Baseball Cards

If you're going to pay big bucks you want the box with intact shrinkwrap with the manufacturer logo printed on it. My memories of my parents working card shows in the early-mid '90s are hazy but the Upper Decks and higher tiers of cards had unique shrinkwrap IIRC.

Magic is the worst about this. Early packs are real easy to sort without even opening.

I think it was easy to reseal vinyl records.

Iirc, foil and plastic packs were harder to reseal as well.

i have an entire topps 1987 baseball set in absolute mint condition -- the only baseball cards i ever bought. i mean i even resisted putting tony pena in my wallet ffs

can i buy a house with this yet?

purchased out of the back ads of the sporting news even! good god i'm old

that's a beautiful set imo. bonds rookie iirc!

Topps lives on, kind of.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/fanatics-baseball-cards-topps-11641261997

Just uncovered a box of plastic protect sleeved cards from my childhood in our storage locker. This bundle is almost all early '90s inserts/chase cards with a handful of regular series exceptions (including three of the Upper Deck Michael Jordan baseball rookie card).

An amusing oddity are a few cards from a giveaway series from Church's Chicken, which weren't completely licensed, so the team logos were airbrushed off--I had totally forgotten that was a thing then.

Adding to the peak '90s of it all, that Church's set had REFRACTOR CHASE CARDS--I've got multiples of the Joe Carter one.

what do you want for the joe carter?

https://www.topps.com/cards-collectibles/topps-now/goose-on-the-loose-2022-mlb-topps-now-reg-card-1066.html

If the goose were clutching a bat with "fuckface" written on it, maybe, but I think I'll pass.

https://i.imgur.com/OfVoZo0.png

Hell yeah

Not a card, but I bought one of these for $4 in Dollarama today:

https://www.fairshop.ca/new/collectibles-c-1/zack-greinke-21-arizona-diamondbacks-player-replica-mlb-players-choice-p-64

(If you look down below, you can still get a Roughned Odor for $10 before there's a run on them when he retires.)

Starlin Castro!

I still want a Mike Richter starting lineup

Not much of a hockey fan, but you can get a new one on eBay for $15.

I had a Gary Carter Mets Starting Lineup action figure back in the day and sad I don't still have it

Phil Neiko was born in ‘39 so he was probably 47 when that photo was taken assuming during the ‘86 Season. Awesome

Upper Deck ruined the baseball card industry

I found my old cards - i like the matter of fact-ness of the 80’s stuff. Ur right that upper deck ruined a lot of stuff (most specifically brands like score trying to do the photography that UD did but not as well). Also a pack of 89 topps was 40 fucking cents!!

That said having switched to a pack of baseball cards instead of eating ice cream when i’m stressed the topps archive line is pretty dope

For obvious reasons I never collected baseball cards but I have some cultural knowledge of what they mean to people who do; the sell-your-soul-for-it Sandy Koufax card that’s a notable Mcguffin in Needful Things and the Yaz card (“here you go, muttonchops Yaz”) that Milhouse is willing to pay $30 (in the 90s!) for

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mr7v7FBcKoI

Anyway at some point randomly last year I received a package in the post from the person who started this thread, with a collection of 2019(?) Portland Sea Dogs cards. That’s the Red Sox double A affiliate and the collection featured a number of guys now on the big team:
https://i.postimg.cc/SRtsyMbq/IMG-4735.jpg

Then clemenza offered to send me some old duplicate cards of his, which I accepted and they are pretty amazing.

https://i.postimg.cc/7Z46qDp5/IMG-4736.jpg

There’s some beautiful cards in this, like the Griffey one on the left, but the NOMAH card on the right might be my favourite of them all
https://i.postimg.cc/yd21tzmY/IMG-4737.jpg

https://i.postimg.cc/NjbgYX6n/IMG-4739.jpg

https://i.postimg.cc/x8HfSF5G/IMG-4740.jpg

As my message to TH says, they are in perfect condition!
https://i.postimg.cc/JhczsgCp/IMG-4743.jpg

So now I have a very small collection of cards, most of them not worth anything (not the point to me), I’m not sure if I’ll add to it massively but certainly I have been looking out for nice cards for my favourite players and such. Thank you so much to both Tracer Hand and clemenza for your generosity and sharing your love of the game with me!

