Short Joey Bart Interlude

He may not ever come back to the major leagues, but I'm still collectin' "hot San Francisco Giants prospect" Joey Bart, the heir apparent to Buster Posey as the Giants' catcher of the future. When he got tagged as their #1 top prospect a couple of years ago, the card manufacturing companies roared into action, as there's money to be made in prospect cards - as I'm sure you're aware.

Gullible guys like me are the reason why. We want to believe. We want to be there on the ground floor. Plus - you know - it's the thrill of the chase and all that. Bart is actually have a great season at AAA Sacramento this year, although he's still striking out too much, and the Giants' coaching staff are trying to bend his swing into something Major League-worthy. Here's hoping they do.

And here are 3 new cards of his that I just picked up!

3 Barts, 3 Adells

The two prospects that I decided to bet on and collect a year ago were San Francisco's Joey Bart and the Los Angeles Angels' Jo Adell. I liked the swagger of both, and I liked their odds to come up immediately, in 2020, and make a big difference for both teams - both of whom needed another young difference-maker to make up for the haphazard pieces they'd assembled.

2020 was a bit of an odd year for baseball, for sports and for the world, as I'm sure you remember. Both guys did come up, and in a relatively small sample size for each of them, barely contributed a thing. "Inauspicious debuts", you might call them. I'm still bullish on both guys - but then I'd have to be, because I've been collecting their cards all year, haven't I?

Anyway, some new (to me) Adells and Barts have come out recently and have made their way into my clutches. 2019's Bowman Prismatic Prodigies was a line of cards I wasn't familiar with, but I found a lot of them on eBay the other day that included both of my dudes, so I bought it. I like them. Here's what Bart's looks like:

Both guys were also featured in the relics that sparingly came with Topps Heritage Minors 2020, a set that I've completed in full (not all the relics, just the base cards, short prints and a smattering of extras here and there). Looks like Adell's jersey got a bit of a workout on the day they cut it up, and we've got some loose thread action going.

This next Joey Bart comes from a Bowman's Best "Franchise 2020" spin-off that I really don't know much about. This would be an "atomic refractor":

Finally, to close our proceedings today, I have a shiny 2019 Bowman Chrome 1990 throwback card of Mr. Adell, #90B-JA. See you later in the week,

10 Random Recent Arrivals

Hey everyone. You know, it does feel a little weird to be acting like a bit of "show-off" here on the card blogs. Honestly, most of my posts seem to be of the look-at-what-I-just-got variety. I know that's kind of strange, but you know why I do it? Because those are the posts I like to read the most on other people's blogs. It's where I see how people collect these insignificant pieces of cardboard - the players they care about; the sets that matter to them; the trades they made and so on. I love that stuff. So please forgive me - I'm not bragging about how awesome it was I got a card worth $1.50 shipped to me or anything; I'm trying to give people what I think they want, even if it's just me who actually wants it. 

Hey, check it out, it's a 1968 Topps Willie McCovey! OK, so this cost me a little more than $1.50, but not a ton more. I figured I'd start collecting my 1968 SF Giants team set with a couple of the bigger names - McCovey and Perry - though Willie Mays' card price is still a bit out of reach for me. Mays is going to be a real stumbling block on my path to collecting the 1960s Giants team sets. I'm going to have to buy some of those cards that were put through the laundry of his in order to truly knock out these sets, I'm thinking.

Oh, here's hall of famer Gaylord Perry from the same year:

OK, who knows who this next guy is? Talk about a card that scanned terribly! This is Kenny Lofton, from a 1994 Topps Finest series. I got this in one of those Walgreens repacks I buy every now and again, and it was my favorite pull that day.

Next up, a guy whom I've flirted with collecting but never really pulled the trigger, Mr. Billy Martin, from a 2008 Topps Triple Threads series.

Look, it's world-famous Dodgers prospect Gavin Lux in the new Topps 2020 Update series. My son got me a small box of these for Hanukkah. Why so sad, Gavin? Wishing the Giants had picked you instead?

Speaking of Giants, here's a couple of winners from 2020 Stadium Club:

...and from 2020 Topps Archive, Vlad! The new Vlad. C'mon Vlad, make your Dad proud and win one for Canada. We the North!

