"But is it art"? (2007 UD Masterpieces)

Upper Deck did a nice turn in 2007 with these pastoral, brushed-up cards. Available in slim packs of 4 (corrected from 6), UD Masterpieces captured memorable moments on roughened, canvas-like stock with gold foil framing. Loaded with parallels and other inserts as modern sets often are, I see its artful look as competing with Topps' 2006 resurrection of Allen & Ginter.

2007 UD Masterpieces (Ryan Howard and Chipper Jones):


2006 Topps Allen & Ginter (Ryan Howard auto & Chipper Jones):


My handful of cards came from a Wal-Mart repack, but I enjoyed the artistic style enough to consider buying more. (As a 99% vintage collector, not many current-day sets grab my attention.) People willing to pony up for a hobby box can score unusual cards like 5"x7" inserts, black borders, and other curiosities. Back in 2007, A Pack A Day blogged their box break live and included a number of nice scans; the affecting "Lou Gehrig Day" is my favorite.

2007 UD Masterpieces reverse:


OK, there's one obvious weakness, the repeated back photos. I assume the painting "treatment" came from a reusable series of Photoshop filters, so why not pick out a nice player profile shot and run them again? Adding more variety would nail it and could even be superior to A&G's "foggy nostalgia" look.

UPDATE: As noted in the comments, I assumed incorrectly--the pictures used are real paintings and thus closer to "art" than one might suspect. What to do about the backs, then? They still seem unnecessarily repetitive. How about a painting of the home park for all members of a given team?

More UD Masterpiece links!

• About.com's review of 2008 UD Masterpieces
• All Masterpiece-related posts from "A Pack A Day" (includes hockey and football)
  
• eBay search for "2007 UD Masterpieces"
  

2007-2008 UD Chronology Stitches In Time

In the grand scheme of things, baseball is my favorite sport of the big four in the United States. Basketball is a distant second, followed closely by football in third. Hockey is in last place. Although, I'll admit, I've watched more hockey games this past season than any other time in my life. That probably has something to do with the Blackhawks finally televising home games.

When it comes to collecting, I just stick to baseball. I do look around for interesting cards in other sports. Mostly, this is for trading and my eBay store. This Ben Gordon card will probably end up in my store, but it will still be a small struggle to keep this out of my collection.

I'm a Bulls fan and Ben Gordon was the start of playoff basketball in Chicago, after a long drought. If I keep it, I will be going down a collecting path that I don't want to get into; basketball cards.

So let's look at this card. Stitches In Time - Veteran. Can you really be considered a veteran for the 07-08 season, if you were the Rookie of the Year in 2004-05? Apparently so. But wait... didn't Emeka Okafor win the NBA Rookie of the Year in 2004-05? But the card says that Ben Gordon was Rookie of the Year. I'm confused.

2004-05 NBA Sixth Man Award Winner is also listed among his achievements of the front of the card. That one is correct. Ben did make the 2004-05 NBA All-Rookie First Team, but that's not mentioned anywhere on the card. Maybe that's what Upper Deck meant to list on the front. That's a pretty big mistake though. I wonder what Emeka Okafor or Ben Gordon would have to say about this card if they ever saw the final product.

Despite that major error, the card is limited to 99. I guess that if you are going to commit an obvious error, it's best to limit the number of cards with that error. Not that it justifies the mistake or makes it any better.

Even the back of the card is a bit confusing.

You have received a Ben Gordon Game-Used trading card. On the front of this card is a piece of memorabilia that has been certified to us as having been used in an NBA game. We hope you enjoy this piece of basketball history, as we continue to keep you as close as you can get!

According to the text on the back, this is a Ben Gordon Game-Used trading card. Also according to the text, this piece of memorabilia just been certified to having been used in an NBA game. Nowhere in that part of the text does it specify Ben Gordon as being the person using this Game-Used memorabilia. This could have been worn by Benny the Bull on the sidelines during the game. I have no idea.

I could take it on faith that this was used in a game by Ben Gordon, but the text on the front of the card says that Gordon was Rookie of the Year. Can I assume one thing, while having a glaring error smack me in the head on another part of the card? Sigh. It's all in the wording, I suppose.

Still, it looks like a nice card until you really start scrutinizing it.

Red Pen Alert!!

