Got One Of Those Onyx Boxes Today

I took a flyer on a 2020 "Hobby Box" from Onyx Vintage, and got it in the mail this morning. I'd seen a scan of a Joey Bart card online, and immediately wanted not only that card, but the whole friggin' set. I'm not entirely sure that when I ordered these, I'd comprehended that there are only four cards in a $40+ hobby box. Here's what Beckett has to say about the 2020 Onyx Vintage set:

"2020 Onyx Vintage Baseball doesn’t get its checklist. Rather, it’s the look and vibe the cards give off. That said there is a small number of names that bring a retro vibe to the possibilities. The rest? Several of the top young players and prospects in the game today.
Hobby boxes are small, carrying just four cards. Two of them are autographs, though.

This isn’t an overly complicated set. For starters, the checklist is kept small to just over 30 players. It’s primarily prospect driven but there are a couple of young MLB players and a trio of retired greats as well."

Mine arrived in a well-designed cardboard box with a plush insert to hold those four cards together. Hey, I knew that there were only 32 cards in the total set, so wasn't expecting 32 cards, but I really did skim the fine print on this one, much like the terms & conditions we routinely breeze through on our app agreements and on everything else.

Listen, if Kristian Robinson turns into Trout 2.0, all is forgiven. Likewise with these other young men. Here are the other two I got, a couple of Valeras:

 

 

The fourth and final card is actually just a redemption slip for another autographed card from a prospect, this one for Luis Patino of the San Diego Padres - whom I've actually heard of; a "live arm" who was supposed to be potentially be up in the bigs right about now. Except there's no baseball. At least there are the cards, and the people who frantically buy them with one click without looking at the fine print.

The 1981 Kellogg's 3D Super Stars Set

The sets I'm currently working on, I'm working on the proverbial "old-fashioned" way: with individual pick-ups and card-by-card building. I have almost zero interest in buying a straight-up completed set of anything, and yet this 1981 Kellogg's 3D set totally caught my attention recently, and I went all-in in one fell swoop.

I don't know about your mom, but by 1981 my Mom had unfortunately stopped buying us Count Chocula and Franken Berry cereals, and the only cereal allowed in the house was either Team, Total or Cheerios. None of these moderately healthy breakfasts were made by Kellogg's, and thus I never got any of these 3D cards. Here's the deal with them: it was the first year in 12 years of making these that Kellogg's made them in the quote-unquote regular size of 2-1/2 by 3-1/2. They'd been minis or "skinny" up to this point. I may go back on this at some point, but I'm just not interested in accumulating an entire set of minis/skinnies. I'll just grab the Giants out of them, thanks.

Speaking of Giants, Vida Blue was San Francisco's sole representative in this 66-card 1981 set. Every team got at least one representative - even Seattle! There are a few guys in here whom I'd mostly forgotten about - Ken Landreaux and Larry Gura among them. Super stars! I do remember Cleveland's Joe Charboneau quite well; he was a real breath of fresh air for that city and that team during a pretty grim time. Poor guy was out of baseball by the following year.

Each of these cards has a waxy-feeling plastic coating on them that actually gives a pretty weird tactile sensation that I kinda like, definitely different than the usual cardboard. I grabbed the whole set for not much money at all on eBay, and I'm happy I did. Here's an article about the set, and here are some of the other Super Stars from this set whom you may have heard of.

Willie Wilson, one of my favorite players of all time:

A Few 1970 Seattle Pilots

As I was collecting the '69 Seattle Pilots set I wrote about yesterday, I found out to my surprise that there had actually been 1970 Topps Seattle Pilots cards as well. While the Seattle team was struggling with bankruptcy and figuring out their next move, Topps had a 1970 set to create, and did so accordingly. Weeks later, the team was bought by a young entrepreneur named Bud Selig, and moved to Milwaukee to become the Brewers whom we know and love today.

Most of these dudes went on to Milwaukee with the team. The Brewers were 1 game better than the 1969 Pilots, losing only 97 games to the Pilots' 98. So out of the blue a few weeks ago, Mike from Junk Wax Dig offered to send over a few doubles he had from his 1970 "Pilots" set. I was more than happy to accept them - and I reckoned I now had a new team set I'd want to complete. I do, and I will. It's certainly not the case that these guys are bank-breakers.

Here are a few more gems from that 1970 Pilots/Brewers team. Special attention to Gene Brabender, please!

