I Swung - And Up Popped A Trade

Hey everybody,

Clayton Kershaw dominated once again last night.

Kershaw is definitely the real deal.  You just know the team's gonna win when he takes the mound.  I was born too late to see Koufax pitch, but I've been lucky enough to see some of the other great Dodger dominators such as Don Sutton, Orel Hershiser, Fernando, Ramon Martinez, and Hideo Nomo; now, Kershaw.  It's a beautiful thing when guys like this pitch for your team.

A couple of posts ago, I started the "Trade Me (Almost) Anything" series, and the first post dominated like Kershaw.  That post helped introduce me to a new trade partner, Bert, and his blog, Swing And A Pop Up .  That might not seem like dominating stuff, but that was just the beginning.

Bert checked into what I collect and he noticed I was chasing the 1987 Hygrade Baseball's All-Time Greats set. 

* WHAM!! *  In one fell swoop of blogo-generosity and coolness, Bert absolutely crushed those set needs by sending me a  hy-stack of those Hygrades.

IMHO this is a an overlooked and undervalued set.  Perhaps it's not undervalued in a monetary way because the card stock is not very thick and printing standards seemed to vary as some card runs seem to have washed out colors.  That's OK to me because the positives of the set far outweigh those small negs.

There are 103 cards in the set and the checklist reads like the walls of the Hall of Fame.

There are the usual suspects, sure...

But there are also plenty of guys that I would never get a chance to get a card of, due to their cards being overpriced, simply not available, or being ignored while Topps prints tribute cards of the same 6 or 7 players over and over.  Bert's generosity and this set helped me to get cards of guys like Three-Finger Brown, Dizzy Dean and Pie Traynor, just to name a few.

Here's what the backs look like:

Here's one more great...

THANKS for a dominating trade, Bert!