A Whole Bunch of Names

  Despite how I've bombarded several mailboxes and yelled all of your ears off about how I'm downsizing, today's post is going to be the polar opposite. The cards I've accumulated in the time in which I'd been dumping hundreds of cards onto other people, or more specifically the cards I picked up in January before I went cold turkey in February.

The theme for most of these is rather simple, these names were the first names I'd seen when I was wide-eyed and first getting into sports and sports cards. A lot were Tulo and CarGo from those early 2010's Rockies teams but those will get their own post. Here is everything else.

Tim Lincecum

Starting off with this really cool Lincecum jersey card. The "A Cut Above" inserts from 2012 were up against stiff competition in what was a good time for die-cuts. These flimsy cards just didn't tickle anyone's fancy compared to the sturdier and shinier offerings around at the time. But when I saw there was a relic version, I was mildly interested.

Especially since the guy on it is Lincecum, who stopped being the Freak we all know and love in 2012. He'd still show flashes of his former self like when he no-hit the San Diego Padres twice later on, but the Padres didn't start being good at baseball until 2021 so take that with a grain of salt.

Takuya Asao

リリーフ投手としてMVP賞をとれのって普通に凄くない？いつかメジャーでも活躍するの見たいよ。

In 2011 Takuya Asao won Central Legue MVP honors as a reliever. He wasn't even a closer, he won the MVP as a set-up man! This is the year after he set the single-season NPB record for holds (47 in 2010).

Anyone who watched the Chunichi Dragons at the time remembers him being absolutely filthy. He would've probably been a dominant reliever in the big leagues too. Unfortunately he got overused and his arm wore down, but his peak was absolutely insane.

Chris Sale

Once upon a time people thought Sale would never be able to find prolonged success as a starting pitcher and that his lanky frame would doom him to just being a reliever. Well several successful seasons with the Chicago White Sox and Red Sox erased that real quick. Sale has a lot of rookie autographs from 2010-11, but I opted for the more wallet friendly option of a sticker autograph applied on a horizontal insert nobody liked from his sophomore season.

Dellin Betances

This is probably the first Betances card I've added to my collection in a LONG time. Now I have both New York Yankees rookie autos from 2012 Topps Chrome in shiny blue (the other rookie is Austin Romine). 2012 is unfortunately when Betances' chances of being a starter died, things got so bad he got demoted to double-A. But there he was moved to the bullpen and from 2013 onwards he enjoyed a very successful career as a dominant four time All Star reliever.

Yoshinori Tateyama

It's easy to forget but Tateyama did actually come stateside and played in MLB in 2011 and 2012. Tateyama hailed from Osaka, Japan and actually went to the same high school that another Japanese MLBer Koji Uehara went to. They were both in the same grade and both teammates on the high school baseball team.

Tateyama joined the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters in the second round of the 1998 Draft. While initially he was tried out as a starter, he eventually converted into a reliever and in the 2000's he was a mainstay in the Fighters bullpen.

Tateyama joined the Rangers in October of 2010, it was right when the Rangers were about to become back-to-back AL Champs, but more importantly it was right when they were heavily scouting Tateyama's Fighters teammate Yu Darvish (spoilers: they got him too). Interestingly enough in 2011 the Rangers also traded for his old high school teammate Uehara from the Baltimore Orioles. So in 2012 he had teammates at different times in his life in Japan on the same MLB team. That's kind of nuts.

Tateyama bounced around 2013 and 2014 going from the Rangers to the Yankees to the Hanshin Tigers before calling it a career after the 2014 season. Since then he's gone back to being involved with the Fighters, at first by being a part of the TV crew covering the team but from 2023 onwards he's been the pitching coach for the Fighters. Makes sense since he was also the pitching coach for the Samurai Japan team that won Gold in the 2020 Olympics.

Tateyama gets the honor of the longest blurb out of anyone I will talk about in this post because his career is just truly fascinating.

Johnny Cueto

In 2012 the Cincinnati Reds only used six starting pitchers for the entire season. Johnny Cueto, Bronson Arroyo, Mat Latos, Homer Bailey and Todd Redmond. Redmond only made one start in what was his MLB debut while the other five made 30+ starts each. That was rare even then and absolutely unheard of now given how nobody knows how to keep pitchers healthy. That version of Cueto will always be the version I choose to remember him by.

Hanley Ramirez

It's kind of crazy how the 2010's had such a big array of fantastic shortstops that they've all gotten lost in the shuffle for various reasons (mostly injuries). Hanley was also on a really great HoF caliber path but by the time he was traded to the Los Angeles Dodgers his best years were somewhat in the rearview mirror. Then he went to the Boston Red Sox and the decline got uglier.