 

Completed: The 1969 Seattle Pilots

One team I've been fascinated with for many years is the 1969 Seattle Pilots. That was their one and only year in existence, and my understanding of why that was so has long been incomplete. As a young lad, I read Jim Bouton's Ball Four, and it left a pretty deep mark on me, as it did so many others (there's a new book out now just about Bouton, by the way, and you can read about it here). Bouton pitched for the Pilots part of that year, and much of the "diary" that is the bulk of the book recaps the behind-the-scenes locker room shenanigans of that team.

I'm also a big fan of the city of Seattle, the second-greatest city in the US of A. I lived there from 1997-99 while in grad school, and I'd live there again in a country minute. Seattle in 1969 didn't really seem to me to be a big-league town quite yet, and the Pilots year there happened to also coincide with the hemorrhaging of jobs at Boeing, the city's largest employer. So yeah - it didn't go so well for these guys. Not only did they finish dead last in the brand-new American League West, they went bankrupt. Bankrupt! Their owners threw up their hands, then packed up and sold the team to a group in Milwaukee the next spring (but not before Topps got out some "1970 Seattle Pilots" cards, about which more next time). We now know them as the "Milwaukee Brewers".

I decided I needed to track down each and every one of the 26 Topps 1969 Seattle Pilots cards - and recently, I did just that. Most of them were procured at my local card shop, Lefty's Sports Cards in Burlingame, CA. The ones that remained elusive were bought on eBay. But I've got them, and this set is done, ladies and gentlemen.

Interestingly, Tommy Harper - above left - is probably one of the fellas you've heard of on the team, along with a couple of the folks below. Harper stole 73 bases for the Pilots that year, and despite a .235 batting average, he had a very healthy .349 OBP. The following year in Milwaukee he'd go on to club 31 homers while stealing 38 bases - his best year in the majors. Oh - and there's no real Jim Bouton card for the Seattle Pilots! Only customs that you can find online.

Here's an article about collecting the Pilots, and here are a few other cards from that '69 set.

 

 

 

My Vlad Cup Runneth Over

This guy. Vladimir Guerrero. I decided to collect his cards, put the word out on this blog that I was open to trading for his cards, and here we are. Now I'm doing just fine on Vlad cards, and I've really been able to procure some great ones thanks to my trading partners.

Case in point is this new haul from Nick at Dime Boxes. He kindly sent me a whole suite of what I like to call "idiot cards" - you can see some good examples on his most recent blog post - but he also had a bunch of Vladimir Guerrero doubles and leftovers that he thought might look better in my collection - and who am I to argue with such impeccable logic, right?

My first couple of Vlad batches were mostly Vlad-on-the-Angels cards, which I talked about here. Now thank to Nick I'm rocking many more Vlad-on-the-Expos as well, including some rookies and many from those bizarre-world late 90s/early 2000s card brands that I'm still getting a handle on - the ones that aren't Topps, Donruss nor Fleer (or if they are, they're sub-brands that I didn't hear about while they were at their peak, during the time I wasn't paying attention to cards).

I scanned a few of the exceptional cards that Nick sent over. I now have more Vlad than any other player save for Pablo Sandoval. And oh man - do I still have a ways to go, too.

A Package of Giants from The Lost Collector

Here's a few ringers sent to me by upstanding patriot AJ, who runs the excellent blog The Lost Collector. AJ's a Yankees guy - perhaps the foremost Tino Martinez card collector on God's green earth - and so when I told him I was a Giants guy, he was like, "You want some Giants cards, comrade?". I told him I did. Today, those cards arrived, and I'm much the better for it.

Totally loving what I got, too. Here's my #1 favorite Pablo Sandoval's "1st Home Run" commemorative card from a 2015 Topps series. I'm not sure the scan quite shows it, but Pablo slugged that thing on August 27th, 2008. This was around the time we were all wondering who this kid was that the Giants called up and installed at third base that we'd never heard of, the one who just kept hitting and hitting. Great card!

Also got a few Barry Bonds cards in the mix, too. Booooo. Steeeeeeeeroids. Is it fair to say I have "complicated" feelings about Mr. Bonds? I think it's fair. This recent article in The Athletic is a really good one about him. I saw him, in person, hit some of the most monster home runs of all time, including at least one walk-off, all the while knowing that he was one of the most despicable and loathsome human beings on the planet. I'm really glad to see the back of him. Not my favorite era of Giants history. But totally psyched to get an 18/30 1995 "Kraft Singles Superstars" card of his! Maybe he wasn't doping that year? Maybe??

 

AJ also sent along an autographed Donruss Playoff Contenders 2008 "Rookie Ticket" for one Rafael Rodriguez. For the life of me, I don't remember Rodriguez! I checked it out, and there's a good reason - he never made the bigs. But here he is, swinging with moxie and panache. Now I have his autograph, baby!