I would love to peek inside of the mind of a child. It should be filled with fantastical ideas and wonderment. I'll bet that all the world's problems could be solved by looking at everything through a child's eyes. Only then, might I be able to appreciate the added artistry of this card to its full potential.

If an adult did this butchery, I would think that they were either, drunk, high, Forrest Gump or extremely bored and distracted. What did poor Al Weis ever do to the person responsible for this masterpiece?

As you can tell by the scan, someone really loves the red pen. The words "White Sox" are helped along by a red ink stripe that isn't quite level. The "Sox" logo on the hat is filled in with red ink. The Topps 1963 All-Star Rookie trophy has changed from a yellow to a somewhat carefully lined red ink.

Al's eyes are mostly reddened and he's sporting a wonderful loopy red five o'clock shadow. He almost looks like the caricature of an old timey robber. Completing this outfit are streaks of red on each sleeve. The right side of Al gets the broad strokes of red ink, while the left side seems to suffer from a smudgy transfer.

Tiny red dots make an appearance just below the H in White Sox, under the newly red banner. There appears to be red across the field behind Al, but that is not red ink, that is actually part of the picture. The dirt between the field and the stands just shows up in a reddish hue.

Lest red be the color of choice here, blue ink makes a subtle appearance. There is a mostly vertical straight line coming down onto Al's left shoulder. Curiously, the puzzling part of the blue ink comes just underneath Al's belt line. Can this be a clue into the mind of the inking artist?

It looks like "ISJ" written in blue ink over Al Weis' lap. What does it all mean? One can only speculate the meaning of this. Perhaps this was the artist's initials? Maybe it is a crudely written infinity sign. Could Al Weis be infinity? Since Al was on the White Sox and the 1969 Mets team, could this be a Cubs fan's revenge on Al?

We may never know the answers to this doctored card, but we can appreciate this as an interesting artifact from (hopefully) a child's mind.

Duo-Tang Topps Sports Shots Binders/Portfolios

I know what you're probably thinking... "What a horribly off-center 1989 Topps Strawberry you have there, Tribecards!" Unfortunately, you'd be wrong. You see, what you have here is a scan of a Duo-Tang Binder/Portfolio (like they sell to kids at Wal-Mart at the beginning of school to keep papers in). And the photo above is the best fit I could get the thing to stay on my scanner. To see how this ginormous 'card' compares to a standard-sized card, take a look at the next scan:


If you look very closely, you will see a standard-seized baseball card in the upper left corner. See it way up there, looking like some kind of "Fan Favorites Mini" card? Yeah, these binders are BIG, though flat with pockets in them.


Duo-Tang and Topps teamed up before with a 1988 set as well, as seen above. The binders/Portfolios measure 9-1/2" by 11-3/4" and are cardboard.


The 1988 set featured 130 players total. Some of them include Joe Carter, Robin Yount, Nolan Ryan, Tony Gwynn, Carlton Fisk, etc.


In addition to Molitor and Strawberry, the 1989 set featured players such as Doc Gooden, Mark McGwire, Ozzie Smith, George Brett, etc. The set was greatly reduced from 130 players down to 39 that year.

If there is great interest, I can post the checklists for each year, but you can find singles and 'sets' on eBay. Most of the sets you find for sale are actually compilations that someone else has assembled. The originals were sold in 50-piece boxes for retail stores to sell for $1 each. I don't even remember how I ended up with the ones I have... They will eventually be given away during one of my free-for-alls.

1988 Leaf Awesome All-Star Stickers

There's a recently-revealed blog called, "A Pack to be Named Later" upon which I am a contributing member. I bought four of these packs to post over there, and each pack will be displayed on a random date in the future. In the meantime, I thought it was an appropriate set for inclusion on this blog! After all, we're talking VERY weird cards and baseball. It's a match made in... Well, let's just get to the set, shall we?

The first thing we see when we open a pack is the gum:

I can honestly say I have no desire whatsoever to put this 21-year old gum anywhere near my mouth. The powder is still very fine and very messy. I'm sure I'll be cleaning my scanner for weeks to come.

There are 99 cards in the set, and in one of the packs I opened, I pulled the checklist - yay me! So, for those of you keeping score at home, here are the cards you'll need to complete your very own set of stickers:



The cards themselves feature various characters sporting relevant (or opposite of what one might think) names. Also, Leaf writers evidently had a hard time coming up with names to go with certain alliterations, as seen in the two cards here:


Larry Line Drive and Long Arm Larry... I guess they couldn't have very well used "Luke," now could they?

