1987 Smokey The Bear Dennis "Oil Can" Boyd

This was another Listia win from a while back. I got this for the dreaded 499 credit bid.

From the research I did, it looks like there was a set of thirty-one of these 4x6 cards. There was a sheet of sixteen perforated cards for the American League and a sheet of fifteen perforated cards for the National League.

I had never seen these before, but checking eBay and COMC, it looks like they are quite plentiful in both full sheets and individual cards.

Another Good Day At The Card Show (Part III)

Here's the final post about the card show I went to last Sunday. I picked up these two Red Sox prospect cards because I like to have cards of as many current and future Red Sox players as possible. There is a very nerdy reason why I do this, one of these days I'll do a post as to why getting all these cards are necessary.

You can't really see his name, but this is Brian Johnson (and yes, I think of AC/DC every time I hear his name). He was very impressive this year in Spring Training and I have a feeling we may see him in the majors before the year is done. Right now he is pitching for Pawtucket (AAA) and his ERA is 0.56 after sixteen innings.

Noe Ramirez has been to Spring Training the past couple of years and is currently pitching for the Pawtucket Red Sox as well.

About five months ago at this same card show I stumbled upon some Brooks Robinson cards from an un-numbered set released in 1993 by Country Time Lemonade called "Country Time Legends". I had picked up three cards from the seven card (plus a title card) set. Here are four more, and now I just need the title card for the set.

I also picked up a couple of Kraft Singles cards, the Delino DeShields is from the 1993 set and the Cecil Fielder is from the 1994 set. The makeup of both sets were the same...a thirty card set, fifteen from the American League and fifteen from the National League. You could either get single cards in packages of Kraft Singles or you could send away for the entire set. 

This was the lone 70's Hostess card I could find.

I also picked up three more from the 1986 Quaker Chewy Granola Bars set.

I grabbed this 1977 Topps Gaylord Perry without checking my wantlist. I was pretty sure I needed it.

I didn't need to check my wantlist because I knew I needed this card. Now I am finally done with 1989 Fleer!

I already have three of these, but for a dime? Hell ya, I'll pick up another one. Something tells me Nick would be proud.

I think I spent somewhere around twenty-five bucks for all of this. It spent a little bit more than the cost of a blaster of 2015 cards, but a hell of a lot more fun. I can't wait until next month's show. I'm pretty confident I won't have to deal with any snow, but up around here, you never know.

Another Good Day At The Card Show (Part II)

At the conclusion of my last post, our "hero" (me) was furiously going through stacks and stacks of cards looking for oddballs. One of the things that this dealer had for the first time was box bottoms from boxes of Topps junk wax.

I only bought this one, but now that I think of it I probably should have bought them all. They were only a dime a piece and I see some of these cards on wantlists now and then. I bought two of these, so I have dupes of all four of these cards in case somebody out there needs these.

The thing about oddballs is, because I'm still slowly but surely trying to get organized, I don't know if I already have these or not.

Did you have an Ames in your area? I did, but I don't remember these cards. You can probably guess that the 20/20 club were players that had at least 20 homeruns and 20 stolen bases. This is the 1989 thirty-three card set which you could find at Ames... but apparently not if you were there with me.

I also picked up six more cards from the 1987 Kraft Home Plate Heroes set. This forty-eight card set could be completed by buying a lot of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese...or just by waiting 28 years and buying them at a card show for a dime a piece.

He also had some of the 1982 Topps stickers.

In 1985 Topps released a twenty-two card set of the Atlanta Braves. The cards were only available in the southern part of the United States and there were three cards in each specially marked package of Hostess snack cakes.

I've got a few cards left and I'm going to save them for the next post!

Another Good Day At The Card Show

It has snowed the past three months during the day of the monthly card show, so when I woke up and saw blue skies, I was very happy. True, it's still a little on the cool side for me (you won't see me walking around in shorts and flip-flops in the middle of December, I don't understand that at all), but a nice morning for a card show.

