More Gems From My Local Card Shop

Talked last week a bit about my very recent trip to Lefty's Sports Cards in Burlingame, CA. I didn't just pick up 1963 San Francisco Giants cards. No, I made my way through as much as they'd allow me to, and found some stuff that I thought might look better in my collection than it did just sitting in their store. Generally, that's how I feel about most cards.

Frank Robinson is a player I collect. It's nice to see that his cards can be had for not too much $$. It's weird - I'm not really collecting Willie Mays, except as someone whose 1960s cards I need to eventually get to complete my SF Giants team sets, but the price differential between a Mays 60s card and a Frank Robinson 60s card is like 30:1. Every time I put a $15 bid, say, on a Mays 1969 card, it ends up selling on eBay for $80 or $90. I think this Robinson here was $3; the 1972 Topps was probably $4. I daresay that Willie was not thirty times the player Frank was.

I have found myself overly excited by young players who are excelling in the minors or in their early majors seasons, and when I see their cards available at prices I like, I tend to strike. Here are a few guys I picked up who definitely fit that category:

Fried, as I'm sure I've mentioned, is a player I collect. I did some serious damage to my Fried needs in a recent CardBarrel order, so other than relics and numbered cards and such, I'm already more than halfway there with this guy.

Here are two Orlando Cepeda cards that I knew would also be important to have in my collection:

How about these two young fellas? I had to get a card of #1 pick Mark Appel, the pride of Stanford and one of baseball's great draft washouts, in my collection:

I know we're jumping all over the place here, but did you know that Jack Sanford was 24-7 for the 1962 San Francisco Giants - the NL champs - and finished second in the Cy Young voting that year?

Finally, a card from 1970 Topps that felt like a good one to add to that slowly-accumulating group of 1970 Topps cards I'm putting together. Until next time!

A Sextet of New Age Performers

Each year Topps Heritage baseball contains a subset of "New Age Performers", typically rookies. I guess it's pretty much always rookies, or at least "new guys". I like this subset. I'm going after the entire 2021 Topps Heritage set, so naturally I need these to be a part of my completist quest for the whole thing.

My most recent CardBarrel order netted me another six of these. Max Fried I already had, but he's also one of the player collections I'm building, so of course I needed another one. These are short prints and a little tougher to track down; I was at a card show in South San Francisco a month or two ago and some of the earlier New Age Performer subsets were in a 25-cent box, so I excitedly grabbed as many as I could without fumbling them all over the floor.

Anyway, here's the sextet I just grabbed from 2021 Heritage.

Some of Your 1963 San Francisco Giants

I made a little trip to Lefty's Sports Cards over this past weekend - my "LCS", if you will. They actually advertise on TV now (!) - sponsorships during San Francisco Giants telecasts. That's really a sign of the times, isn't it? When I first started going there a couple years back, I assumed that if they weren't actively losing money, they were barely making it. Then the pandemic happened. Then people (like me) upped their card-collecting obsessions. Now we've got leverage buyouts and IPOs and card bros and Lefty's Sports Cards advertising on TV. They even just upgraded their AOL-era website.

I still can't believe they won't let me rifle through their boxes of, say, 1972 Topps, and I'm beginning to think that maybe it's not just a pandemic thing. Maybe letting people handle the merch is detrimental to, say, selling those same cards online. Maybe I should ask them if that's the case. It's not as fun to go in as it used to be, though, when I'd just head in and say, "Show me your 1965 Topps!" or whatever, and a box would come out thirty seconds later. 

One thing that is fun about going there still are the books of San Francisco Giants cards they'll still let you look at. I ticked off a bunch of 1963 needs on Saturday - 7 to be exact. No heavy hitters like Mays, McCovey nor Marichal, but in time, my friends, in time. This was the team that were the reigning National League Champions, having just lost a 7-game World Series heartbreaker to the New York Yankees in October 1962, I thought you might wanna have a look at some of them.

"No Junk Wax"? Not Anymore

I had been stoic and resolute in my decision to forsake any & all "junk wax" from the 1980s and 1990s in my collecting - outside of cards I actually liked and the team I collect, of course. This policy has been tested at times, particularly because these cards are so easy and affordable to find, and because there are actually some designs from that are truly legendary - or at least that ring dim bells of nostalgia in my brain. 

