Free Card Friday

Hey! I've only done this once before, and it kinda went alright! So folks - here we go again. I've got 18 cards laid out here. Any one or more of them could be yours. That's right - they're free. There's a two-step process: Alls you have to do is leave a comment saying "I want this one" or "I want that one", and let me which one or ones you want, of course. If you're the first one to drop in that comment, why then it's yours! However, I also need you to send me an email to thejayhinman@gmail.com and tell me the card(s) you requested and give me your mailing address so I can send it to you. Also, let me know if you like trading, because I'm itching to execute a few more PWEs this month. The mailbox has been dry as a bone for weeks! Here you go.

Giants Prospects A-Go-Go

I suppose I've gotten really into prospect cards, as I'm sure I've said before. I think it's because I like so many of the Bowman designs, and I really like the Onyx cards, and hey - it's just sorta fun to get in on the ground floor of some fellas who may end up leading your team to glory in a few years. 

There are a few dudes in the Giants' farm system besides Joey Bart - now establishing himself in the majors - to talk about. Among the team's top prospects is an outfielder named Heliot Ramos. I got to see him play as a San Jose Giants a couple of years ago - or was that last year? I guess it was last year. Covid time is strange, isn't it. Anyway, this guy's supposedly next in line, which means he's next in line for me to start digging up some of his cards before he turns into "Gavin Lux" or "Wander Franco" or something. (Gavin Lux is currently hitting .156 for the Los Angeles Dodgers, by the way). Here are a few of Mr. Ramos:

I really have to laugh at some of my scans sometimes, folks. I have a not-all-that-great printer/scanner and sometimes my well-positioned and cropped card scans look - well - like a big miscut or misprint.  I promise you, if the cards is ever truly messed up, I'll tell you. Usually it's just me being lazy.

Anyway! Another prospect the Giants are hot on is Marco Luciano. He's a shortstop, and he's coming to take Brandon Crawford's job. Here's what he looks like:

That's all I've got on Luciano so far. In fact, you're seeing my total card collection for these three guys. Finally we have Hunter Bishop, a lefty slugging stud who's got some "tremendous upside", as they say. We'll just see, won't we??

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?

Just Started a Nate Colbert Collection

I'm not 100% sure why I started a Nate Colbert personal collection, but I have. I think it has something to do with my connection to him as one of the San Diego Padres' only historical "stars" while I was growing up - though his best years with the club pre-date me being old enough to pay attention. Randy Jones won a Cy Young award; but before Tony Gwynn, it felt pretty barren in San Diego - hence my fascination with Colbert back then, a guy who clubbed 38 homers in 1970 and another 38 in 1972. Or maybe it was him hitting 5 home runs in a doubleheader - see card below.

And no, he wasn't a star per se - he made 3 All-Star teams, and he got some MVP votes in 1972 - but in 1974 he really started to fall off a cliff, hitting .207 that year and then below the Mendoza line in 1975 and 1976. After 5 hitless at-bats as a DH for Oakland in '76, he was out of baseball. Yeah, that's the kind of guy who looms large in my mind but in few others, and hence the perfect guy for me to collect. I just picked up a bunch of his cards this week. This is what they look like.

Those 2002 Angels, The Team I Like In Spite Of How Badly They Hurt Me

We've talked in this space before about the 2002 Anaheim Angels, a team that stomped mercilessly upon my heart and kept me from enjoying a San Francisco Giants World Series victory for the first time in my life. Nevertheless, they truly earned everything that had coming to them, and are one of those semi-legendary, moment-in-time teams that I'll always revere. They had quality up and down the lineup without any big marketable superstars; they have superstars now, a few of them, and they just can't seem to win for losing (!).

I wanted to try and collect a team set for these guys, and chose the 2002 Topps Chrome - even though it doesn't have David Eckstein nor Francisco Rodriguez, probably my favorite guys on the team. Ouch. K-Rod wasn't quite a thing yet, not until that postseason, and I'm honestly not sure why Eckstein didn't make it, seeing as he'd finished 4th in AL Rookie of the Year voting the year before. Weird. Anyway, it wasn't too hard to use a couple of online stores to cobble together this set. Here are a few of the heavy hitters from the team that year.