I had planned on a bigger budget than usual ($40 instead of my usual $20), and I began with working on some set needs. I found a table that had 2015 Topps for ten cents a card. I picked up ninety of them. Right now I need twenty-four cards to complete the set. Please check my wantlist to see if you have any of them.

I also picked up fourteen cards from 2014 Topps Archives at ten cents a piece from this table as well. I didn't buy any Archives last year, but one of the monster boxes of commons that I bought recently had more than half the set in it. So what the hell, since I'm already halfway there with very minimal money spent on it, why not try to finish it?

A couple of tables had $2 autos and memorabilia cards. For Christmas a few years ago, my wife bought me one of those twenty card displays that you can hang on your wall. I've been trying to fill it with Red Sox cards, but most of those types of cards that I have are in landscape format. I wanted to fill it with cards in the portrait style so you wouldn't be looking at them sideways.

So I picked up this Dice-K jersey card from 2008 Bowman Sterling.

The rest of the time I spent at the dealer that has all of the oddballs. He wasn't there the last time I attended this show, so I was very excited to see what he had this time.

He's got a lot of the Hygrade Baseball's All-Time Greats set (that I finally made a want list for). I found five of the cards I needed.

I'm actually not sure if I'm done with this set or not. The checklist that I've found lists a variation of the Jackie Robinson card and an orange Cy Young card. So maybe I'm finished with the set, maybe I'm not.

Per usual, I started taking out entire nine card pocket pages.

All these are from the twenty-eight card 1993 Denny's Grand Slam set. There was one player featured from each team, and you would receive one card with the purchase of a Grand Slam meal and a Coca-Cola Classic.

The Darryl Strawberry and Tim Raines cards are from the Drakes Big Hitters Super Pitchers set, which was released in 1988. It was a thirty-three card set and there were two cards on the box bottoms of specially marked Drake's products.

The rest of the cards in this sheet are from the 1984 Topps Cereal Series set. This set was also thirty-three cards (plus an unnumbered checklist), and could be found in boxes of Ralston Purina cereals.

These next two sheets are from the twenty-eight card Denny's Instant Replay Full Motion Hologram set, which was issued in 1996. You're supposed to be able to move these cards at an angle and see a pitch or a swing, but quite honestly, it doesn't work all that well for me. Maybe I need the "How to View a Full Motion Hologram" card, which was included in every pack.

This page features cards from the 1985 Drake's set. It was a forty-four card set and like the 1988 set I featured earlier in this post, the position players were called "Big Hitters" and the pitchers were called "Super Pitchers".

I've got plenty more cards to show, but to prevent this from being a really, really long post, I'm going to split it up into two or three posts.

More oddballs to come!

Here Is The Winner!

Last week I had a contest. I was going to award a hanging pack of cards to whoever could guess all nine players that were featured in the pocket page of 1982 Topps Stickers that I won from Listia a while back. If more than one person got them all right, then I would run all the names through random.org.

Then I thought that wasn't really fair to the first person that got them all right, as his answers would be out there for everyone to see. So I decided to award two prizes...one to the first one who got them all right, and one to the winner of the randomization.

So Mark Hoyle was first, so he wins a hanging pack of cards of his choice (from what's available in my area).

Three other bloggers were able to correctly identify all nine players; Arpsmith, Night Owl and Tony L (although technically it was Steve McCatty, not Scott). But it's my contest, and if I want to let that slide, I can.

I put all four names into the randomizer and got this result.

So it looks like Mark wins twice!

Mark, I'll send you an email letting you know what's available up this way.

Thanks to all who played!

Last Day

...for the contest that is. Yeah, I snuck a contest into my last post and you have until 11:59 this evening to enter. Good luck!

STICKERS!!!!

I've heard that one of the keys to a successful marriage is to have things in common. My wife and I do share some of the same interests, but there is one aspect of our lives that we will never share a common bond.

Our choice of television programs.