I think it was 1982 Topps that was the final set I collected as a teenager; after that I was off collecting punk and new wave 45s, and left baseball cards in the dust until resurrecting the hobby in middle age. As one does! Yet now that I've had some time to marinate on it - and because I really like to look of these sets - I've started setting aside any 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984 and 1984 Topps baseball cards that come my way. I'm even going so far as to occasionally buy small lots of them online, although with these sets having 700+ and even 800+ cards in them, my want list is, uh, still rather extensive.

This past week I went into my "trade box" - the box where I keep anything and everything I might want to trade to folks out there, and pulled back a small handful of cards, most of them from the junk wax era. It's almost like getting 10 new cards in the mail. Look at 'em! They're beautiful! How about a Mike Mussina rookie card, hunh?

It's 1981 Topps that I love the most of the junk wax era sets. You might not even lump this set in with the various Score and Upper Deck monstrosities of the 80s and 90s. Here are a couple of trade box rescues:

And there's no reason whatsoever to not collect this 1987 Topps card:

Here's the rest of what I pulled back - like I said, not all of it from the 80s and 90s. I just thought it might look better in my collection than in a trade box, you know?

(this last card is a "1986 Season Highlights" Sportflics card that shows photos of Don Sutton, Mike Schmidt and someone named Jim Deshaies - the latter of whom struck out his first 8 batters in a game, which is pretty cool.)

The Accidental Buster Posey Collection

I've kept it no secret that I am a partisan fan of the San Francisco Giants baseball club. Collect the club's cards, and start trading with folks who know of your partisan affiliation, and pretty soon you're going to have a nice heaping helping of Buster Posey cards, whether you like it or not. 

I, of course, very much appreciate what Buster Posey has meant for the club, from 2010 until this very day. He's a legend, a team hall of famer and quite possibly a Baseball Hall of Famer as well. He's been the rock and anchor of these team for 11 years, even in those weird years of 2018-2020 where he really "just wasn't very good anymore" or took the pandemic year off. Here he is in 2021, totally on fire and a team catalyst to boot. Giants pitchers love him; opposing baserunners (usually) don't; and the dude is 34 and about to end a phenomenal season hitting over .300, in a year when hardly anyone's hitting over .300.

He just doesn't really do it for me in a baseball card sense. No, I like collecting the Giants who were total crowd-pleasers, or goofballs, or were the heroes of my youth. My main Giants players collections are Pablo Sandoval, Tim Lincecum, Hunter Pence, Willie McCovey, Jack Clark - and, for some reason, Greg Minton. Guys like Posey, Crawford and Belt just don't rate that way. I love 'em, but not in the baseball card sense.

Yet of course I have a large Buster Posey collection anyway. I'm happy about that. I've starting putting aside any of his cards that I get in trades into a special "Buster Posey" section in a box, as one does. The only time I've ever bought a Posey card is when it's been part of a team set I'm collecting, such as every Topps Heritage Giants set from 2010 through this year. Otherwise, everything - including the ones in this post (save for 1) are from trades.

Here are my ten favorite Buster Posey cards sitting in that special section. The one you see above is a shiny 2019 Panini Optic card, #MVP-13. The one below is my favorite, and the only one I paid for. It's from 2013 Topps Archives and a 15-card insert set called "Gallery of Heroes", Each card is translucent and replicates the look of stained glass. Seriously, it's one of my favorite cards anywhere.

Here's a 2020 Donruss I really like as well. Just got this during the week from Kerry of Cards on Cards blog.

This is also a newish holographic gem insert from Topps 2020:

And here are the other six cards that round out the Accidental Buster Posey Collection Top Ten:

It's 1969 OK

1969, baby. I turned two that year. Two of my all-time favorite albums - "The Stooges" and "The Velvet Underground" (Third Album) came out. Richard Nixon became president. And Topps issued a pretty killer set of baseball cards.

I've now accumulated enough of the 1969 set that I think it's fair to say that I'll try to tackle the whole thing in time. I just received another batch of commons from my #1 source, and they're fantastic to look at. Loads of clean-cut young men playing ball and getting fired up for the season. Last night I saw a video highlight of none other than Willie Mays hitting his 600th home run during this season. I've read two entire books about the Miracle Mets and the amazin' 1969 season. Four new teams joined the league that year: Montreal Expos, Kansas City Royals, Seattle Pilots and the San Diego Padres. 

I've scanned about 10 of the 35 or so new 1969 cards I've received for you here. Oh - and question for you - anyone know why all of the teams have their nicknames on the cards (i.e. "Orioles", "Giants" etc.) - but the Astros' say "Houston"?