March Radness Contest Reminder

This is just a friendly reminder to make sure and enter the March Radness contest and get your picks in before the deadline. The first counting game looks to be this Thursday 9:15 AM PDT (12:15 PM EDT), so make sure your bracket is ready by then. Each game will "lock" at or around the start time of the game, so while you can change your picks on the fly, I would recommend at least having some team selected for each game. Incomplete brackets are not eligible for the contest. Oops, I keep getting this mixed up with the football contest. All brackets must be submitted in full before Thursday morning's deadline or they will not be eligible. Because... of course!

If you have already signed up, great! Just don't forget to make your picks before Thursday morning.

Still Working on All of the Heritage

Discouraged a little bit, sure, but I'm pressing on in my attempt to collect all of the Heritage sets. I've read some things that have been written by some people that have soured me a bit on the idea, but I am resigned to the fact that the Great Baseball Card Chase doesn't really have an end. Trying to assemble something resembling a "master set" barely has an endpoint. Trying to do it 12 times (or 13?) is beyond ridiculous. I've drawn some lines I'm not willing to cross (Chrome parallels?) and may draw more in the future, but for now I am just going to keep going with the flow.

I'm reminded of the great chase because I got another stack of Heritage that I finally got around to posting about, courtesy of The Topps Baseball Fanatic. All of the cards were from 2011, which is another reminder that another old set's days have passed me by and I still need a ton of pieces of it.

In addition to a few inserts and base cards, there were a healthy amount of the black retail parallels that came in the blister 3-packs. Oh, hello, "Mike".

These are my favorite parallels because I like the way the wood grain design is still somewhat integrated. It doesn't work (or it's just not used) on the cards that aren't regular single player cards, but it looks good here. Otherwise, you just have a plain black bordered card which isn't nearly as exciting.

What a goofball. Do Cubs fans miss Carlos and his antics? Does anyone?

Airbrushed Fridays: 1978 Topps #457

Basketball is stressful! The Oregon Ducks, once a top 10 team this season, have become one of the most frustrating things I've ever bothered to look at. Since their starting point guard went down, things have gone rather topsy-turvy, to the point where even their "lock" status for berth in the so-called Big Dance has been called into question by more than one writer. Fortunately, in the middle of the night tonight in Vegas, they squeaked out their third win of the season over the hated Washington Huskies. A date with Utah (ugh) awaits tomorrow night at the same late hour. Oh yeah, this is supposed to be a baseball card blog. Well, if you're still with me so far, enter the hoops contest and stick around for some recycled baseball stuff.

Who is this week's victim, and why do we care? It's Bob Bailey, a repeat offender! Per last time around:

Bob Bailey was a third baseman of average (by MLB standards) skill and great longevity. He spent 17 years in the league, winning a title with the Reds in 1976. Bailey seems to have retired from a life full of baseball and the need for Wikipedia updates some time after the late '80s.

Why is this a thing? Bailey was sent packing mere days before the end of the 1977 season, and Boston scooped him up for all of 2 at-bats that year. He would play his final season in a Boston uniform the following year, before he retired to a life that I assume was full of gold dubloons and astroplanes.

Airbrushed Fridays is a weekly feature as the name seems to imply. If you know of a card with an altered photograph that you'd like to see featured, please contact me. You probably won't win anything other than a hyperlink and a minor league contract with the Arizona Diamondbacks, but you never know!

Hey Hey, Who Needs Some Triple Play?

Erin bought another box of 2012 Triple Play last weekend on the cheap and found it frustrating, as most set collectors do, that the vast majority of cards in the box were ones that she already had. I've gone ahead and updated her Triple Play want list and included all of the doubles, triples and sextuples in the list as is standard. I'd really like to get rid of some of these cards - I have another "Reel Feel" bat card up for grabs (the third one that she has pulled) - and wouldn't mind knocking a few more cards off her list if that can be managed. If not, that's cool, too.

College basketball is in full effect. Don't forget about the March Radness contest, with the deadline coming up in less than one week!

The Club is Open

The Guilt-Free Basketball Card Club is off and running, but sign-ups are perpetually open for anyone new to the party. I recently got a few Blazers cards from Brian C., who had claimed all Mavericks cards. While the point of the club isn't to trade cards per se, I do appreciate it when those that I haven't traded with (or haven't traded with much) send a few things my way as it makes my senseless card purchases feel a tad bit more worthwhile. By the way, I still have a few packages to send out from the initial requests, and I'm still looking to work out some sort of trade for a few of the pricier cards in my collection.

Former Blazer Rudy Fernandez is back to playing in Europe, and making headlines for the wrong reasons. There was a brief period of Rudymania around these parts, at least among the female set, but he ultimately wasn't able to stick as a rotation NBA player.

I collect all former Oregon Ducks, whether they are hoopsters or whatever the American football equivalent of a hoopster is (pigskinner?) Aaron Brooks recently returned to the team he started with, Houston, and he's one of the few Ducks who can still be found in a lot of recent NBA sets.

