Barney Rainbow

The Darwin Barney collection continues to grow.  Along with his base card in series two, there were the usual parallels.  Here are five looks at the flying Barney.

Base version

Walmart blue border

Target red border

Black border, numbered to /61.

Might as well include the silk card, too.

Let me get back to the black card.  By being numbered, we know that there are exactly 61 of these, period.  So far, seven have been sold on Ebay, at about $10 each.  I paid $9.99 for mine.  The sales represent 11% of all the possible black cards listed over 2½ weeks.  And right now there are none listed for sale.  Has the supply dried up already?  Where are the other 54? None are on Beckett or Sportlots (though you can't track past sales on those sites).


If only a few more of these show up later on Ebay, to me, a $10 price seems pretty low (not that I'm complaining). Compare that to the Barney no position SP from Heritage.  It is unnumbered, so we have no idea just how many of them are out there.  Sixteen have been sold on ebay for an average price of $90 and its been over a month since one has been available.  The last one sold was listed on May 19 as a BIN and it went for $110 within three hours of being listed.


All this leads me to think that Topps may actually be undervaluing cards by numbering them.  The unknown quantity of the unnumbered SPs may get collectors to pay more for a card, since you really don't know if there are more or less of these out there.  I'm seeing the same thing with the unnumbered Bryce Harper #661 card.  As of yesterday afternoon, 86 have been sold on Ebay and another 11 were active auctions.  That makes 97 copies of an "SSP" card on Ebay alone.  That's a whole lot more than the seven Barney numbered black cards.  And the Harpers are going for at least $150 each.


Now I don't expect that Darwin's cards would go for the price of a Bryce, but man, it seems like there are a lot of this supposed "SSP", more that you might think, at prices higher than make sense.

Series Two Inserts

Pretty slim pickings here if you're looking for Cubs.


Golden Moments: Cubs score 2/50

Castro's Golden Moment: An eighth inning homer that accounted for the only run in the Cubs 1-0 victory over the Pirates on August 3, 2011.

Sandberg's Golden Moment: A walk-off hit in the 13th inning against the Pirates on July 1, 1991.  It looks like the Cubs can only have Golden Moments against Pittsburgh.


Gold Standard: Cubs score 1/25

Ernie helps set the Gold Standard by getting his 1,500th RBI on September 12, 1969.  


Historic Stitches: Cubs score 1/23

I should have shown this on on the day I showed the cards I picked up for the player collection, but I kinda forgot about it.  Sorry!


Framed Silk: Cubs score: 1/100

This one came with my shipment from brentandbecca and it will go into my growing Darwin Barney player collection.  It's my first silk card.  I wasn't too sure what these looked like.  I actually thought the silk part would be full sized instead of a mini-card.  These are numbered to 50 and mine is #3.


1987 Topps Minis: Cubs score 0/50
Gold Future: Cubs score 0/25
A Cut Above: Cubs score 0/25
Mound Dominance: Cubs score 0/15
Career Day: Cubs score 0/25
Team Rings: Cubs score 1/30...shown last week
Retire Number Patch: Cubs score 2/24...shown last week
Gold World Series Pins: Cubs score: 0/20...it would help if the Cubs had a World Series appearance in the Topps era!


I won't bother with the relic and autograph cards.  There's too many different variations of these to keep track of.

Tile Tuesday: 2012 Golden Cubs

They're printed in gold but they're playing like crap!


Ladies And Gentlemen: Your 2012 Topps Golden Memories Cubs!

2012 Series Two Cubs

My series two cards arrived over the weekend!  Like I did with series one, I bought all my Cubs, inserts, and complete set from brentandbecca.  He busted a whopping 50 cases of this stuff.  Getting everything from one seller has made it much simpler for me.

The Cubs were in the re-tooling, dumping mode over the winter, which left them very short in series one--- only seven cards.  As I figured, that was fixed in series two, as a total of 16 Cubs cards were included.  I'll show the cards in three different groups...

Returning players  Nine of the cards were of players who were with the team last year. That means no photoshopping

Jeff Baker, signing at autograph.  I wonder who the guy in the beard is?  Does he know he showed up on a baseball card? 

Cool action shot of Darwin Barney sliding into second base.  Even better is the stirrup action he's got going.

Speedster Tony Campana make a catch against the ivy.  It's the third "ivy catch" card in the set (Byrd and Johnson from series one were the others).  

Ryan Dempster, on the road in my best guess, Cincinnati, based on the empty red seats.

Bryan LaHair taking a cut at Wrigley.

Trade bait Carlos Marmol on the mound against the Nationals on the 4th of July.  Would it surprise you to find out that Marmol blew this game?  He came in a tied game in the bottom of the tenth, allowed Jayson Werth to steal third, and then threw a wild pitch that let Werth score the winning run.

Jeff Samardzija tossing against the Pirates.  He's become a decent starter this year.  As long as he keeps that up, I'll use his correct name instead of calling him Jeff Spellcheck.

Alfonso Soriano batting against the Cardinals.  Pay attention to his uniform number; I'll come back to it a little further down.

Kerry Wood, celebrating something.

New guys, Photoshop or No Photoshop?  

 

David DeJesus...PHOTOSHOP...remember that Soriano number I mentioned?  Look at DeJesus' number.  Look familiar?  DeJesus actually wears #9.

Rafael Dolis...No Photoshop...This is a shot from picture day in Arizona.  Dolis turned into Marmol II in his brief stint as closer and is now in AAA.

