Junior Junkie's Most Wanted

What used to be a meticulously-curated list of cards has now become a list of exclusion.  In other words, I need whatever Griffeys are not listed HERE.

If you are checking this list as part of a trade, fear not!  I still love duplicates, especially condition upgrades, oddballs, and variants.  I’m no snob.

Sorry – it just got too hard managing both the positive and the negative, not to mention the fact that a complete list of Griffeys I don’t have is virtually impossible.

If It Fits, It Ships: a Red Cardboard Trade Post

The hits keep coming from Matt at Red Cardboard, and this time he sent a PWE that has to be some kind of record (it certainly is here at Junior Junkie HQ). 

The engineering that went into making these cards sit flat but also remain protected was astounding.  I didn't even disassemble it right away (mostly because I physically couldn't) because it was a masterwork of plastic and tape, and it demanded my respect.

I would also like to mention that we were experiencing torrential rain in New Orleans the day this PWE hit the mailbox.  The envelope was almost entirely translucent with rainwater by the time I got it indoors. 

Opened it up - every card was bone dry.  THAT is how you put together a PWE.



I have very little of this brand in general let alone 2013's.  These look great.



That Piazza is a Card Your Mom Threw Out.  I love that set.  Plus Honor Roll is a pretty
well put-together design.  All awesome cards.

 

Dupes, baby.  I love 'em.



So, final tally: 8 full-size cards plus 3 minis and a letter.  Should I call Guiness?

I've got a Priority Mail box packed solid with hundreds of Reds already en route to you, Matt.  I hope it's got something you need.

Why I'm Quitting Packs: Spoils from eBay and the Card Show

Let's face it: I'm addicted to opening packs.  I love it - it gets me some great trade fodder as well as great cards I didn't know I wanted.  It keeps me up-to-date on the sport and the state of the hobby in general.  Plus it gives me something to gripe about which is an essential part of blogging.

However......

One of my collecting goals of late has been a shift in focus from current packs and repack boxes to more specialized, discerning purchases that will yield more Griffeys.

And the result has been a rousing success. 

I've been spending my cash on specific cards (COMC, for example) and auction lots as opposed to busting packs.  Hence, the last few days have seen a huge influx of fresh Griffeys from multiple sources that included trades, a bit of eBay sniping, and a visit to the monthly local card show. 

Trades get their own post, but here are the card show and eBay spoils.

I skipped it last month in favor of a few big COMC purchases, but this past Saturday between shipping trade packages at the post office and my buddy's bachelor party on Bourbon St., I was able to squeeze in a few hours of card show.

First, I got this for 15 cents:

Psych!

It's not what you think - this is an advertisement card printed to look like the real deal.  The back includes a price list of different baseball card sets from the 70's and 80's.  It looks even less authentic in person, plus it is less sturdy than a real '89 UD card.  I'll cover this more when it makes its way into an oddball card post.



I nabbed a lot of oversize cards at this particular show.  Above is card #1 through 11 of some Upper Deck set showcasing memorable Griffey dingers.  Mr. Murray is there for scale....



A few more giants.  These stretch the abilities of lenticular technology to show Griffey's swing in it's entirety.

Even more big 'uns.  That one on the left is another advertisement oddball, this time for lithographs by the artist that painted that particular card.

This dealer did it right.  He had a few stacks of Griffeys with super cheap price stickers
that I couldn't pass up.  I nabbed every one I thought I may be missing.

Again, he had a ton of oddballs, and that Topps Chrome was a quarter.



He even had some King B jerky cards.  I was taken aback by these - I've never see them for sale like this anywhere, let alone down South where King B wasn't even available.  We proceeded to talk about jerky for 10 minutes.

This is an upgrade.

I already own one of these that someone once sold for 60 cents.  I know this because they stuck a price sticker right on the card front.  Sadists.....

