Blog, Batta, Blog!

Blogging light over the holidays, but thought I'd share a few gifts I got from a message board "Secret Santa". Some very cool items.



1978 Yankees roster and schedule. A nice companion piece to the set I have. When I scrapped the idea of building complete sets from each year the Yanks won the World Series, I kept my 1977 and 78 sets, mostly because I bought those cards in packs as a kid (I still have all those, too, but to re-build the sets I bought unopened material a few years ago).



W560 Waite Hoyt. Pretty cool card, from 1927 (A Yankee WS year), of a Yankee. A new card type for me, and a very thoughtful gift.



T205 Barry and Flynn - two new cards, both VERY nice (especially that Flynn with the Cycle back!).

Plus all sorts of Yankees-related magazines from the 80s, and a few shiny refractical Mickey Mantle cards and more 1980 Topps Yankee Team Cards than I can shake a stick at.

Thanks to Albie, who really, really spent a lot of time on my gift. Just a thoughtful, thoughtful thing to do.

Happy New Year!

I retired my 1938 Goudey registry set.

I'd considered doing it for a long time, and gave it some hard thoughts after the recent grading mishaps I've had. I considered crossing the entire set to SGC, but I'm a stickler for display, and it seems I need to upgrade some of my cards before I can cross them to the same grade. I don't want to take downgrades because of the money I have invested, I don't want to sell the ones that won't cross because I don't want holes in my set, and I don't want to cross only some of them because I don't want a mixed set.

At the same time, I no longer want to play the registry game. My set had gotten to #5, and I'm convinced that it's one of the most carefully assembled, high-grade '38 sets in the hobby. There are still some weaknesses in the set, but without the competition of the registry, which I somehow became a victim to, I can be more patient and focus more on acquiring great CARDS, rather than better GRADES.

The straw that broke the camel's back, I guess, was this Al Lopez.


Al has a 7 on the flip, but he's more like a 5. He came with a 7 price tag, though, and a lousy scan and a "no refunds on graded cards" stuck me with the card. Okay, I can't blame PSA for making an obvious, blatant mistake in grading, as we shouldn't depend on the grading company. There could be any number of reasons why the three graders who review each PSA card agreed that the card was worthy of a 7. Or perhaps the corners and edges got damaged while the card was in the holder.

What pissed me off about this was that I bought it. Based on a lousy scan, I saw the "7" on the flip and pulled the trigger on a BIN because I just KNEW that a PSA 7 would be an upgrade to the PSA 5 I had. And when the card arrived, and it wasn't, I realized that I had bought the holder, not the card.

I don't collect holders.

So I got depressed for a while, threw some weak bids at the PSA 8 Medwick in the Mastro auction, submitted my set to SGC for review, and ultimately just decided that I love my '38 set, and think it's one of the nicest ones anyone will ever be able to assemble. But I can't tolerate the fact that I started buying certs to bump my overall grade.

I'll sit on the sidelines and collect my set quietly. I'll upgrade with true upgrades and I'll post my new cards here; my set will stay on this website and I'll continue to have a gallery. Whenever I discover something new about the set, I'll try and write something about it.

But I won't buy a 5 in a 7 holder, ever again.

I forgot to give props to David Vargha for pointing this card out to me on eBay a few months ago. It's more of a picture than a card, I guess, but it's from 1948 and is a Cleveland Indians team issue. Does the picture look familiar?

This is my favorite baseball card.

Actually, not that PARTICULAR Waddell, but this one.


I bought this card in roughly 1983 or so, from a card shop in Ridgewood, NJ, called Dollars and Sense. The owner of the shop was a character named Greg. I used to go there with my childhood friend Dave (who sells cards on eBay for a living now), and Greg knew I liked T206s, as well as 1951 and 52 Bowmans. He used to throw a bunch of those cards in a shoebox, and sell them to me for a buck a T206, and a quarter a Bowman. I pulled the above clipped, beaten Waddell out of the box one day.

My grandfather told me about Rube. He didn't describe him entirely accurately; Rube wasn't a simpleton, he was more of a fun-loving country boy. The stories about Waddell are tremendous. He's my favorite prewar player, and I could sit and listen to the stories all day. My grandfather never actually saw Rube pitch; he wasn't born until 1918. But he was a student of the game, and knew all the stories about all the great players that played before he was born.

I'll have to tell you about my grandfather someday. But I digress.

The Rube card got me thinking about the concept of "value". I bought another T206 Waddell in EX-MT condition in about 1991, to "replace" my old Rube with the clipped corners. Somewhere along the line, I lost it. I replaced the lost one with the one you see above in the SGC holder - nice-looking card, rough back accounts for the grade. I'm now talking to someone about buying an SGC 5 to replace that one.

Clearly the EX-MT version was valuable (although it only cost me $20 in 1991). The SGC 1.5 would also fetch a decent price, due to the eye appeal of the front. I don't know, maybe $80-100. And I'm sure the 5 I'm thinking of buying will run me a few hundred.

But the beater with the clipped corners?

