Free Cards - Update

I've been a bit busy of late, but I have been slowly working on getting organized and getting a list of what I have available to claim. I have got a few packages ready to go as well. Packages will be going out to the following zip codes tomorrow:

20171
72758
85296
91770

Here is a start regarding what I have available to claim. All lots will have no duplicates.

2001 Topps Heritage - 81 72 cards (includes 2 checklists)
2001 Topps Heritage - 49 43 cards (includes 2 checklists)
2001 Topps Heritage - 26 23 cards (includes 2 checklists)

2002 Topps Heritage - 41 35 cards (includes 2 checklists)

Also note that, the multiple lots are listed for 2001 Heritage overlap. In other words, all of the cards in the 26 card lot are also in the 49 card lot. And all the cards in the 49 card lot are in the 81 card lot. You are free to take more than one lot, but be warned that you will have a lot of duplicates.

I'll be working on this some more tonight, so hopefully I'll be able to post over the weekend more of what is available.

BOBOC - Pack 2

For those who may not be quite sure what BOBOC is, let me tell you. BOBOC is a big ole box of crap. I bought one of those discount blasters of old packs at Target a couple weeks back and decided to blog about the contents. This isn't exactly an original idea, but it isn't like there are any original ideas out there in baseball card blogging waiting for me to discover them. So, here we go.

Today, we have the second pack of 1989 Topps.


Another good pack, this one. Two more Hall of Famers, and another oughta-be Hall of Famer. What I found interesting about this pack is that it included a local OKC minor celebrity and a player who is ostensibly still playing today.

43 - Guillermo Hernandez, Detroit Tigers


109 - Hipolito Pena, NY Yankees
124 - Jim Traber, Baltimore Orioles


Jim Traber is the local B-Lister. He is a sports talk radio host here in OKC. What is funny, though, is thathis doppelganger, Cardboard Jim Traber, is probably as big a celebrity locally. A local commentary/comedy website has a cardboard advertising standup of Traber that they take around to different local events.

144 - Jay Bell, Cleveland Indians


304 - Joel Youngblood, San Francisco Giants
391 - Andre Dawson All-Star, Chicago Cubs


440 - Bobby Bonilla, Pittsburgh Pirates


539 - Barry Jones, Chicago White Sox
555 - Bert Blyleven, Minnesota Twins


563 - Bill Schroeder, Milwaukee Brewers
593 - Drew Hall, Chicago Cubs
657 - Joe Magrane, St. Louis Cardinals
717 - Jamie Moyer, Chicago Cubs


It is hard to fathom that when Jamie Moyer made his professional debut in 1984, I was a freshman in college. Today I have over 23 years of service with the same company. I'm middle aged, and he is looking to come back and pitch again next year.

723 - Rafael Belliard, Pittsburgh Pirates
760 - Lee Smith, Boston Red Sox


Lee Smith really needs to be in the Hall.

So, that is pack 2 from the BOBOC.

Up next: 1991 Leaf Series 1

Nachos Grande's Autograph Survey

What is the best autograph you own?

I got this at the Diamond Giveaway site:

What is the best autograph that you've ever pulled from a pack of cards?

That is probably a tie between these three:




Notice a theme?

What is the worst autograph you've ever pulled from a pack of cards?

2004 Upper Deck Yankee Classics Kevin Maas.

Do you try to get autographs through the mail? If so, what sort of success (or failure) stories do you have?

No, I do not.

Addendum: I did send some cards off through the mail to be autographed at a live signing, but I don't do any TTM direct to players. I wrote about that signing here.

Who was the subject of your first ever autograph?

I can't remember who it was, only the situation. I got to go to a few Rochester Red Wing games growing up (in the old Silver Stadium) and we used to line up by the dugout to get our gloves signed. The glove, a Wilson Paul Blair model, is long since gone. And even if I had it, I am sure that the autographs would have worn off through use.

Do you actively collect any autographs (certain players, teams, brands, etc)?

Not at this time, although it might be fun to try to collect more autograph cards from the 2004 Fleer Greats of the Game set. Not sure how I would go about it other than buying them individually. Over the course, of a few boxes, I have managed to pull 2 Vida Blue autos. I'd hate to buy boxes and get more duplicates.

Which is better: Autographs or Relics?

Autographs. Unless you are talking some classic player, I think relics are overdone and, consequently, have little intrinsic or extrinsic value. For example, I pulled a Johnny Bench relic out of a Topps Lineage blaster this year that I threw up on EBay as part of my quest to accumulate funds to buy a Greats of the Game box. I managed to only get $10 out of it. Had I known it would go for so little I would have traded it to Nachos Grande (Sorry, guy.)

What do you think of cut autos?

Overall, I don't really care. I am more about card design than whether auto is on card, sticker or cut. For example, this is a lousy cut auto:


This is a nice cut auto:

What is your favorite autograph design (say in the last 5 years)?

Having only been back in the hobby a year, I probably am not the right person to answer, but I do like the 1952 style autos that came out in Lineage this year:

If you could get the autograph of any five people (dead or alive) who would you want a signature from (and why)?

1. Abraham Lincoln - I think he is the greatest President ever, and a fascinating individual. Read "Team of Rivals" some time to get a sense of the man.


2. James Madison - One of the primary authors of "The Federalist"


3. Alexander Hamilton - The other primary author of "The Federalist"


4. Roberto Clemente - A great ballplayer and an even better human being


5. Lou Gehrig - One of the greatest ever

So, there you have my contribution.

