24 Karat Magic

 "Now that I have these cards that seemed mildly neat to me a decade ago, I can finally put them away in a box and never think about these promos again."

- me, circa my last blogpost before this one

So much for that.

With the die-cuts out of the way I thought I was done with the online promo cards.

NOPE.

So I made a big COMC order and since I was running up a big tally anyway I decided to just swoop in on a type of card I'd wanted for a while. A 1/1 with a piece of gold (or so Topps claims it is) embedded in it.

As luck would have it one of the "cheapest" options available was a Colorado Rockie, a good one at that since Rafael Betancourt had himself a career year in 2012 as a closer. He's also a former Yokohama BayStar so he's got ties to the NPB as well.

For years I was tempted to get one of these 1/1 gold embedded cards or the 1/1 diamond embedded cards from 2011 but they were always a combination of being just a bit out of my price range and/or the options weren't very fun.

Never before has such a good card scanned like shit

Well my attitudes shifted and the Betancourt became a more attractive option since I first noticed it was available.

As I've started calling it quits on a few collections recently I've been circling back to where things were really starting for me, in that 2011-12 time period. The Betancourt is from 2012 Topps which was canned at the time (2011 Topps was just that much better and 2013's design is also sleeker) but I've come to appreciate that surfboard design. It's simple and it gets the job done.

That's sort of where my overall headspace was at when I was at checkout for this latest COMC haul.

Prospecting like it's 2011 folks!

For those who don't remember, Drew Pomeranz was the key prize in the trade that sent Ubaldo Jimenez to Cleveland. Unfortunately Pomeranz never lived up to his full potential in Coors but he did win the World Series with the Boston Red Sox in 2018 and is still technically active today (he was pitching in the San Diego Padres org just last year).

Alex White was also part of that Ubaldo trade and a former top pitching prospect but his career didn't last too long (COORS!). I really like the 2011 Bowman Sterling design for rookie cards so I picked that up.

I briefly thought about getting the other players in the Ubaldo trade, Matt McBride and Joe Gardner, who also had certified autographs but I wasn't in the mood for no-name busts that were just merely part of a trade I remember. Those guys don't even have autograph cards showing them as Rockies, they're both Cleveland cards which... pass.

Instead I spent money on more notable busts from around then.

Excuse the dust, I'm too lazy to clean my scanner

My earliest memories of Seattle Mariners games involved a lot of hype for Dustin Ackley who was supposed to save that franchise. Ackley did have a rookie card auto in 2011 Bowman Sterling too but I decided not to go for that because the picture Topps used for him is lame. Instead I found Ackley's 2011 Bowman Chrome Prospect Autograph for like $5 to be more worthwhile since that design holds immense sentimental value to me. Also for some reason it has the "1st Bowman Chrome" logo on it even though Ackley already got Bowman Chrome cards in 2010.

Ackley's 2011 M's faced off against the Oakland A's a bunch which meant it was also the only time you got to see Jemile Weeks have his strong rookie season. This card was surprisingly rare for a long time but a decade after Weeks no longer looked like the next All Star the A's would trade away, prices finally came down on this.

There were a lot more cards in this haul but they'll be spaced out in other posts. For now I think this cute Dinger card is a good way to finish off this portion.

I'd long known that when modern offerings no longer offer any real meaning to a particular collector, it's a lot more comforting for them to revert to when the hobby still meant something to that individual. But now I'm reaching the point where I don't just know it as a phenomenon that marketing departments can take advantage of, I actually feel it myself.

In other words I am now old and thinking about when Felix Hernandez was one of the greatest pitchers on the planet.

As always thanks for stopping by and take care.

Diamonds, Gold and then a Million Dollars

 In the past I've spoken about the Diamond Giveaway Die-Cuts and the Golden Moments Die-Cuts. For those who missed those, the cliffnotes version is that they were exclusive thick cards you could potentially unlock using digital codes you'd redeem on websites Topps launched for the years those promos were going on.

Today is going to be the third (and probably last) installment where I get a chance to talk about the forgotten Million Dollar Chase Die-Cuts.

For those of you who don't know or remember, in 2013 the promotion that involved entering in codes was the "Million Dollar Chase". The code cards had a dollar motif and collectors groaned every time they pulled one.

Cardboard Connection documented what the promo entailed but the gist of it was basically:

- You used the codes to unlock players

- Then used those players to guess who would get a hit on a certain day

- The objective was to extend your hit guess streak as long as possible and eventually redeem prizes depending on how long those guessing streaks lasted

The die-cuts like the CarGo were some of the prizes you could unlock. Unlike in 2011 and 2012, the die-cuts in 2013 are all autographed. The checklist for it is kind of random and screams more like one big sticker dump. On one spectrum you've got the HoFers like George Kell and Don Sutton, on the other end you've got names like Josh Vitters and Boone Logan. In between you've got even more random names like Gary Sheffield and Steve Garvey.

