I have no idea what’s happened. I don’t know why I haven’t been going after cards and I’ve missed out some good ones. There were two Kouzmanoff cards that I’ve stalked eBay for over the last two years or so. In the past three weeks, they popped up on eBay and I missed them both.

One sold for $1.50, the other for $2.37 (or something). Certainly they were in a good price range, but I missed out because I didn’t check eBay enough. I strangely was OK with missing the cards as well. Usually, I get disappointed when I see a card that I missed. But not this time.

I feel as though part of the problem is the lack of variety. I’m tired of looking at the same cards for the last few months. We should have had some new product, we should have been expecting a ton of new product. But, I can’t get excited for the same 2010 Topps Heritage cards that I see on everyone’s blogs over and over. Yes, there are SPs, but even those have gotten tiresome.

Perhaps the cynical side of coming out in me as I get older. Maybe being bombarded with work over the last few weeks has taken its toll. Either way, I don’t have the itch to buy cards.

How do I get it back?

Who wants to trade for some crappy cards?

Okay, so salesmanship was never my strong suit. Seriously, I’ve unlocked six cards in Topps’ Million Card Giveaway and my luck seems to have run dry. Besides the excellent 1958 George Crowe card that was the subject of last week’s show and tell, I did have one other vintage hit: a 1964 Don Blasingame. I already have Don’s 1965 card and I’m not crazy about the stripped-down 1964 design, so I decided to make a deal. I only need 56 cards to complete my 1965 Topps set, so I tossed out a few reasonable trade requests on the Giveaway website. The next day, I had a shiny Jim Bouton sitting where that blah Blasingame had been.

With that in mind, I’m throwing it open to the readers of this blog. If you’re participating in the Million Card Giveaway and any of these four cards catches your fancy, make an offer on toppscards.com and there’s a good chance that I’ll say yes. The caveat is this: I already have complete sets from 1986-1991, 1993, 1995, 2000, 2005, and Series 1 2008. I had a lot of fun completing the Blasingame-Bouton trade and I’d like to wheel and deal some more! In case you didn’t already know, here are the eligible gentlemen:

Balding? Check.

Heavy 5 o’clock shadow? Check.

Smoking? Check.

Beer in hand? Check.

Wearing a wife beater? Check.

Good ole New York!

Make your own right here.

Now take a look at this jersey relic also made by Donruss of Rafael Palmeiro Orioles and Rangers uniforms.

It’s got nice, clear explanation of what the items are and what team their from…granted it does help that they are different colors.

Now let’s move on to another Palmeiro relic…this time a bat relic.

I really like the idea of “improving” bat pieces by burning a logo into them! Now how can we “improve” those bland white jersey piece that populate way too many jersey cards?

As the cards flashed by they looked like 1940 Play Ball cards but in color. I was pretty familiar with the black and white cards that make up the main Play Ball set from 1940 and so I thought that they just sort of fudged it for the movie because no one would want to look at black and white cards rolling out of the factory.

1940 Playball #40 Hank Greenberg

Well, I consulted my gigantic 2008 Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards which has damn near every baseball card ever made listed. It turns out Play Ball did actually make a few color version of the 1940 cards and it is speculated that these were tests for the colorized 1941 set. If you can lay your hands on a color “Daffy” Dean you could get over $2,000 at auction.