Plus One Vealtone, Minus One Nap

It's been 72 days, 12 hours, 33 minutes, and 44 seconds since Napkin Doon gallantly galloped off into the blogging sunset. 

While I was mostly on blogging sabbatical, the gone-but-not-forgotten Napkin Doon and I got a trade going. I hope it won't be our last one, even if his blogging days are over. I still really wish it wasn't entirely true.

Anyway, I'm back, and Nap is gone, and I also wish it was the other way around. But, oh well. He's a busy guy. I have a busy scanner.

Thus, the results of our glorious trade:

I always love Kalines, and the weird-looking under-sized one is from a Milton Bradley game in 1969. Nap bought it special for me at one of Cleve's auctions. Remember those? Ah, the good ol' days.

Of course, what's amazing here is the 1957 Kaline in beautiful condition. Nap generously dipped into his sampler album for me, and I'm thrilled to own this card. Remember the sampler album? Damn, all those series Nap had just make me feel like an inadequate aimless blogger. Nap, we need you!

And he sent these:

Shiny!

He also sent me a pack of 1990 Topps, which I let my one-year-old daughter open (after checking for no-name Frank Thomas, of course!). She loved it, and still has some creepy mustachioed guys in her toy boxes. 

Any time you want to come back, Nap, I'll be reading. Or, hell, come guest write on my blog. 

Tigers Win! The Stars Revived

Game 4 was a nail-biter. Game 5 was a little smoother. Once this guy sent one over the fence.

And what a beautiful thing it was to see Miggy doing what Miggy does. He's still hurt, but perhaps we're seeing an upswing. Speaking of a beautiful things, this snazzy card comes from a trade with Mr. Baseball Scott.

But it wasn't just Miggy having a comeback.

Verlander's game was a masterpiece. Let's take a moment to humbly reflect with Justin.

Ohm.

Done?

So are all the doubters finished asking what happened to Verlander, as if he's been a junk pitcher all season. He had what would be a career year for most pitchers, and now he's pitching at an unbelievable level again. Let's take this right on over to Boston!

Amazing Trade with Reader Alvin: This Ain't No Bull

I don't get many trade requests from collectors who don't have their own blogs. I'm always surprised to find out anyone is reading besides just other bloggers and my sister now and then, and someone in Russia, according to my stats.

Enter El Toro Alvin. The Bull contacted me flashing some player names I liked. He said he had some GUs and autos of the fellas I like. My interest was piqued. And then he sent some scans. My chin dropped, and I let him pick all he wanted off my trade bait page. I'm always willing to trade a bunch of cards for a few or even one, like this one:

Oh my God, right? I have a couple Kaline autos, but this is my new favorite. I love the design of these 2007 Ultimate autos. The red, gold, and blue is a super classy version of patriotic. All the foil is just done perfectly, and everything draws the eye to that fantastic auto. It's just the perfect card.

This card alone was worth a bunch of my bait. But Alvin had more to offer.

This is only my second Ripken GU. They're tough to come by, and I dig this one. Quite a night and day difference in design from the last card. Look at all that gray. And everything draws the eye to...gray. I'm hardly complaining. I love this card for its simplicity and 'cause it's Cal. And Alvin is awesome.

But there's more.

 I'm seeing less Miggy GUs these days, ever since he won MVP last year. I don't foresee his cards getting any cheaper any time soon. It's always neat to see these cards where he was so young and small.

 

 

 And finally, Alvin sent this Pudge GU. Always great to see a stripe. I dig the designs of this card, though the red and white have nothing to do with anything really, which I suppose is why they washed out Pudge's color. Two Marlins cards in a row. Thank goodness they fed the Tigers so many delicious players or we probably wouldn't be seeing the playoffs.

 

Thanks again to Alvin. This was a smashing good trade. He collects Royals, gold refractors, and Bowman autos from what I can tell. If you have a chance to trade with him, do it!

Brad's Blog Rocks the Trade

Many of you are well aware of great blog aptly titled Brad's Blog: it's a blog and his name is Brad! Make your way over there for some great posts about Phillies and a pretty damn slick collection of Mantle vintage.

