Contested Shots 24: Bowl Game Pick'Em Winnings from Cards on Cards

I love participating in fantasy sports leagues and pick'em contests. I've nearly always in some kind of league. Right now I've got 4 fantasy baseball teams and I'm involved in 2 NASCAR leagues. It's just part of the fun of watching sports for me. The Cards on Cards blog runs quite a few contests each year for a variety of sports, including a college football bowl game pick 'em contest that draws quite a few entries each year. I enter most of the contests. Sometimes I do well, and sometimes I 'win' the last-place prize. This year I wound up winning a prize in the Cards on Cards Bowl Pick'em contest. I missed first place on points, but I got the most correct picks and that was enough for me to be announced as a winner. The Cards on Cards contests also tend to be pretty generous with the number of winners. You should probably give the blog a follow and enter some of them.

The first card out was this giant Nolan Ryan card from the 1980 Topps Superstar 5x7. This is a set I wasn't familiar with (it came out the year before I was born), so I had to do some research to figure out where it came from. It's a pretty cool piece of cardboard.

There were plenty of basketball cards among the stacks of team bags in the mailer, with a mix of new and old cards. Mostly I scanned newer cards, though. I like Dwight Howard, but it sure seems like he has a hard time being a team player. James Harden has flourished this year, with a new-look lineup based around his skills. Patrick Beverley has been a big part of the Rockets' success this year, and Sam Dekker has looked pretty good in the limited time he gets on the court. Dekker is a high-energy guy, but sometimes it seems like he is pushing too hard. I guess being a fringe bench guy would push anyone to try really hard, because you only get so many minutes to play your way into another contract.

The bulk of the package was tons and tons and tons of Houston Astros cards, taken from many different eras. I tried to scan at least one card from every set represented in the package, but I might have failed. At the very least, I tried to make sure most of the notable players got into a scan. 

That Carlos Correa in the upper right corner is a Heritage Chrome parallel, numbered # 001 / 999 (the first one in the print run!). I always forget that Miguel Tejada spent time as an Astro. I always think of him as an Oriole, even though he spent more time with the A's than the Orioles. I think it's because many of his better seasons were in Baltimore, and that would have been right when I was drafting him heavily in fantasy baseball leagues.

Some of the current team's core can be found along that top row up there, with some big names from various other eras scattered throughout the scan. A.J. Reed down at the bottom is part of the convoluted mess that the Astros have at first base. He is currently getting some seasoning down at AAA.

A lot of these cards are from the time when I was out of collecting (roughly 2000-2013), so many sets that might be familiar to other collectors are new and wonderful to me. I am always jealous of people who can look at a card design and remember what year it's from. I usually have to do a little work, unless it is a product I've seen a whole lot of cards from.

These cards were in top loaders, and represent the premium cards in the package (along with that serially-numbered Heritage Correa from a few scans ago). The George Springer card is another Heritage Chrome parallel, numbered # 360 / 999. The Hunter Pence comes from the 2007 Fleer Ultra set. It's hard to believe that all the major sports just have one licensed card producer these days. I'd rather have 30 products divided among several manufacturers than 30 products put out by one card maker. But the leagues don't seem to care how I feel. That Tracy McGrady card comes from a Panini Adrenalyn XL game, and it appears to be a fancy foil card of some kind. The Luis Scola card from 2008-09 Bowman Draft Picks & Stars is pretty rare, numbered # 30 / 50. For a while he was one of the Rockets' better players, but he also got a pretty late start in the NBA and was never going to be the guy to bring them to glory. He was a pretty solid contributor, though, based on my unreliable recollection.

This was quite a prize package. I am envious of bloggers who have their lives together enough to run leagues, host contests, make frequent trades, and post excellent content. I am barely able to keep up with my posting, and my trading/sorting/contest efforts could be saddled with labels like 'unfortunate' or 'sadly lacking.' Thanks for the prize package, Kerry, and especially thank you for running so many entertaining contests! I like participating in your leagues even when I don't win.

Black November, Epilogue - 2016 Topps Update Series Hobby Box

After rolling the dice on a few products from the Blowout Cards Black November sale, I also picked up a box of a current product, 2016 Topps Baseball Update Series. With the smaller checklist this year, I felt that my odds of completing a set from one box were pretty good. If I hadn't felt that way, I would have just bought a set and skipped the box.

David Ortiz is the cover star of the product. Each Hobby box promises one Autograph or Relic card, so we'll see what comes out of this one.

