An American Pastime in Canada

I am writing this a couple of days ago, so the standings are likely a bit different today than they were then. After an extended hot streak, the Astros are contending with teams like Kansas City and Toronto for the second Wild Card spot. There is still plenty of season left to play and anything could happen, but I am glad they've pulled themselves back into contention rather than hanging out at the bottom of the standings with Oakland and Los Angeles (of Anaheim).

I picked up this card of one of Toronto's pitchers from an eBay seller. I was kind of surprised to see it as a Buy It Now with a low price, but I snapped it up before anyone else had a chance to grab it. R.A. Dickey's cards aren't exactly on fire right now, but he still has a decent following and the seller probably could have got more for this card. I half-expected that the seller would cancel the sale or that the card would arrive with some major flaw that I had missed in the photos. None of that happened, though. This is the Green parallel of Dickey's card from the 2013 Panini America's Pastime Baseball, numbered # 06 / 10. It is kind of funny that this card is from a set celebrating America while featuring a player on a Canadian team.

This card kind of bothers me because of that flagpole on the back that runs across the text box for his height. I scanned the card a couple of times because I thought it was a dog hair on the scanner glass. I am sometimes a little slow on the uptake. I'm just really used to having to re-scan cards because of dog hair. That is the price I pay for liking large dogs with lots of fur. It's not a hair. It's part of the design of the card.