Jerseys, autographs, and 1/1s, oh my!

Sometimes a mail day is so generous and so unexpected that it deserves a post all of its own.  This is one of those days.

Mike, assistant to the regional manager of JD’s Wildcardz, and I have exchanged many a stack of cards over the past year or so.  Our collecting tendencies are polar opposites, and we both enjoy pulling the trigger on a trade.  Many of you no doubt have experienced his generosity as well.

Recently, Mike told me he was committing “cardicide”, which I took to meant the unthinkable:  the throwing away of cards.   Nooooo!!!  Turns out he was simply mailing out packages of cards to better homes than his own, and I was told to stay on the lookout for some Yankees.  Cool!  I always enjoy getting Yankees base cards from products I’m too cheap to buy for myself.

Ha! If only. Instead of base cards, here’s what he sent.

2009 UD Ballpark Collection quad swatch, Verlander, Billingsley, Carmona, Joba Chamberlain.  Very nice!

Oddly, this card was in a soft sleeve, taped to the front of a card in a plastic toploader.  How could this possibly have been deemed the least valuable card in the envelope?  What could possibly beat a quad swatch featuring Joba??

This is what:

*MIND BLOWN*

Wow.  The Joba Chamberlain codebreaker autograph!!!!!  The ‘regular’ version of this card was limited to only 49 copies.  There was a more rare red ink version numbered to 10.  This is the mythical code breaker version, the only one of it’s kind.  Mike was half of the code breaking team to solve ’09 Allen & Ginter’s puzzle and thus received a complete (err… half of a complete) set of autographs, all with an exclusive “code breaker” gray frame.

I’m going to tell people that I’m the code breaker and sent the rest of the set to him.

No bubble envelope can ever top this, and the always generous Mike insists that nothing is required in return.  Well, that’s a good thing, because I’m not sure how this could be equaled, but rest assured – the payback wheels are already in motion.

Card shop weekend

It was a rainy weekend in southern California, which means every outdoor activity gets cancelled.  Opening day for the San Diego Adult Baseball League will just have to be pushed back another week.  I’ve still got an entire second box of 2010 Topps to bust, but I wanted something different to open.  It didn’t have to be anything fancy, just not Topps.  Off to the card shop!

First up, I had to check out the latest additions to the relic bargain bin.  On days when I plan on random pack purchases, I like to hedge my bets with some cheap hits just to make sure I don’t walk away completely disappointed.  I bought five.

2004 Bowman Heritage Threads of Greatness, Miguel Tejada.  You gotta respect anyone who can still play almost every day at the ripe old age of 63.

2007 Upper Deck Game Materials, Todd Helton.  It wasn’t a plain gray or white swatch, so this was a relative steal.

2003 Upper Deck Authentic Stars Troy Glaus.  It was a big swatch of jersey for being in the dollar bin, so I couldn’t pass it up.

2002 Upper Deck Future Gems, Ben Fritz.  Sweet – eight years have gone buy since this card was released.  Fritz is gonna bust out any day now.  Jackpot!

2003 Fleer MLB Hot Prospects Hot Materials, Mike Sweeney.  My total came out a dollar short of a round number, so this was a last minute addition.  I liked the color scheme and it’s numbered out of 499.

On to the packs!  Everything I touch lately turns to gold, apparently, as I’ve pulled four 1/1s in the past few months (the most recent will be unveiled later in the week).  Let’s see if luck continues in two packs of ’09 Allen & Ginter.

A Chase Utley black bordered mini was the only card of note.  I regret buying these packs, I’ve only picked up five or six packs of this stuff, total, so I can’t expect much, but I haven’t ever pulled a single card that justified a $5 pack.

The next (and last) pack, 2010 Topps HTA jumbo:

Whaaaa?  Yeah, I realize I said I was tired of Topps, but hat logo cards fall one per jumbo box, and I want one.  So, well, I bought a pack.  Got 40 base cards to add to what I’ve already got, and nine “regular” inserts.  And though I was unable to find the hat logo card, I did pull this:

Peak Performance jersey, Tommy Hanson!  Nothing crazy, but it beats some of the lesser names in the set.  I could’ve done worse, but I’d hoped for better.  No matter what, any trip to the card shop is a good one.

Everything you see is for trade.  My general “request” for bargain bin relics is for a random relic in return.  I don’t care who it’s of or where it’s from, and I don’t even like being told about it in advance!

Quick thanks

Completed the first two of hopefully many future trades with some fellow bloggers, and I gotta show some love for the two newest additions to my relic collection.  A man who doesn’t love relics is no man at all.