They also had no "Political Correctness" back in the late 80's, either:

You couldn't get away with a character named "Contra" nowadays, I don't think.

And in honor of Carl Crawford's recent accomplishment, I thought I would include his predecessor:


The backs of most of the cards include little write-ups about the player on the front. But, some cards have puzzle pieces on them:

Collect all the pieces and have yourself a big-ol' time completing the puzzle.

As I said, at least it's RELATED to baseball, right?

1953 Topps Traded!

In 1981, only my third year of collecting, Topps did something astounding, groundbreaking, nay, unprecedented in the history of baseball. Not content with their "normal" 726 card set, these Brooklyn-based wizards audaciously published a full 132-count expansion of rookies, tradees, and previously overlooked vets. This 1981 Topps Traded set picked up at #727, proceeded in sensible alphabetical order, and closed out with new Mariner Richie Zisk! The 9 year-old me practically wet my pants at the thought of owning such a prize.

OK, it wasn't long before my collection delved back into the 1970s and I realized "traded" sets were old news. Unfortunately, the disco-era cards featured awful airbrushing and questionable player selection, so Topps probably shelved them in search of a better business plan. I do like 1972's "TRADED" cards (including HOFers Steve Carlton, Frank Robinson, and Joe Morgan), but their high-series placement sticks modern collectors with high-dollar prices. My weekly 25-cent allowance afforded a single weekly pack as it was.

The pictured card shows the work of a real pioneer, probably a youngling like myself with a favorite team, sharp scissors, and rubber cement. They cared enough about Willard Marshall, a decent WWII-era right fielder, to track his move north from Cincy to Chicago after 1953. An unlucky "extra" donated his team logo, cap sigil, and team name to this Machiavellian task.

1. Obscure Cincy logo with flyin' White Sock
2. Cover Reds team name with "CHICAGO WHITE SOX"
3. Revise cap with sans-serif "SOX"
   

There's a twist to the team name. In 1953, Topps printed National League team names with yellow-on-black text. The "update" black-on-red combo can only come from the 1954 Topps set. Based on the hat logo, it's almost certainly #39 Sherm Lollar. Sorry, Sherm!

My 1953 set includes a dozen of these "traded" versions. Maybe a bunch of kids did this back in the day, or maybe a few did it to all of their cards. In any event, they're nice to have in a low-grade collection and add a little pizzazz to what's already a beautiful set.

Kids, Leave The Rubber Bands Off The Cards

It was so cool to take stacks of cards and rubber band them together. It was the thing to do for many a generation of card collecting kids. Well, we know better today. Keep the rubber bands off the cards!!

My friend was cleaning out his basement, when he came across a suitcase full of old cards. By old, I mean mostly from the overproduced period of the late eighties and early nineties. My friend thought he had riches upon riches. It almost broke my heart to tell him that they were nearly worthless.

"You don't know that"!

Unfortunately, I do. I know what I'm talking about here. I came to terms, a long time ago, that my heyday of collecting came when the cardboard is usually worth more when recycled.

"You don't know what people are willing to pay for something if they really want it bad enough"!

That is true, but I can stake my reputation that at least 99% of what I found in the suitcase was priceless. And by priceless, I mean that the value per card would be so low that no price could be affixed to the majority of the cards.

I knew I was in for an adventurous night when my friend strolled in with a hardshell powder blue suitcase from the seventies. It even had a mirror embedded into the inside top. It was hideous!

I opened the suitcase and gazed upon a cornucopia of beautiful garbage. To be fair, there were some decent cards in there. Anything before 1986, I considered nice. From 1986 until 1994 there was trash upon trash. There could have been a few nice cards, except for the fact that they were nicked, bent and scuffed beyond salvage.

There were even water damaged cards in the suitcase. Unidentified sticky substances and rubber banded nightmares permeated the case. It was a disaster. The Mark Grant card featured in the picture above, actually had the rubber band dried and stuck to the cardboard. The rubber band crumbled to the touch, but Mark Grant had two lines of dried rubber that weren't easily coming off.

Let this be a lesson, kids. Always take care of your cards!