Into the Sunset, Pt. 25: Randy Johnson

I'll admit, I was afraid to get hit by a pitch in Little League.

I could handle anything outside, but the inside fastballs would almost always get by me. Thankfully, nobody kept scouting reports in Little League.

This is why I have an insane amount of respect for any hitter who had to step in a batter's box against Randy Johnson. Taking a "Big Unit" pitch under the chin is no easy task.

Anyone who wants to argue about the toughness of baseball players should try to step in against a Randy Johnson fastball. That's all I'll say about that.

I have never in my life seen a more hulking figure on the mound than the "Big Unit". At a staggering 6'10" with long hair and a glaring stare, not many pitchers in baseball history (if any) instilled more fear into the batter.

The accolades are staggering. 303 career wins. 4,875 strikeouts. Five Cy Young awards, including four in a row from 1999 to 2002. If Johnson isn't a first-ballot Hall of Famer, it'll be a crime.

Like a lot of other greats, though, his career went out with a whimper. He spent his final season in 2009 with the Giants, resulting in one of the better unfamiliar uniform stints in recent memory.

Johnson went 8-6 with a bloated 4.88 ERA in 22 games with San Francisco...

...but he did pick up his 300th career win with the franchise.

That's really the only vivid memory I have of him as a Giant.

Such a historic milestone was worthy of the last multiple-exposure shot we've seen in the hobby, courtesy of this "Season Biography" insert from 2010 Upper Deck.

For whatever reason, UD omitted Johnson from what would turn out to be their final Flagship checklist. Thus, anything Upper Deck-related from 2009 qualifies as a "sunset" card. That's what my rules say, anyways.

Sadly, it wasn't the greatest year for Upper Deck.

You kind of get the feeling why they were basically kicked out of the baseball card market after seeing these.

So many of their final designs were vastly uninspired. I have nothing but apathy for sets like UD Signature Stars and Upper Deck X. Even their final licensed Flagship design was unimpressive. I can't think of a single thing to write about them.

I mean, I appreciate the fact that they're all "sunset" cards, but my goodness.

What a lackluster bunch.

The only 2009 Upper Deck set that impressed me at all was O-Pee-Chee.

I'll go out on a limb and say this was one of the better sets we've seen in the last decade or so. It's the closest thing to Topps Total since, well...Topps Total. (Please don't make me beg for Total again.)

O-Pee-Chee has a few flaws, but it's a fine set overall. This is a perfectly acceptable "sunset" card by my account. I can't complain with that wonderful "grip" pose.

Plus, they managed to get a shot of the "Big Unit" grinning.

Few other companies can lay claim to such a feat.

In 2010, of course, Topps began their monopoly on the hobby.

Upper Deck put out a semi-logoless Flagship set early on in the year, but lawsuits quickly put a halt on any other releases they had planned.

Topps was the only game in town.

I wasn't too up in arms about it at the time. I pretty much shrugged my shoulders and kept on chugging through the hobby. It's not the ideal situation, of course, but there's not much I can do about it. That's still basically my attitude these days.

That said, I'm not sure Topps put as much effort into their 2010 Heritage effort as they had in the past. I remember being decidedly unimpressed with it at the time.

It might be because I'm just not that big of a '61 Topps fan in the first place, but something seemed a little off about Heritage that year.

Still, I'll always commend it for producing a true Randy Johnson "sunset" issue. You know what that means.

Complete career stats on the back! 

If you can read them, that is.

You need some sort of bionic vision to make head or tail out of those microscopic stat lines. I don't understand why Topps felt the need to cram those cartoons into an already overloaded 22 years of stats.

Don't try and read it.

You'll only hurt your eyes.

Had these been all of Randy Johnson's "sunset" issues, I would've been disappointed. Having such a dominant pitcher go out like that?

Sad.

That is...

...until this card came along.

This is, without a doubt, one of the premier "sunset" pieces in my collection. I'd argue that it's one of the best cards of the modern era. (It ranked in my Top 100 countdown.)

