Stickers!

I hope everyone had a nice Christmas/Hanukkah/Rickey Henderson's birthday. Santa Claus was good to my family - Mom is finally home from the hospital after a long three week stay. The girls got lots of neat gifts, most notably slimeatory goop for H and Fall Out Boy tickets for M. None of my in-laws complained about politics, which was nice.

I only asked for two things and got 'em both from Mrs. Collector: Oppenheimer on DVD, and the book companion to Rob Harvilla's excellent podcast 60 Songs That Explain The '90s. 

There were no trading cards under my Christmas tree, and even though I hand-picked two Starting Lineup figures for my daughters to wrap and put under the tree for me, they a) wrapped them in the boxes they were shipped in otherwise "you'd know what they were" -- as if they had any other gifts to give me -- and b) they didn't put the SLU boxes under the tree. Their gifts took up every inch of space. So that whole idea didn't go as planned but the figures themselves are sharp. I'll show 'em off in a future post.


I did get one hobby-related surprise from my mother in law: a Panini Sticker album!

Much like Starting Lineup figures, this was a throwback to my childhood. The first such sticker book I ever owned was a Panini baseball album - 35 years ago. [I wrote about that album and set here.] Football stickers were harder to find than baseball, but I do recall coming across some back in the day.

Team pages are alphabetical by division, so the Buffalo Bills are first (after an All-Pro page and a Super Bowl page).

Panini no longer expects you to trade duplicate stickers with your friends but they still give you an option to buy some that you're missing, which is cool. What's not cool is that they're still hawking NFTs. 🙄

The album itself is fairly reasonably priced but I doubt the sticker packs are under a dollar. So let's open up the freebies here...

One of these packs yielded two foil stickers (no helmet/logos though). They're much trickier to open than they used to be, due to the standard sized trading card in each pack...

...most of which were wrecked in packaging. Hooker, Mingo, and Taylor have at least one roller line crimping the edge. Jones has a dinged top edge but no roller lines on the side. Only the Tyree Wilson escaped unscathed. Taylor in particular is a bummer, but I did pull his sticker in the packs:

Overall a hodgepodge of rookies, fading stars, and a couple good young players. But wait, there's more:

Look at all these defensive players! Aside from Sauce, Crosby, and a couple others these guys rarely appear in trading card sets. I'd be willing to bet that some of the players in this set don't have any standard trading cards.

There are more goodies inside the album - including a panel of pop-out card checklists (why couldn't they do this for the cards?!?) and two more sheets of stickers:

These are on parchment paper so they can only be left intact or peeled for the album. Some repeated players here including Slay and James. Oh, if only there were a way to trade in my duplicate stickers.

Okay, so... I've got 35 33 stickers here. Should I stick them in the album and try to fill the whole set?

Oh hell no! I'd have to pick up 100+ packs and not get a single duplicate. Guess I'll just slide these into my perfectly-sized sticker box, along with my unpeeled set of 1988 Panini baseball:

Some free/almost free pickups from that online dime store, and some other sticker-cards that are too small for standard sleeves and binder pages:

I do wish there was a better way to preserve these. The nameless hockey stickers are from 1983, and I have a couple Packer stickers from 1981. The backing has noticeably yellowed, more than even the mid-late 1980s issues.

Do you have any Panini (or Topps) sticker albums? Do you have any loose stickers in your collection?

Thanks for reading, and have a Happy New Year!

~

Mergers & Acquisitions

I've fallen into a bit of a blog block lately - haven't felt like writing much even though I've had a couple trade packages and a major eBay "trade" to report. I've had some ideas about the future of my blog(s) and I'll share those at the end of this post. For now, here are the latest additions to some of my set building projects.

Earlier this Autumn I sold my collection of Bowman baseball prospects - mostly to consolidate my collection, but also to take advantage of the Aaron Judge craze. Here are some of the cards I sold in the Bowman box:

 

The bid price (with shipping) ended up being the exact same amount as the best offer price (with free shipping) that I made to acquire this:

I don't like to do these very often, because I know that selling large lots on eBay isn't nearly as profitable as selling each card elsewhere would be. But I'm happy to add another HOFer to my 1956 Topps set build.

