Way back in early November of 2013 I won a box of 2013 Topps Archives Baseball cards at my local card shop's anniversary party. In that box I pulled a redemption card for a 2013 Topps Archives Framed 1973 Mini Auto of Frank Robinson. Yesterday it was finally delivered to my house, after nearly three years of waiting.
In the envelope was that letter, letting me know that Topps would not be putting frames on the Frank Robinson Framed Mini Auto, so I shouldn't be expecting that. They also let me know that they were including a bonus card because I had waited so long on this redemption.
Here's what the card looks like. It's pretty cool, I guess, although Robinson kind of ran out of room there at the end of his signature. The card is hand-numbered # 24 / 25. It's a weird size, too. It's smaller than a regular mini card, but bigger than a tobacco-size mini. I think this card would look a lot nicer in a frame. I feel like I should devote more words to this card since I waited so long for it, but I don't really have much else to say. I do like the 1973 Topps card design. At one point I started a 1973 Topps set build, but didn't get much further than buying one card lot before I moved on to other things.
Here is the bonus card that Topps included in the envelope. It's a relic card of Carlos Gonzalez from 2014 Topps Mini Baseball. It's an okay card, and the relic swatch at least has a pinstripe in it to keep it from being another plain white piece of cloth.
So that's the end of that redemption journey. I've currently only got one redemption outstanding now, a Kawhi Leonard autograph from Panini that I've had in the system for nearly three years now. The card was actually made a couple of months ago, but I guess they only sent some of them out. I wasn't one of the lucky few who received their copy of the card.
Now that I've showcased all the colored parallels from my boxes of 2013 and 2014 Top Mini Baseball, here are the relics from those boxes. Each box promised one relic or autograph, but out of the many (many, many) boxes of both years I opened I only ever pulled one autograph. The autographs in this stuff were hard to find. Kicking things off is this PWS (Plain White Swatch) of Albert Pujols from the 2014 set. I like the design on these cards. It's pretty simple but I think it looks good.
It was pretty nice to pull this Hyun-Jin Ryu card, as he is a guy I kind of PC. I don't know if I have ever gone out of my way to pick up his cards, but I like pulling them from packs. Hopefully he comes back healthy next year, as he missed the 2015 season and had shoulder surgery.
This is my representative from the 2013 set, a pinstriped relic of famed pitcher Kerry Wood. Unfortunately this card came out of the pack with heavy damage on the bottom edge, as you can see in the scan on the right. whole layers of the card were peeled back and torn. I assume the collation machine is responsible for the damage. It's kind of disappointing for the one hit in the box to be damaged, especially a nice relic with a stripe and a good photo on the front.
Most of these relics are jersey pieces, but I did get one bat relic in this Ian Kinsler card. The main thing that sticks out in my mind about Kinsler as I write this up is that he had some pretty negative stuff to say about the Rangers after they moved him to Detroit. I think the young kids these days call it throwing shade when you badmouth a person or organization like that.
Keeping things in Detroit, here is a PGS (Plain Grey Swatch) relic of Miguel Cabrera, This dude has put up numbers all over the place.during his career. I imagine he might find himself in the Hall of Fame one day.
That does it for this group of posts. I got a pretty good batch of relics in this bunch of boxes, especially compared to breaks I've done in the past where I got a bunch of relics of lower-tier guys. In these boxes every relic was a famous name.
I've already shown off the Gold and Pink parallels from a few boxes of 2013 and 2014 Topps Mini Baseball. Now it's time for the rare stuff. These Black parallels are limited to 5 copies each. I got this Miguel Montero from one of the 2014 boxes. It's a pretty cool card, I suppose.
These two cards came from the 2013 set. Again, nothing too earth-shattering but they are at least guys I've heard of before. Alex Rios is currently in the playoffs with the Royals. He's had kind of a down year individually, but his numbers haven't been too bad in the playoffs. Asdrubal Cabrera is similar because he's a few years removed from his best seasons, but dissimilar in that he is not in the playoffs with his current team, the Rays.
There are 1 / 1 Platinum parallel cards in these products, but I have never pulled one. I have pulled a handful of Printing Plates, though. This one is the Cyan plate of Brian Duensing. He's kind of a bullpen arm / spot starter who has played 7 years with the Twins.
Lastly I have this Sergio Romo Yellow Printing Plate from the 2014 set. I think my favorite part of this card is the numbers on the back of the plate, coming out from behind the sticker. I read an article about how these plates are made recently, but I forget where I saw it. It was pretty interesting. Maybe not as interesting as Mr. Rogers visiting the crayon factory, but still pretty interesting.
