1988 New York Yankees Press Player Identification Photo

     I’m not sure what the technical term for this item would be, but for the price, I couldn’t pass it up as an addition to both my Hensley Meulens and Roberto Kelly collections.  I’ve seen lots of these popup on eBay in the last year, mostly…

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     While I am probably one of the last people to delve into the online video box break scene, now that I’ve finally started watching some of these, I realized there was the usual gap in the hobby’s awareness due to the language barrier.  To help…

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     One of the more annoying aspects about CheckOutMyCards.com is their lack of expertise on any cards that are not listed in Beckett’s database.  There are always staff openings on their website for new "Sports Trading Card Identification Specialist" positions.  And while, in the past, they have usually been willing to work with me on adding checklists for more obscure sets (i.e. anything NOT

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      I try not to do it very often, but this past week I picked up a larger lot for a single item.   I was unaware of the existence of the above piece until I saw this lot, so I dropped the minimum $9.99 bid.  I’m not really sure what the proper terminology is for this, but it is the "postcard" version of the Z Silk cachet for the 9th Freehold Classic Sports Memorabilia Show.  A little

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     Yet again, my saved eBay search caught a Hensley Meulens card I did not even know existed. Undocumented by either Beckett or the Standard Catalog of Baseball cards, this promo set was probably issued sometime shortly after the 1990 Triple …

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     Baseball and gambling. Two things that go together like, well, baseball and gambling. For nearly as along as there has been baseball, there has been gambling on baseball. And in an effort to combine the two in a more collector friendly way, fo…

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This can’t end well….

 Box 1 (8 total) Results

Regular sets

Set 1
163/165 (missing 66, 142)

Set 2
115/165

Set 3
8/165

Set 4
1/165

Diamond Star sets

Set 1
35/165 (including a Tony Pena with a damaged Lime Rock stamp)

Set 2
1/165

1 Jos…

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     While you don’t see them so often anymore, in the past 40 years, there have been a great many sets of the rounded persuasion issued by a multitide of companies.  Rather than stretch these out over a dozen posts, I thought I’d just tackle all …

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 Hensley Meulens ratificado como mánager de Bravos de Margarita

      While it’s a bit late, congratulations are in order for Hensley Meulens.  After being the fill-in manager for the end of the past two seasons for the last place Bravos de…

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      Progress is moving at a surprising pace these days.  In the past couple of weeks, I have been in contact with the gentleman who started the fledgling blog 1992 Mexican Leauge Baseball Cards.  He posted a link to some photos of cards and…

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     The more I dig, the more I keep finding on the 2005 Beisbol Cards set for the Mexican League.   Just yesterday, Google coughed up a listing on a site called Ofertopia.com for 158 different cards from the set.  I can’t quite make out what th…

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     I’m sure the few of you that read my ramblings have noticed that my interests typically lean toward the less-than-mainstream.  In this particular instance, however, it is rather surprising just how far outside the mainstream this subject h…

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(click here to skip the wandering preamble and get straight to the important stuff)

     A few years ago, when I seriously got back into collecting baseball cards, I decided to pick up where I left off on my Hensley Meulens collection.  I had mos…

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     Twice in as many seasons, the Bravos de Margarita of the Venezuelan winter league have parted ways with their manager as the playoff drive gets underway. Finding the team in last place with a 15-27 record, team vice-president, Tobías Enrique Carrero,  relieved manager Don Baylor of his duties, in what is described as a "mutual decision" (sure it was).

Baylor cesa funciones en Bravos

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      It would probably be no surprise to learn that players on the same team on a Future Stars card would be on the same team in the minor leagues.  What was slightly more surprising, however, was to find that I actually had all three pl…

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     By 1987, the minor league baseball card market had expanded enough that Modesto actually had a second team set.  For some reason, ProCards always numbered their cards as part of the master set that included all of the team sets they issue…

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Baseball Cards, April 1986, Issue #15, Volume 6, No. 1
Cover: Vince Coleman
Articles:
"On The Baseball Beat" by Irwin Cohen, Tom Seaver interview
"What’s New" by Steve Ellingboe and Vic Knight. pp22-23, 42, 44, 46.  Sets referenced: 1986 Fleer; 1986 Topps; 1986 Donruss; 1986 Donruss All-Stars and Pop-Ups; 1985 Fleer Update; 1985 Topps Traded; 1985 Donruss Highlights; 1985 7-Up Chicago Cubs;

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     Occasionally, I’ll just do random searches on eBay’s Sports Cards and Memorabilia section for “japanese” and see what pops up. A few weeks ago I did that, caught a seller unloading a nifty assortment of random Japanese baseball goodness and put in a token minimum $.99 bid (+$4 S&H). About a week later, this is what turned up:

Three 1988 Calbee cards and six 1988 Calbee wrappers:

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    I first caught this story about a week or so ago, on a Dutch site, and didn’t say anything because I thought it might just be a gag. Then I saw it repeated again today:

Bam-Bam’s odyssey is truly out of this world

     Apparently, Bam Bam is headed for the final frontier, courtesy of Space Expedition Curaçao, a new space program supported by Curaçao’s government.

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     I don’t hide that I don’t particularly like variations and parallels in baseball cards. I just think they’re the product of an extremely lazy attitude toward baseball card production. It’s bad enough that the companies reuse the same photographs over and over, year after year, but to basically make the same card, over and over, with no change aside from color, ELEVEN TIMES, is borderline

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      In 2005, La Liga Mexicana de Beisbol, known to most gringos as the “Mexican League”, began a big marketing push, thanks to a new league president, and part of that effort included a set of league-produced baseball cards (tarjetas de beisbol). I managed to pick up 55 cards from the set on Mercado Libre, and after three weeks of shipping, they have finally arrived. Until I can get them all

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     A little over a year ago, I posted a query about some Mexican League cards I’d found on MercadoLibre.com.mx, eBay’s partner site in Latin America.  Well, I contacted the seller, initially through a Spanish-speaking friend, learned that he did, indeed, speak English, and negotiated the purchase of all of the 1992 Mexican League cards he had.  Unfortunately, by this time, he only had five

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     As I mentioned in my previous post on Venezuelan stickers, I finally received my 1981-82 Dave Henderson. I held off on this one for awhile due to the price, but then finally came to the conclusion that if I didn’t pick it up, I’d miss it forever. This is actually a different sticker/card than the one posted months ago as the former had some black staining along the bottom edge on the

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   Since the early 1970s, Venezuela has been the venue of many sets of cards and/or stickers that go all but unnoticed to the wider collecting world.  As a result, sets like this can be very frustrating to player collectors, as they can be very poorly documented.  Case in point:

1991-92
     Thankfully, my Karl/Tuffy Rhodes saved search on eBay caught this one, or I wouldn’t have known there was

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     Despite having over 950 different cards of Dave Winfield, I’m still over 1100 short of completion, based on SportsCardForum.com’s Inventory Manager. Here are a couple of his most recent cards that represent a really annoying trend by Topps…endless reprints and rehashes of the same cards, over and over and over, no matter how underwhelming those reprints may be.

     Here is what I’m

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