Pack O' Obak

Christmas well and truly kicked my ass, so I'm going to be lazy 'till 2010 and just post some packs. I got no cards for Christmas (although I might use a gift card towards some eventually) but I picked up three retro packs from Wally World yesterday. I had planned to snag a Topps206 blaster, but some cretin appears to have bought them all. I was going to be the cretin to buy all the Topps206, dammit!

Christmas shoppers completely demolished the card aisle at Wally World. The blasters were more or less ok, but all the gravity feed containers for the loose packs were a random mix of pretty much every type of pack that had been sold there over the past 12 months. I found a Topps Heritage High pack in the Upper Deck Football feeder. Four packs of O-Pee-Chee were in the top of a Score football box. Allen & Ginter and American Heritage jumbo packs were shoved in a basketball feeder. These Obak cards were in the Spongebob box. I even saw a rogue Obama pack floating around. I bet I could have found some vintage packs from the '70s had I dug deep enough. I'm glad I finally found the Obak, this set has grown on me like mildew.

50 Arnold "Jigger" Statz

My favorite thing about Obak are the old timers. Here's five factoids about Arnold.

1) He played for the Los Angeles Angels of the Pacific Coast League.

2) The PCL Angels had nothing to do with Anaheim and were affilliated with the Chicago Cubs.

3) Arnold played 8 years in the bigs with the Chicago Cubs, New York Giants, Boston Red Sox and Brooklyn Robins (Dodgers).

4) Arnold played 18 years in the PCL and has the record for most hits with 3,356.

5) The man's nickname is Jigger. Seriously, Jigger.

30 Josh Vitters

Josh is a highly ranked Cubs prospect and may very well be the Cubs' only high ranked prospect judging from the amount of times his name pops up on MLBTradeRumors.com. This card has an odd stormy background which made me wonder if it was a variation of some sort. After some research I found the checklist has plenty of variation cards, but Vitters' ain't one of them.

NNO Rollie Zeider mini

Sweet! A 1909 original card reprint! Tristar 'forgot' to number these cards, but I'm guessing that this was on purpose. I've become so cynical and jaded, haven't I? Here's a pic of the original Rollie. I'm not going to do the research right now, but Rollie might just be the only player who ever played for Chicago's American league, National league and Federal league teams.

87 Abner Powell

Another old timer. Abner looks like a refugee from a Mack Sennett comedy. He's actually an unheralded innovator of the game, responsible for rain checks, ladies' day and the infield tarp. If it weren't for this guy, we would never have had this.

97 John Heisman

Heisman was the president of the Atlanta Crackers?!?!! (Yes, that's this Heisman) This might be the best card in the set. Heisman is better known for his football exploits, including the infamous 222-0 whoooping Georgia Tech put on Cumberland.

DAMMIT now I'm going to have to find a box of this stuff. And I don't mean a blaster.