A week and a half ago I secured a deal for a blue border 2006 Bowman Originals Clayton Kershaw Card serial numbered /249. It was what I thought was the final card I needed for the “rainbow” of one of Kershaw’s earliest cards.
Of course what I failed to recognize is that there is a red parallel limited to just one copy.
I don’t anticipate ever acquiring that card, let alone seeing it, so I’ll just roll with the punches and not diminish this feat.
Here are the base, black /99 and blue /249 border versions of the Kershaw Bowman Originals Card.
For those not familiar, these cards were released in an odd pick out. Topps created this product which essentially contained a two buy-back Bowman autos that were inside a snap case case (like Magnetics for the time), then surrounded it by a handful of unprotected cards. The product was expensive for the time and really isn’t much different than Archives Signature that we see today.
The saving grace, as it turns out, we’re these prospect cards. The auto checklist was littered with mediocre signatures and there was concern about forgeries being placed inside the cases.
In 2006 I attended my first show after a two-year hiatus and the hobby had changed so much during that time frame. I spent two hours wandering the showroom floor looking for something to buy. I wound up grabbing a pack of Bowman Originals and it contained signatures of Fausto Carmona and Brandon Phillips … but had a blue border Evan Longoria, which was a great card for the time.
The Kershaws to me were somewhat elusive, mostly because I felt they were too expensive. The prices have come down a bit in recent years and now I’m proud to say I own these three
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CardboardIcons the blog is a teenager
Posted in Commentary with tags anniversary, baseball, baseball cards, birthday, Bowman, Cardboard Icons, rookie cards, sports on July 2, 2021 by Cardboard IconsThere was a day 13 years ago when I woke up and said, “Screw it, I’m starting a blog.” So I thought what better way than to start with a blog post featuring a 1951 Bowman Phil Rizzuto card that always caught my eye when I opened Beckett Baseball as a kid.
I had no real structure, I just figured I’d post a single card each day and write a little something about it. Well, as you may or may not know, things morphed from there and a few years later this blog and some thrift shopping — as well as Twitter — helped get my foot in the door to write about cards professionally for Beckett, for a few years anyway.
My involvement at that company at this point is none. Aside from a single piece published last year — I actually wrote it for this blog and then they wanted to publish it after the fact — I’d not had a byline in the magazine in well over five years. I have nothing negative to say about the magazine; it was an amazing experience that I absolutely trace back to the day I started writing about cards right here.
My passion for writing hasn’t been the same since 2010 when I left my career as a journalist. It’s easy to write for fun when you write for a living. But now that I work in a more structured setting with 11-hour work days I find my desire to sit and type full paragraphs and thoughts for un to be much less. Plus, I’ve got two kids and a bunch of other adult stuff I have to do. So I do what most other people do — give away their content on Twitter.
That said, I keep the domain active and post on occasion. I keep wanting to come back to this blog and keep things up as I’ve maintained that this is really my diary in this hobby. It’s always fun to recall something about a card or cards and then do a quick search to refresh my recollection.
In a perfect world I’d spent 10-20 minutes a day posting something here, but reality is Twitter is so damn easy to use and the interaction I’ve had with others far surpasses any of that I’ve experienced here, even when I was more active. So if you’re reading this, and don’t already follow me on Twitter, give me a follow there @Cardboardicons I’m pretty active there, and in some ways I’ve gotten back to the roots of this blog by participating in the #CollectableADay posts that some folks have been doing for months.
Anyhow, as I’ve said in recent years, I make no promises about how active I’ll be here, but I do intend to use this space to chronicle some thoughts in a longer format, and to document parts of my collection.
Thanks for reading,
Ben – Cardboardicons.
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