

Comments on the card/player: The original Topps Stars was a set which Topps issued around the turn of the century. This Topps Stars was a 25-card insert in Topps in 2008. Holographic green foil.
How/When acquired: Paid $0.15/card in March 2008 for a Topps blaster.

Card #34806
2012 Bowman Platinum Top Prospects Bryce Brentz

Comments on the card/player: Brentz was the Red Sox #1 pick in 2007. He reached the Triple A World Series with Pawtucket this year and then got promoted to the majors. He hit .308 with the Red Sox with 26 at bats in 9 games.
How/When acquired: Paid $0.68/card for 1 rack pack in August 2012.

Card #25406
2011 Topps Heritage #427 Will Rhymes

Comments on the card/player: I always liked 1962 Topps (the inspiration for 2011 Topps Heritage) and liked this set as well. I bought 2 blasters and a hobby box. This is one of the short-printed cards (numbered 426-500). Brentz played 130 games in the majors from 2010 through 2012. He's currently at Triple A in the Nationals system.
How/When acquired: Paid $0.28/card for 2 72-card Topps Heritage blasters in March 2011.

Card #29741
2011 Topps Team Sets #14 Ryan Madson

Comments on the card/player: I'm sure everyone is familiar with the Topps Team Sets. These are sold in blister packs. It's hard for me to find the Phillies sets in the Houston area. In fact it's hard to find the Astros sets here as well. These cards usually have the same photo, maybe cropped a bit differently, as the Topps base set but this card has an entirely different photo of Madson from the base set. Gotta have these if you're a team completest.
How/When acquired: Paid $10 for 17-card Phillies set in August 2011.

Card #24907
2010 Topps USA Baseball #48 Marc Brakeman

Comments on the card/player: I notice that these USA cards don't give home town and birth date information on the players. I guess because they are minors? I can't find his name on baseball-reference.com so I'm hoping he's playing college ball somewhere.
How/When acquired: Paid $9.99 for boxed set in February 2011.

Card #38948
2009 O-Pee-Chee #525 Comerica Park

Comments on the card/player: I always had a soft spot in my heart (or perhaps my head) for 2009 O-Pee-Chee, Upper Deck's last attempt to get the nostalgic market with an old-time design that wasn't theirs. Combining stadium photo cards with team checklists is always a good idea in my book. 
How/When acquired: Paid $0.22/card for a blaster in June 2009.

Card #29863
1998 Topps #331 Albert Belle

Comments on the card/player: 1998 was a pretty good year for Belle. He hit .328 with 49 home runs, a .665 slugging percentage and 152 RBIs. After 1998, he signed a $62 million 5-year contract with the Orioles.
How/When acquired: Don't know.

Card #19252
1983 Fleer #153 Porfi Altamirano

Comments on the card/player: 1983 Fleer. Whoever though that brown would make a good color for the back of a baseball card? For those who like to stadium guess, that is defiantly the Phillies Veteran's Stadium in the background. By the way, Vince DiMaggio still holds that grand slam record for the Phillies.
How/When acquired: Don't know.

Card #27109
2011 Bowman #62 Brett Myers

Comments on the card/player: The last in a long series of black and red Bowman sets. And good riddance. After going 14-8 with a 3.14 ERA for the Astros in 2010, Myers turned in a 7-14 record with an ERA of 4.46 in 2011. Of course the 2011 Astros had a 56-106 record in 2011 so it's amazing he won even 7 games.
How/When acquired: Paid $0.25/card for a blaster in May 2011.

Card #686
1987 Topps Glossy All-Stars #11 Fernando Valenzuela

Comments on the card/player: As I remember, these glossy All-Star cards were only available in rack-packs, one per. They were inserted in such a way that you could see the card through the cellophane wrapper. I remember looking over the rack-packs in K-Mart to see which had a player I wanted.
How/When acquired: Don't know.

Repack oddities

I like to buy the sort of repack that have a lot of loose cards. Most of the cards are junk but there is almost always a few interesting cards. This one I bought back in November was no exception.

