The Sunday Sort: Patches, Planes, & The Professor

The past six Sundays, I've dedicated at least a couple of hours to sorting and scanning with the majority of the cards coming from fellow bloggers.  Sadly... after today I'm down one free Sunday.  After that, I head back into the classroom for my 29th year.

I'm hoping to continue to set aside part of every Sunday to work on hobby related stuff, but we'll have to see how things play out.  The start of every school year is usually very busy.

Anyways... let's get some of the highlight's from today's sort.

Let's start off with some Oakland Athletics that John over at Johnny's Trading Spot sent me last month:

2026 Topps Rainbow Foil #122

This card features two cool patches.  Lawrence Butler has a Las Vegas patch on his right sleeve, while Nick Kurtz features the Tower Bridge in Sacramento on his left sleeve.  I'm not exactly a patch collector, but this card motivated me to go out and purchase a pair of those tower patches for my Athletics PC.

2009 Topps Triple Threads Emerald #128 (#'d 31/50)

Back in the late 2000's, Cahill was considered one of the A's top prospects.  Unfortunately he only had one notable season with them before being sent off to Arizona.  Player aside... this autographed relic is a great looking card with OAKLAND being the center of attention.

1999 SP Authentic Chirography #EC

Whenever I think of Eric Chavez, "underrated" comes to mind.  He never played in the Midsummer Classic, yet he won six consecutive Gold Glove Awards and hit 20+ home runs in seven consecutive seasons with the A's.

John also tossed in a trio of O-Pee-Chee A's:

1984 O-Pee-Chee Baseball

One of these days, I'm going to sit down and build a bunch of team sets.  1980's O-Pee-Chee A's and Padres will be high on the priority list and these three cards will go toward the 1984 A's team set build.

Next up is this really cool Kurt Suzuki insert:

2020 Topps Archives Snapshots Walkoff Wires #WW-KS

This card commemorates Kurt Suzuki's three-run walk-off home run off Edwin Diaz back on 9/3/19.  The Nationals entered the bottom of the ninth trailing the New York Mets by six runs, but walked away winning 11-10.

Here are a few other Japanese guys for my collection:

And a few mascots:

2019 Topps Stickers #'s 210, 227, & 234

And a quartet of vintage airplane cards:

1957 Topps Planes of the World #15, 38, 53, & 60

My dad would have appreciated these cards.

He worked at Lockheed for a few years in the 60's on the SR-71 Blackbird.  I'm hoping Topps will one day produce another set of airplane trading cards and include the famous reconnaissance aircraft.

Rounding out John's care package was a giant stack of Greg Maddux cards.  Half were part of a Maddux Monday giveaway that I won.  The other half was a stack that John Sharp had won and passed along to me.  I picked four favorites from each stack:

Bo over at Baseball Cards Come to Life! also sent me a pair of Greg Maddux cards:

He also included a pair of Jackie Robinson cards and this Hank Greenberg for my Topps Glossy All-Stars project:

1985 Topps Glossy All-Stars #22

One card closer to completing this project.

And rounding out the Sunday Sort is a four-pack of NPB cards from Kenny over at Torren' Up Cards:

The top two cards are from this year's Calbee set.  Unfortunately, when I used Google Translate I didn't recognize either of these guys.  However the two shiny Dream Order cards featured familiar names.

The guy on the bottom-left is Kazuma Okamoto.  He's the starting third baseman for the Toronto Blue Jays.  Next to him is Teruaki Sato.  He is the starting third baseman for the Hanshin Tigers.  If you haven't heard of him, get ready.  There's a good chance he comes over to play in the states in the near future.

Thank you John, Bo, and Kenny for these generous care packages!  And thank you Mr. Sharp for donating your Maddux winnings to me.

I hope all of you had a great weekend.  Happy Sunday and sayonara! 

The Contest

The Contest is one of the funniest and most popular Seinfeld episodes of all-time.  And it's the perfect lead-in for today's Sunday Sort topic:  contests & Seinfeld.

Back in January, Dominic over at Don Cardwell Loves this Blog held a Super Bowl Pick 'Em contest over on his blog.  Going into the big game, it came down to me and Tom over at Batting Out of Order.  Both of us had picked our favorite teams.  He had the New England Patriots and I rolled with the Seattle Seahawks.  Their Super Bowl victory led me to winning this pack of cards:

2025 Donruss Football

Here's what I pulled:

As a Packer fan, the Jacobs was the highlight of the pack... although it'll be interesting to see if the allegations against him are true or not.  The Burden rookie card could be a decent pull too.  I remember he had a big game against the 49ers late in the season last year.  Although since he's a Chicago Bear, I won't be rooting for him very often.

Let's fast forward to last month.  That's when Gregory over at Nine Pockets held a giveaway for one of his custom cards using a duck race.  Tom's duck finished first.  My duck finished in fifth.  Luckily... Gregory opened up his giveaway to the five fastest ducks, which meant that I got to choose a free custom.

He had a lot of cool cards to choose from including a few Seinfeld related cards and an awesome Beastie Boys In Action custom.  I purchased a few of the Beastie Boys cards when he first released them, so it came down to choosing one of the Seinfeld cards.

Ultimately I decided on the one you saw at the top of my post:

2024 Nine Pockets Custom #3

As I've mentioned a few times on this blog, George Costanza is my favorite character.  So this card will be joining two other customs that Gregory created:

2019 Nine Pockets Custom #1

2023 Nine Pockets Custom #7

Thank you Dominic for hosting this year's Super Bowl Pick 'Em and for the pack of cards.  And thank you Gregory for the custom card giveaway!  Your customs are amazing!  Keep up the great work.

