A Father's Love For The World Cup

The World Cup is down to the Semifinals with tomorrow’s Brazil-Germany match and Wednesdays Netherlands-Argentina match with the winners moving on to the Final on Sunday July 13^th. At this point, with the way that the final four teams are playing, it could go any way. If Silva wasn’t out with his second yellow card and Neymar out with a back injury I would have picked Brazil to take it all but with those loses any of the four teams can win the title.

 

To celebrate the final leg of the World Cup I am going to post up some of my recent soccer pick ups. As I have said before the 2014 Prizm World Cup release is one of my favorite releases of the year so I am targeting these cards to build a set. One of the things that bothers me about this set is the flood of parallels but that doesn’t mean I don’t mind picking some up from time to time and here are the three Father’s Day parallels that I picked up this past week. The cards were inserted in to Panini’s Father’s Day packs and are #/7 each. The cards are exactly the same as the base cards except for the "Panini Limited Edition" on the front and the #/7 on the back.

 

While the top named players Father’s Day parallels are selling for well over $150 there are plenty that are selling for less than $5 with shipping. Together these cards cost me a total of $9.05, including the shipping.

 

First up is Alexandre Song

 

 If it were not for Suarez biting Italy’s Chiellini on the shoulder during a match Song would have taken the “A-Hole of the World Cup” award. He was beyond physical, hitting and punching other players during his two games. He received a red card against Croatia and was banned for 3 games by FIFA. He is currently at the center of an investigation, along with 6 other Cameroon players, by Cameroon‘s football federation for fixing World Cup matches. It was no surprise that I was the only bidder of this card and it cost me .99 cents and $2.50 shipping.

 

Next up is Joao Moutinho

 

Moutinho is a solid player but no goals, no assists and being overshadowed by Cristiano Ronaldo on a Portuguese team that did not advance past group play kept his card prices very reasonable. I was happy to pick up this card for $2.25 shipped.

 

Finally is Igor Akinfeev

 

Akinfeev is by no means the best goalie at the World Cup but in the first two games he gave up only 2 goals and with Russia needing a win over South Korea to move along he had to become a brick wall. If you want to surmise Akinfeev’s World Cup experience just watch Korea’s Keun-Ho Lee’s long distance goal in the 69^th minute. Just plain ugly goalkeeping but it worked out in my favor, .99 cents plus $2.32 shipped and I was able to catch and keep the card in my hand.

Happy Birthday America!

In June of 1776 a committee of five politicians; John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Robert Livingston and Roger Sherman, were tasked with drafting a declaration of independence from the English. The War for Independence had been raging for over a year and the politicians felt it was time to officially separate from the Crown.

It took roughly 3 weeks to put together the document, which went through re-writes and revisions and on July 1^st it was time for Congress to put the final draft on the table and get to voting. After a day of votes, arguments and speeches the Declaration of Independence was adopted on July 2, 1776 with twelve “Yea” votes and one abstention vote.  

Over the next five months a total of 56 delegates signed the document with John Hancock signing first on July 4, 1776 when the final document was approved for printing. The final signature was Matthew Thornton on November 4, 1776. Additionally it is believed that the document that was signed and is currently on display in the National Archives is not the original document nor the only one to remain. The original document that was submitted to Congress in June 1776 was destroyed while it was being re-written and edited, it is also believed that there were up to 200 Declarations printed up and sent to politicians around the country with 26 copies still known to survive.

There have been a couple of Declaration of Independence depictions on cardboard over the years, most recently by Topps and Upper Deck. One of my favorite depictions comes from the 1930 R129 American History release. The cards were issued in strips so it is common to see the cards cut off-center or even ripped where they were separated. They were your typical 1920-1930s color illustrations that actually looked like water color paintings. Beautiful and educational.

 

I hope everyone has a wonderful and safe day celebrating our nation’s independence.

What If Curt Schilling?

It was October 24, 2004, Game 2 of the World Series between the Boston Red Sox and the St. Louis Cardinals. The Red Sox were dealing with 86 years of the Curse of the Bambino but after winning Game 1 things were starting to look up and with Curt Schilling on the mound hopes were high for Boston, the only problem was worrying about Schilling’s injured right ankle.

