Michael Bourn

Marquis Grissom part 2: Electric Boogaloo



Didn't give up ANY of the top pitching prospects. Frank Wren is a Golden God.

So long Jordan, good luck in Houston.

Ginter Code: Huston Street

I was going to have a better post up this morning, but I screwed up the scans.

Has anyone solved this thing yet?

Joy of a Completed FrankenSet Page

If there's anyone out there confused whenever I start talking about my Frankenset, well here it is. Let me explain... no, that will take too long, let me sum up.

I like mini cards. I like them a lot. I collect a lot of Allen & Ginter. Not quite enough to even think about completing the mini set though. But I still really like the minis. And I have a ton of 'em. And I like to complete sets.

SO: a couple of years ago I took all my minis and sorted them by number, regardless of which year they were from. I then picked out my favorite from each number and started building an Allen & Ginter mini set numbered 1-350. I put 'em all in pages and the past couple of years I've been slowly adding to the set, filling in some emply pockets in the pages and replacing some cards when I find a better one. So far I've racked 307 cards out of the 350 card set and I still have a couple dozen 2011s to sort through. This page probably causes some convulsions or at least some nervous twitches in the more purist set collectors, but what the hell, I think it's fun.

The ultimate goal for each page is to:
1) consist entirely of cards I like
2) have at least one representative from each set on the page
3) have a good balance from all years, eg. not one card each from 2006 and 2008-2011, and 10 cards from 2007.

Depending on how long Topps pumps out the A&G brand I may have to cut this set off after about 8 or 10 years and start a second one. I've already had to start putting together an 'extended series' of cards that were not quite good enough to make the main set but are awesome nonetheless. Maybe once I officially complete all 350 cards I'll let this set crystallize as is and start that second set. I'll worry about it when the time comes.

While this page is complete, it's still subject to change. There's about 7 cards on here that are pretty much untouchable. Mark Twain,  Prado, Hudson, Sitting Bull, Hoffman, Galileo and Jeter are all going to be almost impossible to knock out of the binder. The rest of the page I'll swap out for the right card. The page is a little heavy in 2006 and 2008 cards. Blake DeWitt is probably safe for a while since he's the only 2009 representative. Biondi is also pretty safe as a black bordered card. Chutley and Coco will probably stick around too. Alex Rios? Nick Johnson? Akinori Otsuka? Yeah, those will probably drop out eventually.

Part of me wants to put all the A&G checklists in a spreadsheet and determine the absolute best possible A&G set and try to build that, much like Ben Henry's "The 792" best set of the '80s project way back in the day. Then I realize that would be a lot of work to put together and even MORE work to accumulate all the cards. This one here is working out pretty good for me so far.

I'd buy that for a dollar

For one dollar, you could buy this 2006 Chrome rookie card of Wil Nieves...

Or you could get the actual Wil Nieves.

Allen & Ginter FrankenSet Hopefuls

If you're hoping for some real posts on this blog anytime soon you're pretty much out of luck. My Ginter box was a dud and I don't really feel like putting the work in to posting it. I'm also just not in the mood to make jokes about baseball cards after the spate of recent news events. Even following the Braves is frustrating because every time I try to watch, listen or read about them it's all Trade Deadline All the Time and I'm kind of tired of hearing how if we don't get another bat immediately, US Treasury Bills will become worthless and the global economy will collapse. Or something. I may be mixing up my manufactured crises. My hobbies aren't distracting me from the horror and ennui of life anymore so I've had to bunker down in the sweet embrace of apathy to make it through the day.

I do still like my A&G FrankenSet though and I am glad I have some new cards to help fill the thing up. Here's a pile of 12 minis from a blaster and a stack of looseys. Let's see who makes the grade, eh?

 #327 David DeJesus SP

Short prints are always good for filling the set. Well, unless they are journeyman platoon players.

Did The Jesus make the Frankenset? - YES. 2008 AJ Peirzynksnzkslnvkzksnzkxkskzsi gets the boot.