I know I got this in a trade/PWE recently but I forgot who was kind enough to send it to me. Thank you, though!! It's a 1984 Mother's Cookies Alan Wiggins of the San Diego Padres.

Finally, our 10th card is Joey Bart, also from Topps Update 2020, card #P-25. One of the players I collect, and I just randomly nailed him in that pack my son got me. See you next week!

Here's What Showed Up Recently

This is one of those scan-n-posts. I have had a variety of small orders arrive the past couple of weeks on eBay and whatnot, and it just feel sorta wrong to file some of the better cards away without putting them up on the internet for the people to review. One I'm particularly happy about is "my first Mossi", this Topps 1962 Don Mossi. Mr. Mossi is a baseball card collectors' legend, for obvious reasons. He's one of those guys that you just need to have a card or two of, and I'm pretty sure I'm only getting started on building a set of Mossi cards. Mossi was also a damn good starting pitcher as well, after having started off as a reliever in the 50s and then having been converted to a starter by the Tigers.

I also picked another 1962 single card to kick off another player collection I'd like to pull together, this time for Billy Martin. Some of my earliest baseball memories are of Martin being fired as a manager, first from the Texas Rangers, and then his multiple hirings-and-firings with the New York Yankees. Later, he came here to the SF Bay Area and led the A's to an amazing turnaround in fortunes in the early 1980s. The book BillyBall by Dale Tafoya, which I read earlier this year, is an excellent of those years.

Here are a couple of new Joey Bart gems. He's a dude I collect. Next year I think he might be Rookie of the Year and MVP, I'm pretty sure.

...and here's one of those Bowman Chrome Dawn of Glory cards for Jo Adell, the other prospect whose cards I'm accumulating:

Here's another youngster I've just finished spending a couple of week watching in the playoffs. I'm sure you have as well. I like this guy.

As well as his Dodger teammate Brusdar Graterol, whom I like even better. This is from before he was traded to LA during the offseason:

Finally, another youngster who did some very evil things to my San Francisco Giants this season on his way to the playoffs whilst eliminating us:

Let's round out this post with some of the other gems that came in them mail these past couple of weeks. Let me know if you have any questions on 'em!

Picked Up a Few of My Guys at the LCS

Yesterday I did something for the first time since the pandemic started: set foot inside my local card shop, Lefty's Sports Cards in Burlingame, CA. (By local I mean the closest to San Francisco, where I live; we don't have a card shop in my city of 900,000 people). I also took a trip down to Peninsula Sports Cards, a few miles south in Belmont. 

Alas, we're not quite back in a world of unbridled card shopping, which I perfectly and 100% understand and am supportive of. Neither store allowed for browsing boxes, so my goal of jacking up my 1972 Topps collection fell by the wayside yesterday. One store had a 15-minute limit for customers, and another only allowed 4 in the store at any given time. Again: I support this 100%. I'm delighted they're open, and I'll continue to support both of them, even in this reduced form. 

There were still cards to check off the Card Hemorrhage checklists. At Lefty's I picked up some new gems for my player collections, including the 2001 Upper Deck Decades Jack Clark you see here. This guy was such a hero of mine that I wrote a school paper in 6th grade about how he was my most-admired human being on the planet. I don't remember the grade, but I'm sure you can see why grabbing any card with him in a Giants uniform is a priority. 

I also loaded up on a few Tim Lincecum card I didn't have yet:

Pablo Sandoval remains "the player with a ton of cards whom I'm nonetheless fixated on acquiring every last one of them". I got a little bit closer to the goal yesterday with these pickups (among others):

Also added a new one to the Joey Bart book, this 2019 Panini with Bart playing for Georgia Tech (!).

More from my LCS outings next time.

Joey Bart Redux

Well folks, Joey Bart - the San Francisco Giants' top prospect, and a subject of some card-collectin' discussion on this blog - made it to the bigs. This has been a huge topic of discussion in SF Giants' media the past several months, and all the kid did was come up and smack a bunch of doubles and help a not-very-good team reel off a 7-game winning streak. The talk around the Bay Area is that he's "here to stay".

