2019 Press Coverage Odell Beckham

Inspired by the Topps Now! Manny Machado Press Conference Tablecloth Relic, I whipped up this custom for the pending trade of Odell Beckham to the Cleveland Browns.

The "relic" contained inside this one of one card is the SD card from a random camera at the (upcoming) press conference introducing ODB to the Browns' fans.  I should have put an ad page around it offering it up for 13 minutes at a price of 10% of his potential contract.

I'm not sure if this is more relevant (especially as a 1/1) than the Machado, but I hope it's as ridiculously off on an almost unrelated tangent, as the only true connection to the player is his image digitally encoded on the SD card by some unknown reporter.

At least the name is clever - press = reporters and he's a receiver that gets "press coverage" from opposing DBs.

Check out my other ODB custom here.

Think I might start a series of incredibly expensive and almost totally irrelevant relic cards.

I'll take your suggestions in the comments...

C-Note Challenge

Chris over at The Collector recently posted a scenario based on Beckett's C-Note Challenge where collectors go on an imaginary $100 shopping spree.  After last week's binge shopping, it's not like I need to buy more at this point, so this is more like what I left out...

According to Beckett's guidelines, there should be 5 to 15 cards based on the current month's high book value. Since in reality, that would only allow you about half as many cards (because nobody actually PAYS high book, do they?), I'll use current COMC & eBay prices.

I did a little creative "photoshopping" on the page images so they would fit better here.

First off is a basic vintage card that is not (yet) part of a set build, but just an addition to my star cards.  The '58 Spahnie is just a nice combination of colorful and classic pose.  I have a few Koufax, Mays, Aarons, and Drysdales, etc. still in my star binder, but the only Spahns are those I've collected while building the last few vintage sets I've conquered.  Had to find one that was centered a little to the left to offset the name text being shoved to the right margin - something I hadn't noticed until I was looking for the image below.

 

Next up, keeping with the vintage theme, another one from the "would just be nice to have one" list.  At some point, I'm probably going in heavy on these Post cards and will try to build a set.  Will just have to decide which one I like better.  Or maybe which one has the more affordable Clemente and Mantle.

Switching to football, but still on the old stuff.  Here's the cheapest of the remaining 1948 Bowman Redskins I need to fill out the team set.  '48 is Washington's first appearance on cardboard.  Adams is actually an upgrade.  None of the rest of the Bowmans I have are graded, but at this price, I'll happily crack it out.  Looks like it's flopping around in there anyway.  Doesn't PSA usually do better with odd sizes?

Moving fifty years forward in time, this silver 1998 Paramount Priest Holmes rookie would knock off one of the two remaining color parallels I need.  The other is Platinum Blue.  It's our first COMC item.

 

Gotta have something for the space binder!  Was originally looking at the relics from Panini Americana, but this stamp card from Panini Century looks even better and is priced at about half what the swatch cards ran. Would love to meet Gene Kranz in person sometime.

 

And finally, I've got around $20 left, and we've got to leave a few bucks for shipping.  This oversize box topper is from an eclectic mix of historic, sports, and entertainment icons.  I put this one on my list next to the Apollo 11 and Carlton Fisk because ... wow!

Grand Total - $95.96, though I missed the shipping on the Adams Bowman, so I'm probably even closer.

Collector's Log: Stardate 198204.17

More from the 1982 journal.  Long before most collectors were specialized down to a player or team, our buddy Mike narrowed his collecting focus.

He was always an Angels fan.  Not sure about the origins of that.  Might have been their All-Star roster in the early 80's.  Starting on this day in April, he was purging his collection to focus on Angels, Nolan Ryan, Jim Fregosi, and Raiders and Steelers.  I don't remember him adding a lot to the football side.

He did eventually get all the Topps Ryans, and also the Fregosis, which I would pursue myself later.  Gotta give him props for selecting a player who has held his value over the years.  Can't do much better than Nolan Ryan in that time period.

I came away with a few good cards.  Not sure what year All-Stars the entry refers to, but the other nice card was probably an early addition to my Cedeno PC.

Later on, it refers to 75 new cards from Fleer.  Had to be five wax packs, since they were 15 cards each.  Collation never changes much over the years.  Time to trade for the rest.

Some more late night trading yielding big names.  That '71 Vida Blue must have changed hands several times.  I've had one in my PC of his for a long time.  I had a heck of a time finding another decent one several years later to complete my '71 set.  Pretty nice trade to get the two guys at the time, though.

 

After trading, we rode over to the shopping center at 7th Street.  I added to my HO train rolling stock while Billy was distracted by this:

Morgan Fairchild appeared in the prime time drama Dallas, and went on to have a decent tv and movie career.  From what I've seen, she still looks pretty good these days - with a little help from medical technology, of course.

Next day, I was dealing with that constant debate that you have when you put player collections in a binder.  Do you leave empty spaces for just the basic cards, or every oddball that you might run across?  The real trick is to find a balance between spacing things out and not having two cards or less on each page.

That last entry was a big deal back then.  We learned about the error cards that appeared in 1982 sets!  It wasn't just a thing in the previous year that saw two more companies jump into the fold.  Error cards showed up again to spark the search anew!  Wish I'd said what the source was for this report.

That Lerch is one of the most elusive.  I just got one this past year.  Not sure I've ever found the Perez.

Until next time!

Epic Mailday - Part Five

Another chapter of the compendium of cardboard consumerism that I brought on myself last week.  Here is the second of two SportLots purchases I made.

