This Chrome Chipper jersey card came from the eBay store of jv, proprietor of Treasure Never Buried. If you're not familiar with the blog, you should be. It's a card blog that is refreshingly not about cards. There's cards over there, sure, but he doesn't go crazy about 'em, you know what I mean? He doesn't have any cards for sale at the moment, but when he does, don't let the 20 feedback scare you, good communication, good packaging, quick shipping, he's the real deal. Sometimes you can even see the provenance of the cards for sale. Chipper has about 18 billion jersey cards out there but this one is pretty kick ass with the chromey black refractor thing going on. I'm certainly glad jv pulled it and hated it enough to sell it.
This one here was generously sent by JayBee of bdj610's Topps Baseball Card Blog. I drooled over it in this post and shortly after that, I received not one but two of 'em in the mail. This is very generous on JayBee's part since I have only seen one of those Back to School packs in the Atlanta area and that had no Chippers, but Ichiro with a moose. [insert Sarah Palin joke here] I sent some Cubs his way as a thank you. I'm somewhat fascinated with this card. Never mind Chipper's rendition of "I'm a little teapot", look at those wonderfully sloppy lockers! I have absolutely no idea what this has to do with Back to School though.
The rest, including this Leaf Steel card of Chipper are from reader Rob, a denizen of the Great White North. He offered Braves for Expos and I jumped. Five Chippers were included in the lot. 1996 Leaf Steel is one of those wacky gimmicks thrown out by '90s card companies to try to attract attention in a crowded market. The card is really made out of steel and I'd like to know how they printed on the thing. I scanned the back instead of the front due to a plastic film protecting the front. The back looks better than the front anyway, but that doesn't mean I'm not tempted to peel.
The rest of the Chippers, clockwise from the upper left:1996 Topps Laser - I have plenty of Laser cards, but not the Chipper. This is because the card shop at the Mall in Athens had plenty of Laser cards in their cheapo grab bags, but the Chippers were locked in the case with high price tags. If you're not familiar with Topps Laser, basically they took a normal card, put a steel stencil on top of it, then zorched the crap out of the card with a laser to get the intricate design etched into it. This was a big fad in the mid 90's that was completely killed by the Relic craze.
1996 SP Marquee Matchups - Another '90s gimmick was to have two or more insert cards that matched together so you'd buy more packs trying to chase both halves. Chipper is matched up with Mike Mussina if anyone cares.
2002 Bowman Heritage black variation - For some unknown reason, Topps inserted variation cards into Bowman Heritage where the normally pastell name block was black. There was absolutely no reason for this at all, and since they were inserted in every other pack they weren't especially scarce. There's a couple of cards in my set where I have the black version but not the base card.
2004 Upper Deck ProSigs - One of the most God-Awful ugliest sets of all time. Acutally, the gold foil parallel cards look nice, but the base cards feature a blue foil signature on a gray background. Ugh.
The rest of the group is pretty nice too. There are a few Andruw Jones cards in there including a 1996 UD Star Rookie card, a Ticket to Stardom card from the same set (another insert where the card matches up to another half), a '97 Bowman prospect card and this '05 Topps Black paralle card numbered 24/54. That was definitely the surprise of the package. Other cool stuff:A handful of O-Pee-Chee cards including a 1987 Rick Mahler,
Ryan Klesko and Javy Lopez rookie prospect cards,
A big chunk of the 1995 Braves team set,
A '95 SportsFlix Dave justice card where he's taking a huge cut,
A 2004 BowChro Carl Loadenthal first year card (he's worked his way up to Richmond!)
And a few other goodies like Ron Gant, Brian Jordan and Deion Sanders.
I can't really remember what I sent Rob, other than a requested '83 Topps Raines card I recently pulled out of a pack. Hopefully he enjoys them as much as I enjoyed these.
3 comments:
Nice Chipper cards. I just wanted to make a note on scanning cards. I usually scan cards at 150 dpi. This gives an image that's about twice the size of a normal card. This is nice for posting as when someone clicks on the image it gives a nice large view of the card. I've noticed that when some cards are scanned (and in particular any Topps card with gloss), the image has a series of fine parallel lines running through it. I think the problem would occur if scanning at 72 dpi as well. This problem isn't limited to Topps and isn't just limited to glossy cards. Some non-glossy cards (early Score cards) have this problem as well. 2008 Topps cards have the problem but 2008 Upper Deck do not. I guess it's what is called a 'scanner artifact'. I have found that this can be eliminated by scanning the card at 300 dpi and then reducing the size back to 150 (or 72) after scanning. I scan a lot of cards for my card database and those parallel lines drive me crazy.
I really like that Chrome Town Heroes card. I may have to head over to Ebay myself.
I used to scan everything at 300 DPI but the images were a little large. I'll have to remember the shrink trick the next time I get a scan with the lines on it. I also need to scan at 300 for backs of cards. The text shows up better.
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