Signature Renditions: Bill Barber and the 1976 Canada Cup

Up next in the slowly continuing Signature Renditions series is one of my favorite cards in the entire batch:

It's longtime Philadelphia Flyer star Bill Barber playing for Canada during the 1976 Canada Cup. It was an historic event -- the first true best-on-best hockey history. Well, sort of. The six teams in the tournament were the top six hockey nations in the world: Canada, the United States, Sweden, Finland, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. But the Soviets for some reason chose to leave some of their best players at home. Barber was part of an unsurprisingly stacked Canadian roster that also included Bobby Clarke (the team captain), Bobby Orr (the MVP of the tournament), Phil Esposito, Bobby Hull, Guy Lafleur, Gilbert Perreault, Denis Potvin, Larry Robinson and Darryl Sittler. The coaches included Scotty Bowman and Don Cherry.

The six teams played a round-robin tournament that ended with the Canadians and the Czechs advancing to a best-of-three final. Canada won the first game 6-0. Canada jumped out to another lead in game two, but the Czechs scored two quick goals (one by Marian Statsny) to go up 4-3 with four minutes to go in the game. But Bill Barber scored a minute later to tie it up and force an overtime. And, of course, is the moment that this card commemorates.

What's neat about this is that Barber's goal isn't the famous one from that tournament. That honor belongs to Darryl Sittler, who scored the game-winner in the overtime that Barber's goal forced. Sittler's goal is right up there with the most famous goals in Canadian hockey history, only clearly behind Paul Henderson's winner in the 1972 Summit Series. Nice to see Upper Deck go off the board slightly with the choice for this card.

A whole bunch of Yzermans

As a generally messy and disorganized person whose filing system consists of stacking everything in one giant pile until it's been there so long that I can't possibly need it anymore and I can throw it away, it probably shouldn't come as a surprise that I've let my Zistle inventory become hopelessly out of date. I'm in the midst of trying to fix that now, which means hours of checking, scanning and entering. 

But since I have so many new scans on my computer now, I figured I'd milk 'em for some posts, too. I'll start with an assortment of random Steve Yzerman cards, whose the only guy I seriously player collect. According to Zistle, I'm up to 272 unique cards of his so far. Here's a few of them:

One of my favorite Yzerman base cards is from 1997-98 Score, which is more unique than most Stanley Cup cards. Instead of capturing the on ice celebration, these -- and a bunch of other Red Wings cards in the set -- all appear to have been taken during the team parade through Detroit. I like the card so much that I've been trying to track down its various parallels and variations. The first one here is a "platinum" version. It's from a team set that Score produced, so the number is different from the others. I'm not sure if the platinum team card is meant to be a parallel to the regular team-set card, or if it's a separate team set altogether. Either way, it looks nice in hand and scans even better. The second of the three is one of Score's "Golden Blades" parallels. It's basically a very shiny/chrome-y version of the base card. And the third is from a promo set that Score apparently produced, although I can't find much information about it. What's odd about this one is that there appear to be two logos superimposed onto Yzerman's shirt -- a Red Wings logo, which is underneath a Stanley Cup logo. I have no idea what was going on here....Was Score testing something? Or are the logos airbrushed off of the other cards? It's a mystery...

While the Cup wins are obviously the biggest moments of his career, the biggest goal of Yzerman's career was probably the double-overtime game-seven game-winner he scored (after stealing the puck from Wayne Gretzky) to beat the St. Louis Blues during the 1996 Western Conference semifinals. That's the moment this holographic card celebrates. Part of a small set Upper Deck produced during the 1997-98 season called "Diamond vision," it's actually very thick and the hologram, while it doesn't scan very well, is really well done. This is actually a "Signature Moves" parallel, marked by the replica signature that's just barely visible in the center of the card. (Incidentally, my absolute favorite Yzerman base card is from 1996-97 Upper Deck which also captures this exact moment.)

A few Stadium Club examples, plus a Stadium Club Chrome parallel. All four are nice enough, but none are really the fantastic images that Stadium Club is usually known for. It's too bad Upper Deck has an exclusive license for the NHL now; I'd really like to see Topps reintroduce this brand for hockey like it has for baseball. 

Here's yet another great base card. It's from a set called Upper Deck Foundations that was released during 2002-03. I can't find much information about the set online, so I'm not sure what the theme or gimmick was. But scanning through the set on COMC, there are a bunch of other cool images from the '70s and '80's. I'd like to bust a box of this someday. 

A handful of die-cuts. The 2002 Atomic is the nicest-looking. The All-Star card is a neat design, too, although it's only a matter of minutes before one of those points gets dinged.

