I Love The 1990s Cardinals Part 49 - Stan Musial

I know Musial's last season was in 1963.  If you had asked me that question after 1988, I for sure would have known the answer since Topps gave him a Turn Back The Clock card in that year's set.  Pretty sure that this was my first Musial card.

 

Not many cheap Musial cards hanging out at the baseball card shops in St. Louis during the late 1980s.  So, this Topps card was as good as it got until the 1990s.  

There are many things that the 1990s got right on baseball cards.  One of the most important in my opinion is the reappearance of retired players.  How many brand new cards did Stan Musial get during the 1980s?  Not many.  In making this post, I had to narrow down a huge long list of different sets he appeared in during the 1990s just to get it down to a few favorites.  Even more Musial cards have been released over the nearly twenty years since the 1990s ended.  

I know there are modern collectors who get a little annoyed with the older players popping up, but it's a great way to introduce younger collectors to the older players and Hall of Famers.  Also a great way to create some inexpensive cards of players who have outrageously priced vintage cards.  Some of them are really nice looking, well designed cards too.  

Here are a few of my favorite Musial cards from the 1990s.  

First up is a card from the Cardinals 100th Anniversary set.  I am actually going to do a 1990s Cardinals post on this set, not to give away too much, but it was a small set that Pacific put together for the team.  The cards came in packs and were sold at McDonalds.  I managed to put together a set during the summer of 1992.  You can still find the packs floating around, not expensive.  Fun times.  

I like this Pacific Musial card.  Love the batting stance, one of the most identifiable things about Musial.  

If you have never been to a Cardinals game, he's got a giant statue outside of Busch Stadium with his distinct stance.  Not sure if people still do this at the new Busch Stadium, but back in the day at the previous Busch Stadium everyone used to make the Musial statue a meeting place before the game.  Sort of a zoo.  I preferred the Gas House Gang flag behind Stan, off to the left with the red and green flags.  

Old picture.  The card is seriously great, so is the set.  Check them out.  

Musial also appeared in more mainstream sets.  This Score card was one of the first that I remember seeing, which was in the 1992 product.  The card was part of a small little insert set that Score stuck into packs that featured Musial, Yaz, and Mantle.  There were autographed versions of these cards, but the fifteen year old me just got the regular base card.  I wish the picture had the classic Musial batting stance, obviously getting ready to hit here, or he's taking a pitch.

The adult version of me should track down a copy of the autograph.  One of the few older Musial certified autographs missing from my collection.

Twoish more.

In 1999, Fleer decided to use Stan Musial on the packaging for their flagship base set.  It was during those years it was called Fleer Tradition instead of just Fleer.   I was surprised at the time.  Although, the packing also featured J.D. Drew.  In 1999, baseball people were pretty sure that J.D. Drew was going to be the next Mickey Mantle/Stan Musial/Great Generational Hall of Fame player.  He ended up being a good player, but I am not sure he could have ever lived up to the hype.  

The boxes of Fleer cards.  Not my picture.  

Fleer placed Musial into the base set, plus they made a really nice insert set that highlighted different parts of Musial's life and career.  I believe it was only 10 cards.  Nice looking set though....

There are also autographed versions of the insert cards.  Not too difficult to find, but the base cards are great looking without the signature.  Highly recommended.

Musial also signed a lot of cards during the late 1990s.  They could be there own post, so I am going to limit myself to one autograph for this evening.  I have a favorite......

Not to say that his Greats of the Game, or SP Signature autographs are not worthy of a spot in your collection, they are, but I love these Century Legends cards.  I love the black and white picture with the blue autograph, great look.  Musial continued to sign as his health declined later in life, if you are going to take the time and money to buy one of his autographs, the 1990s era cards are definitely your best bet.  

Living Set Cards That Are Still Alive

Topps sells cards on their website.  They have a store with packs and boxes.  There are Topps Now cards, Throwback Thursdays, The Living Set, and probably a few others that I am missing on my list.  I see collectors get these different types of direct to consumer cards, post them, and many of them look like really nice cards.  I did that once.  It's been two years since I have touched the Topps website.  

Not going back.  

The last card I bought off of the Topps website was an Aledmys Diaz rookie card.  It did not arrive in mint condition.  The customer service people at Topps kind of shrugged their shoulders.  I did end up with another copy of the card, but I got it from another collector.  No more cards directly from Topps.  

I have been checking out some of the cards out of the Living Set, also known as the set that is supposedly never going to end.  Until enough people get bored.  Seems like a nice product with some nice looking cards.  I was curious.  I bought a few of the cards.  

Not from Topps.  

There are a few different Cardinals players that have appeared in the set, along with a few different Durham Bulls players.  I decided to start off with one of each, checking things out. 

