First pack of 2013

Topps is hyping the hell out of Series 1, but they got beat to the punch for the first baseball set released in 2013. Phungo Cards are back for another year! I know for a fact that Night Owl got a pack, not sure who else may have laid their hands on one. Forget all that SP nonsense in Topps flagship, this is some serious exclusive distributity right here!

My scanner is having some network difficulties and I taped the wrapper to the wall of my office already so I don't actually have a good picture of it. Oh well. Let's look at the cards.

Hunter Pence. Blah. Playing for the Giants! Double blah. Posey was out. This is a great example of super close cropping in order to hide the fact that the player was traded. You used to see this all over sets in the '70s, but nowadays if there's a big trade Topps will just SSSSP the card to drive team collectors insane.

OH GAWD. First a Giant, now a Cardinal. Carlos is an outfielder or in Turner Field, a shortstop. This is a poor start to the pack. If I didn't know any better I'd think they were put there on purpose. But Phungo packs are totally random and a Philly fan would never torment a Braves fan like that anyway.

NOW WE'RE TALKING! J-Hey! I loves me some J-Hey. I really need to go on COMC and scarf up all his cards while they are relatively cheap like I didn't do with Kris Medlen's cards last year. You can't even find a Medlen card anywhere anymore. Kris is going 30-0 in 2013 with a 0.42 ERA so I guess I missed the boat on that one.

CHIPPAH!!! Even the Philly Fans appreciate the Chippah. Hopefully Chipper continues to tweet madness about the Braves throughout 2013 and beyond. He's still tweeting madness this offseason but the ratio of baseball tweets to animal carcasses is much higher.

MOJO! Insert card of Padrographs and Mr. Phungo himself. Phungo may homebrew baseball card sets, but Padrographs has a mighty epic beard right there. Not sure who the winner is in that contest.

Phungo packs always have buyback cards. Here's a Bowman's Best Chippah card that is much much shinier and much MUCH Yellower in person.

Here's a super shiny Tyler Pastornipples Chrome Xfractor thingy from 2012 Bowman Platinum. It's not a rookie card even though he was a rookie last year because Bowman. Apparently there are at least three versions minimum on these prospect cards with plain foil, Chrome refractor and this Xfractor which has a vaguely squarish pattern when scanned but looks like you just lost a game of Yar's Revenge in real life.

Anothah Chippah! CHIPPAH HOT PACK! This one is from the 2012 Archives set with the nifty 1971 Topps design which just flat out does not look right on white thin card stock with no dinks and scratches and bad corners on the black border. Archives is what Lineage should have been. Actually it's what the entire 2012 Topps lineup should have been as it is seemingly the only '12 Topps product that is not on clearance at Target right now.

Vintage! Hokey Smoke it's a 1963 Topps HIGH number card! '63 high numbers are just as hard to find as those ugly ass artificially scarce '12 Heritage super short prints with the black & white and color photos reversed. Who's idea was that? Frank Bolling manned second for the Braves from '61 to '66 and was a two-time All-Star with the Braves. Sadly Frank's brother Milt passed away this past weekend.

'63 High number in a Phungo pack? Not sure how I can beat this.

*twitches*

*collapses*

~dies~

I refuse to make an immature joke in the title of this post.

I got no problem doing it in the body of the post.

HAY GUISE WANNA SEE MAH BALLS???

Of course you do, everyone wants to see my balls. Except my wife. She wants 'em downstairs with the rest of my useless junk. That was like a quadruple entendre there, but I digress. Fuji wants to see my balls, and I want him to give me some pussy, so you're gonna see my balls whether you want to or not.

One of the great collecting feats I've accomplished in my life was getting autographed baseballs from every Brave whose number was retired, not counting Jackie Robinson. This feat has been blown completely out of the water in the past few years since Atlanta is now in the process of retiring the number everyone who was on the team in 1995. But at one point, I had actually achieved this goal. Here's my balls, badly photographed because all my cameras suck ass at the moment.

First autographed ball I picked up ever was this Phil Niekro ball. I was working down in Conyers at the time and there was a little hole in the wall baseball card shop in a strip mall that I would check out from time to time. Lots of cheap Braves singles, not much else. One day they had this ball in the shop for $25. Phil's one of my favorites so I picked it up. I must have gotten this in late '97, since it has the H.O.F. - 97 inscription on it and I left that job that year. I didn't realize until after I bought it that it was an American League ball, but oh well, it's a Knucksie.

In the early '00s I was swimming in money (no kids!) so I splurged on this Eddie Mathews ball. Got this one at BP Sports down in Marietta. It was surprisingly inexpensive for a Hall of Famer 500 home run club auto but still more than I was accustomed to spending at the time. In retrospect, I wish I had taken a tenth of the money I blew on early 'aughts wax and dropped it on stuff like this instead.

The kids started showing up so I was no longer flush with cash. I found this Hank Aaron ball on Yahoo! auctions (anyone remember them?) for $50 and convinced my grandmother to make it my birthday present. The great thing about this pickup is that the card in the plastic case on the right was originally a 1958 Topps Hank Aaron All-Star card. It has since been replaced with the 1994 Topps gold card you see here. These ball stands suck by the way, the card holder broke and it was hard as hell to replace. the ball also falls out constantly unless you scotch tape the holder. Maybe I just got a crappy one, I dunno. The stuff inside the holder was more than worth it though.