Plus, unlike its Heritage counterpart, it contains readable career stats on the back.

To have all 6'10" of Randy Johnson sprawled out into a beautiful horizontal frame was a work of genius by Topps. The fact that this gem of a play came from his 300th win added a bit of history to it as well.

I could stare at this card for seconds, minutes, hours...and still be mystified by it.

It's pure cardboard art.

When it came to Randy Johnson's "sunset" collection, Topps truly saved the day.

A day in Wrigleyville

I realize I didn't post yesterday.

I had a good excuse, I swear.

Last afternoon, my dad and I attended the Cubs-Yankees game at Wrigley. Though we've been having some shaky weather around here, we could not have asked for a better day for baseball.

Sun shining, not a cloud in the sky. Simply perfect.

One thing I love about Wrigley is that there isn't a bad seat in the place. Unlike a lot of other ballparks, you have a great look at field no matter where you sit. Our seats in the upper deck gave us a terrific bird's eye view of the game.

Though my dad roots for both the Cubs and the White Sox, he's also a huge Yankees fan. We planned on hitting this game ever since we found out the Yankees and Cubs would be playing at Wrigley before the season started.

It was an absolute blast.

I will say that the sheer amount of Yankees fans there surprised me.

Then again, I guess the North Side of Chicago would be a prime spot for Derek Jeter's farewell tour. "The Captain" received standing ovations every time he came to the plate.

As an added bonus, Ichiro was in the Yankees' starting lineup. He's a favorite of both my dad and myself. (That's him at the plate in the photo at the top of this post.)

Seeing as how the Yankees and Cubs don't get together at Wrigley too often, I decided to buy a scorecard to commemorate the event.

Well, that...

...and the fact that I love to keep score.

As it turned out, this was a historic game for me. Why?

It was the first extra-inning contest I've ever attended. The Yankees took down the Cubbies 4-2 in 13 innings, doing no favors to my scorecard in the process.

You could call it a classic Cubs collapse. The North Siders wasted yet another sparkling start from Jeff Samardzija, who gave up all of three hits and no runs in seven innings. Perhaps it's easy to say in hindsight, but I can't understand why he was pinch-hit for in the seventh.

Of course, the Cubs blew it in the ninth. Hector Rondon gave up two runs in the ninth, partly thanks to a throwing error from Darwin Barney on a double play attempt that allowed the tying run to score. (Barney had been brought into the game in the ninth as a defensive replacement, ironically.)

Then, as I predicted when I saw that the Cubs were bringing him in, Jose "No Save" Veras allowed the go-ahead run on a wild pitch in the 13th. He even gave up another tally on a single to J.R. Murphy for good measure. The Cubs went down quietly in the bottom of the frame for the loss.

This was a pretty wacky game in terms of scoring. The Yankees used eight pitchers. Each team burned every single position player on their bench. The Yankees shifted Yangervis Solarte from third to second and back to third during the course of the game.

And Preston Claiborne, an American League relief pitcher, took an at-bat in the 13th. His sacrifice bunt actually helped those two runs score in the inning.

While the outcome may not have been ideal, my dad and I had an awesome time at the game. I can't thank him enough for the tickets and the great day at the ballpark.

What I didn't know was that our afternoon of baseball wasn't quite over yet.

As my dad and I were walking back to my bus stop, we saw something new.

A card shop! In Wrigleyville!

I knew I'd heard of The Baseball Card King shop before. It's the same LCS Jeff frequents around his neck of the woods. I had absolutely no idea they'd opened one up in Wrigleyville.

My dad and I didn't even think twice about making this unscheduled stop.

After all, how often can you say you went card shopping after taking in a baseball game?

I could tell the place was fairly new from the start.

Almost all of the main floor seemed to be comprised of supplies. As far as I could tell, there weren't any cards out in the open. They were all behind glass cases.

I'm usually hesitant about shops like these, but my dad told me to pick a few things out anyways. I told him that wasn't necessary, but he insisted.