I also purchased these two on eBay, around the same time I bought the Banks. Schoendienst was virtually free, I used accumulated eBay bucks to cover all but the shipping. Kell was acquired with a best offer of $25 (plus $3 for shipping) so my total for the pair was about $30.

Now for a pair of actual trades...two months ago Dan Rauer of the blog The Other World
read my post about Panini baseball stickers and offered to help fill some holes in my wantlist. I sent him a stack of Phillies cards (which I hope he got - haven't heard back from him) and he sent about 30 stickers my way, including these:

I still need about 75 stickers from the set, but this was a huge help. Thanks for the trade Dan!

I also completed a trade with the legendary Matt of Bob Walk The Plank fame. I sent him some Pirates a while back and he returned fire with these:

The Clemens relic is #d to 50. Very cool. Nice on-card auto of Steven Wright there, and three SP's for my never-ending Heritage set build. Thanks to this trade I've now got 81 of the 100 short prints.. in the main set. Now I need 15 of the 25 shorties in the High Number set. What have I gotten myself into?

This was a nice little trade package but Matt said he has "more to come." If that is the case, I'll be ready to fire another round ;-)


As for the blog news... I've been thinking about merging my two blogs into one, which would likely be this one. I have a concept that would work better here, and I'm assuming that my sports card readers are more open to reading about non-sports topics once in a while than the other way around. Still brainstorming about it, but if I do plan to follow through with it I'll let you know. It wont be until after Christmas, because I've got a whole lot of Black Friday posts planned once my COMC cards are shipped to me.

Speaking of COMC...have any of you hit the Autumn specials yet? I've got a few cards targeted but haven't pulled the trigger on anything over $1. I'd pimp my port here but I'm still waiting for COMC to complete my submission. Hope you all find some great deals!


~

Buying Back My Childhood - 1988 Panini Baseball Stickers

1988 was a golden year for baseball cards and memorabilia; not only was Topps (over)producing all kinds of products (including baseball card folders!) but this was the first year of Starting Lineup figurines.. which I was addicted to as much as - if not more than - trading cards. 

1988 was also the first year of Panini sticker albums. Topps had been producing similar products years prior to Panini's release, but if they were in stores I never noticed them. Panini's stickers were as much a part of my childhood as Topps cards and Garbage Pail Kids. And so I thought it would be fun to relive my childhood and buy a box of stickers.

Unfortunately a sealed box would set me back about $50 and so I bought this lot of loose stickers instead. I could not tell what % of the set was in this lot, or how many dupes I'd receive - but for $5.40 I took a gamble. 

Of course, once I added that to my eBay bDay purchase, I also needed an album:

As you can see, it's a little wider than my 8.5 x 11.5 scanner. I thought I'd scan a couple of the pages and a handful of the stickers before I stick 'em in the album.

 Here's the inside front cover. This is how we got our stats 30 years ago:

Some teams had more stolen bases than home runs; the Cardinals had more than twice as many. And look at how many complete games the '87 Red Sox and Royals had.

There's an explanation insert on the opposite page:

Here's a sample team page. They all look the same, no logos or team colors (the stickers provide that):

 I only got a few Sox in the box:

In the middle of the book there is a complete stat sheet for every player on every team in 1987. The next page has the '87 All-Stars, but it's covered by this:

 This is where you would affix these small, circular logos:

As for the mini-pennants, they have a place at the back of the book:

The inside back cover gives you tips on how to complete your sticker album. You could even trade dupes with Panini (Try doing that with Topps!)

I only got a handful of dupes in the box I bought. However, I didn't realize there were nearly 500 stickers in the set. Not sure if I'll be able to fill the album, but I'm going to try.

Here are some of the more interesting player stickers, including Hall of Famers:

 Superstars of the 80's:

And some others I thought were interesting - like Lance McCullers (Sr), a baby-faced John Kruk, and the only hatless player in the box Jerry Mumphrey:

The foil stickers were always my favorite as a kid (especially the logos):

I didn't scan the action photos because they are split in half and I didn't have any complete pictures.

Did you collect Panini sticker albums (or any other sticker albums?)

 

 ~