Victor Oladipo

Oladipo was once one of the biggest up-and-coming names when I was getting into basketball. He was really coming into his own as the guy who led the Indiana Pacers to a competitive first round playoff series against LeBron James and his Cleveland Cavaliers that went a full seven games. They lost but the prevailing notion was that they would pick up where the Paul George-era Pacers left off and they might even get as high as the second seed in the Eastern Conference.

Fast forward to 2024 and unfortunately Oladipo is turning into one of those players you toss around in "imagine if they never got injured" hypotheticals. Injuries thwarted any momentum he or the Pacers had during the late 2010's and in the 2020's Dipo suffered more injuries as he also kept bouncing around as a journeyman.

Even so, I did want a certified autograph of his showing him as a Pacer, there's strangely not a whole lot of them out there on the market. You can find plenty of him as a Magic/Thunder/Heat but it's like everyone already scooped up the cards of him with the team he had the most success with.

Clay Buchholz

The first time I heard about Buchholz was in an article where someone in the comments called him Clay Buttholes. That comment has not left my brain for even a second since. Also this 2013 Topps Replacement Autograph is neat solely because I like the novelty of cards created to be replacements for redemptions.

Ryan Braun and Carlos Gonzalez

Braun is definitely someone who people haven't thought about since 2014. 2011 was when he was at the peak of his powers and NL MVP over Rihanna's then-boyfriend Matt Kemp. Over time it'd become known that Braun used performance enhancers to reach that peak and was cast into the abyss.

As for the card I want to be clear that I picked this up because I wanted a cool 2011 Topps card of Carlos Gonzalez and this is my first dual relic from the 2011 Topps Diamond Duos insert set. Braun just happened to be on it too.

Daniel Bard

I actually did have another copy of this at one point in a trade I made with Ryan of This Card Is Cool over a decade ago but that one was eventually moved. Now that Bard's made a name for himself again with Colorado, I was more than willing to re-add this card from the Topps 60 subset to my collection.

Mark Buehrle

Buehrle's stint in Miami feels basically forgotten at this point. Though considering what a disaster that team was it's probably for the best.

Robinson Cano

Letting Cano leave was a good financial and baseball decision for the Yankees, but I do want to see the alternate reality where Cano hands the baton off to Aaron Judge.

Jared Weaver

Weaver anchoring the Los Angeles Angels rotation feels like an eternity ago and also like the last time that team cared even the tiniest bit about good pitching.

Cliff Lee

I've talked before about Topps 60 and how it's kind of confusing that the player on these cards aren't even number one on the list of whatever the achievement at the top of the card is. Like here Lee is commemorated for having the fifth best career ERA in the Division Series (min 20 IP) with 1.11 as of the time of 2011 Topps Series 1's production.

Ryan Zimmerman

Zimmerman's contributions to helping the Washington Nationals start to establish themselves as more than just the Zombie Expos has also been forgotten, but it is fun to remember how he was there to help fans through some awful dreck years until Stephen Strasburg and Bryce Harper finally arrived.

I did get a Trevor Story TTM autograph WAY back when he was still just a top prospect but I finally got to add a certified autograph to my collection. Story has so many autograph cards out there that the market for it kind of nuts. I'm picky and wanted an on-card autograph with logos and this 2017 Gypsy Queen offering (a parallel limited to 150 copies at that) was somehow the cheapest option on COMC.

My first certified Charlie Blackmon autograph. This is from that 2018 Topps Clearly Authentic set where every card came prepackaged in a one-touch magnet holders. I promptly freed this card the moment I got it since the case was a little scuffed and therefore useless (I have extremely high standards for one touch cases and even the tiniest blemish is a big no-no). On top of that this card was moving around in that case and made an annoying clicking sound. I can't handle hearing one of my cards get worse.

Ubaldo Jimenez autographs from 2011/2012 are either high-end stuff that doesn't interest me or cards that show him as a Cleveland player. Blarg, had to compromise with one of these more modern offerings.

I think Ryan McMahon is probably the best position player on the Rockies right now, or at worst second behind Nolan Jones. McMahon's a perennial Gold Glove candidate despite being asked to move around all across the infield to accommodate how the people constructing the Rockies roster have no clue what they're doing. He'd be a really really good utility-man on an actual contender.

Mark Montgomery

The year is 2012. The countdown to Mariano Rivera's retirement has already started, and along with it a search for his heir apparent. If you also read a list of the top prospects in the Yankees organization around that time, one of the fastest risers of note was a reliever named Mark Montgomery. Armed with a fastball and slider, he was striking out hitters at an incredible pace and was aggressively pushed to double-A by his season season as a professional. Then his velocity dipped a bit and all that momentum just stopped. He did manage to stick around as a professional for a good while as he was still active as of 2019, pretty impressive considering it practically feels like he stopped existing after 2014.

