Cutting Corners on My Giants Collection

I'm in the process of pulling together Topps team sets of the San Francisco Giants, from their arrival in San Francisco in 1958 all the way up through 1981. I have 1971-1981 completed, save for one '74 card on the way. It's those 1960s sets that are killer. You know why, of course. Three names: McCovey, Marichal and especially Mays. 

I have pages all reserved for these teams, and scattered cards in slots. It dawned on me that the Willie Mays slots might go unfilled for years, and perhaps forever. In our newly-challenging card-collecting era, in which cards can be up to triple the cost they were a year ago, Willie Mays is just one of those guys who's rightfully going to command a premium. So I half-assed it.

I found that Topps had made a reprint set of some of Mays' best cards back in 1997. Some of these "reprints" were available on eBay for not a whole lot of money, and I was like, "Well, it would be nice to fill those slots, wouldn't it?". The thinking is that the reprint won't fill the slot forever, it's just a "placeholder" right now. Right? Right?

Here's the thing, though: These 3 cards that I got today are decidedly not from that '97 reprint set. They look to be "bootlegs". They have a photocopied look and a somewhat cheap feel. So they're truly placeholders, and nothing I'm especially proud to own. 

I bought an exceptionally cheap 1965 Sandy Koufax card on eBay two days ago for $2.87. Something tell me that's probably not the real deal either. Seller had a 99.8% positive rating, so I said - well, what if? It hasn't arrived yet but I'm certainly not holding my breath for it to be anything different than these 3 Willie Mays cards I just got.

What say you, card community?

10 More Relatively Random New Arrivals

As the cards continue to arrive, whether by trade or by purchase, my ability to document them slips. Not like it matters all that much anyway, but I certainly very much enjoy seeing other bloggers' recent acquisitions and trades, and thus try to float scans of mine where I can. 

Let's start with this Joe Cronin card you see here. I believe I received it in a recent blind trade, and it's certainly not a card from his playing days, and more likely came out in the 1960s or early 70s, as it references that fact that "Joe Cronin is now the president of the American League", a position he served in from 1959 through 1973. Any of you sleuths know what set this card, #14 in the series, comes from?

I found out a month or so ago about a 2020 Topps set called Super 70s that sounded like I might need to investigate. Checked on eBay to see what single cards were going for for the dudes I collect, and found that it wasn't bad at all. So grabbed the Willie McCovey and Frank Robinson cards you see here:

I believe that both of those photos are from the 1960s, but never mind, right? Speaking of legends - this one comes from a 1996 Topps "Mickey Mantle Commemorative Set" set and features a reprint of a 1962 Topps card I simply can't afford right now as I work to complete my '62 Giants set. So I bought this one instead:

Here's #1 Cardinals prospect Dylan Carlson from the 2020 Topps Update #1 Prospect series that came out recently. He looks pretty stoked to be here. He got into 35 games last season and promptly hit .200. Not like I'm gonna do any better!

The consensus choice for card of the year in 2020 was this 2020 Stadium Club Sandy Koufax, and I can't disagree. I made it a must-order in my last CardBarrel pile.

I bought a couple Topps 2020 Update series boxes and pulled this Brett Gardner 15/50 "All-Star Stitches Card" out of one of them.

Also pulled this 2008 Charlie Blackmon prospect card out of a Walgreens "baseball cards" $5 repack box. Guy had yet to hit the majors and to start winning batting titles at this point.

Here's a 2020 Bowman Platinum Eloy Jimenez, just because. 

Finally, I didn't just get this card, and I don't have many Hank Aaron cards to share in any case, but I do want to acknowledge that the guy responsible for my first baseball memory - his breaking the home run record in 1974 - has passed away. I'm bracing myself for Willie Mays. Hang in there, Willie.

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.

1971 Giants - Complete!

This was a fun little set to cobble together, and definitely not as easy as I'd thought it would be. To finish my collection of Topps 1971 Giants without spending a fortune, I bought the Willie Mays card you see here. Final piece in the puzzle. It's certainly not in the best shape; it's off-centered a bit, and yet at $8, it was the only '71 Mays I could find that wasn't in the $25+ range.

