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Showing posts with the label goodbye

Farewell to another collector

    It's been a long time since I've written a post like this and thank goodness. These are the most crushing kind but also the most necessary. I woke up this morning to the news that Ben had passed away over the weekend . He was 43. Longtime blog readers probably remember him, he was the one who wrote Cardboard Icons , one of the OG blogs, it began two months before mine. I remember being excited to see his blog because he was a newspaper writer, his blog handle at the time was "Newspaperman". I found someone who understood my line of work. He got out of the business maybe a year or two later and, like me, wrote for Beckett magazine for a time. He moved on to work as a community service officer in California where he lived. Ben was very active in the hobby and on Twitter/X. He was up on the latest hobby trends and card sets. His collections were BIG to my eyes. He had a crazy collection of baseballs that had one thing in common -- they each had hit a major league ba...

The last days of Panini (in my collection)

  I think I'm on record on my opinion of Panini as a baseball product. I've never had use for it, think its weak points are glaring and its strong points -- if there are any -- help convince only some collectors that it's worth buying. Panini's license with the MLB Players Association ran out at the end of 2022 and we all know it already doesn't have an MLB license. So Panini is out of the baseball card game and, well, let me take a moment to figure out how I still type while I'm standing and applauding. Panini's baseball cards were ugly, uninteresting, inept and inefficient. The only thing it did well, the 2013 Hometown Heroes product, disappeared after a year. The only other thing it did "well," Chronicles, is a mix of boring (see card above) and a whole lot of WTF. It's good WTF, for the most part, but it actively defies you to complete it, which is the opposite of what I'm trying to do here. Panini's baseball inserts got a lot of pr...