The Authentic Moments subsets that have been included in SP Authentic the past three years feature some of the best photography. There's actually quite a bit of overlap between the images used in these cards and the ones depicted in the Signature Renditions line, which might be the subject of a future post. This one celebrates Yzerman's historic '88-89 season when he scored 65 goals and assisted on 90 others -- and finished third in the scoring race. It's easy to imagine all the hardware he would have won over his career if he hadn't played at the same time was Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux. By the way, there's also a gold-ink autograph parallel of this card that looks absolutely amazing. I haven't been able to snag a copy myself, though, and they seem to have largely disappeared from eBay, unfortunately.

Here's a great concept to get around a lack of licensing. It's from 2010-11 Enshrined, a set ITG produced to commemorate players who have been enshrined in the Hall of Fame. (Get it?) The card is printed on extra thick stock, giving it a premium feel.

I want to love this card, I really do. It's part of a small insert set Topps produced in 2003 depicting a handful of stars -- Ron Francis, Brett Hull, Patrick Roy and Mario Lemieux -- on the card designs one year before their actual rookie cards. So Steve Yzerman, whose actual rookie card is part of 1984-85 Topps/OPC, is pictured on the 1983-84 design. All of the cards in the set are from designs used in the 1980's, which is basically targeted right at me. But here's the problem: They're all printed on slick, modern card stock. It totally ruins the effect. I'm not sure why they couldn't have used old-school cardboard for these. What a missed opportunity.

I have no idea what's happening here, but it's a great photo.

Random but good. (Check out that early '90's fashion!)

Random but awful. He looks like he's guest-starring on Saved by the Bell.

Random but god-awful. He looks like he's guest-starring on To Catch a Predator.

The Captain and the Cup.

A couple of the more odd insert concepts I've come across. The Lamplighters card has actual mesh in the center of it, presumably to simulate a hockey net. The Time Capsule runs on on Windows 98.

Nose-picking Brett Hull photo bomb.

Here's an insert from a really nice retro set that Topps did in '03-04 based on a nearly 100-year-old cigarette card design. Another reminder of how nice it would be if Topps still had a hockey license along with Upper Deck.

1980's O-Pee-Chee sticker. Never really collected the stickers as a kid, so these don't resonate with me quite the same way as actual '80s cards.

To wrap up this post, here are three sunset cards from 2006-07 releases. I love the look of the Flair Showcase, which is one of at least four Yzerman cards in that set. I'm pretty sure the other three are short prints, though, so I haven't been able to track them down yet. My favorite of this trio is probably the gold medallion Fleer Ultra parallel, solely because it includes full career stats on the back. One of my many -- many -- collecting goals is to obtain all of Yzerman's sunset cards at some point.

Something new on something old

If the Walt Disney Co. ever designed baseball cards, I suspect they would look an awful lot like Topps Archives. There is no other set on the market that plays (preys?) off collectors' nostalgia quite like Archives. Yes, there are other retro sets like Heritage, but they stick to a single design and the nostalgic effect only really works on people who remember the original version. 

Archives, by contrast, squeezes several generations into a single set. The 2014 edition had base cards modeled after Topps flagships from 1973, 1980, 1986 and 1989, plus insert designs from 1968, 1969, 1971, 1981, 1987 and 1997. With Archives, Topps is trying to tug at everyone's childhood memories. It's the Magic Kingdom of baseball card sets. 

And dammit if it doesn't work. 

This is the most expensive card I bought from COMC during the Thanksgiving week sale. Mike Trout is amazing and all that, but he's not someone I try to collect. And yet, I had to have this card. The concept of putting today's baseball stars on the arguably the most iconic hockey card design of all time was irresistible. Layer on top of that that fact that these are achievably rare inserts -- the 1971 hockey design cards fell at one in every 24 hockey packs -- and I couldn't help myself. Into the cart it went. 

If this had been a full set, I may be been able to restrain myself to just one or two examples. But, no, there are only 20 cards in this particular insert set. So how could I not try for all of them? At around $5, I believe this card of the 2015 National League MVP was the second-most expensive card from the entire 100-plus lot that shipped from COMC. 

The completely arbitrary -- and totally self-rationalizing -- rule I've set for myself with these cards is that I will spend no more than $3 per on average across the full set. This card of Masahiro Tanaka, which I believe is a rookie card, or at least a rookie year card, was the only other one north of that line. I generally detest the Yankees, but I really do kinda like Tanaka. Wish the Jays had signed him.