That one got put away through high school and college, when baseball cards were of no interest to me. It was kept in a screw-down for a long time, and then when I got sick of screw-downs it was put in a card saver. It moved with me through 5 or 6 residences, always kept in a special spot so I wouldn't lose it in transit. Today I keep it tucked away, right in the middle of my other tobacco cards. Nothing - NOTHING - could pry it away from me. It is one of the most "valuable" cards in my collection.

All this talk about PSA 8s on the message boards got me thinking about this recently. With such high dollars being spent on cards (I'm guilty of it myself), it's easy to start thinking of these things in terms of their investment potential. It's easy to write off the lower-grade cards as useless, and a waste of money. But how do you quantify the value of that beat-up Rube at the top of this post? As a kid I TREASURED that card. It was a Hall of Famer from 1909! The oldest card in my neighborhood, one that everyone wanted to own. I turned down Schmidt rookies, Rose rookies, Rice rookies, Seaver rookies - all the cards that were huge when I was a kid.

I like having some nice cards, but there's WAY more to the hobby than that, for me.

I give you Sunny Jim Bottomley.


Jim, as pictured on his R311 card (which I just acquired) had a problem with his cap. It's kind of endearing, actually, as the cap is always tilted off to one side. Here's his 1929 Kashin:


Yup. Off to his left just enough. It's a thing with Sunny Jim, always wearing his cap tilted off to the left.

Bottomley played when my grandfather was a boy, the same grandfather that taught me that it was disrespecting the game to ever set foot on a ballfield in shorts, or without a proper cap. If a player had his cap on backwards, my grandfather (who I called "Pal" or "Willie", even though his name was Joe) would lose his mind. He also hated long hair and earrings on men, tight jeans, and short skirts. I'm pretty sure that if he were alive today, he'd flip his lid if he saw the kids wearing the hanging-down baggy jeans and the hanging-out boxer shorts, with the pant legs dragging behind them as they walk.

But then I realized something.

The frickin' hat thing is a 1930s EPIDEMIC.

The hat thing is the hanging-out underwear of the 1930s.

Check out Kiki Cuyler. His hat's so messed up, it looks like he's wearing a wash rag on his head.



And Charlie Gehringer? Yup. Tilted to the left, yo.



Lefty Gomez? Dresses left.



It goes on and on and on and on and on.



And it doesn't start in the 30s, either. It goes way back to the turn of the century.




These guys were THUGS, man. THUGS. Even Fred Clarke. FRED CLARKE! Wearing his underwear, hanging out the back, with all that jewelry and those earrings and stuff.

What's next? Did Connie Mack have tattoos? Did Rube Waddell travel around with a posse?

Umm, actually Rube DID travel around with a posse.

Sometimes it takes something stupid to remind me that the world really hasn't changed ALL that much.

They even had plastic Devo hair in the 30s.

I found a whole bunch of E121 (or W575-1) Henry Johnson Confectioners cards over the last week or two. I snagged a Cobb for a bargain price at the SCP auction last year, and thought it would be cool to start collecting these. I know there are people who are E121 fanatics out there; I'm not really one of them. But the Henry Johnsons are, in my opinion, pretty cool. So I've been keeping a lookout for these, and have managed to latch onto a dozen or so, including a bunch I just picked up from a very nice seller's website.

The Wally Schang is easily the nicest HJ I've ever seen; the image is crisp and the card is in pretty good shape. I also got a Johnny Evers, my second HOFer. A few of the others I picked up have star-shaped hole punches in them; I think these are cancellations of some kind and so does the one person I've met who I would consider an "expert" in these cards.



I'm always looking for these, so if you have any, feel free to get in touch. I'll even buy a fake one from you, if you have one.

One thing that makes me crazy is when people try and oversell the scarcity of these, though. They're scarce, yes. Are they worth the $350 one guy had a common SGC 40 selling for at the Reading show? Hell, no. I bought my Cobb - a PSA 4 (MK) - for $400. I know I got a bargain price, but not THAT much of a bargain. Of all the others I own I've never paid more than $30 for a common.

That being said, if you've got any, I'd love to buy them from you.

I use a lot of propane in my life.

It heats my house and my water, it fuels my oven, and it dries my clothes. It fuels my barbecue grill and powers my mosquito repeller in the summertime. It fuels a tool I use to burn weeds.

For about 90% of the propane I need, I use Suburban Propane. Suburban is also a client of my company. We do their marketing, their ads, their website, and a lot of their internal systems.

For a small portion of the propane I need, I use Amerigas. There's a gas station a mile away from my house that has an Amerigas propane tank exchange cage - I bring my empty cylinders there and replace them with full ones. It's cheap and convenient. When I need to fill the gas tank for the tractor, I bring the propane cylinders and swap them out in one, big "gas run."

Last summer I went out and bought an Amerigas tank, and when I got home and hooked it up, I discovered that it leaked. By the time I discovered it, the tank was empty, my whole deck smelled like propane, and I had no gas left to cook with. At that point, the gas station was closed and I couldn't barbecue. It was sloppy service, and I was pissed. I bitched about it to everyone who would listen.

Not a single person I bitched to thought it was weird or unethical that I was bitching. They all seemed to understand that I'm entitled to buy propane wherever I want, and once my wallet comes out of my pocket I become a consumer, entitled to all the same expectations and rights that everyone else has.