That Went Better Than Expected

 About two weeks ago my guy, Daniel Vogelbach, broke the Cardinals' hearts with a pinch hit walk-off grand slam. 

Pinch hit homers are very cool. Grand slams are most excellent. Combine the two with a walk-off and we have something worthy of Topps's attention. 

For a second I thought about purchasing one copy of the Topps Now card commemorating such a VOGELMNSTER event. And then I saw the back of the card.

I knew right then I must have at least two copies, one for my player collection and one to place in the Folder of Fun. 

Then I thought it might be a good idea to just purchase a lot of ten. Two cards would set me back $20, whereas there's a price break for ten at $5 per card. 

You see, I had my sites on a parallel. Vogelbach has not been included in a major release all year. So it's been a very slow year adding to my favorite player collection. An extra card in the form of parallel would be so sweet!

I could hopefully sell the extra Vogeys on Ebay and/or Twitter, snag a parallel, and keep a few base cards for my collection. In all, I pre-sold five on-line, which left me with five for my collection. I didn't make any money on the five I sold, but knowing the total cost to me was now only $25 and I made some other Vogelbach fans happy was a total win. 

Today the cards came in. 

Wow. I hit three parallels! I'm only missing the 1/1 and the red parallel, which is numbered to 10. Pictured above are the blue (48/49), purple (03/25) and the orange (2/5).  For what it's worth, 524 of these cards were made in all and there are 90 total parallels. Roughly one out of every 5.8 cards is a parallel. I think I beat the odds!

The five pre-sold copies are already packaged up and ready to ship with tomorrow's mail. The other two base cards will slide right into my collection as planned. 

Part of me almost wonders if Topps knows that I'm a Vogelbach super collector. Regardless, it was a fun buying experience which added four more Vogelmonsters to my collection! Woo-Hoo!

Thanks for stopping by!

Expansion?

 Expansion in the sports world has always caught my attention. When I was first introduced to baseball there were twenty-six teams in MLB. The Rockies and Marlins were added 1993 and the whole process was just so fascinating to me. I read everything I could about the player draft, mascot selection, uniforms, team colors, and anything else that I could find in print. None of the luster wore off when the Diamondbacks and Devil Rays were added five years later. 

There have been rumblings about expansion the last couple of years in MLB. I for one would love to see four divisions of four teams each in the AL & NL. Add in a two wild card teams in each league and give the top two teams first round byes and I'd be elated. I Nashville and Las Vegas would make good additions. No?

I'm thinking about expanding also. Recently I was sent a pair of PWEs from Jeff, the author of Wax Pack Wonders, which got my wheels turning. 

Above are a bunch of Cubs cards numbered 672 or higher. Jeff thought he would give me a head start on expanding my Cubs FrankenSet past 671.

You might be wondering why I stopped at 671. Well, there's two main reasons:

1. I originally was going to stop at 650, but I used some page markers for ever 50 cards in the binder. Doing so pushed me to 653 to fill a full page. Argh. I had a bunch of cards pulled that were numbered higher than 653 so I decided to add another 18 cards, which landed me at 671. For what it's worth, I am not a fan of empty pockets. 
2. The higher the numbers the more I thought my set would be dominated by Topps. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but I was going for variety in players and card designs. 

Jeff sent 14 cards from Topps and the other card manufacturers were only represented by the four cards below. 

Here's a snapshot of what the backend of the FrankenSet checklist currently looks like: 

As you can see, Topps is king when it homes to the "high" numbers.

I'm not sure if I'm going to run with Jeff's expansion idea, but I'm not going to immediately sort these cards into my collection either. I'm going to think on it. It could be fun to chase down another 100+ cards until I get 792, which would be another hat-tip to Topps. We'll see!

Thanks for cards, Jeff! 

What do you think? Should I expand my Cubs FrankenSet? 

What about MLB expansion? Maybe MLB should focus on settling the new CBA this off season and work on "fixing" baseball before diluting the talent pool?

Note from a Player

 My junior high coaching season ended yesterday. Well, sort of... I'm the junior varsity girls softball coach at one of the middle schools in our district. The junior varsity team is made of all the sixth graders and a few seventh graders, and our last game was yesterday. Technically I'm also the assistant varsity coach as well, and that team will continue to play for a week or so until they are eliminated from the state playoffs. Trying to coach a bunch of energetic 6th and 7th grade girls can take a lot out of a guy, but now I'll get to relax a bit and enjoy my assistant varsity gig. 

I've held this coaching position now for the last seventeen years and it's been fun watching the younger middle school players grow and mature into the occasional standout high school player. 

Every now and again I get a little extra something from a player during or at the end of a season. This was one of those years and I thought I'd share it. 

Sweet note from a very nice kid. 

I hope this note brought a smile to your face! Thanks for stopping by!

Gold Sig of Vogey

 When there's only five copies of a card sometimes I give up hope of ever adding one to my Vogelbach collection. A copy could be sitting in an unopened box on a shelf somewhere. Or, there might be one online, but the price could be prohibitive. 

Recently, my luck was in my favor.

A couple of weeks ago I came across this silver bordered, gold autograph of a mini Allen & Ginter 2020 Vogelbach card. Just GORGEOUS.

I added the card to my watchlist and crossed my fingers that the seller would send me a discounted offer on the card. Sometime this happens when a card doesn't sell right away at the initial asking price. 

An offer never came, which was okay with me because it was priced pretty reasonably to begin with. 

The "buy it now" auction was set to expire at midnight on Sunday, and with that in mind I offered 75% of the seller's asking price early Saturday morning. My offer was accepted immediately, which must have been the result of some sort of setting within the listed auction. 

It just arrived in my mailbox and now it's downstairs living the good life in my Vogelbach autograph box. Most excellent!

Thanks for stopping by and have a great weekend!