When I was a kid, I used to laugh at my mom because of how little she knew about current pop culture. It seemed like once the pop culture train reached 1960, she decided that was it, she wasn't going any further. This included fashion, hairstyles...everything. Prior to that however, she's a wealth of information.

Want to know something about Ricky Nelson? Ask my mom.

Want to know who played second base for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1954? Ask my mom.

DO NOT ask her about the Beatles, Rolling Stones, or who played second base for the LA Dodgers in 1968.

Apparently I jumped off the pop culture train about 2002. I've arrived at this date because you can ask me anything that happened after 2002 and you will probably get a blank stare. It took me years to realize I wasn't a passenger anymore. I lost my way with music first. When someone would talk about what I thought was a new band, I would later realize this was their 3rd or 4th album and they had been on the radio for years.

My wife is still riding the train. She tries to talk to me about current events/movie stars/music, etc., and I have no idea what or who she is talking about. In fact, during these conversations my "give a shit meter" isn't even on. In this respect, I am far worse than my mom, because at least she was aware of the Beatles, Rolling Stones and the LA Dodgers.

My wife loves reality shows. "Dance Moms", "Amish Maifa", "Housewives of Wherever", you name it, she's watched it. These types of shows irritate me so much, I will literally start shaking. So my wife and I watch TV in separate rooms. If we do watch something together, there is a good chance one of us is just putting up with it so we can spend some time together.

So as you can probably imagine, my wife has begged me to watch shows with her, and quite honestly, I haven't been interested in any of them. I do feel guilty about that. So a few weeks ago, she asked me if I would watch this season of "Dancing With The Stars" with her. I figured I could handle this show, and I found out I can. We DVR it, and fast forward through everything else but the dances and judges scores. True to form, the only people I'd heard of were Patti Labelle and Suzanne Somers. I was aware of Rumer Willis (because of her parents), and Michael Sam (because he was a football player), but I have no idea who anyone else is nor am I familiar with anything they did.

When I was growing up, "The Dukes of Hazzard" was my favorite TV program. So when I heard that James Best had passed away, I was bummed out for a bit. When I was a kid, I wanted to have a car just like the General Lee. Could you imagine me, with bad knees and a bad back, trying to get in the car through the f'n window? And if I tried to slide over the hood to the drivers side? Yes Virginia, we have a bleeder.

Although the circumstances weren't ideal this time, I do enjoy thinking back to when I was a kid and reminisce about a time where I had far less responsibilities and was still a passenger on the pop culture train.

So it shouldn't come as a surprise that my favorite posts to write are ones that pertain to what I collected when I was a child. In the early 80's, not only was I collecting cards, I would also do the sticker books that Topps would produce. So when I saw a stack of of thirty-five stickers from the 1982 book on Listia, I moved in for the kill.

I won them for a little bit less than seven hundred credits. Here they are in their pocket-page protected glory:

The best part is that I already have the book.

Unfortunately, most of the pages look like this.

One of the cool things about these stickers is that I can do something with these that I'm not able to do with the stickers Topps released this year.

I can tell you who these players are without looking at the names on the back.

Let's take this group of nine stickers. Here are my guesses, from left to right.

Dave Collins
Tom Hume
Ken Landreaux
Tim Raines (he wasn't Rock Raines yet)
Stan Bahnsen
Lee Mazilli
Garry Maddox
Bill Madlock
Mike Easler

How did I do? I got eight of the nine right. In center square was not Stan Bahnsen (who was actually with the Angels in 1982), but Scott Sanderson.

How do you think you would do? Take a look at these nine players. Who are they?

Comment on this post who you think these nine players are. Whoever has the most right will win a hanging pack of something. I think Topps base, Opening Day and Heritage are available in my area right now. If more than one person gets all nine correct, off to random.org we go. (Just for the record, I got all nine of these right.)

I'll keep this open for a couple of days, the contest will end at 11:59 this Saturday evening. Good luck to all, and if anybody needs me, you can find me listening to "Foreigner 4" and watching reruns of "The Greatest American Hero".