 

As he pitched through the evening his sock showed a noticeable patch of blood. The Red Sox won the game plus the next two to sweep the Cardinals and put an end to the curse. The sock was eventually loaned to the Baseball Hall of Fame but after Schilling made some bad investments he sold the sock in early 2013 for a little over $92k to a private buyer but it gone me wondering what if Schilling had decided to sell it following the game and Donruss were to have purchased it with intent on including it in a 2005 release?  

 

So for my next installment of custom What If? Cards

  2005 Donruss Prime Patches Portraits Curt Schilling Bloody Sock jumbo relic

The Rise Of Carmelo Anthony (Sort Of) And The Downfall Of Jeremy Lin

The Houston Rockets have not been shy about saying they want Carmelo Anthony, just as obvious is the way the Rockets are telling Jeremy Lin that his days in Houston are numbered. Today Anthony was in Houston talking with the Rockets and the team went all out to bring Melo to the city. What is funny is that the Rockets bent over backwards to bring Lin to Houston and now they are tossing him on the junk pile.

 

These are images that greeted Carmelo Anthony during his visit to the Rocket's Toyota Center arena today. The Rockets are pretty straight forward that if Melo ends up in Houston he will be wearing Lin's #7 jersey.

 

I wonder how those collectors who spent big money on Lin during his “flash in the pan” days in New York feel about the purchases. Cards that were selling in the thousands can now be picked up for a small percentage.

 

A perfect example of a delusional seller versus a realistic seller:

 

2010 Panini Rookie & Stars Lin autograph #400/499

$559.99 (Currently on sale from $699.99)

 

Vs.

 

2010 Panini Rookie & Stars Lin autograph #337/499

$79.99 or Best Offer

 

What is worse is that the delusional seller who has the card at $559 is also selling a 2010 Panini Threads Lin Jersey shaped autograph #28/99 for $1039.99 (on sale from $1299.99) and a 2010 Panini Prestige Lin autograph #44/99 for $879.99 (on sale from $1099.99). If you want a laugh read the descriptions for the three Lin cards, they are promoting Lin as a Knick and have probably not been changed in 2 years. He probably bought them when they were at an all-time high and is determined to make his money back even though he is re-listing the cards over and over and over again in hopes of suckering someone in to make as poor an uninformed purchase as he made in 2012.

Why Do Signatures Have To Be So Difficult To Collect?

 Besides sticker autographs the only thing worse than your favorite athlete having a crappy signature is your favorite athlete having someone else sign their autograph for them. One of my favorite upcoming NFL rookie this year is the Chicago Bears Ka’Deem Carey, a University of Arizona product.

 

When he was still playing for the University of Arizona Ka’Deem had a very unique, and highly collectable autograph. He signed a large “K” with “deem” along the upstroke of the “K” and his full last name. Here are a couple of examples that he signed, some have been signed in person while others were PSA/DNA verified. Notice he signs his full name plus adds the inscription “Bear Down” and/or his uniform number even on the shoe. Each "K" matches, the "d" is lower case not capital, the "C" and the "Y" match on each item. These are items he has signed between 2011 and 2013.

 

 

When he signed for Upper Deck, Press Pass and Leaf prior to the NFL Draft he cut his signature down to a craptastic “KC” which can be seen in this 2014 Leaf Metal Draft card that I picked up back in April. Other players have done a similar change to their autographs when they were heading in to the draft/just drafted in anticipation of having to sign a ton of cards once they made it in the NFL.

 

He are a couple of his other UD, Press Pass and Leaf autographs that are available. If he were not one of my favorite U. of Arizona players I wouldn’t pick up any of his autograph cards because these are horrible signatures that rival Chris Johnson’s “CJ” signatures. These cards were all signed in 2013 and early 2014 prior to the NFL Draft.

 

You can imagine my surprise when I do a search of the recently released NFL licensed Topps and Panini products and I see signatures are that are quite alien. What is even more disgusting is that there are signatures within the same product line that do not even match. None of which match anything that he has signed for the past 3 years

 

Here are four Bowman cards, all hard signed and I am sure they all say something along the lines of the signing being witnessed by a Topps employee but I am having trouble believing that. I realize that a signature may have slight changes from card to card but not this significant. Going down the line:

 The “K” looks different on three cards (the mini and X-Fractor are a bit similar) and none of them match the way he used to sign the “K” for years.

There are four different “D”, four different “C” and two different “Y”. Only the “Y” on the Bowman Refractor looks correct to the “Y” he has signed for years.