My Durham Bulls player is Willy Adames.....

The art work on the front of the card is nice.  Adames has been a pretty prime prospect for a few years now and has a ton of cards.  Not sure he has an "art" style card.  Kind of something different after years of Minor League and Bowman products.  

Back of the card.  Would have been cool if Topps had put his Triple A stats in the past year column on the stat box on the bottom of the card.  

My Cardinals card is Jack Flaherty.  

This picture feels a little bit more like a sketch book drawing than a baseball card.   A few of the students in my class this year are really into art and do a lot with sketchbooks.  This feels like something in a sketch book.  I should get one of them to make a Jack Flaherty picture and see how close it is to this card......

Back of the card.  It would not shock me that 100% of the Dugout Quiz cartoons on the Living Set cards are about only four or five players.  

One more for today.  Besides the two cards from the Living Set, I also ended up with a Topps Now card from 2016.  I actually have a few cards from this set, which I bought before the whole Aledmys Diaz debacle.  Mainly, just a mix of Cardinals and Durham Bulls players.  I think I might have a Bryce Harper card too.  

My new Topps Now card is a former Durham Bull.  

I have a few other Upton cards out of the Topps Now set.  I was surprised that one of them is actually a pretty tough find, definitely on the expensive side for a B.J. Upton, I mean Melvin, card.  This one seems to be fairly ordinary.  

The back of the card has a quick description of the event that got the player the Topps Now card.  

Overall, some nice cards that I am happy to add to the collection and they arrived safely at my house without any bends, folds, or the need to call Topps customer service.  

Set Project Update Take #2: 1983 Kelloggs

Two more weeks to finish off this set.  I know my last update was just a few days ago, but I am actually putting together a set in a timely fashion.  It has rarely happened in this space.  The cards are not very hard to find, nor are they very expensive.  When I made my post at the end of last week I was still roughly 40 cards short from completing the set.  I had already worked out two trades and have a COMC order coming through in the next day which will drastically cut down on the 40 cards needed.

First up.

Ran into a trading partner, who is a huge Angels fan, who sent me three Angels cards that were on my list.  Return package will be along shortly, but I am always happy when other collectors are generous with help on projects.  One of the great things about collecting baseball cards.

I picked up seven other cards from my checklist from another trade.  I got a few of the Kelloggs cards that I needed and they got a little bit of help with an older Topps Heritage set.

I was actually surprised when I started out on this project that I did not already have the Neil Allen and Quisenberry cards.  Both players were Cardinals at one point during their careers, and on most of these 1980s sets that I have started to work on, those are the cards that I usually already have in my collection.  Plus, Neil Allen coached with the Durham Bulls for a long time.  

Updated Checklist:

2 Rollie Fingers 

4 George Brett 

6 Pete Rose 

7 Fernando Valenzuela 

8 Rickey Henderson 

9 Carl Yastrzemski 

10 Rich Gossage 

11 Eddie Murray 

13 Jim Rice 

14 Robin Yount 

15 Dave Winfield  

17 Garry Templeton 

19 Pete Vuckovich 

26 Andre Thornton 

27 Leon Durham 

31 Nolan Ryan 

33 Len Barker 

35 Jack Morris 

39 Jim Palmer 

40 Lance Parrish 

41 Floyd Bannister 

42 Larry Gura 

44 Toby Harrah 

45 Steve Carlton 

46 Greg Minton 

52 Dale Murphy 

53 Kent Hrbek 

54 Bob Horner 

55 Gary Carter 

56 Carlton Fisk 

57 Dave Concepcion 

58 Mike Schmidt 

59 Bill Buckner 

Set Project: 1983-1990 Topps Glossy Send Ins

If you opened packs of Topps cards during the 1980s, you probably remember the contest cards that used to pop up every couple of packs.  They usually involved winning a trip to the All-Star game or Spring Training.  I think in the later 1980s Topps also offered collectors the chance to buy sweatshirts, or a chance to subscribe to Topps Magazine.  Cannot believe I passed up those opportunities.

I actually did save up my contest cards though, and at some point towards the end of each summer, I could usually convince my parents to get a money order to send in for a sweet stack of 10 glossy cards.  I actually think based on the number of cards in my collection, plus the fact that I probably split the cards my brother, I likely got a $4 dollar money order.

In retrospect as an adult, the fact that the money order probably cost $1 to buy, I am surprised my parents just didn't take me and my brother to the card shop to just buy the set of glossy send in cards. 

Four to six weeks later in the mail, we would have a stack of the glossy send-in cards.  They were really the same card design every year with a different colored border.  Still pretty exciting for the time when there were not many choices of sets to collect in the baseball card world.   

