Diamond Nine #23

 I've been super busy this week and haven't even had time to really post anything.  So a quick Diamond Nine is an easy way to keep things going!

It's a hodgepodge today...

Claim away!!

Need Russ

Probably the absolute worst time to ask this, but.....

Anyone have a Russell Wilson RC available for trade?  I have been wanting one for a loooong time, but haven't gotten it done.  I know I don't have a lot of readers, and most of them are not big football guys.  But if anyone knows someone who would be up for that, I would love to hear from them! Spread the word.

Russ RCs are going for a premium around here.  Seattle is our closest NFL team.  So I never see deals on these at card shows.

My preference would be one with him in a Seahawks uni (nothing against Wisconsin!).  Top pick would be the Topps flagship base card.  No way I could swing enough to trade for the Topps Chrome.  But any Russ RC would be good enough for me!

And no, not this one (though I wouldn't turn it down)!

Diamond Nine #22

Free stuff on the blogs, once rampant, has slowed to a trickle.  Lots of reasons for that, I suppose.  Most of all, these things are cyclical, but other reasons could include diminishing inventory for giveaways, postage costs and even 'free stuff fatigue'.

For me, it has been the work required to get all the cards out the door.  Gotta match up the claimer with the claimed cards, package the cards, address the envelopes and so on.  Doesn't sound that tough, right.  And it isn't, but after 21 Diamond Nine giveaways, I ran out of steam on it. Not forever though!

So yesterday, there were at least three free card giveaways on the blogs I read.  It was nice to see, and I even claimed some stuff from two of them.  And that got me thinking that I should probably get back on the horse!  Not as often as in the past, but I think I can do a little.

Which brings us to today's cards...

No duplicates can be picked by the same person, let someone else have the other one!  The bottoms of both scans are cut off a bit, but the whole cards exist, I promise.

If you can't tell who that is on the bottom left, it is Dansby Swanson...

Card show pinch hitter

So I haven't been able to hit any card shows for a looong time.  Sound familiar?  But a friend of mine, Rob, was able to go to one, and I sent him $20 to hit the cheapie boxes for me.  He got me some pretty sweet stuff.  Some of what he found was standard dime and quarter box stuff, but some was treasure!  

A quick aside, when I don't know anything about a card, my go to method to learn about the card is to look it up on COMC.com for a ballpark value, and then if I am still interested, look on Ebay to see what the card has actually been selling for.  So I will use that method a few times in this post, but it is for learning only, not because sales value is always the most important consideration.  But it helps, when I can't keep up with which versions of which cards from which sets are the hardest to find or the most desirable from a big picture standpoint.

Check it out...

Some Trout inserts!  These were quarters, if Rob is to be believed.  I don't remember Trouts in quarter boxes, but maybe times are changing.  Either way, I am happy to have these.

Next up, someone many of you don't know much about, but he has a good little cult following in the Seattle area.  It's a Slick Watts RC!!  None of his playing days cards use the nickname Slick, but "Don" just doesn't have the same ring.  This was a quarter!!  Cheapest copy on COMC tight now is $8.91, so a quarter sounds great to me!

Next up might be the find of the show, at least to me.  A 1997 Donruss Elite - Elite Series Mike Piazza, numbered to 2500.  I always liked the Elite series, but for some reason I had not seen one from 1996.  The cursive E is both strange and wonderful.  Just feels like a classy card.  For a quarter!!

And another sweet find!  I had never seen the 2013 Heritage Minors set.  Pretty good card! So young.  Probably just got his braces off.  This was found in a dime box!

The next card was also from a dime box, and Rob knew I had been looking for one of these.  From the front, you would wonder why I would want it so badly, but if you have already seen the back, then you know!

How often do you get to see a 6'10" scruffy lookin guy acting like a Raggedy Ann doll???  Sweet!

I guess this next one was a whole dollar.  Wasting my hard earned dough, Rob!!  But I do love the relics of the old timers.  This did not scan nearly as nice as it looks in hand

Next up are 2 cards that, when I first looked at them, I thought, 'OK, standard quarter box stuff'.  Right?  What I didn't know, but found out when I was researching the cards, is that both of these are the harder to find variations.  Sweet!  I love both Ozzie and Albert, so adding rarer (but not RARE of course) cards of either of them makes my day.

