Art Deco Garbage*

I am not a big fan of the 2010 National Chicle set.  I know plenty of collectors who love the set.  I know a lot of collectors who hate it.  It has always been really low on my list.  There have been plenty of painting/sketch/art sets produced over the last two decades that it's not really hard to find a few favorites.  I spent a chunk of the past year working on one of the Topps Gallery Heritage sets.....

which is one of the best art sets in my opinion.  Plenty of others that I could post here too.  There are some decent art cards in the National Chicle set, if you pick and chose single cards, you can find some winners.  Sort of.  One of my favorite Cardinals cards.....

the painting of Brock is nice, but is that a Venezuelan flag in the background?  Cool if this were a Dave Concepcion card.  Miguel Cabrera is also an acceptable player for a Venezuelan flag background.  

Beyond the odd touches, again Lou Brock with a Venezuelan flag, my reasons for not liking the National Chicle set are pretty short.  Mainly, I despise the revisionist cards in this product where players are drawn into other uniforms.  I couldn't find my Lou Gehrig soul patch card, but there are still other really bad cards to show as examples.

As a Cardinals fan, this one is downright terrible.......

Pujols as a Brown?  Sigh.  So many things are wrong with this card.  There are worse though, with this Babe Ruth card being the crown jewel of awful in this set.  

I guess Babe Ruth was at least on the Braves for a season at the very end of his career.  Better than Pujols as a Brown considering he has no connection to the Orioles or Browns.  If you are going to make a Babe Ruth card on the Braves, then why is he still standing in Yankee Stadium?  

The wrist bands half way up the forearms, turtleneck looking thing.  This is a Chipper Jones card with a Babe Ruth head with the facade of Yankee Stadium in the background.  

These cards are sort of like the revisionist history quotes that people post all over the internet.  One of my biggest pet peeves in life.  I hate made up history.....

Abe said this in a movie.  Right?  

So, what card could possibly make me want to touch such a terrible set?

Imagine that Topps made a card in this set, of a younger player at the time, whose card had a pleasing background that matched the team's color scheme.  Picture that this same card actually pictured the player in their uniform, not of another nearby team, or some other weird connection to the past or future.

The card is also autographed and I am willing to overlook the rest of the set for this card.....

It's not a rookie autograph, rookie card, or anything overly special, but it's just a nice card with a good player's autograph.  Bumgarner has been a really good player to this point in his career, a few World Series, a whole bunch of home runs, and a lot of snot rockets.  

                                    

I actually had this card a few years ago, traded it to a Giants fan, and I sort of regretted it a short time later.  I have a few other nice Bumgarner autographs, so at the time it did not feel like much of a loss.  The Giants have had a rough last year and I feel like there have been a few more nice cards of Bumgarner floating around and they seem to have come down a bit too.  

Could not pass this one by.  The asterisk?  

*While the National Chicle set is generally art deco garbage in my opinion, this card is an art deco gem,

High Tek Bum

I had some plan a few weeks ago to find a bunch of the cool 1990s era player autographs from the 2014 Topps High Tek product.  I was working on that plan and got a little bit sidetracked and ended up landing a totally non-1990s autographs, but I guess this card can still fit in my collection because:

1.  It's a player from North Carolina

2.  Autographs of World Series MVPs look nice in any card collection

I picked my newest card up from a Facebook trade.  Ironically, I made the deal with a Royals fan which felt kind of like reliving last fall's World Series.  I needed to send a few Alex Gordon's home in order to complete the deal, but the trade was tough assignment since I had to find some cards of Royals relief pitchers.  Apparently there are not a ton of them hanging around my collection, nor other people's collections.

In the end I walked away with this Madison Bumgarner......

I have a few Mad Bum autographs already, and I am not specifically collecting him, but you really cannot go wrong by adding a few of his cards to the collection.  He's got a few World Series rings, he's still relatively young, and should do well with maintaining his card value over time.  Given the potential resume he could end his career with, given what's already there, I actually think he's a bit underrated.

Snorting Bull Awards: 2014 Hobby MVP

2014 Hobby MVP

I did not give out this award last year, but decided to add it to my list of end of year accolades.  I went through and made some criteria and had a few different players I considered for this award.  There is the obvious choice, Derek Jeter, but collectors had ample notice that he was leaving the game at the end of the year and his retirement did very little to move the needle on his card market.  Jeter was popular and would still be popular if he were playing this year, or he had just picked a random day in the middle of the year and walked.

Instead I decided to go with Madison Bumgarner.

I quietly dabble in Bumgarner cards.  He's a North Carolina guy and it's hard to pass up cards of a pitcher that talented.  We had the 2014 Postseason, but this was Bumgarner's third successful trip to the postseason.  During the past World Series appearances the price of Bumgarner cards would bump up a little bit around the time of the World Series and then just fall back down into Earth.  During the 2012 season I picked up an ordinary Madison Bumgarner autograph and spent about $7 on the card.

Prices on Bumgarner cards were still selling for less then $10 at the beginning of the year.  This card is now selling consistently for more than $20.  Harder to find autographs of Mad Bum are even pricier now.  One of my favorite Bumgarner cards of all-time is his 2010 Topps National Chicle autograph.  Not the world's best set, but the Bumgarner autograph in the set is awesome.

At the time this set released I went out and got a bunch of the autographs including the Bumgarner.  This was one of the more expensive autographs in the set at the time and cost me about $15 shipped.  Like his Topps autographs, it has had it's fluctuations, but is now selling for more than $30.  Sure, there could be a dip in some of the prices of Bumgarner cards, but the guy is 25 and has 3 World Series rings.  Bumgarner could have a pretty uneventful rest of his career and his cards will still always have decent value because of his work over in the postseason over the last five seasons.  2014 helped to cement Bumgarner's place in the deep end of the baseball card swimming pool and made him my 2014 Hobby MVP.