Brad and I got a trade going a couple months ago. I had a bunch of Phillies hits and vintage and inserts I needed to find a good home for, and Brad became that home. What I didn't expect was the awesome generosity he'd show me.

He sent me this glorious Al Kaline auto. I have a couple of his autos, but this one is now my new favorite. It's a great picture and a design completely made for autos. This card is totally my jam. This trade is my jam. Brad is the bomb for sending this. OK, my '90s exclamations of joy are not doing this amazing trade justice. Let's get back to the cards.

Here are some extras for my player collections. Love the Chrome Heritage, and Pudges in gear are always cool.

He also sent along some sweet Fielder senior cards.

Speaking of '90s Tigers, it's Sweet Lou Whitaker, encased in gold. I love finding Whitaker cards I don't have, and this one is a lot of fun. 

Here's the back of this card. It's a Sweet Lou smorgasbord collage: batting, fielding, and looking confused in the background--the many faces of Lou.

Just to show you what an awesome trader Brad is, these were some of the extras he never mentioned. I mean, the guy just tossed in a Bryce Harper kind-of-rookie for fun. I love it, as well as the International parallel of some Tiger I'd never heard of.

To wrap this trade up...

Here's a beauty of a card. Blue refractors are always nice, but when they feature Mr. Verlander, well, hell, that's a near-perfect card. 

Thanks, Brad, for the amazing trade. I'll be looking for Phillies cards for you. For the rest of you, be sure to head over to Brad's Blog for some great reading and maybe a some great trading.

Iconic Rookies: The Wizard from the King

This iconic rookie is brought to you by the one and only Diamond King who is always a generous trader. And he sent me a card that was a big void in my collection.

It's a little off-center, a little dinged, and completely perfect. Look at those sideburns, the old Padres uniform. I'm not much for headshots, but this one is perfect. I think it's that it feels candid, that this isn't Ozzie posing, but Ozzie just being a badass. I'm not a fan of the 1979 Topps set, but this card makes me appreciate the design, especially the old Topps logo in the baseball.

This is another one of those cards every collection requires. And I have my refractors and The Diamond King to thank. What is he going to do with all those refractors? I have to know!

For the hell of it, because we can never have enough of them, here's a few extra Ripkens also included in the trade:

No Average Trade, No Average Verlander

At this point, most of you probably know all about Jason and his great blog Joe Average Collector. I was lucky to chat with him and trade with him early on in his blogging career, and we've had some amazing trades since. And they all started with one card Jason originally offered me, a card I still can't believe I own:

What an extremely stunning card. This is my first Verlander patch card, and that's about the primest patch one could get. I think this is my favorite Verlander card I own, and one of the shiniest gems in the collection.

 

And with this trade, Jason, being the super generous guy he is, threw in a bunch of sweet extras:

 

 

More Verlanders, including a 2006 rookie.

 

 

We also traded for this very cool All-Star Avila card.

 

So, that was our first trade, and since then, Jason just keeps sending me awesome cardboard:

 

Such as this dynamic duo of vintage and new, well-loved and manu-patched, all-star and hall-of-famer. This was our second trade, which leads to our most recent one.

 

For this most recent trade, Jason dug into his vintage and found a bunch of great gems. Here we have a quad of my favorites, '68s and '58s. This Charley card might be the most unmanly card of a Tiger ever, which makes it perfect.

 

He also sent a woodgrain '55 Bowman Tiger I needed. Zuverink only started a couple dozen games for the Tigers, but his vintage visage was one I needed for my vintage Bowman Tigers team sets.

 

To wrap up this vintage trade, here's a complete work of baseball card art. I absolutely love this card, Gray's portrait, his somewhat sneaky-looking smirk. The background is so cool too. Man, this is one of the best cards I've seen in a while. Good luck, modern cards, in trying to compete with this.

 

Oh, yeah, there is that. Sorry, '53 Gray. This card is a bit more thrilling.

 

Thanks, Jason, for an amazing trio of trades. Be sure to check out Joe Average Collector's Blog for tons of great writing, and if you're lucky enough to get to trade with him, you won't be disappointed.





Spankee Shares His Mistresses

Those trades just keep on coming. I contacted Spankee at My Cardboard Mistress, offering him a few cards I thought he might be interested in and he sent me some awesome stuff.

