Thanks for All the Fish!

P-Town Tom over at the Waiting 'til Next Year blog has been cleaning house recently when it comes to his non-Cubs cards. One of his posts detailed how hard it has been to find a taker for his Florida/Miami Marlins extras. I am not a closet Marlins fan or anything, but there are plenty of players I follow who have passed through the team's roster at one point or another. I gave it a couple of days to give a real Marlins fan a chance to step up and claim the cards; then I posted a comment offering to take them off his hands. A little while later, a few hundred Marlins cards showed up in my mailbox. I didn't scan all of them, but I pulled a couple dozen to show here.

In my younger years I was almost exclusively a basketball and non-sports collector, with the occasional foray into football or baseball. I dropped out of card collecting almost entirely around 2000. Over the next decade or so, I picked up cards from trading card games like Magic, World of Warcraft, and WWE Raw Deal, but no sports cards. In 2008 I picked up most of a baseball set because my wife and I were having our first kid and I wanted to collect a full set of baseball cards from his birth year. My dog knocked the box containing Series 1 out of the box and peed on the pile of cards, so I've only got 2008 Topps Series 2 now. In 2013 I picked up card collecting again, this time going all-in on baseball and non-sports cards. I don't know exactly why I switched over from basketball to baseball, but that's how it worked out. I still gather cards for a couple of player collections in basketball and football, but those sports are pretty far down the list in comparison with baseball, Star Wars, comics, NASCAR, wrestling, and UFC.

The main point of all that text is to say that I missed out on nearly a decade worth of card sets and designs, and the 2000's were full of card sets. This lot was a great chance to look at many of the sets I missed out on over those years. That first scan really contains some cool stuff, like Upper Deck Ionix, Topps Stars, and Fleer Metal Universe. I remember the basketball versions of some of these sets, but a lot of them were new to me. Even though I was out of collecting for many years, I still played fantasy sports pretty heavily. Many of the guys in this lot spent time on my fantasy rosters, like Josh Beckett, Juan Pierre, and Hanley Ramirez. 

P-Town Tom would probably like to see his Cubs re-enacting the scene pictured on the first card in this scan, as the Marlins celebrate a victory over the Indians in the World Series. The Cubs have an uphill battle, though, as they dropped Game 3 and fell behind 2-1.

A.J. Burnett found his way onto quite a few of my fantasy rosters, as he usually piled up a decent number of innings and strikeouts. There is plenty of awesome shiny foil in this group, and a cool farewell-type card for Andre Dawson, whose time in Miami wasn't exactly the highlight of his Hall of Fame career. He also missed the Marlins' 1997 World Series run by one year.

Future Yankee Miguel Cabrera has piled up so many stats with the Tigers that I sometimes forget he was a Marlin. He even won a championship in Florida. Mike/Giancarlo Stanton is the current face of the franchise, and he's got the contract to match his status. Jake Marisnick is currently a defensive specialist for my Houston Astros, but his bat hasn't kept up and I don't think he's the answer as a full-time guy. We'll never see the full extent of Jose Fernandez' talents, as he died in a boating accident last month.

The box of Marlins also included this nice Hanley Ramirez Clubhouse Collection relic card from 2009 Topps Heritage. It's got a pinstripe and unlike most relic cards of today, it even has some text and a cartoon on the back.

In addition to the Marlins cards, P-Town Tom included some PC cards of famous Mariners. I don't add to these player collections very frequently on my own, so it is always pleasant to have them show up in a package.

I think that bubble gum card in the center is one of the more famous baseball card photos out there, and I am glad to finally have a copy of it. There is plenty of other cool stuff here, too, including a couple of father/son cards and a representative from the ever-cool Collector's Choice brand.

Even though the Marlins are not at the top of my favorite teams list, there was plenty of stuff in this package to entertain me. There were a lot of familiar names for me to reminisce on, and a lot of unfamiliar card designs for me to discover. The only part that I dread is the sorting, as I've found in my big sorting project that big player or team lots are time-consuming to process just because you're jumping around from year to year and brand to brand instead of just collating a big block of cards from the same set.

Thanks for all the fish, P-Town Tom! I know this was a no-obligations offer, but I will try to gather a few cards to send back in your direction.

