2012 Leaf Memories or How Much Did I Pay for Leaf to Put Two Foil Stamps on a Common

Nothing says sportscards quite like someone purchasing previously sold cards which have limited value, buying them in bulk, putting a stamp on them and charging 50 times the price they paid.  Especially, since by doing so, they can skirt the issue of being able to place cards with Major League team logos without a Major League license.  So, let's talk about 2012 Leaf Memories.

1990 Leaf is an enduring design, primarily for being one of the first high-end challengers to Upper Deck.  It also rebranded Leaf from Canadian Donruss to a brand of its own.  The set features higher-quality cardboard and metallic coloring and is far from the worst design of the era.  Of course, avoiding bright yellow or mixing two off contrasting colors is usually enough to save you from that fate.

Obviously, with 22 years having passed, it is the perfect time to honor the memory of 1990 Leaf.  Not caring about most non-Topps releases (and most Topps releases for that matter), I was blissfully unaware of this set, until The Daily Dimwit showed off his new Astros from 2012 Leaf Memories.  Is that a new Mike Scott card?  Limited to 20?  To eBay!!!!!



I quickly find the above card with no problem, which represents 5% of the stamp run.  So, basically, I was willing to pay $5 for a card, which is exactly the same as one I own, that I can get for less than $1 shipped.  When you stop and think about that, you say, "Are you crazy, it's foil stamping, with no additional image?" Of course, the player collector in me checks it off the list and moves on without a care in the world.

Except the care of an autographed version of the card!  Searching Mike Scott Leaf led me to the autographed version as well.  An autographed version!  Two Mike Scott autographed cards in one year.  And limited to only 33 copies!!!  To the bidding.



I actually lost the first two cards I bid on.  One for less than I paid for this and one for the same price.  After losing the second card, I made an offer on a third for the same bid price as the last card, but with free shipping.  Fortunately, the seller accepted and I was only tied to one-eleventh of the print run on eBay. 

With this out of the way, I can safely feel I found all of the Mike Scott cards I needed for the year.  There is the Leaf History Cut Signature set, but somehow purchasing a piece of paper Mike Scott signed in a fancy holder holds no appeal for me, especially given the whole, Mike Scott is alive and signing autographs thing.  But to each his or her own. 

1973 Topps Ron Cey Rookie Card

If you bid on a card enough times, eventually one of them arrives at your doorstep.  You bid, you get outbid, you lose interest, you come back, you bid on another, so on and so forth. 



With the Ron Cey/Mike Schmidt rookie card, it was always a matter of time and a matter of saying, this will cost more than a blaster.  In fact, I think it costs more than any other 10 cards I've bought for this set, possibly 20, since I ended up getting good deals on 1973 Topps cards throughout the last two years.  The key is to purchase large lots with stars, which is how I ended up with a couple of really cheap Ryans and other fine stars. 

The downside to purchasing the rookie card of the best third baseman of all time is that I am out of excuses for not finishing my 1973 Topps set this year.  There are no difficult cards stopping me from finishing the set.  No extravagant purchases left.  While there is a Ruth and a Phillies team card with Mike Schmidt from the high numbers, there are no stars to stop me. I have to go to shows, search on eBay and find the last 34 cards to finish the set.

So, by year's end, the set will be completed.  The pages full of cards and images of ballplayers from years gone by.  The album bursting with cardboard, ready to sit next to the other album of 100 year old flag cards will be full and put away, with I satisfied in the knowledge that I've put another set to bed. 

Preparing for a Superstorm

So, with then Hurricane Sandy bearing down on me and only one last day to prepare, I asked myself, what is the best way to prepare for the storm.  While some would say lay in supplies and others would avoid traveling, I got in my car and drove to the next state to go to a card show at the mall.