Another birthday, another ball. I opted for the Warren Spahn ball this time which was a good thing because Warren sadly passed away the year after I got this one and the vultures came out and jacked the prices up. I also got this one from BP sports. On either the Spahn or the Mathews I forgot to get a COA, but I can't remember which. It doesn't really matter because I can't find the one COA I have anyway. I don't even care anymore because with all the shenanigans going on in the hobby 99% of everything is probably fake anyway. Including the stuff I got signed in person.

Dale Murphy capped off the retired number collection.  I got this one in 2007 for my birthday and was my second to last birthday present that I received from my grandmother. The ball was was purchased from Champion Sports Cards in Kennesaw which is my official LCS. This one is inscribed NL MVP 82, 83. Eventually I will pick up one that reads Dale Murphy - HOF but we'll have to wait for the veteran's committee for that one.

Since I got these balls, Maddux, Glavine, Bobby and Smoltz have gotten their numbers retired. Chipper's gonna get his retired next year. I knocked out these in ten years, you think I can knock out the next five in another ten?

Mailday isn't as fun without the impending dread

I keep getting packages without Bips. I guess I scared everyone off with my threats of using the Nuclear Option. Don't fear the Bipper, besides my aresnal of enough Todd Helton cards to cover Coors Field just landed upon a certain Rutgers grad. One of these packages was expected, the other came out of the blue. Since I'm already horribly behind and the next 72 hours look insanely busy I'll get these two out of the way quickly with my one card rule.

Robby from Detroit Tigers Cards and Stuff offered a 2010 Topps insert trade on his blog and I bit. The meat of the trade will be posted in its entirety in a seperate post, but he also threw in a couple of other things. I'm bending my one card rule in this case as I have to post them both or I shall die. Here's the first:

Eddie Mathews '57 Championship Patch

 

My first 2010 patch and my first patch with a Brave on it period. The patch is a bit, um, looser than the ones last year though. I friggin love this card, but I still don't think I'll be getting any 2010 Topps blasters until they start hitting the 50% off bins.

Chipper Jones '51 Red Back

i didn't even know that Chipper was in the Red back set until Robby offered it up to me in the deal. I really really like this set even though Topps already did it in a Bowman Heritage release a few years ago. Igot one question for Topps though... Balk?? Really?

Chris from Project '62 also sent me a package of coolness even though Mr. Roberts was nowhere to be seen. The items were pretty random, but this O-Pee-Chee card stuck out to me:

I like the way this Glavine card turned out, extreeeeme closeup and all. It kinda sucks for him how his career ended but when you think about it, it was either him or Tommy Hanson getting called up. I've gotten mostly over my Glavine Mets Derangement Syndrome, and that's a good thing too. Now that Tom is in the front office I give it about ten years before he's sitting in the GM's chair for the Braves. In the interest of equality, here's a second item from the package.

Awwww YEAH. Donkey Kong Fever, baby. Three stickers and rub off cards. I just about rubbed off when I saw this. Forget the Wiebe auto, I coveted this pack even more in his contest. Looks like #23 was my lucky number! Methinks this pack may make it into a future video break...

Thanks guys!

1388

With a bop against Doug Davis last night this guy:

tied this guy:

for second place on the Braves' all-time RBI list with 1388 runs batted in.

One more ribbie and Chipper will be all alone in second place. If he can managed to keep playing until 2020, he might have a shot at passing Hank, who has 2202 RBIs.

While we're on the subject of all-time great third basemen, Tim Kurkjien has a nifty article about the hot corner.

I Love It When A Plan Comes Together

While I didn't actually write any of them down, I have several collecting goals for 2007 that I've more or less completed. Complete the 2007 Topps set - check, complete the Allen & Ginter set - one card away, get the Topps stuff organized and want lists together - kinda check, work on the blog - double check. Another goal I had on the front burner was to complete some of my Braves team sets. Specifically I wanted to finish off at least one per decade. I did a pretty good job on that goal as I knocked out a bunch of 80's traded sets, 1977 Topps (with some auto'd cards no less), 1969 with Felipe Alou and I completed the 1953 set by finally tracking down a Warren Spahn. Anything more was a bonus, and that bonus arrived in the mail yesterday:

A gorgeous 1956 Topps Eddie Mathews card, the last one I needed for my '56 Topps team set. After the 1953 set, 1956 Topps is probably my next favorite set from Topps. A lot of people prefer the 1955 edition with the bright colors and the logo, but I think the action shots look much better in 1956. The photo here is spectacular, it appears that Eddie has just clobbered Pee-Wee Reese at second base. Eddie takes his base as poor Pee-Wee is sprawled out writhing on the ground while the ball is a yard away. The other two Hall of Famers have cool action pics as well. Hank has the famous Willie Mays sliding into home goof on his card, while Spahnie looks like a Greek God straddling Mount Olympus on his.

Now technically, I don't have a complete complete team set as I don't have the rare "1955" team card variety although I do have the left and center versions. I also don't have any of the 1956 Topps pins or the Warren Spahn Hocus Focus card either. It's still a team set though, I can work on the rarities and oddballs later. Here it is in all its glory (click to view a large version).