Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood gets bigger with upcoming USPS stamp

Would you be mine? Could you be mine?

The answer is “yes,” when it comes to stamps for children’s television icon Mister Rogers as the U.S. Postal Service will issue a new stamp featuring him late next month.

It will be formally unveiled at a dedication ceremony on March 23 at WQED’s Fred Rogers Studio in Pittsburgh — an event open to the public — and should go on sale at that time, too. These Forever stamps will cost 50 cents each and will also be commonly collected as sheets. He’ll share the stamp with one of his puppets, King Friday XIII.

Believe it or not, it’s also not his first collectibles appearance.

Chris Cornell’s lengthy career includes very little cardboard

This is one of those black days for music fans.

Soundgarden and Audioslave singer Chris Cornell — one of the iconic voices of grunge music in the 1990s and a successful performer in all the years since — has died at 52.

Known for his intense guttural sound but also dramatic range, Cornell was part of six studio albums with Soundgarden and three with Audiosoave as part of a career that spanned more than 30 years and included two Grammy awards.

“For me to make a connection with music it has to either have a visceral nature, whether it’s anger or aggression or that kind of passion which shows up in rock music, or there has to be some sort of melancholy and introspection, something about it that makes you feel your own pain,” he once told Rolling Stone.

But, when it comes to cardboard, there’s not a lot to go around to note his lengthy career.

Board Buzz: Must-read threads on the Blowout Forums (Sept. 26)

The Blowout Cards Forums are where thousands of collectors converge daily to discuss, well, a little bit of everything. Here are five threads about collecting and more that you should check out right now.

What’s Buzzing Today: Jose Fernandez reactions, Carson Wentz’s start, Pro Set & more.

Kenny Stabler auction commands thousands via awards, memorabilia

Earlier this month the late Oakland Raiders quarterback Ken Stabler entered the Pro Football Hall of Fame but this past weekend the treasures from that career entered the hands of collectors around the world.

The auction of “Snake” Stabler’s personal collection of memorabilia via Pristine Auction ended on Sunday night with one six-figure item that didn’t reach its reserve and many others of note. In all, the auction generated nearly $200,000 in sales.

The priciest item was his 1976 Hickok Belt Award for Professional Athlete of the Year (above), which reached $107,427.60. It’s an honor that was awarded the final time with Stabler’s win and this is the first copy of the award to hit the open market. It’s an 18K gold belt buckle with a three-carat diamond, a three-carat ruby, a three-carat sapphire and 26 diamond chips totaling 5.5 carats.

Dennis Green is who we thought he was — a coach with very few cards

“They are who we thought they were” may be a sound bite he’s remembered for, but Dennis Green also will be remembered as being what many thought he was.

A pretty decent football coach.

The former Minnesota Vikings and Arizona Cardinals leader died from an apparent heart attack on Friday at age 67. He last coached a decade ago with the Cardinals, going 5-11 to cap his 13-year coaching resume with 113 wins and 94 losses.

Buddy Ryan’s defensive dominance didn’t translate into much cardboard

He was a coach for two of the greatest teams in NFL history, a defensive mastermind and a coach that his players revered.

He’s Buddy Ryan, a 26-year veteran of the coaching ranks and an innovator in the game. He was a young defensive coach for the New York Jets that won Super Bowl III. He was the brains behind the 46 defense and the dominating Chicago Bears that steamrolled their way to a victory in Super Bowl XX.

“Buddy was such an integral part of the Chicago Bears and the ’85 Bears, it was unbelievable,” former Bears coach Mike Ditka told NFL.com. “There’s no way we win anything without that defense, without his coaching and I think everybody understands that. We won because of our defense, we can never forget that. That’s just the way it was.”

He died on Tuesday at age 82 — and he’s also a legend you won’t find often on cardboard.

Old sets can include a few surprises … like Pro Set’s UK MusiCards

It sounded like a fun, cheap rip of some oldschool wax — a late-night buy just because it was a good deal — but it turned into another lesson about old cardboard.

This time, the product was a long-forgotten (and maybe unknown to some) release from Pro Set back in 1991 — the company’s UK edition of SuperStars MusiCards.

To those of you who were around for Pro Set, you probably fondly remember the football card chases created by the Dallas, Texas-based company in 1989 and 1990 and the overproduction that was happening but we never saw because everybody (and their mother) was buying. By 1991, many of its products — and there were many in the non-football realm — arrived with a thud. Not because they were bad but because they were trying new things and new things didn’t always work. (And because the presses kept on rolling.) By 1993, the company was back down to football and by 1994 the company was gone completely.

And if you weren’t around then? Well, you missed out on some of the best simple cardboard of all times … and one example of that is this 1991 SuperStars MusiCards UK Editon.

Prince can be found on two 1991 Pro Set MusiCards … but not much else other than his memorable records

More than 100 million records sold, seven Grammy Awards, an Oscar, four films, countless albums and one of the better Super Bowl halftime shows in history.

The accolades and memorable moments in the career of Prince Rogers Nelson, aka Prince, are plentiful, but fans of the 57-year-old who died on Thursday have just two options for collecting the star on trading cards that were released by a major manufacturer and actually show him on the front.

They come from the 1991 Pro Set SuperStars MusiCards UK Edition.

Making the Grade II: Corey Seager Pristine, a WrestleMania upstart, legends & Sheldon Cooper’s shirt

Like many collectors, Buzz is a fan of grading and knows that there are many reasons that collectors choose to slab cards. Sometimes it’s to enhance the appeal and protect them when selling. Other times it’s to protect an investment for the long-term or to protect for sentimental reasons. Or, it might be just for fun or curiosity about a potential grade.

Here’s the second Grading Diary here on The Buzz …

Buzz List: Five top Santa Claus cards *serious* collectors need right now

With the holiday season here, cardboard is probably on the minds of many Buzz readers as they wonder what might await them soon.

Others, like Buzz, might be thinking of Cardboard of Christmas Past — you know, some of the Santa Claus trading cards we’ve seen throughout the years. Most of it’s trivial and not all that collectable — but they all stand out in a way compared to our traditional sports cards.

1989 Pro Set Promos #1989
When Dallas-based Pro Set created this card during its first season of making football cards in 1989, it sparked a trend that we saw in not just football cards but other areas in the years that followed. (Boy are there some bad Photoshop jobs there in the 1990s.) For all intents and purposes, though, Buzz would call this one a “Rookie Card.” Yes, there were previous non-sports cards — but this was the one that put cards like this on the minds of the sports-collecting masses after it was mailed out to dealers and selected NFL-related people.