Feeling well prepared for the storm, which unless I could get a generator for an apartment, I was not, I headed off in search of cards.  Two and a half years before, I started my return to purchasing sports cards in a mall, a different mall closer to home, but at a show run by the same people.  It was there, I purchased my first T206 from a selection of 200 or so cards.  Going to this mall in Pennsylvania, I found the same dealer, who conveniently or perhaps not conveniently, does not sell on the internet.  Looking over his wares, I found few cards I needed for my set and those I needed were well outside the price I was willing to pay.  I did however, find a rare card I was willing to upgrade.



This particular Lefty Leifeld is a favorite of mine.  The yellow, purple and blue create a strange background, not quite a sunset, but not quite any other time of day.  This particular example has better and stronger color and aside from the faint crease four buttons up, is quite the nice card.  If I were to rank the T206s from 1 to 524 based on appearance alone, I would rank Leifeld Hands Behind Head in the top ten without question.



From there, I went about the rest of the show, looking for other cards of interest as the storm winds began to settle in.  I found a table with an older gentleman, obviously an original New York Giants fan given his age, Giants cap and strong interest in discussing the team.  I quickly found a set of 1987 M&M cards from which I needed the Mike Scott for my collection.  Given that the whole set was cheaper than purchasing a single card, I felt this was a fine deal and added 1988 Topps Traded set for $2 as well.  Looking through his boxes, I found the above card for a quarter and while not a Joe Morgan fan, I do appreciate food items with Houston Astros wearing the orange and picked that up as well.  



While most of the other tables were bust, such as fifty cent commons for 2012 Topps Update and  some low interest boxes, I added one last card to my purchases for the day.  When I saw the Sergei Zubov for slightly more than I paid for a set of 1988 Topps Traded, I knew that needed to come home with me as well.  Anytime I can find a decent relic of an offensive minded defensemen who played before 2000, especially a Penguin, I grab that immediately.  (As always, disregard the price on the sleeve, which is far more than I would have purchased this card for.)

With my purchases in tow, I drove back across state lines, into the traffic jam surrounding a Rutgers game and finally home, where I awaited the storm to come. 

Great Scott!

The pun will only be marginally funny the first time, but by the time we get to 20 or so tries, the pun will be fantastic, I swear. 

Aside from Mike Scott being my favorite modern player growing up, what is great about collecting his cards is the lack of competition for a player with a fairly deep set of cards.  Rare is there a Mike Scott card I want which requires more than one bid over minimum to take down an auction on eBay and whenever I get very serious about expanding my collection, I often have little problem winning what I want.  And what I want is 2005 Topps Pristine Leading Indicators. 

The one you see above is my fourth.  The fifth is already en route and a sixth is likely to be joining this one shortly.  As someone who generally prefers patches to autographs, these cards are really the only Mike Scott relic cards you can buy from his career.  There is also the 2005 Topps Celebrity Threads jersey cards, but one of those is sufficient for my needs.  Every time I am confronted with the opportunity to purchase some of these cards, I instinctively do, like Pavlov's dog responding to the bell.  When I made my first COMC purchase in 2010 of essentially Mike Scott cards, I purchased three of them.  I am strongly preferential to the orange cards and will usually go the extra dollar or two needed to bring one home, but can't say no to a white swatch either.  More importantly, while researching this, I learned there is a refractor version limited to 25.  None of the ones I've purchased to date are numbered to 25 and knowing the existence of this card has given me another card to chase after.



It also allows me to pick up some real oddball pieces as well.  I know very little about the above pins.
 They are small, about 1 inch by 1.5 inches.

• They are small, about 1 inch by 1.5 inches. 
• They are metal with bronze-colored backs. 
• They are pins.
• They have All Star on the front.
• They are supposed to be from 1986.
• The Mike Scott looks like a Fleer card.    

There is scant information available about these pins on the internet.  I was able to find the original auction and nothing else.  They are not like any other cards I've seen and not part of any set I could easily identify.  I had to buy the three pin lot, which left me with two extra pins (Jesse Barfield and Mike Schmidt) that don't exactly fit my collection.  In the unlikely event that you know something about these pins, I would be interested to know more, especially for cataloging purposes in my Mike Scott list.