 #253 Mike Minor A&G

Ten days from now Minor will be pitching in another organization's rotation after Wren makes a panic move to bring Rick Ankiel Part 2: The Strikeoutening aboard to bolster an anemic lineup. That bat will be gone by next year and all the fans screaming bloody murder that the Braves HAVE to make a move RIGHT NOW will instead bitch and moan unceasingly about how we gave up a quality lefthander for a plate of magic beans.

Did TradeBait make the Frankenset? - NO. Blocked in the Braves organization by Brandon Beachy, blocked in the FrankenSet by a 2006 Ian Kinsler RC.

#19 Daniel Bard A&G

Offcenter toward the bottom on the front, offcenter toward the top on the back. How does that happen in 2011?

Did Pitching Shakespeare make the Frankenset? - NO. There are a handful of untouchable cards in the set and the 2008 Albert Einstein is one of them.

 #285 Alex Rios Black Border

Is Rios playing worth a damn over in Chitown? I haven't been paying attention. 

Did Waiver Wire make the Frankenset? - YES. A 2008 Brandon Phillips got bumped and I'm not too happy about it. Stupid Composition Book border..

#74 Torii Hunter

Torii knows his cardboard greatness peaked in 2007 and he is stoically resigned to this fact. 

Did :O make the Frankenset? - YES. He shoves out a 2007 mini of Ervin Santana.

#231 CJ Wilson A&G

Isn't he the guy who threw the meatball to Princess Fielder in the All-Star Game?. Shoulda walked him and pitched to McCann. He hasn't done much in the All-Star game with the bases loaded.

Did Gopher Ball make the Frankenset? - NO. Even though it's Tadahito Iguchi, I can't replace a 2006 mini unless the card is a slam dunk keeper.

#304 Madison Bumgarner SP

I remember the good ol' days when Madison's dad flipped his shit over a Wax Heaven. Oh sweet memories...

Did the Bum make the Frankenset? - NO. 2008 Victor Hugo makes Bumgarner More Miserables.

#72 Maxim Shmyrev

Ping Pong players? In my Frankenset? It's more likely than you think...

Did Table Tennis make the Frankenset? - YES. Empty slot in the binder. But Brandon Phillips is out in the cold. There is no justice.

#109 Martin Prado

Dagnabbit if ping pong players make the cut Marteeeeeeeeeen damn well better make it in.

Did Marteeeeen make the Frankenset? - YEEEEEEEEEEES! Empty slot in the binder! COMPLETED PAGE! MARTEEEEEEEEEEEEEN

#208 Marco Scutaro A&G

Are Red Sox fans bitching about Scutaro? They can't possibly be bitching about him as much as much as Braves fans bitch about Alex Gonzalez. WHO JUST STRUCK OUT WITH THE BASES LOADED FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUU.

Did Scooty Poots make the Frankenset? - YES. Three straight empty slots in the binder. I'm on a roll!

#342 Mike Pelfrey SP

woohoo a met. im thrilled

Did im too lazy to think of a witty nickname make the Frankenset? - NO. 2006 Stonewall Jackson, um, Stonewalls him. meh.

#340 Ryan Zimmerman SP

Oddly enough, this and the Pelfrey were in the same pack. Must be the missing mini from my box. How did it get into a Target loosey?.

Did Invader Zim make the Frankenset? - YES. In another move I didn't want to make, 2008 Carl Crawford gets bumped. There were already four other 2008 cards on the page so Zim squeezed in as the 2011 representative.

Out of 12 cards, 7 made it in the binder and Brandon Phillips and Carl Crawford get screwed while a Ping Pong player is added to the set. Not too bad a ratio. I'm done scanning for the night so maybe you'll get to see that completed page tomorrow if I don't succumb to apathy in the meantime.

The 2011 Ginter Code - Card #250 Ichiro

I'm spoiling my next box break post but there is no way I'm going to finish writing that one tonight and I wanted to get something up on the blog before I passed out from exhaustion. Besides, this here is a big EFF EWE to all the greedy gus eBay sellers slapping Post-it notes on their code cards and berating their potential customers for wanting to freeload images of their hard earned codes. Here's a free code for my fellow freeloaders.