 

It looks like Panini at least used stickers from the same sheet or at least signed by the same person because all of the cards that I have seen all match up to each other, though are still incorrect from Ka’Deem Carey’s original signature.

 

At this point I am done purchasing Carey’s autographs, his signatures are either a crappy “KC” or fake. At least I know the “KC” was signed by him while his newer signature is completely up in the air as to who signed it.

Some Sets Are Made To Collect But The Amount Of Parallels Make You Say "Forget It!"

One of my favorite sets of the year is Panini’s 2014 Prizm World Cup, which came out in May. I am a huge soccer fan and every four years during the World Cup I am in heaven so this set is ideal for me.

 

I have not been a big fan of Panini’s Prizm releases, they just never sat well with me, but the collaboration of soccer and Prizm works well here. I dig this release and have decided to put together a set, something I have not done in many years. The set itself is not huge and consists of the base set (201 cards), ten inserts (210 cards total) and three autograph sets (62 cards total) for a total of 472 total cards on the checklist. I plan on skipping the autographs for now so the 411 base card/insert set shouldn’t be too difficult to put together. I may pick up a hobby box but so far I have been slowly building the set using hanger boxes and singles.

 

As I entered my cards in to Zistle I noticed that the base set was added but nothing else. Zistle uses “Set Experts” to keep individual sets up to date and complete as possible and there was not a set expert for the 2014 Prizm World Cup release so I applied and was accepted. I put in some serious time this weekend and was able to complete the entire checklist for the release. As I was verifying the checklists I noticed the total amount of cards on the checklist is an insane 5,688 cards.

 

I feel sorry for the completest set collectors who need every single card an all of its parallels. The main 472 cards are manageable but the problem here, as with most modern sets, is that there are tons of parallels. Most of the cards have 10-12 parallels with some, the Black and El Samba parallels, limited to 1/1, there are also parallels limited to #/5, #/7, #/10, #/25, #/99, #/149 and #/199.

 

This product is made for the set collector and the positive thing about collecting this set is that there have been so many cases busted, Panini actually sold out, that you can pick up base cards cheap on the secondary market. It is actually cheaper to pick up a lot of 20-25 cards for $5 than it is to purchase a $20 hanger box with 24 cards. It is going to take some time but I look forward to the challenge.

Not So Chat-Worthy

So the other day I got an email blast from Terry Melia promoting Chatograph, which I had never heard of before even though it has been around for a bit. The information included in the email describes the service as a way to allow a fan to have a personalized interaction with their favorite athlete, artist or personality. I thought “That is pretty cool”, who wouldn’t want to have a one on one with someone they idolize, even if it is a simple chat session. Additionally you get an autographed copy of the interaction, a nice kicker.

 

So I look in to it and find out that it is not really an interaction as much as you submit a question or comment that is then forwarded to the star, who answers it. A print out is made, the star autographs it and the print out is sent to you. So basically they took the idea of fans sending their favorite athlete a letter and TTM request (roughly $1 for the stamps and a SASE) and added in a middle man and charge up to $30 for the same thing. This left me scratching my head as to why this would succeed unless they can bring in big stars or people who are not known for signing autographs. I think I will pass.

The History Of The NBA's #1

Last month I compiled a “History of the NFL’s #1” post where I listed each #1 NFL pick back to the origination on the NFL Draft in 1936. I had some fun putting it all together so I decided to put together a “History of the NBA’s #1” list dating back to the beginning of the BAA/NBA in 1947.

I am trying to be as uniform as possible but with basketball there were years where only one company, or in some cases no companies, producing basketball cards. This is where I used the player’s first available cards. In the first couple of years of the BAA/NBA there were no cards produced at all and by the time the first cards were produced nearly a decade later these early players had already retired or moved on from the sport, in these situations I was able to find pictures of the players (except Howie Shannon in 1949).