1997 Collector's Choice Teams #CI11 Marquis Grissom

Upper Deck produced the Collector's Choice set from 1994 through 1998. It was Upper Deck's second set after starting their iconic Upper Deck set in 1989. This Grissom card was easy to identify as a card from Collector's Choice. My only question when I looked it it was "What year is this from?" Collector's Choice base cards didn't change much from year to year and I can never tell them apart from the fronts. The back tells me it's from 1997. OK, ready to catalog. But wait a minute. What's with the number? CI11?  Turns out this is a Collector's Choice Team card. I never heard of this. In at least 1997, Upper Deck put out these team sets. But not every team, just the Braves, Orioles, Indians, Rockies, White Sox, Marlins, Dodgers, Yankees, Mariners, and Rangers. 13 cards to a set.  This card goes in the Reference Card album. You don't usually see doubles in a repack but there were two of these.

1995 Megacards Ruth

This is from a 1995 set put out by a company called Megacards. I don't know anything about the company. The set consisted of 25 cards highlighting different years from Ruth's career. 21 of the cards were b/w photos with gold foil trim. The front of this card seems to have some condition issues with the white speckles. The speckles don't seem to be something on the card or paper loss. They may be an artifact from the original photo.  I already had one of the color cards from the set from a previous repack.

1989 Pacific Legends II #123 Andy Pafko

I mostly think of Pacific as a card company that specialized in cards for the Hispanic market in the 1990s. But they did produce some sets in the late 1980s. This 110 card set picked up the numbering from the 100-card 1988 Pacific Legends I set. I already had a Phillie from Legends II that I got in a trade. I can now replace that in the Reference Album with this card. This is my first Andy Pafko card. Although he had a decent career, he's mostly known today as Card #1 in Topps 1952. Due to kids rubber banding their cards in those days, apparently it's hard to find a 1952 Pafko card in decent shape. According to Wikipedia a 1952 Pafko sold for $84,000 in 1998.

I'm a member of the National Baseball Hall of Fame!

And I didn't even have to hit a single home run, or, in fact, play professional baseball. It only cost me $50.

I got a mailing from the HOF promising me membership and some goodies. Here are the goodies.

First off is the 2014 HOF yearbook.

Nicely produced magazine with profiles on the 2014 inductees, stories about the Hall and thumbnail sketches about a lot of past inductees. There is supposed to be a monthly magazine but I haven't seen that yet.

Two 75th anniversary window clings.

A membership card

I guess I should have applied for membership under my blogger name. Didn't think of that.

No magic decoder ring.

But the best part of the package was this:

A Hall of Fame commemorative half dollar struck by the US Mint in uncirculated condition. I couldn't get a good scan of the coin so I got these images from the Mint's web site.

The coins are actually curved, concave on the glove side. Here's a link to the Mint's web site with more information. The BUY button does not work, so I expect the issues are sold out. You can get them on eBay for 'buy-it-now' prices in the $25 and up range.

My Reference Cards #9 - Fleer Focus and Fleer Club 3000

In the second half of the 1990s and right up until they went bankrupt, Fleer issued so many different card sets it was near impossible to keep up. And sets would come and go. If you found a set one year that you liked, good luck finding it the next year. Fleer/Skybox will issue 12 different card sets in 2000. Of course the other companies were issuing lots of cards as well, but there was less stability from year to year with Fleer.

2000 was the inaugural year for Fleer Focus. It's first year of two. I bought a hobby box on May 2000 for about $0.24/card.

2000 Fleer Focus #185 Cal Ripken, Jr.

The base set has 250 cards. Fleer Focus (as did most of Fleer's sets) had a gimmick. Note that the background of the photo is out-of-focus, while the player is, not only in focus, but surrounded by a white aura. The player is also glossy, while the background is not. Not a bad gimmick really, and not a bad looking card. I like the logo-on-a-cap, although it's been done before. The back has career stats and a small photo.

Cards numbered 226-250 are serial numbered Prospect cards. These have a red foil shield on the front and are numbered to 3999. I just pulled one of these from the box.

2000 Fleer Focus Green #206 Jeromy Burnitz

It's hard to see, but the player and team names are in green foil. This was a full parallel set, serial numbered to 300.  I pulled two of these, the other being Michael Barrett of the Expos.

There was another full parallel set, serial-numbered to 1.