From Jake, of Baseball Card Stuff, a 2009 Allen & Ginter Tim Hudson:

From Chris, of Budget Baseball Cardboarding, a Giambi from ’08 Upper Deck.  I was thrilled he was willing to part with this as it’s my first relic from the set.  All I had to give up in trade were some Ricky Ledee RCs (might have been unsolicited) and some cards of that Desperate Housewives girl… you know, Tony Parker’s wife.  I bet I’m the first person to ever use that joke.

Thanks, guys.  I look forward to many more trades with both of you.

One pic pack rip – 2008 Allen & Ginter retail

Gint-a-cuffs, one pack edition

Before I get to Gint-a-cuffs, let me tell you about something that is severely underrated:  Fondue.  It may not be beer and brauts on a Sunday afternoon on a manliness scale, but seriously, at a fondue restaurant you spend a good half hour dipping things in cheese, at which point they bring you a plate of raw meat for you to cook to your heart’s content, followed by a bowl of chocolate and more ‘things’ to dip.  Good stuff – had a nice dinner at a fondue restaurant for the wife’s birthday and I could sure go for a bowl of cheese right about now.  

That aside, let’s get to Gint-a-cuffs, the one pack edition!!

You may be saying to yourself, “Self, didn’t Gint-a-Cuffs end a long time ago?”  Perhaps it did, but I recently purchased my first ever pack of 2009 Allen & Ginter and I wanted in on the fun.  Unfortunately, I never paid much attention to the scoring, so I’ll just make it up as I go.  

• #277 Kerry Wood -10 pts for a guy who never quite lived up to the hype
• #212 Mariel Zagunis +5 pts for a random, previously unknown athlete who signs TTM.  Add another 10 pts if she returns my TTM request

• #280 Shin-Soo Choo +10 pts for a funny sounding name
• #18 Clyde Parris +25 pts for a Negro League player who signs TTM.  Subtract 100 pts if he sends it back unsigned with a donation request

• #222 Akinori Iwamura +20 for a horribly miscut mini parallel. (It’s worse than it looks in the scan!) I would’ve thought this was incredibly valuable 15 years ago for being cut like this.  Hey… remember pogs?  I seem to recall thinking that miscut pogs were extra valuable, too.  Add another 10 pts for making me think of pogs.  Total for this one card: 30 pts

• #350 Jimmy Rollins +50 for a retro themed card featuring a retro themed advertisement.  

• #AGHS-11 Fransisco Rodriguez -100 for a card celebrating a ridiculously overrated (if not downright worthless) stat
• #NP62 Ryan Braun  -20 pts for the lame font used for Braun’s name.  Get creative, Topps!

 

Ouch, a total score of -10!!!  Not good.  Despite the low score, I did find myself enjoying this pack.  I won’t go crazy buying the stuff in the future, but I can see myself using its $5 price tag to round out an even twenty dollar bill at my card shop.  There are certainly worse ways to spend the money.  I’ve already sent the Parris and Zagunis away for TTM attempts, but if you need any of the others to complete a set, let me know!

Card shop haul

Friday is too far removed for this post to be reasonably titled “Card Shop Friday”, so you get the less familiar “Card Shop Haul”.  Same great content, same great reason for blogging about it:  I’m bored and want to post scans of the packs/cards I purchased at the card shop to share with the blogosphere since nobody in my household has more than a very mild interest, at best.

I already knew last Friday that I’d need supplies the next time I headed for my shop.  I’d initially planned to purchase supplies only, but quickly reasoned that it’d be a waste of time to not buy at least a pack or two.  I’m getting a bit weary of bargain bin products only, yet I didn’t feel like purchasing an entire box of anything.  After all, I’ve still got half a box of 2008 UD Heroes still to bust.  But I also wasn’t feeling a super high end, five cards per pack product, either.  What’d I do?

Bought a 50 card per pack product!

2009 Topps is fun, and I definitely plan on acquiring the entire set at some point.  Instead of spending large chunks of my budget on entire boxes, these jumbo HTA packs seem kinda fun.  50 cards per pack, 45 or 46 of which are base, plus three or four other guaranteed inserts per pack.  As an added ‘bonus’, relics/autos are inserted at a rate of slightly less than 1:4.

I went in to the shop planning on spending $10.  Between the Topps HTA pack ($10) and the supplies I needed (25 ct box of top loaders: $3), I had a horribly uneven total of 13 bucks.  More cards!!

