Sometimes it’s little things that make you feel good. For instance, have you ever hit the “perfect pump” at the gas station, releasing the pump handle just as the dollar amount clicks to a perfect, round number? It doesn’t really matter in this age of pay-at-the-pump, but it feels good, right? Like tossing a wad… Read More 61 from ’64: Finishing the 1964 Topps Giants set
Late last summer, when sports apparel and memorabilia giant Fanatics came out of nowhere and swooped trading card licensing deals with NBA, NFL, and MLB, one of the biggest side stories was the fate of venerable card maker Topps. The company has produced an MLB card set (or many sets) each year uninterrupted since the… Read More The Other Shoe: Fanatics buys Topps
There are some team names in professional sports that don’t match their location or history very well. What if I had the power to change those names to something more appropriate? The inspiration for this exercise was thinking about how messed up it is that there’s a team called the Jazz in Utah, a team… Read More Right Name/Wrong Name: Fixing the MLB’s names for fun
I have talked plenty here before about how, in my card collecting hobby, I’m drawn to beautiful, interesting cards that aren’t necessarily what everyone else is collecting (and therefore aren’t as pricey as what everyone else is collecting). This is definitely more a decision on the collecting side of things rather than the “investing” side,… Read More On the shoulders of Giants: To collect the 1964 Topps set or not collect it?
It’s always fun when something unexpected and good pops up, right? Getting two flat tires in a week courtesy of screws laying in the road (which happened to me earlier this month), that’s unexpected and bad. Not fun. Getting a chance to look through someone’s vintage card collection for the first time (which happened to… Read More Me, Hank, and the Mick: My first experience digging through a vintage sports card collection
In this occasional sports card feature series, I highlight a few of my favorite single-card purchases of recent vintage. Since I haven’t written much about sports cards since the start of the new baseball season, I thought it’d be appropriate to take a look at four of my favorite baseball card acquisitions as of late.… Read More The Singles Mixer: A couple Sox, a Redleg, and an Angel
When I was a young sports card collector, I didn’t really “get” the whole Donruss Diamond Kings thing. Diamond Kings was an insert in the Donruss baseball card sets with hand-drawn/painted images of some of the day’s most popular players. I always thought the drawings/paintings looked kinda lame, and the design of the cards was… Read More SportKings, Topps Gallery, and Panini Diamond Kings: Sports cards as art
I haven’t followed baseball all that closely the last several years, but for me there’s nothing quite like the time when the first baseball card sets of a season hit store shelves. There’s an excitement and a freshness that comes with a new baseball season that seems to exceed the excitement and freshness of all… Read More 2021 Topps baseball series 1: A base set to beat all base sets
I started the Blast From the Packs series to talk about my experiences opening actual packs of cards and essentially reviewing the sets they come from, but over the past month or so, the majority of my “allowance money” has been going toward purchasing single cards — colloquially referred to as singles — on eBay… Read More The Singles Mixer: My favorite recent baseball purchases
I won’t pretend to be an expert on using eBay, but I’ve been successful in the last month or so tracking down affordable boxes of old sports cards; grab bags of random packs of sports cards; and single cards of favorite players, including rookie cards (actually, they’ve mostly been rookie cards). I’ve learned a few… Read More Blast From the Packs: How I use eBay to buy sports cards
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