Tony, the Killer, and Carew

Following in the footsteps of such successful blogs as Ben Henry’s Baseball Card Blog and Chris Harris’ Stale Gum, there has been a plethora of new blogs dealing exclusively with baseball cards. I’ve added quite a few of these sites to our blogroll and also to our baseball card links page. Instead of just leaving it at that, I decided many of these new sites were worthy of their own post to highlight what each brings to their readers. I’ve even invented my own grading system based on the TwinsCards.com patented Five-Puckett scale.

One-Puckett: A good start, but the content is lacking and the frequency of posts is below the Mendoza line.

Two-Pucketts: There is definitely some potential here. Tighten up the content and your well on your way.

Three-Pucketts: This site is a good, solid site that has relevant, informative posts with a definite passion for the content.

Four-Pucketts: This is a very good site. The content is a cut above the rest with fresh, insightful posts and a clear, knowledgeable understanding of the target audience.

Five-Pucketts: Reserved for the best of the best. The pulse of the industry beats by the content found here. Bookmark and visit on a daily basis!

We’ll do these one by one and I’ll try and write a small blurb about each site, but please check them out. You won’t be dissappointed!

The Fleer Sticker Project

The first site I’d like to feature is The Fleer Sticker Project. FleerFan has created an awesome resource for a niche of cards that probably wouldn’t get a lot of press elsewhere. FleerFan covers all the Fleer team logo stickers going back to 1960. He’s even posted a few Twins stickers: 1967 Fleer Logo/Emblem Card, 1968 Cloth Emblem Card, 1968 Team Fleer Logo/Emblem Card, and 1961 Fleer Decals.

Pictured here is a 1969 Fleer 3D Baseball Trophy Plaque. Fleer featured all 24 teams with a 3D effect card featuring the teams cap and sold for $0.10.

I have quite a few Fleer stickers but until now, I never had a way to figure out how to tell the difference between years. At some point (in the near future), I’m going to have to search through my boxes to pull them out. This is just an incredible resource and even though there aren’t daily posts, The Fleer Sticker project is worth worth a daily visit!

TwinsCards.com Rating: 4/5 Pucketts: This is a very good site. The content is a cut above the rest with fresh, insightful posts and a clear, knowledgeable understanding of the target audience.

Being a team collector who lives overseas, I don’t have the convenience of going to local card and memorabilia shows. To feed my “Twins” habit, I often scour the pages of eBay looking for a good bargain. I’ve managed to find my share of good bargains and admittedly probably have overpaid for a few things I just have to had. I thought it might be fun to visit some items I’ve recently found for bid.

Let’s start with a couple of items that are just out of my price range…

1987 Minnesota Twins Championship Ring

Buy It Now price: $10,000 (or make an offer).

Item description (from eBay): Well This is a REAL twin 1987 Championship ring. My father is selling it. He did do alot of looking into this ring and it is REAL. Only one company makes this ring. I am Going to upload pictures and Give you all more to look and think about. I am excited to say this is an offer of a life time. If anyone has any questions please email my husband at jonhhy_z0@hotmail.com Thank you and happy Bidding.

Somehow, I have a hard time thinking this is for real, but hey…this is a REAL twin ring! By the time I publish this post, the auction will have ended but maybe we’ll get lucky and no one will put in a bid and the item will soon get re-listed. Get those checks ready!

Keeping with the 1987 theme, I give you the 1987 World Championship Trophy…with free shipping!

Starting Bid: $6,400

Item description (from eBay): 100% original & authentic……Spectacular item!……This is the actual World Championship Trophy that was distributed to Twins players and front office personnel back in 1987…..Trophy measures 12″ in height and weighs 5.7 lbs………Twins & Cardinals Press Pins adorn the front, while gold flags of all American & National League Teams surround the crown…..Overall Condition: NM…….Manufactured by Balfour…..Simply breathtaking……Seldom seen…….A unique opportunity to purchase a treasured item…..Shipping & Insurance included……View our other auctions

I have no idea what to think about this. Do players and front office personnel get real trophies? I would never give this a second thought had it not been for the free shipping. Now I’m seriously considering cashing in some of my mutual funds that might someday send my kids through college. I’m sure they’d understand

Are those items just a tad over your Christmas budget? How about 12 Nick Punto autographed baseballs?

