Puck Junk's Bad Hockey Card Hall of Fame

 One of the most hilarious series in the card blogosphere is Puck Junk's Bad Hockey Card Hall of Fame. You can't help but to laugh hysterically with every post. 

Back at the National, which was in Sal's backyard, he produced a promo set of 6 cards of the Bad Hockey Card Hall of Fame, and while I wasn't able to get to the National, he was kind enough to send me a set. 

I finally got them scanned, so I thought I would check and see how many of the original cards appear in my collection. 

Card #1 is a checklist...I love checklists! 

Card #2 is Pavel Bure from 1991-92 Upper Deck, and yes, I do have this card, but I have not scanned it yet. This makes the Hall of Fame for the photo choice. I'm not as down on the concept of non-hockey images on hockey cards as most people, although if it wasn't for the Canucks wordmark and NHL logo you wouldn't be able to tell which sport it went to based on the photo alone. 

Card #3 is Mel Bridgman from 1983-84 O-Pee-Chee, and this card makes the Hall for the terrible paint job given to his uniform including for some reason that funky gray helmet. I do not have this card. I do not have many from the mid-80s OPC sets, mostly the Rangers. What says 80s hockey better than a toothless enforcer? 

Card #4 is Bryan Pitton from 2010-11 Score, and the photo choice is obviously why this card made the HOF. According to the back of the card, even his teammates got into teasing him because of this card, based on the Puck Junk post. If that doesn't get a card into the Hall of Fame, nothing will! Not only do I not have the original card, this is actually the ONLY card of Bryan Pitton in my collection, so that means this scan will be his official representation in my Alphabetical Directory and Hockey Encyclopedia as well. I'm not sure if that makes it better or worse, haha! 

Skipping ahead to card #6, we have Dale McCourt from 1979-80 Topps, which makes the Hall because of the backstory of this card- McCourt refused to play for the Kings, taking it all the way to the Supreme Court (!) to prevent it from happening...but that didn't stop Topps from painting a Kings uniform on him anyway. I do not have the original card. 

Finally, we finish with my favorite card in this set...

Card #5 is Rogie Vachon from 1971-72 O-Pee-Chee, and if I have to explain why this card is in the Bad Hockey Hall of Fame, your eyesight is worse than mine 😂 Due to a trade to the Kings, they needed a new photo, but instead of say, using a close up of just his face, or drawing on a new uniform as they used to do, nope...they cut out a picture of his head and glued it to Ross Lonsbury's body, making this downright scary yet hilarious card. Alas, I do not have this card. I thought I did, but it turns out I have a DIFFERENT card where they pasted someone's head on someone else's body. Yes, that means they did this more than once! 

Perhaps that will make Series 2. 

So I only have 1 of 5, and none scanned. I hope you enjoyed this look at this funny cards, and I thank Sal for sending me the promo set. Hopefully in time I will be able to add all the original cards to my collection as well. 

 

Saved from the Abyss

 Perhaps an overly dramatic title, but it sure feels apt. You may recall that back in 2016, I had a remote hard drive crash and take some scans with it. I don't know how many, but...a lot. Well into the four digits. I thought I had recovered all I was going to be able to recover already, but as it turns out, I was wrong. 

I had a file that was labeled as "Check these", so I obviously knew there was something that needed to be done with them, but I wasn't confident of their being as useful as they turned out to be. When I was getting everything ready for my 5th Anniversary of  the Cardboard History Gallery I rediscovered this file, by which I mean looked at it for the first time in who knows how long? I don't even remember where I found it. After I took care of the album of stuff that I knew needed to be worked on, I decided to jump into this file and I'm sure glad I did! 

In total I was able to recover 1055 card scans and 14 packaging scans. That's a big deal, as it's both a month's worth of rescanning I don't have to do, and the packaging scans I can't recreate at all because I've since opened the packs! 

I was able to recover all these scans in 3 days time, so 3 days definitely beats rescanning them over the course of a month or more, since I don't always do that many scans in a month. And also, they are not all together (probably) and I have no idea which boxes they are in so I don't have to worry about digging through dozens of boxes looking for them right now- I can now stick to my original plan of pulling the missing ones and rescanning them after I finish everything and get the sets back together like they belong. 

The recovered scans weren't all back scans either, which is the majority of what I lost. In fact, I recovered front scans and back scans together of cards I didn't realize I had already scanned! In total I recovered 197 front scans, with most of them coming from the 2003-04 NBA season for some reason. 89 of them, and 115 of them if you include 2002-03 NBA and 2004-05 NBA season, which were the second and third most common recovery. I don't know why they are concentrated so much in this three year section of time, but I'm not going to complain, I'm thrilled to get these scans back. 

All of the scans were made with Scanner #3, which isn't anywhere near as good as Scanner #4, which I am currently using. I may very well end up rescanning some of them when I finish scanning everything and put the sets back together...but for now I am thrilled to have any scan for them, even if lower quality than what I can make currently. 

Some of the sets, I was only missing one known back scan, or multiple back scans, which have now been found, meaning as far as I know they are now fully uploaded of what I've scanned. I don't know if there are others that I did that were totally lost or this is truly everything I've ever scanned of them. Time will tell, but it's not going to be soon. And that's OK. I love the scanning process so I will continue to scan as much as I can, eventually I will break even and be able to get my sets back together. It's taken me 35 years to build the collection, so it's naturally going to take quite a while to scan it all. 

