Ha Ha! No one guessed!

The Shineeeeee Marteeeeeeeen was from Matt of Heartbreaking cards of Staggering Genius. No one guessed so he, um, wins? I suppose. He also sent these cards:

DESTROY THEM WITH LASERS

And a Frenchy jersey swatch.

Thing is I already have these, so they are going to Captain Canuck unless he specifically refuses them. Then they'll probably go to some other Braves fan. Maybe McCann Can Triple. I haven't sent her anything in a while. If she don't want 'em I suppose someone will take 'em.

Speaking of Matt, I still need to package up the card I'm sending him in return, so I'mma gonna get on that now.

Epic Trade with Sewing Machine Guy

Ok, I promised I'd show off this trade for you this weekend and I shall be true to my word. I traded all this stuff to Sewing Machine Guy. Twelve cards from the '50s, an Al Kaline sketch and cash considerations. While there were a few bonus Braves cards in the package, the centerpiece of the deal was just four cards. Here they are:

1953 Topps Allie Reynolds

Yankees form the '50s are hot commodities on the Vintage circuit for good reason. Besides the Mickeys and the Yogis and the Whiteys, even the more common cards are of some pretty great players. Take Chief here:

20-8 in 1952, 160 strikeouts, 2.07 ERA. Not too shabby. Allie came in second to Bobby Shantz in the MVP voting that year, coming ahead of teammates Mantle and Berra. His career ended after suffering a back injury in '54 and Allie came up one vote shy in the Veteran's Committee for induction to the Hall of Fame. This is one of the more iconic cards from the set and one of the harder ones to come by, especially for a bottom feeder like me.

1953 Topps Dom Dimaggio

Yes, he's You-Know-Who's brother but Dom was a pretty dang good player in his own right. Dom only played 10 full seasons due to serving in the Navy during World War Two. He held down center field pretty solidly during those ten seasons in Boston, earning seven All-Star appearances and lead the league in runs, triples and stolen bases in 1950.

This is another difficult card to find for the '53 set. Well, you can find it, but it ain't gonna be cheap. The Little Professor is wildly popular in Boston, He's a dang good player and Dom simply doesn't have a whole lot of original cards from this playing days. This one here is easily his nicest from his playing days other than maybe his 1941 Play Ball card. As a result, it's also not one you'll find in the bargain bins. The next two you will never find in any bin, bargain or otherwise.

1953 Topps Pee-Wee Reese

Oh lookie, a Hall of Famer. And a Brooklyn Dodger to boot! Dodgers are sometimes harder than Yankees because there are fans in two gigantic cities chasing after them. Not to mention all the nostalgia freaks like me who think the Dodgers should be moved back to Brooklyn.

If you want to know why I love this set so much, look at the painting on the front of the card. That's why. They should just rip the plaque off the wall at Cooperstown and tack one of these babies up on the wall in its place.

Ok, That's a pretty good trade right there. Oh, wait, I forgot. There are four cards in this trade.

1953 Topps Whitey Ford

When I put together my 1953 Topps binder, I printed out black and white copies of every card to use as placeholders until I could get my hands on a real copy. Six of those cards from the low series I printed in color and glued to card stock because they were the 'pricey' ones that I didn't think I would be seeing in a while. The six were:
Jackie, Feller, Mickey, Yogi, Satchel and Whitey.

Full disclosure: Whitey has a big crease right across the front. Additional disclosure: this card could be run over by a tank and it would still look good. When SMG offered these to me I about had a mild coronary.

So, waddya think? Did I get Renteria or Jurrjens in this trade? Before you decide, check this out:

Completed Page 1

Completed Page 2

Completed Page 3

Completed page 4.

After this trade, I am now down to needing only 7 cards for my '53 low number set. Of course three of them are Jackie Robinson, Bob Feller and Satchel Paige. The other four have their numbers retired in Yankee Monument Park. Who wants to bet I can knock it down to 4 by the end of the year?

Sketch Card #14 - 1954 Jumbo

While I feel bad about being two weeks behind on my self-imposed Card Show post schedule, I am more than two months behind in posting my sketch cards. So tonight I'll procrastinate on one by catching up on another. I could have posted one of two cards tonight, because I've been trying to post these things in chronological order but I forgot to note the date I did one of them. I went with this one just because. Here's a jumbo sized pastel sketch of a 1954 Topps Al Kaline rookie card.

