Timmah

When pressed, I tell people my two favorite baseball players of all time are Pablo Sandoval and Tim Lincecum. This is somewhat odd, because neither is at all associated with my youth; both came along to the San Francisco Giants as I was heading into my 40s, and yet both played with some joie de vivre and panache - and helped lead us to three World Championships - that, well, why wouldn't they be?

So there are the two baseball players whom I've decided to collect the "hardest". Just today we had a mail day that brought it two new Lincecum cards. The first is this 2006 "Just Rookies" card that you'd think would be some ultra-rate collector's item, but which I just procured for $1.99 off of eBay. I'm not too familiar with the Just Rookies brand, but there are a million of these on eBay. It is now my earliest Linecum card. I suspect any of the others from 2006 will be a little more difficult to come by.

The other one is a 2007 Topps "Moments and Milestones" card, numbered 02/25. Again, way cheaper than it should have been. In this case, not complaining. I have quite a ways to go before I feel like I'm truly getting there w/ a world-class Linecum collection, but these two get me that much closer.

Still All-In On 1975 Topps Baseball

I suppose I mentioned this once before, but when I first became acquainted with 1975 Topps baseball, the only ones that we could buy at my local (Sacramento) 7-11 - where I bought all my first cards - were the mini versions. Consequently, these minis - which were only available in limited parts of the country - were what I thought 1975 Topps baseball were; a one-year aberration where they decided to experiment with smaller cards. It was only in my non-collecting adulthood that I found out the truth - that those minis were relatively "rare", and that '75 Topps was mostly made in your normal 2.5x3.5 version.

The only '75 packs I grabbed back then in 1977, when I first started buying cards, were leftovers that were sitting unbought. Of course I gave them all away to a neighbor, probably around 1980 or so. Now here I am trying to collect the regular 1975 set, and yeah, it's costing me more than the 25 cents a pack I paid back then. Thankfully there's Ken in Missouri, who recently sent me a nice handful of '75s that I didn't have, including this beautiful if a little chewed-up-in-the-corner Rollie Fingers.

I'm all-in on the 1975s. Seriously one of the great sets of all-time. Here are a few more that came over in the batch from Ken.