This is what makes prospect collecting really fun for me, personally. Though I'm not really gambling on ultimate card value - because these are not cards I want to sell, and even in a best-case scenario, we're talking $75 cards and not $7,500 cards - it's great to see these guys come up and do what they're supposed to do. You look in your card box and - oh - I have 25 beautiful-lookin' Joey Bart cards already. I'm going to assume that the prices for the ones I don't have just tripled this past week.

Contrast Bart with poor Jo Adell, who also got called up very recently, and whom I also collect. As of this writing, Adell is hitting .186 with a .250 OBP - and man - I saw him make a howler of an error in right field the other day. For all we know, he turns it around after a bumpy start and becomes an Angels mainstay for the next 15 years. I hope so. This is as close to gambling as I get: hoarding a bunch of 50-cent/$1 prospect cards for guys I'm intrigued by and seeing what happens. It's fun to be watching it play out in real time, at the same time, with the 2 prospects I chose to chase in 2020.

Another Round of Cards Coming In Hot

Just got back from a socially-distanced, no-airplanes, careful-as-hell vacation, and I had some new cards waiting for me upon my return. As I say to my wife when there's a stack of new envelopes in the mailbox with what are obviously cards I've ordered contained within them - hey, now how did those get here?

I'm just picking off piece-parts & players & stuff I like here and there, from the usual-suspect ordering sites, using my small stack of Paypal pretend money that I use to buy cards. Many of my most recent cards were excitedly added to orders because I saw them on someone else's blog - maybe yours. This 1965 Topps Bill Rigney for sure. He's either workin' a piece of chaw here, or just has one of the most baddest-of-ass expressions of any manager of all time.

This post is an excuse to scan a few of those cards. Here goes. First, here's a guy who you may know, Mr. Frank Robinson. His 1975 SSPC card both fills a need in my pursuit of that entire set, as well as a slot in my hallowed Frank Robinson player collection:

I'm also a big fan of Vladimir Guerrero, and I picked up his 2020 Panini All-Time Diamond Kings card, no. ATDK-22...! 

We just talked about Joey Bart on the blog last week - here's my newest card of his since that post, a 2020 Bowman's Best, #TP-21:

As I work toward collecting the 1971 Topps set - I'm nowhere near even 20% of the way there - it's gem cards like this Casey Cox Washington Senators card arriving in the mail that make me realize I never want to be done, and probably never will:

You guys familiar with Willie Mays? He's a Baseball Immortal. It says so right here, on these 1980-88 SSPC Hall of Famer cards that I just became aware of. This is card #168. 1979 was the year he was inducted.

Here's another Willie, and a Buster Posey as well - both from the 2013 Topps Archives Gallery of Heroes series. These are fantastic. Yes, they're effectively "stained glass" cardboard - light shines through them and makes pretty colors and all that. The black line you see on the Posey card just happens to be an ink stain on my scanner. The card is fine.

Finally, how about Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney, throwing out the first pitch at a Seattle Mariners game in 2015? Oh yeah, I know she was on that funny TV show too, but I know her better as a guitarist for my wife's favorite 1990s band, a band I was taken to see at least 6-7 times during the latter half of that decade. This is from the 2016 Topps First Pitch series - when I saw that Brownstein had her own card, I reckoned I needed my own copy of it. According to the back of the card, she threw a total bullet, too.

Is It Joey Bart Time Yet?

The second post on this blog was about Joey Bart, the San Francisco Giants catching prospect who's the heir apparent to Buster Posey, and who is going to be making his major league debut "any day now". We haven't had a kid in the organization that we - by whom I mean Giants fans - were this excited about since Tim Lincecum, or Posey himself. I get why the Giants are keeping him off the major league roster for now; the service time thing sucks for the player, obviously, but locking up that extra year for the team works for me. Not like the Giants are really going anywhere this season anyway, but in 2025? Look out, folks.

Anyway, I'm building up a solid Joey Bart collection. Anything of his with an autograph - especially those Onyx cards - is prohibitively expensive, so I'm completely bereft of any Bart auto cards for now. Someday. In the meantime, though, on the eve of what I believe will be his call-up to the big club, I thought I'd share w/ you a few of his 2019 and 2020 cards, mostly Bowmans, so you can get a glimpse of the man before he comes in and hits .375 and blasts two homers a game and moves Posey  to DH and and and.....