Lovely Labrynth of the Silver Castle

I only play Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links at a casual level so I have no clue how to play Labrynth and I don't want to read what these cards do so I probably will never learn how to play the deck. What I do know is that Lovely here has big boobs and is conventionally attractive, good enough for a degenerate like me. Although the secret rare sparkle effect makes the art harder to see.

Justin Verlander

This post started on an insert that only existed in 2012 and it's going to fittingly end on another one too. I had forgotten all about these Mound Dominance inserts. These were so obscure and uninteresting that I had no idea there was even a relic version. Normally I wouldn't think much of a boring grey jersey card (even if it is limited to 50 copies) but knowing it's from a one-and-done bumps it up to mildly interesting for 30 seconds territory.

One day Verlander will get the recognition he deserves as one of the greatest pitchers of all time. But that won't be right now since in early 2024 he's just seen as that old guy who stunk for the New York Mets in 2023. We can also blame him for his brother Ben getting famous too.

Alright that concludes this extremely long scan dump of names from a decade ago. This covered enough ground from back then that if there's ever a follow-up,

As always thanks for stopping by and take care.

First Case of Buyer's Remorse and the Sunk Cost Fallacy

 For most of my time in this hobby I had largely been able to avoid what you'd call "buyer's remorse". Even when you consider how much time and money I'd spent on collections I immediately just moved on from and dismantled, I can't say I ever really regretted it since in the moment I really wanted those cards.

Like back when I'd go to minor league games a lot there were several impulse purchases for cards I could potentially get signed, and that potential was often realized so there was nothing to regret. The rest were usually random and rare like the time I bought a Don Mattingly photo variation SP or a vintage Don Newcombe Bowman card. Both of these were super cool and relatively cheap so these were perfectly okay.

The rest of the time I have these criteria set up before I hit the BIN button.

*Do I feel like this would immediately become a key part of my collection?
*If I wait 2 months to buy it, do I still feel like I want it?

Almost everything I've ever shown on here has cleared both. There probably were a few exceptions here and there but on the whole it's just a matter of how long a card fits being in my possession before I decide it's time to move it.

But fast forward to late-January and I got my first "I should've thought this through a little more" moment in a long time.

Now the card in question is pretty cool unless you're someone who doesn't like the San Francisco Giants or the New York Yankees. It's a dual autograph of future Hall of Famer Buster Posey and former blog namesake Francisco Cervelli. By all accounts this should be amazing, definitely something that would've been perfect in my collection even despite all of the shifts, downsizes and re-arrangements right? This card should take me all the way back to my fondest/earliest MLB memories of 2012, shouldn't it?

Well, unfortunately it didn't feel like it.

Even though this card was on my mental wantlist for a decade since I first discovered it, it didn't feel like I finally reeled in a card I'd long wanted. Instead it felt like, "mmm, now what?".

You see when I first discovered this card existed a decade ago I had a delusion of grandeur that it would pair well with another dual autograph card that I owned at the time. A Dellin Betances-Clayton Kershaw dual autograph. My dumb idea was that a pairing of those two dual autographs would be perfect. Both featured home-grown Yankees players I was a super big fan of, and both also featured two future HoF NL West superstars who were absolutely big deals in the 2010's.

One problem, I forgot I had sent out the Dellin-Kersh dual autograph to Nick made this purchase seem like a waste the moment I realized that idea wasn't going to happen. Especially since I was not going to spend even more money to buy another copy either.

Note to Nick: this does not mean I want the Dellin-Kersh back, keep it since it made you and your kids excited. If you try to send it back to me I will get very upset :(. This Posey-Cerv dual is already gone anyway.

To be clear moving on from that was okay with me, if it wasn't I wouldn't have sent it to Nick. And it would've gone to someone else anyway.

But yeah the brainfart ended up making this Cerv-Posey dual look meaningless as a result.

I tried to spin it for the positive since it's still an autograph of MVPosey (bonafide HoF lock) and Posey's autograph prices are in the somewhat reasonable spot now where he's been retired long enough that his prices went down but his HoF ballot debut is just far enough away that they haven't ticked back up yet. Still expensive, relatively, but that's what comes with dealing with a 3x World Series Champion, lifelong Giant, 2010 NL ROY, 2012 NL MVP and 7x All Star.

It's also yet another Cervelli autograph, even though I've pulled the plug on that collection eons ago. Cervelli is still cool.

But in the end lying to myself didn't work. This blogpost is proof of that.