He takes me to a baseball game and lets me get a few cards afterwards. How awesome is that?

I spotted a few relatively cheap X-fractors in one of the cases.

I grabbed the "Youk-ah"...

...and these two for fifty cents a piece.

Though some of them were overpriced, the owner had a lot of vintage for sale. Enough to fill more than two glass cases.

Not a lot of them were what I'd call cheap. After a rather thorough search, however, I found a couple that were to my liking. I was originally only going to get one, but my dad told me to grab them both.

How could I say no?

The fun started with this 1960 Topps Robin Roberts.

I felt five bucks was a fair price for this one. You might be able to find it cheaper elsewhere, but you won't find one in this kind of shape for much cheaper.

With this one, I know own Roberts's 1957, '58, '60, '61, '62, '63, '64, and '65 Topps issues. On top of that, I'm a huge fan of this design.

I've gone out of my way to try and track down some of the biggest names from 1960 Topps.

I guess that's why I had to complement Roberts with Mr. Mathews here.

I can say for a fact that this is one of the most beautiful 1960 Topps singles I've found. I love the sheer colors and the empty seats behind the great slugger in that shot.

Though it features a few creases, five bucks is more than fair for this one. Its semi-high number status (#420) makes it a relatively tough find at any price.

Mathews was coming off a 49-homer season when this one hit the streets, an additional bonus to an already fantastic piece of cardboard.

Plus, it's now the oldest Eddie Mathews card in my collection.

I walked out of that card shop with a huge smile on my face.

Between baseball, cardboard, and quality time at the ballpark with my dad, I don't know that I've had many better afternoons in my life.

Flea market or blaster?, Pt. 2

In case you missed yesterday's post, I took $20 to the local flea market this past Sunday.

The decision to do so came after a long and heated inner battle that almost resulted in me buying a blaster from the nearest Target.

Obviously, the flea market rules over pretty much anything I could find at my local big box store.

If that stupid blaster-minded part of me wasn't convinced by what I featured on the blog yesterday, it most certainly will after I get done with tonight's post.

Yesterday, I recapped ten bucks' worth of cards I found from three different vendors at the local flea market. That left me another $10 to play around with on Sunday.

If you go back and read pretty much any of the flea market posts I've written over the past two years, you'll find that I've raved quite a bit about one particular vendor that sets up around here. He has the highest quality dime boxes I've ever seen, and always cuts me an unbelievable deal on my final total.

I was about ready to bow down and thank the cardboard gods when I saw him back at the flea market on Sunday. I'd been going through dime box withdrawal, and I knew a dig through his dime cards would tide me over for a while.

This time, he had two dime boxes on display. One contained a little of everything, while the other was stocked with mostly newer cards. We'll start with the latter for now, and specifically the card you see above.

I'm not sure how such a great shot managed to fly under my radar for all of 2013, but I'm sure glad to have it in my binders now.

One thing I like about this guy's selection is that there always seems to be a father and son looking through his cards whenever I hit his table.

I can tell he tries to appease every kind of collector possible, and he has that friendly vibe that keeps me coming back to the flea market week after week.

A kid that couldn't have been more than nine or ten years old was going nuts over finding a shiny new card of Ozzie Smith when I was pulling out these two dime beauties for myself.

I don't care how old I am.

Seeing a kid get that much enjoyment out of a baseball card will always bring a smile to my face.

As will the sight of Coco Crisp's 'fro.

These were a couple other fantastic gets from the more recent dime cards on display. The Davis is a short-print from this year's Heritage, mind you.

Score!

For the first time in a while, I actually liked the look of last year's Finest.

They've been surprisingly easy to find in dime boxes these past few months. This guy had a big stack of them ripe for the picking on Sunday.

I pulled a decent amount of veterans to go along with the nine rookies you see above, but man.

What an impressive crop of young stars.

Finding these for a dime a piece was awesome.

Shortly after I got through with the Finest, I spotted a big stack of cards that appeared to be a bit smaller than the rest.