Like any good nostalgia-dependent set, this insert collection mixes a few retired greats in with active players. 

Goggles! Seriously, Chris Sabo has to be the most random inclusion in this set. How on earth is he one of the 20 players Topps chose for this treatment? (What's that? He was rookie of the year in 1988 and a hot collectible in the late '80s, when collectors who are now 40-ish adults with disposable income were young kids collecting some of their very first baseball cards? I see what you did there, Topps.) 

Probably the most bizarre thing about this insert set is how it is dominated by Cincinnati Reds. Along with Sabo and Phillips, there are also cards of Joey Votto and Eric Davis. That's 20 percent of the set, represented by one mid-market team. I would love to know the method behind this particular bit of madness. 

Every time I come across a Wil Myers card, I get a little jolt of excitement. For some reason, my brain insists on remembering only that he was once a top 10 prospect who won AL Rookie of the Year and not that he has since cratered and is now toiling away in San Diego. 

 

And one last modern-day star to round these out. I've since added two more of these (Jose Abreu via eBay auction and Miguel Cabrera, whose currently sitting alone in a newly begun COMC order). That puts me at 13 of the 20. I have little doubt I will complete this at some point. Nostalgia will see to that.

The collector's curse, or: How I wound up with a baseball card of Bill Clinton

First, let me say this upfront: COMC is fantastic. There's no better place on the Internet for card collectors. It's basically a 24-hour-a-day card show, with an almost endless inventory and the ability to haggle with dealers. I've lost hours of my life on that site, and I'm sure most collectors have, too. 

But COMC is also devious. Before the site lets you make an offer for a card, it requires you to buy enough store credit to cover the amount. The idea, I'm sure, is to make sure that every offer is genuine in binding -- if a seller accepts, the deal is done. You can't suddenly move the goal posts.

Of course, sellers don't always accept your offers. And when that happens, you wind up with a bunch of money that you'd already mentally decided to spend burning a hole in your digital pocket. And when that happens, this happens:

I liked Bill Clinton as a president, but I can safely say that I have never in my life wanted a baseball card of him. And yet, I own one. All because I happened to stumble across it while there was a bit of leftover cash in my account. And that's what I mean by devious. Most collectors (or maybe it's just me and I'm projecting) can't resist cards. All it takes a little nudge -- whether it's nostalgia, a nice design, a cheap price -- and they'll buy. That's the collector's curse. And what's what COMC preys upon.

I ended up with this card of Bill Clinton because I wanted a framed Masterpieces card, which, to my mind at least, are some of the prettiest parallels around. I chose this one, which is a "green linen frame" parallel, because I thought it was an interesting and unusual image. And because it was less than a buck.

Of course, if I was going to get an example of the green linen frame, then I figured I should also pick up an example of the allegedly different "Windsor green frame." I mean, what if I decide to pursue a whole parallel set? I really should know which version looks nicer in hand, right? That's how Kirk Gibson wound up in my COMC cart, too. I chose it because this was a moment I remember from my childhood -- although I don't remember it fondly, since I was rooting for the Bash Brothers-and-steroids-fueled Oakland A's that year. Nostalgia is a powerful force. Just ask Disney. (For what it's worth, I cannot for the life of me see any discernible difference between the green linen and the Windsor green.)

I wound up with one other framed Masterpiece card in the form of this rookie of current Blue Jay shortstop Troy Tulowitzki. What can I say, other than that I'm a total sucker for framed cards. This is the green linen again, by the way.

Here's another rookie-parallel-of-a-current-Blue-Jay card. This time, though, the player is Russell Martin and it's a mahogany parallel from 2005 Bowman Heritage. This is actually a fairly thick card, thicker, I'm assuming, than the base cards in Bowman Heritage. Beyond that, though, it's a fairly boring card. It's between this card and the Clinton one for title of, "My worst (recent) impulse buy."

Staying true to the impulse buy/parallel cards theme, here's one more: A gold parallel of Jose Bautista from Topps' 2008 flagship set. Unlike the Martin, though, I don't regret this one at all. I've seen some other blogs rip the design of 2008 Topps, but I actually kind of like it. The team name in alternating colors looks really good, I say. And while I'm generally not a big fan of the gold parallels in Topps' flagship sets, I make an exception when A)It meshes so well with the team colors and B)It is off a guy who is in the conversation for Greatest Blue Jay of All Time.

That's it for today. Hopefully it's obvious by now, but this was another post of stuff I picked up mostly during COMC's Thanksgiving Week sale. I've decided to ditch the "Black Friday binge" title for these posts, though. It was beginning to feel too...well...gluttonous.