At the Trade Deadline 11: Coot Veal and the Vealtones Trade - A Little of Everything and a Miraculous Recovery

I got some cards in the mail from Dhoff over at Coot Veal and the Vealtones. It took me a while to send a package back out to him, but I sent four or five mailers out last week to various bloggers, Dhoff included, and they should be arriving over the next couple of days.

 

 

 

First up is this Roy Oswalt jersey relic. He had a pretty good run with Houston. While looking at his Wikipedia page, I learned about this incident from his minor league days:

In 1999, when Oswalt was with the Class A Michigan Battle Cats in the Midwest League, he suffered an apparently serious shoulder injury. After a month of pain in his upper shoulder, Oswalt was convinced that his shoulder was torn. Shortly thereafter, he was checking the spark plug wires on his pickup truck. He touched one of the spark plug wires, causing the truck's engine to start. The truck's electric current flowed through Oswalt's body, and consequently the muscles in his hand tightened on the spark plug wire. Unable to let go of it, Oswalt grasped the wire for almost one minute. Oswalt then claimed his foot slipped off the truck's bumper and he was finally "thrown off." After the electric shock, Oswalt told his wife that his shoulder's condition improved and that he no longer felt any pain. According to Sports Illustrated, he reported it thus to his wife: "My truck done shocked the fire out of me, and my arm don't hurt no more.” Apparently, the electric charge loosened accumulated scar tissue in the shoulder. Oswalt claims he has not felt any pain in his shoulder since the incident.

I guess I know what to do next time I am feeling some shoulder pain.

Also included was this jersey relic from Lance Berkman, who also had a pretty good run with the Astros, perennially finishing among the league's MVP candidates. He eventually won a World Series title with the St. Louis Cardinals in 2011. Also, his nicknames included 'Fat Elvis' and 'Big Puma,' which is a nickname he fabricated and campaigned for after he tired of the 'Fat Elvis' moniker.

 

 

Up next are a couple of odd-sized cards and a nice woodgrain-textured mini that reminds me of the paneling in the trailer we lived in for a couple of years early in our marriage.



Jeff Bagwell was well-represented in the package.

 

As were a number of other Astros. Kazuo Matsui is notable in my memory because I picked him up in fantasy baseball for stolen bases back in 2008, but he spent time on the DL with a rather embarrassing ailment, anal fissures, and was not very effective afterward.

King Felix makes an appearance with a 4-pack of cards...

 

 

...and so does Craig Biggio.

 

Even more Astros make an appearance in the package. Todd Jones is sporting quite a mustache in the upper right corner, and just beneath him Darryl Kile attempts to be the Lady Gaga of baseball with an interesting fashion choice.

 

No Astros package would be complete without some Nolan Ryan goodness, and there are several nice cards here. He looks especially thrilled to be photographed on the 1987 Donruss card down there in the middle row. I wonder if he plunked the photographer soon after the picture was taken? Team logo stickers are always fun, although it is hard for me to convince myself to ever peel and stick them.

 

Here are some cards of one of the guys who consistently beat out Roy Oswalt for the Cy Young award. This is not official, but I think Randy Johnson's nickname might have been Daddy Long-Legs. He is one spindly dude. Also, I'm pretty sure he is posing there in the upper right with an early prototype of the Hubble Space Telescope.



Here is a nice group of glamour shots that the Astros send out to modeling agencies looking for manly men to sell flannel outerwear. Look at those mustaches in the top row! It makes me want to drive to Cabela's right now and buy some Realtree camo shirts and a Blaze Orange vest.

Here are a couple more Mariners. That Martinez card comes from the same set as the Astros glamour shots above, but the light background kind of takes away from the effect, in my opinion.

 

Here are a few more cards for my player collections followed up by some more Astros. Mark Reynolds is one of those guys who can hit a lot of home runs for your fantasy baseball team, but his batting average is atrocious. It's kind of like drafting Dwight Howard in fantasy basketball. You might get some good stats in a lot of categories, but you can say goodbye to your free throw percentage. The risk is usually not worth the reward. I am not a big proponent of punting categories in fantasy sports, as giving up in one category means you have to make up those points elsewhere.

 

 

I saved all of the horizontal cards for last because they scan better together than they do mixed in with vertical cards. These feature a mix of all of the categories shown above, with player and team collections being represented to varying degrees.

 

There were sure a lot of cards in this package to sort through and scan. I appreciate the trade, and there are a lot of choice pieces here that fit nicely into my collection. I hope that my return package will be acceptable in comparison.