Sports Cards Ate My Brain

I loved Game of Thrones so naturally I've been collecting the cards. I came across Game of Thrones Inflexions on a website and bought three boxes. Each box has three packs with each pack having three base cards and two hits. Here is the result: These are silver parallels of the base and are numbered out of 75.  There are other, rarer, parallels but I only got silver.   These laser cut cards come one per box. These are lenticular motion cards and also seem to be one per box.  They are semi-transparent and much prettier in person. There were two autographs per box. This is a "full-bleed" autograph card and is similar to cards from earlier sets. These are called Valyrian autographs. My favorite autograph set is these gold ink signatures.  The ink really stands out. Each box seems to have one big hit so here there are in order of how much I like them. This card contains an actual United Kingdom postage stamp.  I used to collect stamps and England was my special...

I'm a little late with this but Happy Birthday to Bobby Cox. I met him once in the bookstore I worked in and helped him find a children's book for a gift. He had on his Braves jacket but I would have recognized him anyway. I think it was around 1990.

Page six is all 1984.  There were 3 major manufacturers and Topps and Fleer was also generating food sets and other oddities so there was plenty to buy. This was between my junior and senior years of high school so any job many I made went toward cards. Nestle Dream Team 3 Topps made these cards and Nestle packaged them with candy bars.  I'm pretty sure I got this card from a local shop as I was more of a Snicker's fan. O-Pee-Chee 212 Those crazy Canadians!  They are more aboot hockey than baseball but I appreciate them having separate sets of cards. Ralston Purina 13 This is a Topps product even though it's not a clone of the regular Topps cards like almost all of the others. Seven-Eleven Coins 5 These discs came on the bottom of a Slurpee Cup inside a compartment on the underside.  As Seven-Eleven was close to my house I bought a bunch of Slurpee's in 1984 (Cherry and Cola swirl.) Topps 500 Here is the actual Topps cards from 1984, not to be confused with it's 1 m...

As I stated a few posts ago, I found a stash of 2010 Bowman and Bowman Chrome of the various different varieties and found some decent cards of some good major league players that were not the top names in 2010. Here's some of what I found: 2009 Bowman Chrome Draft Prospects DJ Lemahieu 2009 Bowman Chrome Draft Prospects Dallas Keuchel 2009 Bowman Draft Prospects Gold DJ Lemahieu 2010 Bowman Chrome Prospects Nolan Arenado 2010 Bowman Chrome USA Stars Francisco Lindor 2010 Bowman Chrome Prospects Green X-Fractors Gary Sanchez. I found a few other cards that I haven't scanned including a Christian Yelich. The lesson here is to hold on to those Bowman cards for a while when they are not immediately hot players.

Page 5 brings us in to 1983.  The Braves won the division for the first time I could remember and Dale Murphy would go on to win his second MVP award.  The city was having a ball.  I was at the peak of my teen aged collecting, taking any money I got and going to 7-11 to buy some packs of cards and a Slurpee (with a baseball coin in the bottom.)  George's batting average stayed above .300 and he was still the perennial American League All-Star Third baseman. Here are the cards for page 5: 1983 Donruss 338 This is an almost identical Donruss design from 1982 except there is a glove instead of a ball and the bat points in the opposite direction.  Not a lot of imagination here. 1983 Fleer 649 Yes, it's a checklist but it has George's name on it.  I will replace it with a regular Brett Fleer card some day and put it in my Braves collection since their checklist is on the back. 1983 Kellogg's 4 We say goodbye to Kellogg's after this set.  It's a little on th...

I'm a traditionalist so I keep my over sized cards in a shoe box. While I was looking through it I came across four tickets from games I had attended.ITh We'll go through them in chronological order. March 17, 1994 The Atlanta Knights were a farm team of the Tampa Bay Lightning.  Best known at first for having a female goalie in their first season the Knights won the IHL's Turner Cup in the 1993-94 seascuon. I don't remember what happened this particular game but I'm sure the atmosphere in the old Omni was good like it always was. May 7, 1996 Good ole Atlanta - Fulton County Stadium hosted this game during it's Farewell Season (as noted on the ticket).  The Braves moved to Turner Field the next year.   According to the box score I looked up the Bravos won in the 10th on a double by fan favorite Javy Lopez. Hall of Famer Greg Maddux started the game for the Braves and pitched 8 innings. Here's a link to the box score:   https://www.baseball-reference.com/box...