Adventures in Repacking

The first time I bought one of these Walgreens baseball card repacks, I was phenomenally let down - betrayed! - by the fact that the majority of the cards were from the junk-wax 80s and 90s. I didn't get anything I wanted or needed, and when I did get some modern stuff, it was basically half of the 2019 Topps Series 1 Detroit Tigers team. I swore I wouldn't buy them again; but I didn't really grasp how they worked.

Everyone's hero Nick at Dime Boxes posted about his Walgreens repack purchases here, and it turned out if you're lucky, you can get some pretty interesting things in these boxes. He got a couple of autographs and some minor league cards. I wanted some of those. Happening upon them again this afternoon when I went to pick up some shaving cream and printer cartridges, I realized these 100-card packs are only $5.99 each - and honestly, that's not really rolling the dice too badly. So I bought two of them, and you know what? I feel better about repacks now!

I didn't get any true weirdo minor league cards - that would have been the best - but I did get an autographed 1996 Best Eric Ludwick card, when he was a prospect in the Mets organization...! With only 1:4 boxes having "hits", I was delighted to have a hit of my own.

This next 2019 Heritage card won't matter much to anyone but Angels fans and me, but I'm a big Matt Shoemaker guy because in the summer of 2016 I went to my first and only game at Angels Stadium, and Shoemaker twirled a phenomenal complete game, which the Angels won. He looked like Koufax out there, and I was like, "The Angels finally have a pitcher". Um...

One of my favorite San Francisco Giants of recent vintage was also in there, and it's a Topps 2014 card I didn't have:

Also a few first-class relievers for my relievers project, including a large-headed 1992 Lee Smith from Score:

And then a bit of junk wax over here, but a keeper nonetheless. The Hack Man!

And this guy, too:

Can't say these'll be regular purchases, but I won't deny the low-key thrills that came from ripping them open. Most of the cards were garbage, but these few semi-gems made the $5.99 price worth it for me this time around.

Boof Bonser Collection Coming Along Nicely

I know it's ridiculous, but now for some reason I'm accumulating cards for one Boof Bonser. I talked about why this is happening here. All it takes is some non-discriminate clicking on various sites - your CardBarrels, your SportLots and so on - and all of a sudden there are Boof Bonser cards all over your house, and you don't really understand why. Here's what came in this week.

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.

Are Soccer Cards As Lame As I Think They Are?

This is a baseball card blog - except on those few occasions during which we've discussed some hockey cards. Now I'm going to expand the conversation just a little, and perhaps only once, to ask you: are soccer cards really as lame as I think they are? Let me explain why I pose the question.

I happen to be not merely a rabid San Francisco Giants fan, but in recent years I've expanded my casual regard for the beautiful game of soccer into a frothing fandom that has had me watching 700% more soccer/football than I do even baseball. Not just the World Cup every 4 years, as I've done for decades now, but games spread throughout the week in the English Premier League, the Championship, the Bundesliga, Champions/Europa League, the MLS, world friendlies, the NWSL - you name it. A few years ago, thanks to their strong pipeline of American players (Clint Dempsey, Brian McBride and Tim Ream, to name a few), I somewhat randomly chose Fulham to be my English club of choice - even got to see them play in London the year before last.

Despite watching every game of theirs during the last two years - even via wonky pay-per-view, laptop-only, one-time-purchase streams, often watched on delay on an iPad before bed - I never really even thought once about collecting Fulham cards. It truly never even crossed my mind - until it did, and I wondered, "Are there actually cool-looking soccer/football cards that aren't made for 7-year-olds and that have interesting designs that are comparable to those found in my beloved baseball card hobby? Cards that don't have power boosts, names like "Match Attax", doofus player ratings and other trappings designed for the schoolboy, as opposed to cards designed for a refined middle-ager like myself?".

I'm still wondering. I bought the 2018-19 Topps Chrome series of Fulham cards, 5 in all, and as you can see with the Calum Chambers card above, that's about as good as it gets. It looks very much like Topps 2020 baseball Series 1, one of my least-favorite sets of all time. I ask you: is there such thing as a "Heritage" set for soccer cards? Anything?

