I hope everyone had a nice Christmas/Hanukkah/Rickey Henderson's birthday. Santa Claus was good to my family - Mom is finally home from the hospital after a long three week stay. The girls got lots of neat gifts, most notably slimeatory goop for H and Fall Out Boy tickets for M. None of my in-laws complained about politics, which was nice.
I only asked for two things and got 'em both from Mrs. Collector: Oppenheimer on DVD, and the book companion to Rob Harvilla's excellent podcast 60 Songs That Explain The '90s.
There were no trading cards under my Christmas tree, and even though I hand-picked two Starting Lineup figures for my daughters to wrap and put under the tree for me, they a) wrapped them in the boxes they were shipped in otherwise "you'd know what they were" -- as if they had any other gifts to give me -- and b) they didn't put the SLU boxes under the tree. Their gifts took up every inch of space. So that whole idea didn't go as planned but the figures themselves are sharp. I'll show 'em off in a future post.
I did get one hobby-related surprise from my mother in law: a Panini Sticker album!
Much like Starting Lineup figures, this was a throwback to my childhood. The first such sticker book I ever owned was a Panini baseball album - 35 years ago. [I wrote about that album and set here.] Football stickers were harder to find than baseball, but I do recall coming across some back in the day.
Team pages are alphabetical by division, so the Buffalo Bills are first (after an All-Pro page and a Super Bowl page).
Panini no longer expects you to trade duplicate stickers with your friends but they still give you an option to buy some that you're missing, which is cool. What's not cool is that they're still hawking NFTs. 🙄
The album itself is fairly reasonably priced but I doubt the sticker packs are under a dollar. So let's open up the freebies here...
One of these packs yielded two foil stickers (no helmet/logos though). They're much trickier to open than they used to be, due to the standard sized trading card in each pack...
...most of which were wrecked in packaging. Hooker, Mingo, and Taylor have at least one roller line crimping the edge. Jones has a dinged top edge but no roller lines on the side. Only the Tyree Wilson escaped unscathed. Taylor in particular is a bummer, but I did pull his sticker in the packs:
Overall a hodgepodge of rookies, fading stars, and a couple good young players. But wait, there's more:
Look at all these defensive players! Aside from Sauce, Crosby, and a couple others these guys rarely appear in trading card sets. I'd be willing to bet that some of the players in this set don't have any standard trading cards.
There are more goodies inside the album - including a panel of pop-out card checklists (why couldn't they do this for the cards?!?) and two more sheets of stickers:
These are on parchment paper so they can only be left intact or peeled for the album. Some repeated players here including Slay and James. Oh, if only there were a way to trade in my duplicate stickers.
Okay, so... I've got 35 33 stickers here. Should I stick them in the album and try to fill the whole set?
Oh hell no! I'd have to pick up 100+ packs and not get a single duplicate. Guess I'll just slide these into my perfectly-sized sticker box, along with my unpeeled set of 1988 Panini baseball:
Some free/almost free pickups from that online dime store, and some other sticker-cards that are too small for standard sleeves and binder pages:
I do wish there was a better way to preserve these. The nameless hockey stickers are from 1983, and I have a couple Packer stickers from 1981. The backing has noticeably yellowed, more than even the mid-late 1980s issues.
Do you have any Panini (or Topps) sticker albums? Do you have any loose stickers in your collection?
Thanks for reading, and have a Happy New Year!
~
We got the 2020 Topps sticker album that year and purchased a box or 2 of the packs in order to complete it. Probably was an overspend but me and the boy had a good time putting them in the album.
ReplyDeleteI have a number of stickers in my collection, including a number of logo stickers, ones from random packs, and ones acquired in trades. I usually put team logo ones at the end of the teams in my binders and put the ones of players with the appropriate year/set.
Have lots of unstuck Dodgers stickers from the '80s. The only stuck stickers are in my '82 Topps baseball sticker book. Sticking any other stickers would require a sticker-book purchase, which I don't see happening. ... I don't think I need to explain how annoying Twitter/X can be but a to-the-point example is how many people on there thought NFTs were the greatest new thing that would change the world.
ReplyDeleteI guess this is how I learned that Dane Jackson finally got an item where he's actually pictured with the Bills.
ReplyDeleteI had the Topps baseball sticker books 1986-1989, the Panini 1988 and 1989, and Topps Football 1986 and 1987. Used to bring them to school every day to trade with classmates. Packs were a quarter each, I think. Unfortunately, unlike my cards, the stickers/stickerbooks did not survive my childhood. A couple of years ago I bought the full Topps baseball stickerbook run, and stick in any stickers I come across. At some point I'd like to do the same for Topps football and Panini baseball of the era.
ReplyDeleteCan't wait to see which two SLU you have to show off. As for Topps & Panini stickers... I do have a bunch of loose ones. Some are part of player and team collections. Others are just some loose ones I've acquired in collections or had from opening packs. I have a few (maybe 5 or 6) partially completed sticker albums from either a flea market or Craigslist find. I don't have any intention of completing them though. The only one I really, really, really treasure is the 1982 Topps baseball sticker set. I'm pretty sure that's the first set I ever collected and tried to fill an album for. I have a completed sticker album... as well as a complete sticker set that hasn't been attached. I'm still hoping to eventually track down an unused album to go with that sticker set.
ReplyDeleteI have a few Panini baseball sticker albums from the 80s. I seem to remember Mattingly, Canseco and Nolan Ryan being the covers. I might have started a hockey one and never finished it. Will have to try and track all those down... They're hiding in storage somewhere!
ReplyDeleteI have some albums, but I mainly collect thr stickers for my PCs
ReplyDeleteThe way they do these modern sticker sets seems very confusing to me. I seem to recall seeing something in recent years that were even serial numbered stickers, which if true, is just bonkers. I can't help but wonder too if autographed stickers will be a thing in the future. It would be terribly funny though if the stickers came with sticker autographs on them :)
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