#250 Ichiro

As you can see, a 2011 Ginter Code card is a base card with some squirrelly designs on the corners that can be put together with other Code cards to make little four-leaf clover designs. What this has to do with anything, who the hell knows. If you're really really interested in this thing, The Topps Archives Blog have a Ginter Code Cheatsheet up. Anyone compiling code images may freely swipe, steal, borrow, pilfer, purloin, filch, gank, abscond, share or yoink this image for your compilation. There's also an official Ginter Code Twitter twooter up, which so far reminds me of that Chieftan Mews character that was posting around the time Radiohead's The King Of Limbs was released. Just, you know, less helpful. Here's a scan of the back because all the crooked sellers refuse to show the back BECAUSE ZOMG THERE'S A CODE!!! AND YOU FREELOADERS ARE TAKING MONEYZ RIGHT OUT OF MY POOR CHRILDENS POCKETS BY STEALING IMAGES OF MAH CARDS WITH YOUR EYEBALLS YOU BUY NOW NO MONEY NO LOOKEE NO COMBINED SHIPPING NO REFUNDS

Yeah, There's a whole lotta nothin on the back. There is a code however: the same Topps Card Code that they have put on the back of every single card they've printed the past couple of years. EBay sellers? Deceptive? Couldn't be. I have a handful of these and as I pull them I'll post them free of charge. Us freeloaders gotta stick together.

9 more cards from two more racks

It's going to take me a couple months to figure out the Gint-a-cuffs scoring, so here's the second half of my 'hanging blaster' to tide you over. Extra added bonus: I remembered to check the descreening filter this time while scanning!

MARTEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEN 

I don't know what it is, but the full bleed border mini inserts always look friggin fantastic. I'm not even going to attempt to explain Kasper Hauser because it's just too weird. Google him. Nineteenth century con men always did their work with style.

Speaking of looking fantastic, here are some choanoflagellate-type thingys swimmin' around.

Ok, storytime. I'm watching the All-Star game with my son. National League is up, two men are on, Brian McCann is on deck. This dude is at the plate. I'm still mad at him for getting Bobby Cox suspended for a game last year (have I told this story already?) so I start calling him Princess Fielder as is my wont. The kids think this is utterly fantastic and my daughter (who should be in bed by now but refuses since big brother is up) is absolutely fascinated by the ugliest princess ever. So right in the middle of our mocking of the world's fattest vegetarian he has the nerve to hit a home run and steal all of Brian McCann's RBIs. Imagine! Even though he stole B-Mac's glory (especially since he stole B-Mac's glory) I continued to call him Princess which pissed my wife off something fierce so I get yelled at. Ever since then I've been pulling his cards like crazy. Dang Princesses. Moral of the story: If someone you are ragging on suddenly shows you up, double down on the mockery. It's not mature, it won't help anything, and you end up looking really stupid, but damn, it's fun.

Ping pong, man, ping pong.

MOAR PHISHIES. I got two bordering cards now and boy, do they look great. If you think it's odd that I got four Ascent of Man cards in four racks, then also know that I got absolutely NO dang short prints either. Not one. The hell is up with that.

The most powerful warship in the Royal Navy!

Sunk in a storm.

Penultimacy: adjective - The next to the last in a sequence

Antonio Meucci: Invented the telephone twenty years before Alexander Graham Bell. As in, Meuicci was the first man to invent the telephone. First. In a sequence.

Topps needs to invest in a dictionary.

I don't know who this dude is, but this is a bad ass card.

9 cards from two racks

Yay! Target has A&G! Booo! They don't have blasters! Here's 9 cards from the first two racks I snagged. Why 9? That's how many cards fit on the scanner.

Kalamazoo. Just Kalamazoo.

Dude masters fire and he's only 24 out of 26 cards. If card #26 is Michael Eisner, I'm giving up collecting cards as a hobby and taking up cross-stitch instead. That's some mighty fine flocculence there...

Hooray! Retail Checklists! Now I have five more cards to chase for this set. Well, four now.

A card in every garage, a chicken in every pot and a Chipper in every pack.

