Inbound and Down #28: The Chronicles of Fuji

The Chronicles of Fuji.  Need I say more?  OK I will.  Mark is one of the best and longest lasting writers on the card collecting blogosphere, and I have had the good fortune of trading with Mark on a few occasions. 

I'm so far behind on my blog reading that I didn't notice until today that Mark had announced on his blog that he was sending packages (27 of them!) out to folks in the world, and I was one of them.

To be honest, I really don't remember sending him anything (it could have been a while ago, my mind is shot...), but I won't sneeze at the cards he sent me.

Why is it I don't remember Joe Carter as part of the Crash the Game set?  Right, the mind is gone...

OK, maybe the mind isn't that far gone, because I instantly recognized the Tony Fernandez on the right as being from one of the many 80's Fire Safety sets that the Jays released.  Love the old photo of Exhibition Stadium in the background.

A trio of Bowman Platinum gold.  Sadly, none of these 3 are currently with the club.

More Bowman Platinum, and a Topps Super insert from last year's Archives featuring Josh Donaldson.  Nice!

The Brett Lawrie card will go into his PC, the Jose Bautista card is sharp and I must be careful, and I have to admit, that Blue Jays logo in the center is the ugliest of them all. 

Didn't have my reading glasses on when I pulled this out of the envelope, and I said out loud "who the hell is this?"  I did not recognize Pat Borders at all with the mustache.  Cool jersey card though from the 2000 Black Diamond Rookie Edition set.  I had no idea that Borders was ever affiliated with the USA Baseball program, which makes this even more cool for me.

Mark, thank you for the great envelope, it is very much appreciated!!

thanks for reading, Robert

Sampling, pt. 2

So I decided to not be "left out" and purchased a rack pack each of Bowman Platinum and Gypsy Queen on Saturday while at the big red box.  Neither product is one that I'm going to build, but hey if a card or two could be sent to peeps as part of a trade, then the purchase would be worth it.

Let's start with the Bowman Platinum.  4 cards a pack for a little over $3 is quite a bite for the wallet, but the cards do look sharp.  The rack packs come with a trio of purple parallels, with only one of the three players that I pulled being a player that I'd heard of.

I've watched Yelich play a few times this season against the Pirates, and given a year or two could be a decent left fielder for the Marlins.  Both Pederson and Williams are at the AA level for their respective clubs.

I was able to pull a decent card in each of the packs.  My luck with Blue Jay parallels continues with pack #1:

The gold parallels look really nice, and I was happy to pull a Jose Reyes for the Jays collection. 

Pack #2 yielded a refractor of Roman Quinn, plus a couple of New Yorkers that someone might be interested in.  Luis Heredia had a solid season in West Virginia for the Pirates high A team. 

The third pack was the best of the 3, pulling a Jose Fernandez RC and a sapphire reprint card of Giancarlo "Michael" Stanton.  I mistakenly thought it was an autograph card at first, even still it's a nice card to snag.

Let's move on to the Gypsy Queen rack pack.  Similar to the 3 card purple add on in the Platinum pack, the GQ came with a 3 card white framed parallel pack.

To me, these really are beautiful cards.  Maybe the nicest parallel in any of the Topps products this year.  I wonder how Jonathan Niese would feel having to face Frank Robinson and big Cecil Fielder back to back in a lineup? 

The first pack gave me a chuckle, as side by side I found the base and the mini cards of Yu Darvish.

In the 3 packs were a couple of inserts, a Dealing Aces of Roy Halladay and a glove stores of Coco Crisp.

The Halladay card is really sharp, and any card that features an outfielder robbing someone of a home run is always cool.

In the final pack, my luck with autograph pulls recently continued.  At least I remember this guy...

That's a pretty nice signature that John Kruk has.  I only saw a handful of these on the bay, with an interesting range in price ($7 low, $24.99 high).  I'll hang on to this for a bit, see if there's a Phillies fan out there that might want to trade for it.

All in all, some decent packs came from my sampling this weekend.  I may have to try that again sometime.

Thanks for reading, Robert