The pack design replicates the art on the box. Each box has 36 packs, with 10 cards per pack (packs containing a special card may have fewer than 10 cards).

Here are the pack odds and the NPN information. As usual, there are plenty of parallels and inserts to chase.

I was able to put together a complete 300-card base set from this box, as well as pulling 22 doubles. So the collation was pretty good. I selected a few of my favorite photos to scan for this post. Common themes for my favorites were All-Star uniforms, UPF (Ugly Pitching Face), glorious manes of hair, and fielding photos with interesting background scenery like advertising signs or greenery.

Panoramic ballpark shots also made my favorites list a couple of times, along with hat tips. As with any baseball set, there were a lot of standard throwing/hitting torso photos, but there are some gem in here. I do kind of wish for a set with regular rectangular borders, but that's not the direction these things are trending in right now.

I got three coupon cards. The front highlights the existence of the Topps website and their social media pages, while the back offers 50 cents off on various Topps retail products. I just counted up the cards from the box, and apparently these don't count as part of the 360 cards in the box. They are extras, so they don't replace a base card or insert from the pack you find them in.

There were six Gold parallels in the box, all numbered out of # / 2016. I guess for me, the Edwin Encarnacion All-Star and the Tim Lincecum are the highlights here.

The box contained three Rainbow Foil parallels. Bartolo Colon's Home Run Heard 'Round the World is probably the highlight of this bunch. The Mark Trumbo card is nice, too.

I also got a pair of relatively scarce parallels. The first is a Rookie SP photo variation of Mallex Smith. I believe the pack odds are reversed on the SP cards, as the Rookies appear to be much easier pulls than the All-Star SPs. The second is a Negative parallel of Kirby Yates, a pitcher for the Yankees.

I pulled 5 cards from the Ichiro Chasing 3k insert set, which highlight Ichiro's hits on his quest to reach 3000 MLB hits, a feat he accomplished on August 7th.

I pulled six inserts from the 3000 Hits Club insert, which has a checklist full of players who reached the 3000-hit mark during their MLB careers.

I like the Topps Fire insert set, which is modeled on the design of the 2015 Topps Fire Football product. It is a pretty busy design, but it actually feels like a legitimate insert set. I pulled some good names, too, in Carlos Correa, Clayton Kershaw, Kris Bryant, and Josh Donaldson.

I got six of the First Pitch insert cards in the box. I had already purchased a full set of these cards online, so these are all doubles for me. I'll probably have more to say about them when I post about the set as a whole.

I got five of the Team Franklin inserts in the set, which feature players who use Franklin-branded batting gloves. Topps could have done a lot more with this concept, most significantly by including a parallel version with glove relic swatches embedded.

Finally, here is the hit of the box, a Scouting Report autograph of Tigers pitcher Michael Fulmer. This was a decent pull for a box of a basic Topps product, as Fulmer had a very good season. It is unfortunate that this card came out of the pack with fair-sized ding in the corner. You can kind of see it in the card-back scan as a touch of white in the upper right.

That's it for this box and for this order from Blowout Cards. I got about what I expected from this box of cards. I am glad that I was able to complete the Update Series checklist from one Hobby box. The 4-product break overall had some highs and lows, with the Cal Ripken Jr. # 1 / 1 from 2016 Topps Archives Signature Series really moving this break from not-good to pretty-good.

Finally! The 2015 Topps Stadium Club Set

I've been trying not to bust packs too much lately, as it seems to be more cost-effective to buy collated sets and cherry-pick the hits I want from online sellers. I miss out on the thrill of pack-busting, but I guess that's what repacks, group breaks, and the occasional hobby box are for.

With that attitude I didn't purchase much 2015 Topps Stadium Club at all. I saw plenty of it on the blogs and picked up a few singles here and there, but I was waiting on the base cards until I could pick up the whole set in one go. It took a while, but I finally had a set fall to me at my (cheap-ass) price ceiling. I got it for about 19 cents per card, which I thought was a pretty decent deal. I flipped through the whole thing and picked out a few favorite cards to scan here. I tried to ignore some of the cards that have already had plenty of run in the blogosphere, so you won't find Bip Roberts, Ernie Banks, or George Brett here. I'm no Yankees fan, but this Mariano Rivera card shows how I reacted once I actually landed this set for my collection.

