I didn’t really do a whole bunch of blogging, or even thinking for that matter, about baseball cards over the weekend, but today I realized that Saturday marked the 1 year anniversary of me making my very first post here at Condition: Poor. Of course, looking back on it now, it wasn’t really much of a post. Just 3 short sentences telling you, the reader, that I’ve been wanting to start a blog about baseball cards and now I did. I’m just noticing now that I didn’t even bother to capitalize the “I” in “I’ve”.

I really can’t believe that it’s been a whole year but I must say I’m pretty happy with what I’ve accomplished. I know my little corner of blogdom may not be the most informative or the most up-to-date but I feel like I’ve showed some pretty cool pieces of cardboard and shared some interesting insights on them. In the process I’ve met some cool folks and planted the seeds of some good friendships, which I guess is the real point of doing all this. I don’t get to meet a whole lot of people who are focused on collecting cards in my everyday life so I’m really glad that I have this blog to share my thoughts on the subject and get some feedback from other like minded individuals. I also feel like writing this blog has helped me gain some focus in what was a rather scatterbrained collection.

So in a way to say thanks to everyone out there who’s read this blog and thus encouraged me to keep going with it I’m holding an Offical Condition: Poor First Anniversary Giveaway Contest. Here’s how it’ll work.

Recently, I cashed in my cards at the Topps Million Card Giveaway. I sort of lost count of exactly how many codes I’d entered, but in the end I held 14 cards in my online collection, all of which I had shipped to me. I will put up one list of all the years of the various cards and another list of the names of who appears on the cards. Your job as contest participants will be to try and match up the year to the player. I’ll let people put in their guesses until August 15th. At that point I will reveal what cards I actually got sent to me from Topps and for each correct guess on your part you will get one entry into a randomized drawing for the big prize. If you guess 3 cards correctly, you get 3 entries. If you guess them all correctly you get 14 entries. Also, if you are following this blog you get a bonus entry. It doesn’t matter if you signed up 5 weeks ago or 5 seconds ago. I guess that means that the 6 people who are already following me don’t even have to do anything to get in. They already have one entry each.

Here is the list of years:

1958

1959

1960

1965

1967

1968

1969

1970

1971

1971

1973

1973

1976

1983

(Note there are 2 1971’s and 2 1973’s)

And here is the list of players (in alphabetical order):

Ken Berry

Ken Boyer

Dean Chance

Chicago Cubs

Tom Hall

Frank Kostro

Tug McGraw

Steve Renko

Frank Torre

Walt Williams

Gus Zernial

All you eagle eyed readers out there will notice that although there is 14 dates, there is only 11 subjects. I will tell you that one of the subjects on that list has 4 cards in the stack that Topps sent me. An additional twist to this little guessing game is figuring out who I received 4 cards of and figuring out which years. Those who’ve read this blog regularly probably won’t have too much trouble figuring out who it is.

Anyway, just leave a comment to this post listing your guesses and sometime after the 15th I’ll reveal the correct cards and who gets what entries. Then after that I will plug all the entries into Random.org a couple of times (let’s say 7 times) and whoever is on top will be the winner. Simple enough? Good. Now get to guessin’.

What’s that? You want to know what the prize is before you waste your time guessing? Well, you greedy little buggers, I’ll tell you. Since this anniversary happens to coincide with my recent push to get the SlangKo Heroes of the Diamond set done (and as incentive for me to actually finish it up) the winner will receive a complete set of all 60 Heroes of the Diamond cards printed out and hand cut by yours truly. I’ll also throw in a couple of random goodies that have been cluttering up the SlangKo corporate headquarters for good measure.

So there you go. Now get.

Tags: SlangKo Heroes of the Diamond
Filed Under: Contest by slangon
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