This is my big trophy from the show.  I'd seen it at the same show two months prior but didn't have enough cash to land it.  This time I was ready.  The dealer was shocked I remembered the card two months later.

It wasn't just Griffeys, though.  Here's everything else I found to spend money on:

Vintage!



Ron Swoboda is a minor celebrity in New Orleans.  Apparently he was also a member
of the '69 Mets.  Amazin'.

 
R.I.P. Charles Muncie.  He passed away only 3 days after I bought that card....

That was not the only vintage I picked up, but everything else is slated for specific bloggers, so you'll just have to wait for them to post about it (and me to ship it which will probably take far longer).




A few of my football-minded friends call me "Hooshma-zo"
because of this guy.

 
Moving on, I've also been participating in the occassional eBay auction.  In the past week I've landed 5 smaller auctions and one kinda big one.   Without giving too much away (all of these will eventually be covered in the blog), here are a few highlights from those auction wins:

One auction contained the Finest cards from the first three years of the brand's existence.  Out of these I only had the '93 in my collection, so these were very exciting additions.



I already have this, but it's just an awesome card.  There was an autographed version of this, too - it was among the first autographed Griffeys available in packs.



This is one of those weird oversized Topps cards.  I never bothered to pick one up, but now I'm stuck with it.  You may recognize that close-up picture from another Topps card that would come out years later.....

 

Two rookie reprints, one Scoremasters rookie, and a sweet Star interview card.


Everything else listed here is from the big win which was over 250 cards.  Take a look:



Eddie is working overtime showing scale.





Sadly that PowerDeck jewel case was empty.  Still, it's got Griffey on it, so it gets to stay.





This is a picture of the 250 Griffeys that came with that auction.  The stack on the left is cards I needed - the right is cards I already had.  I was blown away by how many were new to me.  I was expecting a bunch of commons and overproduction cards, but there were tons of inserts and parallels here.  Can you spot the bunny rabbit?



On all six eBay auctions I averaged 25.5 cents per Griffey and ended up with just under 500 Griffeys total.  About 40% were new to me which is a pretty amazing ratio considering how many I have.

Busting packs is fun and exciting; but it doesn't touch eBay, COMC, my LCS, and card shows when it comes to value and average price per card.  I will admit here that I picked up a bunch of packs of '91 Studio and '94 Stadium Club for 25 cents each.  For a quarter I don't even count it as pack busting.

1992 Bowman: 90's Fashion Time Capsule

In my collection:3

Griffey looks: well-insulated

Is this a good Griffey card? Yes.  A unique shot of Griffey at practice in one of the landmark sets of the 90's.  This is a set that falls right into my wheelhouse (baseball reference!).

The set: 1992 Bowman is an otherwise timeless set that somehow got trapped in the 90's.

This is the first year Bowman made all of their cards Tiffany-style: glossy and on higher-quality card stock.  Moreover, it was not overproduced as the previous modern Bowman sets had been.  That scarcity combined with a shift in focus to rookies and prospects made this an alluring set that continues to fetch good prices.

And how about that less is more design?  Bowman has always embraced that concept, but they really pull it off in '92.  The front is clean and simple: player name, Bowman B, nothing else.  The substitution of the brand name with just the B is modest and attractive, and the mildly sylized color bars on opposite corners frame the picture tastefully.  The backs are colorful and engaging with that big, weird team-by-team stat box looking more legible than ever.  Overall, this is just a well put-together baseball card.

The content of the sets is also given the simplicity treatment.  You may have seen some of the cards from this set stamped in gold foil.  Those are actually base cards and should not be confused with parallels.  There is no parallel of '92 Bowman, not even a Tiffany set.  There are also no inserts and no subsets (apart from a few of the cards sporting gold foil).  No gimmicks - just sweet-ass baseball cards, y'all.

'92 Bowman is also loaded with great rookies including Carlos Delgado, Mariano Rivera, and Manny Ramirez

Here's one of my personal favorite rookies from this set:

A dollar at the card show - well spent.

