1972 VENEZUELAN STICKER JERRY KOOSMAN Throughout the '60s, Topps licensed its baseball-card designs for use in Venezuelan sets. The cards in those sets were generally of lower quality than their US counterparts: the low-def photos lacked any sort of gloss, and the paper stock was mealy and thin. The Venezuelan card backs were often different [...]
1999 TOPPS FINEST GOLD REFRACTOR AL LEITER I peeled Al Leiter tonight. OK, it might be helpful if I rewound a bit and explained. Back in the late '90s, card manufacturers were dabbling in all manner of metallic printing. Collectors loved the shiny stuff, but balked at how easily these cards would get scratched or [...]
1975 TOPPS HANK WEBB WAX BOX Back in the spring of 2011, I did a piece on Hank Webb. This past May, I wrote about a 1970 Topps box. Well, today is the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup moment. The moment that I stumble into the path of a random stranger, we collide awkwardly, and then [...]
2001 DONRUSS ELITE ASPIRATIONS TIMO PEREZ Fun facts/fictions about Timo Perez for your late-September, fourth-place, 2X-games-out reading pleasure... Timo is the only player named “Timo” ever to play in the majors. “Timo” spelled backward is “omit.” “Perez” spelled backward is “zerep.” Before coming to the Mets, Timo spent four years with the Hiroshima Carp. Timo [...]
1993 TOPPS FINEST JUMBO DOC GOODEN Dwight Gooden was the first player who belonged to me. All of my life as a baseball fan leading up to his debut, I was a boy rooting for men. But then Gooden appeared in 1984 with a birth date just a couple of months before my own, bearing [...]
1991 TOPPS DESERT SHIELD JULIO VALERA Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of Mets cards, we move this week from Japan to the Middle East. During the Gulf War, Topps stamped over 5 million cards from its 1991 baseball set with a gold Operation Desert Shield logo, with the goal of distributing [...]
2012 BANDAI OWNERS LEAGUE LASTINGS MILLEDGE Mets COTW is back in town after 5 weeks in Japan, jet lagged as hell and raring to go. While in Tokyo, I dropped 5,000 yen on Japanese baseball cards at an Akihabara hobby shop. All in the name of research, I assured my wife, as she cocked her [...]
KIRIN METS COLA I'm in Japan currently, 6,000 miles from my collection, so I don't have any cards to share this week. However, I did come across this copyright-skirting bottle of cola in the local convenience store. The selling point for this soda is not only its zero calories, but also the claim that it [...]
2008 TOPPS SILK CARLOS DELGADO The first baseball-player silks were distributed by tobacco companies in the early part of the 20th century. Those early issues (catalogued as S74 and S81, for those of you scoring at home) were actually satin, not silk, and were intended to be sewn into pillow covers and the like. So [...]
1967 CLEON JONES TAB BOTTLE CAP So imagine if you will that it's 1967. You're a happening guy/groovy chick. You're in your pad, listening to the Airplane, tripping on some of Owsley's finest. The Baleroesque thrum of White Rabbit kicks in and just then you realize that you're incredibly parched. After spending a few seconds [...]
2012 BOWMAN BLUE WAVE RED REFRACTOR BRANDON BROWN This prismatic 2012 Bowman Blue Wave red refractor of Mets' non-prospect Brandon Brown is effing brilliant. How brilliant, you ask? This card discovered the Higgs boson like a year ago. This card knew who Keyzer Soze was 10 minutes into The Usual Suspects. This card reads Ulysses [...]
1997 DONRUSS SIGNATURE SERIES BOBBY JONES Today is July 4, which of course can mean only one thing: it is the day after the date on which both Jim Morrison of the Doors and Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones died. The Mets never had the mediocre fortune of employing mediocre 2B/3B Jim Morrison, who [...]