The Lost Box of Total Awesomeness - This is the Awesome Part

We are at the climax, the crescendo, the pinnacle, the apex, the summit, the zenith, the absolute height of Awesome, the grand finale. This is the reason I flipped out over finding this box. This is the reason I wrote all these dang posts. This is melting nazis, Rocky screaming for Adrian, the crowd at the Astrodome chanting "Let them play!", Return of the King finally ending, the Death Star blowing up, everyone showing up at George Bailey's house to give him some money, the stuff dreams are made of, Dr. Strangelove walking, Nemo finding his dad, the start of a beautiful friendship, Willie Mays Hayes sliding into home and "You met me at a very strange time in my life" all rolled into a pile of old baseball cards.

But first, let's recap this box.

The box itself and random stuff
A big pile of Braves
A whole bunch of Topps
Even more bloody Topps
More Topps, all 1984 this time
Box Bottoms
1987 Topps
Two Packs
Finally, some Fleer
Fleer Ultra
Old Donruss
Score and Upper Deck
Topps Venezuela issue
60's Oddball stuff

And now this.

The thing you've all been waiting for.

TEH AWESOEM

1959 Fleer Ted Williams

Twenty-Six of Them

Background on this: A very large chunk of my vintage Topps collection was aqcuired in the '80s at a card shop called Atlanta Sports Cards. They would sell bricks of old junky commons for a few bucks each, and every time I went I'd scrounge through it and pick up some old cards from the 60's and 70's. Very rarely they'd have some from the 50's, usually dirt commons in bad condition. Almost never was there a brick with a superstar or Hall of Famer showing on the top. One time tough, this was in the box. A pile of '59 Fleer Ted Williams cards. It was something like 7 or 8 bucks, which was what I normally paid for three or four bricks, not just one. But it was TED FREAKING WILLIAMS. Now, back then, this was not a sought after set by any means. A card investment guide from 1988 lists its prospects as "Below Average" due to the focus on one player and all the non-baseball subjects in the set. But it was TED FREAKING WILLIAMS. Hall of Famers like Mantle, Mays, Aaron and Williams were normally completely out of my price range and here I got 26 of them in one fell swoop.

I got the brick, drooled over the old Ted Williams cards and then one day they vanished. I looked everywhere for those damn cards and I couldn't find a single one. It was frustrating as hell and I was almost certain that I had lost them in a move or something. I was afraid to buy more because I couldn't remember which ones I had. I eventually got one, but it was in terrible condition and cost more than the original brick cost. So after I had given up on ever finding these cards again, I found them. And flipped out. And wrote fifteen posts about it. Using the word "awesome" 1,782 times in the process. AWESOME.

And now you know the rest of the story...

Here's all the cards in a big pile, soon I'm going to do a post on each one. It's a great set and I can milk it for 26 more posts easy. I hope you enjoyed the awesome, I have one more post for you this weekend to tie up some loose ends. Enjoy...

The Lost Box of Total Awesomeness - Almost forgot about these

Venezuelan Topps cards from the '60s is pretty awesome but I have much more awesomeness in store. Here's some oddball stuff from the '60s to lay the foundation and prepare you for the ultimate awesomeness that is ahead. Oddballs ahoy!

1968 Topps Game Al Kaline

Topps oddballs from the '60s are great ways to find cheap cards of stars. Some of them look great, others not so much. This set from 1968 is cool in many ways. They are unique, they look pretty good, they are not scarce and they can be found fairly cheaply. Even the Mantle is affordable. Plus you can play a baseball game with them if you are so inclined.

This card might be one of the first cards in my collection. My mom traveled for work a ton when I was a kid. On a trip to Boston, she found a couple of sheets of Al Kaline cards at an antique store and brought them home for me. I was pretty stunned by all these old cards from the' 60s and '70s and even moreso when I found out Al was a Hall of Famer. As a nerdy little child, I was also bemused that his name was a chemical term. One of the cards in the lot was a game card like this. I have two of them, so I don't know if this one the original one or one I picked up later, but it's a cool reminder of the cards that first got me fascinated by old Topps cards.