Otherwise, I am quite pleased with the latest additions to my Mike Scott collection, as the fulfill my favorite card to obtain and my need for more eclectic issues. 

Two Terrible Mail Days

Perhaps the greatest part of purchasing cards is getting fun packages in the mail.  Every day, I come home from work, excited about what might be there waiting for me.  The last two days have been quite the opposite, filling my postal box with disappointment and grief, though with a little good fortune.

Yesterday, the misfortune was a combination of faults and flaws.  Arriving home, I find two packages in my mail box and by mail box, I mean that little locked box in an apartment building that is kept indoors and safe from any harm.  So, I take out the packages and find a little white envelope and a package from Britain.  The little white envelope contained a Donruss pop-up card of Mike Scott.  Any time I can purchase a Mike Scott card I don't have for $0.01 and $0.50 shipping, it should be a great acquisition.  Of course, when you own seven of them and don't realize it, the package disappoints, stings a little even, as you realize for $0.51 all you have done is up your feedback and someone else's feedback on eBay.

The package from Britain was exciting.  About three weeks ago, I won a Southampton soccer jersey on eBay.  The buyer shipped a package to me and a few days later, let me know there was an error and he was fairly certain he sent me the wrong jersey, but the right jersey was going out that day and I could keep the package.  The seller was more than generous and I would have been quite alright waiting for the package to arrive and confirming there was a problem prior to rectifying, but the seller went out of his way to fix.  So, of course, the wrong package arrives and I was optimistic that it might be something interesting or usable.  Sadly, it was little more than a AFC Bournemouth jersey in medium.  Since it has been about half a life time since I could wear a medium in public, I have a spare AFC Bournemouth jersey I can never use.

Flash forward to today.  I get home very late and find a package inside my mailbox.  By inside, I mean somehow the mailman defied the laws of physics by not appearing the bend the package, but managing to get the package, with stiff cardboard to fit the diagonal of the mailbox, despite actually being slightly larger than the mailbox.  Perplexed, I tried pulling the package, but was met with the stiff resistance of cold (actually room temperature), unforgiving steel.  With some persistence, I was able to remove the package from the mailbox, but not without bending the package slightly and shearing the edge off one side of the package.

Getting upstairs, I take a few pictures of the package, in case I need to complain to the post office that our physics-bending letter carrier is aiding and abetting in the destruction of the U.S. Mail. 

The package itself was the results of my first Sportlots purchase.  I found a few dealers on Labor Day who had an extensive collection of rarer and offbeat Mike Scott cards I didn't own and placed a fairly sizable order.  I was super excited about the order and quite scared, as I knew some of the larger cards were in this particular order.

In a fortunate turn of events, seller SoCalSpt did a tremendous job packing the entire order and nary a card was harmed, despite the best efforts of my mailman.  In addition to a fair number of Canadian cards, I was able to get a Donruss Super Diamond King which is around a 5" by 7" card filled with George Perez artwork.  I also picked up the below cards as well



The 1991 Topps card is actually a Topps Micro, despite my scanner insisting it is a normal sized card.  The disc was one of the giant Sportflics discs and is even cooler in hand. 

What I thought was most interesting was the 1990 Donruss Learning Series card.  The front of the card features the Learning Series logo, as well as a different picture than found on the standard Donruss card.  However, the back is exactly the same, save the card number.  Thanks to Baseball Card Pedia, I was able to learn these were supplied as learning aids to schools, though I cannot exactly figure out what is learned from these cards, other than you need to buy more cards.  But that's what happens when you mix private business and public education. 

Fortunately, thanks to some great care by a seller, mailday, perilously close to being ruined was saved and filled my day with the joy of new cards for my collection. 