All right, these next 2 were total surprises to me when I went researching.  Before the research, I thought, hey, OK cards here.  But nope, these 2 are way more valued cards than I thought.

First up is a copy of the Topps Chrome version of the famous Bautista Bat Toss.  Iconic moment, well worth preserving on a baseball card.  But on closer examination, this card is numbered on the back to 150 copies.  Cool!  Turns out it is a Blue Refractor, and there don't seem to be many available on COMC or Ebay.

This is a card that doesn't fit my collection all that well, so it is available for trade if someone needs it.

And another card that I don't plan on keeping, but shocked me when I looked it up is this Kemba Walker RC.  I figured it would COMC for a few dollars and actually sell for maybe $2.  Nope.  The cheapest one on COMC is $23!  I would have never guessed, and this came out of a quarter box!  If you need this card hit me up for a trade!

The last "card" I'll show is a bit of a mystery to me.  Anyone want to help me ID this?  It is hard metal, different from other metal cards I have seen.  A little thicker too, and kind of heavy for it's size.

The back is an exact duplication of the real Murphy RC, with the 1977 copyright date.  I was hoping for another, separate copyright to point me in a direction, but no luck.  The only difference from the original (other than the obvious metal difference!) is the number 2536.  I assume that is a serial number, incremented for each copy of this card.

I found a copy of this, autographed, for sale online, but no details on who made it or where it is from.  I'm sure you experienced readers will have some info for me though.

Thanks for reading!!

My biggest trade ever

Regular readers might remember a post, a little over a month ago, where I posted about outrageous prices that modern basketball cards were going for.  Not a very original post, that concept has been all over the blogs.  But in that post, I mentioned that I had a copy of the card below, a 08/09 Radiance LeBron James.

Not a pic of the card actual I owned, I got this off Ebay

It is a pretty sweet card, looks beautiful.  Sort of low numbered too.  My point, at the time, was that it and many like it are going for what I consider INSANE prices.  Insane.  Prices.

A graded 9.5 copy of this card sold for $1111 recently.  I did not miss the decimal point, Eleven Hundred Dollars.

Mine was not graded.  I looked it over, but not being a grader, I wasn't sure what it would end up getting from a grading company.  One of the corners looked slightly fuzzy to me. Not super sure.

Well, to make a long story short, I ended up trading the card, not grading it and selling.  As with any trade of this magnitude, I am sure that there are people out there who would think that I did quite well, and others who think I was taken like a fool.

Personally, I feel pretty good about the trade. Even if it is possible that I could have gotten more, I am happy with what I got, since I could never hope to get this card any other way.  So without further ado, here is what I traded the LeBron for...

........

What a beautiful card!!  It looks like at least a 6.5 to me.  As if I cared, really.

In all honesty, I kind of hope that LeBron goes and wins the championship and the guy I traded with makes a mint off of the LeBron.  He is definitely in it to sell the thing.  I never want someone who I trade with to feel ripped off, so I wish him well.  And even if that happens, I'm super happy with a real vintage card that I never hoped to own!

Now some of the reasons I was very willing to make the trade.  First, There just aren't that many of this Clemente card around.  Are there less than the 299 copies of the LeBron?  Of course not, there are many, many more than that.  But the LeBron suffers from what I think of as fake scarcity.  How many different LeBron's are out there numbered to 299 or less?  Hundreds for sure.  And it is a beautiful card, but will it ever achieve the iconic status of a 56 Topps HOFer?  Not to me.  I think it will be drowned in a sea of shiny LeBron cards as the card companies continue to try to outdo each other.

So I will miss the LeBron.  But not as much as I will enjoy the Clemente!!  And I think this clarifies for me, that I would always be willing to trade pretty much any card, if the price is right.  I wonder what I  could get for the Clemente??  

I got Blazed

I'm kind of, sort of a Blazers fan in the sense that I live 10 minutes from Portland.  But I am not a die hard.  I appreciate it when there are quality players/people on the team, but don't go out of my way to see games or collect the players.  Of course, when they are doing well, the whole area seems to rally around them, and gets really fun, and easy to get caught up in.  I remember 1990 and 1992, and the whole area was really on fire with fandom.  It was a lot of fun.