1963 Jell-o Roy Sievers

1963 Post Robin Roberts

Here's a couple of food oddballs. Post Cereal and Jell-o cards are another great way to get stars from the early '60s for cheap. The jagged edges from the scissors of spazzy kids all hopped up on sugary cereal and Jell-o scare away the gem mint PSA crowd and they are just ugly enough to be ignored by the mainstream. I love cards that you have to cut off boxes. These from the '60s, Hostess cards from the '70s, box bottom cards from the '80s... The soul of card collecting died a little bit when there were no cards to cut off of other things in the '90s and today. These two cards look almost exactly alike, so how can I tell which is the Jell-o and which is the Post card? Here's a scan of the two together:

As you can see, the Sievers card is just a tiny bit smaller than the Roberts. Post cards came on large boxes where four or five cards could spread out. Jello boxes are tiny and they had to squash the card to fit on that little box. The other giveaway is the red line in the stats. On the Jell-o box it ends abruptly, while on the Post box it extends almost to the border. Just looking at these cards makes me want to pull out some scissors and cut some cardboard really bad.

1960 Fleer Warren Giles

1960 Fleer Harry Heilmann

These are two more cards I've had forever. I don't remember where I got them, I just remember them always being around. Heilmann is a Hall of Fame outfielder for the Tigers from the Ty Cobb era. He was a great hitter, but no one seems to remember him at all today. He also has the honor of being the first player to hit a home run in every major league stadium during his career (granted, there were only 16 stadiums at the time). Heilmann is cool to anyone familiar with baseball history, but Warren Giles is not a card anyone would be really interested in. Who wants a card of the National League president? When I was a kid I was torn between the coolness of having an old card and the lameness of it having an old fat guy in a suit on it. It doesn't help that the 1960 Fleer set is among the ugliest of all time. The border "corners" are just stupid. The pictures look like they are all black & white photos that were tinted after the fact, so the colors on them can be quite bizarre. Also several of the old timers have photos on their cards that were taken in the '50s and not during their playing days. As a result there are several geezers on trading cards that look like they should be playing bridge instead of baseball. Still, they are old dang cards and some good history for one of the hobby's great manufacturers.

UP NEXT: You'll see...

The Lost Box of Total Awesomeness - ¿Qué?

Ok, after long last we have truly stepped in the realm of TOTALLY FREAKING AWESOME. This is the part of the movie where Danny putts, the Sta-Puft Marshmallow man shows up, Han Solo swoops in and shoots Vader's ship and the evil nazi dude opens the ark. We have now reached the portion of the box with...

OLD TOPPS CARDS

Yeaaaaaaaah boooooooooy! You thought I was blowing smoke up yer arse with all this awesome talk eh? See, I told you this box was awesome. There are no less than 53 cards in the box from the years 1959 to 1968. Finding just that right there, without all the other stuff in there too, is undeniably grade-A certified Total Awesome.

Here's how I got all the cards in this post. Back in 1987, I got a birthday gift from my aunt. The gift was two tapes; The Joshua Tree by U2, and Elton John's Greatest Hits. She got the U2 because the guy at the store said that's what teenage boys were listening to then, and Elton John was her favorite artist. Let's just say I was not entirely interested in these musical choices. I didn't start liking U2 until college and Elton, um, I wasn't really into the "Sad Songs Say So Much" era of Elton. I took them back to the mall to trade them in for some Weird Al or maybe a George Carlin tape and lo and behold, there was a card show that day! Forget music, I wanted cards. I return them both and get 25 bucks in my greedy little hands. I go out to check out the tables and this guy comes up out of nowhere and offers me a 1953 Jackie Robinson card for 25 bucks. I turned him down and he want away, never to be seen again. This is one of the great regrets in my life. In my defense, he wasn't a seller at the show, just some guy. For all I knew he had just pilfered the card off a table and if I had bought it I could have been thrown in the pokey for being a card thief. Besides, I only had three bucks in my pocket and I wanted to check out all the tables. Really, scrounging around the cards at every single table is the true joy of going to a card show. So I turned him down. I missed out on a 1953 Jackie Robinson card. I am such an idiot.