2000 Fleer Focus Focal Points #1 Mark McGwire

This 15-card set was inserted 1:6 packs. I pulled 5 of the set.  These are foil board on the front and glossy on the back. The foil and back color is color coded to the players team. There was an insert to this set as well, called "Focal Points Striking" which I didn't get.

2000 Fleer Focus Fresh Ink #13 J. D. Drew

This autographed insert set has 48 cards and was inserted 1 in 96 packs. This is the very first autographed or relic card I ever pulled directly from a pack. In the scan it looks a bit like a sticker auto, but the autograph is directly on a piece of foil printed on the card. This was a pretty good card in 2000. Drew had just come off his rookie season and even though he hadn't exactly set the world on fire, he was still considered a future great player.

2000 Fleer Focus Future Vision #3 Ruben Mateo

Another 15-card set, this one inserted 1 in every 9 packs. Multicolored foil on the front, glossy on the back. Although this card says "Ruben is the Rangers' All-Star outfielder of the future", I'm guessing that Mateo never got closer to the All-Star Game than watching it on television.

2000 Fleer Focus Pocus #3 Nomar Garciaparra

Lots of multicolored holographic foil gives this 10-card set some eye appeal. Inserted 1 in 14 packs, I pulled 3 of them from the box.

There was one other 10-card insert set "Feel The Game" which I didn't get.

Fleer Club 3000

There are 14 base cards and 71 memorabilia cards in this set. The cards celebrate players who have either 3000 hits or pitchers who have 3000 strikeouts in their career. They were inserted in five of the Fleer branded card packs,  Fleer Tradition, Fleer Focus, Fleer Mystique, Fleer Showcase and Ultra. The cards are not numbered.

Fleer Club 3000 George Brett

The cards are die cut across the top and bottom to cut out the numbers. The Brett card came in Fleer packs, but I paid $0.83 for this in 2003.  I have half the set and would like to own the whole thing.

Fleer Club 3000 Memorabilia Steve Carlton

I didn't actually know that these memorabilia cards existed until I saw this one in a baseball card store in the Philadelphia area when we were visiting there last spring. I gladly paid $10 for it.

Players being interviewed

I imagine that baseball players, at least the better ones, spend more time than they want being interviewed. Here are some cards of players talking to the press (or maybe just the team's broadcast team).

1995 Collector’s Choice Special Edition #151

On his baseball cards, John Franco always looks like a guy who is always having a good time. Here I imagine he's talking to the broadcast team during a game.

1993 Upper Deck #35 Kirby Puckett

Puckett looking quite humble probably after he won a game single-handedly.

1989 Upper Deck #515 David Palmer

 Palmer looks like he's giving a pregame radio interview in his pajamas.

2010 Topps History of the World Series Paul Molitor

Paul Molitor, just before getting a bottle of champagne poured on his head.

1998 Skybox Dugout Axcess #35 Curt Schilling

Curt Schilling probably not expounding on his theory of evolution.

2007 Upper Deck #186 Barry Zito

Barry Zito surrounded by reporters.

2013 Topps #568 Steve Lombardozzi

I imagine the interviewer loves it when sort of thing happens.

2005 Upper Deck ESPN #2 Troy Glaus

Troy looking quite relaxed in what appears to be a pregame interview. Saying things like "We've got a good ball club", and "We just have to take each game as it comes".

Repack box hits a triple!

Last week I bought one of those Fairfield Authentic Memorabilia repacks. These come in two flavors, either relic or autograph. I bought the "Autograph Edition".

These have four packs of cards plus a loose auto card.  The 4 packs were 2102 Gypsy Queen, 2012 Topps Update, 2012 Topps Series 1 and 2010 Topps Update. As you may have guessed, not much to write home, or even a blog post, for the packs.

Here's the auto and what I consider a triple:

1. It's an auto card (but I already knew that)
2. It's a type of card I didn't have. 2008 SPx was a 150 card set with cards 101-150 being autographed. I actually only have one other card (not a auto) from the set, also an Astro
3. It's an Astro.

If it had been an on-card auto instead of a sticker I would have called it a home rune.

If the Astro had been an Astro I actually cared about, like Bagwell or Oswalt, it would have been a Grand Slam.

Patton made 2 starts for the Astros in 2007 before being traded to the Orioles for Miguel Tejada. In his other 5 years as a player, he's been used sparingly in relief. But he's apparently still working.