2010 SEGA Card Gen Lot

My 4th of July didn't go exactly as planned. We were going to take the kids to the water park, but I woke up with a headache, dizzy spells, and an upset stomach. So my wife and kids went to the water park and I mostly stayed in bed. I did manage to go out and get a handful of fireworks in the late afternoon, and after my family came home I went outside to set them off. It kind of stunk to be sick on the holiday, but I am feeling a little better this evening and should be able to make it in to work in the morning.

I have a full set of 2013 SEGA Card Gen cards and a pretty large number of cards from the 2012 set, but I don't have many from the earlier versions of the product out of Japan. A bunch of 2010 SEGA Card Gen cards came up on eBay recently, and I grabbed a fair number of them. For the most part I didn't bite on any of the higher-priced big names, but I got a lot of other guys from the set. Kendrys Morales' Wikipedia page says that MLB mistakenly called him 'Kendry' until May 2011, and you can see that on his card here.

I did wind up grabbing one big name in this lot, opting to pay a little more to get that Lance Berkman card into my collection. Other than that, this scan has a lot of relief pitchers and a couple of starters. And Nate McLouth.

Here are some card backs for you. I love all of the trading card game / video game imagery on these cards, with the star ratings and the power bars for different attributes. It seems odd to me that Lance Berkman has a relatively low total score of 75 and an 8-star rating, but I am guessing that certain attributes are worth more stars than others.

Here are the last eight cards from this lot. Carlos Gomez made the GIF and video circuit today for beating up a cooler with his bat. I hope he feels better now. I like that picture of Rod Barajas in his catching gear.

The seller also included a quartet of shiny bonus cards in the package. The highlight is probably that Jose Bautista in the upper left, but I also like that Refractory Dylan Bundy in the lower left.

Tim 'The Angel (of Anaheim)' Lincecum

I picked up a few SEGA Card-Gen cards of pitcher Tim Lincecum from a seller in Japan, and they arrived in the mailbox just around the time Lincecum signed a contract with the Angels in an attempt to get his career back on track. Actually they didn't actually land in the mailbox, because I had to sign for the package and the mail carrier brought it straight to the door.

This 2010 card came out just after Tim had won his second Cy Young award and just before he won his 1st World Series ring with the Giants. In SEGA Card-Gen terms, that means he gets 8 stars on the front of his card and a nice full ratings block on the back. I don't have many 2010 SEGA Card-Gen cards in my collection, so I am always happy to add a new one. This seller is the same guy I get most of my Card-Gen cards from. He doesn't post auctions all that often, but when he does there are usually a few things I jump on right away. I combined this Lincecum lot with some Japanese wrestling cards he posted to bring down the per-card cost for shipping.

This 2012 card features an identical number of stars and the exact same stat ratings on the back. Although Lincecum's 2010 and 2011 seasons were a step down from his Cy Young years, he was still among the best pitchers in the game, and when this card came out he was close to winning his 2nd World Series ring, this time pitching mostly in relief during the playoffs.

This 2013 card is not Lincecum's base card. This is his Foil Rare card, a special set that features a foil background with a SEGA Card-Gen logo on it and a slight ratings bump on the back over the base card, as well as a different picture and different numbering. You can see Evan Longoria's cards side by side on this post if you want to see how the Foil Rares differ from the base cards. For a long time R.A. Dickey's card from this set was my most-wanted card, but blogger Zippy Zappy helped me track it down from this same seller's webstore. The wheels were starting to come off on Lincecum's control by this point, but he was still a celebrity and a star, so he kept his high ratings in this set. If there had been future sets I imagine reality would have set in soon enough.

I hope Lincecum can revive his career with the Angels, as baseball is more fun when the exciting players are playing well. Of course I still want the Astros to catch up to the Angels and the rest of the AL West, but hopefully they can do that concurrently with a Tim Lincecum revival.

At the Trade Deadline 43: I Got Zippy-Zapped

A few days ago I got an unexpected bubble mailer in my mailbox. That's not entirely unheard of, but I am always suspicious that maybe I ordered something and forgot about it. I opened it up and found a familiar phrase on a card taped to one in a stack of several (re)packs of cards. I'd been Zippy Zapped!

Zippy Zapping is the calling card of the aptly-named Zippy Zappy from the blog Cervin' Torren' Up Cards. He's been pretty active on the Zippy Zapping front lately, as there have been quite a few reported Zippy Zappings around the blogs over the last week or so.

There are a few things you can almost always find in a typical Zippy Zapping. One of the main things is prospects. He is a fan of the Long Staten Island Yankees, but he carries a vast knowledge of the farm systems of most teams in baseball. I spend a lot of my time after receiving a package from him doing research, as I don't know nearly enough about even my favorite teams' prospects, let alone the prospects in any other system. I didn't scan all of the cards he sent, but I looked at a few lists of the Astros' top prospects and made sure to scan some guys from the Top 10. A.J. Reed is the up and comer who is rumored to be waiting in the wings if Jon Singleton can't get his bat together pretty quickly. Singleton is one of the guys I collect, so I am hoping he can hit well enough to keep Reed in the minors for a while still. 

Carlos Correa was last year's darling, playing his way to the AL Rookie of the Year award. Zippy Zappy included some nice cardboard of the young shortstop, including some prospect cards, a nice Diamond Kings card I hadn't seen yet, and his Heritage card from the 2015 High Numbers set. I haven't started a Correa PC yet, but I probably should. I guess I prefer to collect prospects like Singleton who haven't lived up to the hype. Their prices are lower.