Honestly, it's such a phenomenal sport, but because it's relatively new in the USA, the average age of the US-based soccer fan is somewhere in their 20s. Baseball? We average out in our 50s. We fiftysomething baseball fans have loads of memories, some disposable income and plenty of navel-gazing contemplation time for our cards. I don't see the US soccer demographic coming from the same place - but perhaps that's a terrific marketing opportunity for someone, am I right?

Anyway - if there are really beautiful, collectable, affordable soccer cards from the last decade or two, I'd love to know about them....! Until then, I'm going to assume that we're still in very early days when it comes to soccer cards worth accumulating.

Some More Seattle Pilots Ephemera

Silly me, I once thought that "collecting the Seattle Pilots" meant "buy the Pilots cards from the Topps 1969 and 1970 sets, and you're done". How naive! The deeper I went into that Pilots rabbit hole - and no, I haven't quite completed that '70 set just yet - the more I learned about post-1970 card issues featuring Pilots players - or weirdly, guys who never played for the Pilots but who still got cards dressed up in their uniform (Ichiro Suzuki hadn't even been born when they spent their lone season in Seattle) - the deeper I needed to go.

Like Jim Bouton for example. He's the world's most famous Seattle Pilot, thanks to his book Ball Four that immortalized his year with the team. He never got an official Topps card of him in a Pilots uniform in 1969 nor in 1970 (he was traded to the Astros during the '69 season). You know what he did get, though? A 2004 Fleer Greats card, that's what. You see it here to your left. Bouton had two monster years for the Yankees as a starting pitcher in 1963 and 1964, winning 21 games in the former, but was mostly a "sloppy mopper" in the years that followed. I still call him a Fleer Great, though. So should you. He's got a Seattle Pilots card that I'm exceptionally proud to own.

Bouton also has a 1989 Swell "Baseball Greats"card, and it's a delight as well. I need to learn some more about the Swell brand. I can't say that it's all that much to look at, but there he is - Jimmy B, getting ready to kinda/sorta throw his teammates under the bus in 1969. Card #66 in the Baseball Greats series. Information on this series, please, fellow card collectors!

And listen - if you've never watched Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye, it's an outstanding film, as is virtually everything Altman made in the 1970s ("3 Women" is probably my favorite film of all time). Why is that relevant? Well, because Jim Bouton is in it - and not just for a minute, either. He's got quite a few key scenes. Anyway, that's your dose of Seattle Pilots card collecting ephemera for this time around.....as I pull together more weirdo Pilots odds & ends, you can be sure I'll share them with ya here.

Let's Remember Some 1975 Guys

I first started buying Topps baseball cards as a young lad in 1976, but a couple of kids in my neighborhood who also bought cards had started accumulating a year earlier. Thus, even though '76 Topps was my personal entrée into the world of baseball cards, I soon found myself with quite a few 1975 Topps in my collection as well, via various trades and I'll-buy-that-for-a-nickel pickups from my Sacramento-area comrades.

One thing I've never had - until this week, that is - is a complete set of the 1975 Topps San Francisco Giants cards. The cards partially reflect a 1974 team that was pretty awful, going 72-90 and finishing a dismal 5th place in the NL West. However! 1975 would end up being a little better. They traded for the Yankees' Bobby Murcer, and he made the All-Star team. John Montefusco, who didn't get a card in this 1975 set, ended up being the NL Rookie of the Year, pitching his way to a 15-9 record with a 2.88 ERA. The Giants finished in 3rd place to tough Reds and Dodgers teams, with an 80-81 record. Not great, but they'd be worse again the next two years, just as I was coming online as a SF Giants die-hard.

The 1975 cards I got back then were the minis - smaller versions of the main cards, apparently only issued later in the season. Someone told me only in certain states as well - is that true? Like California? I'm sure I could look it up somewhere, but I'm certain one of you knows. I think the colorful design of these may be my third favorite overall design of the 1970s, after the '72 Topps and the '71 Topps. That sounds about right.

Anyway, I have been pulling together the normal-sized cards from this set - maybe one day, after I've collected everything, I'll tackle the smaller versions. Here's what some of the 1975 Giants looked like.