Paul Maholm...Photoshop...I think (that's why I didn't use all capitals).  

Ian Stewart..PHOTOSHOP...The white border around "CHICAGO" is wrong; but this was a decent try.  And the dirt was a nice touch too.

Chris Volstad...No Photoshop...The pinstripes look really good.  Too bad Volstad's performance didn't look as good.  He's in AAA right now, compliments of his 0-6, 7.46 ERA.

NEVER PLAYED WITH THE CUBS.. This is the third group, guys who have never even played with the Cubs.

Anthony Rizzo...PHOTOSHOP...This card was also included in the factory team set, and its a bad Photoshop job.  The Cubs patch is way too small.  Also, the Cubs don't wear the style of helmet he's got on.  But Rizzo is tearing up AAA and should be in Chicago before the end of the season.

Dave Sappelt...PHOTOSHOP..Problems with this card include red outlining around his number instead of white, the wrong type of helmet, and the Cubs logo on the pants in too big and in the wrong spot.  The Cubs got Sappelt in the Sean Marshall trade with the Reds.  He's hitting .226 in Iowa right now.  If he doesn't improve, this may be a card of a player that never played an inning for the team he's shown with.

Five Random Cubs Cards

I've got 10,580 Cubs cards from 70 different brands listed on a spreadsheet. A random number generator picked five cards, one each from the past several decades.  For the second straight time the RNG picked Mr Cub; in fact this time we get Ernie Banks bookends.  Let's see two!!

1950s / 1960s Milton Bradley 1969 Ernie Banks  I've written about the Milton Bradley cards before.  These came out the glorious and then disastrous 1969 season.   Like most of the team, Ernie tanked in September, hitting only .208 and hitting only two homers.  Both were monthly season lows.

1970s Topps 1976 #301 Rick Reuschel  I've always wondered why Reuschel was wearing a batting helmet for this picture.  I'm guessing the photographer grabbed him after BP, but wouldn't you think the someone would have told him to grab his hat?

The '76 Hostess card has a picture from the same shoot.

1980s Topps 1989 #501 Vance Law  Coming off of an All Star season in 1988, Law tanked in '89.  His batting average dropped 58 points and he went from 78 to 42 RBIs.  The Cubs released him after the season and Law spent the 1990 season with the Chunichi Dragons.

1990s Topps 1993 #128 Kal Daniels  Did you know that Kal's real name is Kalvoski?  I just learned that!  I wonder what the story is?  The Cubs picked up Daniels from the Dodgers in late June, 1992.  The former first round draft pick of the Reds cost the Cubs a career minor leaguer name Michael Sodders.  Daniels hit .250 in his  half-season on the north side.  The Cubs let him go after the season and Daniels never made it back to the majors.

2000s Upper Deck Legends 2001 #60 Ernie Banks  This card comes from my Ernie Banks player collection.  The 2001 Upper Deck Legends set was made up of 90 current and retired players.  

Upper Deck liked the picture enough to use it a couple more times.

The Missing Retired Number Patch Card

I don't think this comes as a surprise.

I did what Topps didn't.......again!  This would have been the perfect opportunity for Topps to include Ron Santo in a set.  The Cubs retired his number 10 in an emotional ceremony on September 28, 2003.  His words that day, "This is my Hall of Fame."

Maybe Topps is paying homage to the long snub the Hall of Fame gave Santo by snubbing him in all their early releases, before finally including him in the update set.


Just to get a proper perspective, I did a quick search at Beckett to see how many Topps cards the last four HOF inductees had the season they went in.


Andre Dawson, was included in these 2010 sets...

• Topps 206
• Legendary Lineage
• Cards Your Mom Threw Out
• Sterling
• Triple Threads
• Tribute
• Tales of the Game
• Base set SP variation
• Manufactured Patch

Bert Blyleven was included in the following 2011 sets...

• Topps 60
• Base set SP variation
• Kimball Champions
• Topps Lineage
• Triple Threads
• Update SP variation

Roberto Alomar, class of 2011, was in....

• Base set SP variation
• Topps 60
• Commemorative Patch
• Manufactured Glove
• Lineage
• Marquee
• Tier One
• Triple Threads
• Update set SP Variation

This year's other inductee, Barry Larkin, had already made it in 2012...

• Golden Moments
• Timeless Talents

So why the Santo shutout???

Series Two for the Player Collection

My main stash of Series Two cards haven't arrived yet, but I did get a couple other series two cards in yesterday's mail.  They're for my Ernie and Ryno player collections.

First up is the Team Ring.  I liked these in series one and I still do with series two.  Ernie's ring has 1958 and 1959 engraved on the sides, representing the years he was the NL MVP. 


There are some slight differences between these and the series one rings.  In series one, they were called Retired Rings and featured players with retired numbers.  The series two cards are called Team Rings and you can see the Cubs logo in the center of the ring.  A second difference is that the series one cards were numbered, strangely to /736; series two are unnumbered.


Here are the two so you can compare them yourself.

Topps must like the retired number concept this year because they used it again in series two, with patches this time instead of rings.  Both Ernie and Ryno were included.

Topps did a nice job with these.  The best part for me is that Topps used the unique number font that the Cubs use.  The numbers look just like they would on the back of a jersey, except when Ernie played the numbers didn't have a red outline...a minor quibble.

Now my major quibble....Topps had the chance here to include another Cubs retired number, one that was special to the Cubs last year and will be important to the folks in Cooperstown this year.  More on that tomorrow.