Current Bid: $49.00

Item Description (from eBay): Here’s A Clean Clear lot of Autographed NICK PUNTO BASEBALLS. THEMINNESOTA TWINS 3RD BASEMAN ROOKIE HAS HAD A DECENT START TO HIS CAREER AND IS CURRENTLY THE STARTING 3RD BASEMAN . WITH YOUTH ON HIS SIDE IT’S POSSIBLE HE HAS BETTER YEARS TO COME.. WE BOUGHT A DEAL OF AUTOGRAPHED BASEBALLS FROM A MAJOR MANUFACTUER AND EACH BASEBALL HAS A CRISP CLEAR SIGNATURE .
WE have 3 or 4 of these lots so you may not get this exact lot, but, the lots are all equal in clarity of signature .

WOW…autographed Nick Punto balls? Somebody stop me before I make a big mistake. I was one of the millions who bought in on Don Mattingly’s rookie card…but they’re not suckering me in again!

Okay…for the real cheapo’s out there, here’s a bargain that will be hard to pass up. A 1961 Rookie Card of Zoilo Versalles. According to many, Zoilo gained the nickname “Zorro” based on this error card.

Buy It Now price: $3.00

Item Description (from eBay): BID ON 1961 TOPPS ZORRO VERSALLES “ROOKIE CARD” #21. FORMER MINNESOTA TWINS (MVP) SHORSTOP. EXCELLENT CONDITIONCHECK SCAN AND HAPPY BIDDING.

I could fill these pages with hundreds of outrageous items and hundreds more that would be great bargains, but this will give you a little taste of what eBay has to offer. Have fun trying to find your next bargain.

The original idea of this blog was to focus on Twins history as well as Twins collecting. While Scot has held up his part of the bargain and provided you with hundreds of history related posts, I have been lack in my promise to provide many posts on Twins collecting. Well, here’s a start…

Here is one of the latest items I acquired via eBay. They are a set of three tumblers that depict members of the 1965 A.L. Champs. They are 5″ in height and each tumbler contains the photos of 4 players along with their facsimile autograph.

Tumbler 1: Harmon Killebrew, Don Mincher, Jim Grant, Jimmie Hall

Tumbler 2: Tony Oliva, Camilo Pascual, Bernie Allen, Sam Mele

Tumbler 3: Zoilo Versalles, Bob Allison, Earl Battey, Jim Kaat

Okay collectors/fans…what is your favorite? Not necessarily the most expensive, although it could be, but which piece is the centerpiece of your collection?

It’s bad enough when they misspell your name in the old school yearbook. Or when you finally appear on that nightime talk show and they dredge out the photo of you in your leisure suit days.

Imagine the joy when the card companies can’t tell the rookies apart from each other. Maybe they all look alike, with the too tight hats and the clean uniforms hoping for a spot in the starting 25 as the team moves north-south-east or west after spring training.

I found a couple of gaffs in the world of Twins baseball cards.

The first is Bud Bloomfield, drafted from the Cardinals minor league system and played ever so briefly as a middle infielder for the Twins in 1964. One hit in his seven trips to the plate. His Topps card (only one, in fact) actually shows a picture of Jay Ward with Bud’s name.

Bud happily informed me of this fact when I wrote him, telling me he is much better looking than Jay and that should have been the giveaway. I’ll let you judge for yourself. Here’s the real Bud Bloomfield in a fantasy card image.

Jay Ward did have a real card in 1964, the other showing him hatless.

Coming over to the Twins from the Los Angeles Dodgers system in a trade for Bert Cueto, Ward played 21 games in ‘63-’64, returning briefly to the majors six seasons later with the Cincinnati Reds before embarking on a career managing in the Indy leagues.

I did some bad homemade re-workings of the 1964 cards which can be seen in “Twinkies Autographs” section of the site.

To find another name/photo gaff, we have to jump all the way to 2002. That’s when Topps Total issued a rookie card for prospect Brian Wolfe, showing Grant Balfour.

Grant had already been carded by Bowman, Donruss and Fleer in 2001, and did have his own image with a Topps Total card that had the right name with the right-handers picture. Just for the heck of it, I had both players sigh the misprinted card.

Since injuring his shoulder and sitting out the 2005 season, Grant was picked up by the Cincinnati Reds who were hoping he could bolster their depleted bullpen in 2006, but it was another year of rehab. Balfour is now with the Milwaukee Brewers organization.

Brian Wolfe, shown in this 2002 Bowman card, was drafted by the Twins in 1999 and played in the system thru 2005 when he was given his release. He was picked up by the Brewers organization, who included him in the Corey Koskie trade with Toronto before the 2006 season. He is currently with the Blue Jays AAA club.

Of course, the other fun in collecting Twins player cards is when you run across guys labeled as Minnesota Twins players and go “who are these guys?” There were rookies (Mo Ogier for one) who shared card space in the early days. Nowadays, with the need for card companies to produce the first image of any prospect, so many players that will never see a major league ballpark are often on team labeled cards, but it wasn’t always so.