And here's one of the great rookie cards of the modern era:

Not mine - this one is still on my want list.



Luckily they got Mike in his uniform.  I say "luckily" because much to the delight of bloggers who poke fun at the more questionable wardrobe choices of aspiring young ballplayers, Bowman started photographing rookies in street clothes.  And not just any street clothes - 1992 street clothes.  Needless to say, the results are hilarious.

Yikes.  There are dozens upon dozens of cringe-worthy photos of the 90's making fashion victims of us all.  I get to complain because my Mom was still dressing me when this card was made, so it was all her fault I probably looked like a spaz.  Happy Mother's Day, Mom!

Let's see that Griffey:

The Kid looks to be practicing catches in the outfield.  I'm thinking it must have been a little nippy out that day because he is well-insulated against the elements.  Good hustle, Junior. 

This is one of those rare sets that only has one Griffey to get; but for those of us who cannot get enough '92 Bowman, there is another.  In 2010 Bowman re-used this popular design for their Bowman Throwbacks insert:

Great card, amazing photograph.  I love how you can't see his eyes.  I'm thinking that if you could, the laserbeam of Griffey-focus would slice your skull in twain.  Best to let that stay between a man and his ball.

This entire set is available at dacardworld.com for $125.00.  For that you get all the great rookies including Piazza, Mariano Rivera, and Carlos Delgado as well as 2nd-year cards for Chipper and Pedro Martinez.  But what is more than that, you get tons of pictures of dudes sincerely sporting Esprit turtlenecks, stonewashed Guess jeans, and Jordache bermuda shorts.  Now that is priceless.

2002 Donruss Elite With a Capital "E"

[Note: for some reason Blogger is not centering all the pictures and it's making the post come out al weird structurally - sorry.  Also, the concert ticket put up for grabs at the end of this post has been claimed.  Thanks for playing!]

 

In my collection: 2 regular

Griffey looks: fancy deuce chunkin'

Is this a good Griffey card? Yes.  Homeboy is chunking a high-end deuce of supreme shininess.

The set: It may not come out in the scan so well, but the finish of this set is relentlessly mirror-like.  I don't usually like the shiny finish but Elite got it right this year - it reflects light tenaciously and without apology.  It also features the player name in that great script font found in several Donruss/Leaf sets of the time including one of my all-time favorites, Leaf '95.

The design here puts a lot of stock into the giant script E, so huge it can't even fit on the card, that we are supposed to associate with this high-end set.  I've never been a fan of brands using self-referencing as design elements.  Indulge me for a moment, gentle reader:

Every Holiday season Lexus runs these commercials of upper-middle class suburbanites giving each other Lexuses (Lexi?) with big red bows as presents - super practical, right?  The commercials always feature the infamous Lexus Holiday jingle, the same one they've been playing for years.  This past December (and November, and probably some of October) the commercials depicted couples finding unique ways to play that song as a clue that they were giving someone a Lexus.  In one a family gives a Mom a jewelry box that plays the jingle at which point she realizes what it is and runs outside because obviously she is getting a new Lexus.  A couple is in the elevator of their apartment building and the song is playing in the elevator, and the wife turns to her husband all excited because obviously this means a new Lex is waiting for her downstairs.  Lexus' ad agency now thinks that we know that song well enough to associate it with a new Lexus, a point completely lost on my sister.

You see, my sister (who is a little older than me) and I were watching one of said commercials this past year, and when the jewelry box recipient mom got excited and ran outside to see her new car, my sister said to me something along the lines of, "Wait - how did she know there was a new car outside?"  I replied, "That was the Lexus Holiday jingle.  She knew from the song."  It was then that I realized that I'd been had.  The campaign had worked.  A self-referencing ad just proved to me that I watch way too much television.  Perhaps I should start using my time more constructively by, say, starting a blog (see what I did there?).