Here are a few cards we talked about in the trade. The Perry/Iorg auto is about as shiny as shiny gets. Shiny to the eighth power, to be exact.

We'd also talked about this one:

I'm not really a Gypsy Gueen collector, but I love getting new Kalines, and I'm a sucker for framed cards. This card is just stunning. As classy as the Perry/Iorg card is shiny.

This card was a complete surprise. Spankeea didn't even tell me he was sending it, though it would have been the keystone of our trade, and it just goes to show what a generous trader he is.

Here's some other surprises:

A low-numbered Pudge card and a shiny blue Clete. Clete's a Twin now, but I still dig this card, the ball frozen in mid-air, the fancy blue chrome-ness, and just the fact that "Clete" is a cool damn name.

He also sent some nice Ripkens for the PC. I'm getting closer with this Upper Deck Road to the Hall set, but this is my first Iron Men card, a set I'd also like to complete one day. There sure were a lot of Ripken insert sets in 2007, and a lot of pairings with Ripken.

This was a trade that just kept on giving. Various minis and refractors.

Some more great Cabreras, including a numbered orange parallel from 2012 Bowman. I'm glad to pick up some 2012 Bowmans, since I still haven't, and probably won't, be buying any of this product this year. So I'm glad to snag these cards in trade.

We both collect Verlander, so adding these Verlander cards to the PC was a nice suprise in a trade full of surprises. I especially dig the Heritage duo card with Weaver. Something about that picture looks a little shopped to me, but maybe they really posed together.

Finally, the biggest surprise of all:

Some super creepy, ultra-rare X-Files cards. Not sure how these ended up in there, but I like it. I like the whole thing. Thanks, Spankee, for a great trade.

Kaline Versus Cobb: Making the Player Collection Official

So, I'm finally following up on my posts about my Cobb conflict. For many of you collectors, and especially you Dodgers guys, you don't have such worries about the questionable characters of the legends from your team. Us Tigers guys, we have Cobb to contend with. But we also have Kaline. And I'm grateful for that. This last year, I've been getting to work on my Kaline player collection, which has become somewhat respectable. And, from what I understand, Kaline was a pretty decent fellow. Let's examine the cardboard testimonials.

According to the back of his '55 Topps card, Kaline was one of those "Bonus Babies" going to the highest bidder straight out of high school. What's more dangerous than a high school kid with a huge wad of cash? But it wasn't pimp cups and  Cadillac tail fins for Kaline. This is what he did with his money:

As this 1992 Front Row cards says, Al used his $30,000 bonus and "gave it to his parents to pay off the mortgage, and to finance a much needed operation to save his mother's eye-sight." Now that's a pretty stand-up guy. I have heard that Kaline can be a grump when it comes to autos, but, hell, I think we can forgive him. At least he isn't strangling his fans like some Tigers legends.

So, to go along with this post, I'm officially breaking out the giant-sized scissors to open the Kaline player collection page. On the page I list all of the Kaline cards I currently have. If you have anything not on there, I'm interested in trading for it. I'm putting this on the right side of the blog, near the top, where I'm also now linking all my other player collections, and the lone set I'm working on, 2007 Bowman Heritage, which is finishing up at a snail's pace.

OK, back to the above Front Row card pictured above. As you likely noticed, there's a mysterious certificate of authenticity below the card. And why is that there, you ask.

Because I recently acquired my second Kaline autograph, from Carl Crawford Cards. He sent this along to even up a trade we made months ago. I sent him some Johnny Gomes autos and some other goodies, and he sent an awesome Kaline bat relic. I guess he figured that one relic wasn't enough to complete the trade, so he sent this. I was completely happy with the bat relic, but that just shows you what an awesome trader he is. But that's not all he sent this time around. He actually sent a whole slew of Kalines that he'd put in order of awesomeness, with this in the back.

Here's a few more he sent.

More autograph-grumping, stand-up guy Kaline cards.

And if a bunch of awesome modern Kalines and an auto weren't enough, some well-loved vintage.

