This Is What Happens When You Don't Know What You Have

Just about all I have left in my Draft queue is posts that will take a long time to write, and I've got a lot of other stuff going on right now that takes up a lot of time. I hate to have long pauses between posts, but I don't think I am going to be able to generate really interesting content for the blog with a lot of regularity for the next week or more. I am trying to move into a new position at work that could lead into a pretty good career track, and that means putting some time into reworking my resume and preparing for a potential interview. I feel pretty good about my chances, but I don't want to leave anything to chance. I've spent the last few evenings working through some online courses that serve as an introduction to the position.

I also have been working on losing some weight and increasing my fitness in anticipation of a military school I am signed up for in a few months. I've lost around 12 pounds since October, but I've kind of been stuck at that point for a couple of weeks. I am pretty good when it comes to push-ups and sit-ups, but as always my run time could use some work.

I bought this card on eBay a few months ago. Once I got to looking at it I realized that it looked pretty familiar, because I already had a copy. I had pulled the same card from a box I bought during last year's Black Friday / Cyber Monday sales. Oops. It's a Press Proof parallel of Hakeem Olajuwon's Scoring Kings insert from 2014-15 Donruss Basketball. Pretty much everything in this product has many levels of parallels, so there are all kinds of serial-numbered cards in a given box of this stuff. It's a cheap, fun break without much in the way of big hit potential but plenty of color and inserts to keep it interesting. This Olajuwon card is # 158 / 199. This is the kind of thing that happens when you lose track of your want list or your collection as a whole. I don't usually wind up making a lot of duplicate purchases, but I get bitten every now and then. I imagine it happens to everyone a couple times during their collecting careers.

Pack of the Day 109: 2014-15 Panini Donruss Basketball Box Break

I've finally reached the final post about my Dave & Adam's Card World order, with a box of 2014-15 Donruss Basketball from Panini. This product has a ton of inserts and parallels, so this will be a fairly long post, one of the reasons I've held it for last.

The base cards feature a similar design to the baseball set, with the little baseballs in the colored stripe exchanged for basketballs. I'd rate the photography as pretty good especially as you can actually see some of the action surrounding the players, something you lose out on in the many sets that feature the player cut out and placed on a background. There is a Rated Rookie subset, which I believe is short-printed, although not horribly so.

These parallels are called Swirlorama, apparently. The base set and most of the inserts have Swirlorama parallels. There were a fair number of Houston Rockets in the box, so that was a bonus for me. There are a lot of players who I don't really recognize or whose names are familiar to me but I couldn't tell you much else about them. The NBA is mostly relegated to various cable / satellite channels, so I don't ever watch games. I have to watch the box scores and the occasional highlight video to get my fix.

Most (all?) of the parallels outside of the Swirlorama cards are serially-numbered. With the amount of stuff in this set, the print run on Donruss must have been about 65 million cases. Up top are a couple of Stat Line parallels, which are numbered based on some statistic the player has put up in their career. The Purple Press Proofs down on the bottom are all numbered out of # / 199, and there are a few other tiers of Press Proof available. Many of the insert sets also have Press Proof parallels.

The Rookies is an insert focused (duh!) on first-year players. I don't think any of these guys are big names. In my limited exposure to basketball I usually pick up on the bigger names, and these guys aren't them.

The Production Line insert set features players who excel at Scoring, Rebounds, and Assists. All of my cards in this box came from the Scoring subset. Up top are the regular inserts and along the bottom are a Swirlorama of Kevin Durant and a Press Proof of DeMarcus Cousins. The Cousins Press Proof is a Blue Press Proof, which is limited to 99 copies.

Court Kings is an insert featuring various star players. It's got a textured face and filters applied to the photos. It seems like James Harden popped up in just about every group of inserts I pulled from this box. He is the #1 player on the Rockets and arguably in the league, but I don't know if he's my favorite Rocket. I think I would be hard-pressed to choose a favorite player on the team right now. It might be Dwight Howard.

Finally we get into some players that I know and like. Clyde Drexler is a favorite. With his receding hairline and mustache he always looked like someone's uncle who just happened to be a ball player on the side. I guess you don't have to look a certain way (or even bathe) to be a ball player, but I always thought Clyde looked a bit older than he should to be flying so high. Kiki Vandeweghe's name always stood out to me when I would see his cards as a kid. And it was nice to snag a Hakeem Olajuwon Blue Press Proof from the box, as I always like to grab cards for my Dream PC when I can.

Elite is by far the biggest insert in the product. I just picked a handful of the many cards from this set that came out of the box. Robinson and Olajuwon will probably always stand out in my mind when I think of the NBA, as they had some titanic matchups while I was at the peak of my fandom. I guess Patrick Ewing was also a rival to Olajuwon and had a more compelling narrative with the NCAA Championship going to Ewing and the NBA Finals going to Olajuwon, but I liked David Robinson more. The Elite Status Die-Cut parallels are have varying print runs, with the Jonas Valanciunas card I pulled being numbered # 48 / 83. 