Yesterday I showed off the Gold parallels I pulled from a bunch of 2013 and 2014 Topps Mini Baseball boxes I opened in late 2014. Today it's time to display the Pink parallels from that same batch. I'll probably let the pictures do most of the talking here, as pretty much none of these hit on any players or teams I am very interested in. The Pink cards from both years are # / 25. You can see pretty clearly on these scans the condition problems that the colored parallels had coming out of the pack in 2014. Whatever they used to color the borders was a flaky chipped mess.
Matt Cain had a pretty good run from like 2009 - 2012, maybe even 2007 - 2012 as long as you don't put much stock in Wins when evaluating a pitcher. But 2009 - 2012 was the peak and he did come away with a couple of World Series Rings.
Even with his struggles the last three seasons, CC Sabathia has got some good career numbers and one Championship Ring to go along with a Cy Young Award. Yovani Gallardo has got an All-Star appearance and a Silver Slugger award, so he's got that going for him. He's actually kind of had a second peak to his career with pretty good numbers lately.
Eric Chavez has managed to hang around for about 7 years past his prime, which is an achievement in itself. Tommy Hanson can grow a ginger beard. He's been bouncing around a bit trying to hang on in the minor leagues. From what I can tell he is currently in the Giants system somewhere.
Juan Nicasio is a bullpen guy who made 53 appearances for the Dodgers this season. He's also the final card in this batch. I like getting these rarer parallels, but in a 660-card set you don't always pull superstars or PC guys. The boxes were cheap enough that I can't cry and moan too much about my pulls.
These pictures were buried at the bottom of my Scans folder for a very long time, and I've finally gotten around to chopping and cropping all the images. Judging by the contents of the scans vs. what I remember coming out of the average box of these cards, I think the scans are made up of the 'hits' from 4-5 boxes of 2014 Topps Mini Baseball and either one amazing or 2 really good boxes of 2013 Topps Mini Baseball. The scans are dated December 2014, so these were probably the result of some Black Friday or Cyber Monday deals. I've gone ahead and broken the scans out by insert type. Today's post features all the Gold parallels from the scans. This first card is a League Leaders card featuring the 2013 NL Home Run leaders Pedro Alvarez, Paul Goldschmidt, and Jay Bruce. The Gold cards from 2014 Topps Mini have a print run of 63 cards while the Gold parallel in 2013 had 62 copies of each card.
The star of this trio is Adam Wainwright, who was unfortunately injured early this season and missed much of the year with a ruptured Achilles tendon. Somehow he was able to make a very rapid recovery and made 3 relief appearances late in the season, just 5 months after the injury. That didn't help my fantasy teams any, though, as I drafted him at the top of my rotations in a couple of leagues this year.
Anibal Sanchez is another guy I drafted in a couple of fantasy leagues, although not in the early rounds like I did Adam Wainwright. His numbers did plenty of damage to my teams' pitching lines before I dropped him. I didn't do very well in fantasy baseball this year. It was nice to pull a Josh Reddick Gold parallel as he is one of my main PC guys. I haven't added a whole lot of his cards lately, though. The 2014 Mini parallels suffered heavily from chipping and flaking along the edges and corners.
One of the 2013 Gold cards was this World Series card featuring the moments leading up to some man love between Sergio Romo and Buster Posey.
I can't say I have any love for the Giants. Madison Bumgarner has pet Basset Hounds, though, so I guess there is something good about the Giants. Their fans do seem pretty devoted, at least among the category of 'people I know who are Giants fans.' Here's my Basset Hound:
He's kind of a lazy turd, which makes him a perfect pet for me. His fur is super soft, which is pretty much why we keep him around.
Here are the rest of the 2013 Gold cards. Nothing too crazy there. Motte's beard game is pretty strong, so I tend to take notice og his cards. Kyle Seager has been a pretty decent sleeper player in fantasy baseball the last couple of seasons. He hasn't got the big name or the big market appeal, so he comes at a discount in drafts.
This guy, however, does not come at a discount. Most years over the last decade or so he has been worth the high pick, but 2014 and 2015 saw most of his counting stats dip a bit over previous production that led to two MVP Awards and plenty of voting consideration in the years he didn't win the award.
Jason Motte and his beard make another appearance in this post, this time with his 2014 card. That grip on Matt Thornton reminds me of an idea I had to photoshop fruit into the hands of players so that they all would appear to be standing around holding apples and pears and stuff. It would work especially well in sets with a lot of close-up posed shots, like Heritage.
Jeurys Familia racked up 43 saves in the regular season and he's come away with 5 saves so far in the postseason. Pretty good stuff. The Astros could have used a bullpen arm like his for their playoff run. The Mets are a game away from a World Series berth. If the Blue Jays and Cubs don't put something bordering on miraculous together it looks like there's gonna be a Royals - Mets World Series for 2015.
