Nope, Definitely Not Collecting "Throwback Thursday"

I had sort of lost track of what was going on with Topps' weekly "Throwback Thursday" sets. I'd subscribed to email updates from Topps a little over a year ago, and ordered a 6-card Throwback Thursday set in the early part of this year because I thought it looked quite handsome. Blogged about it here, in fact. But I mean, yeah - these are just money-grubbing limited edition sets designed to make suckers out of all of us, right? Also - that and the fact that Topps started sending me emails every single goddamn day, to the point where I had to unsubscribe. Now I'm so unsubscribed that I can't seem to re-subscribe, even though I want to. So this is why I forgot about "Throwback Thursday" as a concept, and why I missed out on a few phenomenal-looking cards.

Folks, that's why there's an eBay. There will always be someone ready to make a buck off on top of someone else's buck. I'd seen a scan of Topps TBT set #39, which features "six lightning fast players, current and retired", based on a Topps "World on Wheels" design from 1954 (which is in itself a pretty cool set featuring cars - check it out here). It's in an edition of 1,665. There's a Trout card and a Luis Robert card and even a Trea Turner card. The first two I didn't really want to spring the $ for; the latter I don't think I saw. But the other three just looked so awesome that I bought them straight-up on eBay. I simply had to. Ricky Henderson you can see above. Here are the other two I went for:

I'll treasure them forever and always. But I wasn't done buying Throwback Thursday cards, or so I found out. Set #36 featured "six next-generation stars", and is based on a 1998 design. Well one of those cards was Mike Yastrzemski, or the "real Yaz" as we call him around here. Again, it was something I couldn't pass up, even if it was being sold by some grubby capitalist totally trying to exploit the dignity of my labor. But no, I am definitely, absolutely not collecting "Throwback Thursday" cards, no way.

Turns Out I Bought One of These Things

I figured you guys were all doing it, why not me? Plus Ichiro Suzuki is one of my guys. 2020 has been my biggest year of card accumulation since my youth (pandemic-driven, I'd imagine), and the big thing this year has been the Topps 2020 project, so...?

Ordered it for $19.99 from Topps something like two months ago, and it just arrived in the mail this week. It's Ichiro card #169. Artwork by Blake Jamieson. I think it looks real, real nice. So of course after all the get-rich-quick stories that were proliferating about these cards, I had to go and look up on eBay what this card was going for on the secondary market, and.......well. Turns out it's lost value already. It can easily be picked up for ten bucks. I guess that trend is over with, isn't it?

Anyway, it comes housed in its own special plastic box, itself housed in a paper sleeve holder-thing. The card itself is nice & thick, like it holds a collectable coin or a piece of uniform or something. I probably won't be buying any more of these Topps 2020s but I reckon I picked one of the better ones, looks-wise. You guys grab any of these recently?

Everyone Hearts Ichiro

Ichiro Suzuki is one of those players I was always jealous was on someone else's team. I absolutely loved watching him play, particularly when a pitcher would try to jam him and get him to hit on the ground to his natural side - where a shift might be waiting - and he'd just pop it the other way for an easy single or double. Ichiro did that all the time. Man, we could have used him on the Giants.

Remember that first year, 2001, where the guy was the AL MVP, the AL Rookie of the Year, and took his Mariners to the AL Championship series, where they (unfortunately) lost to the Yankees? That did it for me. We'd never had a Japanese import baseball player like this, and no one so adept at smacking singles at will since Ted Williams or even Ty Cobb.

As I started up collecting cards again this past year, I reckoned I'd pull a few Ichiro cards where I could. I only have a small collection thus far, but here are a few of them. I know I can spend some big dollars to really ramp this thing up, so I'm concentrating on commons and sparkly variations for now, and see where it all takes me.

More Hot Ones Scorching Up The Mailbox

Guess it was a busy card-orderin' week about ten days ago at Card Hemorrhage HQ, because the mailbox lit up like a Rockefeller Center Xmas tree on Saturday, thanks to a trio of received orders from COMC + a couple from eBay. Let's take a look together, shall we?

First, I picked up a handful of those "Tarot of the Diamond" cards one of you blogging rogues was writing about the other day - my apologies for already forgetting whom. I'm following 40-some-odd excellent card blogs in my Feedly feeder-thing, and it's like a daily orgy of card-collecting excitement, except I don't always write everything down. Sometimes I just get excited and start ordering things like this 2020 Gypsy Queen "Tarot of the Diamond" card for Mike Trout.

Now, like Nick over at Dime Boxes said in one of his recent posts, I'm not going totally out of my way to collect Trout cards, but hey, if they can come into my hands easily, I'll make a special spot for them in a box. My Mike Trout cards. This is now one of them. There are 22 in this year's Tarot of the Diamond series. Perhaps you have some extras that you don't want? Feel free to let me know, and we can work something out, I'm certain.

Also picked up a couple from the 2018 Gypsy Queen Tarot of the Diamond series as well. I definitely purposefully collect Ichiro, and hey, maybe I sort of collect Trout, too:

Next, a couple of San Francisco Giants team sets I'm working on got a little closer to being completed. A few weeks ago Fuji sent me my first 2005 Topps Emerald Nuts cards for the Giants, and I was instantly smitten. I picked up a few more of them this weekend:

There are 30 of those in all, and so I'm about a third of the way there now, all told. Someone on eBay was selling a batch of the 2011 Emerald Nuts Giants as well, so I threw down a couple of bucks for those to get me started on the 38-card set:

My, what a team that was - a team that won a World Series the year before, if you can believe it. I've got 13/38 of these, and my math says that's 34.21% of the way there. Next, let's talk about Shohei Otani. I watched his return to pitching yesterday against the Oakland A's, and he went 6 batters without getting a single out, and was then pulled. Not so good, Shohei. But here are a few cards of his I grabbed, all of them featuring him with Ichiro as well:

In my posts on my small sub-collection of hockey cards, I mentioned that I'm actively collecting the entire O-Pee-Chee 1973-1974 World Hockey Association set. The biggest hurdle to get my over the hump on this one were the two "expensive" cards in the set, and with some money having recently come in from someone having bought $100 worth of records from me, I sprung for these two ringers:

Everything else from here on in this set is just a numbers game for me. Can I find some shaggy-haired dude from the the Phoenix Roadrunners whom I've never heard of? Here's hoping I can. 