I have a signed canseco dream team that makes me giggle

Baseball cards got exceedingly ugly for a time--"refractor" cards looked like the worst dollar-bin album cover art--but the Nomar card is a Topps Stadium Club, and they usually looked great in the '90s.

lol. I actually considered sending you a Roy Halladay refractor (but was prevented from doing so because it didn’t ship to Canada!)

I was really, really into baseball cards from about 1983 to the bubble burst in the '90s, which really killed my interest. I had a binder of my best cards that was at one point was valued (at least per the Beckett magazines I used to devour) at about $7,000 - $8,000. Hoping to use it to help pay college expenses, I held on too long and when I finally took in in it was worth about $150 total.

i've still got thousands of cards in my childhood home, gyac if you have a list of favorite players whose cards may be of negligible value from the years 1987-1991 i likely have them. plenty of Score and Donruss and Fleer and particulary ugly Topps lying around.

Really kind of you Omar - if your webmail works, message me that way & we can discuss?

I thought the thread might have been revived for this crazy story, what Canadian dreams are made of:

http://www.cp24.com/news/saskatchewan-collector-finds-rare-case-containing-coveted-wayne-gretzky-rookie-cards-1.6749401#:~:text=Heritage%20Auctions%20took%20the%20hockey,of%20%242%20million%20or%20more

Heard about that on the radio the other day--amazing. ($200,000 worth of baseball cards, too.)

Didn't know there was a baseball card thread so I want to repost this from the 'Rank Anything You Feel Like Ranking' thread just to see if anyone wanted to engage with it. I chose this period only because that's what I'm familiar with - I knew the '70s sets from growing up in that era but I also knew most of the '60s sets from older kids in my neighborhood who had hung on to their cards.

Topps baseball card sets 1960-1980 by aesthetic design:

1. 1975
2. 1965
3. 1964
4. 1971
5. 1972
6. 1974
7. 1960
8. 1976
9. 1970
10. 1967
11. 1961
12. 1977
13. 1966
14. 1973
15. 1963
16. 1968
17. 1969
18. 1980
19. 1962
20. 1978
21. 1979

― Josefa, Saturday, August 18, 2018 1:38 AM (five years ago)

I know the sets from the first half of the '90s much better; collected for about five years in there, mostly overproduced sets from the glut.

https://cdn.acidcow.com/pics/20100809/the_30_worst_baseball_cards_of_all_time_24.jpg

Incredible stache

phwooar

the randiest randy

Has mustaches over his eyes too

https://i.imgur.com/PbRk0uT.jpg

look what came in the mail from user gyac!!!

Just to clarify, I did not deliberately purchase 3/4 of these cards.

What does that Ortíz say on the back

V underwhelming. No stats or anything. The others are great - little retro clip art, drawings, fun facts etc

Is the Seabold a rookie card as well

lol it is. Let's hope he gets the chance to lower his career ERA to something under 8.

Probably not in Colorado

Sends baseball cards very much in character...Thank you to gyac for some cool cards, including these two, which I think are both from heritage sets:

https://i.postimg.cc/sXVkq4zF/buster.jpg https://i.postimg.cc/C596hj3x/tim.jpg

Those were supposed to be smaller and side by side...

(they're side-by-side if you have a big enough screen!)

The Lincecum is supposed to look like an ‘85 Topps iirc. One of my favorite designs. The set with the legendary Gooden rookie.

I sent a few others, as clemenza alludes to, so here’s what I sent and why:

Lincecum: duh

Posey: the Posey/Lincecum battery of the 2010 postseason is my Roman Empire

Brandon Morrow: obviously he was a Jay but I kept reading about him when I started reading about Lincecum. He was a California kid who was drafted ahead of Lincecum, by the Mariners. Lincecum was a stud at UW and Mariners fans had been watching him carve up the pac12 for three years and Mariners fans, to this day, still bitch about (them drafting) Morrow. So you had a California kid go to Seattle and a Seattle kid go to California. Morrow was basically ruined by the Mariners messing him around but the Jays, I believe, helped him get back to what he started out as. The parallels are intense - their careers started and ended at very similar times.

Sergio Romo - my Immaculate Grid stud! And the story about him striking out Miggy with a slow fastball in 2012 remains classic.

I also sent a José Bautista by virtue of him being both a Blue Jays stud, baseball brawl and rule 5 legend?

This is all really cool