400th Post

I've reached another milestone here at Nine Pockets:  

400 blog posts!  

Because I add content here each Sunday, 400 posts means this blog has been rolling along for almost eight years now. And that's a lot of content. 

 

I guess if you break it down, some of it has been nostalgia, some of it has been custom cards, some of it has been completed sets, and so on. Ultimately, it shows that trading cards have been a bigger part of my life than I thought. Back when I started this blog in 2018, I couldn't have imagined that I'd find so much to write about. 

In any case, and as usual with these milestone posts, I wanted to tie in some cards using a sports-related milestone of some kind. 

The first thing I thought about was baseball players who batted .400. However, there haven't been many of those—none from our modern time, in fact. So I next thought about a few players who nearly batted .400: Tony Gwynn (.394 in 1994), George Brett (.390 in 1980), and Rod Carew (.388 in 1977). 

 

However, we're celebrating 400 blog posts here, and 394, 390, and 388 just don't do enough of a job to mark the milestone. Thankfully, I found something soon after:

 

Players who've batted .400 across an 80-game stretch.

 

That's essentially half a season. After a little bit of research, here's what I found:

 

 

Name	At-Bats	Hits	Average	Date Range
George Brett	315	137	.435	5/30/1980–10/1/1980
Ichiro Suzuki	349	149	.427	6/30/2004–9/27/2004
Wade Boggs	332	138	.416	6/26/1985–9/22/1985
Tony Gwynn	327	133	.407	4/9/1997–7/15/1997
Larry Walker	302	123	.407	4/9/1997–7/14/1997
Rod Carew	310	126	.406	4/16/1977–7/17/1977

Man, that 1997 season was something else. Larry Walker and Tony Gwynn both took their .400 batting averages well into July. Walker finished the season at .366, while Gwynn ended up at .372.

 

It goes to show you how much harder it is to keep up that .400 pace for another 80 games.

 

Regardless, it's an impressive feat. And because this is a trading card blog, here are examples of what collectors would have been pulling from packs while the guys listed above were swinging such hot bats:

 

 

1980 Topps #450 George Brett, 2004 Bazooka Stand-Ups #18 Ichiro Suzuki, 1985 Topps #350 Wade Boggs

 

1997 Topps #410 Tony Gwynn, 1997 Topps Stars #1 Larry Walker, 1977 Topps #120 Rod Carew

I should note that the table shown above only represents a partial list. Nomar Garciaparra, Todd Helton, and John Olerud also accomplished the feat, as well as other legends like Jackie Robinson and Roberto Clemente. (The most recent player to do it appears to be Joey Votto, from June to October of 2016.)

 

And I'll leave it there. Milestone achieved.

 

Whether you've been visiting this blog from the start, reading it today for the first time, or anything in between, I'm sending my thanks. I hope you've enjoyed doing the reading as much as I've enjoyed doing the writing.

 

Here's to more great trading card and blogging milestones all around!

100th Custom Card (Plus a Giveaway)

If you're a blogger, artist, or any type of creative person, then you'll know about "the itch". 

 

That is, the creative itch. It's the need to tinker. To doodle. To goof around. To create something.

 

You can have so much fun with the process that time keeps going by without much notice. You finish one blog post or one project, and keep moving forward with the next one, and the one after that. If you add in all your other daily tasks and obligations, it's very easy to forget to look back on the catalog of stuff you've created over time.

Well, back in 2019 at Nine Pockets Headquarters, I created my very first custom card. It featured George Costanza on the 1956 Topps design, barreling into Bette Midler at home plate. (Clean play.)

 

Remarkably, it's now six years later. And after all that time I'm still having lots of fun coming up with new ideas for custom cards and seeing them through to fruition—and printing! It's always cool to have something that you've created in a tangible, physical form.

 

So, to mark the six-year milestone, I decided it was time to take a step back and look through all of my designs. The best way to do that? 

Set up a binder, of course.

