Allen & Ginter Blaster Break!

2010 Allen & Ginter, that is.  Sorry if I got you withthe tease, but I found this A&G blaster at the Big K discounted $12.71 including PA Sales Tax.  Here are the highlights:



Some favorite cards and Stars (click any pix to enlarge):

2010 Allen & Ginter King Tut
2010 Allen & Ginter Buster Posey
2010 Allen & Ginter Raul Ibanez
2010 Allen & Ginter Matt Kemp

The Ibanez card was the sole Phillies card in the pack.  Kind of like there season - 1 Phils Card per Blaster, 1 Phils Win per week.

Short Prints

2010 Allen & Ginter Alex Rios
2010 Allen & Ginter Scott Sizemorer
2010 Allen & Ginter Jonathan Broxton
2010 Allen & Ginter Ben Sheets


Sheets is going to be back in baseball w/ the Braves I think.  Sort of a Phungo favorite. 

Minis

2010 Allen & Ginter Mins
Rafael Furcal
Regis
Jose Lopez
Trevor Hoffman
Olympus - Hades
Biggest - Mountain, Everest
Seven Seas - Francisco Vasquez De Coronado
Animals o the World - Bull Spain



Inserts

I got one of the two "This Day in History"/Birthday Cards I needed.  The Matsui Card celebrates one of the crummier days in recent Phils history - and it is a Dupe in the Phungo Collection - Fail.

Card Show Report 2010 09 11 - Concorde Mall, Wilmington DE

Even before I got to looking around at cards I met Greg from In Search of Pat the Bat. He was good enough to give me this fine 57 year old Al Glossop Photo Card.

1943 Philadelphia Phillies Photo Pack "Al Glossop"

Al Glossop was a journeyman infielder spent 1 season of his 5 year career with the Phils. There were not many baseball cards issued during the 1940s, so I always enjoy adding something from that era to the Phungo Collection.

According to the Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards there are 40 known Photos from the 1943 Photo pack. Other players from the set Include Chuck Klein and Lloyd Waner.

I also heard a rumor that In Search of Pat the Bat may be back up and running in the near future.


1954 Topps #174 Tom Qualters

One of my favorite dime box dealers was featuring vintage for the first time. Most of the stuff I see at shows is going for a lot more than what I can find in on-line sales and I end up just window shopping those tables. The rest of the 54s were priced at around $5 I think, but this one was a little off in condition and marked as a buck. That's Phungo Quality.

Phillies Dime Box
The Phils dimers included a Mike Schmidt Coca-Cola variation. I didn't realize that some of the Opening day cards had different photos on them until I cam across this Raul Ibanez card. The B-side is the OPC version of the 1978 Bake McBride card.

Phillies Super Vets
This is an interesting set which I am slowly collecting. Brian from 30-Year old Cardboard chronicled his experience building this set earlier this year.

WBC Cards
I have been putting whatever WBC cards I find into a binder, not sure what I am going to do with them. I am one of the few collectors that has any interest in the event so the cards are usually easy to find and in low-demand. The Gavin Floyd card isn't really a WBC card, but I have grouped any card featuring the Players country in my WBC binder.

Dime Box
I really like the Franchise History cards and expect to collect all of them eventually - I already had the base version of the Padres card, but couldn't resist the Gold version for a dime.

The Brent Dlugach card is from the 2010 National Chicle Rookie Renditions subset. This set consists of 20 rookies on (mostly) Classic Topps designs that are painted.

Right now I pick up almost any Mini I see in a dime box. The Dempster card is an A&G back.

Card Show Report - 2010 05 14 Exton Mall, Exton PA

I mainly scoured cheapo bins in the 2-3 hours I spent at the Exton card Show. I was able to knock out about a dozen cards from my Phillies Want list and another dozen cards from my other want lists.

There were some minor surprises. In one of the dime bins I was perusing I found 3 Chicle cards and picked out all of them. I spent a good deal of time in a nickle bin which actually had a number of 2010 Topps Cards, and 2010 UD - including a good chunk of the Biography set. There were several Bowman Chrome cards in there as well.

My biggest surprise was finding a couple 2007 Topps XFractors in the dime bin.

The Pictures:

2010 Topps National Chicle Lou Brock
Later in the year I may have skipped the other Chicles (Zambrano, Braun). I was a bit of a Brock fan when I was a kid, and I will always at least consider any retro card of his when thumbing through a budget bin.

The Phils


I am pretty sure all of these came from my Phils vendor. I am good for finding a bunch of Phils cards in his bin at every show, I picked up these and a bunch of 2010 Topps Phils Commons all for $5. Someday I will get around to cataloging my haves and wants for the Phils Carlton collection, but I haven't as of today.