Despite that buyer's remorse I kept my big boy pants on and paid for it. I didn't ask the seller to cancel or make up some shit to back out of it. If anything I more or less demanded it be sent to me immediately when the seller provided the tracking number but didn't bother actually physically sending it out for a week. Even if I were genuinely excited to get it in tow I would've still been annoyed at that.

I then scanned it and inserted it into another post which still hasn't gone up but ultimately decided to make this post instead when the lie I told to myself crumbled and the card being in that post didn't feel right anymore.

This is where the sunk cost fallacy/coping comes in. At the end of the day I paid what I paid and it's gone. It was technically a card I had thought about getting for a decade and finally got. In all likelihood I was gonna spend that money on something else that's dumb and would've been dumped onto someone. The only part that stings is that I just didn't think it'd be in record time.

I suppose I could've also recouped some of my losses by selling it but at the risk of spoiling another post I have in the works, dumping > selling. Way too many headaches involved when you're dealing with another person and money is factored into the equation. Cards with a value of tens of dollars are not worth having those kinds of headaches over.

And in this case The Lost Collector (or at least his HoF binder he's arranged for his son) is the beneficiary. I realize Nick being a Giants fan would've made him as a landing spot just as interesting, and he's the one with the Dellin-Kersh dual and could've fulfilled that by proxy, but the convenient thing about Posey autographs is that absolutely nobody would complain about getting one for free.

And ultimately, TLC sent me a certified Cervelli autograph in what was our first trade. I've since sent him back several certified Cerv's but I felt this being the ultimate Cerv autograph (though not really because of him) would've made it the ultimate full circle move too.

Or I don't know, maybe that's just a more stoic way of saying I just wanted this immediately out of the house and onto the guy I've been dumping my certified Yankees autographs onto and it's about time they got a good one as opposed to another bust from 2015.

As always thanks for stopping by and take care.

I Always Wanted One of These

 Wow, we're already in March. Time moves so fast.

A couple of months ago I did my annual goals and grades post where I also showed off my best pick-ups of 2023. During that haul there was one really glaring omission that I really wanted to add but decided to save so it could get its own blogpost all to itself. I also wanted that blogpost to be after I made the "big" announcement.

Even though I've been collecting since 2011 this is the FIRST ever jersey letter patch relic thing I'd ever held. On top of that I can now call it mine!

In the time since I'd been collecting almost none of the other players I collected ever got cards like this. The prospects I rooted for never got these cards, even after they got to the big leagues they never got these cards. I was hoping they would at some point but I got tired of waiting.

That Kyle Freeland In The Name jersey patch card comes from 2021 Topps. As you can all see it's the letter "L" in his name, a very unfortunate letter to bestow upon a pitcher but whatever, I'd wanted a proper 1/1 for a while now and now this replaces my Blank Back eBay parallel from 2021 Topps Heritage.

After my last post went up, some folks asked me if Kyle Freeland would be my next focus. Let me just say right now, no. I don't want to do a player collection ever again. I am also not going to be actively collecting Colorado Rockies that much longer, mostly because they're a poverty franchise.

The fact of the matter is that I'm a spot where I've gone back and gotten a lot of stuff I wanted that I missed out on the first time (the blogposts are still being worked on). On top of that I don't really want a "collection" in general anymore. Because collecting is just another word for accumulating, which is the opposite of what I really want to do which is to tear as much of what I have down to like a single box housing everything and only make scant, carefully calculated purchases every once in a while when the mood strikes me.

Unrelated Scan (though that's clearly the same pic of Freeland)

The thing about the Freeland cards is that last year, after a decade of prospecting and being relegated to pre-rookie stuff and niche fan favorites, it was a good way to get my hands on some of the stuff given to the biggest names in the sport.

Well okay, Freeland isn't on the same level of superstars who get like a thousand different cards each year but he's at least a notable enough name for a Rockies team that is devoid of any real star power that he got the token Rockies treatment and has a really nice cardboard resume. Which was good enough for me.

Emphasis on was. I already got almost everything I wanted from Freeland's catalogue (up until this point), except for one very specific card which has no copies available on eBay or COMC.

So nice I'm showing it twice!

So for now we've reached the end of the Freeland accumulation era of this blog too. Maybe in the sets to come Topps/Fanatics dishes out some super cool Freeland cards that even I have to immediately whip out my credit card for, but I am very happy with where it is now.

A few of the remaining Freeland pick-ups have yet to make their blog debut, those might just get thrown in as unrelated scans. But as far as actively adding goes, I was able to cap it off with my first letter patch. Perfect place to stop and take a breather for now.

As always thanks for stopping by and take care.