McCutchen Monday: Sabremetric variant

Since Andrew McCutchen has become a national star, he is getting more and more variants in every one of Topps products.  We already have the Zoltan variant I showed off back in May.  In series 2, Topps released a sabremetric variant for the Series 1 card.

You can see the difference on the backs below.

It's nice to see Topps evolve with the times and including more of these analytical stats on the back of cards.
The front of the card features the same base image from Flagship Series 1.

BayDay BayDay: Topps Chrome Heritage 2005

I'm very short on time today so its just gonna be a quick post to show off my newest Jason Bay. Its a 2005 Topps Heritage Chrome numbered out of 556.

Gerrit Cole Series 2 variant

Welcome Back Gerrit Cole!!!!

To honor the return of the young right hander, I'm going to show off a variant from Series 2.  It's the Futures Game variant.  Topps used some of the top players and their Futures game jersey variants from a few years ago for these Series 2 variants.

USA!!!!

Many Americans watched the USA soccer team play Germany in yesterday's World Cup matchup.  I don't have any soccer cards, but I do have a Gerrit Cole 2011 Topps USA baseball cap patch numbered 10/25 to showoff today.

I was shocked to win this card many many months ago for around $12.  I'm excited to get Gerrit back tomorrow.

Throwback Thursday: Vintage 1964s

As anyone that follows my blog knows my card collection consists mainly of the following:

• Supercollection of Charlie Morton (over 90% of all cards produced)
• Nearly 500 unique Andrew McCutchen cards including over 150 relics/autos
• over 500 unique Jason Bay cards including over 125 autos/relics
• an almost complete rainbow of Tony Sanchez 2009 Bowman Chrome Autos BGS 9.5 or higher
• too many autographs, relics, shortprints of other Pirates to count
• an attempted run of every Topps flagship Pirates card produced from 1952-2014

I was able to knock off 3 more needs from the latter and pick up 1964 Topps Pirates set by adding the following for the low price of $4.

Isn't it nice to know that I only need 4 more cards to complete the 1964 Topps Pirates team set.
They are
7 NL Leaders
342 Willie Stargell
472 Vern Law
570 Bill Mazeroski

What became of eTopps? Why is everything digital?

I know that eTopps was a failed experiment by Topps, but it did produce some nice looking cards such as this 2008 eTopps of Charlie Morton.

2008 eTopps 130/749

Topps latest attempt to digital card collecting is Topps Bunt, but I haven't quite gotten into it.  I know that I should so that I can continue my conquest of trying to get 1 of every Charlie Morton card, but the reality is I'm not a big fan of digital card collecting.

As a matter of fact, I'm not a big fan of digital anything.  The other day I went into Best Buy and the entire CD collection was only 1 rack.  All country, metal, rap, soundtracks, jazz, etc was all together in one section.  This made me a little sad because I really enjoyed reading the cd booklets, looking at lyrics, reading the thank yous, who did recordings, etc.  The same is starting to happen to the DVD sections in electronic stores.  More and more stuff is going digital.  The day the world becomes a complete digital mess is the day I hope, I'm not around anymore.  I will not eat a digital pizza and I will not collect digital baseball cards.  Give me something I can hold in my hands.

I wanted the Pirates to give Charlie some run support today instead of him going 7 innings and allowing only 4 hits and 1 walk while striking out 11.

McCutchen Monday: 2005 Just Minors Justifiable

As I begin marching towards my next century mark in pursuit of my 500th unique Andrew McCutchen card, I am still adding more base rookies and predraft cards of the young 5 tool talent and last year's NL MVP.

My latest purchase cost me $1.  Yup!  Only a $1.

I am now sitting at over 475 unique cards of Cutch.