Maybe it's -- Nah, it couldn't be.

Wait. Hold on.

Is it?

IT IS!!!!!!

A WHOLE STACK OF TOPPS MINIS!!!!

I had been dreaming of finding a huge batch of these in a dime box ever since they hit the streets.

Had Topps gone the retail route with their mini release, chances are I would've dropped a good deal of cash on them by now. I'm a sucker for anything mini, and these look amazing next to their full-size counterparts in a binder.

But NOOOOO. Topps had to go and get all online-exclusive and leave small-budgeted collectors like me out of the picture.

What Topps didn't anticipate was the generosity of dime box vendors like the one at my local flea market. I'm not sure where he got such an impressive array of Topps Minis, but I could've hugged him for making them available at just a dime each.

I had an absolute field day with these puppies. After all was said and done, I plucked 60 of them for myself and quite a few for other bloggers as well. Among the finds were stars like "Mo" and "Big Papi".

Needless to say, these were the stars of the more modern dime box.

Heck, we haven't even gotten to the "little of everything" dime box yet.

I have never in my life encountered a group of dime cards that hit on so many different facets of the hobby. I know I throw around the "little of everything" term a lot, but this guy's dime box are always just that.

You want vintage?

He's got it.

I have no idea who Howie Koplitz is, but I wasn't about to let an authentic Senators card slip past me for a dime.

How about mini-collection hits?

Of course.

My "anthemic" and "interview" themes were common suspects in this dime box.

Plus, Darryl Strawberry even has a little bonus bubble action going there.

Reprints and Ichiro.

Two of my favorite things to find in a dime box.

He's got those, too.

I just recently decided to start a full-on player collection of Rickey Henderson.

I'm amazed at how prime of a dime box suspect he is. My collection is already nearing the 200-card mark.

Whether it's '80s Rickey or '90s Rickey, he received some sweet cards during his career.

Time to take a ride in the way back machine.

Jack Quinn is the only big leaguer I know of to have been born in Slovakia. J. Lee Richmond is credited with throwing the first official perfect game in 1880.

Go ahead and win some bar bets with those two pieces of trivia.

Disembodied body parts for a dime?

You know it.

I found quite a few kooky cards in this guy's dime box.

These are two of the more oddly-shaped pieces you'll ever see. The Williams is especially seizure-inducing. It has to be Pacific.

That should've been their motto.

I've seen these wacky 1994 Fleer "Pro-Visions" inserts on a few other blogs.

I finally found a few of my own, landing about a half-dozen of them from this dime box. I can't even begin to try and explain what Fleer was thinking with these.

Maybe we shouldn't be all that surprised with what they churned out the very next year.

Speaking of which...

The lone '95 Fleer single I found was a memorable one.

It was a rookie card of none other than the immortal Hideo Nomo. Something about the zany design fits him.

I don't collect Mark McGwire. I just wanted to prove that you can find rookies of his in dime boxes here in 2014.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

These two aces are starting to gain traction on my cardboard radar.

I've been picking up more and more Hershiser and Gooden cards lately. As I've found, even rookie cards of theirs aren't prone to winding up in dime boxes.

I'm still shocked I snagged these for loose change.

I made a pact with myself on Sunday.

If I see one of these very '90s SAMPLE cards in a dime box, I'm going to buy it. I don't care what team it features, what set it's from, or who it is.

It's mine.

I'd never seen so many samples in one spot before Sunday. I'm not exactly sure how or why so many of these hit the market during the '90s, but they make for curious little oddities.

If you haven't heard, I like oddballs.

That's why I was so happy that they became the premier headline on Sunday.

I seemed to find oddballs everywhere I looked in this guy's dime box. Here, an oddball. There, an oddball. Everywhere, an oddball.

I even managed to expand my oddball knowledge, which is always a plus.

I found a stack of these beauties about halfway through my dig, yet had absolutely no information on them. They have a very Mother's Cookies feel and feature some excellent photography. Check out that burning hot Dale Murphy card in the center for proof.

