Strive For '65: Slowly Not So Surely

It has been a few weeks since I have made any progress in this goal. With a little more than 8 months to go, it is looking more and more like it will not get finished in time.

In a recent small lot of nine cards from sportlots I added one card to my 1965 Topps Baseball Set Build. It was the main card of the four cards or so that I was interested in of the nine cards and the 2nd oldest (the oldest looking one is actually a more modern reprint). The cards were delivered promptly and pretty safely in a padded envelope. They were in a nine-pocket binder page with the page folded up by the rows, similar to what many are doing now with PWEs.

Lets look at the most recent addition to my Strive For '65 Project:

Card #158 Dick Sisler Reds (Front and Back)

So the updated numbers:

177/598 (179/600) 29.9%

Some of those other cards I will mention in this blog sometime later, maybe. The Expos card of course I will mention sometime on my Curly W Cards blog.

Joy of a Complete Team Set: 1965 Senators

OH hey a trip to my LCS over the weekend helped me with some Homie team goodies including the official Joy of a complete team set. Unfortunately I won't mention them on this regular blog, but fortunately I do yack about it on my Curly W Cards blog. The story includes this dog of a card:

and how I turned it around from this:

To this:

Yeah that is much better and Don likes it better too. See no more moss growing on his hat:

So this helps with my Strive For '65 campaign. It now stands at 157/598 (599)

Card of the Whenever: 1959 Topps Baseball Roy Campanella

After coming up with an idea for my Curly W Cards blog of showing off one Washington Baseball Card and calling the feature "SeNators Singles", I have decided to do something similar here. If you read enough card blogs you will notice that some of the bloggers have a "card of the day" or a "card of the week" feature where they feature a random card from their collection on a regular basis. Some blogs ARE that feature. Due to my posting nature I won't be able to do a daily feature, and sometimes a weekly feature I get lazy so for this feature it will be "whenever".  It won't necessarily be "regular" in the sense of having a fixed schedule. It will just happen when it happens. So Deal with it. Speaking of deals...

I keep surprising myself with cards that I have failed to mention on this blog but I had mentioned in some of my very seldom "mail day" posts on various card forums. This card is one such card. It is a highly sought after card that often sells for ridiculously over inflated prices even for vintage cards and even for a Hall of Famer. I can understand high prices sometimes for vintage and super Hall of Famers. What I can not understand those ridiculous overinflated prices for a brand new card that has an autograph, on a sticker I might add, and/or a tiny piece of what is supposed to be part of a uniform they supposedly wore at one time. Sometimes for a player that hasn't even played a single professional game yet. OH come on seriously people? Yeah I am a bit of a cheap scape.

Now for the steal: Before I won this card I had seen some auctions for it go for a little less than (but not much) what I ended up paying and I missed bidding on them or was outbid cause I was low-balling a little. The price I ended up paying hits close to my upper limits for an individual card, but for a card like this I might have even gone a little over my top price. The card is in what I would say is Pretty Good to Very Good condition, the dealer had it marked as being in Fair to Good condition.

THE CARD:

1959 Topps Baseball 550 "Symbol of Courage" Roy Campanella

Here is the back:

Nope didn't get it for that little, but I would love to have. That is the price sticker that was on the penny sleeve it was in, it was also in a toploader but I scanned it "naked" without the glaring toploader. I also scanned the back raw so all the info can be read.

I received the card on Wednesday 06 March 2013 (This year? Really I thought it was last year). I got it for (hold on to your seat) $24.99 Shipping was FREE. I have seen it listed on Ebay with starting bids of twice or three times as much sometimes in much worse condition. Copies in better condition I could see paying a bit more heck I might have even gone up another 5 bucks but $30-$40 is my upper limits for a single card at this time, even vintage cards of Hall of Famers. I am glad I found one at an affordable price. It makes trying to complete these vintage sets that much easier.