The Elite Dominators set seems to be numbered awfully high for a rare pull with a big checklist. There are 50 cards in the list and there are 999 copies of each one. I pulled Derrick Rose, who is injured yet again. It's not his leg this time, though, so that's a change. He just seems to be snake-bitten when it comes to injuries.

There are a fair number of hits in the product for the price point, although for the most part they aren't super exciting. I got a couple of PWS (Plain White Swatches) of Derrick Favors and Carl Landry. Carl Landry has had a pretty decent career after breaking out with Houston over his first few years. He hasn't been a superstar or anything, but he has been serviceable. Derrick Favors was the third overall pick in the 2010 draft and has emerged as one of the statistical leaders of the Utah Jazz.

The final hit of the box is a pretty decent one, especially at the price point of this product. It's a Signature Stars autograph card of Elfrid Payton, the 10th overall pick in the 2014 draft. Although his averages from last season weren't outstanding, he did put up some very good games including some triple doubles. This autographed card is numbered # 07 / 40.

Donruss is a fun break because there are so many inserts and parallels that come out of the box. There isn't much in the way of big hit potential, but that keeps the box prices down. I need to collate what I've got so far to find out how close I am to a complete base set. It would be fun to chase a mini-master set with all the base cards and easy inserts, but I don't know if I would want to focus on that at the expense of other collecting goals.

It looks like the Cubs have advanced in the NL Wild Card game with bit of drama and a bench-clearing beaning of their star pitcher after he hit a couple of Pirates. Tensions run high in the playoffs. While I hope they make a deep run and win it all, I figure the Astros will fall sooner rather than later. I'll probably stick to rooting for the AL for a while whenever that happens. I'll probably be pulling for the Blue Jays if / when the Astros are eliminated. If the Astros and Blue Jays get knocked out and the Cubs are still in it I will probably switch sides and pull for the Cubs, since in that scenario the other playoff teams would probably be the Rangers, Royals, and Dodgers. Yuck! I like individual players on each of those teams, but various rules of playoff fandom rule them all out. I don't really have anything against the Cubs, so they win by default. If it becomes a Rangers, Royals, Dodgers, Cardinals playoff then I will just turn the whole thing off and wait for next year.

2014-15 Donruss Basketball Hakeem Olajuwon Elite Parallels

I think I picked these Hakeem Olajuwon inserts from 2014-15 Donruss Basketball around the time the set released. I opened one box of this stuff (that I never posted about) and I liked it enough that I considered finishing the set, but it was one of those things I never got around to doing. Donruss Basketball has about a million parallels and inserts, and all of the inserts also have a million parallels, so each box has a lot of colorful and serially-numbered cards. It leads to a pretty bloated and overproduced set, but it's a fun cheap NBA box break. I would definitely bust a couple more boxes of it if a good deal fell in my lap.

These two Olajuwon inserts are parallels of the Elite insert set, which in base form has a silver background. The one on the left is the Red parallel, and my copy is numbered # 06 / 25. The one on the right is the Blue version, and my copy is numbered # 07 / 99. They are nice and shiny on their own, but I think the two colors side by side look really nice together.

There's not much to the backs of these cards, with a repeat of the front photo, a team logo, some basic information, and a career stat line. I don't buy a lot of basketball cards or really even follow the NBA that closely any more, but there's always room in my collection for another sharp-looking Hakeem Olajuwon item.

Workin' at the Card Shop 7: Two Autographs from One Pack

I had some time to kill between work and an appointment I had, so I made a visit to the local card shop to have a look around. I planned on picking up a little bit of 2015 Topps Series 2 and hopefully a couple packs of 2015 Topps Archives. He had Archives in stock, but none of the boxes were open yet. I felt bad about asking him to open a box so I could buy two packs from it, so I wound up with a Jumbo Pack of Series 2 and a couple packs of 2014-15 Panini Donruss Basketball instead. The Jumbo pack of Topps contained 50 cards. I won't show all of them, but I'll show some of the ones that caught my eye:

The first thing I noticed was the weird coloring on Billy Butler's uniform. "Self," I said, "That is probably an airbrush job on his Royals uniform. I took it a step further and went and found the image that was altered to create this baseball card:

View image | gettyimages.com

The other guys I chose for the scan were either Astros or showing off some Ugly Pitching Face (UPF). And that's it, really. I have a hard time with some of the little colored circles containing the player's position abbreviation. The light blue ones and the bright yellow ones are a bit distracting.

These were the best horizontal cards in the pack. I was glad to get an Astros team card. I included Wei-Yin Chen because he got hosed by the Orioles recently and I read an article about it, so his name was stuck in my head when I sifted through these cards.

