Picking Up Some Laundry

I haven't felt much like blogging the last few days. I've still been cranking out posts here and there, but without a lot of enthusiasm. Maybe it's the changing of seasons or something. I've got several longer posts piled up that I'd like to get to, box breaks and the like, but the amount of effort required for those gets me down when I think about it.

There are a lot of people projecting big things for the Astros this year, which has me worried. I think they need better pitching. Texas is pretty good. Seattle is also pretty good, even though no one really talks about them. I am right in the middle of fantasy baseball draft season. The teams I've drafted so far have me thinking it's going to be a long year.

Here is a pretty neat card I picked up recently. It's a Jon Singleton Treasure Signature Materials card from 2014 Panini National Treasures Baseball. This is the Laundry Tag parallel, with a little bit of the laundry tag from a jersey in the relic window. The signature is on a bit of acetate sandwiched into the card. There are only so many relic swatches you can get from a laundry tag, so this one is numbered # 6 / 8. Singleton doesn't get a lot of cardboard these days, so it's nice when I can find something new from his days as a prospect on the upswing for my player collection.

From the back you get to see the signature in reverse, which I guess is pretty cool. All of the real estate it takes up displaces the other back-of-card elements, though, creating a cluttered appearance. I guess that doesn't matter too much, as card backs seem to be a lost cause these days anyhow, especially on high-end hit-based sets.

Jon Singleton 2014 Panini National Treasures Timeline

I feel like I've been posting a lot of non-sports stuff lately, which is likely to scare off some of my readers who are strictly sports card collectors. I've got eleven posts in my Drafts folder, and of those only two feature sports cards, with three more being borderline sports (NASCAR) posts. My Scans folder is a little more sports-centric, but a lot of the stuff in there has been there for a while because it either is of little interest to me right now or it requires a lot of work (i.e. cropping and aligning more than two photos) to get moved from Scans to Drafts. Anyway, I have had a hard time getting really excited about sports cards lately. My focus has been on Star Wars and comic books.

That doesn't mean I haven't been picking up baseball cards here and there. Most of my acquisitions have been for my Jon Singleton player collection. His cards are trading at a steep discount as he continues to struggle at the AAA level, so I can throw in a bid on just about anything with his name on it and have a good chance at winning. I picked up this National Treasures Timeline auto/relic pretty cheaply. I would think that a card with such low numbering would have a more interesting relic piece, as I've seen similar cards with higher print runs featuring multi-colored patches. This is from the 2014 National Treasures product put out by Panini and my copy is # 3 / 5 in the print run.

The back of the card features an expanded version of the photo on the front and a little write-up of Singleton's major league debut. The relic guarantee features Panini's certification that the relic piece in this card was actually worn in the game on June 3, 2014 when Singleton made his first appearance. That's kind of cool in this age of, 'This relic is not tied to any specific game, season, player, or sport,' disclaimers. I still think they could have chosen a better piece from the jersey to use on this card.

Since sweeping the Dodgers and winning a series against the Yankees, the Astros have lost series to the Twins and Mariners. They currently are splitting another series against the Twins, with tomorrow's contest deciding the outcome. After that comes a long stretch of games within their division that should determine whether they can remain on top of the AL West. They've only got a small cushion over the surging Rangers right now, and a few games one way or the other could push them right out. It remains to be seen whether Singleton will play a role in that battle, but with his current slump I wouldn't bet too heavily on it. The Astros have plenty of other low-average, high-pop players in the lineup already.