This one went to Sewing Machine Guy as part of a blockbuster trade we pulled off. And this one was big. Bigger than Renteria for Jurrjens even. Bigger than the card itself, which is 8 inches by 6 inches, a tad larger than the real '54 Kaline. This is to date the biggest thing I've created to send off to another collector although I'm in the middle of a project that will beat it. So how did this sucker get so big? Like this:

Most of the time when I'm doing a sketch card for someone I'll to a practice sketch first to figure out what the heck I'm doing before I try to do it for reals. So I pulled out the sketch book, started drawing and really liked what I did on the first go. It wasn't exactly perfect. Al is leaning to his right a tad and the Tiger logo (somehow I've managed to draw that thing twice so far) is a little derped. But it looked pretty darn good and was big enough for me to do a little experimenting with my soft pastels. So, even though I had already pulled out my ruler and made a page full of '50s Topps sized blanks to draw the final product upon, I ripped out the page instead and started scratching away with the pastels.

Did I mention pastels are messy as hell? Colored dust EVERYWHERE. My blue jeans became purple from all the red dust from that background. I wasn't finished though, there's more work to be done.

Even though it was now practically a painting, I still wanted to create a sketch card, so the whole shebang got glued to the card stock I was going to use for the standard sized card. While letting it dry it got slightly smudged sooooo:

I touched up the details a bit, spritzed it with some fixer and pulled out the X-Acto knife and did a little trimming. Once completely dry, I put it in an oversized top loader. This way it would be protected and hopefully thwart some of the curling that was going on. Soon after I tackled this, I started messing with acrylics, so I haven't done a whole lot more with pastels, although I have one project in mind.

All righty then. There's the sketch portion of the blockbuster trade. What about the cards? SMG requested some Tigers from the '50s in his original offer so I pulled these out of my binders and sent them his way.

In order: 1950 Bowman Aaron Robinson, 1951  Bowman  Bob Cain, 1952  Bowman  Bob Swift, 1955 Bowman Bill Tuttle, 1956 Topps Duke Maas, 1955 Bowman Dick Stanfel, 1954 Bowman Fred Hatfield, 1954 Topps Ray Boone.

BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE

1955 Topps Bob Miller, 1958 Topps Tigers Team, 1952 Topps Marlin Stewart and 1957 Topps Billy Hoeft. I scanned all the backs of the cards to record the card numbers so I could add them back to my want lists.

You read that right, I pulled these out of my sets to send to SMG for the stuff he had to offer. Oh yeah, I also sent along cash in the deal. Good Grief! Did I get Edgar Renteria for all this? Rest assured, I got Jurrjens. So what did I end up with in exchange for all this stuff? You'll find out later this weekend...

Half a set of Game cards

This week in posting has gone disastrously, so I'm going to write it off and finish up with a post I should have had up last year. At least I'll have caught up a little! I don't remember exactly what I traded to The Cardboard Don for these things. I'm pretty sure a relic was in there somewhere. I do remember the sketch card though, but I'm behind on posting that one too...

Ah well. one thing at a time. Here's half a set of 1970-71 Topps Baseball Scratch Off Game cards.

UGGGGH. Tim McCarver would have to be the first one out of the package.  These cards were inserts inside packs of 1970 and 1971 Topps. There were 24 cards, one "Team Captain" per team. I have no idea which team gets the privilege of boasting Tim as their team captain because he's such a team player he didn't bother to wear a cap on this card. I suppose I could look it up, but with Google's new policy on combining history among all Google accounts, I'm afraid to have "Tim McCarver" in my search history. My demographics are fairly well calibrated at Male, 25-34 (YESSSSSS) Interests: Sports Memorabilia, Cartoons, Art & Design, Stupid My Little Pony crap on YouTube (the stupider the better!), Armchair SOPA Activism and Showtunes. I can't risk messing that up and getting targeted ads for Tim's latest book.

MUCH BETTER. Mack Jones, team captain of the Expos. I miss the Expos. They didn't have as much money as the Nationals do.

Sal Bando, captain of the A's. People get all caught up in Reggie and forget Sal was a helluva player.

Here's two Tony Perez cards, but they are not doubles. How can this be? While Topps completely recycled this insert in 1971 right down to the players they put on the cards, they did make one change to the set:

The centers for 1970 inserts had a white background.

The centers for 1970 inserts had a red background. I got one of each for Tony. Not that I'm going to try to collect all 48 varieties of this set, hell no. I'm not even picky if the suckers have backs to them, which some of them do not.