In the first couple of decades of Twins cards, we had a few players traded to the team in the offseason that were expected to be major league participants, but never showed. Ken Retzer had a 1965 Topps card, he came over in a trade of catchers (Joe McCabe) with the Washington Senators. Larry Cox has a 1975 SSPC card labeled “Minnesota Twins” on the back. He was a catcher obtained from the Philadelphia Phillies for Sergio Ferrer. And Ken Reynolds, 1973 Topps, obtained from the Phillies for Cesar Tovar and then traded to the Brewers before spring training ended.

But a couple of real oddities are:

Eduardo Perez from the 1994 Fleer Ultra series. He played 13 big-league seasons, but never remember him once donning a Twins uniform, going near a Twins training camp, or being any part of the organization. Yet there it is….Minnesota Twins.

And Pascual Perez, another 11-year veteran who has “Twins” on the team glove in this 1983 Donruss release.

If there are any others out there, please feel free to share, as so many cards have great secondary stories!

One of the more popular pieces of Twins memorabilia seems to be the annual yearbooks produced by the team and made avaiable to the public at the beginning of each year.  Collecting them can be a challenging…yet attainable pursuit. Yearbooks are great to collect and offer a unique insight into Twins history as it happened. Not only do they contain great photography, but also offer up informative articles, biographies and statistics of current and former players.

The Twins offered their first annual in 1961 but many people do not know that there were actually two versions of the yearbook in 1961 as well as 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970 and finally in 1985. The second versions were “Revised Editions” that were printed later in the season with updated information. According to TwinsCards.com staff member and long-time Twins collector, Pat Bones, “The covers were the same, except they added a ‘revised’ tag and content differed depending on call-ups (from the minors), trades and some of the miscellaneous photo sections.” Copies of the 1969 editions are included above.

Hardcore Twins collectors often run into a road-block if they are trying to collect yearbooks from each year the Twins have been in existence. From time-to-time, I get an email from a collector asking where he might find yearbooks from 1983, 1984, 1993, 1995 and 1997…as they are not pictured in our publications section. Curiously enough, the Twins did not issue yearbooks in those years. Outside of contacting the Twins (which I may do), I cannot find any information as to why yearbooks weren’t produced for those years. Budget cuts? Environmental considerations? Cheapskates? Who knows! If you know why they weren’t produced, let us know.

For all the fun that collecting yearbooks brings, recent years have brought some pretty boring yearbooks. While they contain all the essential information any Twins fan would need. they lack the human touch that many of the past issues had. I sorely miss the “Family Section” where we got to see the players with their families. Here’s one with Ray Corbin and his wife showing off the latest fashion from 1974. I also miss the managerie of team and fan photos. Not only of the players but ones like “Nun’s Day” at the Met from the 1967  annual. Absolutely classic stuff!

Collecting should be fun and collecting yearbooks can bring a lot of enjoyment and nostalgia to anyone’s collection. Finding some of the older ones can be a little bit of a challenge, but not one that will break the bank. I’ve seen the earliest of Twins yearbooks on eBay for as little as $30-$50…you just have to find the right one at the right time. Later editions can be found for as little as $5. Good luck but remember that collecting doesn’t end once the yearbook makes it into your collection. Don’t be afraid to open them up and reminisce about a little Twins history!

I recently posted a comment on Scot’s other blog, Coffeyville Whirlwind, and I alluded to the hobby not being fun anymore. That’s not the case for me, but my opinion in general about how the hobby has progressed has led me to believe that kids probably don’t have as much fun collecting baseball cards as they once did.

I’m not going to turn this into an essay on how important baseball cards have been in my life or how one card changed my life. On my list of the most important things in life, collecting baseball cards falls near the bottom of the list…somewhere between understanding the importance of Gross National Product and learning how to play the tuba. Instead, I want to examine how the hobby has changed. How the fun has been taken out of something that used to be fun for your average 10-year old.

Now, it doesn’t take a Rocket Surgeon to understand the hobby has changed. Cards are more expensive, more emphasis is put on condition, there are a zillion different sets, etc. Those aren’t the changes I’m talking about. I’m talking about the changes that have occured for the 10-year old kid who goes to his local convienance store with $5 in his pocket and wants to buy some baseball cards!

Let’s turn back the clock. The year is 1975 and my Dad had just returned from work. In his hand are several packs of baseball cards. I can’t remember being overly excited, but like any kid my age, I was excited that I was getting something for free. What I do remember is that the packs were brightly colored, the cards inside were these crazy colors and a lot of them seemed to have been cut wrong. From the moment I opened that first pack of 1975 Topps…I was hooked!