Anyway, ennui aside, I now had free reign to look around at all the tables. One guy had 100 count plastic boxes filled with cards for a couple of bucks each. This is my kind of deal. I looked at every one of them, most were filled with cards from the '80s but there was one Dodgers box that had an older card on top. I recognized it was from the '60s and there apopeared to be more of them in the box. I grabbed it along with a couple more of those boxes and paid the man. I also found a few cards here and there, maybe even some packs and blew threw my birthday money at the show. A big pile of cards was much better than one Jackie Robinson card* which was a hell of a lot better than a couple of tapes. Here are the old cards from that box.

Six 1962 Topps cards

#11 Tom Morgan - This is the only LA Angel in this post. I'm not sure how he was able to sneak into the Dodgers box.

#32 John Roseboro - Al all-Star cather for the Dodgers, he's best remembered nowadays for his fight with Juan Marichal.


#108 Willie Davis - Longtime Dodger center fielder who had speed and power.

#175 Frank Howard - He is remembered more for being the Washington Senators' slugging All-Star, but Frank started his career with the Dodgers.

#190 Wally Moon - A charter member of the National Eyebrows Hall of Fame. Oh, he could hit a ton, too.

The 1962 sets is one of the great ones and these are some really solid Dodger players from that set. Let's check out the cartoon on the back of Wally's card:

Sera.. Sera... SE FUE!

Wait, what???

That's Spanish! These cards are in Spanish! What the hell is going on around here?

Did you know that in 1959, 1960, 1962, 1964, 1966, 1967 and 1968 Topps made cards for sale in Venezuela?

Well you do now. All the old cards from the '60s in that grab box were Venezuelan issues. I guess the dealer thought he was pulling a fast one by fooling me with these oddball cards instead of the real things. Boy, was I a dope! Of course nowadays these cards are much much harder to find than the regular 1962s and they book for about 10 times more than a common card. Here's another back:

Aww, these cards were owned by Oswaldo. Thanks Ozzie, I've taken good care of your cards. Except for the whole "losing them in the basement for 10 years" thing. Here's some more Venezuelan cards:

Fourteen 1964 Topps Venezuela cards

#14 Dick Nen & Nick Willhite Rookie stars - Nen played 6 seasons for a .224 career batting average, Willhite pitched 4 years and ended up with a 6-12 record.

#51 Pete Richert - Pete hung around the league as a reliever long enough to win a World Series with Baltimore in 1970.

#101 Walt Alston - Hall of Fame manager for Dem Bums won 4 World Series including the only one in Brooklyn.

#137 - 1963 World Series Game 2 - Willie Davis hits a 2 run double in the first inning at Yankee Stadium, which is all the Dodgers needed that day.

#138 - 1963 World Series Game 3 - Jim Bouton and Don Drysdale have an epic pitching battle as the Dodgers win 1-0.

#140 World Series Champs - A recap of the Dodgers' sweep of the Yanks.

#214 Ken McMullen - Ken wasn't a great third baseman, but he was good enough to play for 16 years.

#291 Phil Ortega - The Dodgers must have had a special one way flight from LA to Washington, because this is the third or fourth player in this group who played for both the Dodgers and the Senators.

#353 Wally Moon - Just. Look. At. Those. Beautiful. EYEBROWS!!! They're like Groucho Marx, Frank Zappa and Brooke Shields all rolled into one!

