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
I really, really liked last year’s Topps baseball set. Not everybody did, but that slick, sharp, clean, modern look really did it for me. It was a bordered card that didn’t feel closed-in, it was a visually interesting card that didn’t feel cluttered. As far as base sets go, it was hard for me to… Read More More like Midds: Topps 2022 Series 1 Baseball
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
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 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
One of the fun things about digging back into old sports cards is the learning I’m doing. I’m learning about/remembering players from my youth, discovering cards of current-day general managers and coaches who used to play (sometimes in relative obscurity as benchwarmers). I’m having fun digging back into the history of championships, MVPs, record-setters, and… Read More Blast From the Packs: From Score to Pinnacle back to Score
I recently learned that the Donruss Trading Card Company was named for its three founders: guys named Doug, Don, and Russell. My first thought was “man, how did Doug agree to that? Total Doug erasure with a name like Don-Russ.” So then I was thinking of other names they could have went with, like: RussDoDon… Read More Blast From the Packs: Donruss through the years
When I started this little experiment in purchasing sports cards from my past off eBay as a way to spur my writing muscles awake from a much-too-long slumber, I said to myself, “this isn’t going to be a big new hobby, it’s more of a writing exercise. Besides, I can’t even afford to buy cards… Read More I hate/love the trading card industry: A two-sided essay
How did I end up opening 30-year-old packs of baseball and football cards from Canada? It’s all thanks to the magic of eBay!… Read More Blast From the Packs: Clearly Canadian
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