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 [...]
1970 TOPPS TOMMIE AGEE The 1970 set is one of my favorite Topps sets. Yeah, I know, the gray borders are kind of bland. But the set was packed with good photos, the different color lettering of the various team names made it excellent for matching games and the yellow and blue backs are perhaps [...]
1979 TOPPS PAT ZACHRY In his 1978 card, Pat Zachry looked like a college kid. On the 1979 card pictured here, Zachry looks like a middle-aged man on a first-name basis with the clerk at the local liquor store. I wish I had a current photo of him. I’d like to think he still has [...]
1993 TOPPS FINEST EDDIE MURRAY Eddie Murray is one of four players in baseball history to have 3,000 hits and 500 home runs. Yet I think it’s fair to say that while active Murray’s reputation was based much more on being an “RBI man.” Murray came up in 1977 and won the Rookie of the [...]
1978 TOPPS DOUG FLYNN When I think of bad baseball players, I immediately think of Doug Flynn. Want to win a bet with your friend? Ask him who the worst hitter in Mets history with 1,000 PA is and give him three guesses to pick the guy. Despite what you might think from the subject [...]
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 [...]