For the next 10 or so years, I routinely saved my money just to buy packs of baseball cards. I think packs sold for $.25 and for me to save $2-$3 over a couple of weeks was like hitting the jackpot. Of course, Dad was a large contributor to my obsession as he would routinely bring home a couple packs every day. I couldn’t wait to open the next pack because of the anticipation of finding a new card. It wasn’t uncommon to hear me or my friends say something like, “Awesome…I just got a Bake McBride card and a California Angels team card! Now I only need 225 more cards to complete the set.”

We got our cards from places like 7-Eleven or Little General Stores. On Sundays, my parents would go “flea-marketing” or looking for local garage sales. There was always somebody with a shoebox full of cards that we would rifle through looking for that elusive Pete Rose card or the high-numbered Steve Carlton. Some stalls at the local flea market specialized in sport’s cards and while mom and dad would wander around looking for a new lamp or coffee table, I would spend the couple hours looking through cards and chatting with the stall owner. Every once in a while, the “card guy” would have to leave for a break and ask me to watch the cards for him. It was the first time in my life I felt empowered.  Although I didn’t understand what empowered meant at the time, I definitely look back on those moments as the first time I can remember having total confidence in what I was doing…and loved doing it!

There was a great sense of accomplishment I got when I finished a set or found that missing card. I even started trading my thousands of doubles for other, “older” cards. I remember one particular Sunday, I traded all the 1975 Topps doubles I had (including all the George Brett’s and Robin Yount’s) to another collector for an almost complete set of the 1965 Topps Embossed and a bunch of Brooklyn Dodger autographs. At the time, I had no conception of value. All I knew was that I had a bunch of cards I really didn’t need and those ‘65 Topps Embossed looked really cool! That trade was made in a matter of minutes. I told him what I had, he told me what he had and we made the trade. Who got the better deal? I don’t know…and I didn’t care. It wasn’t about the deal…it was about the fun…it was about collecting and dealing and one person helping out another.

As we collected the cards, they didn’t go from the pack to a plastic sleeve and a screw-down holder to a glass-case that was locked in a humidity controlled room downstairs that my friends could only see by appointment. Instead, they went in my pocket then maybe to a shoebox (wrapped in a rubberband). Eventually, complete sets made it to an album, but it was a home-made album made of document protectors and doubled-sided tape. My cards were everywhere (kind of like they are now). Often they were laid out on the ground by team and by starting line-up and many hours were spent reading the backs of the cards and memorizing statistics and other trivial information found on the back. From the backs of the ‘75 Topps I learned that Cal McClish’s real name was Calvin Coolidge Julius Caesar Tuskahoma McLish and that the fan’s name who caught Roger Maris’ 61st home run was Sal Durante.

Admittedly, I am very far removed from today’s baseball card collecting 10-yr old. I have lived outside of the U.S. for almost 13 yrs and haven’t bought cards at a 7-Eleven in probably 20 yrs, but I do know that the hobby has changed. Although you can still buy packs of cards, they are now much more expensive and have fewer cards in the pack. Your average collector does not complete sets pack-by-pack. It’s much easier and less expensive to buy the entire set at one-time. Ebay has revolutionized the hobby by making it easier and less expensive to get the cards you want. While that fact my be enticing, it certainly de-humanizes the whole experience and takes away the fun that once was the centerpiece of the hobby.

The kid with $5 in his pocket has many more choices than I did in 1975. Not only is he faced with a bevy of choices at the store, he probably has his own eBay account and just goes online to find the missing cards from his set. If he does choose to buy locally, he is faced with the decision of what to buy from the many different types of cards out there. While I applaud Major League Baseball and the card industry for minimizing those choices in recent years, it still isn’t enough. Topps and Upper Deck reamin the only two standing after agreements between MLB and the MLBA to only issue licenses to these two companies. Even with only two card companies, the list of sets made available under every concieved name is too large to comprehend. And with the inclusion of game-used cards and autographed cards, the hobby has turned into a gold-rush to find the most valuable cards.

Arguments can be made for variety being the spice of life, but my “old-school” mentality wishes there were only one choice. It doesn’t matter what the choice is, just don’t make me have to spend an eternity guessing whether I made the right one. Let’s bring card-collecting back to the kids and not the money-hungry, portfolio carrying, investment brokers who only care about how much the cards are worth and are oblivious to the fact that Ed Ott’s 1981 Topps card tells us that Ed rode a bicycle to Spring Training prior to the 1979 season!

Have we taken the fun out of collecting? Or am I just an old goat that needs to catch up with the times? Let me know…