Finally! RIPPING THE ZENITH BUHNER CARD

Ok, here's what you've all been waiting for. and waiting... and waiting... and waiting... Ah well, time to regroup and move on. Anyway, I'm still having technical difficulties. The video doesn't work, but I'm plodding full steam ahead anyway and RIPPING THE BUHNER.

Well, not ripping it. I have a few implements of torture that should be able to open the sucker up if I try hard enough.

But first here's a grainy photo of my gargoyle, who vigilantly guards my PC from evil doers. His name is... well, it's a funny thing about his name really... I was given this gargoyle by my friend Josh a long time ago. One day I asked the gargoyle what his name was. He said to me, "What name do you like?" So I told him that I liked the name Harvey. I've liked it ever since I was a little boy. And he looked right at me and said "Harvey? Like Mary Chase's Pulitzer Prize winning play?" And I said, "Yeah! Just like that!" And he said, "You mean Harvey, like the 1950 film starring Jimmy Stewart and Josephine Hull, based on that very play?" And I said "Yeah! Yeah! That's the one! Is that your name?" And he said, "What a coincidence, that's not my name at all." and went back to surfing on his laptop. The subject never came up after that, come to think of it... Oh well. Not that important. Ok, here goes!

Hmm... that's not working. Maybe this?

Nope. Rats. I was certain that would work. Better try the Xacto knife.

Presto! A perfect Rip Card Caesarian. Hold it... wait... what's that?

It's BATMAN! And he's got the card!

29 Jeff Bagwell - Now that's a pretty huge upgrade right there! Bone was a good player and all, but Jeff will be getting quite a few Hall votes before it's all said and done.

WASN'T THAT FUN?! Don't you wish I could rip some more of these cards? Guess what? I CAN!!! Thanks to reader Jason who traded me a few packs of this stuff I have SIX more cards to eviscerate today! HOORAY! Let's open the first pack!

Bah, there's a Dare to Tear instruction card urging me to rip the sucker to shreds. None of that for me! I've got... devices.

First up: Z67 Travis Lee rookie

Travis Lee was a huge rookie prospect in 1998, but his bat never really came around. The guy sure could play a mean first base though. Let's gut this puppy.

Bubble gum? What's that doing in there? Topps is gonna be pissed. They won a lawsuit to prevent that sort of thing. Actually, it looks suspiciously like a stick from Topps Heritage... hmmm. Let's see if I can pry the card out of Travis and chew gum at the same time.

51 Charles Johnson. Another decent pull in 1998, not so good now. It came out of Travis Lee though so I say it's an improvement. Batman sez... Next!

Z23 Juan Gonzalez

Nice card of Juan Gone in his prime. This card is so good it's on the freaking pack. The pack also shows CHIPPER coming out of it! Oh please ohplease ohPLEASE.

What the... a two dollar bill? That's random. At least I can go to Taco Bell and get lunch now. What kind of stupid card company would put MONEY in a pack of cards? It's like they know the product is crappy so they have to bribe us to buy their junk. Wait, there's a card in there too:

4 Sammy Sosa. Nice. Not the most popular guy right now but he's still a good player in my book. He's got a better shot of making the Hall than Gonzo, though it doesn't look great for either of them right now. I'm calling this a win.

Z38 Gary Sheffield

Everybody loves Gary Sheffield. It's a good thing I didn't have a vote on this joker or I would be dousing the card with lighter fluid and setting it ablaze. Wow, this card is really lumpy, what in the world could be in this thing WHOA

How the heck did a copy of Neil Gaiman's The Doll's House get in there? It doesn't seem possible unless the bloody card is a Tardis or something. I'm not complaining though, The Sandman is the shiznite. I didn't have this compilation either, so it fills a hole in my comic collection at least. But where's the card?

Ah, there it is. Inside the book. 75 Livan Hernandez. Ugh, a book of nightmares is a perfect place for this card. I know I still wake up in the middle of the night after seeing Eric Gregg calling strikes in my dreams. Time to open another pack.

Z46 Raul Mondesi

Man did he finish his career with a thud. I still remember that handful of games he played with the Braves. Ugh. Time to slice and dice, baby.

Holy crap! A Rykodisc 3 inch CD of Zomby Woof originally inserted into Guitar Magazine back in 1988! What is that doing in there?? These cards are fantastic! Well, except for the cards that is. Whoops, who's that in the gateway...

72 Bernie Williams. Well that makes sense, Bernie is known for his own jazz music. He doesn't throw in all sorts of rude, vile and un-PC humor along with it, but Frank never won any World Series rings either. Nice upgrade from Mondesi there.

Z52 Jim Edmonds

Weird. You can actually see the indentation of the inner card on the front of this one. Let's let that sucker out.

Hey, cool! My flash drive. I wondered where that thing had gone. Now I have the rest of my images for my long abandoned The 792 posts. Maybe I should fini- HEY SHINY!

SWEEET! Mike Piazza Green Epix! Awesome! Epix was a cross brand insert in Pinnacle products with Orange, Purple and Green versions. I'm not sure which one is more scarce than the others (if any) but according to my SCD this card is found in 1:11 packs. Or is that 1:11 cards? Who cares, I got the shiny!

Z15 Derek Jeter

Ooooh... this one's tough. This is a nice card of the Yankee Captain. Cool photo with him trying to tag the runner sliding into second. Ugh... should I rip this one? I just got a shiny card, I might be pressing my luck. Aw hell, I gotta do it. I still haven't gotten a Chipper yet.