The Gill Man - Evolution, Part 1

Here is a random 2004 GOTG card to act as a reference point:



I started with this image cropped to the correct proportions:


The first step was to adjust the image background to be visible but faded. The first thing I did was use the Photoshop quick selection tool to select everything in the image except the Gill Man. Once that was accomplished, I added a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer. When you add an adjustment layer after making a selection, that layer only changes the area selected. With that layer, I cranked up the lightness, with the following result.



I left more detail in the image background than the real GOTG cards had, since the image was so iconic and I really wanted to have the heroine recognizable. Of course, the model card above had a more sepia tone to it. Luckily, the hue and saturation adjustment allows the image to be colorized. So, I clicked the colorize box, then adjusted the hue into the yellow range. At this point, I also softened the edges of the selection and added an embossing effect to bring in the shadow around The Gill Man. That took a lot of trial and error and I didn't do it in a way to save the intermediate step. So, all of the changes in this paragraph led to this result:



The next step was to add the border. This was fairly simple. I opened a real GOTG card image, scaled it up to the same size as my base image, then selected the border and hit Control-C to copy the selection. I went back to the Gill Man image, pasted it on.


This is where one of the weaknesses of my effort is noticeable. The border was at a different level of detail resolution which is blatantly obvious when you zoom in.


Next, I added the Fleer logo, and embellishment at the bottom, by using the lasso tool to select it on a real GOTG card then drop it into a new layer on my image.


Then I added a layer mask and used the pencil tool to mask out all the white space around the logo so the underlying image shows through:


I wasn't real happy how the logo looked at this point. So I cranked up the intensity of the red channel on the crown and lowered the brightness on the script to make it pop better:


The last part to complete the card front was to add text, which is a fairly simple thing to do. I had to make one change here. On the real cards, the text is in silver foil. But, that would not show up well in a digital image, so I decided to put the text in black. Also,the layout of the card led to a problem. Where the text went on top of the Gill Man, it disappeared:


To resolve this, I determined the "base" color of the card, since it wasn't pure white and dropped a solid layer of that color down over the top of the card. I then added a layer mask and basically brought the complete underlying image back in except for a one pixel border around the text where it crosses over the Gill Man's legs, so it can be more visible.


And that was it. The front of the card.

The Gill Man - Conception

Now that my entry in Thorzul's Nightmare on Cardboard contest has been revealed, I thought I would do a few posts on how I created it.

I don't rightly recall why I chose the Creature From the Black Lagoon for my subject matter. I'm not up on any of the current monster movie villians. The last horror movie I saw was "The Blair Witch Project." And, even then, it was probably at least 15 years since the previous time I saw a horror movie. I don't see a lot of movies, but when I do it is either a screwball comedy or a Coen Brothers movie. Everything else, for the most part, doesn't get me into the theater.

So, let's talk a bit about how I saw The Creature on a baseball card.


First off, in the movie credits, the character name is The Gill Man, not any of the various permutations of The Creature. So that was easy enough. As far as choosing a team name, I had a recollection of a minor league team with the word Swamp in it's team name, so I googled it up and, viola, the Shreveport Swamp Dragons. Also easy.


The information on the back is a little more obscure in it's origin. As I was looking at the IMDB entry for The Creature From the Black Lagoon, I noticed that there was two different actors that played The Gill Man. Ricou Browning did the underwater scenes and Ben Chapman played in the land scenes. As it happens, there was a major league baseball player also named Ben Chapman. So, I used his vitals and major league statistics. The only thing I changed was the birthplace. I figured it would stretch the limits of credibility that The Gill Man would be born in Nashville, Tennessee. So, since the movie was supposedly set along the Amazon River, I chose a city that was along the river. So, there it is. Not an overly complex explanation, but now you know what I was thinking.

In my next post about this card, which I will probably post tonight, I'll walk those of you who are interested through the process of creating this card. It will probably be a fairly long post and only of interest to Photoshop geeks, but I had so much fun with this, I figured I'd immortalize the process, so I can reference it next year when I may try a Killer Klowns from Outer Space theme.

Jackie's Gone

I traded away my Jackie Robinson Diamond Die-Cut. After numerous offers, most of which falled into the category of 'insulting', I pulled the trigger on this offer:


I will now begin entertaining offers of 1970s commons for these two cards.

Free Cards!

I've been slowly working on getting my collection organized and I am realizing that I bought a lot of cards this year that don't fit into my collection and are just taking up space in my storage closet. I started off putting a few lots of cards on EBay, but after a 295 card, no duplicate lot of Topps Series 1 sold for around $3, I decided that, after both EBay and Paypal take their pound of flesh, it wasn't worth the effort.

So, as we move closer to Thanksgiving, my favorite holiday, I've decided to do two things. First, for those of you who have been my trading partners this year, I am going to send you out some cards that fit into your collecting priorities and I think you may like. There is no obligation tied to these cards. They are just my way to say thank you for making my first year back into the hobby enjoyable and to make me feel like I am joining a community.

Second, I am going to group cards into logical lots that I will list as available. You can claim them, drop a couple, three dollars into my Paypal to cover shipping costs, and they are yours. So, what are the logical lots? Well, that depends. For the cards where was trying to build a set, like Topps flagship, I will likely group them into large, no-duplicate lots. For other cards, where I was just sampling stuff that was out there, I may group them together by teams.

As a sneak preview, I scored a huge lot of around 2000 cards on EBay for $20. It is mostly 2001 and 2002 Heritage, and 2001 Fleer Showcase. After I extract what I need for my Heritage collection, the rest of them will be available.

Stay tuned.