2012 Topps Allen & Ginter Kate Upton Autograph

I have a long and somewhat painful history with this particular card. Shortly after returning to collecting in 2013, I discovered Topps Allen & Ginter. One of the best things about the product line is the non-baseball autographs and relics. While not every signature or swatch is of interest to me, each season there are a handful of subjects that I mark as targets for my collection. My main target for 2012 was Kate Upton, who had an autograph and a relic in the set.

I eventually acquired a relic and an autograph, as well as a mini printing plate, but I ran into money trouble and wound up selling the autograph and the plate, breaking even on the plate and taking a decent loss on the autograph. Yuck. Ever since I sold it, there has been a hole in my collection.

There are usually one or two copies of Upton's autograph card on eBay, but the prices on them are uniformly higher than I want to spend. One popped up earlier this year, though, at a fairly reasonable price. I waited and waited on it, and eventually the price came down to the best price I've seen in a while. I was able to purchase it and add a copy of this card back to my collection. It still probably cost me more than I should be paying for a trading card, but sometimes we do crazy things for the sake of 'completing' our collections.

A Box of Munnatawket Mini Awesomeness

Around the time I got that Christmas card from the creator of the fabled Munnatawket mini card set, I won a couple of his auctions for cards in the set, Freddie Freeman and Torii Hunter. There was an e-mail exchange in which I apologized for being a cheapass and winning his cards with lowball bids while some of the other cards sold for a bit more and also telling him that I planned to buy more cards from him soon, so he could save on shipping and just hold Hunter and Freeman until that happened, and he asked me if I was serious about putting together the whole thing. I said something along the lines of, "Heck yeah!" and he told me that the package with the two cards in it might be a little bigger than expected. There was more to it, but those were the highlights.

It was definitely a little bit bigger than a two-card envelope. It was a whole box of these things, featuring various quantities of most of the cards in the set. I sorted them out by number and put them all into pages row by row, gaining an immense feeling of satisfaction as the little pockets filled up. The photo above shows the current state of the box, so you can see that there were plenty left over after I took the ones I needed.

He encouraged me to share them with other people, so I have been including a few in each trade package I send out, trying to match subjects in the set to the interests of other collectors. There are some good baseball photos in the set, but some of my favorites include the oddballs like Dirk Nowitzki dressed in a Rangers uniform and holding a basketball.

In true Ginter fashion, the checklist includes figures from outside the world of sports, like Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling. I guess you could call her the founder of a sport, as there is an official U.S. Quidditch league with their own logo, World Cup tournament, and even a concussion policy. It looks like the Lone Star Quidditch Club currently is ranked #1, but their perfect record is held down by a weak Strength of Schedule. It could be argued that #5 Maryland Quidditch and #6 Ohio State Quidditch have the more impressive resumes. My preferred school's team, The Moscow Manticores at the University of Idaho, aren't ranked dead last, but they have a 1-2 record and they are rated last in Strength of Schedule. Interesting stuff.

I don't have a lot to say about this row of cards, but it was on one of the pages I scanned and I had to include it. Also, it's not very often that Justin Verlander gets outdone in a baseball card set, but in this case...

...his girlfriend Kate Upton outdoes him by about 6500%, with the highly sought-after #0 card in the set. I did not receive any duplicates of that one, so you'll have to track it down using your own wiles. I sent a copy of the Spider-Man card to the UK recently as a throw-in with a comic book sketch card I sold to someone there.

This row is full of big names, and also Wil Myers. The rest of these guys should be pretty familiar to baseball fans. It's a little jarring to see Morneau in a Pirates uniform, as he only spent 25 games with that organization. 

I'll close this up with Michael Morse, the current last card in the base set, one of the autographs, and a couple of the photo variations from the set. Actually, I am not sure which versions of Giancarlo Stanton and Manny Machado are the regular cards and which are the variations, but there are (at least) two different cards for them. Cespedes has an Athletics card and a Red Sox card, so the order those go in is more obvious. I have since discovered that there are even more interesting things in this set, but they were part of different transactions and they will get their own posts.

This was among the coolest packages I got last year, and I will be trying to pay this one forward for a long time. So if you get a package from me this year and you're like, "What? I don't remember setting up a trade with this guy," you can thank folks like roddster, Too Many Verlanders/Manninghams, Zippy Zappy, The Prowling Cat, Cards on Cards and Nachos Grande for being so generous and inspiring me to try to do the same. Sometimes I fail, but I have found myself picking things up with other collectors in mind a bit more often lately and looking for one more thing to add to an outbound package.

Thanks for the cards!

What eBay Hath Wrought 50: The Real Cardboard Equivalent of Kate Upton

Judson over at My Cardboard Habit recently posted about some flashy Nelson Cruz Topps Triple Threads card that he acquired after winning it on eBay twice. In that post he referred to the card as 'the cardboard equivalent of Kate Upton.' I like the guy, but in this case he was wrong. This is the cardboard equivalent of Kate Upton:

There she is, right on the front. This particular card even has a piece of an old t-shirt from her closet embedded in it. Pretty good stuff. There is an autographed version out there, but the going rate for that thing goes well into the triple digits and boxes of 2012 Allen & Ginter's go for $100 and up with presumably a snowball's chance in hell of pulling the Upton auto from any given box. I like pop culture on my trading cards, but even I have limits.

So there you go, everyone. That's what the real cardboard equivalent of Kate Upton looks like. It even gets most of its fame in the same way the real Kate Upton does, being ogled by sports fans while wearing an itty-bitty swatch of fabric.

Yes, I put Kate Upton's name in the post title and in the body of the post a couple of times to drive search engine traffic to my blog and give me a little ego boost when my hit counter spikes. This blog is nothing if not self-serving. I also take a little bit of glee in the fact that many of those folks out there searching for Kate Upton will be angry and feel a little bit slighted when their searches bring them to a blog about baseball cards.