Ut oh... a packet of generic Acetaminophen tablets, that's not a good sign.

Barf. 95 Shannon Stewart rookie. I shouldn't have gotten greedy on this one. Well, the Jeter is still mostly intact since I didn't rip it to bits like the packaging said. Can't win 'em all. Overall I did pretty good I think. XXX, Bernie, Sosa and a Piazza insert gives me over a 50% success ratio. And guess what...

I've got three more packs to rip whenever I get the stupid video working! WOOHOOO!!!

Till next time, keep on rippin'...

The Original Rip Card

It took ten years, but I finally found one. This is a card from the 1998 Pinnacle Zenith set. Zenith started out in 1995 as a high end product with super thick stock and a glossy foil "Yellow Brick Road" motif on the fronts. By 1997 Pinnacle had gimmicked them up by including two 8 by 10 inch jumbo cards per pack and raising the price to $10. Many of these unsold packs made their way to K-Mart repack boxes by the early aughts. The 1998 version took weird to a new level. Pinnacle sold '98 Zenith in three card packs of 5 by 7 inch jumbo cards. But inside those cards were three normal size cards, waiting to be freed from their cardboard prison. Sound like a recent Topps gimmick from Allen & Ginter? You are correct, only Pinnacle did it 8 years earlier. They promptly went out of business once they did it too.

As you can see here, there are no easy tear tabs on the back inviting you to safely open up the card, it's solid cardboard. When Pinnacle said rip, they meant RIP as in completely destroy the 5 by 7 card to get at the smaller card inside. Also unlike A&G rip cards, you weren't guaranteed a super rare card inside the larger card, Zenith base cards were found inside the larger cards along with a smattering of inserts. Obviously collectors didn't take well to the idea of destroying cards to get cards and the idea was not popular at all. This is actually the first large size '98 Zenith card I've ever seen, let alone acquired. I do have a few normal sized Zeniths and an Andruw Jones promo 5 by 7, but none with a baby card incubating inside it. I sure as heck have never seen a pack of this stuff anywhere. The very concept of these cards horrified me when I first read about them in Beckett or some such hobby mag back in the late '90s so I wouldn't have bought one anyway. Unopened boxes exist so my theory that this product was so awful it simply never hit the shelves is probably incorrect.

So now that I have it, what will I do with it? THAT IS FOR YOU TO DECIDE. I'm putting up a poll asking you, dear readers, to decide this card's fate. Should I leave it intact? Open 'er up to retrieve the card trapped within? Something else? Go and vote and I'll do whatever you say and post it Friday morning. IF there is out there some twisted individual who considers themselves a Jay Buhner SuperCollector and they just have to have an unripped Bone 5 by 7 Silver Impulse parallel then post a comment begging to spare the card from the knife. I'll let a Buhner freak have it and spoil everyone's fun, but they better step up and send me some great scans or photos of their collection, which better be epic. Otherwise it will be spindled, folded or mutilated according to the vote.

If the vote says to rip, I will not be shredding the card as the Zenith box seems to imply is the best way to go about it. Instead, I'll take an Xacto knife to the back, make a slit on the left side over on the text box and slip the card out without completely trashing the large card. A cool thing I noticed after I got it out of the shop and into my hot car is that the card is hermetically sealed and the heat caused the air inside to expand and make a little cushion in the middle of the large card. I'll probably do that again to make it easier to open the thing.

For all of you out there unsure on what to do, here are some arguments for and against ripping the card:

FOR: The cards are meant to be ripped, go for it.

AGAINST: Ripping the card ruins the value, it will no longer be mint.

FOR: This card isn't mint anyway, the edges are kind of dinged up and there's a couple of scratches on the card.

AGAINST: The large sized cards are still harder to get than the regular sized cards, mint or know. Keep it intact.

FOR: How can the large cards be harder to get than the normal cards? All the normal cards originally came from INSIDE the big cards.

AGAINST: You've seen plenty of the normal sized cards before, but no large cards. A lot of the large cards were probably destroyed, so now the large cards have a higher value in the price guide than the normal cards.

FOR: Who cares about the book value? This is 1998 Zenith, 99% of collectors have never heard of this set and wouldn't care if they had.

AGAINST: It's a difficult set to find and this card is a scarce Silver Impulse parallel seeded one in every 7 packs.

FOR: No one cares about parallels - ever - and it's not even the good Gold parallel, it's the crappy Silver one. Plus it's called Impulse, Rip it!

AGAINST: Why ruin a known scarce insert just to potentially get a lame base card of a nobody? Do you really want to destroy a good card to get a base card of Chan Ho Park or Lou Collier?

FOR: Dude, it's Jay Buhner not Griffey. No one will weep for one less Buhner card in EX condition. I'm not going to rip ot to shreds anyway, just cut a little C-Section to deliver that card. The card inside it could actually be a deadly card tumor! I could be saving Zenith Buhner's life!

AGAINST: Yeah, or you could completely screw it up and wreck the Buhner card and whatever is inside it. You're the clumsiest person I know, and I should know because I'm you. Leave well enough alone.

FOR: Chipper Jones is a base card and is in every insert set. There's a small but significant chance of pulling a Chipper.

AGAINST: Ok, I can't really argue against that. Rip the sucker with extreme prejudice.

Ok, the Lincoln - Douglas debates that surely wasn't, but you should have enough info there to make an informed decision now. Go and vote, your choice will be revealed on Friday morning.