2008 UD Premier Stitches: Pronk and V-Mart In Stitches

For some reason I have yet to dare examine, I stopped putting my cards into binders in 2008. I have no logical explanation that comes to mind. I just quit putting cards I received into their corresponding binders that year. Instead, I now have boxes labeled with things like "TBF" or "TBC" on them.

TBF means they have been entered into my database and are ready to be filed. Yes, that's right. I could simply move those cards from their boxes into the binders to which they belong. Alas, I have not done so. the other cards, "TBC," mean they are To Be Checked. That lets me know that I have not yet looked to see if those are doubles or not. I have TONS of those.

I digress... Often...

Today, we're looking at a pair of cards that actually DID make it into the 2008 binder. They are a couple of 2008 Upper Deck Premier Stitches:


The Pronk is pretty cool because it is a representation of the guy featured on the card. The Victor Martinez is cool, but, I mean, it's a Chief Wahoo logo. Upper Deck could commission someone to make a V-Mart on there? I dunno, maybe there is a version somewhere with his likeness.

In any case, I am generally not a fan of the manufactured patches. I like game-used. I don't know why it should matter. I mean, who thought of cutting up a jersey the dude wore in a game and stick into cards? I dunno, but really, that was a stroke of marketing genius...

I digress... Often..

1960 Nu-Card Baseball Hi-Lites (Revisited)

I have four 1960 Nu-Card Baseball Hi-Lites cards in my collection. They are about the size of postcards and a decent card stock. I actually did a post about these back in 2009 (link at bottom of this post) which was then cross-posted to "Things Done With Cards."

So, if I already talked about these back in 2009, why bring them back out?  Well, in this post, I wanted to show all the cards I have in this set. In the other posts, I just showed off one or two.

As you can see, I have "Indians Take Bums," "Bob Feller Hurls 3rd No-Hitter of Career," "Colavito Hits Four Homers in One Game," and "Early Wynn Victory Crushes Yanks."

Here we have another example of non-Indians cards in my collection. The Early Wynn actually comes from his days with the Sox. So, why is it in my collection? To the best of my recollection, I bought the cards off eBay as a set and I believe they were sold as an Indians set. Honestly, until I scanned them in here for this post, I didn't even realize that Wynn wasn't in a Tribe uniform! Shows how observant I am, eh.

I did not show the backs of the cards in the other post. The backs feature a trivia question witht he answer printed upside down.

There were 72 cards in the whole set, and the checklist for them can be found here:
http://www.teamsets4u.com/checklist/1960s/1960nuscoops.html

(The other post I did about these is here: http://www.tribecards.net/2009/09/1960-nu-card-baseball-hi-lites.html)

Accidental Bobble Head Collection

It happens to each of us at one point or another in our collecting: someone sends you something that is related to the team/player you collect but isn't a card. I have lots of things that are Indians related yet have nothing to do with my Tribecards collection. I considered fighting it at first, but then realized that was just a waste of time and generally led to inadvertently hurting someone's feelings. So, I have a slew of non-card Indians items. Bobble heads are such things.

I don't really remember how I came about my first Indians bobbler. I can only assume it was sent to me by one of my friends, most likely in the hobby world. I know that Jack (Baseball Dad) has managed to wrangle at least a couple of these from giveaways at Tribe games. 

The funny thing about collecting is that once you start down a path, whether you meant to or not, it's often hard to quit. You see, this small collection of Indians bobble heads (is it one word or two? I never know) has led to a MUCH larger collection of bobbles in general. I will show those off at some point, but today I am focusing on just the Indians:

From left to right:

Gaylord Perry in celebration of Progressive's 75th year.
Grady Sizemore gold glove
Asdrubal Cabrera
C.C. Sabathia celebrating Cy Young Award
Asdrubal Cabrera celebrating his amazing sidearm sweep (I added the card for effect - haha!)
Retro Baseball Kid Bobble - bought when the family saw the Indians in Cleveland
Bob Feller commemorative statue - Okay, not really a bobble, but belongs here anyway.

