Jason Vargas Update

Well, since I last wrote, I've been desperately trying to get this scanner that my mother gave me, for free, to work, so I can more easily put pictures up here of cards for you guys to enjoy.

But, in other news, I have...

A Jason Vargas Card Update


Well, as many of you saw in my previous blog post I posted a video to YouTube depicting the erroneously printed Jason Vargas card in the new 2012.  Well, somebody, (specifically user TheChaseman19), commented that the statistics that were printed on Vargas' card are apparently the stats of  Vinnie Pestano of the Cleveland Indians.  


But Where's the Love for the Mariners?


I grew up living in the greater Seattle metropolitan area, and subsequently I grew up a Mariners fan.  Therefore, I was also rather disappointed when the same commenter also informed me that Topps apparently misprinted the card for Mariner Center Fielder Franklin Gutierrez!  I know the Mariners are far away from their "glory days" of the late 90's/early 2000's, but still...  Well, if I get one of these cards, I'll get it up here, working scanner or not!

New Topps 2012 Series Out, But Jason Vargas is Misprinted!

Yesterday afternoon as I was running errands around town, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the brand-new Baseball 2012 Topps Series 1 has hit the store shelves!  Therefore I thought this would be a fitting opportunity for me to write a pack-review.


I decided that pack-reviews would be a good subject to write about in this blog, so that way my readers would be able to have an idea of what they might expect if they go buy a pack of cards at their local store, so they can decide if they want to try it or not.

PACK:  Topps Bseball 2012 Series One Jumbo Pack!

PURCHASED AT: K-Mart, Pocatello Idaho

CONTENTS (In Order Pulled):

TOP PART:

#311 John Danks, CWS
#290 Curtis Granderson, NYY

#37 Mike Napoli, TEX
#63 Nate Schierholtz SF
#76 Ian Kennedy, ARI
#GS-7 GOLD STANDARD, Frank Robinson, BAL (Insert)
#CW-6 CLASSIC WALK-OFFS, Mark Teixeira, NYY (Insert)
#TT-18 TIMELESS TALENTS, Albert Belle, CLE/ Mike Stanton, MIA (Insert)
#41 Devin Mesoraco, CIN
#79 Austin Romine, NYY
#104 Brett Anderson, OAK
#222 Chris Coghlan, MIA
#110 Mark Teixeira, NYY
#48 Wade Davis, TB
#318 Erik Bedard, BOS
#273 David Freese, STL
#45 Jhoulys Chacin, COL
#181 2011 NL Batting Average Leaders, Jose Reyes, NYM/Ryan Braun/MIL/Matt Kemp, LAD

BOTTOM PART:

#281 Mark Trumbo, LAA
#64 Michael Martinez, PHI
#310 Adrian Beltre, TEX
#112 Juan Nicasio, COL
#54 Jhonny Peralta, DET
#GM-5 GOLDEN MOMENTS Adrian Gonzalez, BOS (Insert)
#TM-36 Mariano Rivera, NYY (Insert, this card is roughly 75% the size of a standard-sized baseball card, and is done in the style of the Topps 1987 style)
#252 Dellin Betances, NYY
#219 Jordan Pacheco, COL
#221 Luke Gregerson, SD
#12 Wilson Ramos, WAS
#56 Geovany Soto, CHC
#143 George Kottaras, MIL
#124 NL Active Batting Average Leaders, Albert Pujols, STL/Vladimir Guerrero, MTL/Todd Helton, COL
#269 Jason Vargas, SEA (misprint)
#302 AL 2011 Home Run Leaders, Jose Bautista, TOR/Curtis Granderson, NYY/Mark Teixeira NYY
#272 Nyjer Morgan, MIL (2011 NLDS Brewers Game 5)

Overall, it seemed like a pretty solid pack of cards, and personally I like the look of this year's set, so I'm pretty excited about that (why they made a Mariano Rivera card in the style of those ugly 1987 Topps cards, I don't know).  I still haven't gotten an actual scanner, so I won't go to the trouble (for now, at least) of putting up pictures of all the cards just yet, but I did go to great lengths to take a couple pictures of the Jason Vargas #269 card.  The flaw was that the wrong statistics were printed on the back, so it should still give you a pretty good idea what the set looks like as a whole.

I made this extra-large so you could read the stats printed on the card yourself.

 If you're wondering, Jason Vargas has never played for the Indians.  If you want to see his correct statistics, you can click here to get to his stat page at mlb.com.


I'm interested in what you guys think about the new cards!  If you have bought a pack already yourself, please feel free to chime in!  I finally have the Internet at my home, so hopefully I'll be able to write on here more often.

Frustration!

