31 March 2014

Goodies from LCS (part one)

Went to my LCS - House of Cards Silver Spring, MD on Saturday (29 Mar)


Picked up a bunch of stuff I had mentioned here the main focus of that post of course was the Team Set. The main focus of this post is the 8 Senators cards I picked up including that Upgrade of the '65 Don Blasingame. So lets get to the cards:

As I said I picked up an upgraded copy of the 1965 Topps Baseball 21 Don Blasingame, got it for $2

Card #2 is the only card that is older a 1960 Topps Baseball 470 Washington Senators Coaches: Ellis Clary, Sam Mele and Bob Swift $4

1969 Topps Baseball
199 Jim French $2

461 Mike Epstein (Name in Yellow) $2

1971 Topps Baseball
93 Senators 1971 Rookie Stars: Norm McRae and Denny Riddleberger $2
Didn't realize I had it already until I went to log it in on Zistle, oh well that means one for the '71 set binder and one for the Senators team binder.

559 AL 1971 Rookie Stars: Terry Cox Angels, Bill Gogolewski Senators and Gary Jones Yankees $3

1970 Kellogg's Baseball24 Mike Epstein $2
Ugh has paper residue glued to the back that I didn't notice till I got home need to upgrade. Chalk up another card to upgrade.

1971 Kellogg's Baseball 34 Mike Epstein $6

30 March 2014

Strive For '65: Senators Team Set


I'm not sure which card blogger coined the phrase "Joy of a Complete Set" I seem to think it was Doug The Night Owl. I could be wrong I often am. Anyway I have reached some joy. I am there with the 1965 Topps Baseball Senators Team set. So I am celebrating the "Joy of a Complete TEAM Set" (almost 50 years later).

OK so here is the Complete 1965 Topps Baseball Senators Team Set:

021 Don Blasingame
038 Jim King
056 Ron Kline
086 Les "Buster" Narum
099 Gil Hodges MGR
129 Bernnie Daniels
148 Willie Kirkland
152 Phil Ortega
181 Senators Rookies: Don Loun, Joe McCabe RC

211 Steve Ridzik
224 Bob Chance
233 Don Zimmer
252 Pete Richert
267 Senators Team Card
284 Nick Willhite
304 Dave Stenhouse
319 Ken McMullen
336 Woodie Held

371 Frank Kreutzer
394 Jim Hannan
417 Ed Brinkman
445 Don Lock
466 Senators Rookies: Pete Craig,  Dick Nen RC
496 Joe Cunningham
523 Mike Brumley SP
574 Roy Sievers

As you can see I scanned them the hard way (the way I usually do), individually not in the plastic sheets. I didn't put them in the sheet pages yet when I scanned them, because I put them in with the rest of the set.

When I was first composing this post I had just technically "completed" the team set, but needed to upgrade one of the cards. The first copy of card 21 Don Blasingame I got is in a very low grade (condition I should say since they are all ungraded raw, UGH modern collecting terminology minutia) due to some paper debris on the back from when the card was glued onto a piece of paper in a notebook or binder of some kind.

The Front isn't too hot either there is some scuffing on his hat in the top right corner. Looks like he is growing moss on his hat.
Here is what Don's backside looks like.

As you saw with the above team set pics I got an upgrade to the Blasingame card.
1965 Topps Baseball 21 Don Blasingame Senators
(Front and back)
Ah Much better. This one came courtesy of my LCS for $2. It isn't perfect but it is much better and acceptable, where that other one was just not. I got it (the upgrade) along with a bunch of other stuff I will eventually blog here about hopefully soon. I won't blog about the supplies I got that would be just plain boring and supplies are not Curly W stuff.

I still need to finish the full 1965 Topps Baseball set. As of this writing I have 157 of 598 (599) cards for the full flagship set. I have a separate binder for my SF'65 (or S4'65) set build. That is an improvement over having them all over the place in a couple of boxes and loose card piles laying wherever. I have left space in the pages for the missing cards to file into place when I get them. Many times for many sets I don't do that until the set is well over 50-75% done, since sometimes it takes years and years for me to even get back to actively building ancient sets. At least I only do one card per pocket, haven't done the two per pocket since the late '80s.

Sadly there are no "Joy of a complete page" milestones yet. The closest is a page that has 7 cards in it. Two more to go Woo Who! (#s 37 & 41). Sadly there are also 4 completely empty sheets/pages, and many many pages with just one maybe two cards in them. I don't think I am any closer to finishing any of the other teams just yet. Those will not be mentioned on this blog though, you got to go to my other blog for that if I notice those milestones.

So far all the set additions have been through purchases no RACs yet.. Still waiting on some cards I had bought from a guy on one of the card forums. I had to send him a money order he doesn't Paypal. I think I overpaid only four common cards (Damn Yankees) for $25 delivered.

16 March 2014

Half A Six Pack

I was going to show these cards separately as Senators Singles but decided since I got them at the same time and I have a huge backlog of cards to blog about on all my blogs I need to do them together. I got these three cards in a PWE six-pack of cards I got from Jeff at 2x3 Heroes. The first two are some of those retro modern cards and the third one is one of those modern trading card games that nobody can figure out how to play so nobody ever plays the games.

 2007 Bowman Heritage Baseball 106 Felipe Lopez Nationals
(Front and Back)
I love vintage cards and now I love the modern retro cards in the vintage styles. I didn't use to like the retro Heritage styles but after getting some several years back I grew to like them. Some years and designs work much better than others. The 2007 Bowman Heritage is a bow to the Original 1952 Bowman design.

Second Up we have a nice 2011 Topps Heritage card the design which honors the 1962 Topps Design, which in itself is sort of a homage to the days when kids would peek through a knothole in a wooden fence outside the ballpark to see the game.
 2011 Topps Heritage Baseball 186 Rick Ankiel Nationals
(Front and Back)

Now this next card is technically a game card. How you play the dang thing I'll never know and as a card collector and not a card player I don't really care that much. I don't even think any official rules have been printed for this silliness, if there are then I'm wrong. Anyway I'm not even sure how well these things sold originally, and now they mainly just sell to the player or team collectors. There might be some set collectors but since the cards are not numbered who knows how many cards there are exactly. Oh OK there might be a checklist or two on the interwebs somewhere. Anyway here is one of the cards of the kind that I never really wanted to get but I guess I'll get the Nationals and Orioles and my PC players from this set sometime.
2009 Topps Attax Baseball Card Game NoNumber Lastings Milledge Nationals
(Front and Back)
Oh the toppstown website. I guess the game was something that used codes from the website to play. Which means the website probably explained how to play, but since this is now over five years old the website is probably closed and abandoned.