Pablo Sandoval as a Red Sock

Recently I decided to get off my duff and really up my game when it came to my Pablo Sandoval player collection. I may never collect all 2,343 of the unique cards of this man, but I reckon that I'll do my best to at least grab everything I can that's grabable, within reason.

I started my first binder for a player, and organized all my Sandoval cards by year. That was fun, and it didn't take as long as I thought it would - less than an hour - but I did need a magnifying glass in order to differentiate between a 2013 and a 2014 and so on. So now my strategy is to work backward from 2021, and go by year to buy any and all cards of Sandoval's by year that I can find - and that aren't 1/1s and selling for $375/each on eBay. 

2021 was easy - there's one card, and it's one that I talked about in Monday's post. 2018-2019 was pretty easy too. Sandoval was a role player for the Giants, and one that some thought might be somewhat washed up. I then went big on 2015, 2016 and 2017 - the years Sandoval toiled for the Boston Red Sox, in a contract that is thought to be one of the worst in Sox history. He was basically injured all of 2016, and played poorly in 2015 and 2017, so much so he was mercifully released back to the Giants during 2017 - where he started thriving again, albeit in a lesser role.

As you might have gathered, dude is my favorite baseball player of the 21st century. If you've seen him play - especially as a Giants - you know why. Here are some cards that represent the lean years of the man's career, all recent acquisitions of mine.

Pablo Springs Eternal

Player collections come and go, wax and wane, surge and fall back - but there will always be Pablo Sandoval. Pablo Sandoval is to Card Hemorrhage as Tino Martinez is to The Lost Collector, as Dan Vogelbach is to Waiting 'Til Next Year.

I may dabble in Ichiro, Max Fried, even Heath Bell and others - but the guy whose cards I'll be chasing down til there are no more to chase is Mr. Pablo Sandoval, my favorite player of the 21st century (Tim Lincecum being a close second; maybe we go with Ichiro and Trout after that). I've haphazardly been adding his cards for about 18 months now, and it's a fairly solid collection but by no means anywhere near complete, not even the various base cards. 

I'm somewhat helped in this endeavor by the fact that I've yet to run across any other Pablo Sandoval player collectors.  I'm sure P-Town Tom feels the same way about his Vogelbach collection, and why he keeps scoring those 1/1s. If you happen to be a Sandoval collector, or know one, please get in touch. Sandoval was just beloved enough but just shy enough of superstar status that his cards don't command mega-premiums, so I can get relics and numbered things of his for decent prices. Some of those are scanned here.

Ideal situation? The Braves don't have room for Sandoval on their bench this spring and he gets released, setting him up for a third round with the Giants in 2021, and some October heroics again when they meet the Chicago White Sox in the 2021 World Series this Fall. Right?

Anyway, here are some of my recent Pablo pickups.

San Francisco Giants Heritage Project Update

I think the card-collecting project I'm having the most fun with currently is trying to assemble a San Francisco Giants team set for every year that Topps Heritage has been in existence. In case you were wondering, that would be 2001 through 2020. It's fun because it's achievable, and it's achievable because, well, they made a lot of 'em, and because there aren't that many folks dying to hold onto Travis Ishikawa and Darren Ford and Jeremy Affeldt cards. Plus, they look good in binders, all numbered in order and such. It's the simple things in life, isn't it?

Anyway, I especially like the 2014 Topps Heritage baseball set because it was the year that the Giants won their third World Series this past decade, and more importantly, it's because the cards replicate the look of 1965 Topps - one of the great sets of our time. I'm still missing the basic Bumgarner from this set - card #428 - even though I have the super-special purple chrome edition of it. It's at least $5 everywhere I look, and that just seems to be a bit steep for a basic Bumgarner, you know what I mean?

But those purple chromes are awesome. I knew I needed some more parallels to round out my 2014 Topps Heritage Giants set. So I ordered some. This is what they look like.

