more cards from night owl, plus a contest

there were too many good cards sent my way by night owl to be contained to a single post, so here are some more.

this 1996 select certified wilton guerrero card

actually shows roger cedeno

1994 topps traded chan ho park

this is park, obviously, and it looks like he's pitching in a high school stadium

speaking of high school, here's a 2012 panini triple play matt kemp when i was a kid card

the back is all about how basketball was kemp's primary sport until late in his high school years.  now, is this card better than the early 70's topps boyhood photos of the stars subsets?  maybe.  but then again, maybe a black and white picture of kemp posterizing some kid under the basket would have been ok, too.

2003 topps bazooka paul loduca relic

2004 topps clubhouse collection chin-feng chen relic

2004 topps traded edwin jackson relic

2007 bowman heritage jeff kent relic

and 2008 topps brad penny relic

night owl was purging his relics, and i was one of the beneficiaries.

like i said, a lot of good cards there.  speaking of good cards, i've been meaning to have another contest of sorts.  i have a lot of good cards to trade.  you may have some dodgers you want to get rid of.  and, there are a lot of good cards up in my header.  just in case you aren't looking at the web version of the blog, here's my header, or at least the cards:

and here's the contest.

i count 31 cards in my header.  all you have to do is identify them.  get it right, and i'll send you up to 9 pre-1980 cards from the team of your choice in a pwe.  you can send one or two dodger cards back, if you like, but it's not required. heck, i'll probably send cards just for trying since there are a couple of obscured cards, plus a tricky one in there.  to make things easier, i've set up a key for the header:

you should be able to click that to get a larger version, but let me know if you need me to email it to you.  speaking of email, you can send your list (and mailing address) to me at gcrlatcomcastdotnet, and please do so by noon pacific on saturday the 25th.  good luck.  and thanks for the cards, night owl!

i went for blue on black friday

it's been well over seven months since black friday, so i am a bit unsure why it has taken so long for me to post about some of the cards i purchased that day.  especially since one of the cards i bought on ebay that day was this 1952 bowman duke snider card

it was cheap, thanks to some rounded corners, scuffing, and a bit of paper loss, but to me it looks the way vintage ought to look.  that is a pretty card.

i have been on the lookout for a 1972 topps venezuelan steve garvey card for a long time, but have only seen one come up for sale in that time. it was prohibitively expensive.  on the other hand, i picked up this 1977 topps venezuelan davey lopes card

for what i thought was a reasonable price.  these cards are really thin, with nothing on the back, by the way.

most of my black friday shopping was done on comc, where i picked up a 1950 bowman bruce edwards card

along with a 1951 topps blue back

ralph branca card

this was my first blue back - there are only three dodgers in the blue back set, and they seem to be a bit tougher to find than the red backs.

i found some post cards - 1961 post john roseboro

1961 post larry sherry

and 1962 post stan williams

that weren't butchered too badly by the scissor wielding children of the 60's and gladly added them to my cart.

it wasn't all vintage, however, as i purchased a couple of 1983 permagraphics cards of pedro guerrero

and fernando valenzuela

along with a 1983 topps glossy send-in valenzuela

i am pretty sure i have this card already, as i sent in wrappers for these sets pretty regularly, but i bought it anyway because it didn't look familiar.  i still haven't checked to see if it's a double or not.

the last couple of cards are blue and shiny.  from 2012 bowman, i grabbed the matt kemp

and duke snider

blue sapphire rookie reprint cards.  my black friday duke purchases spanned 60 years, now that i think about it.

this was money well spent without getting up early and fighting the crowds - i think i'll make a habit of 'blue' friday...

a quick trip to tatooine

with the trade of juan uribe to the braves, i would expect alex guerrero to eventually settle in at third base. at least until hector olivera is ready.  however, most of guerrero's playing time of late has been in the outfield, since both yasiel puig and carl crawford are injured.

last year, topps included guerrero in many of its sets, and listed him as a second baseman.  that made sense then, but he has yet to play at second in the major leagues.  here are three of those cards, with guerrero turning two to boot.

