Deck the Halls

I'm scared to post any more of the great Brewers cards I've been able to pick up on the cheap this off season for fear that the team will lose those players.  It's already happened to Corey Hart and there are the rumors about Rickie Weeks.  

So I'll post a nice auto card of a guy whose already a former Brewer.  Hall spent 8 years in Milwaukee. Getting called up late in September 2002 and becoming a regular fixture on the team in 2005.  Hall is one of those guys I never got to see play, but who's likeness graced tons of cards in my team sets in the 8 years he played with the team.  Hall was a utility player for the team playing shortstop, outfield, and on the bases. His best season was 2006 and after signing a big contract with Milwaukee began his downward slide.

In August 2009, Bill was traded to Seattle and then Seattle traded him to Boston in early 2010. In Boston, Hall became a super utility player even playing pitcher for a game and stuck out all three batters he faced.

In 2011 he played for the Astros and the Giants, his time there was less than memorable.

In 2012, Hall signed a minor league contract with the Yankees and after not making the team after Spring Training opted out of the contract and signed with the Orioles and got called up in May, but ended up back in the minor later that year.

This year Hall signed a minor league contract with the Angels, but was released in May due to the fact he couldn't hit.  After that Bill signed up with the Long Island Ducks a team in the Atlantic League of Professional Baseball, which has no affiliation with the MLB.

Whew.  Anyways I was able to pick up this great Hall auto for a buck plus shipping.  If Bill's back in Long Island next year I might have to TTM him.

Couple packs of Small Pros Series 1

 Put out by McFarlane Toys, you know the comic artist who created Spawn and puts out super realistic action and sports figures?

 Anyways I was at the store and saw that these had been marked down to a price I figure I'd like to try a couple.

The checklist consists of
Peyton Manning and a variation
Calvin Johnson
Aaron Rodgers and a variation
Andrew Luck and a variation
Trent Richardson
Jason Witten
Robert Griffen III and a varaiation
Troy Polamalu
and a Mystery figure which is SPOILER.....Adrian Peterson.

You can see a full figure gallery here

I opened my two packs and was a little disappointed that both were RG3 until I realized that I had gotten both the regular and variation. Lets have a look..

 The packaging says the age for these is 5+ but man putting these together was tough. I don't mean figuring out what goes where, just getting the body, head, and arms all in the sockets was hard.

Not too shabby. I would have been really happy had I opend both Aaron Rodgers figures, but what can you do. I also would have been happier if RG3 had had a better year.  Both are for trade if anyone wants them.

And while doing a little research online I found that there is a Series 2 due out December 18th. Just in time for stocking stuffers
Here is the Series 2 Checklist
COLIN KAEPERNICK with variation
ELI MANNING
DREW BREES
LARRY FITZGERALD
CLAY MATTHEWS
ROB GRONKOWSKI with variation
CAM NEWTON with variation
RUSSELL WILSON with variation
and one mystery figure - Stevie Johnson (Thanks to Corky for letting me know)

A great idea for Panini or the greatest idea?

I was looking at Panini's drool gallery on their blog The Knight's Lance. Mainly their high end baseball product America's Pasttime and next years Donruss and it got me thinking.  We kid about how Panini cards are kind of like the old food issues back in the 70's and 80's.  And while I think Panini has done a decent job with not being able to use logos and team names maybe it's time for Panini to embrace the food issue past and put out a set that not only honors it, but down right glorifies it.  

Just an idea.

Well maybe just an insert set. But there's an opportunity here for Panini to either just make up some food issue looking cards with blatant air brushing or maybe they could even partner with actual companies to come up with some great ideas.  New heritage Hostess and Post anyone? MSA discs? Kelloggs 3-D?

  But Panini if you steal my idea for Pete's sake please don't make this a high end product.

I am available for consulting.

cb out.

Happy Friday the 13th

Just wanted to let you know I was thinking of you.

My COMC Black Friday Hauliday!!

Just a quick blurb and some math about my Black Friday haul from COMC.

I ended up taking off Black Friday to finish a few things around the house. We recently participated in the statewide energy audit program in Alaska and I had a few things I still needed to do after our final inspection. I ended up sealing my house too well, so I had to put in some combustion air for my furnace and I also needed to put a humidistat in.  So I spent a few hours on Friday adding a Dew Stop switch to my bathroom fan.

And after I finished my first major electrical upgrade to my house I spent a few hours patting myself on the back and surfing COMC for some good deals.

For those who have never bought off of COMC.com I'll explain the concept.  While some sites like ebay or sportslots.com let you sell stuff through their website you keep possession of your stuff till it sells then you ship it.  The COMC model is different in that you send COMC your cards they catalog and scan them to their site, store them,  you get to set your price and if and when your cards sells COMC packages and ships them. Of course as a seller you pay fees for the service.