A Crinkly Package but not cards

I've been sitting on this post for too long. {SIGH}

One of the card blogs I read fairly regularly is "Crinkly Wrappers". I made a comment on one of Ted's posts a while back and he sent an email in reply w/ a notation that he had checked some of my want lists and had a couple of 2009 Philadelphia Football cards to help w/ my set build and a ton from the 1994 Ted Williams Baseball set to "start/finish" a set (seeing as I had a handful already it would be the latter). All I had to do was send my mailing addy and pay for postage. No problem, done and done. Ain't that the way the blog-universe is 'sposed to work? Then on Monday 19 Mar 2012 a nice package arrives. I had anticipated some of what I saw, but not all.

I knew there would be only a handful of the football cards so barely a poker hand of football cards wasn't a disappointment.

I needed most of them (I already had the Anquan Boldin and I think another one).

2009 Philadelphia Football 6 Anquan Boldin Cardinals

I did not have the Marc Bulger, although I have most of the Rams from this set weird I usually have Bulger cards coming out of my ears. LOL

 2009 Philadelphia Football 174 Marc Bulger Rams

(Front and Back)

Some of the other cards I may show individually later sometime when I talk about their subsets or the next time I do a random sampling of cards.

Then there was this: A ton of cards from the 1994 Ted Williams Baseball set.

 a loaded 8 3/4 x 12 inch flatbed scanner worth of

1994 Ted Williams Baseball Cards.

 9 semi random cards from the base main part of the set.

9 more semi-random cards but these are:
Checklist 1 of 2 plus some of the sub-set cards

(each subset has its own checklist as well)

The Subsets are as follows:

• Cards 93-99 Women of Baseball: The women who played professional baseball during WWII in the AAGPBL (All American Girls Professional Baseball League) the league that was immortalized in the 1992 movie A League of Their Own
• Cards 100-117 The Negro Leagues
• Cards 118-135 The Campaign: Minor League Players (Includes future Major League Players Jason Giambi and Billy Wagner)
• Cards 136-144 Goin' North: Players in their Minor League Uniforms
• Cards 145-153 Swinging for the Fences: Players who have hit 4 homers in one game
• Cards 154-162 Dawning of A Legacy: Cliff Floyd and Tim Salmon careers

A near complete set of 1994 Ted Williams Baseball. 112 out of 162. Some of the higher priced Super Stars, the Namesake cards (Ted Williams) and harder to find cards from the set are missing but with a little shopping around and maybe some begging on card forums and to other bloggers I'll have the set finished sooner than later (then I can start in on the 1993 set). I already had the Women of Baseball sub-set, which I plan on blogging about sometime in the future, and the "3 MuskaSenators" cards from the main part of the set Frank Howard, Walter Johnson, Eddie Yost (I'll blog about them on my other blog I'm about to mention). I did not have any of the Negro League cards from the set. I mentioned that on my other blog "Curly W Cards" (my blog about Washington Baseball cards) in my Frank Howard post that I didn't have any Negro League cards yet. Well now I have some Yay!

My favorite card from the set is still the first one I had gotten of the player mentioned above. Now I have a double of it (and some of the ladies).

Card number 88 Frank "Hondo" Howard - Senators
(Front and Back)

Many many thanks Ted for such a fantastic lot of cards.

Introducing Curly W Cards my other Card Blog

My Curly W Cards Blog

Just a little self promotion here. Over the past week plus a few days over, I have been working on and kicked off another card blog. I had posted up a page here (static page linked on the right sidebar not a regular main page post) Originally called "Thinking about a new Card Blog" but when I launched the blog I changed it to "Curly W Cards Blog News" (Now Curly W Cards Blog Update) in an effort to start getting visitors. The page here gives a brief tale of how I decided to start it up.The blog is Washington Baseball Specific. I plan on covering the whole spectrum of cards from the various Washington DC baseball teams focusing on the Senators and the Current Nationals. Even though technically the "Curly W" the Nationals have been using was developed in 1963. Previous Washington teams used a straight laced W that was usually narrow since the "Curly" version wasn't around yet. I'll talk about those older cards dispite the fact they pre-date the more modern logo. The nature of the beast will also have me mentioning the Montreal Expos often and probably the Texas Rangers and Minnesota Twins. So occasionally I'll show cards that on the surface don't have anything to do with baseball in DC. [Think "6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon" only with Washington Baseball cards]

Off on a semi-related tangent thought. I don't have any cards from the Negro Leagues neither vintage nor modern commemorative so I probably won't mention the Homestead Grays too often. (Unless I get blessed with packages of them from interested readers - If and when I get readers. There is a nice 1994 Ted Williams baseball card set that includes a few.) Time to get back on track.