Such self-referencing is happening on the front (and back) of this baseball card, and I'm against it as a design element.  It's not a bad look, but does it have to reference the card brand?  True, Elite had been around for a few years at this point, but are we as collectors supposed to look at it and say "Ah, yes, the great E of the Elite.  Such a fine specimen is this.  It says to the world 'My taste in cards is quite impeccable, is it not?'"  It couldn't be a big G for Griffey or his uniform number or just about anything else?  Is anybody really that enamored with this set?

Rant over.  Let's take a look at that Griffey:



Here we see Griffey doing a little fancy deuce chunkin'.  The shininess of this set accentuates the excellence of said deuce.  Hey, Junior!  What's the candlepower of that deuce?  Two?  Hm - seems like more.

The portrait on the back was taken either an instant before or an instant after that found on the back of Donruss Fan Club cards from the same year:



That's Elite on the left, Best of Fan Club on the right.



This is another 2002 Donruss set that omits Griffey from its inserts.  The only cards Griffey collectors have to chase here are parallels.  Here's all the parallels I don't have from this set:

#8 Beckett Sample Silver
#8 Beckett Sample Gold (about 10% of the production run)
#8 Status Parallel #/24
#8 Aspirations Parallel #/76
#8 2002 National Sports Collector Convention #/5
#8 2002 National Sports Collector Convention Status Parallel #/5

Those Chicago Sports Collector Convention cards keep popping up in early-aught Donruss sets.  They all seem to be #/5.  They're not makin' it easy......

Tonight is Father John Misty live at One Eyed Jacks.  His solid album Fear Fun is one of my favorites of 2012.  I have an extra ticket, so if you're nearby and want to come along, shoot me a comment below....  Because let's face it, if there's anything in this world that says party, its Thursday night and talking about baseball cards.  Woooooooo!



Elite en Español: 2002 Donruss Super Estrellas

 [I opted for French in high school and college, so forgive me if my Spanish is a little off.  Or a lot off.]

2002 Super Estrellas #26



2002 Super Estrellas #26

In my collection: 1 regular

Griffey looks: chunk the deuce!

Is this a good Griffey card? Yes.  I mean, he's chunkin' the deuce, bro!  Mess with that, please.  I dare you.  Plus it's fun to see what certain baseball terms are in Spanish.

The set: This 100-card set was created by Donruss/Playoff as the first entirely spanish-language set (unlike Pacific which had both English and Spanish).  Each box came with a poster also entirely in Spanish.  Sadly it was both the first and last year the set was made.

I suspect that Donruss, having just recently returned to baseball after declaring bankruptcy three years before, was trying to find a niche with this set.  Nobody except maybe Pacific was going after the Spanish-speaking baseball collector, and Pacific wasn't making baseball cards anymore at this point.  I can't say this was a bad strategy.  Then again, perhaps the fate of Pacific was a sign of things to come.

El Griffey esta aqui:

 

 

2002 Super Estrellas #26



I'm willing to admit that Griffey could be celebrating the fact that they have two outs on the opposing team, but I prefer to think that this is shot of Griffey chunkin' the ol' deuce.  Griffey is super cool and up on current urban trends.  Peace in, playa.

They did add a shadow behind Griffey even though he is in front of a far-away backdrop.  It looks kind of ridiculous, and for some reason the effect makes me feel claustrophobic. 

The design itself isn't bad.  It includes the diagonal effect found in the 2001 flagship set and a banner similar to that used in the 2002 flagship set.  Both of these elements are repeated on the back of the card.  As a whole its not bad, but also nothing to write home about. 

The best part of this set is piecing together what all the words mean.  I really like the J after his name - it stands for Jardinero which must mean outfielder.  Apparently his lanza is izquierdo, which I think is saying that he throws left-handed.  This card is an interesting read all over the place.