Closing things out (shoulda put Familia's card here; then that would have been a good pun) is this trio. Brad Peacock started one game for the Astros this year, then went on the DL with an intercostal strain. He could come back in 2016. Nelson Cruz was an All-Star for the Mariners this year, hitting 44 home runs and batting .302 on the season. Pretty good numbers. Josh Beckett's card shows the chipping and flaking that this year's parallels had, especially along the right edge there. Josh Beckett retired after his 2014 season was derailed by injury. He was in the Cy Young conversation in 2007 and a 3-time All-Star. He put up decent strikeout numbers for a starter throughout his career, so I had him on a few fantasy baseball rosters over time.
That does it for the Gold parallels from this batch of 2013 and 2014 Topps Mini baseball parallels. This is by far the longest of the four posts I've put together for these cards, as the Golds were the most numerous parallels in these sets.
I've had a couple of pink cards in my Drafts folder for a while, so I thought I'd knock them out in one quick post. Most of the stuff I have in my Draft folder has been there for so long that I don't really remember the circumstances under which I acquired it. I will rarely pass up a chance to acquire a Pink parallel of a player I collect if the price is right. This first one is from the 2014 Topps Update Series and features Jon Singleton. It is numbered # 14 / 50. A few weeks ago it looked like Singleton might be called up from AAA, but Chris Carter has begun to hit the ball a little bit and that doesn't leave much room for Singleton. Maybe he'll get a chance sometime during the year, but it's far from a sure thing at this point.
Josh Reddick has had a pretty good 2015 so far, although the same cannot be said for his team, the Oakland A's. They sit in last place in the AL West, 9.5 games behind the Houston Astros (this may or may not be true by the time this post goes live, but it'll probably be close). You'll have to look elsewhere on the club for answers as to the Athletics' woes, as Reddick has been solid so far. While this card looks very similar to the one above, the serial numbering is different, reflecting a print run of only 25. That's because this one comes from 2014 Topps Mini, and the smaller Pink cards come with a smaller print run. This one is numbered # 21 / 25.
I've really been battling the pack-busting itch lately, just wanting to open anything. So far it's been limited to the blaster of Archives I opened the other day. 2015 Topps Series 2 releases in a couple of days, and I'm wondering if that might be the thing to scratch the itch. It's a relatively cheap break, and the flagship set is one I will always put together anyway. I'll have to look into it. I've been saving* a lot of money over the last little while by buying sets outright instead of trying to build them through pack-busting, but I still miss the whole ritual of peeling the plastic off the box, opening the packs stack by stack, and sorting through all the cards.
* It's not saving money if you didn't need the stuff you bought! Saving money would be putting it into an investment or under the mattress!
Cards on Cards recently held a box break featuring one box of 2014 Topps Mini Baseball. Unfortunately, the break faced some difficulties as he was the victim of some holiday mail theft and lost the original box for the break as well as some of the trade packages used as payment for the break. My outbound package was one of the ones that disappeared before arriving at his home. It contained a full Cardinals team set of Gold parallels from 2014 Archives, which I had acquired in my quest to complete the full Gold set. He was able to acquire another box for the break, and I finally got around to building a return package for him, which should be arriving at his new secret address in the next couple of days.
My team for the break was the Toronto Blue Jays, and I came away with one of the rarer hits in the set, a Black parallel of Moises Sierra. These cards are limited to 5 copies each, with this one being numbered # 5 / 5. Sierra spent a couple of years with the Blue Jays, but was selected off waivers by the White Sox in May 2014 and then selected off waivers from them by the Royals after the season was over. That's all I know about him. I also got a stack of base Blue Jays, which look like their counterparts in the eponymous Topps base set, only smaller.
Also included in the package were a number of cards featuring my favorite NBA team, the Houston Rockets. I believe this was part of his Guilt-Free Basketball Card Club, which is something we'd corresponded about but a trade had never actually occurred. I sent a few Clyde Drexler cards his way in my recent package, and I have more to send once I compare the rest of my collection to his Zistle list. I believe these two Hakeem Olajuwon cards were new additions to my Dream PC.
Yao Ming was set up to be a superstar for the Rockets, but nagging injuries prevented him from ever really getting things going. I don't have many cards from this era, as I got out of card collecting right around the time Hakeem went to the Raptors and then retired. It's a shame that the Ming/McGrady-era Rockets never lived up to their potential.
That Craig Ehlo card makes me laugh. Shane Battier was Daryl Morey's poster child for whatever the basketball name for sabermetrics is. Then Battier went off to the Heat and got himself a couple of Championship rings. I included the other cards in these scans because I liked the designs or the pictures on them.