This trade added enough weight to my Kaline player collection to be able to get the page going, so thanks, man. Awesome cards. If you have any Carl Crawfords or Johnny Gomes cards, be sure to check out Carl Crawford Cards and make him a nice trade offer.

Play at the Plate Dips into the Personal Stash

We all know Brian over at Play at the Plate, who runs one of the best blogs around and is about as generous as it gets with contests. I'd been hoping to trade with him for a while--I love me a detailed want list to scour through. We finally got a trade going, and Brian dug deep into his pockets full of cardboard and sacrificed some cards that were probably a little hard for him to part with.

My first graded card ever and this is now a cornerstone card of the Pudge rookie collection. A grade of 9 at that. I believe it lost a point because of the dirt on Pudge's pants. I still am so surprised that Brian could let this one go. It couldn't have been easy. I know he likes catchers in gear, and this is probably the coolest looking Pudge rookie card.

I imagine this Scherzer mini was a little easier for Brian to part with.

Some more great cards that will find a good home with the Vealtones. I really dig the Heroes card here. You can't really come up with more star power on one card than this card contains. And this is my first Elite Extra Edition. I'm none-too-blown-away by this set, but it's a Verlander, so it's a cool card.

Now that's a damn sweet card--a woodgrain Kaline that actually fits into a regular 9-pocket page. I didn't even know Bowman Heritage reprinted this card. And that's certainly a card worth reprinting.

To wrap up the trade, here's a hunk of Pudge bat. Another card I can't believe Brian could part with. Could he possibly have had a double of this? Instead, I'm guessing this is just another example of how generous Brian is. Ovation had a really classy design with this card. Not sure what's up with all the green, but I like it. I like it all. This was a great trade, and I hope Brian enjoys what I sent as much as I enjoyed these cards. Thanks for the great trade.

Trade Post: Pudge + Freehan = Collector's Crack

The Cynical Buddha sent me some cards to help me toward my enlightenment of Pudge-rvana. If you don't know what Buddhistic cynic I'm talking about, you should go head on over to Collector's Crack. I had some Brewers and some Big Hurts, and he had some Pudges, and thus the trade began.

This was the card that got the trade started. I had a 2008 Heroes Corey Hart GU that was getting no love, and he offered this hunk of Pudge's bat. I had the base version of this card already, and I'm thrilled to add the wooden version to the collection.

But he didn't stop there. Cynical Buddha had a lot of Pudges apparently.

These are just a few of my favorites. Pudge in catchers gear. Pudge in a Tigers uniform. Notice how much more he smiles when he's wearing the old English D.

I'm a big fan of the early T206 sets, and now I have a bunch of the various poses from this set. Actually, he sent 3 or 4 of most of these, to the point where I almost felt Bipped. Bipped in the best sense possible, since these are the kind of doubles that induce internal peace and move my mind toward a state of cynical bliss.

Here were the worst two cards of the giant stack of Pudges. Somehow, in the '90s, Ivan managed to be captured in some extremely awkward photographs. Not sure what's going on in the Zenith card, why Pudge's shorts need to be so short, or why he's doing Jazz-Hands! And then more short-shorts while Pudge attempts to stop a green boulder from crushing his head, all while wearing a toothy grin.

There were a ton more Pudge cards, and it was a truly generous trade package. But I want to save space for my favorite card of the trade, a card that Cynical Buddha mentioned only as a side note addition to the trade.

I was so excited about this card. An on-card auto of Mr. Freehan, a Michigan native, a Tigers lifer, and one of our all-time best catchers. I was a fan of Freehan before, and I know most Tigers fans are, but now I love this guy even more. I was reading up on him again for this post at baseball-reference.com and found out some new awesome bits of Freehan history. He was "a master in getting hit by the pitch, leading the league three times." OK, that's cool, a skill that I wouldn't consider one being able to master. Also, Freehan holds a record in catching for 325 of Mickey Lolich's starts. That's the highest number for any pitcher/catcher pair, and that's just seems like one of the most seminal catcher records a catcher could hold.

So, Freehan's cool, and this card is awesome. Thanks so much, Cynical Buddha. I'll be looking for Brewers cards for you. And all of my half-dozen readers should check out his excellent blog, though I'm sure you're all frequenters.