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.

Josh Reddick 2013 Panini America's Pastime Impact Ink Red # 4 / 5

I am in Arkansas for work for a couple of days and the internet here isn't the fastest thing in the world, so I haven't been able to keep up on writing posts. I will try to post a couple of times while I'm gone, but they'll probably be short one-card deals like this one. This particular card have been sitting in my draft queue for a long time. There isn't really any reason for that. I just haven't had anything to say about it.

I still don't have a lot to say about it. It comes from 2013 Panini America's Pastime Baseball and features a sticker autograph of Josh Reddick, one of my PC players. This is the Red parallel of the Impact Ink autograph set and is numbered # 4 / 5. Last year I picked up the base # / 25 version of this card. Jumping back and forth between the scans on my computer I can't actually find a difference between the cards outside of the serial numbering. Maybe the foil is a different color and I just can't see it in the scan? I don't know. There might be dumber things out there than parallels that aren't different from each other, but I'm not sure what that might be. Anyway, it's another autograph of a PC guy and I am happy to have it in my collection.

2013 Panini America's Pastime Baseball Josh Reddick Silhouettes Prime

I already had the basic version of this card with a plain grey swatch, but when this Prime version of the card with a big chunk of yellow and green patchwork popped up I had to get it, too. This copy is numbered # 02 / 10. Outside of the numbering, the fabric, and the 'PRIME' designation on the back of the card, this card is the same as the base version. I haven't been watching the A's games much lately as I usually turn on the Astros' games if they are available on MLB.tv, so I don't really have a feel for how Reddick is doing this year. Baseball Reference says he's doing all right statistically, although it seems like kind of a wasted effort on an Oakland team that isn't really going anywhere so far on the season. There are still a lot of games left to play, so maybe they will heat up as the summer goes on. The Angels are creeping up on the Astros, and I have to wonder if Houston has what it takes to close the season out on top of the division.

A Few Scarce R.A. Dickey Panini Pickups

Over the past little while I have picked up some R.A. Dickey cards with relatively small print runs. This first one is a parallel of the Golden Leather insert from 2014 Panini Prizm. Cardboard Connection tells me that this is the Gold parallel, but it looks Yellow to me. In the past I picked up the Blue and Red parallels, too. I'm pretty sure I have the base version but I can't find it here on the blog, so I won't link to it. This copy is numbered # 04 / 10. It's a nice shiny card.

This card hails from 2013 Panini Prizm. It's part of the 2013 Panini Prizm USA Baseball set, and features an autograph that stayed mostly on the sticker. It's also a shiny card, and is numbered # 04 / 25.

Finally, here is a Gold parallel from 2013 Panini America's Pastime Baseball. It's numbered # 03 / 25, and the scan features a nice dog hair that I missed on the initial run-through. I haven't been paying much attention to the Blue Jays this year as the Astros are finally good enough to watch with some regularity. R.A. Dickey has had a pretty rough go of it so far, though, looking at his numbers. So far this year he is 1-4 with a 5.00 ERA and a 1.29 WHIP. His deeper stats are similarly ugly. It seems like he starts out slow most years, so maybe he'll find a way to get the knuckleball tamed again and finish strong, but right now he is struggling.