Last year COMC revamped its shipping and handling process. Now they offer a flat $3 shipping fee.  Which is great.  COMC use to also charge a 25 cent per card handling fee that you would see at checkout.  Now COMC has incorporated that charge into the price of every card.  So if you pay a dollar for a card on the site, a quarter of that is COMC's handling fee.  Psychologically this actually works great because nothing was more off putting than picking out 20 or so well priced cards and getting to the checkout and realizing that shipping and handling was going to be 8 to 10 bucks!

And every year COMC has their big Black Friday event.  Like in years past they offer free shipping with a minimum purchase and other goodies.  This year you had to ship 20 items to get free shipping and you got $5 in store credit for every 50 cards you had shipped.  They were also giving away 100 shopping sprees to the site.  COMC also encouraged all their sellers to run specials and discounts on their cards to entice buyers. Over all I have to say the deals were pretty good this year.

I went to the site with one goal in mind. I was only going to go after cards for my Robin Yount and Rollie Fingers player collections.  I ended up getting a little carried around and spent about $42. Which might not seem like a lot to some of you, but it was a little more than I planned on spending. Over all I think I did alright. I ended up added about 35 new Younts and 17 new Rollie Fingers to my Player Collections. That's  52 total cards, so I also got $5 in store credit.  When it was all said and done I got all the cards for about 80 cents a piece.  I'll be featuring those cards on my player blogs.

But I did the quick math and realized that while I spent $42 on 52 card, most numbered parallels and inserts and that I got all those great cards for about 80 cents with free shipping COMC still made $13 off of me.  52 times .25 is $13.  Yikes.  This is why I'm glad that COMC adds the quarter to the price of the card. This is also probably why I only end up buying like this at COMC on Black Friday.  I still think I got some great deals and I did. Most sellers had great discounts and I'm glad I didn't have to pay an extra $3 shipping.

I still love to window shop on COMC and if you're only going to buy a few higher end cards on the site the $3.00 shipping and quarter per card handling fee isn't so bad.  And while COMC probably will never be the site to fill large holes in your sets like justcommons.com or sportlots.com they do have a great selection of just about everything now.  Plus I also like that they scan an image of every card for sale, front and back.  And the card in the image you pick is the card you get.

Sorry I'm starting to ramble.  My point is that I like COMC. I like that they add something different to the sport card buying landscape. I also like their customer service. The one time I've had an issue with an order all I had to do was email my problem to them and it was taken care of.

Anybody score anything really good on Black Friday?

And I'm sorry this post didn't feature any pictures of baseball cards so here you go.

Edit:

Here is a picture of my haul!

cb out.

A Swing and a Big Ass Trade

I love finding new blogs and I love finding new trading partners even more.  I recently entered a contest over at Swing and a Pop-Up. The contest was actually pretty hard and I didn't win, but Bert the proprietor of the blog emailed me with a trade proposition. He told me he could put a huge hurt on some of my set needs especially the 80's and 90's Topps.  Boy he wasn't kidding.  

Some trades are glamorous, exchanging cool autos or relics and other trades are more blue collar.  And I've been in both and I'll take a good old blue collar, knock a few hundred cards from my needs list trades any day. 

Bert ended up sending me a mostly full 800 count box full of late 80's goodness.

 I don't know if you can tell from the edges but there was a nice stack of 1986, 1987, 1988, and 1990 Topps in there and a huge stack of 1989 and 1992 Topps.

 He also included a couple 1981 cards and a nice stack of Brewers cards for my Brewers team sets.

I'm still working through it all, but I did manage to update my need list. All those sets are now much more manageable. I figure I'll should be able to knock off almost all my late 80's and 90's sets with my next Justcommons.com purchase.

This has been one of my more epic trades and I'm glad I got at least one more off before most of my collection gets mothballed later this month to start working on the nursery.  Thanks again Bert.

Hey Rickie!!

Ah Rickie Weeks. Like a flag in the breeze, sometimes Rickie is red hot and other times not so much.  And the fact that Rickie took the rest of this year off doesn't lend much to his collectability, but when you can pick up an early auto card of one of your team's franchise players for cheap, well that's not a bad thing. 

Rickie became a fixture on the Milwaukee diamond in 2005 and while some years are better than others, especially this year, he's still one of my favorites.  Rickie signed a 38 million dollar extension in 2011, so it looks like he'll be with the team at least one more year, maybe, there are are always rumors. Rickie also has the unfortunate distinction of leading the league with the most errors of all second baseman for a couple years in a row and even was ranked as the worst starting second baseman in the majors in 2009, ouch. 

Poor Rickie, I'm hoping he comes roaring back from injury next year, it would be nice. But in the mean time I really wanted to add a nice auto to my collection, since I didn't own any and I never got Rickie to sign anything for me at Spring Training or TTM. 

2004 Fleer Platinum Rickie Weeks Inscribed autograph card I-RW #d 036/200

I really like the look of the autographs from this set. So much better than those clear auto stickers they use now. There's also at least one other Brewer auto in this set and it's fairly cheap as well and that's Scott Podsednik.