Well, it has been nearly two years since I've done any significant selling online, and I am feeling a tad frustrated now that I'm trying to get back into it.  Data feeds to Google and similar sites were a fairly new thing when I was last doing this are now the total norm, and I feel like I have to go and learn how to do it all from scratch!  It is rather frustrated.  I know it probably sounds rather dramatic, but I feel like my time away from being able to get onto the Internet constantly is like being in prison for a couple years and now I have to relearn how to function in normal society again now that my sentence is nearly over. I can handle running around in the "real world" just fine, but I almost feel as if I have to relearn how to do Internet sales again, because of all this feed stuff.  I'm a pretty smart guy, I think, but reading lists of technical details on what kind of things are allowed in a feed and watching equally technical, monotone-voiced videos about data quality aren't exactly helping me any.  I just feel like banging my head on the wall sometimes when I try to go through figuring all this stuff out.

See, this video above is the kind of helpful videos that they give you to watch!  I hope you enjoy it as much as I did! (ha ha)

Labor Peace!

Major League Baseball agreed to a new five-year collective bargaining agreement the other day.  I'm really excited because almost all my cards I'll soon have available (yeah, sorry, I'm still working on that) for sale are baseball cards, and that would pretty much kill this whole online card shop thing right from the get-go if there were a strike.  I was pretty sure they would get it done, though, because baseball's labor front has actually been rather peaceful the last few years, despite having a stormy past.  That being said, seeing all the problems that the NFL had and the NBA is continuing to have, I was a bit nervous.  But it seems to have all worked out in the end.  

Here's a link in case you want to know all the nitty-gritty details:

http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20111122&content_id=26025274&vkey=news_mlb&c_id=mlb

'Till next time!

Selling Soon!

My logo from an earlier attempt at
doing online sales drop-shipping
computer and video games.

Well, even though I'm a long ways from getting a full-blown website going, I'm devising a way to get some sales, perhaps "test sales," if you will, going.  See, I already have a storefront at atomicmall.com from when I was selling computer games online under the name "Stu's Video Games." (See picture above.) I really like using that site, and through it I have a feed already that gets my products featured through Google Shopping automatically when I post things to the site.  The best part is it's free to post items.  The biggest problem I have is that selling trading cards under the name "Stu's Video Games" is rather misleading, and likely to attract the wrong audience.  But I just thought of all this a little bit ago, so hopefully by the time I post next I'll have figured it all out and, with any luck, actually have something that somebody could potentially buy from me! 

Organizational Progress

One of the things that I didn't get to last time in regards to problems I'm facing is that I have a whole bunch of semi-organized baseball cards that I need to organize in order for this project to become very effective.  I had organized a considerable amount of the ones I have available, and I have been working hard to get more of them organized in a manner that if somebody were to want to purchase it, I could actually find it for them and subsequently send it to them.  As you can clearly in the photo to the right, I've been hard at work!

Beginning Challenges

Well, like any endeavor worth undertaking, my goal of establishing an affordable online card store has some challenges that I will need to overcome.  I've thought of a few major ones that I will address today, as that will perhaps get me thinking of potential solutions.

Here are some of the potential problems I need to overcome, listed in the order greatest to least importance, in my personal opinion:

1. I don't have the Internet at home.  This, needless to say is a huge one.  It is virtually impossible to run any sort of Internet-based store without the Internet.  I typically use the Internet at my mother's home, as well as the local library, and a local coffee shop.  Even when I have the Internet, Pocatello, Idaho, where I currently reside, was recently rated as having the nation's slowest actual Internet connection speed, so even when I am on the Internet, it can be a bit frustrating, both in waiting for my computer, and in the fact that I could go to some random town, like, say, Hampton, Iowa, and be able to find a better Internet connection than here.  Fortunately, my wife has to take an online class for school, and she finally decided that we're going to get it sometime before the next semester starts in January, so while I can't do anything about the speed, the availability of the Internet will shortly resolve itself.  HOOORRAAYY!!
2. My scanner isn't working well. Having done direct Internet sales a few previous times, I know that having a good picture is utterly important, and the best way to get pictures of baseball cards is to simply scan them in.  The printer/scanner which my wife and I inherited this past summer works beautifully as a printer, but the scanner scans images in rather fuzzy, and I don't want my potential customers thinking that I'm selling them shoddy baseball cards!
3. I haven't blogged before!  It's true.  But I decided I should start doing it, because I have heard that blogging regularly on a website a way to get it to move up in search engine rankings. Specifically, one of the things search engines look for is frequently added content, particularly words.  Plus it will help when more people start reading and commenting on my blog, hence doing some of my work for me! In the meanwhile, I have to learn how to use this thing, and add pictures and links and so forth, so it will look more visually interesting than it currently is (or isn't).  I find it ironic that as the world is embracing microblogging for the purpose of changing the world and overthrowing world governments and so forth, I'm just barely getting into regular blogging for the purpose of starting a small business.  This is so 2008.  I guess I had better catch up sometime, so this is as good a time as ever.

Well, to go along with the first problem I addressed, I am out of time to write more, but perhaps I'll come back to it the next time I'm online!