Topps is really pushing the evolution theme in this product. Two words for ya: BINOMIAL NOMENCLATURE. You have no idea what that is, but you vaguely remember having to memorize it for a biology class in middle school.

Yay! My first double for 2011!

The Ginterization of this photo did a neat thing to the ball Clayton is tossing. I've been stating at it for an hour. It looks like something out of a Rene Magritte painting.

Fuzzy Monkey! It was with this card I realized that Topps put the Ginter football pebbles texture on the Ascent of Man cards. It distracts a bit from the monkey butt, I think.

BIG MAC ATTACK. Two Braves and two cards from insert sets I'm collecting in two racks. Not too bad. Now hurry up and deliver the blasters already. Target still has plenty of 2010 blasters, though. C/MON TARGET, DON'T FORCE ME TO DIG THROUGH LOOSEYS

I resemble this card way too much

GRAAAAAR!

No really, just watch any of my YouTube videos. Put an Upper Deck hat on that critter and it may as well be me. Devolution! 

GOD MADE MAN
But he used the monkey to do it
Apes in the plan
And we're all here to prove it
I can walk like an ape
Talk like an ape
Do what monkeys do...
God made man
But a monkey supplied the glue

Are we not men?

We are Devo!

Heritage Barcodes

A hot tip from reader Joe advised me to be on the lookout for Target loosey Heritage packs. Specifically ones with a barcode that ended in 01849. Apparently these packs all had either a SP, insert or red tint variation when he ripped about a half-dozen of them. Other packs had a barcode ending in 3-something-something-something. I've gotten quite a few looseys with bupkis in them so the promise of a SP was welcome. I am always up for testing out a scientific theory, so I snagged a couple of packs with the 01849 code and did indeed get two SPs. Johnny Cueto and an Alexei Ramirez All-Star. I also got one of the other barcode packs (I really should have saved the wrappers) and pulled a Red tint and a Chrome of Pedro Alvarez. So much for a control group.

I have two theories regarding the Target barcode variant and the proclivity for those packs to provide some sort of non-base card.

1) While Wal-Mart's looseys generally only come in gravity feed boxes, Target often gets gravity feed and individual boxes of product. The two different products have different barcodes and the two got mixed up while cleaning or in consolidation by the distributor. Due to the fact that most Heritage packs have at least one SP or insert in them and the low sample size of our packs, we just got lucky and got an insert in every pack and there is no advantage in the 01849 code packs.

2) SHENANIGANS!!!



If you've read this blog for any length of time, you know which theory I support.

At any rate, as long as you are not one of those hardliners who believe that anything other than closing your eyes, grabbing randomly in the card aisle and buying whatever happens to fall into the cart is pack searching, it couldn't hurt to check the barcodes and grab a pack or two next time you're at the local Target and you find that THEY STILL DON'T HAVE ANY ALLEN AND GINTER SERIOUSLY WTF.  Surprisingly, my three packs completed two pages.

This one here was missing four cards prior to my purchase, including the Braun! I don't think I've ever come close to knocking out a page like that before. Not from only three packs.

Why, yes, I am including Red Tints in my main set. Basically, I don't give a flip anymore about variations. Back in 2004 variations were fun, there were less than a dozen of them and they had old school logos on them that were kind of neat. Now we have green tint variations and red tint variations and blue tint variations and I think maybe purple variations exclusive to Rite-Aid packs in Montana and black border variations but they don't really count because they are a variation on the Chrome set and Jesus H. Christ, we got like 500 variations and some of them are super short prints and eff all this noise. So yeah, tinted cards are in the set. It kind of looks like a '52 Topps background now that I think about it.

2011 Allen & Ginter Box Break Part 2: Packs 2-4

If this post was a Wondermark comic, its title would be as follows:

"In Which the Box Was Killed"

Not much to say when you're completely out of Gint-a-Cuffs by pack 4. Here's the damage.