JediJeff from 2 by 3 Heroes recently posted a somewhat high end basketball pack over at APTBNL, and somehow I accidentally laid claim to the whole thing. I really wanted the LaMarcus card, but you can see the rest of the cards over here. They're all available, of course. I have yet to really define rules about what happens to my basketball "hits", but I guess when everything is essentially free I can do whatever I want. Also, the Sixers have yet to be claimed, so the crazy clear rookie auto of the guy I've never heard of will probably stay in my collection for awhile.

Join up, won't you?

Contest Time! March Radness V

It's time once again for a little Radness in your life. It's the March Radness contest, in fact - back like a fifth year senior! As usual, the name of the game is winning free cards by making yourself appear smarter than everyone else at college basketball related prognostications. Last year we had a record 32 entrants, and I'm hoping to increase that number once again. Here are the contest rules, which remain more or less the same as past years:

Once again, one of the requirements is having a Yahoo account. If you absolutely, positively refuse to sign up for one of those things, go ahead and send me your bracket before the deadline in some sort of legible form and I'll send you a prize if you manage to pick a lot of winners.

Yahoo's default scoring rules apply. Play-in games do not count because they are still incredibly stupid. Should you choose one of the play-in winners to advance in the real part of the tournament, not only do you do so at your own peril but you also have the advantage of showing success no matter which play-in team makes it in. Please, please, PLEASE make sure you fill out the entire bracket, including the tie-breaking final score of the final game. I hate to disqualify people for not filling everything out, but it always seems to happen.

What's the incentive here? Other than bragging rights, winners of 1st, 2nd, 3rd and Worst Place will receive prizes in a similar manner as the college bowl pick'em contest that I held a couple of months ago. The prize pool will include a 2013 Topps Heritage baseball blaster (OR another unopened product of equal value because not everyone likes this year's Heritage release), an assortment of unopened packs, some relics/autos/serial numbered cards and junk... the usual deal. I will iron out the prize details next week.

If you participated last year, you should have already received an email at the address attached to your Yahoo account. New signups should click here (password = marchradness). The deadline is the morning prior to the first real (non play-in) tournament game on Thursday, March 21st, though I would suggest getting your bracket done by the night before just to be safe. Leave a comment here or send me an email if the invite link doesn't work or if you are otherwise having trouble joining up so I can send you a direct invitation.

A Junkie's Discards

One of the best things about my occasional "Up For Grabs" series of posts (wherein, unlike most of my material, I avoid all pretenses and get straight to the point of trying to peddle my wares) is that it's introduced me to some new trade partners and writers. Right now, my favorite new blog is The Junior Junkie. While it may just seem to be a blog about a player that has no ties to the Cardinals, the writing is compelling enough that it could be about just about anything. Griffey is/was a nice enough player that I don't mind reading about his cardboard sagas (I am from the Northwest, after all...) but the writing goes well and beyond my usual "uhhh I like stuff. [insert player here] is cool!" meanderings that usually have me sticking to trade posts, trade grabs and giveaways. You know, the standard Cards on Cards fare.

Speaking of which, here are a bunch of Cardinals cards that the Junkie sent. (Not, not that Junkie. Let's just call him Junkie Jr?)

When I first saw scans of the new, stupidly online only and overpriced Turkey Red product, I rubbed my eyes a couple of times and wondered if I wasn't looking at this old Topps Gallery set. And then I realized I probably needed more caffeine.

I really need to finally spring for the 2011 World Series deluxe DVD set. Sadly, it's the closest I'm going to get to watching a Chris Carpenter performance this year.

If only they had made Topps Archives base cards look like actual cardboard. I'm guessing it sold enough last year that they aren't going to change it much this time around, but I suspect that the inserts, parallels and hits were doing all of the heavy lifting.

Ron Gant! Gary Gaetti! Dennis Eckersley! The 1996 Cardinals, Tony La Russa's first with the team, was like a union of guys who peaked in the late-'80s. Like baseball's version of a hair metal band, maybe.

Junkie Kong Jr. sent me a barrel full of 1983 Fleer Cardinals. Something seems off about the font on Dane Iorg's card.

See? Look at Tommy Herr's card. Someone accidentally hit CTRL-B when they were typing his name, except that computers probably didn't do anything but play Pong, Hangman and start Global Thermonuclear War back in 1982.

I miss the weird shapes in the background of the first Topps Chrome cards. I wonder what happened to that?

I never minded Skip Schumaker. I actually enjoyed him as a bit player and occasional starter, but I won't miss the bellyaching by the Cardinals hardcore fanbase over whether or not he deserved to be on the field. Are Cards fans actually a bunch of self-important lughead jocks or something? I thought everyone was supposed to love the underdog guys like David Eckstein, Aaron Miles and Skip Schumaker. Okay, fine, bringing Miles back in 2010 was a little desperate.

Man, I do love me some Flair, the set that there's no way I could have ever afforded even when I moved out and on my own. I don't think college kids were supposed to buy high end sports cards, I guess.

Finally, I think my 1990 Leaf team set may finally be complete. I did actually buy a fair amount of this stuff when I should have been putting together a 1990 Topps set like a good soldier. (Okay, fine, I actually put together the 1990 Score set that season and own multiple copies of the 1990 Score Traded set.) These cards were awesome, but I'm not sure the design quite holds up over all this time. Now 1990 Score, on the other hand...