As for the Sunday sort, it's slowly coming along.  I'm over half way through the blogger care packages and eBay purchases.  And I have even started working on some Flea Market Find posts that have been sitting in my draft folder since April.   Please stay tuned.

Until then...

Happy Sunday and sayonara!

A 70's Set Build & an 80's Project

The Sunday Sort took place.  Set building and scanning did too, however I wasn't able to hammer out a post.  Until now.

This week's sort involved three care packages revolving around a 70's set build and an 80's project.  Let's start with my Topps Glossy All-Stars collection build.

Collectors who bought Topps rack packs from 1984 to 1991 were treated with a bonus white bordered, glossy card featuring all-star players, managers, and honorary members, captains, or team photos.  These are commonly referred to as Topps Glossy All-Stars and each year the set was exactly twenty-two cards.

A few years ago, I decided to build or buy the entire eight year run of sets and house them in one binder titled "The Topps Glossy All-Star Collection".  

Tom over at Batting Out of Order sent me half of the 1984 set:

1984 Topps Glossy All-Stars

These eleven cards have me four cards away from completing the 1984 set:

As for the entire Topps Glossy All-Star project, I'm still forty-two cards away.

John over at Johnny's Trading Spot sent me three of the Schmidt Glossy All-Stars:

I actually already had all three of these sitting in my binder, but this is a great way to see that Topps used the same design for the run of these sets.

John hit a home run with one of my other projects though.  He sent me ten cards for my 1977 Topps Star Wars set build:

While I hope to complete the Glossy All-Star project by the end of the summer, I'm in it for the long haul with this set build.

I'm not in a rush with this set, because I already own a complete set that I purchased years ago.  This particular set build was inspired by this flea market find and will be a source of entertainment for years to come.

Steve at 1975baseballcards.com also sent me some cards for my set build:

Like the blue and red series, the yellow is also slowly coming along:

While the green and orange series are nearly complete.

Steve included a few other cards for my collection.  One of them was this Red Schoendienst error card that actually depicts Whitey Herzog:

2024 Topps Heritage #149

Getting back to those Topps Glossy All-Stars, Herzog has the honor of having the most appearances (3) among managers.  In fact, the only other manager with multiple appearances is Tony LaRussa with two.

Thank you Tom, John, and Steve for you help and support with these set builds and projects.

Happy Monday and sayonara!

Extra Innings

I'm assuming most of you who write on the Blogger platform are experiencing delays on getting their posts added to blogger feeds.  Has anyone found a solution to this?  Last week, one of my posts didn't pop up on my feed until over 24 hours later.  I've also noticed that there are major delays with fellow blogger's publications on my reading list.  I try and go back at least one or two days each morning to see if I missed anyone's posts, but I'm sure a few have slipped through the cracks.  Hopefully Blogger fixes this issue sooner than later.  Until then, if you have any personal tricks, please let me and others know down below in the comments.

Rickey Loves Relics & Retirement

Back in early April, I received a text message from Greg over at The Collective Mind.  His LCS had recently acquired a huge Rickey Henderson collection and he shared a pair of photos with cards that were available for purchase.

The collection was very impressive and I could have used almost everything in the pictures.  However at the time, I hadn't done my taxes... so I decided to shop conservatively.  I ended up picking two $25 cards:

2010 Topps Sterling Legendary Leather Relic #5LLR-5 (#'d 09/25)

2010 Topps Sterling Stats Relic #SSR-5 (#'d 08/25)

I don't usually spend $25 on relic cards, but these two took me on a trip down memory lane. 

Watching high-end breaks on YouTube in the late-aughts lured me back into the hobby and Topps Sterling was one of my favorite products to watch.  Boxes were usually player or statistically themed and 2010 was the final year of the initial product run.

That year each box cost collectors around $250 and contained only two packs: a mystery pack (with one framed parallel or a cut signature card) and a themed pack (with three base cards and two hits).  In other words it was a high dollar gamble and not a product I would ever consider opening.

On the other hand, I was very excited to add these two game-used jersey cards to my Rickey Henderson PC for about the same price as two 2026 Topps Series 2 value boxes at Target.  I also offered to send him $25 to cover shipping and reward him with a finder's fee, but he insisted on only accepting $10.

As a bonus, he tossed in this Rickey relic card:

2021 Topps Tier One Legends Relic #TTLR-RH (#'d 019/149)

2021 Topps Tier One is another high-end product.  These one pack boxes were also originally $250.  However instead of six cards, you only received three: 2 relic cards and 1 autograph/autographed relic.

In May, Greg sent me a few more Rickey Hendersons.  Two were for my Topps Base Card Run:

1995 Topps #559

2001 Topps Traded #T77

I'm down to these six:

Technically I already own copies of his 1980 and 1981 cards.  However the second year card is part of my 1981 Topps set and the rookies fall into one of three categories:

#1:  Part of my 1980 Topps baseball set

#2:  Graded Rookie Card

#3:  Signed Rookie Card

He also tossed in a pair of 2013 The National promo cards:

2013 Leaf National #N-RH1

It looks like this year's National Sports Collectors Convention will be held in Chicago again.  I'm not going.  In fact, I've never gone.  Not sure I ever will, but never say never.

The final cards in Greg's care package were customs created by his friend Eric (EricD3043 on TCDB):

I'm super jealous of collectors with the ability to create custom cards like these.  

My personal favorites are the 1965, 1978, 1979, 1980, and both of the 1960 customs.  Great job Eric!

Thank you Greg for going out of your way to grab those two high-end Rickey relics... and for giving me a bonus one to boot.  And congratulations on your retirement!  After dedicating the past 22+ years to that school district, you've earned some rest and relaxation.  Hope you get to spend some quality time with your girlfriend, cars, collection, and card room!

  

Happy Thursday and sayonara!