 

These other dudes, you know 'em. You love 'em like I do. Well, except Bonds. He's an idiot. Just delighted to get this mix of cards from AJ. Check out his blog The Lost Collector and send him some Yankees if you ever get the chance. I did, but I suspect they're not one-tenth as cool as what he sent me.

 

 

Johnny Antonelli - My Dad's Guy

I certainly get more of a thrill out of 50s and 60s cards than I do penny cards from the junk wax era, and reckoned that it made some sense to collect at least one player that played back then. There will be more, but I had to start somewhere, and I started with Johnny Antonelli.

Antonelli was a 5-time All-Star and two-time 20-game winner for the New York and San Francisco Giants, and played from 1948 until 1961. He actually had a chance to play for the 1962 expansion New York Mets, who set the record for futility by losing 120 games that year, but our boy Johnny chose to "retire" at the age of 31 rather than take his talents back to the Polo Grounds with Casey Stengel and the boys.

Johnny Antonelli was also my dad's favorite player when he was a kid and a teenager, just as Jack Clark was mine. My dad introduced me to the sport of baseball in 1976, as I recount in this post of mine on a different blog. So when it came time to figure out which 50s/60s dude I was going to collect first, well - I mean I'm accumulating McCovey cards for sure, but the more affordable way to complete a guy's cards is to begin with someone with a shorter career and much lower price tags on his cards, right? And plus I knew my dad would get a kick out of it (he's still with us, sheltering in place in San Jose, California).

The card you see up top is a 1954 Bowman. Let's take a look at the other four Antonellis I've managed to grab so far. First, a 1956 Topps:

 

1957 Topps:

 

Then it's on to San Francisco.....this one's from 1959 Topps:

 

...and finally this one from 1960 Topps, with the amazing alternating red/black letters:

 

Only one more year in baseball for Johnny Antonelli after that. He passed away just over a month ago (!) at his home in Rochester, NY, on February 28th, 2020. The Trading Card Database says he has 81 cards in total, so my quest is on, and I'll share what I can in this space during the months to come.

Whole Lotta Vlad

It was a mere three weeks ago when I decided to add baseball cards from the career of one Vladimir Guerrero to my want list, and blocked out several pages in a binder in anticipation of my burgeoning Vlad collection. Man, I really enjoyed watching this guy play when he was around - particularly those early years with the Expos. He seemed to me to be a great non-Giant to start accumulating.

First card I grabbed was this 2002 Leaf Certified "Mirror Red" card with a little game-worn jersey encased in it. Number 029 of 150, it says on the back. Nice start, even if it doesn't scan all that well (trust me, it looks better in person. There are "Mirror Blue" versions available through the years as well).

Next, I was delighted to accept in trade from Tom of The Angels, In Order a set of hand-picked Vlad-on-the-Angels cards. I mean, he just plucked a bunch of doubles from his collection and increased my Vlad card count elevenfold. Thanks, Tom! Here are a few gems from that PWE:

 

You want to know what "Derek Jeter says..." in that 2008 Upper Deck card in the upper right there? Nothing! I turned it over. Jeter had nothing to say about Vlad. I'm sure there's a good reason he made it onto the front of this card, though, and I'm guessing some of you can tell me about it.

But wait! That's not all. Then I got a trade package from Gavin over at Baseball Card Breakdown, packed with more Vlad. This trading thing is something I'm a big fan of. I wish I'd gotten involved earlier. Gavin dropped in a couple prospect cards, plus Vlad of all eras - even on that Orioles team I'd forgotten he was a part of (dude still hit .290 in his final year). Here are a few that arrived in that package:

 

Superb stuff. Thank you, gentlemen. Those blogs again are The Angels, In Order and Baseball Card Breakdown. Like Vlad, they're good 'uns, and they have a damn sight more to teach me about the craft of baseball card accumulation than I've been able to glean on my own thus far.

Thowing Back To 2019

Right now 2019 baseball is all we've got to hang on to, isn't it folks? I'm digging this talk of bringing all 30 teams down to Arizona to play in Spring Training parks in front of no fans, if only because it's so ridiculous (and because it means baseball on TV). Barring that, I was reading today that the Korean and Taiwanese baseball seasons might actually begin on time or something close to it. ESPN, Fox, MLB Network - start your engines. I'm ready to watch.

So here's a set of 6 cards that I grabbed a couple of months back as part of Topps' "Throwback Thursdays". In fact I'd probably still be buying these sets each week if Topps hadn't been sending me so much goddamn email that I had to unsubscribe. Each Thursday they put out a limited small-run set of something-or-other, and then try and sell it to you. This time they got me.