But hey! The 1971 Giants, your National League West champions, are now complete! I wrote a bit about this set - and that team - here. Mays. McCovey. Marichal. Bonds (Bobby). The whole 1971 NL West Champs. When I was growing up in the late 70s, that was the refracted glow I had to bask in, all the way until we finally did it again in 1987 and 1989.

I had two other cards I had to take care of to complete the set since the last time I posted about my epic quest. The first was Bob Heise (high number card! #691!), whom I'd never heard of before. Turns out Heise played 11 years in the majors, up until 1977, and in his 1,232 lifetime plate appearances, smacked one home run - and it was for your '71 Giants. Here he is, on his one and only Giants card:

Folks, I have to get better with my scanner. Unlike the Mays card above, that really is off-center a bit, the Heise card is that way simply because I'm not so good at using my scanner's software. The other card I needed was the Juan Marichal "Play Baseball Scratch Off" insert. I got it via CardBarrel for really not very much dinero:

I thought I'd scan a few others that I didn't include in the last post. Check out John Cumberland's bad-ass logo-free black hat, and enjoy the other '71 Giants, whose set I may have mentioned I have now completed.

The Willie Mays "20 Giants Seasons" Set

This year's Topps Heritage not only looks fantastic - based on the beloved black 1971 Topps card design as it is - but it's got a special set of twenty bonus cards for SF Giants maniacs like myself to collect. These are the Willie Mays "20 Giants Seasons" cards that are sprinkled in with normal 2020 Topps Heritage packs; nothing particularly rare nor especially hard to find - just 20 you need to grab if you want to see various Mays landmarks that played out over his 20 amazing years with the New York and San Francisco Giants, circa 1951-1971.

Today I got Card #18 - the 1970 card - in the mail to complete my set. It commemorates Mays' selection as "Player of the Decade" for the 1960s by the Sporting News. Each of these cards shows off the stadium that Mays was playing in during the year in question - so, the Polo Grounds for his NY Giants years; Seals Stadium during the first couple of years in San Francisco, and Candlestick Park for the remainder of his Giants career. I myself have seen him in person at Oracle/AT&T/SBC/Pacific Bell Park - a wonderful stadium that many of us have lobbied to be called "Mays Field" instead. Whenever I meet someone at a game, it's always by the statue of Mays out front, because everyone knows where and who that is.

Of course, I'd love to be a Mays card collector. It's just not financially feasible for me. I'm already realizing that McCovey is going to be a bit of a grind, and in order to be a completist, I'll need to settle for some low-grade cards of his from the late 50s and early 60s. (I'm already doing great on McCovey circa 1968-1980, and am working my way backward from there). Mays is a different beast entirely. You guys know he's still alive, right? We need to celebrate this guy and his contribution to our greatest sport every single day. This 20-card set is a nice and relatively painless way to do so.

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...!

The Dashed Promise of the 1972 Giants

One of the first team sets I completed was that of the 1972 San Francisco Giants. Mostly, it's because I love the retro look of these cards, with the marquee letters, the stars etc. When you look at the names that the Giants assembled for that team - who'd just come off winning the division in 1971 - it's incredibly impressive. Like this guy, to your left. Sure, he may have been 40 years old, but he was Willie Mays, right?

They also had McCovey. Marichal. Bobby Bonds! Jim Ray Hart! Dave Kingman! Garry Matthews! New superstar acquisition Sam McDowell, whom the Giants excitedly traded pitching ace Gaylord Perry to Cleveland for. Looking good for '72.

Well, the wheels totally fell off that year for the Giants, despite this abundance. They went 69-86, and finished in 5th place, ahead of the lowly Padres. McCovey hit .213. McDowell was mostly a bust, while Perry went on to win the Cy Young for the Indians. Mays was traded for chump change in early May to the Mets. Marichal went 6-16. Let's just say it wasn't a good year, and it ushered in a pretty brutal stretch for San Francisco until 1978, which was the first full year of baseball that I was old enough to pay attention to.

In the meantime, we have the cards! All of 'em. It's a great set that won't set you back all that much, if you're interested in accumulating it. Here are a few of the guys who made Spring 1972 look so hopeful.