A little research showed that these come from a guy named Scott Cunningham. He released these in 1986 as a way to advertise larger photographs he had for sale.

Beautiful.

But those were far from the only oddballs I found on Sunday.

Try these on for size.

Fleer Limited Edition. O-Pee-Chee. Circle K.

So much oddball goodness.

MORE ODDBALLS?!?!?!?

Yes, sir.

Collect-A-Books. Purina. Post. And these weren't even all the oddities I found on Sunday, believe it or not.

It was easily one of my better dime box digs ever.

I spent so much time digging through this box in particular that I didn't even have a chance to get through this guy's quarter, fifty-cent, or dollar cards.

I didn't want to leave my friend wandering around the flea market for too long, after all. Besides, I figured I got more than enough enjoyment out of these dime boxes alone.

As I finished counting my cards, I was stunned. I got a bit carried away. I guess it happens to the best of us.

I'd picked out 340 dime cards in total. Since I was down to my last few bucks at the time, I was worried that I wouldn't have enough to cover it. I figured I'd at least bring them to the guy so he could quote me a price.

I'm no math genius, but the retail value of my finds should've been 34 bucks.

You know what the guy wanted for the lot?

Ten dollars.

Yes, ten dollars for 340 cards. I vehemently thanked him and handed over a crisp ten-dollar bill.

On that note, I bade a grand farewell to the glorious local flea market. Twenty dollars had never gotten me so far.

It beat the hell out of a lousy blaster.

That's for sure.

Flea market or blaster?, Pt. 1

This weekend, I pondered what to do with the lone $20 bill in my wallet.

A part of me badly wanted to grab a blaster off the shelves of my local Target. I haven't ripped a ton of packs lately, and the itch to do so was starting to take hold of me.

I knew it wasn't the most fiscally responsible choice, but I found it hard to quell the urge. I very nearly made that trip to my local Target for a blaster. Thankfully, I managed to restrain myself.

Instead, I took that $20 to the local flea market yesterday.

Let's do the math. I probably would've gotten anywhere from maybe 50 to 80 cards out of a $20 blaster, only a fraction of which I'd actually need.

At the flea market, I scored the 350 hand-picked singles you see above for my collection, all for that very same twenty bucks. On top of that, I dug up an additional stack of cards for future trade packages and my fellow blogging buddies.

Did I make the right choice by choosing a trip to the flea market over a silly blaster?

I certainly think so.

I even convinced one of my friends to come see what this flea market hubbub was all about. He bought himself something very reminiscent to one of these as a gag, and didn't mind me taking a few extended breaks to dig through some cards.

It didn't take long for me to spot the first table of cardboard gold. The vendor didn't have a whole lot, but it got my day at the flea market off to a promising start.

The guy had a glass case of dollar cards off to the side. The only one that interested me was this historic UD Masterpieces Jackie Robinson. I'd long had one of the framed parallels of this very card in my collection, yet had never managed to track down the base issue.

That definitely made it worth a buck to me.

Next to the dollar case was a small sampling of quarter cards.

I only ended up picking out a bucks' worth of cardboard, but I tried to make it count.

Seeing as how these are two of the greatest third baseman in baseball history, I was more than happy to drop a quarter on each.

One question was on my mind all day.

Would my regular card vendors be there this week?

They hadn't been in attendance during my last trip to the flea market. Since the weather was so windy and dreary that day, I can't say I blamed them.

Yesterday, on the other hand, was a sunny and generally beautiful afternoon. I was hoping they'd be around.

Thankfully, I spotted one of my regular guys about halfway through my flea market journey. He seemed happy to see me. I've become a regular customer of his over the past three or four years.

I dug through his small sample of quarter cards while I asked him how the flea market was treating him so far. He had a few newer inserts available, so I plucked out a few to take home. Among my purchases was this strange Ryan Zimmerman card.

I didn't realize they made X-rated versions of these "Superstar Celebrations" inserts.

The real draws of this guy's table, however, are his dime boxes.