By this point I was allowing myself twenty bucks and wanted at least one more nice pack before turning to the dollar bin.  The $4-$5 range seems to be my shop’s wheelhouse, so I stood deciding between ’08 and ’09 A Piece of History, various years of Bowman, ’08 SP Authentic, and the pack I eventually picked out:

Yep, believe your eyes, Priceless Pursuit is taking a peek in the Allen & Ginter bandwagon.  For now I’m just sticking my head in and seeing what it’s like.  I’ve got enough Yankees base cards and a handful of relics through trades to know that I do enjoy the product, even if not as much as most others seem to.  Price:  $5

$18 down, two to go.  For the first time I actually looked inside the display cases (which I’m pretty sure are consignment shelves, which seems kinda nice), and saw the most glorious site I’ve ever seen in the shop:  a box of $1 relics (or three for $2!).  There were only a couple baseball relics, so I got the one that I liked best (I already had a couple versions of the other that was in there), a 2005 Donruss Champions Willie Harris game used bat:

Very thick, very nice!  I figured I may as well get three to bring my total to an even $20, so I picked out two football relics.  The first is a 2006 Topps Turkey Red Trent Green:

And the second, a 2005 Leaf Certified Freshman Fabric Ciatrick Fason, serial numbered 0709/1499:

I’m glad the scan was able to capture how refractor-y this card is.  Though Fason clearly was not the running back of the future in Minnesota, the shine was too rainbowy to pass up.  And the Trent Green Turkey Red is simply classy.  In fact, all football card relics are classier than baseball relics.  At least the ‘basic’, one color swatches are an actual color.  I’ll take a plain purple or red swatch over a white/gray jersey any day of the week.

I could definitely have done worse with the $20.  I’m looking forward to my first pack of ’09 Allen & Ginter and to getting started on collating 2009 Topps flagship.  Regardless of what the packs contain, I’ve created a “no lose” situation for myself!  No matter what cards I pull, I’m still three relics ahead of where I was yesterday.  As always, the relics are for trade (I guess in case you’re a team collector of the White Sox, Vikings, or Chiefs).  Stay tuned for the pack rips

Ketchup Day

Remember in elementary school, whenever your class would inevitably fall behind on lesson plans, how it was called “catch up day”?  I remember one teacher of mine was creative about it and would draw a ketchup bottle on the chalkboard, calling it “ketchup” day… get it?  

Or maybe you never experienced a ketchup day, which is too bad for you.  For some reason, I always found them more fun than normal schools days.  They were probably easier, but who knows.

First time for you or not, today is ketchup day on Priceless Pursuit.  I’m still in the process of painting, packing, cleaning, and moving in to the new house, so I’ve got a bit of a backlog of mail from the past week and a half to get to.  As such, there’s a slight chance that the following cards might be attributed to the wrong people, but there’ll be plenty of shout outs and plugs to go around so it shouldn’t be too big of a deal.

If, by some chance, you’ve sent something that I’ve completely left out, perhaps it has been delayed due to my mail being forwarded.  If you’re one of those organized types that keeps addresses in some sort of book or file, contact me and I’ll get you the new address.  

Moving forward…

First up was a contest from Bad Wax, my prize being a 2009 Allen & Ginter Travis Hafner relic card!  I never win big contests…

Of course, I then proceeded to win another contest, this one over at Pack Addict.  Gotta love the Yankee Stadium Legacy cards when they’re free, plus a nice older card of Mike Piazza:

A surprise package from Jeremy Scott arrived one afternoon, containing a nice little assortment of Yankees cards and a ramdomly inserted Jeremy Scott Photography business card, mini parallel!!  Not sure if the actual size conveys, but it really is the approximate size of an Allen & Ginter mini.  

Two of my favorites from the cards he sent are the Brett Gardner Heritage RC and the ARod Turkey Red.  I’ve taken a liking to Gardner and his old fashioned singles-hitting, base-stealing way of playing baseball.

Other assorted Yankees were inside as well:

And finally, even more Yanks from Ryan of Ryan’s Memorabilia that were his half of a trade for the Ripken Masterpieces I pulled a while back (along with a handful other Orioles and Ripken cards).  I’ll post some of my favorites, with apologies to the cards that were left behind.

Some from 2009 Allen & Ginter:

Some sort of Topps parallel card of ARod looking like he’s up to no good:

Yankees from 2009 Bowman:

And the key pieces of the deal, a Phil Hughes autograph and Chien-Ming Wang relic from ’09 Allen & Ginter:

Whew… I think that catches me up.  If, by some chance, I’ve overlooked anyone, please don’t hesitate to contact me via comment or email.  Big thanks to all of you for your generosity!

Through the mail – Joe Nathan

Currently active players are a lot more fun to chase TTM than retired guys.  Every time I see the guy on TV I can say, “I have his autograph”, much to the amazement of everyone around me.  My wife never gets tired of it.   I also like to imagine that when Joe Nathan received this particular card he passed it along to all of his buddies in the Twins clubhouse for them to touch, bragging about how Joe from San Diego sent him a card to be signed and not them!  Take that, Joe Mauer! There’s no doubt in my mind that Mauer and Justin Morneau held this very card in their hands, dreaming of the day that they, too, would get a card to sign from me.