To give the non-pitchers a fair shake, I have included Kolten Wong and his Ugly Fielding Face (UFF) in this scan. Max Scherzer gets in for some UPF and because he's kind of a PC guy. Marwin Gonzalez gets in because he's an Astro and Adeiny Hechavarria makes the cut because I picked him up on a fantasy baseball team recently to play shortstop, because that position is a minefield in fantasy this year and whoever I drafted for that position was putting up terrible numbers.

I chose Moustakas because of the great fielding shot, another Astro card in Jed Lowrie, Carlos Gonzalez because he's on one of my fantasy baseball rosters, and I don't know why I included Jose Fernandez but then this popped up on my Facebook feed and gave me a reason:

I love it when a (failure to) plan comes together!

I pulled an autograph in the pack of a guy who was drafted in 2004, has played since then in the minor leagues, and pitched 6.0 total innings across 7 games in 2014 for the Giants as his only Major League service to date. The only real notable thing I saw on his Baseball Reference page was that he managed to hit three batters during those 6 innings. That Career High number in the corner of his card is celebrating his 11.6 minor league strikeouts per nine innings ratio in 2014. I got a Gold parallel of Danny Santana, another guy who is on at least one of my fantasy baseball rosters. My First Pitch insert features Jon Hamm, an actor whose work I don't really follow at all. I had to look him up. Madison Bumgarner rounds out the scan, with an appearance in a decent-looking insert set called Stepping Up

That Edgar Martinez card looks like it fell right out of 2012 Topps Baseball, and I don't think of that as a compliment. Wei-Yen Chen makes another appearance in this post, this time on a Black parallel numbered # 46 / 64 (a palindrome!). Mike Piazza shows up in some sort of bat-themed set about which Night Owl has remarked, "I think Topps did an excellent job of making bats look like loaves of bread in a deli." And finally, Willie Mays appears in a set that presumably discusses famous comebacks in baseball history.

But wait! That's not all! I also got one of those Call Your Shot! code cards in my pack. I went to the site, entered my code, and this screen loaded:

The autograph selection is random, meaning that if you 'win' a 'prize,' you click through to your cart, pay Topps $4.95 for shipping and handling, and probably eventually get an autograph in the mail. From what I've heard, the players on the screen are just a partial list. The Full player list available here link goes to a broken page labeled as the B-level list. I have seen copies of the A-level and C-level lists and they are each several pages long, covering a huge number of players. So it's pretty random. Going through some Blowout forum threads on people who have already received their cards from the Series 1 codes, it looks like Topps is just sending out whatever happens to be nearby. I have seen some 2013 Topps Five Star of Jason Heyward, some Bowman Sterling of Didi Gregorius and Oscar Taveras, a Jim Rice Five Star card, a Marcus Stroman from last year's base Topps set, and some other stuff along those lines. I guess whatever I get probably can't be any worse than an Erik Cordier sticker autograph.

The two packs of Donruss basketball didn't contain anything too amazing. Mostly they just reminded me how out of touch I am with the current NBA. I manage to keep track of the Houston Rockets and most of the major stars and fan favorites, but 95% of the other guys are unrecognizable to me.

Here are three guys that I recognized from the packs. Beverley is said to be a pretty good player, but during the few opportunities I had to watch him it seemed like maybe he was showboating a little too much and needed to take better care of the ball. I've never liked Pau Gasol very much. He seems too much like a soccer player or something. Maybe he's just an emotional and expressive dude, but I find him irritating. Klay Thompson and all of the Golden State Warriors are jerks, and they will remain as such until the Houston Rockets can manage to beat them in a playoff series.

Here are some of the inserts that came out of the packs. It seems like I can't buy any basketball cards without pulling a Zach Randolph card of some kind.

Oh, and here are two more inserts featuring players I don't like all that much. I guess I should have asked the shop owner to open a box of Archives for me to pick a couple packs from.

Seeking Redemption 12: 2014-15 Donruss Basketball Wrapper Redemption Pack

I opened a box of 2014-15 Donruss Basketball a couple of months ago. It was a pretty fun break that I haven't found time to feature on my blog yet. Part of the product release was a wrapper redemption promotion, where if you sent in all 24 packs from a box of cards you would get a little set of 3 All-Star cards, with an outside shot at an autograph from one of the three featured players. I sent in the wrappers from the box and a few weeks later an envelope showed up in the mail with a pack of cards in it.

I wasn't lucky enough to get one of the autographs, but I did get the 3-card set made up of Zach LaVine, Stephen Curry, and Andrew Wiggins. I kind of like the color scheme on the front of the cards, and the photography is decent. I am not much of a Stephen Curry fan right now, as his team recently outplayed my Houston Rockets in the Western Conference Finals to advance to the NBA Finals.

Here are the backs of the cards. Each of them contains a little blurb about the player's performance during the 2015 All-Star Weekend. I like these cards well enough, and getting something for all of my wrappers is slightly better than just throwing the wrappers away. I liked the Donruss box break so much that I really wanted to put the set together, but I haven't gotten around to trying that and at this point it might be too late for me to regain my enthusiasm for that project.