He doesn't get new stock in that often, but I was happy to see he had an entirely new array of dime cards on display yesterday.

I spent a good 20 minutes digging through his inventory, coming away with about four dollars' worth of dime cardboard.

I couldn't pass up the opportunity to land a new Doc Gooden oddball for a shiny FDR.

Nearly a whole row of one of his dime boxes was filled with 2000 UD Victory singles.

These things are loud, cluttered, and generally forgettable. Yet, for some reason, I've long had a weakness for them.

I can't explain it.

As usual, the dime gods were good for a few mini-collection hits.

You can never go wrong with pitchers at the plate.

I even found a couple striking parallels for just a dime a piece as well.

My decision to start a Matt Kemp collection is beginning to pay dividends.

I'm still floored at the quality of rookies I continue to unearth in dime boxes.

You'd think that the majority of first-years you'd find would be no-namers who never made it to the majors.

While there are a fair amount of those, it's not all that hard to find rookies of names like Zito and Trumbo for dimes.

All the more reason to love the world of dime boxes.

This was by far the most interesting card I pulled from this guy's dime box.

For full disclosure, I should mention that I already have a well-conditioned copy of this 1992 Topps Manny Ramirez rookie in my collection.

Still, when I saw this mangled one in a flea market dime box, something inside me just couldn't let it go. You don't find miserable cards like these all that often.

As you can tell, this Manny is horribly creased, chipped, and generally beaten. With the amount of water damage it appears to have, I wouldn't be surprised if it'd been living in a swimming pool for the last twenty years.

But, for whatever reason, someone saved it. And it somehow wound up in this guy's dime box.

Although I'm not exactly sure what I'm going to do with him, I welcomed the downtrodden Manny into my home.

I'll be seeking mental help soon.

Shortly after I finished up with one of my regular vendors, I stumbled upon a guy I saw the last time I hit the local flea market.

He recognized me and seemed eager to unload some cardboard. Almost instantly, I spotted this Jose Fernandez rookie in his miscellaneous box without a price. I wanted it for a few reasons.

1) I've become a big Jose Fernandez fan over the past year. Of course, I was devastated to hear that he had to undergo Tommy John surgery last week.

2) Fernandez is actually four months younger than me, and he already has a Rookie of the Year award and a Top 3 Cy Young finish under his belt.

3) This card is a treasured new addition for my error collection. I guess the people at Topps quality control somehow didn't notice the Mariners logo in the bottom-righthand corner.

I asked the guy if he'd take a buck for it.

Happily, he obliged.

When I hit his table a few weeks ago, the guy had a quarter box on display.

This time, however, it had magically transformed into a 5/$1 box. Either he was willing to cut me a discount as a repeat customer, or he just really wanted to get rid of his cards.

Either way, I was happy to land these two at a mere 20 cents a piece.

I can't turn down a Mariano Rivera "sunset" card at that price.

After the Fernandez rookie and the five 5/$1 cards I'd picked out, my tab was up to two bucks.

That's when my eyes wandered over to a stack of 1965 Topps Embossed singles this guy had in his glass case. Again, they were unpriced, but I took a look anyway.

I've never been a huge fan of these. But, hey, vintage is vintage. Right?

Originally, he said he'd be willing to let them go for fifty cents a piece. After I sifted through them, however, he offered me the ten or so he had available for just two bucks all together.

Although I didn't need all ten, I accepted. I figured I could distribute the ones I didn't want in future trade packages.

Besides, the ones I actually did need were easily worth two bucks.

And that's how I basically doubled my collection of '65 Topps Embossed singles.

I spent a grand total of ten bucks on cards from the three vendors I discussed this evening.

But, Nick, didn't you say you had $20 in your wallet?

Why, yes. I did.

Okay, I'll ruin the surprise and say that my other regular vendor was in attendance yesterday. But you'll have to tune into the next edition of "Flea Market or Blaster?" to find out what I scored from his table.

I'll just say that it beat the living crap out of anything I could ever get from a blaster.