A sucker for easy trades

  

Trading cards takes a lot of time. Also, sometimes it takes a lot of work.

 

Everyone collects differently and sometimes it's difficult to match up with another collector. That happens all the time. No big deal really. Then there are the fellow collectors that drag out trades for too damn long.

 

I never participated in collectors forums, but I've heard that trades were often like that there. I have no problem trading away nice cards, but I'm not going to send a couple dozen messages back and forth to come to an agreement on an exact accounting of precise compensation. I've dealt with this in the past with a couple bloggers. It's not fun. Trading is supposed to be fun.

 

That's why I gravitate to super simple trades. My favorite are: "I'll send you some cards whenever and you send some cards whenever." That's how most trades go on the blogs. It's about the only ones I make these days.

 

It's also why I participate in stuff like Diamond Jesters' Time Travel Trading. It couldn't be any easier. Find a card you like, find a corresponding card in your collection that is older than the one you want, make the trade. I've made dozens upon dozens of Time Travel trades because it's so easy.

 

 

This time I selected some heavyweights from the 1985 Topps football set. Look at the tiny way the set recognized All-Pros. Certainly not the 1970's treatment! But then how many big, bold looks do you need on the '85 football set?

 

 

Two 1960s cards but they arrived in different ways. The 1961 Pete Runnels came the traditional way. The 1968 Turk Farrell was a "Trapped In Time" selection, one of those cards that has waited four years for someone to select it. Farrell may be hatless and bordered by the '68 design but I had to claim him.

 

 

But this is my favorite pick-up. It's a 1982 Fleer stamp of Steve Garvey. I recall when these came out in 1982 and shunning them when I saw them for sale. Stamps??? That's not even a sticker!!

 

I dismissed these for years, not even bothering with the Dodgers. Now it's 40-plus years later and I wish I hadn't waited so long to add them.

 

So that's one easy trade down and here's another one from an old friend from the old blog days.

 

 

This is the creation of gritz, who ran the blog Project '62. He was always doing card art projects (still is, obviously), creating baseball card mosaics and things.

 

He recently made some artwork of some classic cards from my era ('70s and '80s) and put them all together with a mosaic for this foldout panel. If you know the '70s and '80s, you know the Topps card, the 1981 Al Hrabosky, 1972 Dock Ellis, 1978 Glenn Burke and 1977 Mark Fidrych. They appear on both the front and the back of the panel.

 

 

A look at the innards. There you see the 1965 Topps Bob Uecker mosiac. Just great work. Still don't know how he does it.

 

So, of course, the cards are meant to be cut up, just like a Hostess panel! So I did.

 

There they are, some brand new customs for my customs binder! And each of them has an individual "transfers ad" on the back, as you saw in the previous pic.

 

That is if you cut wisely because if you didn't, you would have cut up the Uecker mosiac.

 

 

I was careful. This beauty is 5x7 and I have just the page to store it. Really genius how this was created so I can have the individual cards as cards and also as a panel on the back (or front) of the Uecker pic.

 

All I had to do was send a couple of beat-up vintage cards for this, that is all he wanted. And he sent a couple of key cards along with his custom work. 

 

 

Man, this card (pinch hitter!!!!!). I've owned the 1987 Nestle Jackie Robinson card from the early days of the blog and have picked up seconds and thirds of it over the years. But until this package arrived I had never seen the Snider -- the only other Dodger in the set -- until that point. 

 

 

I don't have hardly anything from the 1954 Topps set that isn't a Dodger. But this is a legendary card (one I wrote about in a Beckett article recently). I don't care about the creases, it's a '50s card, it should look like it's that old.

 

The back of this card is almost as fascinating as the front.

 

 

And that was two very easy trades. All I gave up were a few duplicates. And nobody was checking off a ledger making sure they got "their share" and that it was no less than what I received. 

 

I was very lucky to find the card blog world and this kind of trading, I don't even want to think what it'd be like if I grew up on the forums or in the world of grading or peddling rookies or any of that stuff. This is much more my speed.