 

 

 

It contains one copy of each card I've designed, including the commissioned projects I've done for fellow bloggers and trading card enthusiasts. It's fun to flip through the pages and reflect on how the ideas and designs have changed over the years—not to mention all the work that's been put in.

 

Being a collector myself, the next natural step was to count up the cards in the binder. I knew the total would be fairly close to 100, but I wondered just how close it would be.

 

To my surprise, I'd already surpassed it! 

 

If you include checklist cards and the commissioned cards, the number is 144. (Add some digital-only cards, and it's a bit higher.) Even if you remove those from the equation, the total still reaches over 100.

 

Fist pump.

But as exciting as the milestone is, I can't ignore the fact that I missed the chance to celebrate it in real time. So let's fix that.

 

First thing to do: 

Try to figure out which specific card design was the 100th.

For a while, I couldn't decide whether I should go with the 100th card I finished designing, or the 100th card that I actually printed out. Each of those options would produce a different result.

 

Eventually I figured I'd go with the 100th card that was printed. But looking through my order history reminded me that I always try to have a few different cards printed at the same time, to save on costs. I was able to narrow it down to one small batch of cards, but there's no way to know which card in that batch was the exact 100th to be printed and cut. (D'oh!)

 

In any case, here's the small batch:

 

And although there's no way of knowing which of these four cards was the actual 100th to roll off the printing presses, I decided to designate this one with the honor:

Choosing Mr. Costanza is fitting in a "full circle" kind of way. As I mentioned earlier, the very first custom I created also featured Georgie Boy. 

Second thing to do: 

How about holding a giveaway to help celebrate?

The first idea to cross my mind was to give away one copy of each custom card I've ever designed. And as fun as that would be, it's just waaay too big for my britches. I don't have nearly enough of a following to give away that many cards. Not even close. So, let's do this instead: 

 

We'll celebrate six years of designs by giving away one of the Costanza cards shown above to six different participants. 

The duck races that I've held for a couple of previous Nine Pockets giveaways seem to go over pretty well with readers, so I think I'll do that again. But this time, the top six finishers will be the six winners.

To enter the giveaway, just add a comment to this post. That's all you have to do. I'll keep the entry period open through next Sunday, September 21st. Then I'll close it out and get those ducks ready to race.

 

With this milestone now officially in the process of being celebrated, I'll turn it over to all of you creative folks out there:  

 

Have you hit any milestones lately, be it through blogging, creative work, card collecting, or anything else?

 

Share some good ones in the comment section. And here's to more milestones for all of us!

PS: Feel free to share this giveaway with some other trading card bloggers and collectors out there. I want to make sure we have at least six participants.

A Most Minuscule Blogging Milestone Achieved

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed a new number on the right-hand widget bar here on the Nine Pockets blog.

I've got 50 followers!

Huge news, right? Time to update my status to "influencer".

 

 

Jokes aside, noticing the number on that widget did give me pause for thought. A milestone like this would have been a much more meaningful occasion back in the heyday of blogging. I can imagine well-known bloggers from various corners of the internet celebrating every 100 followers they gained, for example. 

 

But in today's online world, there are quite a few additional forms of social content that grapple for our attention:

 

2-sentence posts

10-second video clips

Single-panel memes

News clips 

How-to videos 

City walks

Virtual tours

ASMR videos

Endless sports highlights

Live streams of all sorts of events

Stories that disappear after 24 hours 

Reaction videos

Unboxings

The list goes on and on.

 

And that's not to mention the emergence of the aforementioned influencers, and their millions of followers across various platforms. Put that all together, and it means bloggers aren't exactly pulling in the numbers these days.

But do you know who still reads blogs?

 

You do.

 

You're undeniable proof that blogging is still here. You, and other folks like you, still enjoy reading the unique content that blogs can provide. I'd even like to think that one day, folks might grow tired of the barrage of content and alerts coming in from all those other platforms, reduce the amount of time they spend tapping, swiping, and aimlessly scrolling, and replace it with some quality time reading blogs again. 