As far as I can tell the only other prizes you could unlock were coin cards which are not autographed.

Code Card from Night Owl Cards' blogpost

Anyway after typing all that out, I think it's clear why this promo is so forgotten. Just how many collectors seriously bothered keeping up with this promotion?

I suppose this type of daily commitment thing is still prevalent today given how "beat the streak" is a popular thing for sports gambling outlets. Also fantasy baseball is a whole second job in and of itself. But when the payoff is a bunch of die-cuts of likely nobodies and un-autographed coin cards, I think most were just content with selling off the codes or letting them expire. That's what I did at the time.

So back to the die-cut itself though, I quite like it. The wooden plaque motif makes this die-cut less shinier than its 2011 and 2012 counterparts but it's simple and it works. There's also a big plot of space allocated to where the autograph sticker can be applied (all of the autographs are stickers BTW).

If nothing else this was a unique way to add a certified autograph of Chicago Cubs great Carlos Gonzalez.

Also since I already had the three Colorado Rockies die-cuts from the Diamond Giveaway promo and just showed off the two from the Golden Giveaway promo in my last post, here's the complete run.

My scanner can't do full 8x10 scans anymore, leading to me making stuff like this in post

What a sight. Complete with the representatives getting axed in exactly the same order in which they left the Rockies org.

Now that I have these cards that seemed mildly neat to me a decade ago, I can finally put them away in a box and never think about these promos again.

As always thanks for stopping by and take care.

Glazed Trees

 In a post Gavin over at Baseball Card Breakdown made last night, he shared a few pictures of the aftermath of an ice storm that his area over on the Pacific Northwest.

One of them was (third picture from the bottom), was a picture of a frozen branch.

I left a comment stating I loved seeing pictures like that. The original comment was a lot longer but halfway through I decided to turn it into the post you're reading now.

A few years ago when I was just taking a walk I noticed something similar had happened to some foliage I happened to walk passed. I thought it was one of the prettiest things ever. 

I know that these are just frozen but a mix of being in a chemically altered state and the winter cold made me think these were glazed.

I'm definitely not the first to notice how cool this looks and I won't be the last either. There's something neat about seeing leaves like this even though I'm pretty sure the leaves themselves are having a really rough time in there.

For one thing you don't associate snowy winter with lots of luscious green. There are some trees that still have their green leaves even in the winter but those are usually like larches. The kind of trees that have pine leaves and thick bark. Most of the other trees went bare in the autumn months when the temperature dropped.

Like whatever was on this branch. Even seeing a branch like this is cool too.

There's also something about how this is a fleeting and a real "moment in time" kind of thing.

Like everything you're seeing is only temporary. The temperature that's low enough that the ice exists, the way the ice is coating the whole thing, the state of the branch as is, all of this could be like this today and look completely different tomorrow.

I don't know, maybe it was just because I was high but I thought it was one of those "oh shit, take a picture now, who knows when you'll see something like this again?!" moments.

In more colder climates this is probably a lot more common and probably a regular occurrence. But in the past few years I've lived just outside New York City where the winters went from a lot of snow to a lot of rain. Whether or not the temperature drops shortly after the rain enough to where things freeze like this is kind of 50/50. Although in my own neck of the woods it was more like 10/90.

Maybe I just have bad luck with frozen foliage.

Still, that doesn't change how these are still just a transient state to be appreciated in the moment and preserved in photographs to be viewed later long after the ice melts and the branches get to breathe again.

That's one of those beautiful temporary things mother nature loves providing.

Intentionally blurry

I'd prefer frozen foliage over everything being buried under snow at least.

At least the glazed trees look nice, this snow just turns into gray sludge that never melts and makes it harder to walk on sidewalks and get out of motor vehicles.

Gotta take the good with the bad though I guess.

As always thanks for stopping by and take care.

Blast Off

 I've alluded to it before but one of the biggest benefits of collecting Colorado Rockies cards is that there's so little demand or interest for them that they're really really cheap and affordable, relative to what star players on teams that are actually worth caring about usually go for.

Going back to last summer I'd been assembling a small but highly contained collection of notable Rockies players by getting both a certified autograph and a really nice memorabilia card too. The memorabilia cards have largely been patches because why not go for the nicer cards?

The fact that the very names I'm after are both Rockies and players who left the game a while ago with what most could reasonably call less than Hall of Fame caliber resumes has made this very fun, very affordable and also very quick to put together.

Although there is one exception.