The 1962 set was the only Venezuelan product that was printed in Spanish. 1964 Venezuela is easily differentiated from the American set by the back:

Instead of having a pink back, the cards are printed in black and white. Instead of a scratch off answer to a trivia question, the answers are printed in red:

Oddly enough it still has instructions to rub a coin over the answer to reveal. This is a neat way to see the answers to the questions without scratching up all your old '64 cards. These were the cards that really freaked me out when I opened the grab box. I didn't even notice the Spanish at first but it's impossible to mistake black the black backs. I thought I had gotten robbed at first and had gotten counterfeit cards, but the Spanish on the '62s tipped me off that these were some oddball issue. There's one more set of Venezuelan cards to show off:

Two 1962 Topps Venezuela cards

#13 Lou Johnson - I only got Lou from the '66 set. This set is really tricky. Check out the back:

This is the big difference between the 1966 American and Venezuelan sets: No gloss on the front and the ink on the back is a little bit darker. That's it. Other than that they are identical other than the 15x book prices. If I hadn't gotten the other ones in the box that were obviously not normal I would never have noticed these. So of you have any weird looking '66 cards that are dark with no gloss you might have a Venezuelan card.

If there are any hard core Dodger collectors or aficionados of Venezuelan cards out there I do have a few doubles I could trade. If you offer me something I need from here, I'll be all ears. I'm probably never going to see another one of these cards as long as I live though, so super serious collectors only.

So was that Awesome enough for you? Was that the Awesomest? YOU AIN'T SEEN NOTHING YET! I have something coming up for you that will amaze and astound you. But first, a few cards to warm you up. Up Next - SIXTIES ODDBALLS.

* OH I AM SUCH A FOOL

The Lost Box of Total Awesomeness - A Little Randomness

I have decided to wrap this box up by this weekend. It's a good way to lead in to the Olympics. A lead in of AWESOME. We're right at the climax now, big things are about to happen. Just a few last things to tie up plot wise before The Big Finale. We've seen the Topps, Fleer and Donruss cards, time for Score and Upper Deck.

Seven 1990 Score cards

It's kind of weird to think now that this set was too expensive for me back in 1990. I couldn't find a pack of it for less than $1.25, and that's if I could find it. Now I can pick it up for a song. Hmm. Maybe I should snag a box one of these days. I've never actually pulled a Thomas rookie out of a pack, that would be kind of fun. Here's all seven cards for your approval:

2 Cal Ripken, Jr.

Nice looking card of Cal. The back mentions that he just passed Steve Garvey for the third longest consecutive games played streak in history. He had played in 1315 games in his career at that point.

300 Will Clark

Quote from Terry Kennedy about Will the Thrill's swing: "He's even stylish when he punches out. He truly has a classic swing."

410 Dave Stewart

I didn't realize Dave was born in Oakland. You can see three straight years with 20 wins for Dave on the back.

586 Deion Sanders rookie

Not nearly as good as Prime Time's 1989 Score rookie, but I'll take it.

609 Mike Stanton rookie

Only 74 games behind Orosco on the all time games pitched list, but no one has picked up the lefty so far this year.

631 Larry Walker rookie

Has he really been retired for three years? It's nice to see Larry in a 'Spos uniform.

675 Maurice Vaughn 1st Round Pick

How does one effectively convey a wolf whistle on the internet? I'm dying to whip out the Steve Miller reference on this card.

Three Upper Deck cards

Just three UD cards in the box for some reason. They're all good though.

1990 #63 Kent Mercker Star Rookie

Kent's still in the league! He's on the 60-day DL, but that counts. This is his real live rookie card too.

1993 #1 Star Rookie checklist

Now that's the way to open up a set! The 1993 Upper Deck set is incredible. Check out the checklist on the back:

Two probable Hall of Famers in Piazza and Chipper, plus quite a few legit MLB players like Salmon, Snow and Javy. And this doesn't even include Derek Jeter, who was put in Series Two's Star Rookies. Ok, so there's Rene Arocha and Nigel Wilson cluttering things up, but no set has ever bat 1.000 on their rookie subset.

