Almost a perfect game

Great stuff.  I come home today to a bubble mailer on the dining room table, and as I always do, I look to the name in the upper left corner.  Looking to see which of the many great people in the blog world has sent me some goodies.

Today's name I didn't recognize right away.  It had been a while since Tom from The Angels, In Order and I had traded, or even conversed.  No worries there though, because Tom was right on the money with these cards.

There was 20 cards in the envelope, divided up evenly for me to create two posts.  The first 10 cards are from a parallel set that I started working on a while ago, but kind of put on the back burner for the past few months.

Say hello to 10 Upper Deck X die cuts...

I put the cards in numerical order before I scanned them just to make them easier to put away later.  The first five represent a full house, Indians full of Rockies.  That's just how it worked out.

A lot of stars and big names (at least in 2008) were in this lot.  I wondered where Milledge was once I saw his card, I found out that he's in Japan playing for the Yokult Swallows.  

If Tom had sent me two more of the X die cuts, I would have had a perfect game.  Yes, I bowled a lot growing up and seeing the X's always reminds me of that.  No, I never threw a perfect game myself (though I did throw 15 consecutive strikes over two games once...).

Tomorrow, I add to one of my PCs, plus one more card for another set that's been neglected.

Thanks for reading, Robert

Just because it's not gold, doesn't mean it's not gold

About a month ago I was fortunate to land quite a few gold parallels that I had won on eBay.  I had a few members of the blogosphere contact me looking for some of them for their own collections.

One of the trades I completed was with Jim who writes the great GCRL blog.  The link documents what I sent his way, and today I received his end of the trade.

Before you ask, yes there were gold cards in there.  Those 4 have already been removed from the Serial #'d Insanity want list and will be featured in a SNI marathon coming soon (you read that right...).

Of course, there was a nice bit of blue and white in the envelope also, both baseball and hockey!!  Let's start with the Jays.

A couple of sets that I really haven't devoted a whole lot of time chasing this year, Bowman base and Topps Archives were right on top.  I probably should have put together a want list for these sets, but I really never even thought about doing that to be honest.   Don't know why.

The placement of the Jays logo on the Reyes card is rather unfortunate

With all the different parallels in Bowman this year (blue, gold, orange, silver ice, hometown) it's almost as if I'd be chasing another Topps product.  Wait a minute...

I like the 2000 Topps card of Homer Bush.  How can you not like the guy whose name is a baseball play?  You don't see too many kids named ground rule double (OK, now I know I'm stretching it).

What I wasn't expecting in the envelope, but were most warmly welcomed in the house when I saw them, were these two Leafs beauties.

71-72 OPCs!!!!  That was a holy shit moment right there.  One of the best vintage hockey sets produced in my opinion.  I love the vintage style Leafs logo on the lower right, not as classic as the one on the Doug Gilmour card from a few days back, but still great.  One day, I will own this set, but for now I'll be very happy with two more cards to add to my Leafs collection. 

The backs are great as well, let's look at McKenny's...

Now I don't recall if McKenny ever did any acting, but I do know that he was the sports anchor on Toronto station CITY for decades.  Jim was very well spoken and was great in front of the camera. 

Like I said, just because there's no gold border, doesn't mean that these cards weren't golden for me.

Thank you Jim!!  Very much appreciated...

Thanks for reading, Robert

Eighty One

(Warning:  Extensive viewing of junk wax era cards may be hazardous to your health)

I've lived in western PA for over 15 years now.  I arrived well after the run of success the Pirates had in the early 90's,  and the Buccos were already stuck in mediocrity.  Some decent players were part of the club in the late 90's when I arrived, but the team just couldn't get over the hump. 

Pitchers like John Smiley and Bob Walk were nowhere to be found.

On came the new millennium, and the Pirates found themselves in a new home, PNC Park (there was a cartoon that depicted PNC as an acronym for Pirates Need Cash back then...) and there was hope that a winning team would soon be on the way.

But players like Jose "Chico" Lind and Gary Redus were nowhere to be found. 

On came the mid 00's, and the team was a wreck.  After 4 more years of losing records with Lloyd McClendon at the helm, the Pirates started rotating managers and young talent on a regular basis.  Names like Bay, McLouth, Bautista, and Kendall were moved as they were approaching large contracts befitting their performances. 

Players like Tom Prince and Don Slaught were nowhere to be found. 

For most of the first dozen years that I've lived in PA, I would watch maybe a dozen games on the TV at most.  It was painful to listen to, read about, or watch the Pirates.  Then finally, a glimmer of hope in 2009.  The team announced that it was going to totally rebuild with youth, and part of that was calling up a 22 year old phenom...

even though that happened, cartoons like this still ran in the Pittsburgh area...

2009 & 2010 were miserable, but the Pirates began the youth movement, bringing in kids like Walker, Jones, Alvarez and Tabata.  Trades were made, bringing in young pitchers such as Morton and MacDonald.  The nucleus was beginning to take shape.  Clint Hurdle was hired, and there was hope for the first time in a long time in Pittsburgh.

A couple of heartbreaking years ensued, and the young Pirates were learning how to win.  The kids also learned that the season is long, and you have to keep going for 162 games to achieve the kind of success that they wanted.

Last night, the city of Pittsburgh (and the surrounding area) breathed a sigh of relief.  20 years of losing had finally come to an end.  I will say this for the people of Pittsburgh, they certainly were a lot more patient that someone in say Chicago, New York or Los Angeles would have been if their club had been on such a skid.