Todd Helton.

Among all of the Rockies who were around in the early 2010's, Helton has the best chance of getting Hall of Fame enshrinement. Which means if he gets in his autograph cards will creep up in price but smart people can simply wait a year because Topps will print more autograph cards of his and flood the market. This is more or less what happened when Larry Walker got into the HoF, you can easily find a certified autograph of his for like $15-30.

Luckily I already picked up an autograph of the Toddfather last year. Now came time for the accompanying memorabilia card. I did think of adding a nice patch similar to the other Rockies I picked up during my spree, but rather than that I opted for my first ever Rockies bat relic card.

Strangely enough I actually do remember opening a pack of 2004 Topps Bazooka baseball. I was ten at the time. My parents were running errands and we went to a Pathmark that we usually never went to and I guess there they had one pack that I must've said I wanted to try and open.

The contents of the pack and the Pathmark itself are long gone but I remember two things, one is that I pulled a mini of Jim Thome (not a bad player to get), the second is that the gum tasted like shit and I spat it out in the parking lot. It's truly a blessing that Topps doesn't put gum in their card products anymore.

Obviously I didn't pull any "hits" like this in that pack. I didn't even know what was in the whole checklist. Thanks to 2024 internet I now know that the hits were all just relics like this, but that strangely suits me just fine. I like this card, it's simple and colorful despite having a ton of gray and just being a piece of wood.

Plus in a hobby that appears to be dominated by people who grew up in the 1980's, I did appreciate seeing and getting a card from the 2000's which were my actual childhood for a change. That decade almost never gets shown, it's almost like every collector ever stopped collecting in 1998 and didn't come back until 2014.

Then again I didn't start until 2011 so :P.

So with the Toddfather now addressed, time for my mind to shift to other things.

For whatever reason (probably just nostalgia) the two most prominent members of the 2012 Rockies have been on my mind in recent times so expect Troy Tulowitzki and Carlos Gonzalez to make a few appearances in these next few posts. 

As always thanks for stopping by and take care :).

The First Team

 When I first blogged about the 2012 Sega Card Gen set it was as someone who had just finished the base set. One of the things that I never really got to go into was the process of building that set. How I made a ton of trips to my local arcades in Yokohama and not-so-local card shops in Shinjuku and Shibuya to build that 408 card behemoth.

At this point a lot of the details are hazy but I do remember one thing. The first team I assembled was the New York Yankees. At the time I was still a Yankees fan, and naturally I wanted to finish that team first. It wasn't too hard because that team was full of big names who were easy enough to find at shops, the only issue was that they were expensive.

Anyway fast forward to 2023 and the first team set I completed from the rare foil subset was also the New York Yankees.

You see during my trip to Japan I picked only two MLB cards but boy did those two cards count.

CC and Tex there helped me finish the seven card rare foil Yankees team set.

Along with them the set featured Alex Rodriguez, Derek Jeter, Robinson Cano, Curtis Granderson and Mariano Rivera. A real who's who of great players at the time.

I suppose if I expanded it to prize cards there's also the Hiroki Kuroda foil rare but that's neigh impossible to find or get, and it's not even in this 60-card rare foil checklist anyway.

So there we go, a decade in the making. Technically some other teams who only had one foil player were already done before the Yankees (like the New York Mets who only had David Wright or the Toronto Blue Jays who only had Jose Bautista) but I'm going to go with this because there were multiple foils. A actual challenge.

As always thanks for stopping by and take care.

Time to Pare It Down

 The better part of the last 11 years was spent accumulating autographs nonstop. Looking back on it, the chase and just getting autographs either through the mail or in person was the fun part for me. But over time the thrill of getting that magical signature faded faster than the ink has.

I still get the odd itch every now and then but for the most part I'm comfortable enough saying I'm mostly done.

So before the calendar turned to 2024 I made the decision to part with my TTM and IP autograph collections. Or at least most of the baseball cards that made up that collection.

I took advantage of my winter holiday by scanning all of the autographs I'd accumulated over the years just so I could at least preserve the jpegs. The players took the time to sign for me after all, would be a real waste if I didn't at least keep some proof of it. Especially since I had somehow been able to maintain a log of everything from day 1.

After that was a long thought process on where exactly these cards would go. I will admit that some names popped up in my mind depending if I was willing to go by team or as one giant lump. Ultimately I picked a weird hybrid of both by sending the New York Yankees and San Francisco Giants to nick and everything else to Gavin.

Well almost everything. I disposed of my home-made customs.
From the official cards I did keep some stuff.

Some keepers

Luis Torrens

The Torrens collection is still here, I have other plans for it.