Smokey The Bear

I think fire prevention is a cause almost all of us can get behind, given the destructive force and our love of our own material goods.  But how does one convey the importance of fire prevention to large groups of people.  With a talking, anthropomorphic bear wearing a forest ranger hat.  That is how we pass along fire prevention.

But how do you get Smokey the Bear, everyone's favorite talking, anthropomorphic bear into the homes of people, especially children, who have yet to be conditioned to be afraid of fire's awe-inspiring power and force?  Well, in the 1980s, it seems one of the preferred vehicles for our friend was baseball cards.  Not just any baseball cards, but baseball cards featuring some of the second-best players of the day.

Until the other day, I too, was blissfully unaware that in the 1980s, there were series of baseball cards featuring Smokey the Bear.  Smokey the Bear and established baseball players.  When running some eBay searches for Mike Scott cards I might not already own, I found this gem, with an unhappy Mike Scott and a poor man in a bear suit.  (Note to readers, Smokey the Bear is fake, like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.  If I have ruined this for you, I would apologize, but really you should know better by now.)  Not wasting an opportunity for a chance at greatness, I submitted a best offer, which was accepted, allowing the card to be sent on its way. 

After a few days of waiting, the card arrived.  At first, I could not figure out what would come in these two, paperback book-sized pieces of cardboard.  But once I opened one side, I saw that the Mike Scott and Smokey the Bear card was in fact giant-sized and safely kept in the cardboard in a cloth and plastic protector, likely designed for photographs.  I was overjoyed by the cards arrival and was able to resist the temptation to remove the card from its protection to see the reverse, knowing that by doing so, I keep the card safe for generations to come and gaze upon the magnificence of Smokey the Bear and Mike Scott.

For set and team collectors, I've put a checklist of the entire 26 card set below, as each team had one designated representative who was forced to pose awkwardly with a man in a bear suit. 

American League

Baltimore Orioles - Larry Sheets

Boston Red Sox - Oil Can Boyd

California Angels - John Candelaria

Chicago White Sox - Harold Baines

Cleveland Indians - Joe Carter

Detroit Tigers - Jack Morris

Kansas City Royals - Buddy Biancalana

Milwaukee Brewers - Jim Gantner

Minnesota Twins - Kirby Puckett

New York Yankees - Mike Pagliarulo

Oakland Athletics - Jose Canseco

Seattle Mariners - Mike Moore

Texas Rangers - Charlie Hough

Toronto Blue Jays - Tom Henke

National League

Atlanta Braves - Dale Murphy

Chicago Cubs - Jody Davis

Cincinnati Reds - Bill Gullickson

Houston Astros - Mike Scott

Los Angeles Dodgers - Steve Sax 

Montreal Expos - Mike Fitzgerald

New York Mets - Roger McDowell

Philadelphia Phillies - Steve Bedrosian

Pittsburgh Pirates - Johnny Ray

San Diego Padres - Steve Garvey

San Francisco Giants - Mike Krukow

St. Louis Cardinals - Ozzie Smith

What Do I Collect?

A simple question with an oft changing answer.  The oft changing answer is the bigger part of the problem, as I have a tendency to acquire items which are often neat in the moment, but not in the long term.  Nonetheless, I've tried to summarize my collecting goals, if for no other reason than to give me some additional structure in my acquisitions.

T206 Cards

This is where it all started for me again, with one Orval Overall leading to a tobacco collection of 457 unique T206 cards.  My goal is to collect the set to 518 and given the progress I've made in the last two+ years, I think this is a fairly attainable goal.  Most of my purchases are of the lower grade variety, in the trimmed/poor to good range.  To push me toward finishing the set, I've tried to pick up not only the commons when I find them, but to seek out the more difficult cards on the journey up front, since you never know when you will find them again at an affordable price.  I've picked up a substantial majority of the hall of famers, including the four Ty Cobb cards and managed to get most of the shorter print cards to 518 with the exception of the Elberfeld Portrait Washington card, which always manages to elude my grasp.  Now, collecting to 518 means no Wagner, Plank, Magee, Slow Joe Doyle NY National, O'Hara St. Louis or Demmitt St. Louis, but I can live with that.  The cards I own still have a sense of history and are stunning pieces of art, even though they are stunning pieces of art used to stiffen cigarette packs and encouraged people to smoke more.