So recently I was gifted with a stack of mostly Blazers "stuff'".  The reason I received the stack was actually kind of sad.  A fellow collector in the area had been putting away stuff over the last couple of years for an older Blazer fanatic.  This stuff was not top of the line, more like a pile consisting of any old thing that he didn't want to keep, but that he figured the old guy might appreciate. 

There were posters, magazines, newspapers and yes, a box of cards.  Unfortunately, when my friend went to deliver the bounty, he was told that the old guy had recently passed on.  Very sad.  Anyway, my friend needed to share that story, and we had a good talk.  He then asked if I would like the stack o' Blazer stuff, since he was probably going to throw it away if I didn't.  I said sure, and here are the best parts.

First off, I am not going to show any of the cards.  I know, this is a card blog.  But they were just about 800 Blazers commons from the past 30 years, and only a few of you would even be interested.  So...

Some mini-posters from BP gas stations.  Probably from 1990 or so?  Clyde was the face of the franchise, but folks around here still talk about Kersey and Porter.  Duckworth was a fun and interesting guy, and Buck Williams was a very underrated beast and a huge part of the Blazers success in those years.

Next up, very little Blazers in this bunch.  But maybe a guy the Blazers could have had????  Jordan mags are always welcome, and the 2 Clyde Card Magazines are nice as well.

Mostly local newspapers chronicling some of the big moments in sport!

The local take on Big Mac

A local high schooler who ended up making good.  Can you tell who that is without reading the caption?????

Here is a closeup of the caption.  He was a pretty big deal around here, won 2 state titles in high school.

And my favorite item from the stash, this 'TrailBlazer Portfolio'.  This was apparently given out by a local bank to customers in 1978.  The artist was Michael Lundy.

There were 11 total prints, one in color.  They are on some nice thick parchment like paper.  Decent quality.  They have been in the folder for most of the last 42 years, but are still not mint.  Some dinged corners mostly.  Here are a few.

And a close up of the color print, Maurice Lucas.  Not a lot of star power on that Blazers team, but a lot of decent players.

The biggest star on any of the prints was Kareem, playing some soft D on Lionel Hollins.

Overall, pretty interesting stuff.

Recent incomings

Here is some stuff that had passed into my grubby hands over the last couple of weeks.  Always appreciated, thanks to all!

First up is a batch of cards that made the rounds across the country!  The story begins when Alex of Chavez Ravining posted some cards he didn't really need and asked if anyone wanted them.  I, being the Diamond King, jumped on the offer!  A couple of days/weeks/whatever later, Alex sent me an email explaining that he had sent the cards to the wrong blogger on accident, but that Matt from Diamond Jesters was going to keep the mail rolling and send them my way.  Wow!  As we all know, the blogging community is pretty cool that way, and Matt didn't disappoint!  And he included this note:

Here are the cards!!  Thanks to both Alex and Matt!

Those All-Time Diamond Kings may not be rare or special, but I really like them.  I'm probably going to go for the whole set someday.  The struggles of nostalgia!  That they are very plain, with one color backgrounds, strikes me as both good and bad.  I like the simplicity, but the lack of team logos always gets to me, and that combined with the single color backgrounds almost make the cards too simple.  Like a dimension is missing.  Oh well, I like them anyway.  The throwins of Martinez and Williams are very appreciated!  I love Pedro, feel like he is underrated.  I saw him on MLB TV today and his poor neck has ballooned a bit.  Getting old stinks.

Next up are my winnings from the most recent BFG over at Johnny's Trading Spot.  

These are pretty cool.  I love the one making fun of Topps, nice crossover.  And the Hungry Jerk one plays right into my pre-teen mentality.  'Buy it Stupid!'  LOL.

And last up, these three came from a Free Card Friday courtesy of Kerry from Cards on Cards.

Some pretty top flight cards here.  Any Trout is a good Trout right now, I have so few.  And my 13 year old son has decided he wants to learn to fish, so any Trout is probably a good Trout for him too.  I'm looking forward to spending time fishing with him.

The Embiid checks my boxes too, you all know how much I love colorful cards, and this one is both colorful and shiny.  Also my first Embiid, I have very few newer Basketball cards.