 

Sure, it might be naive to think that way. But I'm sticking with it. 

And that's why I'm setting aside a few minutes to celebrate 50 followers.

 

  

As small as our little corner of the internet is, there's a lot of value here—and a lot of great people, to boot.

If you're one of the 50 followers, or even if you just stop by Nine Pockets every once in a while to read through my thoughts about trading cards and the nostalgia they bring about, I'd like to issue a sincere thank you.

Your time spent here means a lot.

 

Keep enjoying the hobby. And if you're a blogger, keep on doing what you're doing.

 

More good content to come.

300th Post

I've reached another milestone here at Nine Pockets:  

300 blog posts!  

Because I add content here each Sunday throughout the year, 300 posts means this blog has been rolling along for almost six years now. And once again, I'm very happy that I've been able to come up with enough content to fill that many Sundays. I hope you've enjoyed doing the reading as much as I've enjoyed doing the writing.

And because this is a trading card blog, I wanted to tie in some cards with the number 300, using a sports-related milestone of some kind. 

For whatever reason, the first one that came to mind was 300 MLB wins for a pitcher. It turns out 24 guys have reached that milestone, which is too many to feature here.

Next, I thought about the same milestone for NHL goaltenders. Well, a whopping 39 of them have reached the 300-win mark. So I didn't really want to go there. However, after a little more digging, I discovered that only 6 of those 39 have accumulated all 300 of their wins with the same team. That's kind of cool.

Here's the short list:

Name	Team	Wins
Henrik Lundqvist	New York Rangers	459
Pekka Rinne	Nashville Predators	369
Carey Price	Montreal Canadiens	361
Tukka Rask	Boston Bruins	308
Turk Broda	Toronto Maple Leafs	304
Mike Richter	New York Rangers	301

 

Still, I wanted to keep thinking about that number 300. I figured there was another milestone out there that would better suit this blog post. My thoughts went back to baseball: How about relief pitchers with 300 saves?

Welp, there are 31 relievers on that list. Some are names you'd think of right away (Rivera, Hoffman, Franco, Eckersley), while others... 

Todd Jones?

Jeff Montgomery?

Jason Isringhausen??

Yeah, those were just some of the names that surprised me.

It was all interesting research and information to this point. But I still needed to find something else related to the number 300.

How about pitchers with 300 strikeouts in a season?

Okay, now we were getting somewhere. Only 19 pitchers have hit that number. And even fewer have done it multiple times. Let's represent the top few guys on the list with some cardboard.

1999 Upper Deck Victory #16 Randy Johnson, 1977 Topps #650 Nolan Ryan,
1963 Topps #210 Sandy Koufax, 1998 Topps #332 Curt Schilling

Nolan Ryan struck out 300 batters a total of 6 times across his career, as did Randy Johnson. As for Koufax and Schilling, they achieved the feat 3 times each. The rest of the list is full of two-timers and one-timers.

Now here's a question for you: Tell me which bit of additional information about these guys is the most impressive: 

• Five of Randy Johnson's six career 300-strikeout seasons came in a row, from 1998 through 2002.
• Johnson also had seasons of 290, 291, and 294 strikeouts. That means he almost hit the 300-K mark nine times. (That's terrifying.)
• Johnson and Schilling both struck out 300 batters while they were teammates with the Diamondbacks in 2002.
• Nolan Ryan went 12 years between his 5th 300-strikeout season (1977, age 30) and his 6th (1989, age 42).

It all leaves me speechless. So I'm going to just end this post right there.

Whether you've been visiting this blog from the start, reading it today for the first time, or anything in between, I'm sending a big thank-you. And an even bigger thank-you for the comments, emails, and trading card exchanges over the years. We've got a great community of bloggers and collectors, and if you're amongst that company, here's to more great milestones and trading card content all around!