A Mauer and Morneau touched (and Nathan signed) ’08 Topps Allen & Ginter, #281… very cool.

Is there a better card to have signed than an Allen & Ginter?  They’re not glossy, so the autographs are returned in near perfect condition.  The card is mostly white, so the signature stands out no matter what color the player signs with.  Plus, it’s Allen & Ginter, and who doesn’t love that?

As you can see, Nathan’s got a nice signature which we signed at the bottom of the card in blue sharpie.  It’s always nice for an All-Star to take time out of his day to do things like this for the fans.  Some more facts that you may or may not have known about Joe Nathan:

• Didn’t convert to a pitcher until drafted by the Giants in 1995
• Made a $500,000 lead gift to the Department of Athletics in support of the construction of a new baseball field at Stony Brook University (his alma mater)

2009 Allen & Ginter, finally

I think I may be the last card collecter in the world to have NOT picked up any 2009 Allen & Ginter yet.  I don’t really know why, either.  It’s not that I don’t like it – I do.  In fact, ’08 A&G was one of my favorite sets of all-time (of my lifetime), so perhaps I haven’t grown tired of it yet seeing as how I’ve only picked up five or six packs of the stuff.

And it’s not because the code has been broken, because I had no aspirations of cracking it.  Maybe it’s because everyone else is posting box breaks of ’09 A&G so I kinda feel like there’s nothing left to be surprised by?  I don’t know.

For whatever reason, I was late to jump on the bandwagon this year… until Thursday, July 24th.  Upon opening my mail box I found a mysterious, unexpected bubble envelope from Loi at Box Opener.  It actually took me a little while to figure out who they were from and why they were sent to me – I didn’t recall sending him any football cards (which, by the way, have been sent to everyone who’s requested them except the guy who asked for Giants – those are coming!)  Turns out he’s a Sox fan and had some Yankees he needed to rid his collection of… winner, me!

Before I get to the Allen & Ginter, here’s what else was inside:

2009 Legendary Cuts:  Chien-Ming Wang, Alex Rodriguez, CC Sabathia.  Very nice!  These are WAAAYY over the price range I’d ever spend on a pack of cards without a guaranteed hit.  

More 2009 Legendary Cuts:  Joba Chamberlain, Derek Jeter.  Believe it or not, I’m pretty sure this is my first Joba Chamberlain card.  I’ve chased his rookies at Target but have never pulled one.  And since I’m just now sort of getting back in to collecting new stuff, nothing I’ve purchased has had any Jobas in it.  And you can never go wrong with a high end card of the Cap’n.

And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for… from 2009 Topps Allen & Ginter… MARK TEIXEIRA GAME USED JERSEY!!  I’ve seen a lot of complaining about the size of the relic in ’09 Ginter, but I don’t mind.  In fact, all of the complaining led me to believe they’d be smaller than they are.  Now I just need about a thousand more of these and I can stitch myself an authentic Mark Teixeira jersey.  As for the rest of the relic card, I really, really like it.  The frame is unique, and I love the mini card behind the plastic “shield” (for lack of a better description).  I almost like it enough to want to buy a box of ’09 Allen & Ginter.  Almost.

Thanks, Loi!  I don’t have anything to immediately send in return (I’ve already sent my one Sox relic away) but rest assured that in time, you shall receive Sox cards.  I’m just happy that I now have two addresses to act as trash cans for anything with “Boston” written on it.  If you’re like me and prefer to experience box breaks on somebody else’s dime, make sure to check out Box Opener!

Allen & Ginter at Target; free cards

Last night I discovered that my local Target had a box of 2009 Allen & Ginter (retail, obviously) on the shelf, but knowing the code has been cracked made it easy to walk right on by.  Not that I’d have put any effort whatsoever into cracking the code myself, but I couldn’t help feeling that the packs woul yield just a little less value.

Plus, I’m sure my hobby shop will have some sort of multiple pack discount available, so to make up for the online purchase of 2007 Masterpieces I’ll make any Ginter purchases from them.  See, no hard feelings from me.

Also – I’ve still gotten some response for my football card giveaway: Aikman, Elway, Cowboys, and Dolphins have been claimed.  I’ve gotten addresses from everyone except the guy who requested Dolphins cards (you know who you are), so please get it to me!  I’ll have everything mailed out by Monday.  To everyone else:  If you’d like a handful of football cards, tell me the team or player you collect and I’ll send some your way – no strings attached!  I can’t promise you’ll get anything of value, but you might.  I wouldn’t know either way.