I have a few from 1983, but there are too many that are in too good of condition for them to be something that I actually got that year.  Plus, that was the first year I collected.  The first year where I actually have a somewhat significant amount of the glossy mail-ins cards is from 1984.  

Again, same design every year.  

I know that some of these cards that are in my collection have been with me since 1984.  They have rounded corners, or for some reason, the fronts of the cards are different colors than the backs of the cards.  A little weird considering my house was definitely smoke free.....

and I kept my cards in boxes and pages.  You can see the edges of this Quisenberry cards are a little bit yellowed, as is the Carew card above, especially when compared to the back of the card.  I'm actually guessing that I probably put these cards in sheets at some point.  I recall having a notebook for my cards later elementary school years that were filled with the best cards in my collection.  

In other words, my glossy mail-ins and Vince Coleman rookie cards.  

Other copies of these cards in my collection have clean white borders and no rounded edges.  Likely because I bought them as an older collector.  

The Raines card above is not well centered, but is a much better card than the Quisenberry.  There used to be a card shop in south St. Louis County off of Telegraph Road where I actually think I ended up with a lot of these cards.  The guy who owned the store had a lot of sets like these and the cards usually ended up in dime and quarter boxes.

Surprisingly, I have large amounts of most of these sets, but none of them are complete.  Of the sets that I have, I am actually missing a lot of the Cardinals out of the them.  Maybe they were not in the dime and quarter boxes at that store, or some other reason that I cannot think of at the moment.  

I am not going to post the checklists of all the Glossy Mail-In sets, but I will break down each of them and give a percentage that I am starting out at.  Some are going to be easy to finish, perhaps a COMC order, others I am going to spend a little time digging around for the cards.  I have a few road trips coming up in the next few months, plus there are a few card shows around here.   

1983 - 31 out of 40 78%  

1984 - 28 out of 40 70% 

There are several 1984 cards that I will likely replace since my only copies were clearly from my actually collection in 1984.  The seven year old me was not good with corners.  Really lower than 70%

1985- 35 out of 40 88%

These are all pristine, not sure I actually ordered any as a kid in 1985.  Maybe my brother ended up with all of them.  

1986- 42 out of 60 70%

1987-  22 out of 60 37%

1988- 42 out of 60 70%

1989- 58 out of 60 97%

1990- 55 out of 60 92% 

The percentages are all pretty high starting points, outside of the 1987 set, but I still need almost 100 cards, roughly, when taking into account all the different years that I am trying to assemble here.  I am going to say that this is going to take until February.  I will be shocked if I finish it sooner.  

I am going to tack a few other set projects onto this before the end of the year.  

Set Project Update: 1983 Kellogg's

My original post for this set can be found here.

To summarize, I am trying to put together a few more sets that would be in the "oddball" category that are from the 1980s and 1990s.  Things like the Kellogg's and Hostess cards, maybe some of the Denny's sets too.  I started out with 9 cards, which were mainly Cardinals cards, a few players with connections to the Cardinals, like Jack Clark, and a few that are somehow connected to the Durham Bulls.

My goal is to finish in two months, it has now been over a month and I have crossed off another eight cards from my checklist.  That brings me up to 18 out of the 60 cards, or 30% of the set.  I am going to have to pick up the pace a little bit in the next month in order to finish this project in my allotted amount of time.

I am going to break these down into two groups.  The first five came from a Sports Lots seller.

I had a couple of more recent sets that had some holes in them, nothing worth posting as a project, but I always have trouble getting combined shipping on that site.  It's a cheap way to get single cards, but if you have to pay shipping to each person you buy a single card from, it makes it expensive.  

In this case, I found the four or five cards that I needed for my recent set, and also ran across these five Kellogg's card for this set project.  Love combined shipping.  

Next three.

I got these in a trade with someone off of a Facebook group.  They were not originally part of the trade, but I have been asking, while working on other trades, if people have any 1983 Kellogg's cards.   I ran into one collector.  

While I feel behind on this project, 70% more to fill the set, I actually have a bunch coming in off of COMC that I got by making offers, and a few more that I have pulled in from Ebay and another Facebook trade.  On paper, it looks possible, but it's going to be close.  

More Kellogg's early next week.   The updated checklist....