Also, I'm getting really close to a goal of having the 1970 Seattle Pilots set completed. The high-numbered ones are quite a bit more pricey than I'd thought they would be, no matter the lack of notoriety of the player. Alas, my Bobby Bolin card arrived with a little bit of flair on his upper lip:

Do I replace it with a "normal" Bolin? Or do I live with this bastardization of his card? Here a couple of other Pilots items that arrived this weekend:

Finally, let's end it with this 1970 Kellogg's Willie McCovey card. Such a great series. I'm so glad the kids of the early 70s hung on to these things and they're now making their way into the hands of morons like me. Until next time, folks!

The Pilots Cards That Came After The Pilots

I've made no secret of my affinity for the Seattle Pilots, a one-year MLB team from 1969 whom I've written about here, here, here and here. Given that they existed for a mere year, and had Topps cards for only two years, they are eminently collectable and an "easy win", as they say (though I haven't finished up that 1970 Topps set just yet).

Now I'm interested in the more goofball, post-1970 Seattle Pilots cards that exist. We already talked about the 1983 Renata Galasso set here, but some other Pilots cards have recently come to my attention, and so I'm sprung into action, by the proverbial hook or crook. First, how about this 1992 Leaf Heritage Series Paul Molitor, bedecked in a full Pilots get-up? As you may well recall, the Pilots turned into Paul's Milwaukee Brewers in 1970, where they remain to this day (albeit in the National League now). Paul's card says "The Seattle Pilots would prove to be mistake", which I guess is pretty much the general consensus on the team.

Now this next specimen is not a posthumous Pilots card, but rather a 1969 Don Mincher card that Milton Bradley put out. Milton Bradley, like the game people? Anyone know if this was part of a game? I'm getting the sense that it was, if you look at all the code at the bottom of the game, as well as on the card's back. Me, I got mine via a COMC order, and it was quite inexpensive to boot. I suppose it's because it's, you know, Don Mincher and not, you know, Hank Aaron.

We already covered Mincher and Tommy Harper's lovely 1970 Kellogg's cards here, and while I think I've found most everything that's card-sized (i.e. not stamps or posters) that came out while this team was still around - with the exception of this 1969 Tommy Davis Deckle Edge card I still need to grab somewhere - most of what's to still be collected is "post-Pilots".

Here's a good one: Ichiro Suzuki in a Pilots uniform. 2010 Topps National Chicle Diamond Stars, #538/999. It even lists him as being "on" the Pilots, while giving his birth year as 1973. Wait a minute, that's.....impossible....

Finally, I recently became aware of the 1989 and 1990 Pacific Trading Cards "Baseball Legends" series. Perhaps there are more editions as well - my left hand is tired of typing and I don't feel like looking right now. But check it out - there are some Pilots "legends" like Gary Bell and Diego Segui! Thanks very much to Nick for the Frank Crosetti card as well. 

That's it for this week's edition of Pilots roulette. We'll see if I can come up with another batch that'll be worthy of yet another post.

A Round of Applause for The Diamond King

....because he was kind enough to send me a stellar batch of cards in a trade that I will post for you here today. He's one of those guys who just flat-out "gives away" stuff on Twitter, as long as you email him which pictured card it is you're interested in. I did that with a vintage-looking Frank Robinson he was offering up; we got to talkin' on the emails; and then we executed a new trade.

The Diamond King of Vancouver, WA - the other Vancouver - went right off of my teams/players/sets wantlist and found what he could. While this is, of course, my favorite thing to receive in a trade - the stuff I'm actively collecting - I'm so enamored with the PWE trade that honestly, anything that's not early 90s Donruss that shows up in the mail is totally exciting. Xmas every day, baby. I'm actually buying stuff on eBay that I can use to round out some trades from my end, as I'm still new enough to this whole thing that I just don't have a garage-full of trade boxes ready to be plucked (though I already have enough that my wife's starting to ask me to move it all out of sight....a good sign! Ready to trade en masse!)

You'll notice a 2011 Brandon Belt Bowman "Platinum Ascension" rookie card up top. Those of you who don't live in the SF Bay Area may be unfamiliar with how much oxygen "the Belt Wars" have sucked up over the last nine years. Is he an undervalued OBP stud? Is he the weak link of the team? Should we trade him? Is he the core guy on the roster? The Belt wars. For what's it worth, for me he's an above-league average first baseman who seems to flail at all the wrong times. I like him. Now I have his Bowman Platinum Ascension rookie card.

Was also very happy to get some lovely Ichiro cards I'd never seen before:

As well as a few SF Giants prospects who didn't totally pan out. Well, Tommy Joseph panned out - he's the guy we traded to the Phillies to get Hunter Pence...! And Connor Gillaspie had some amazing, lifetime-memory hits in the 2016 postseason. Gary Brown, you got anything left? Come back and show us.

Finally, here are two guys who did end up panning out for the San Francisco Giants baseball club. Thanks again, Diamond King...!