Yes, this post has had a little bit of humor, and a lot of personal opinion.  But I can honestly say this.

I've never seen a city anywhere that was as happy as Pittsburgh was to see the number Eighty One last night.

No matter what happens the rest of the way for the Pirates, this season is a success as far as I'm concerned. 

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

Sampling, pt.1

While playing chauffeur on Saturday for my wife and her two friends, I was asked to stop at Target so they could look around.   This was one stop that I had no problem with, because of the card display at the front of the cash registers.

Since there is only one current product on the shelves that I'm working on set wise (2013-14 OPC hockey), there wasn't a whole lot on the display that really stood out.  I wound up deciding on a handful of OPC packs (of course), and a couple of products that I hadn't planned on purchasing at all this summer (GQ and Bowman Platinum). 

I guess you could call it "sampling", maybe somebody more in the know could help me out there. 

I figured that I'd get a couple of posts out of what I pulled, splitting the posts up by sport.  Let's start with the hockey goodies.

This year's OPC set is probably one of my most favorite of the past few years.   That's probably why I've bought as much as I have already.

The legends photography is always top notch, and this year is no different.

What makes them so special for me this year is the photos aren't generic ones that have been used many times in the past.  The Mike Bossy photo in the center is one of the best I've seen so far this year.

The rookies so far have left something to be desired.  The hyped up "double rookie class" is proving to be a tough one to crack, at least for me.  The only big name RC I've been able to snag is the Jonathan Huberdeau. 

I seem to be pulling all the rookies that played a handful of games last year.  It's even harder because the teams I follow didn't play any western conference teams last season, therefore making the rookies on that side of the league a little more "unknown". 

I pulled just one of the rainbow parallels out of the 5 packs I bought.

Not sure why every time I see this guy I think of "skillet" instead of Skille

I like the rainbow parallels.   Not enough to chase the whole set of all 600, but if the Leaf parallels were to find their way here, I wouldn't be upset at all. 

This next card is my favorite card of the set so far.  It's not too often that I say that about a base card, but the vintage uniform featured is fantastic...

The Gilmour card features him in the circa 1930's Leaf jerseys.  I love the old style design and logo, I've always thought that the logo looked much more "natural" than the computer generated logo of today.  This is the 2nd base card for Gilmour that I own, which is good because I will not have to chase an extra copy down for my Leafs collection. 

Nothing overly fabulous in the 5 packs, but still some stuff worth showing off.  Next up, GQ & BP.

Thanks for reading, Robert

Sakic Sunday: #'s 301 & 302

Just a quick Sunday morning post to show off the first two cards from this year's O-Pee-Chee release to go into the collection. 

These 2 cards came to me courtesy of an eBay auction, $0.49 cents plus shipping.  The retro parallels are interesting, I wouldn't say that they are growing on me, but I do like that they follow the color scheme of the base set.  At least the sticker insert on the right is using a photo that I don't recall having seen on a card previously.

The march to 400 is on!

Thanks for looking, Robert

A good way to start the weekend.

Outside of playing chauffeur for three women (which really isn't that bad), I'm having a pretty good start to the long weekend.  With two of my wife's friends in town, I have carte blanche to do whatever I feel like until Monday afternoon.

I decided to keep on going with the great cleanup of the cards on my computer desk, part of which is a nearly one foot high stack of Blue Jay cards that need to be cataloged.  I was able to get through about 100 of them last night, and I figured what a better way to get in a post than to count down the ones I went through, 5-4-3-2-1 style.

Let's start with 5 Roberto Alomar cards...

No, they're not crooked because I've been drinking

Later this year I'm planning to go through my Blue Jays cards and do some kind of countdown.  You can be sure that a couple of these will be in that list.  The '93 Upper Deck in the top row center might be one of the best base cards I own, what a great picture!

A set that I couldn't afford back when it came out, the '92 Topps Stadium Club, is one of the best sets in my opinion of the 90's.  Here's 4 of the Blue Jays from that set...

Pat Tabler might be the only member of the '92 World Series team that I haven't featured on the blog at all.  Tabler was a first round draft pick of the Yankees, and was once traded for a pair of decent pitchers (Bill Caudill and Jay Howell).  Tabler was known as a clutch hitter, and was a career .489 hitter with the bases loaded.

Remember the cards in a can, Pinnacle Inside?  Not the greatest idea ever to come to the hobby, but at least somebody was trying.   Here's three Blue Jays from that set for you...

Boy, I remember the Jose Cruz Jr. hype.  He was going to be the next big thing in Toronto.  Jose was a 30-30 man in 2001, and left the club that year via free agency.  Jose never approached 30 in either category again.  Shawn Green also had a 30-30 season in Toronto in 1998.  The next year, he was a 40-40 man.  the following year, he was a Dodger.  The Jays had to decide which of Green or Delgado they could sign, because both of the sluggers were going to demand big contracts.  Delgado wound up remaining a Jay until 2004, and still holds the club record for most homers in Toronto with 336.

What would a post be without a couple of parallels?  How about a couple of 1994 Score Gold Rush cards

Jack Morris just a little under 68% of the vote in last year's HOF balloting.  254 wins, 3 times a 20 game winner, and an incredible 11 seasons with 10 or more complete games are a lot of numbers that in my opinion should have helped get him in the HOF.  The 3 World Series titles shouldn't hurt either.

Last but not least, one of Bowman's Best.

I like the card, that's the only reason Green is being shown twice.

Hey, only a few more hundred Jays to go through!  Ahh, the joys of collecting. 

Thanks for reading, Robert