What eBay Hath Wrought 100: A Stack of Randy Johnsons

I have had some mixed experiences with big grab-bag lots of single players lately. I have a hard time getting posts up about them for the same reason I have difficulty getting through all the teams in the 2013 SEGA Card-Gen set series of posts. There is a big time commitment that goes along with those posts because of the sorting, scanning, cropping, and writing that has to be done. With one or two packs of cards or a couple of singles it only takes a couple of scans and ten minutes to write a moderately coherent paragraph about the pictures.

I put in a bunch of bids on various lots of Randy Johnson cards, and this is a portion of the one lot I actually won. I got 54 cards for about $6.00, so it was just over a dime apiece for them. The majority of the cards are from his time with the Diamondbacks. There isn't much that is extremely spectacular in the lot, mostly a bunch of base cards from sets that I've never heard of. That's not a bad thing. It just means that the vast majority of these cards are from the years 1999-2003, when I wasn't very much into collecting and there was a large proliferation of card companies churning out sets. There seems to be a lot more innovation and creativity in the designs of these sets than there is in today's Topps-opoly.

Flipping through this lot makes me realize how awesome Randy Johnson really is on a baseball card. He's tall and gangly, so he kind of dominates a card just by virtue of all those limbs everywhere. His face is super-intense, so you get a lot of good facial expressions on his cards to go along with the wild mullet and mustache combo. Even his portrait and candid-style photos tend to be pretty good, like that one that shows him taking pictures with a huge camera. Looking at Randy Johnson cards makes me want to buy more Randy Johnson cards.

I personally can't think of Johnson without recalling that he absolutely demolished a bird with a pitch during a baseball game. If you don't want to watch the whole video, skip to 1:38 to see the bird-ball:

You obviously have to feel bad for the bird that gave up its life to that pitch. It sure added to Johnson's legend, though. I don't know that I would want to go stand in the batter's box against that kind of firepower.

And yes, one of the first things I did when the cards arrived was peel the protective film off of that Topps Finest card in the bottom right corner. Cards were meant to be seen and enjoyed, and that means the film has to come off. I would have liked to see more shiny stuff and some inserts in this lot, but for the money it was a pretty good bunch of cards. I really need to pick up a bunch more of his stuff, as he will probably be headed to the Hall of Fame sooner rather than later, and then he'll have the HoF premium attached to him.