My Final Really Old 2014 Topps Stadium Club Box Break

I think this is the last batch of scans from all the 2014 Topps Stadium Club I opened in 2014. This might have been one of the better boxes I opened, as there are a couple of good inserts and my autographs were stronger than usual for this product.

For the base cards I scanned some of the black and white photographs from the set. All of these are pretty good shots of historically-important baseball players. Baseball fandom is a relatively new thing for me, so I probably don't know or appreciate these guys as much as I ought to.

You get one Gold parallel per Hobby box. Mine was Troy Tulowitzki, who is now enjoying life as a member of the Toronto Blue Jays. The guy he was traded for, Jose Reyes, is having trouble adjusting to playing for a losing team. The three Rainbow Foil cards in my box were Yasiel Puig, Ozzie Smith, and...

...Salvador Perez, whose horizontal card messed my scanning all up. I don't have much to say about the Rainbow Foil parallels. I guess the Puig is nice, although injuries and attitude combined with a strong crop of new hot players have kind of sucked the hype out of his hobby value lately.

I also got this Foilboard parallel of one of the players I collect, Jon Singleton. These only fell about once in every four Hobby boxes, so it's a pretty nice pull. It's also a Christmas card, carrying the # 12 / 25 serial number on the back.

All of these are base-level inserts that come one per Hobby box. Between the Puig parallel from earlier and the Kershaw and Ramirez here this is getting to be a Dodgers hot box. I guess there are worse problems to have. That Billy Hamilton card made an appearance in my last box break, too.

I got four Field Access inserts in this box. It's a pretty good batch of Hall of Famers, and Robinson Cano. The Randy Johnson from the last batch that I thought was a rare parallel was not a rare parallel. This batch is the one with the Electric Foil insert parallel.

The Randy Johnson card is # 07 / 25. These Electric Foil cards are tough pulls, seeded at 1:88 mini boxes, or 1:29 Hobby boxes. That's only one for every 3 cases. I like that card anyway, but with a little bit of foil treatment and a serial number I like it a whole lot more.

The hits keep rolling in on this box, as that Evan Gattis autograph on the left is a Gold parallel, which is a 1 per case card. This one just barely misses being a Christmas card, being numbered # 11 / 25. It was a pretty good card anyway, but now that Gattis is an Astro (and arguably my favorite player on the current roster) I like it even more. Tony Cingrani is another guy I've heard of, which is a step up on many of the autographs in this set. He's had a rough go of it since a good showing in 2013, though, and is now down in AAA trying to get sorted out. Andrew Heaney has actually been pretty good for the Angels this year. His June and July numbers were better than his August and September numbers have been, but outside of an 8-run debacle against the Blue Jays he hasn't had any really horrid starts.

With all things considered this was probably my best box of Stadium Club from 2014. I got three different cards numbered # / 25 and three autographs of guys with recognizable names.

2014 Topps Stadium Club Dodgers Triumvirate Completed

Last year I opened a box of 2014 Topps Stadium Club and pulled a Clayton Kershaw Triumvirate Illuminator card. The Illuminators a case hit, and are an acetate parallel of the normal Triumvirate Luminous insert set. Then in March sometime, I picked up a copy of the Hanley Ramirez Illuminator on eBay. At the time I thought that the third card in the Dodgers Triumvirate was Hyun-Jin Ryu, which I figured I would be able to pick up relatively cheap. As it turned out, he was actually part of the 'Pitchers of Asian Descent' Triumvirate, and the card I needed to complete the 'Dodgers Superstars' Triumvirate was none other than Yasiel Puig. At the time, prices on the Puig card were not in my range and I put the project on the back burner.

At the end of April I saw the Puig Illuminator pop up on my eBay feed at a decent price and I bought it, completing the three-card puzzle. I guess I could have scanned the cards all together to make the puzzles above look better, but that would mean tracking them all down again and running them through the scanner. It was easier to just find all the old individual scans in my computer and stick them in this post. The result is butt-ugly and no one will want to look at it, but I justify it because it is easy.

Oh, and when I bought the Puig the seller was offering free shipping if I spent a certain amount of money with them. The amount I needed to spend was the same as shipping was going to cost on the Puig, so I figured I'd rather get two cards with free shipping than spend the same amount and get one card. I chose this Jeff Bagwell Hall or Nothing insert from Skybox eX-2000. It's a die-cut, cardboard and acetate layered monstrosity of an insert that represents the best and worst of cards in the late 90's.