Set Building
These cards are all from different sets I am building:

2007 Bowman Heritage
2007 UD Masterpieces
2008 UD Spectrum
2008 Topps All-Star Rookies


The Retro
I am a sucker for this kind of stuff. The Brooksie is from the 2006 Topps Rookie of the Week promotion. I picked up maybe a dozen of these. The Action Packed card is of Roberto Clemente.

Shiny
As always there were lots of Bowman Chrome in the nickel box, not as many Topps, but I did find the above Ibanez card in there.


Other Nickles



There is one woman who often has a nickel box at the show - this week she had a lot of 2010 Topps commons (no phils) and 2010 UD cards including gobs of the Biography cards. She also had the above Soriano card - which was homaged in the 2010 Topps Yo Momma Set. Who needs the reprint when you can get the original for a nickle??

I am not a football guy nor a Giants fan, but I could not let this 08 Masterpieces Football cards sit in the nickle bin.

All told I went through $28.50 at the show in about 3 hours. $5 in Phils card, $7 in the nickle bin, $6 in a dime box, $1.50 on a Grab Bag, and $5 on a six pack off oddball packs to open over at A Pack To Be Named Later.

Introducing 2010 Phungo Cards

2010 Phungo #29 Raul Ibanez

We here at team Phungo are pleased to announce the release of the 2010 edition of Phungo Cards.

For those of you unfamiliar with Phungo Cards you can read more about them here where we debuted the 2009 set.

This year's set is a bit smaller then the 2009 set at 52 cards, as opposed to 64 last year. There are also 8 non-numbered Black Frame inserts this year - last year there were 11.

There are a variety of reasons for the smaller set. The number one issue, as with most things was a lack of time. I just didn't have as many opportunities to get to the ballpark this year, and I procrastinated on several tasks.

Overall I am glad to get a set together for 2010, but was disappointed with several aspects of the cards. In general the quality was down. Mostly because I didn't get to enough games and many of the games I went to were night games which were not as conducive to photography. I never figured out enough Photoshop to quickly make a lot of images. In the 2009 Phungo Card set I used a lot of my best photos from years past so the ones that were left were basically rejects. And in the end I had a deadline of basically now and that led to me rushing some aspects of the project.

The first card that I am presenting from the 2010 set is of the Phils big 2009 FA signing Raul Ibanez. If you remember the 2009 cards they are very few changes. I flipped the area for the Card number and the "phungo" logo. This years phungo logo is white or light colored on a darker background. The Date the photo was taken remains on the card. I have used the specific position (LF in this case) rather than the generic OF for outfield.

The picture of Ibanez was taken on June 19th when he was on the DL. At the time Ibanez was having an MVP season. After that the 36 year old outfielder aged tremendously. His BA dropped 70 points in a second half which also saw him hit 10 less homers. Regardless he ended up posting pretty solid numbers for the season and I am hoping that his second half crash was due to nagging injuries rather than aging out of the game.

I hope you enjoy the 2010 Phungo Cards because you will be seeing a lot of them over the next couple of weeks.

Topps Cover Jinx Continues - 2009 Topps U+H first pack break

This past spring we reported on the PED epidemic spreading throughout the Topps Cover Players.

Well the trend sort of continues as Topps latest cover boy Tim Lincecum finds himself in a totally different type of drug trouble.

I wonder which Topps 09 Cover Player will be? a PED or Marijuana User?

One other thing, I think it was Chris over at Stale Gum that noted that Topps chose to airbrush out Manny's Dreads for the 08 Topps wrappers.

The design of the current Topps U&H cover seems to accent Tim Lincecum's "rebellious" locks. Is Topps stating that they are more comfortable with Lincecum's long hair then Ramriez's Dreads?

Regardless, I really was just using this as an excuse to bust open some Target U&HIGH packs in honor of Mr Lincecum.

First 2009 Topps Series 3 Pack

first up the numbers are STILL UNREADABLE!!!

#UH53 Clete Thomas
#UH176 Diory Hernandez
#UH200 Randy Johnson
#UH157 Josh Hamilton All-Star
#UH239 George Sherill

#UH320 Classic Combo Mark & Daniel Schlereth

How great is this card, I often listen to Mike and Mike during drive time, and it really interesting to hear the elder Schlereth discuss his sons career.

#UH113 Francisco Rodriquez All-star

#UH62 Russell Branyan Gold (#d1179/2009)

#PP23 Propoganda Poster Nick Markakis

#TTT65 Topps Town Raul Ibanez

#UH119 Bud Noris
#UH76 Scott Rolen

Nice first pack a Great Propoganda Poster. A Gold Card and A Raul Ibanez insert.