1994 #12 Cliff Floyd Star Rookie

Cliff's having quite a comeback down in Tampa this year. I wouldn't mind seeing the Rays win the division just to stick it up the Sox and Yankees' butt for once.

10 cards, 10 wins. That is just the appetizer for the Awesome that awaits... Up next: OLD STUFF.

The Lost Box of Total Awesomeness - Desperately Trying To Make Donruss Awesome

Ok, this sucker needs to be put to bed already. There are thankfully only four more posts after this one. And then you will truly know the Awesome. In the meantime here's some old Donruss.

30 1981 Donruss cards

Give or take a couple because the cards don't really want to slide against each other easily. They're not really sticking together, they just don't like being moved. They're all pretty beat up and most are slightly different sizes from all the others. Here's five for your enjoyment, because I don't want to scan six.

That collar scared the bejeezus out of me. Then I saw the socks.

I want to know how in the world the photographer set up the lighting for this picture. Mike's uniform has to be radioactive or something.

If you want a baseball cap that has scrambled eggs on the bill on a trading card pretty much your only options are the 1970 Seattle Pilots cards and this one. Man, I want one of them hats.

It's completely stupid, but I'll never get over the novelty of Danny Ainge on a baseball card.

Compared to the other photo disasters on '81 Donruss cards (and I left out some real doozies) This card of Mookie as actually quite good looking. Comparatively speaking.

4 1982 Donruss cards

Rickey Keeton becomes spokesman for this small group by virtue of the 'stache. Moving on...

28 1983 Donruss cards

This is definitely the best group of the bunch. That's not saying a whole lot though.

The quest for perfect sideburns.

Kirk rockin' the 'stache. There are a ton of mustaches in '83 Donruss.

Nice card of Hawk getting a hit. There's a lot of cool cards in this pile.

Aaaaand the coolness dies a horrible death.

I've developed a loathing for Joe Morgan that I normally reserve for politicians and short printed cards.

1 1987 Donruss card

Completely skipped over '84-'86. Not awesome. The "total awesomness" moniker I hung on this box is being tested sorely by the Donruss suck.

2 1989 Donruss cards

Zero 1988 Donruss cards = Awesome! More awesomerest than that is Dick Perez' rendition of the Sabo Specs.

2 1990 Donruss cards

Which would you rather see: a bent 1990 Donruss Joe Girardi card or Tony Gwynn. That's what I thought.

1 1991 Donruss card

I hate the green borders of this set with a passion. When you sit down and really think about it though, the blue borders are pretty awful too. Eh, it's Dave Justice. MVP!


I was planning to post this on A Pack A Day, but this post is very, very close to having the entire box lose its Awesome label and It needs a little oomph. When you see what's up soon, you'll agree that it would be a complete shame to mess up the awesome. So here for your edification...

A Coca-Cola Nolan Ryan 1992 Donruss Pack

16 of 26 Nolan Ryan

There was one of these packs in every 12 pack of Coke, Diet Coke and probably a couple other flavors. Each packhad only one Nolan card in it. With my caffeine addiction I think I had the complete set within three weeks.

364 Bill Spiers

I'm forever blowing bubbles........

369 Brett Butler

During the late '80s The Braves' outfield was so incredibly bad that I rewrote history in my mind so that the Len Barker trade never happened. As far as I was concerned Brett was out in center field for the Braves instead of Terry Harper or Oddibe McDowell. As a result I collected Brett's cards and simply refused to acknowledge the logo on his uniform.

375 Paul Gibson.

Another player whose glasses were half the size of their head. Just think of Bogener's card with a Detroit D on the cap and you're good. Here's the back of Nolan's card instead.

This post was really scraping the absolute dregs of Awesome. I promise the next three posts will increase the Awesome quotient exponentially. I know there are those out there that scoff, "this is not awesome, this is teh suck" but the unbelievers will soon repent.

Next up: RANDOMNESS.