Alongside a few more Ming highlights I've got some Rockets from the more recent iterations of the team. Chandler Parsons was briefly my favorite Rocket, but he followed the money and went to play for Dallas. That in itself isn't all that bad, but he keeps Tweeting and making references to how well he gets along with Mark Cuban, the Mavericks' owner. Maybe Mark Cuban runs his ship that way, but I don't like the idea of the players getting all comfy with the team owner. James Harden and his beard are pretty famous, but he and Dwight Howard came off as pretty arrogant during the team's offseason last year. I wonder if that attitude pushed away potential additions that could have helped the team. The current version of the team is pretty darn good, but they get beaten consistently by other good teams and I don't see them going far in the playoffs unless they get hot at the right moment.
It took me a while to get this post scanned and written up, but I really appreciated this package, especially with all the stress and confusion that Cards on Cards went through to get this group break done.
I've got a bit of Mini Fever, and here are the results of another big break of 2014 Topps Mini Baseball. First up is a little breakdown of the base cards in the box:
This box produced 225 base cards. There weren't any doubles within the box, but when it came to working on my set build there were only 80 new cards added to go along with 145 doubles. At this point I still have not pulled any triples, but have 176 total doubles across three boxes, or close to 80% of a box. For the set I moved up to 498 / 660 of the cards, or 75.45% of a base set. At this point any further boxes are likely to contain a lot of duplicates. Adrian Beltre hates to have his head touched, so a card by Topps featuring a teammate in the act of touching his head makes for good comedy. If I were a better detective I would know who that teammate is. He seems rather pleased with himself. I'm kind of surprised they didn't save this photo for Stadium Club, although the flagship set does usually have a few photography gems to go along with all of the torso shots and cropped-off limbs.
It would be a lot easier for me if all the parallels in a given box were horizontal or vertical. When you have a mix you either have to feature some cards sideways or split things up into a million different scans, which means more cropping and re-sizing work. At least this horizontal-format card is Puig, even though it's only a checklist. And from what I hear, Puig is like three guys back on the HOT list. He got supplanted by Jose Abreu, and then Abreu has supposedly been passed up by this Kris Bryant guy. At least Puig has some decent-looking cards because he's always violating the unwritten rules of baseball by celebrating and having fun. *Brian McCann's nose starts bleeding* This card is # 36 / 63, which is sort of a symmetrical number and probably qualifies as an eBay 1 / 1.
I also got Gold cards of these other three guys. Alex Cobb is probably spitting a substance into his glove to rub on the ball later. That Lonnie Chisenhall picture gets me every time. That has got to be the least flattering uniform in all of baseball. I guess throwbacks are cool, but some of them should stay in their own eras. I always think that Aramis Ramirez card is a Ryan Braun card, but it's not. It's Aramis Ramirez. Speaking of Ryan Braun, in my Cost Accounting class we did an example problem in class, in which a company called Louisville Sports is contracted with making corked bats for a Green Bay Brewers player named Ryan Brown. Cost Accounting is pretty boring, so they put little stuff in there like digs at sports cheaters to spice it up and add an edge to otherwise boring problems.
Ramirez is # 09 / 63, Chisenhall is # 21 / 63, and Cobb is # 03 / 63.
I got one Pink parallel in this box, this one of Mariners outfielder Michael Saunders. The rumor is that Seattle is looking to move him and get some other pieces for their outfield. He played pretty well last year when he wasn't injured, but his time on the DL led to criticism from the GM and counter-criticism from Saunders' agent. Don't fight with your GM, folks, or you'll get shipped off to Canada. Just ask Josh Donaldson. Of course, Saunders is from Canada so maybe he wouldn't mind getting shipped there.
edit: I just heard that Saunders was traded to the Blue Jays for J.A. Happ. I guess there's something to this theory of mine.
This Pink parallel is serially-numbered # 24 / 25.
Probably the hit of the box was this Yellow Printing Plate of A.J. Ellis of the Los Angeles Dodgers. I'm not a Dodgers fan, but it's kinda cool to get a printing plate out of a box. Yellow printing plates are probably the least of the four plate types (my personal order of preference is black-blue-magenta-yellow), but a 1 / 1 is still a 1 / 1.
The promised hit of the box was this Prince Fielder relic card. Some of the shine is taken off of this one due to Fielder's lost year, which was a part of the Rangers' collective lost season. Still, he's a name-brand player and so far my relic pulls have been much better this year than they were in 2013.
As a whole the box was pretty good, although I didn't make as much progress on the base set as I wanted. That is to be expected, though, as I get closer to that 100% completion mark. At around this point last year I think each box was getting me only 5-7% of a set in new cards and a while lot of duplicates.