I picked up two other packs while I was at Target. I wasn't nearly as happy with those packs - I didn't pull any Phils and I actually pulled a duplicate of the Konerko/Dye 300 Homer card - 36 stinkin cards and I got my first dupe - bleck.

#PP21 Mark Texiera (b-side)
#LGU24 Legends of the Game Update Paul Molitor
#TTT57 Topps Town Joey Votto
#TTT54 Topps Town Adam Jones

The Molitor and the Tex are nice inserts and I also pulled a Nolan Reimold RC but still bummed about not getting any Phils base cards out of the three packs.

Phungo Game Report - 2009 09 02 - Giants 0 @ Phillies 1

2009 Phungo #35 Cole Hamels

It was a perfect night for baseball and Cole Hamels was nearly perfect himself.

Cole threw a complete game shutout against the San Francisco Giants on Tuesday night allowing just two hits and a walk while pitching to 2 over the minimum (1 runner erased via pickoff). Jonathan Sanchez was nearly as good as he only allowed one run on an double Ryan Howard hit through a drawn in infield.

Here are some quick shots from last nights game:

Newest Giant Brad Penny

Giants Phenom Tim Lincecum


Raul Ibanez and Harry Kalas Memorial Banner

Other game observations - I cannot figure out why anybody would pitch to Howard right now, He is Red hot while Jayson Werth has sort of fallen off after a couple of great weeks, and after him the rest of the lineup is pretty quiet. Ibanez is really struggling.

Good Guy Awards go out to Phils Phan Phavorite Aaron Rowand and Tim Lincecum who both were spotted siging autograps. Chase Utley gets a GGA for the home team for signing a handul of autos just before game time.

In the Phungo Card above I have listed Hamels postion as ACE, because he was the Ace of the 2008 team and the card number is 35 to match his uni number. I like this one. It is a good action shot and fairly clear.

2009 Topps Card Show Blaster Break

I like Blasters, but I prefer Hobby packs to Retail.

Since Blasters are basically retail only, I decided to build my own Hobby Blaster.

I did this by going to a recent card show and getting the best deal on hobby packs that I could find and buying $20 worth of them - which is basically the cost of a blaster. I found a guy selling packs at 3 for $5 and picked up 12 of them here are the results:

Phungo 2009 Topps Hobby Blaster

97 Base Cards = 97/330 = 29% no duplicates, 2 Phillies #73 Victorino, #299 PSH Hamels WS MVP

1 WBC Redemption #6 1 Relic CBR-RG - Ryan Garko ("The Relic contained on this card is not from any specific game event or season")
1 Black Parallel #234 John Russell (28/58) this card is a duplicate of one of the base cards I recieved.

1 Turkey Red #TR41 Cole Hamels
3 Ring of Honor (17 Sheffield, 21 JohnnyPodres, 23 Mariano Rivera)
2 Legends of the Game (2 Honus Wagner, 15 Pee Wee Reese)

10 ToppsTown Silver (1,2,3,4,5,8,11,16,20,21) 1 duplicate (20 Berkman)
1 Topps Town Gold (24 Jay Bruce)

3 Topps Attax
1 David Wright Stay in School

That breaks down to 97 base, 20 inserts, 1 insert dupe. I am not at all sure of what the composition of a Blaster is for 2009, and the outcome of this faux blaster versus a real blaster is likely a bit better. I suppose the Relic and the Black Border are both considered premium hits and depending on the outcome of the WBC redemption it is hopefully a bonus hit.

I would have liked to have gotten a few more Phils in the 12 packs. Generally I like the look of the base cards and the photography is much improved over 2008.

Here are a couple of the Phillies related cards.


#299 Cole Hamels Post Season Highlights
#TR41 Turkey Red Cole Hamels
#6 Raul Ibanez

I was at the "Decisive Game Five" of the 2008 World Series mentioned on the back of the first Cole Hamels card. Yes, Victorino was the only regular Phils card I got in the 12 packs but the Turkey Red Hamels sort of makes up for it. Ibanez is the Phils big off-season pickup. I suspect this photo was taken at a Mariners Yankees weekend series in early May of 2008, as I have spotted several photos of the Mariners at Yankee Stadium in recent Topps sets.

Here are some of the other inserts.

CBR-RG Ryan Garko Relic
RH21 Ring of Honor Johnny Podres
#234 Black Parallel #28/58 John Russell

Thing I am happiest about in 2009 Topps - Improved photography. I am not sure I love the design on the face of the cards, but I think they make a better use of the real estate then the 08 Cards.

My biggest complaint about this years cards in general is the tiny tiny card numbers. The Black on Blue is virtual unreadable, as with teams like the Mariners and the Ibanez card.