Nonetheless, I am always happy with my T206 cards and they really are the core of my collection.

Orval Overall

Who is Orval Overall?  Well, in terms of sports greatness, he was a very good second or third starter for the Chicago Cubs around the last time they were viable World Series contenders.  His claim to baseball fame is that he won the last game of the 1908 World Series for the Cubs. 

My interest stems from some research about 10 to 12 years ago, when I wrote some of the biographies for Stars of the Deadball Era, National League.  While his life after baseball is what most people would call pedestrian, such as being a banker, I still find I have a strong connection to him.  Given the timeframe and the cards available, it became a natural for me that I would collect his cards beyond the T206 set.  There are a decent number of caramel and other tobacco cards, silks, discs, pins and even west coast candy cards to collect.  His popularity is not so great that his cards are prohibitively expensive, like chasing Ty Cobb or Christy Mathewson cards from their playing days.  That being said, the variety is nice, while not having too many exotic cards which I would have a slim chance of owning, due to the small populations available.  

Mike Scott

Growing up, my favorite player was Mike Scott.  There is something about a pitcher who comes out of nowhere, to dominate for a few seasons, which lures me in.  Especially once you put in the orange uniforms, split-finger fastball, false accusations of scuffing and complete and utter dominance of the 1986 Mets in the NLCS. 

Collecting Mike Scott cards gives me a great appreciation of how many oddball series were created in the 1980s.  I have heavy bronze cards, disc cards, bakery cards, fire prevention cards, coins and all sorts of other random cards which have crept into my boxes over time.  I am always on the lookout for a new Mike Scott card I've never seen before, so I can add it to the growing stack of orange and white cards containing an often bespectacled man. 

Other Collections

I also from time to time, pick up cards which fit into these categories.

Late 1980s and early 1990s Pittsburgh Penguins, such as Paul Coffey, Tom Barrasso, Ron Francis and other non-Lemieux and Jagr players as cards become available.  I'm especially a sucker for any relic cards for these players.

Non-Sports Tobacco cards.  I have a fairly decent sized collection of non-sports tobacco cards.  I especially enjoy cards containing pictures of flags and animals.  I managed to complete the entire T59 Flags of the World set, which makes is likely the only time I can mention Saxe-Coberg-Gotha and card collecting in the same sentence.  T29 Hassan Animal cards are my set in progress, as I have about 45 of the 80 cards in a binder directly behind the Flags of the World.  I also have my strays which I pick up at card shows and antique stores, which include Silk Flags, World War I picture cards and Franz Liszt. 

Deadball Era players on Post-1960 Cards.  Topps has done a great job in putting out cards containing Christy Mathewson and Ty Cobb over the last few years.  They even put out cards for less famous members of the Deadball Era, such as Kid Elberfeld, Willie Keeler, Mordecai "Three-Finger" Brown and even George Davis (who is both a Hall of Famer and possesses quite possibly the coolest, most apocalyptic background found on a T206.).  I am such a sucker for these newer cards, that I almost always buy up these cards at shows when I see the guy who has the "new" Topps cards for sale.  Quite possibly, the card from this era at the top of my list is the 2011 Topps Ty Cobb driving a car card.  I'm sure you've seen the picture and somehow a Hall of Famer driving an open top car in 1910 or 1911 is begging to be in my modern collection. 

I probably also pick up cards of Astros in technicolor orange uniforms and I am working on a low grade 1973 Topps set which has fallen by the wayside, but left me with about 250 duplicates sitting in various boxes near the binders.

So, I think that covers what I collect, which is far broader than I hoped it was.  I'm sure more of these cards will be showing up on this blog soon.