Starting off with gridiron greats.  One more off the neverending list of 2016 Donruss, and another insert down from 2013 Topps Legends.  Those Hot Numbers from 1994 Flair started off with a few in a box of stuff I got.  I thought they were cool looking so I put 'em on my want list.  I don't even have the regular set built or started.   Montana puts me down to the ever elusive no-number header cards for his and Joe Namath's Heroes series.

A few more for the post-career section of the Bo binder.  That mini is from Topps Magic and is a tribute to a 1949 design apparently.  Looks like they did them in 2009 and 2012 too with a slightly different look.

A couple Bo baseball.  I'll be shocked if these aren't dupes, especially the On Deck.  I know I've seen them before.  Probably just slacking on keeping my list up to date.

These are the only two set hits for baseball in this order.  Keep that Untouchable Moose in mind.  At least Donruss put the whole word on one line and didn't have to remember to include a hyphen.

A pair of manager PCs frome the 1st Edition version of 2005 Topps.

Some more Coaches, Managers and minor league players that I PC.  That's my second Kodak Pookie.  I'm an idiot.

A Masterpiece for the Michael Jordan collection, which is made up of him only in black and white uniforms with hats.

Three Julio Francos.  These are a bit off the flagship path, so they're needs.

A nice mix of mostly parallel Livans.

A herd of Moose.  There's that Donruss again.  I needed one to narrow my set down (to the Jeter Hit List card), and one to fill the slot in his PC binder.

Seven Royce Claytons with him on only three different teams.  Some nice shinyness.

And last, some hockey cards of my one PC for that sport.  Sergei Fedorov.

Not bad for about a blaster and ¼ and a couple evenings work.

Epic Mailday - Part Four

The next part of the perpetual parade of pasteboard purchases is the first of a pair of SportLots orders.  While comparison shopping for the COMC purchase earlier, looking for cards on my miscellaneous and non-sport page, I found a seller on SportLots that had a nice selection of my golf inserts from 2002 Upper Deck.  Of course, you can't just submit a small order on there, you have to max out the number of cards the seller will ship at a reasonable shipping price, so a couple days later I went back in and added to my cart.

Killed all my Green Rooms, and cut down the others to where I can at least put names to the last five or six.  Most started out as the majority of the numbers up to 25 or so.  Upper Deck's golf cards are always very elegantly designed, as it should be for this sport, usually with a predominately green theme like you see here.  Their graphics can be intense, but almost never overwhelm the photos or the overall visual appeal.  I don't follow golf as much as I used to, but I still like these sets from the early 2000s.  Once I kill the other three inserts, though, my list will be blank.  The SP sets always gave me the impression that they were a lot tougher to do, though I think I know one out of state shop that might have base sets tucked away in a back room.

 

 

While filling out orders on SportLots, I basically search a particular seller's inventory for anything on my want lists.  So I moved over to my hockey page and found some of the last few 1981-82 Topps, 2006-07 Powerplay, 2007-08 Ultra, 2013-14 Score and 2017-18 OPC for sets.  Threw in the red Carlson for the Caps box.

Then I dove into my newly added late 80's Capitals team sets list and knocked off a few including a couple stickers.  Most years, those number "helmet" stickers have variations where the number is on top or bottom of the team logo.

Moving on to two of my football player collections - Priest Holmes and Richie Anderson.  They span the entirety of the 2000's with the 2001 Fleer Tradition, NFL Showdowns for both guys from 2001 First Edition, and the Select and Panini from 2017.

Also hit some Bo Jackson post-career cards from the last few years.  These are so similar that they all tend to look the same.  Makes it tough to determine if I have them or not without physically checking the binder, since I don't catalog them any other way.

 

Of course, Bo will transition to baseball as well, and in this case, even archery.  I've seen a lot of those Chronicles singles, but hadn't looked real close until this one.  Might have to investigate these further, they're more interesting than shows at first glance.

 

 

Was all over the place with baseball singles, either for PCs or set hits.  A lone Piniella that didn't appear in the batch from COMC.  2010 Verlander kills my base set.  The GQ AJ is just a card I liked the look of - he's not actually a PC, nor did I do that set or inserts.  The last two are just singles off big set lists.  I usually wouldn't bother with onesy twoseys like this, but this particular seller tended to only have a handful from certain products, but I usually needed a couple of those few, so I clicked 'em in my cart for under a quarter each.

These 2005 Donruss Champions took my list down to ten cards for all 450.  These are the consummate "leave a blank space on the base card for the relic" crap design element, but I'm still fond of them.  For a while, the stack I had was great trade bait, and then I turned around and decided to build them myself, so I probably traded for a lot of the same ones I had shipped out earlier.

Further destruction to what is becoming one of my favorite Heritage sets, (and revving my desire to build the original too) 2011 Heritage.  Got the last couple checklists to fill out all five.  Not sure how I feel about buying checklists just like regular cards, but since these were really thick, quality stock, I guess it's worth it.  I also tried to get one of the last 2007 Bowman Heritage set checklists, but the seller sent the one from the Prospects subset instead.

Finally, to of the better inserts from 2013 Hometown Heroes, the Nicknames, complete with representative cartoons.  I'll refer to Andre by Hawk Dawson, but I still think of Ken Harrelson first.

Next time, the other half of my SportLots order.  And then I promise, the gluttony will subside a bit.