PACK 2:

273 Brent Morel
279 Jose Tabata
222 James Shields
AOM09 Ascent of Man Placoderms
AGR-ARA Alexi Ramirez
78 Luke Scott Mini
HH65 Adrian Gonzalez Hometown Heroes

Pulling a hit in pack 2: good. Pulling a jersey card of Alexei Ramirez: bad. This is why you don't buy boxes for "The Hits". You buy boxes for insert cards of Placoderms!  Saying it right now for all posterity: 2011 Allen & Ginter Ascent of Man is the insert set of the year. My crappy scans notwithstanding, these things look amazing. The subject matter of the set also pisses off my local school board something fierce, so there's a bonus. I'm not entirely sure how placoderms illustrate the evolution of man since the card back specifically states they went extinct. But hey, armor plated fish.

MINI CARD - Did Luke Scott make the Frankenset? - NO. Cockblocked by 2008 Ivan Rodriguez.

PACK 3:

228 Brandon Snyder
81 Yonder Alonso
194 Rick Porcello
104 Huston Street
174 Joakim Soria
322 Trevor Cahill SP
NO FRIGGIN MINI
MMF39 Samuel Colt Minds That Made The Future

Topps quality control strikes again with a missing mini card. Crap like this is why you have to pack search just to make sure you're getting what you're supposed to get in the pack. I'm looking at you, 8 card Heritage pack I bought from Target two days ago. Whoever pulls two mini cards in your pack, remember... THAT'S MY MINI YOU SHAFT.

On a positive note, I got a "Minds That Made The Future" card in this pack. These cards are frickin' sweet. This and the Evolution set are going to be the two standard sized inserts I collect out of this set. The rest I'll snag Braves and maybe a type card or two but I don't really care about them anymore. I can't care about them, because Topps has so overly bloated this product that Master Set collectors across the country are all committing suicide faster than a Hackergate whistleblower. Back in 2006 and 2007 there was one one-per-pack insert set of 30 Dick Perez Sketches. In 2008, we get 50 State flags as the one perpack insert. 2009, 75 World flags. Last year Topps was kind enough to keep their Newspaper Headline set at 75 cards. This year?  The one a pack insert is a 100 card Hometown Heroes set. But wait! It's not one a pack anymore, because you can also pull Scientists or Ships instead of  a Hometown Heroes card. So in summary, 5 years ago you have a kickass base set and an easily attainable one per pack 30 card set. Today you'll probably have three full sets completed (with SPs!) before you knock out that Hometown Heroes set. Oh well, I'll sacrifice any chance at completeness for a cool Steampunk looking set I guess.

PACK 4:

177 Aaron Crow
24 Kristi Yamaguchi
171 John Lackey
37 Fausto Carmona
AGR-TC Tyler Colvin
258 Howie Kendrick Mini
HH36 Gordon Beckham Hometown Heroes

A Cub. My second relic is a Cub. Not even a good Cub! A .105 hitting Cub! (are there good Cubs?) Ze box... she ees dead. I'd have to pull a cut auto of Jesus to pull this one out. One other thing about relics this year - do the edges of the swatches look burned to anyone else? Like they were cut by laser or something? The mini cards are inside the frames tighter too. You used to be able to slide them around, now they won't budge. The pack is saved by a colorful Kristi Yamaguchi card and the Beckham Hometown Hero. I ain't collecting them all, but this card of a fellow ATLien and Georgia Bulldog is neat.

MINI CARD - Did Howie Kendrick make the Frankenset? - NO. 2009 King Felix retains his throne.

I'll do my best to post packs 5-8 before August.

The Angry Baseball Card Nerd

Thorzul's latest contribution to the card blogging community:

I thought it would be funny if the card collecting community had an Angry Baseball Card nerd. He'd be a guy who exclusively reviewed awful products from junk wax's past.


Don't we already have one of those?

BO KNOWS INTROSPECTION

I Partied Out of Bounds a little too much this weekend and I'm too worn out to do the Ginter Freakout justice right now. Enjoy some Goodwin Bo in the meantime.

B52s at Turner Field!

THEY PLAYED PLANET CLAIRE!!!



SO HAPPY

GOODWIN LOVE CONNECTION

"Hey baby, wanna wrestle?"

"EW. Seriously? You're like, kidding, right?"

"I WANNA WRESTLE!!!"