If you're going to use zoomed-in shots of players on your cards, that Josh Donaldson photo is a good example of how to do it. At this point it is hard for any Jose Bautista card to live up to the 2016 Topps Series 1 bat flip card. It would be awesome to be a fan who shows up on a baseball card, but it would be significantly less awesome to be a fan on a baseball card making a derp face.

That J.J. Hardy card is pretty chaotic. I guess the Orioles won't be mixing baseball with Twister again anytime soon. Not pictured on that Dale Murphy card is his mom telling him to clean up all that baseball stuff before someone trips on it and gets hurt.

It's nice to see an athlete showing proper form for the Anthem. So many times on TV broadcasts I see athletes dancing around or focusing on something else during the National Anthem. Football players seem to be the worst offenders in that regard. I guess not all the players are from America but for me it's not a negotiable thing. Bo Jackson was so cool back in the day. I don't even like thinking about the Astros right now. They've got a lot of expectations piled up now, and I have to wonder if their bats can be hot enough and their pitchers can throw well enough to stay in the mix this year. Evan Gattis will play a big role in the team's fortunes once he gets back from hernia surgery.

I don't have much to say about this batch of photos. Just nice photos all around. Stadium Club is a cool set. Maybe if every product looked like Stadium Club it would be too much, but I don't know. What cards out there look better than Stadium Club?

For a while there Yoenis Cespedes must have had his bags all packed, because he moved a few times before finally signing a deal with the Mets. Doug Fister was brought in to (probably) fill one of the back-end rotation spots on the Astros' roster. Hopefully he'll be able to put a poor 2015 behind him.

I picked these cards more for the photos than I did for the guys pictured on the cards. Felix Hernandez showed up to Spring Training this year having bleached his hair and goatee. The look has been universally panned by press and teammates, but Hernandez says he plans to keep the look all year in spite of the criticism.

In the lead paragraph I said I would try to avoid photos that had already seen a lot of run on the blogs, but I couldn't leave out that Eckersley card. It's probably my favorite card in the set. I watch a lot of A's broadcasts on MLB.tv, so I see the big-head A's quite a bit over the course of a season. I'm not sure why it works out that way, but if the Astros aren't on the A's are usually my go-to team. Next on the list would probably be the Blue Jays and then whichever matchup on the day features the most players on my fantasy baseball team.

In hindsight I think the Derek Jeter or Fred McGriff cards would have been better to close the post than that Scherzer card, but I wasn't really thinking about that when I did all the scanning for this post. Oh well.

I'm glad I was able to finally add the set to my collection. My patience paid off in the end, as the price was about 65% of what I anticipated a full set would cost me. There were a couple of cards missing from the set when it arrived, but I was able to purchase the missing cards on Sportlots quickly and without much expense.

At the Trade Deadline 42: An Awesome Trade Package from Lonestarr

I recently got a massive trade package from blogger Lonestarr / Twitch. It touched on nearly every part of my collection. I scanned quite a bit of it for this post, but there was plenty more. I just couldn't scan any longer.

I don't have many Elway cards, and this SPx Gold card is a great addition to my collection. I remember that the Hakeem Olajuwon SPx Gold from this set's basketball equivalent was one of the prizes of my collection in my teen years. Hologram, die-cut, and foil on thick card stock? Yes, please!

This package may have nearly doubled my Peyton Manning collection. It certainly was a big boost to the number of Manning cards I have showing him in a Broncos uniform. I've heard rumors that Peyton will officially announce his retirement soon. I guess we'll see what happens. That whole business with the sexual harassment allegations from his college days is pretty disappointing. Without any context outside of working in male-exclusive jobs for a large portion of my life I imagine he tried to pull some sort of prank that went over the line, and instead of owning his actions he denied them and went on the attack. Probably a sincere apology and an admission of wrongdoing 20 years ago would have cleared the whole business up.

There were plenty of other Broncos in the package. That Terrell Davis is probably my favorite of this bunch, although it is hard to deny the power of Tim Tebow. I wore my Tebow jersey just the other day. Apparently there was a poll recently in which respondents were asked who their favorite and least favorite NFL quarterbacks were. Tim Tebow appeared in the top handful of both lists (5th-most popular, 2nd-least popular), despite the fact that he hasn't played in a regular season NFL game for a few years.