2014 topps walmart blue

2014 topps chrome purple refractor

and 2014 topps mini pink parallel

notice that the cards show guerrero throwing to first without a lick of grass in sight.  that's what makes a tatooine card a tatooine card.

here are some others from my mini collection

1994 donruss bobby bonilla

1995 upper deck luis lopez electric diamond parallel

1996 upper deck brady anderson vj lovero showcase insert

2000 topps stadium club bobby abreu

2001 fleer tradition corey koskie

2011 topps carlos beltran

and 2012 topps emilio bonifacio

i am guessing that there is all kinds of mischief one can get into at mos eisley spaceport, so the vegas code probably stands - what happens on tatooine stays on tatooine.  unless you're luke skywalker bragging about taking out womprats to a group of rebel pilots.

card show stuff

it's been over a month since wallet card and i went to the semi-annual regional card show, and i still haven't shown off the other cards i bought and scanned.  like this 1951 bowman don newcombe card

it's nice that the 'bull pen' is labeled and that curious george's man in yellow is watching newk warm up from the stands.

i picked up a card for my 1965 topps set, and it features three hall of famers

say hey! the giants must have had a pretty good team in 1964 with all that power (plus juan marichal and gaylord perry on the mound).  well, they won 90 games but were 4th in the national league, 3 games back of the pennant winning cardinals.  the dodgers were two games under .500, but bounced back pretty well in '65.

i also grabbed a card for my 1957 topps set for a buck - don mossi

i won't mention the ears.

from the dime binder, a 1982 topps sticker of pedro guerrero

showing his co-mvp form in the 1981 world series

the rest of the stuff comes from the dime boxes, and they were brimming with junk wax. i took some new to me double plays, like this 1993 donruss spike owen

1993 leaf ricky gutierrez

1994 leaf jose lind

1995 leaf carlos baerga

and 2001 fleer tradition marlon anderson

a little something for pretty much every facet of my collection!

canadian food and other items of subjective merit

i guess poutine is the food most often cited as canadian fare, at least in my experience. i've been to canada many, many times, and i've never tried it, so i can't say whether it is any good or not.  what i do know to be good is receiving cards in the mail, as i did a short while back from brian at 'highly subjective and completely arbitrary'.

one of the cards that was on display in one of the team bags was this pedro guerrero oddball

it turns out that it is from a 1987 general mills fold-out food issue, which was obviously distributed in canada, because it's got the requisite french translations on it.  at first i didn't know it was a fold-out, and i thought that it just had the astros' kevin bass on the back.  but no, it's a fold-out

in fact, this is one of six fold-outs - one for each division - and it folds out to larger proportions.  inside there are more players, including the dodgers' steve sax

and fernando valenzuela

here you see fernando next to the padres' tony gwynn and the braves' dale murphy

with some of the other players being the astros' mike scott, giants' chili davis, and reds' dave parker.

the other player featured is the astros' bill doran, and i had to unfold the thing one more time to get him to show up.

that seems like a lot of astros, but keep in mind they won the division in 1986.  i like to think that if this had been issued a year earlier, steve garvey might have been included.

most of what brian sent was part of the trade break that he recently conducted, but there were a few other random dodgers included in the package, like this 1990 score john wetteland card

i haven't shown cards of the 1996 world series mvp very often on this blog, but that's because he was traded to the reds in the eric davis deal after the 1991 season so there aren't a ton of dodger wetteland cards to show.

there are even fewer (i think) of victor diaz, but a 2003 topps heritage card

is one of the ones available to team collectors like me.  diaz never actually played in a big league game for the dodgers, but he did see some action later with the mets and rockies.

i wish there were fewer cards of andruw jones as a dodger, but here's a 2008 topps heritage card, anyway.

if that card were the lowlight of the package, then this one was one of the highlights - a 2012 panini cooperstown tommy lasorda blue crystal parallel

there are no two ways about it - that is objectively a nice looking card. in my subjective opinion.

thanks for the cards brian - i'll show more of the trade break stuff another time.