One issue: the picture is the same as that found in the 2002 Donruss Elite base card:

Pretty lazy, but appropriate when considering the excellent deuceage being thrown.  The card backs look nothing alike:

A Pack to Be Named Later published this post a few years back wherein you get to see this very Griffey just pulled from a pack.  Very exciting - to me, anyway. 

The only thing I'm missing from 2002 Donruss Super Estrellas is the poster:

Posters de Jugadores #9

Besides that, the base card about does it.

Right now I'm going to try to decipher the blurb on the back using only my powers of context, my knowledge of the Romance languages, and what I know of Mr. Griffey's career.  Here goes:

"At 31 years and 261 days old became the youngest player in the major leagues to hit 450 homeruns  against San Francisco's Russ Ortiz on August 9th, 2001.  Griffey was 15 days younger than previous record-holder Jimmie Foxx who is in the Hall of Fame."

How'd I do, Spanish-speakers?  I think I'm pretty darn close.

Vaya con Dios....

2002 Donruss Fan Club and Best of Fan Club: a Celebration of Mediocrity

[Note: Over the next few posts we're going to spend some time with the Donruss sets of 2002.  I thought there would be only four or five, but no - I keep uncovering all these oddball sets they released that year.  So rather than mete them out one at a time over many months, we're just going to throw them all at the wall at once and see if they stick, exactly like Donruss did.  I've always been one to stick up for Donruss.  Sadly, now I'm starting to understand why they went out of business.....again.]

2002 Donruss Fan Club and Best of Fan Club



Seeing double?


In my collection: 2 FC, 1 BoFC

Griffey looks: poised to run

Is this a good Griffey card? Yes.  In the interest of collecting all the Griffey cards there are to be had, this is certainly one, er, two of them.  Ahem.

The set(s): We're doing a two-fer here as like Topps and Topps Chrome, there is essentially no difference between Fan Club and Best of Fan Club apart from the finish of the card and the words "Best of."  Even the backs are identical.  Yet somehow they are two different sets.

It seems Donruss took what should have been a subset of the flagship base and its parallel and made each into its own set solely for the purpose of shoving more cards into packs.

At least Topps Chrome is a cool finish and based on something pre-established, namely the Topps flagship base set.  Fan Club is a mediocre subset at best.  It's should never have gotten its own set.  Ever.  Yet it somehow got two.  These cards really, really never should have been made.

Let's take a closer look at the Griffeys....I guess:

Like Donruss in 2002, it appears that Griffey just pulled one foul.  But I happen to know that Griffey is awesome at baseball, and he actually just knocked a hit into right-center.  Now he's poised to run as he watches it drop between the fielders.

That's the Best of card.  It's shiny.  Ahem.  Let's move on.....

This is the back of both cards - there is no difference between them.  The design here is actually pretty good.  Complete stats and a decent layout.  I would prefer to have seen some blurb in the negative space at the bottom of the stat box; but overall no complaints, I guess.

I am glad that Donruss wasn't putting Griffey into many inserts at this time.  For that reason I am only missing parallels from these two sets, and I have no real interest other than that of a completionist in obtaining them.  Still, here they are (and big up to millercards.net who had complete checklists for this weirdo set):

2002 Donruss Best of Fan Club

#118 Chicago National

#118 Spotlight

2002 Donruss Fan Club

#118 Credits

#118 Die-Cuts

It's true that Donruss is not the only company to turn a subset into a set and a parallel into a whole other set; they are, however, a company that already failed once.  You would think their "come to Jesus" moment would have been declaring bankruptcy only three years prior. 

Still, in the words of one of my favorite podcasts: How did this get made?  Perhaps Donruss still had something to learn about dumping set after set on an already supersaturated market.  Perhaps the previously football-exclusive Playoff brand was releasing sets the way they had always done believing baseball collectors were always up to embracing the new, shoddy as it may have been. 

Regardless of how these two sets came to be, I have to wonder if they made money.  I would love to see some sales figures.  Or would I?

Happy hump day, baseball card people!