Pablo Sandoval All Day Long

I've made no secret of the fact that Pablo Sandoval is my favorite active player in baseball, and that he's the one guy with lots of cards whom I'm nonetheless determined to collect in full. When the Giants let him go earlier in the shortened 2020 season, I was of course disappointed and reckoned I might never see the man play again - and then there he was, in the NL Championship Playoffs, popping up on second base for the Atlanta Braves in their futile quest to bring down the Dodgers. I screamed at my wife - "look! look who it is!!", but for some weird reason she didn't quite share my enthusiasm. 

Lately I've upped my Sandoval game a bit by buying as many affordable short-prints and numbered cards of his that I can find. COMC is good for that, if you don't mind paying through the nose to get your cards shipped to you within 3 weeks, as opposed to paying a little bit less to get them 4 months from now. I do mind - but I did it anyway.

Here are a few Pablos from that relatively recent order. Chromes and camos and numbers and stuff I've never seen before. Pablo on the Red Sox - that sure went well, didn't it? Bits of Pablo's uniform. It's certainly a strange hobby we have here.

Plenty Psyched About This Recent Trade

I blind-emailed Daniel over at It's Like Having My Own Card Shop about a blind trade, and pleasingly and most beneficially, he was into it. Even packed 'em up right away and mailed me my batch, and I had them a mere 6 days later. I got some gems, some ringers, some real Card Hemorrhage dillys, let me tell ya.

I'm probably most excited about this 2011Allen & Ginter Tim Lincecum relic. It's a jersey encased in a mini, encased in plastic, wrapped in cardboard. Given how orange it is, it's likely from the Giants' "orange Friday" home games, in which they wear throwback orange-dominated uniforms on Fridays only. It's also a Timmy card I didn't have and had never seen. Thanks, Daniel.

But wait! There was more. I am also now the proud owner of a Topps Pablo Sandoval relic from 2015 that I also didn't have and had never seen. This is card # CHR-PS, and commemorates his .330 batting average in 2009. Sandoval - who just may be my favorite player of all time - was recently picked up by the Atlanta Braves, but I haven't seen anything about him joining them for their playoffs, which start this week. They would be wise to do so, as he may just hit 3 home runs in a World Series Game 1 for them. 

The next-most unusual card in my batch is this 2003 Upper Deck Troy Glaus "game face" relic. Love it. Have never seen these before. Is that Glaus airbrushed onto a piece of baseball? That sure is what it looks like. I may need to uncover more of these game face cards.

Also received a couple of 1970 Topps San Francisco Giants from my want list, poorly-scanned by me here as usual:

...and a few other ballers from either the Giants or the 2002-era Angels. What a great trade. Let's do it again sometime, Daniel from It's Like Having My Own Card Shop.

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.

The Cards of Pablo Sandoval, Continued

I don't know how you guys have been doing during the pandemic, but I was happy to see my hero Pablo Sandoval in total fighting shape for the new 60-game 2020 baseball season that may or may not actually take place. This photo was making the rounds on social media this past weekend. All I can say is: Pablo will be ready. He's always ready, unless he's on the Boston Red Sox.

My Pablo Sandoval baseball card collection continues to "burgeon". Although he's often seemed more like a local hero and/or local curiosity, I sometimes forget that for a few years there, Pablo Sandoval was a big-time nationally-known player. Maybe it was winning three World Series in five years? Two-time NL all-star? They're certainly made a ton of Pablo Sandoval baseball cards because of it, and now I have to collect 'em all. I guess his profile isn't all that massive across the sport of baseball any longer, but you know that everyone's happy he's still around.

I'm doing fairly well on the Pablo accumulation project, considering that I really only started late last year. Here are a few more that I've added recently that I thought you might want to take a gander at. Nothing too wild, just nice to have around.

Finally - where were you in 2012 on the day that this happened? I was sitting right here, about 15 feet from where I'm typing this, watching it on TV. Imagine that!