And probably my favorite card in the post, the die cut Durant!  Love die cuts, and even though both the Embiid and Durant are pretty much just copying late 90's stuff, it is still cool enough for me!

Thanks again to all!!

Drawing time!!

 OK, that second try went a lot differently than the original post!! 

I got 13 entries into the drawing for the 2020 Donruss Divisions 'case hit'.  12 commenters and one emailer.

Before the randomizations, I learned a couple of things:

1. Give people time.  Not everyone reads blogs every day, and there are a lot of blogs to read!
2. Make the effort at the same level as the prize.  This card is OK, but not amazing.  Asking people to do much more than comment probably wasn't realistic.  Especially after we have all been conditioned by the 'free card' posts that have been rampant over the last 6 months.
3. Bloggers are very respectful of others.  Several said they were interested, but didn't want to take away from a 'true fan' of one of the teams.
4. Night Owl really hates the Padres, Giants, D-backs and Rockies!! Just kidding Greg!

Anyway, I put the 13 entries into random.org in the order they came in, and here are the three randomizations:

First pass...

Second pass...

And the third pass and the winner...

Congratulations to gcrl!!  The card will get sent out early next week (with our already in progress trade!  Saves me postage, nice.)  Thanks to all who participated, I appreciate it.

Well that didn't work, so let's try differently

 Welp, I thought I would get some bites on yesterday's post, but I struck out.  Live and learn I guess!

I offered a card up, in exchange for a pretty easy participation cost, but nobody felt the need.  Some reason's could be:

1. The card sucks, nobody wanted it - possible, even though it is a case hit
2. The time and effort I asked for wasn't worth it - yeah, I asked people to take action, maybe too much?
3. Nobody likes any of the teams from the N.L. West - Need a Yankees card!
4. Nobody read the post - oh, waaah, poor blogger has no readers, haha

Or maybe something else.  If you have an opinion on that, leave it in the comments, I would love to hear it.

But I still figure I will try to give the card away.  Let's see if loosening the rules gets any bites!

All you have to do is comment that you want in on the drawing.  The deadline will be 5PM PST on Saturday, September 5th.  If I get anyone who wants a shot at the card, I will randomize the list of commenters 3 times and the top of the list will get a PWE with the card in it.

Here is the card...

Good luck!

Inspired by Waiting Til Next Year

Inspired by this post by P-Town Tom from Waiting 'til Next Year, I recently purchased this Case Hit from 2020 Donruss.

Take a look at Tom's original post to see the stats and math, but basically, this particular card would be found, on average, in one out of every 2,304 packs.  Cool!  Rare!!! Even though it isn't numbered or anything...  It features:

Dodgers - Cody Bellinger
Giants - Evan Longoria
Padres - Fernando Tatis Jr
Rockies - Nolan Arenado
Diamondbacks - Ketel Marte

Even though I love anything rare, I have decided that I will not be keeping this card.  What I would like to do is to get one volunteer for each team represented on this card for a little battle, the winner gets the card! No skill necessary, and honestly, skill won't even help, it will be mostly luck.

If you want in, here is how to get in.  Send me an email (my email can be found in my blogger profile) stating which team you want to represent, and some kind of proof that you are an actual, bona fide fan of that team.  How do you prove it?  Any way you can, but some ways that come to my mind are:

1. A link to your blog, that is obviously somewhat dedicated to your team
2. A picture of you surrounded by team gear of your team
3. A convincing paragraph about your passion for your team
4. Something else!

First convincing proof in an email (not in a comment here, though comments are most welcome!) for each team will reserve your spot.  I will try to keep the teams claimed updated below:

Dodgers: None Yet!
Giants: None Yet!
Padres: None Yet!
Rockies: None Yet!
Diamondbacks: None Yet!

I guess we will see if any Rockies or Diamondbacks fans read here!

Once we have a player for each team, I will post a blog post with a couple of questions.  There are no wrong answers, but some might be 'righter' than others. The players can leave their answers in the comments, and based on those comments, a winner will be determined.  Clear as mud?  Don't worry, it will be easy.  So if you are a fan of one of the teams, and are interested in the card, please email me!!

Even though the card is 'rare', I will be shipping it in a PWE, so keep that in mind!