 

2013 Anthony Bennett, Cleveland Cavaliers

2012 Anthony Davis, New Orleans Pelicans

2011 Kyrie Irving, Cleveland Cavaliers

2010 John Wall, Washington Wizards

2009 Blake Griffin, Los Angeles Clippers

2008 Derrick Rose, Chicago Bulls

2007 Greg Oden, Portland Trail Blazers

2006 Andrea Bargnani, Toronto Raptors

2005 Andrew Bogut, Milwaukee Bucks

2004 Dwight Howard, Orlando Magic

2003 LeBron James, Cleveland Cavaliers

2002 Yao Ming, Houston Rockets

2001 Kwame Brown, Washington Wizards

2000 Kenyon Martin, New Jersey Nets

1999 Elton Brand, Chicago Bulls

1998 Michael Olowokandu, Los Angeles Clippers

1997 Tim Duncan, San Antonio Spurs

1996 Allen Iverson, Philadelphia 76ers

1995 Joe Smith, Golden State Warriors

1994 Glenn Robinson, Milwaukee Bucks

1993 Chris Webber, Orlando Magic

1992 Shaquille O’Neal, Orlando Magic

1991 Larry Johnson, Charlotte Hornets

1990 Derrick Coleman, New Jersey Nets

1989 Pervis Ellison, Sacramento Kings (1990-91 Hoops Basketball)

1988 Danny Manning, Los Angeles Clippers (1989-90 Hoops Basketball)

1987 David Robinson, San Antonio Spurs (1989-90 Hoops Basketball)

1986 Brad Daugherty, Cleveland Cavaliers (1987-88 Fleer Basketball)

1985 Patrick Ewing, New York Knicks

1984 Hakeem Olajuwon, Houston Rockets

1983 Ralph Samson, Houston Rockets

1982 James Worthy, Los Angeles Lakers (1983-84 Star Basketball)

1981 Mark Aguirre, Dallas Mavericks (1983-84 Star Basketball)

1980 Joe Barry Carroll, Golden State Warriors (1981-82 Topps Basketball)

1979 Earvin Johnson, Los Angeles Lakers (1980-81 Topps Basketball)

1978 Mychal Thompson, Portland Trail Blazers (1979-80 Topps Basketball)

1977 Kent Benson, Milwaukee Bucks (1979-80 Topps Basketball)

1976 John Lucas, Houston Rockets (1977-78 Topps Basketball)

1975 David Thompson, Atlanta Hawks (1976-77 Topps Basketball)

1974 Bill Walton, Portland Trail Blazers

1973 Doug Collins, Philadelphia 76ers (1974-75 Topps Basketball)

1972 LaRue Martin, Portland Trail Blazers (1973-74 Topps Basketball)

1971 Austin Carr, Cleveland Cavaliers (1972-73 Topps Basketball)

1970 Bob Lanier, Detroit Pistons (1971-72 Topps Basketball)

1969 Lew Alcindor, Milwaukee Bucks

1968 Elvin Hayes, San Diego Rockets (1969-70 Topps Basketball)

1967 Jimmy Walker Detroit Pistons (1969-70 Topps Basketball)

1966 Cazzie Russell, New York Knicks (1969-70 Topps Basketball)

1965 Fred Hetzel, San Francisco Warriors (1970-71 Topps Basketball)

1964 Jim Barnes, New York Knicks (1970-71 Topps Basketball)

1963 Art Heyman, New York Knicks

1962 Bill McGill, Chicago Zephyrs

1961 Walt Bellamy, Chicago Packers (1969-70 Topps Basketball)

1960 Oscar Robertson, Cincinnati Royals (1961 Fleer Basketball)

1959 Bob Boozer, Cincinnati Royals (1961 Fleer Basketball)

1958 Elgin Baylor, Minneapolis Lakers (1961 Fleer Basketball)

1957 Rod Hundley, Cincinnati Royals

1956 Sihugo Green, Rochester Royals (1961 Fleer Basketball)

1955 Dick Ricketts, Milwaukee Hawks (1957-58 Topps Basketball)

1954 Frank Selvy, Baltimore Bullets (1957-58 Topps Basketball)

1953 Ray Felix, Baltimore Bullets (1957-58 Topps Basketball)

1952 Mark Workman, Milwaukee Hawks

1951 Gene Melchiorre, Baltimore Bullets

1950 Charlie Share, Boston Celtics

1949 Howie Shannon, Providence Steamrollers

1948 Any Tonkovich, Providence Steamrollers

1947 Clifton McNeely, Pittsburgh Ironmen

 

In a strange twist of fate the #1 NBA and #1 NFL Draft Picks have a connection, neither athlete ever played a day of professional sports. Like the first  #1 pick in the NFL, Jay Berwanger, the NBA's first #1 pick Clifton McNeely decided to skip playing basketball and instead became a high school coach at Pampa High School in Texas.