These little guys watch over me from the top shelf above my computer desk where I do most of my blogging, gaming, writing, editing, collecting... You get the idea.

I've never had a desire to complete the set of Indians bobble heads, though I suppose that little itch (you know, the one that makes you buy packs to feed your addiction) will come to me one day. And in those moments, I will tear out to sites like eBay in search of nodding little fellas waiting to join their friends here.

1976: Bad Year To Be A Brohamer Card

In 1976, I was 7 years old and deep in the throws of my formative collecting years. I've told stories here before about collecting cards and the awful things my friends and I would do to cards in those days. Now, before you start to think back TOO far, we were beyond the days of using cards in our bike spokes. In fact, I'm not sure any of my friends did that - that was before our time.

What we did, however, is probably considered much worse, much nastier. Much. Nastier. You see, in 1976, we wanted to be sure that our collections would be preserved for all time. And so, we enshrined our cards not in mere pocket pages (which I suppose were available, but we knew nothing of them) nor in shoe boxes nor any other kind of protective storage. Rather, we chose to glue our cards into spiral notebooks.

Yeah, read that again. We glued our cards into spiral notebooks. The Jack Brohamer I have in my personal collection is one of the few bits of evidence and artifact of those days long gone by. I could have easily replaced this card with a specimen in much better condition. In fact, I probably have other '76 Brohamers in my duplicates boxes. But, that isn't the point.

The point is, in my head anyway, to have this keepsake to reflect on those youthful days before we knew what "collecting" was really about. In the photos below, you can see (especially the card back) the remnants of my brutality. I mean, sure, it was bad enough we glued them in, but, we didn't stop there. When we were ready to trade or flip our cards, we simply peeled them off the lined pages to which they had been so meticulously glued. This made for rendering most of the cards completely useless. In fact, most of the cards would simply separate the fronts from the backs. As you see, that's mostly what happened to poor Brohamer here.

Though I cannot say I am proud of the way we treated our bits of cardboard heroes, I can also say that I do not regret such actions. For you see, we were kids. We weren't caught up in book value and future collectibility studies. No, we were wanted to have our keepsakes mounted in the most permanent thing we had at the time. Those really were simpler days. Not saying they were better, just simpler.

1974 Capital Publishing

I've tried to rack my brain and remember just how I managed to acquire these two cards from the 1974 Capital Publishing collection. Try as I might, I just can't recall. Generally, that means one of two things: 1) I bought them on eBay (probably as part of a bigger Indians card lot) or 2) They were sent to me by one of my awesome cardboard habit enablers (that would be one of you).

Either way, these are cool "cards." I say that in quotes because these are about 4.5" x 5.5" and feel like postcards. On the left, we have Ray Chapman and the right is Al Orth (Phillies).

The photos are black and white, as you can see, and are evidently taken from VERY old photos that are probably in the public domain (or were at the time these were made).

The backs feature biographical info and stats from the years they played ball. Note: The backs are just the fronts flipped, so they don't match the pictures above.

Apparently, Capital Publishing released several "versions" of these (some folks refer to later versions as reprints, though that could be debatable). One way to know these are the '74 variety (at least in my research) is the numbering at the bottom. Later versions do not include the card numbers. There are 110 cards in the set.

I have no idea why I have the Phillies player in there. Haha! If you are interested, the list of Cleveland players in the set are listed below and there is a link to the full set below that.

10 Russ Christopher
 11 Snuffy Stirnweiss
 18 Sam Zoldak
 24 Don Black
 32 Cy Young
 39 Tris Speaker
 43 Nap Lajoie
 49 Walt Judnich
 66 Ray Chapman
 72 Elmer Flick
 77 Bill Bradley
 96 Jim Bagby Sr.

http://www.teamsets4u.com/checklist/1970s/1974capitalpub.html