1 Rod Carew 

2 Rollie Fingers 

3 Reggie Jackson 

4 George Brett 

6 Pete Rose 

7 Fernando Valenzuela 

8 Rickey Henderson 

9 Carl Yastrzemski 

10 Rich Gossage 

11 Eddie Murray 

13 Jim Rice 

14 Robin Yount 

15 Dave Winfield 

16 Harold Baines 

17 Garry Templeton 

19 Pete Vuckovich 

23 Willie Wilson 

24 Johnny Ray 

26 Andre Thornton 

27 Leon Durham 

31 Nolan Ryan 

32 Dan Quisenberry 

33 Len Barker 

34 Neil Allen 

35 Jack Morris 

39 Jim Palmer 

40 Lance Parrish 

41 Floyd Bannister 

42 Larry Gura 

43 Britt Burns 

44 Toby Harrah 

45 Steve Carlton 

46 Greg Minton 

47 Gorman Thomas 

51 Fred Lynn 

52 Dale Murphy 

53 Kent Hrbek 

54 Bob Horner 

55 Gary Carter 

56 Carlton Fisk 

57 Dave Concepcion 

58 Mike Schmidt 

59 Bill Buckner 

I Really Hate Shopping

I really hate shopping.  Luckily, my house is in a place where I can walk ten minutes and buy most of the things that I need in life.  Driving is two minutes to most of these places depending on a traffic light.  There are two grocery stores, the post office, Walgreens, a Verizon store, a bunch of different restaurants, Lowe's (hardware store for you NC people), Target, an emergency room, etc, etc.  You get the point.

Usually, my wife does the big shopping trips in our household and I stay home and hang out with the kids.  However, the small shopping trips are all mine.  A week back I was dispatched to Lowe's to purchase playground sand.  The sand in our sandbox had been soiled by a cat.

There are actually many cats in my neighborhood.  We have a person in our neighborhood who feeds stray cats.  They come for miles.

At one point this summer she even tried to crowd source a vet bill for a stray who had been bitten by a snake. 

I bought the playground sand, but ended up being dispatched to Target for a few art supplies for a school project my son was working on.  Lowes and Target are right next to each other.  Didn't even have to move my car.  Now, I am not usually a retail card person, but sometimes I dabble.  I dabbled with three hanger packs of Topps Archives.  

The aisle was dominated by a bunch of Panini stuff.  I would have actually preferred seeing some Heritage High Numbers cards.  

The base cards out of Archives are the usual stuff out of that product.  Three different past card designs with both current and former players.  The best base card that I found was A's pitcher Daniel Mengden.  

I saw him pitch for the USA Baseball college team while he was at Texas A&M.  That mustache is incredible.  I know there are other cards of Mengden and his mustache, just like this one with the posed shot.  Pretty sweet.  Heard there is one in Heritage High Numbers too.  

So, what else did I get?  You know it has to be pretty good since I never blog about retail cards.  

Somehow I also managed to land two autographs in three hanger packs.  I consider anything beyond basic inserts and base cards out of retail packs to be something pretty special.  Maybe I am wrong and the odds are better now.  Still happy.  

First autograph.....

belongs to 60s and 70s Red Sox infielder Rico Petrocelli.  His career was not very long, but some of his prime years were excellent.  Hit for power, had a decent average, drove in runs, and was also an excellent defender.  

Second autograph......

to long time Braves and Mets infielder Felix Millan.  I was actually a little bummed to see that this card was a redemption, but then there are actually live copies on Ebay.  It's a Mets card on a 1977 design.

Very nice looking card.  I have not even tried to send in a redemption card in a few years, but this one might be one that I take on, especially if there are live copies of the card already available online. 

I really hate shopping, but every once in awhile nice things happen while I am at the store.   

Project Durham Bulls Part #40 - Jeremy Hellickson

2009-2010, 2014 Durham Bulls 

Background-

Hellickson was a very important member of the Durham Bulls during the 2009 and 2010 seasons.  He pitched part of a season in Durham in 2009, helped the team win the Triple A National Championship, and took home the MVP in the final game against the Memphis Redbirds.  The following season, Hellickson played roughly 20 games with the Bulls and ended up winning the Baseball America and USA Today Minor League Player of the Year Award.  Hellickson also took home the International League MVP.  One of the more impressive resumes while playing for the Bulls.  Hellickson ended up playing on the 2014 team as well on an injury rehab.

Hellickson's Major League career has not been as spectacular as his time in Durham, but he's still been a nice pitcher.  During his first full season with the Rays, Hellickson won 13 games and took home the 2011 American League Rookie of the Year Award.  He played on the Rays until 2014, but has bounced around since playing for the Diamondbacks, Phillies, Orioles, and and Nationals.  

Card- 

I wanted to go with something early in Hellickson's career.  He had cards out earlier than this 2011 Bowman Chrome, but nothing that was a quality autograph.  After this Bowman card, the flood gates sort of opened for awhile and Hellickson appeared in a bunch of different Topps products.  He has always had a little bit of an odd signature, but he is very consistent with it.  Especially the earlier cards.  Price was never a huge deal with Hellickson cards, but they have certainly become much more affordable since he started bouncing around the last few years.