 So far I have only posted an introduction post at CWC. I am in the process of developing 2 or 3 posts that concentrate on just one player per post. I figure that will be part of my SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) for the blog. Each player post will feature a few cards from that player, unless I only have one card of them. The first post I'm working on probably won't be a homer but could possibly be a ground rule double or a triple maybe. I almost had it ready to post but then I decided I should scan the backs of the cards I showed so I can mention the backs as well, unless they are blank. I still need to do that scanning.

I have a couple of static pages on a top tab list one is a repeat of the "Introduction/Welcome" post that will serve as an introduction to the blog. The other is an attempt to list all the Washington Baseball cards I currently own. (Oy what a task). That one is called "My Curly W Checklist". On it I will list each card from each Washington player I have, even their cards from when they were on other teams (finding some of those in my collection is challenging since my collection is not well organized and quite big). The list is in chronological order by card set/series. UGH I just thought maybe I should have made the list alphabetical, but then I get the problem of what to do with multiple player cards and the team cards would have to be either at the beginning of the list or the end they would get lost in a list if they were in the "Ws" (or "Ns" or "Ss") The team cards and other miscellaneous cards would have to be chrological anyway so why not?

I am also working on a player list of the guys I "Super Collect" (Some I "super" collect more than others). Maybe I should incorporate some sort of checklist there or link them to a list. The Herculean task I am attempting is to make a full All-Time Roster. I had noticed that any ATRs on the web are "franchise specific" so they include all the current players on a team like the Rangers or Twins and those players during the "Non-Existent" years who never put on a Washington Uniform or played in DC so why list those guys. Even though I do collect guys like Gary Carter (Expos) and Vladimir Guerrero (Expos, currently on Orioles)

At times I think I bit off more than I can chew or even close my mouth, but it has been fun developing it, I only wish my collection was better organized.Wow I was originally just going to mention the blog and link to it, or make a "link this" link to the welcome entry. So enjoy.

Curly W Cards Blog Update

I'm toying with the idea of starting a 2nd Card Blog (technically my 3rd since I have a blog at TCC). That will concentrate on Washington Baseball Nationals and Senators (and the players that have been on those teams). I did a little looking and didn't see any card blogs devoted to the Nationals. One or two bloggers may collect Nationals or one of their players, one blog I follow the guy seems to be a big Ryan Zimmerman fan, but the Nats are not his fave team. Many of the other more popular teams have several people blogging about their cards from those teams. I'm not sure how much I could keep up a blog like that but I might try. The big problem would be my big procrastination of scanning cards. I have many cards I was going to scan but haven't and I have a few series that I want to talk about in this blog that I haven't because I haven't done the scanning. (Footballs 2009 Philadelphia set comes to mind, I still need to finish that set among a million others). Another problem I have is I know I would accidentally cross-bleed posts about the Orioles and about my other Washington Teams.

Right now I'm thinking of titles for the blog some I'm thinking about are:

Curly W Cards

Washington Wax

DC Wax

Washington Natators

Washington SeNATors.

Nationals n Senators

DC Baseball Cards

Of course this might not even happen it is just a thought.

UPDATE: 27 Feb 2012 - "Curly W Cards" is launched. So far I have just set it up and posted a welcome post and page.

21FEB2012 - Well I didn't do the set up I was hoping to do over the weekend. I won't make any updates mentioning "future" stuff to do, just stuff I have done.

16FEB2012 - I plan on doing some of the initial set-up of the blog this weekend maybe. I already have a graphic logo for the blog, actually I have 3 logos ready, two use the same photographic scan I did a few years back with a bat and a couple of vintage hats. I also have a text intro I came up with to explain the scope of the blog. On a previous update I mentioned I had thought of "Curly W Cards" for the title which I am going to go with. I'm not sure of exactly when I made that update.

NOTE: on 24 November 2012 I decided to move this static page to a regular post and backdated it to 27 February 2012 which was the last update and the Launch of my Curly W. Cards blog.