Chaos and Kanji is the blog where I write about my adventures through Japan!

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Monday, June 13, 2011

Going Postal: Letting the Kaat out of the Bag

Between a small spurt of purchasing on eBay, a contest, Sportlots, and trading, I had several envelopes show up in the past few days. It's like Christmas in June!

The first two cards nearly didn't make it into my hands. The Saturday mailman dropped the envelopes in the neighbor's box instead of mine, but he was kind enough to bring them over on Sunday!
 This was a bit of an impulse buy. Abbott's autograph is going to my personal collection. It's a nice on-card signature from a USA team member and inspirational Lifetime-TV Movie of the Week person.
All the recent talking on printing plates inspired me to bid on a few cheap plates on eBay, that I won, well, cheap. Notice how the plate is printed in reverse-negative (or, forward). I'm thinking cards must be printed using offset printing. This one certainly looks like it received a good bit of use, and there's even a bit of ink on the back (including a little bit of stray cyan).

These two Geoff Geary parallels came from a Sportlots purchase, as did the Sue Bird below. The easy stuff is now over for Geary - I need all the silly parallels Upper Deck made, the minor league issues, and the 16 different 1/1 printing plates.

 Another printing plate! That's two down, and I think there's one more on the way. This yellow one is from 1997 New Pinnacle, featuring Jeff Fassero. The yellow plates tend to be creepy, and look almost like those scary tin photos from the 1800s. If you recall my recent article, this is the first baseball printing plate set issued! I believe offset printing explains why printing plates aren't negative images. You'd think I would know that from being in a Graphic Arts classroom for four years in high school, but then I never worked the presses we had so I never had the experience.

 You thought I was done with Geoff Geary for the day? Think again! Someone listed the autograph, and I bought it. He has only three autograph issues, the other two being parallels of this card, so I have the easiest one to find.
 Poor Ichiro, being only the third-quickest to 1500 hits. I was a winner at not-quite-new-but-recently-rebooted The Diamond King, run by Kevin, and in the prize draft I managed to pick up the card I really wanted - this Ichiro game worn jersey card! It probably wasn't the "best" card in the bunch - in fact, any of the other baseball cards would have been awesome in my collection - but it was the one that best fit into my current collecting scheme. Thank you so much, Kevin! Hopefully some cards can go back the other way!

There is a lot to post on today! I didn't realize this would take so long. But that's alright - blog reader Ryan proposed a Gypsy Queen trade and we worked out a deal. I picked up eight base cards and mesmerizing dancing gypsy Levitia for my collection! I sent him a bunch of my extras to clear up some space and help him finish his set. I still need just four cards - won't you help a collector out? I have plenty of extra base cards to offer if you need them. Thank you again, Ryan, and I hope you're happy with your stack as well.

 Last, but not least (in fact, almost half of the cards posted today): Jim Kaat. Kitty (thanks Wikipedia) won 283 games in his career, with an ERA of 3.45 and 2461 strikeouts. More important for my collection, he won 16 Gold Glove Awards. Sixteen! I'm in the middle of a trade that will bring several other award winner cards my way, but no Kaats. So I measured up the deals on eBay and Sportlots and found a good auction for a 12-card Kaat lot. It's always nice to knock large amounts of one player out of the way!

That's almost it for the mail over the past few days. I have a group break to post on later this week (I might save that for Saturday).

2 comments:

  1. I like your theory on offset printing for the non-negative printing plate images. It makes a ton of sense.

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  2. No problem, RG - glad we could work it out, great trade. Love the '91 Donruss bookends, too.

    If anyone cruises through here and has some extra GQ bases lying around, please feel free to drop me a line (ryanlamonica at hotmail dot com). The chase continues.

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