5 Years of the Cardboard History Gallery

 Today marks the 5 Year Anniversary of the launching of the Cardboard History Gallery, my "magnum opus" where my card collection is documented in full. Where each person, each team, each set, each year, each subject for non-sports, all get an album. But it's more than just that. There's the Alphabetical Directory which has one image for each person scanned in my collection, there's the Set Archive which has one image from each major set, there's the Peripheral folder in each of the major sections which has an album for box, pack, set, publications and more. There's the Encyclopedia where the people in the Alphabetical Directory are also copy and pasted into subject folders. 

My ultimate goal is to open a museum and Hall of Fame for trading cards. When (if) that ever actually happens, the Cardboard History Gallery will serve as the main interactive experience for visitors. A full documentation of the museum collection. (That's also why I will take literally any card, for the eventual museum)

Although I launched the Cardboard History Gallery 5 years ago today, the process behind it was much more intense. I didn't finish creating every album until March 27th of this year. It took me two years of sorting scans on my hard drive before I was ready to launch in the first place. And of course, the scanning process has been going on since 2009, and the collecting of cards since 1988, so there are a couple of different start dates I could go with here...lol. 

Here are some statistics from 5 years of the Cardboard History Gallery:

Of course photos really means scans for the most part. There are some cards and packaging that are too big to fit on the scanner tray, and the Card Show albums are all photos, but the rest is all scans.

Using the math skills of Excel I copied down how many people and how many sets have been scanned, and let it do the math for me.

I have the sets broken out very much, but I also copied and pasted to get a total of how many sets make up the overall Non-Sports category, Other sports, and my favorite, Auto Racing.

Of course this is just what has been scanned...all numbers have the potential to go up, most of the numbers absolutely will go up. The people numbers will likely go up much more than the set numbers, but since I have no intention of stopping to collect, both numbers are not complete. And I still have thousands of cards awaiting scans, years worth of scanning. Thankfully, I really enjoy it and consider the whole process my favorite part of the hobby.

How do I remember the date I launched it so well? Well, for one, it tells me on the Statistics page. For 2, it tells me how long ago each album was created and some of them were at 4 years 11 months ago. But most of all...I launched it as a birthday present to myself. Yes, today is my birthday and I have to say...this is the best present I've ever given myself. 

 

I hit a milestone in September and didn't realize it until now

 I hit a pretty big milestone last month, although I didn't realize it until just now.

You might not be able to guess what it is, so here's a "hint"...

When I updated the Encyclopedias on my Cardboard History Gallery, I discovered that I had reached the 4000 people scanned threshold for basketball! That's a pretty big deal, really. I was only 24 people away when I trailed off scanning in the spring, and I completely forgot how close I was. I ended up scanning 49 new people last month, so the milestone was hit at some point in the month. 

I don't know exactly who the 4000th person get scanned was, but I DO know the 4000th to be uploaded. That was Kai Jones. 

In the time between when I started writing this post and when I finished it, he essentially got fired by the Hornets, placed on waivers because the team didn't want him around anymore. I started writing it right after I finished the last post I published. 

It's taken me 27 years to get to 4000 people. I wonder how long it will take me to get to 5000? 

New People Scanned in September 2023

 After not doing much scanning at all during the summer, I certainly made up for it in September! With injuries to both feet I couldn't do much else, certainly not modeling which requires 4 trips up and down the stairs each time I work on models, not even counting the trips outside to paint which adds even more trips. One foot is now healed but the other is still very problematic- so I scanned. Oh did I scan! I ended up scanning exactly 1234 cards in the month of September, and 252 of them were people getting scans for the first time! 

There's a good reason why there are so many. My best friend, the one who sent me that huge box I posted about back in 2015 where I saw my hockey collection grow from 28 to 2800 cards in a single day-is a big fan of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. He wanted to see them take over the lead in all my football categories, so he sent me basically all of his duplicates, bringing my Buccaneers supply from "normal" to "ample"...according to the Database I now have 493 Buccaneers cards, and the next closest team has 122. So yeah...ample. 

So, since these were easy to access, about half of everything I scanned this month was football, which is definitely unusual for me. When you see the screenshots, you'll see other football too...it wasn't just the Buccaneers he sent me, and he also sent me some baseball and hockey as well, both of which led to new people getting scanned. 

But wait, there's more! Since the last time I did any scanning, I was able to find some NBA blasters at my local Wal-Mart, which is the first time in a long while. I found one for 2021-22 Illusions and 2022-23 Hoops and Donruss. So not only are there rookies in there, there's also players who debuted in the 2/3 years where cards were scarce at retail and I have only a scant few. For instance, Anthony Edwards- the #1 pick in the draft now 3 years ago, is appearing for the first time this month. Interestingly enough, the first pick of the draft from last season and the first pick from this season also appear for the first time this month, thanks to Topps Now producing an NBA set for the first time. Unfortunately I didn't pull any Cade Cunningham cards in those three blasters, or else I could have had 4 straight #1 draft picks appear for the first time in the same month-something that has not happened since I began collecting the NBA in 1996. Oh well. 

Even so, with them, Football still has the largest influx of new people, with 145 of the 252 being football players. 

It took me 8 days to get them all sorted and uploaded, which ensures that I won't accomplish nearly as much scanning in October. That's ok...don't want to get burned out. 

As always, click the image to see them larger and actually make them large enough to read the names. Thanks for reading.