Believe it or not, it's the only set I own that includes a picture of Mike Trout on the card, unless it's an Angels team card. (I'd collect Trout if only my wallet allowed for it). I dig this six-card set, though. You don't see "WAR Leaders" cards every day, due to the hidebound sabermetrically-challenged overlords who run the hobby, who generally see Avg/HR/RBI as the starting point for evaluating a player. And until I got this set, I didn't know that Troy Tulowitski had actually called it a day. I liked that guy. He used to crush the Giants every now and again.

This Throwback Thursday set is "Set 3". They printed 482 of them. It's based on a 1984 card design. You can learn more about it here.

Look at Me, I'm a Big Boy Card Blogger

It only took just over a week, but I reckon I've now joined the ranks of the proverbial "professional baseball card bloggers" society. This is thanks to Great American Madding, who helms the Cards on Cards blog and who just sent me my first "trade" cards in the mail in what you folks like to call a "PWE". Thing was, I haven't even sent him a thing yet, either! That's how Great of an American he is. (Don't worry, sir - I'm working up a batch for ya as we speak).

This trading racket you card bloggers seem to engage in is one of the reasons I thought I'd raise my blogging voice in the first place. What a blast. I send you some surprises/wants, you send me some surprises/wants, and everyone's happy playing a low-stakes game of "postage". Madding definitely did me right. Just look at this Big Time Timmy Jim card to your left, a 2013 Topps Opening Day Franchise Flashback to a time when Mr. Lincecum not only rocked a San Francisco Sea Lions Negro League uniform, but also wore a mini-beer belly and the coolest pair of dork spectacles this side of Dick Tracy.

We could have stopped right there, but he also provided me with the following modern Giants gems:

 

 

Even a couple of 2018 Topps Stickers (!), easily the first stickers in my collection since my 1970s Wacky Packages. Hey, remember when Matt Moore almost threw that no-hitter against the Dodgers? That and being the guy we traded Matt Duffy for will always be the two things folks in SF remember about him.

 

Thanks again to Madding for the loot, and for helping me feel as if maybe, just maybe, I belong here.

2016 Panini Tim Raines "The Great Entertainers"

Here's a card I kinda like having around. It's a chunky 2016 Tim Raines tribute card that Panini made as part of their "Great Entertainers" series that year. It's got an autograph, a piece of what's clearly a blue Expos uniform, and a stamp on the back saying this is #88 / 99. It's card #TGR-TR for those of you keeping score at home.

I certainly remember Raines and his moderately-talented Expos teams. I used to gently root for them because they were Canadian - from French-speaking Canada, no less - and yet didn't care one bit when it was the Blue Jays who brought home the hardware in 1992 and 1993. Uniforms? Cool dudes like Raines? Hey, I don't know. I was just glad to see the Expos win it all last year as the Washington Nationals. Hope you dig my Raines card.

Pablo Sandoval: King of Kings

My top player for collecting - the one whom I'm somewhat optimistically ultimately planning to have all 2,305 cards for - is Pablo Sandoval. He's been my favorite player pretty much since he materialized on the San Francisco Giants in 2008 as a catcher - a guy whom I'd not even heard of as a prospect before he was called up - and a guy who promptly started to rake, hitting .345 in his first year and then .330 in his first full season of 2009, with a .387 OBP.

Though it certainly helped, those stats weren't why we all loved the guy so much. It was the dude's joy de vivre; his ability to transcend what looked to be an almost comical amount of unathletic weight distribution and make totally insane plays at third base; and the fact that he raked. I never cared for the whole "Big Panda" / pandamania hoo-hah around the guy, but I'm glad he got the attention, because he earned it in spades, culminating of course with that crazy three-homer game in the 2012 World Series - perhaps the only time in my lifetime in which I believed the San Francisco Giants were truly the absolute best team in baseball.

Anyway, we let Pablo get away in 2015 and he said some dumb things going out the door. He was infamously awful for the Red Sox. He wasn't really my favorite player any longer - but then in 2017, he came back to the Giants, and he's been a total delight ever since. He pitches! He gets married in a blowout wedding! And he keeps raking, at least in a manner in line with his diminishing abilities. The Giants signed him again for 2020, and man, I hope the season actually happens.

So this is the guy whose cards I'm really going after the most. Autographs, prospect, rookie, parallels, commons, uniforms, whatever. Here are a few of the ones I have now.

