Card Collecting over Thanksgiving

This year for Thanksgiving I was lucky enough to spend a few days in the warm weather in North Carolina visiting family. I cannot think of the last time my whole family was together for Thanksgiving. Along with the warm 70 degree with and the awesome dinner my sister made I was also able to talk baseball and card collecting with my brother-in-law The Snorting Bull. He was going through some cards and put some aside for me that he knew I would enjoy. Besides receiving some cool cards I also got some really good tips on collecting from him.

The first card that he had for me was from 1989 Bowman set that he was putting together. Being a huge Ken Griffey Jr. fan he had this awesome rookie for me. The thing that is cool about the card is the fact that it is slightly bigger then your typical baseball card.

The next three cards come from the 1998 E-X 2001 set. This is one of the coolest base set cards I have seen. I would have been 9 years old when this set came out and it was long before I serious collected. I could have a few of these in my collection as a kid, but with them being sold there is no way to tell. The cards feature Tony Clark (one of my favorite Tigers as a kid), Ivan, Pudge, Rodriguez (before he was a Tiger) and Justin Thompson.

After making the comment about how cool the E-X 2001 cards were, the Snorting Bull was talking to me about older card sets that had the same idea. He found a 1998 Topps Tek card of St. Louis Cardinals, Mark McGwire and he added it to my pile. He must have had a few of these to give up a Cardinals card.

The one current Tigers card that he had for me was of Miguel Cabrera from the 2015 Gypsy Queen set. It features a piece of his uniform and is #/25. Always great to add a Cabrera card to my collection.

The last card is a dual autograph card of early nineties Detroit Tigers, Frank Tanana (left) and Mickey Tettleton (right). During the nineties the Tigers didn't have any great teams. Tettleton had his best part of his career during his four years as a Tiger with a career OPS+ of 135 in Detroit. Tanana spent eight years in Detroit and had a career ERA+ 99 with the Tigers.

#MyCardMonday

With the regular season wrapping up this past weekend the Detroit Tigers did end on a high note. They beat the Chicago White Sox 6-0 with only giving up 3 hits, the young guys looked good with their hustle on Sunday, and Miguel Cabrera claimed his 4th batting title in 5 years.

In honor of Miggy winning another batting title I figured I would share another one of his cards for #MyCardMonday. This bat relic comes from the 2013 Topps Tier One set. This is my one and only bat relic that I have of Miggy and thought it was fitting for today.

Even the back of the card is pretty cool talking about Miggy's Triple Crown season of 2012 when he drove in 139 runs. The team had produced 726 runs that season. He drove in 19.15 percent of the runs that year which is the highest for a player whose team made the playoffs that year. He broke Johnny Bench of the Reds 1970 record of 19.10 percent.

#MyCardMonday: Congrats Miggy

Saturday afternoon I was able to witness a pretty cool feat in one of the greatest hitters that I have ever been able to watch. Miguel Cabrera step into the batters in the first inning against the St. Louis Cardinals, Tyler Lyons and launch his 400th career home run over the centerfield wall.

I thought the Upper Deck Sweet Spot Signature would be a fitting card to use for Miggy's 400th home run post. As a Tigers fan it is truly awesome to be able to watch someone this talented play everyday. Every time he steps to the plate its like he will going to do something great. The thing I love most about the Miggy is how much fun he has playing the game. Always has a smile on his face and joking around. After the game he was quoted saying he wishes he could stay 32 years old, because he enjoys playing the game so much.

Here is the clip from his home run on Saturday

#MyCardMonday

As a Detroit Tigers fan I will say I am extremely lucky to watch a player who should go down in history as one of the all time greatest hitters to play the game that we all love so much. That player being Miguel Cabrera.

For #mycardmonday I thought I would honor Miggy today. It is truly a pleasure to see him play almost every night in the Old English D uniform. Even with injuries that was dealing last year he still managed to play 159 games. He did have a down year offensively, but a down year for Miggy he still hit .313/.371/.524 with 25 home runs and 109 RBIs. Oh and lets not forget he did lead the league with 52 doubles all while dealing with bone spurs. As of right now he is 8 home runs shy of 400 for his career so it shouldn't be much longer and I will being doing another post about him reaching that milestone.

Once Miggy decides it is time to hang up the cleats, it will only be a few years before he should be immortalized in the Baseball Hall of Fame. It is really something to watch this guy play for my Detroit Tigers.

#MyCardMonday

My brother-in-law, The Snorting Bull, has started a #mycardmonday where you show one of your favorite cards every Monday. He has been doing this for awhile now and has challenged people to start doing it as well. I figured why not starting doing this with a card that is connected to him.

A little background before we get to the card. Growing up as a kid I would buy a pack of cards here and there, but wasn't really much of a collector. I had a maybe 100-150 cards and when I went off to college for one year I was going through somethings trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I had no money and that Christmas of 2010 Eric (my bro-in-law) helped me sell my cards. Now fast forward to March of 2012 I decided to get into collecting. That March I was in North Carolina visiting family and told Eric I was interested in starting a collection.

I showed Eric a few cards that I had but they were nothing special. Well about a month later Eric tweeted me a picture of this Cabrera Triple Threads card. He told me he actually had a couple copies (if I remember correctly) of this card. Then he dropped some of the best news as a collector. He  said he would give me one of them. Being a Detroit Tigers fan or just a baseball fan in general you know how special of a player Miguel Cabrera is and as a baseball card collector his cards usually aren't very cheap.

Thank you Eric a.k.a The Snorting Bull for helping me out with my journey of collecting baseball cards and reintroducing me back into this great hobby!

My Trip to Big D's

Being from Northern Michigan I do not have a local card shop that I can go to. There is one in East Tawas from what I found online, but that is still over an hour drive for me. I consider North Carolina my second home due to the fact I have two sisters, a brother-in-law, a nephew, and an aunt and uncle that live there. My brother-in-law Eric or better known as The Snorting Bull is the one person who reintroduced me into collecting cards. This past August I was down there for a wedding and Eric and I took a trip to his favorite card shop, Big D's before the wedding. Eric had let Jimmy the owner know that I am a pretty big Detroit Tigers fan and he had pulled aside some cool cards for me.

The first couple cards I looked at were some short print Miguel Cabrera cards. I tend to be pretty bad at collecting or paying attention to short print cards so I figured this would be a good start to looking for short prints.

The next card Jimmy sold me was newly acquired second basemen Ian Kinsler autograph. I had already collected a quad piece relic of Kinsler, but had not had a chance to add a Kinsler autograph yet.

My favorite Tiger's card that I picked up from Jimmy was this cool 2014 Topps Series 1 of Victor Martinez. I really like the parallels in theses sets. He also had the black one, but I had pulled that out of a pack that I had bought earlier in the year. I think I am going to try to collect all of the different color parallels of V-Mart for last year. Two coolest ones I can check off my list.

 My last card I bought kinda caught Jimmy off guard. Growing up in the 90's I was a huge Ken Griffey Jr. fan. I spot this card actually right away when I walked into the shop and started looking around. I would look at it then go on and look at some other cards, but always found myself going right back to this card. I finally asked Jimmy want he wanted for it and he gave me what I thought was a great price and it was mine!

With not having a local shop of my own I had considered Big D's as my own shop. After going there in August Jimmy would message me on Twitter about buying boxes he was selling and I found his prices were just as competitive as where I was buying boxes online. It was unfortunate news to hear that Jimmy had shut his doors to Big D's last week. It is always sad to see a local shop close. If you have a local card shop to buy from do your best and try to support them. The owners are fans of collecting cards just like us.