Switching sports to basketball, several Houston Rockets cards were included in the package, highlighted by a couple of appearances by my favorite player of all time, Hakeem Olajuwon. I also liked that Panini Black Friday Dwight Howard card, although Dwight Howard himself has been pretty underwhelming as a Rocket. I have to wonder how long it will be before he and James Harden get run out of town and the Rockets enter another rebuilding phase without really living up to their potential? It's almost like a repeat of the Yao Ming / Tracy McGrady days, although their problems had more to do with injuries than with attitude. I don't know why that Earl Boykins cards has rounded corners. It must be a parallel that I am not aware of.

There were two other cards in this Astros scan, but I cropped them out when I discovered a big hair on the scan in front of one of them. It was a sweet card, but I was so done with the scanner by that time. I like that Bill Virdon card. I pulled an autograph of his out of a box of Heritage in 2014. For whatever reason that makes him stick in my head. I'm not about to run out and start a Bill Virdon PC, but I'm at least two cards into one now. I love those rainbow-colored uniforms. Sometimes I think I might be part unicorn or part leprechaun or something.

There were plenty of Astros from all eras in this package. I think I've mentioned at least six times that I didn't scan them all. I DIDN'T SCAN ALL THE CARDS IN THIS PACKAGE! There were a lot of cards. If I were a rapper I would be bragging about all of my phat stacks (of cards). But I'm not a rapper. When I try to sing or rap my wife tells me, "No!" and mists me with a spray bottle.

That Nolan Ryan / J.R. Richard card is one of the cooler cards in the package. It's an Astros card, but it's also a Nolan Ryan card, but from a time when he wasn't an Astro. And now the Astros are in the A.L. so this card wouldn't even be possible anymore unless they started making AL West Leaders cards. At that point Topps would have jumped the shark. Can you imagine Division Leader cards for all of the different divisions? That would be ridiculous.

The Astros probably got the least freaky of the 1995 Fleer card designs. Things don't get all that trippy until you're below the waistline and the colors go weird, which I guess is kind of a metaphor for life.

I like those framed Gypsy Queen parallels. That's one of the few things I like about the Gypsy Queen brand. I guess I'm a Ginter man if it comes down to faux-old-timey vintage brands. I like that Lance Berkman Soaring Stars card. It's like he's defending the Earth from Randy Johnson-thrown meteors with a cosmic bat or something.

Now we're getting to the hits portion of this trade package. Those two cards on the top are serially-numbered. Nolan Ryan is # / 250 and Tony Scheffler is # / 200. Olajuwon is die-cut, Prizmed, and # / 199. Also he is wearing those cool goggles that he sported for a while. He tried, but he couldn't rock the goggles as well as Horace Grant did. If there were a Mt. Rushmore of eyewear it would definitely have Horace Grant and Kent Tekulve on it. Who else would be on it? That Aaron West autograph is pretty cool, too. When I see the name Aaron it makes me think of that Key & Peele Substitute Teacher skit.

These relics are all pretty cool. I believe that Lancaster JetHawks Mascot Patch is my first manu-patch relic. Some of my readers might be impressed that I have remained untainted this long, while others wonder why I didn't get on the manu-patch train a long time ago. My one stalker might comb feverishly through my posts to find out if this really is my first manu-patch card. I know for sure that the J.R. Towles card in the upper right contains my first game-used base relic. The other relics are your more standard swatches of fabric, but the Rod Smith is # / 750 and the other card contains the previously-mentioned Tracy McGrady's pants or something. It's not a breathable enough material to be a jersey.

Closing things out are some non-sports items in the form of sketch cards featuring some of my favorite comic book characters. I believe the She-Hulk sketch was done by Lonestarr / Twitch himself, while the Wonder Woman sketch was done by Colby Zigler. I haven't been able to add as many She-Hulk and Wonder Woman sketches to my collection as I'd like, so these were a welcome addition to my sketch card binder. (I wish I had a sketch card binder. I actually don't. I have a vague idea of which sketches I have and sometimes I can find them in among the other cards in boxes and the piles of cards on my desk.

Closing things out is a sketch of Power Girl reminding all the fanboys out there that Cosplay does not equal Consent. That's a big deal with cosplayers and models, both online and at convention or promotional appearances. Sketch artist Cesar Feliciano has illustrated what might happen if one of these rude folks mistook Power Girl for a cosplay model.

This was an awesome package from top to bottom, and I was super-stoked to flip through all of it. I wasn't super-stoked to scan all of it, but I scanned many of the best parts. The rest of the stuff you'll just have to wonder about. It was all pretty cool, with plenty of touches personally-tailored to my collecting habits. Thank you!