Fred Norman, Bachelor

I think one of the things that's most excited me about my return to collecting, as I sorta mentioned in my introductory post last week, is the notion of collecting baseball cards in any way, shape or form that I want. The concept of "Frankensets" has been exceptionally intriguing. To think that I don't "need" to be chasing the high-dollar, low-run cards to have a blast at this, and can arrange and order cards in any manner that fits my concept of logical - well, that's why I've doubled down the past year. I suppose I never really conceived of that as an option before.

I do have to give full credit to the Dime Boxes ("The Low-End Baseball Card Collector's Journey") blog for giving me the shove I needed for my first real frankenset. Nick, the fella that runs it, shares my sense of the absurd - or rather, I share his sense. He started a "Dime Box Frankenset" series in which he pits one goofus card against another, and lets you, the astute reader, vote on which one is more horrid. Some of these have been absolute whoppers. I mean, just look at the Bob Zupcic, Dick Green and Ryon Healy cards in this post alone. Someone at these respective card companies decided that these were the best representation of these players that they were going to get this year, and called it a day. More likely, they share the same warped sense of humor that Nick does, and knew that someone was going to totally love these. Like me.

I started buying some of the best of these online, just to build up my own best-of-Nick's frankenset, and am now starting to "season" it with some that haven't quite made his elections yet. To think, all those years that I wasn't collecting, I thought Oscar Gamble's 1976 Topps Traded card was the height of hilarity. What did I know, right?

This brings us to today's subject, Fred Norman's 1973 Topps base card. This card brings me much joy for a couple of reasons. First, Norman and his Padres are playing at Candlestick Park in San Francisco against my Giants. As is evident, no one's at the game; or, as I often recall from my trips to Candlestick that decade, there are probably somewhere between 1,000-3,000 people clustered around home plate in the lower deck, then about 25 hippies smoking dope scattered across the upper deck. Around the 7th inning, seagulls will start circulating, beers will kick in, and fights will start. What an image. What a card.

Second, Norman was a 211-inning workhorse for those '72 Padres - a really bad team - and managed to pull off a 3.44 ERA and a 9-11 W/L. I remember him as being an innings-eater on the mid-1970s Big Red Machine Cincinnati teams, and a 2-time World Series champion.

But most importantly, in the spring of 1973, Topps thought the most important thing to mention in their de rigeur cartoon was that "Fred is a bachelor", complete with a mini-skirted kissing bandit chasing him around the field. A bachelor! That's not a term you hear much any longer. It was a term of art in Hollywood for closeted stars like Rock Hudson and Errol Flynn, but more often it just meant you hadn't married yet, and of course you were just playing the field and looking for the right one.

Anyway, this card really has it all, doesn't it?

Your 1976 Phoenix Giants

For most of my life, the path for a minor leaguer toiling in the San Francisco Giants organization to get the call to the bigs ran through Phoenix, Arizona. From 1966 to 1997, Phoenix was the AAA franchise for San Francisco, and whether they called them the "Giants" (1966-1985) or the "Firebirds" (1986-1997), if you were one step away from that final promotion, you were plying your trade in the Valley of the Sun.

It has long been reflexive of me to speak of the guys "down in Phoenix", even once our AAA team had moved to Fresno and then later (and currently), Sacramento. When I re-entered this card accumulation racket this past year, I got a hankering to see if there might actually be minor league cards for my childhood hero, Mr. Jack Clark, pictured to your left. Well, turns out there was an entire set for the 1976 Phoenix Giants, and I bought it on eBay. I'm gonna show you a few of them here.

Each of these 4 fellas comes from a set of 22 cards. Well, they're not exactly cards. They're more like photos, with superimposed autographs, a Valley National Bank logo and the little Giants logo you see in the lower left. There's nothing on the back. They're floppy, like photos. Hey. let's call them photos. The four gentlemen I've scanned from the set each made it to bigs - with Greg Minton having had an exceptionally distinguished career, along with Clark. Johnnie LeMaster was a bit of a Giants punchline during the time he started at shortstop, but it seemed like he anchored that position for at least four or five years. Most of the others in the set did not make it to the big club.

Skip James got scanned because he shares a name with my all-time favorite bluesman: Skip James. (Yes, even better than Patton, Johnson, Hurt and all them). He made it to the parent club in 1977 and 1978 for a total of 36 at-bats and a career average of .167 before playing out his career in Japan. Do you call that a "cup of coffee" in the bigs, or is 36 at-bats more like a couple of mugs? I'm not sure, but I actually remember him being on the team as a pinch-hitter. I was all of 9 years old. but I remember.

Anyway, take a gander at these 1976 Phoenix Giants and let me know if you ever saw these heroes play some AAA ball back in the day.