Hello Loyal Readers, For various reasons, I haven't posted in a few days. Bottom line is I got my car fixed on Saturday (there went my stimulus money) and on Sunday i went to my storage unit to get all of the boxes of cards out so I could go through them.  Besides being worn out from carrying everything upstairs, in five trips, it has taken all my free time since then looking through the cards and figuring out what I want to keep. I realized that the boxes must have been in storage since 2013 since that is when the newest card is from. There were a lot of 2010 and 2011 Bowman and Topps baseball and stuff from pretty much every sport (even non-sports).O I found many things to add to my collection including some seeds for the Detroit Tigers collection I've decided to start. It has been exhausting but I am finally done and may have the brain power tomorrow to put out an actual post. Oh yeah, I found one of these:

On page four we finish up 1981 and move into 1982.  Baseball had a short season in 1981 because of a strike.  George batted .314 in 1981, which would be good, but it is a drop off from hitting .390 in 1980. The cards: 1981 Squirt 1 These cards were sold with the Squirt soft drink.  I can't say it is one of my favorites and I don't remember seeing it in 1981.  I had to get this card on ebay.  These cards were sold in strips of 2.  George had two different combos, both of which I have.  The cards were produced by Topps. 1981 Topps 700 Usually with Topps having a card number that is a multiple of 100 means you are one of the best players in the set. 1982 Spotbilt 5 I believe Topps produced these for a sports shoe company.  I know I have seen Spotbilt ads of other players. 1982 Donruss 34 I like the bat and ball design on these cards even though they are pretty basic. 1982 K-Mart 38 Topps produced this set for K-Mart which highlighted MVP winners from...

I've pretty much stopped collecting modern sports cards at this time.   It's not that I think there is anything wrong with them I just prefer the older cards. That doesn't mean I don't have a Ronald Acuna rookie card (Topps Chrome) but I bought very little baseball product last year and really don't plan on buying any this year. Football and basketball are pretty much out since I don't like Panini.  I guess that means no racing either. Hockey has been out since the Thrasher's moved. That pretty much leaves me with non-sports cards.  I have bought boxes of Walking Dead and Star Wars products lately but only the ones on pretty deep discount on Dave and Adam's Card World. I really don't give a damn about graded cards.  The one decent one I had I sold on Ebay a few weeks ago just because. I don't put cards in albums.  My George Brett cards are in one because I happened to find the album when I was going through storage bins and needed some space in m...

Page 3 is all 1981 cards.  1981 was the first year for Donruss and Fleer and there were also more readily available food and oddball sets than previous years. Here are the cards:G Donruss 537 George ended up winning three batting title and Rod Carew seven so this card is pretty much spot on. Drake's 5 These came with some sort of snack cake that I don't remember us having in Georgia.  They were produced by Topps so the backs look almost identical to the regular Topps release. Fleer 28 I liked the 1981 Fleer design better than the Donruss.  One of the main reasons would be the full stats on the back.  In fact, Fleer even included minor league stats for veterans for many years. Fleer 28 What?  Didn't we just have card 28?  The first one was an error in numbering.  This is what the actual card 28 should look like. Fleer 655 This is how that first card should have been numbered.  At some point in the production Fleer corrected the issue. Fleer Star St...

Working at home I've been using my lack of commute time to go through old boxes and see what I want to keep an what I will give to someone. I found my old basketball stash and found some nice cards. Here are the top ones: This is a 1997-98 Metal Championship cards.  The regular Metal series card has skyrocketed.  This one h as gone up also since The Last Dance documentary has been airing on ESPN (I have NOT been watching it.)  I pulled a couple of other Jordan's out also but did not scan them. A 2007-2008 Topps Gold Parallel Lebron.  It does have some wear issues but this is a keeper for me so no worries. 2014 Upper Deck Goodwin Champions Giannis (I am not typing the last name!) I remembered I had this card someone and thougt it was my only Giannis but I stumbled upon this: 2014-15 Panini Prizm Prizm Parallel.  It's shiny!  This is by far my most valuable basketball card. That is it for my Giannis collection. I also found 2 2009 ...

For the uninitiated, May 4 is Star Wars Day (see the title of the post to figure it out.) I celebrated all weekend by finishing Jedi: Fallen Order yesterday and playing some Star Wars: The Old Republic online. As far as cards go I have a decent collection of some of the recent sets. I've decided to share the autographs I have. The Peter Mayhew is my favorite so I ended with it. Not much more to say.  I'm off to play some more online. I connected my scanner so no bad photography for a few posts.