Like this Boog Powell card here. The back half is completely ripped off. I ain't even mad. If you've seen one back to these things you've seen 'em all. Like this one here:

The Reds stole one from the A's in the 8th inning according to the back of this '71 Tony Perez card. Every single card has this exact back (minus the added scoring of course) so who cares if you only have half the card. This isn't exactly a condition sensitive set. A game card that came out of a fresh 1970 pack opened in a clean room would still only grade a PSA 4, tops. These things were never mint, ever.

Here's an awesome '70  Yastrzemski with bonus Killebrew!

Well speak of the devil... Here's full Harmon, with a little schmutz on the front. I can't tell exactly what that is. Might be a printing flaw or the card might have gotten run over by a bicycle that just rolled through hot tar. It's hard to tell.

Mel Stottlemyre was team captain of the Yankees? Wow, did their fortunes fall in the early '70s.

Nate Colbert joined Boog as a member of the 50% off club. Nate's missing back is a little more obvious on this scan.

Future Brave Jimmy Wynn is the captain of the 'stros. WHO BETTER REMAIN THE 'STROS. I can handle the Houston Astros in the American League, but not the Houston Oilers or the Houston Gamblers or the Houston Swamp Rats or whatever polls well in focus group testing. The only DECENT name they could possible change to is the Houston Colt '45s which would be promptly kiboshed because omg gun violence. Dammit Bud! Quit screwing up the game!

Dick Bosman got to be captain of the Senators as well as a coaster for an 8 oz. coke bottle.

 Last but not least is Lou Piniella, who is also not wearing a cap, but as anyone who has read Ball Four a couple dozen times knows, he was dumped from the Seattle Pilots and went on to win Rookie of the Year for the Royals. Lou is also one of the cards I got with pristine innards:

Damn, that's purdy. Maybe I should reconsider my position on Tiptons just for this set. Thanks be to the Don for this trade, I hope the return was deeemed acceptable. I'd hate to wake up to find a pony head in my bed.

Package from Scott

I promised I'd show off the sketch that Scott sent and I'mma do it. But I asked for three cards and he sent thirteen so I have to figure out what to do with the other ten. I know, I'll show 'em off here! Check out my cards.

 
A couple off the '76 wantlist.

Topps205 of Hall of Famer Larkin. I don't need this one for the set, but I have plans for it.

Three Braves reprints from the classic Dover reprint books by Burt Sugar. I already have these in book form and in separated form, but Lopez is going to be a filler in my Braves binder.

Three minor league cards from the '80s including long time trainer Sam Ayoub.

Jermaine Dye minor league auto. I swear I have this already but I can't find it. I'm completely disorganized right now because I've been too busy

POSTING PONIES



(this one was a dirty trick)

The best trade I have ever made

This weekend I pulled off a masterful trade on the Transmogrifier Mark 2. Words cannot describe the brilliance of this deal so I'll just let the pictures speak for themselves. I traded this:

Waddya mean it's too small? Ok, fine, here's my part of the trade in bite sized chunks.

1967 Jim Pagmiaroni
1969 Johnny Edwards
1973 Paul Splittorff

1973 Danny Walton
1974 Dave LaRoche
1975 Tommy Davis

1976 Tony Taylor
1978 Earl Weaver
1978 Larry Barlow

1979 Rick Langford, Eduardo Rodriguez and Larry Milbourne

1979 Paul Thormodsgard
1979 All Time ERA Leaders
1980 Derrel Thomas

1980 Larry Christenson, Roger Freed and Mike Heath

1983 Joe Nolan, Greg Luzinski and Ron Hodges

1985 Billy Gardner
1985 Steve Carlton
1986 Enos Cabell

1987 Charlie Hough
1992 Edgar Martinez
1994 Pedro Martinez

1994 Ken Hill
1994 Orel Hershiser
1997 Derek Bell

2001 Manny Ramirez
2009 Kenji Johjima

I trade all this crap for this... this beauteous thing...

BEHOLD: 

MAH COOKIE 

PART TWO

ELECTRIC COOKIELOO

Proof for the doubtful:

Who the hell is Jim Pagmiaroni

If you wanted any of these cards I traded off, sorry. this was a last ditch effort to get a cookie. And a Cookie I did got. Cookie Rojas isn't the reason I'm so happy with this trade though. It's because 

I'M FREE

No more Transmogrifier. 

Ever. 

No more offers of a 1987 George Brett for my Brian McCann Die-Cut. Ever. 

I'm done. Shipping has been requested and I am out of cards and codes. I do have 45 rings left to trade. There's a perverse part of my soul that wants to try to collect 45 Braves rings, but I shall resist. 

I am free. FOREVER.