These 2014 Bowman Draft Picks and Prospects Black parallels were all in sleeves with tags priced in Japanese Yen. I am pretty sure these parallels are from the Asia-exclusive version of the product, which includes several color variations not available in your standard Bowman product.

These brightly-colored parallels are all serially-numbered, with that Vincent Velasquez Prizm Draft card being an eBay 1 / 1, numbered # 001 / 100. It's the first one in the print run, yo! The other guys feature more pedestrian serial numbers. Velasquez is the only name I really recognize in this group, although Joshua Magee seems like I remember him in some back part of my brain.

Probably to keep my head from exploding at the sight of so many prospects, Zippy Zappy also included a number of cards featuring old guys from the Astros franchise, like Bagwell, Berkman, Qualls, and Tejada. There were others, but I have become a lazy scanner in my old age. My main memory from this group is drafting Tejada in fantasy baseball for a couple years after he was useful. I do a lot of dumb things in fantasy baseball, but luckily other players also are irrationally attached to players who have outlasted their usefulness or are prone to chasing prospects too early. Everyone has a weakness.

And here are some guys who contributed to the Astros' big run last year. I especially like seeing the progression of Keuchel's beard. I think Evan Gattis is still my favorite Astro, even though I don't really collect his cards like I should. It's hard to divert myself from my Singleton collection even to chase my favorite player on the team. I've gone too far down the rabbit hole.

Another Zippy Zappy signature is SEGA Card-Gen cards from Japan. The video game associated with these cards was discontinued, though, so these have all but disappeared from the usual acquisition channels. Zippy Zappy himself has announced that his supply is drying up. These are some of my favorite cards, so I am extremely grateful that he sent me three of them from his diminishing inventory. The 2010 and 2011 sets are not well-represented in my collection, so I was very happy to get two cards from 2011 in Wilton Lopez and Carlos Lee and a card of star pitcher Roy Oswalt from the 2010 set.

I didn't scan everything that Zippy Zappy sent, but I did scan a little of everything he sent. I am super grateful for the packages I receive from other bloggers and I do my best to pay it forward in the packages I send out. Zippy Zappy is one of the bloggers I am indebted to, as he has dropped some really nice cardboard bombs on me. Thank you!

At the Trade Deadline 33: A Long-Forsaken Zippy Zapping

I've been digging through my scans folder in an attempt to get everything cleared out, and I found a batch of photos tucked in between a bunch of 2014 Topps Mini scans. After some research I determined that this was a long-lost Zippy Zapping from the writer of the Torren' Up Cards blog, who is known for sending out very generous packages to unsuspecting bloggers. The date on the scans was 06 DEC 2014, so this thank-you post has been a long time coming. Probably the highlight of this first scan is the Robinson Cano Bowman card and its Chrome companion.

Mike Zunino's Chrome card down in this scan has its base twin up in the first scan. I probably should have scanned them together, but I didn't. George Springer has been playing well for the Astros in the playoffs so far (I am writing this last Sunday evening, just after Game 3 of the ALDS against the Royals), and I really hope the Astros can close the Royals out in Game 4. I guess by the time this post goes live we'll know how things worked out. I know people have mixed feelings about the All-Star cards in Topps Update, but I think they're okay. I like to see players in uniforms different than the ones we're used to seeing them wear. That Felix Hernandez card is pretty good; probably my favorite card from this scan.

I sat here for a little while trying to come up with something to say about any of these four cards, but there wasn't much there. Zunino and Montero got almost the same base card photo. It's a good thing Montero has that goatee or we're have no idea who was who.

Robinson Cano makes another appearance in this scan, this time on a Donruss card. There are several sets here, representing three different decades of cardboard.

It wouldn't be a Zippy Zapping without some prospects in the mix. If you keep up with his blog or his comments on other blogs, he manages to know something about nearly every prospect in the minor leagues. I can't even keep track of four or five big-league rosters, let alone all 30 teams and their attendant minor league systems. 

Zippy Zappy included a hit in the package, this Bowman Chrome Prospects Refractor Autograph of Dylan Unsworth. A little bit of Googling tells me that he is attempting to be the first South African to make the major leagues. He made it as far as AA this year and he is still pretty young, so there is time for him to achieve his goal. This autograph card is numbered # 011 / 500.

This Franklin Gutierrez card comes from Topps Attax, another in a long line of fairly short-lived baseball card games. I like the idea of sports card games, but in practice it seems like they don't work out well. I am not sure why. I guess this kind of game is a niche hobby within a niche hobby, and you just can't get enough people together in groups to build a robust community. I don't even know any other baseball card collectors in person, let alone baseball card collectors who might also be into gaming.

One of the hallmarks of a Zippy Zapping are cards from SEGA Card-Gen, a set of cards that went along with an arcade game in Japan. This component of Zippy Zappings is likely to go away sooner rather than later, as the game has been cancelled and I have noticed that the eBay and internet pipelines for these cards are drying up. I got lucky in this Zapping with a card from way back in 2010. I have a fair number of Card-Gen cards from 2012 and 2013, but this might be my only 2010.

Thanks for the Zippy Zapping! I feel really bad for losing this in my scan folder for so long. This was a great batch of cards, and it was poor sportsmanship on my part to leave this post on the shelf for so long. I hope you can forgive me someday!