Stuff addressed to me

I've always thought it was really weird and kinda shitty to sell autographs that were specifically addressed to you. Like I go on eBay and see "to Robert" or whatever and I'm like man, if your name isn't Robert you can't buy that. And even then...

So yeah I'm keeping the "To Kenny" cards and the stuff that came with letters even if I'm not selling them.

Colorado Rockies, New York Rangers, New York Giants and NBA Cards

Small enough and cool enough to keep intact.

Non-Sports/Cosplayers

I'm not sure if anyone was excited at the thought of getting cosplayer polaroids or anything but uh, those are staying with me. Polaroids of attractive women cosplaying has essentially replaced sports cards as my main collecting hobby now.

Various cards I just wanted to keep

The reasons why I'd want to keep any given card are varied and subjective. I thumbed through stuff I kept "just cuz", and except for like Japanese cards and Team USA stuff (mostly because I still appreciate P-Town Tom giving me two(!) base sets so many years ago) there were all random. I tried keeping these small though.

Some other keepers

With the TTM and IP cards themselves now gone all that's left is sorting through the blogposts left behind. A lot of from 2014, 2015 and 2016 were deleted anyway thanks to a switch from a previous photo sharing service to Google Photos a half decade ago that made them unreadable. Thought it might be best to axe them all unless the post features all/mostly cards I decided to keep.

As for the future, I can't say I'm definitely done with autograph collecting (old habits die hard as they say) but I think the scale/level that I'd been doing it until now is over for sure. In 2022 and 2023 respectively I only sent out 4 TTM requests, I think that sounds about right going forward.

Still, big thanks to all of the people who signed autographs for me throughout the years. This was incredibly fun and it's all thanks to the kindness of strangers who helped.

And as always thank you the readers for joining me on my journey into TTMs and IPs. Take care.

Cumulative TTM tally from 2013 to 2023: 1,499
Cumulative IP tally from 2013 to 2023: 674

Goals for 2024, Grades for 2023

 新年明けましておめでとうございます！今年もよろしくお願いします！

Happy New Year Everybody!

So with the acknowledgement that the blog (and by extension every last one of us) is a decade older now out of the way, here's a report card for my New Years Resolutions for 2023 and goals for 2024. As is tradition for the first day of the year on this blog.

2023 Grades

3. A limit of 30 Sports Cards and 30 Non-Sports Cards for the year

F. Just a flat out F.

2. One Non-Certified Autograph Intended for Me

A. Got a few TTM returns back this year, and a bunch of signed polaroids and photographs from cosplayers this year.

1. $600 Limit

F.

Honestly at this point I have to come to terms with how my main spending habit with this hobby is to splurge on like 10 different $40 cards during one random afternoon every 5 months and justify it because of a combination of feeling overworked and how I have a bigger budget to work with than I did when I was in college.

I also have no real desire or want to fix this, nor am I in a position where I need to save money for more important things so I don't expect this to change in 2024 and I'm just going to stop pretending to care. My apathy towards sports cards at certain times of the year is probably going to save me the most money.

2024 Goals

3. Get A New Hobby

Cutting back on this hobby is one thing, filling the void it filled is another. Work fills up the void in terms of time I think it'd be best served for me to find another hobby to get into lest I go nuts on a spending spree again. I don't really want to get into another genre of collectibles either.
Right now I want to see if I can get into something more practical, like cooking. I've been cooking non-stop since I came back from my vacation but I want to improve my skills and stop relying on easy noodle-based dishes. Maybe later in the summer when my work schedule lets up I might look into cooking classes.

2. Still Track My Spending

Okay so it's not like I'm able to put down thousands for superfractors or whatever and not blink. I do need to keep a log of what the heck I've spent just so I have a number. The last three years I've averaged out to like $1,500 per year. If that ends up being where I land again in 2024, sure. Not exactly big baller money, but a decent chunk of disposable income.

Also, as much as I harp on my baseball card collection (because that's the main crux for this blog), I do also need to focus on how much I've let non-sports go unchecked. Whatever I've spent on this hobby does not include the stuff I've spent on cosplay polaroids or figurines or plush dolls or other general merchandise. It's a lot easier to pretend it's not much when I don't blog about it too often, but that does add up too. Especially since that's where my attention goes when it's not on sports.

1. One Non-Certified Autograph Intended for Me

I've slowed down considerably on autographs (I didn't even go to a single baseball game in 2023!), but I would like to add one that's specifically for me. Probably from the non-sports realm.

Anyway time to bid one last farewell to 2023 with a recap of what I thought were my best/favorite pickups in mostly chronological order.

It'll be really easy to see why the baseball card hobby started falling by the wayside for me.

As always thanks for stopping by and take care.