Cyber Week Breaks: Arrival and Day 1

My big order from Blowout Cards arrived today, with a whole bunch of fun stuff for me to break over the next few weeks. I am really tempted to just start ripping it all open now, but this was a pretty big order and I want to make it last longer to stretch out the anticipation and entertainment value of my dollar.

Here is a picture of the order. I've got 13 boxes of 2015 Topps UFC High Impact, 4 boxes of 2017 Topps UFC Chrome, 1 box of 2016 Topps Star Wars Masterwork, 1 box of Topps Star Wars: Jedi Legacy, 1 box of 2015 Topps UFC Chronicles, 1 Jumbo Box of 2012 Topps Series 2, 1 box of 2017 Topps High Tek Baseball, 1 box of 2016 Panini National Treasures Racing, and 1 box of 2016 Panini Certified Racing. I also have 2 boxes of 2017 Topps UFC Knockout on the way from Topps and a box of Cryptozoic DC Bombshells on the way from eBay that I'll add to this pile when they get here.

I divided all of the stuff into lots for each day's breaks, but since today is the first day I made the break a little bigger than the others. I've got a Jumbo pack of 2012 Topps Series 2, two packs of 2016 Panini Certified Racing, a box of 2016 Topps UFC High Impact, a pack of 2016 Topps Star Wars Masterwork, and 8 packs of 2017 Topps UFC Chrome. I'll probably just be scanning the highlights rather than going through and scanning everything.

The baseball pack didn't offer much in the way of highlights, so this Ken Griffey Jr. 1987 mini insert is the representative from the pack. 2012 Topps Baseball has some of the uglier inserts out there, and I mostly bought the box 1) because I felt weird making a big order without much baseball representation and 2) to chase a Bryce Harper rookie card.

The serial-numbered insert from the Panini Certified packs was this die-cut Famed Rides card of Richard Petty's car. I've never been much of a Richard Petty fan, but he's pretty famous and had a lot of success in racing. This one is numbered # 065 / 199.

The other pack of Certified had this Kurt Busch autograph in it. This is the base version of his Certified Signatures card, and my copy is numbered # 038 / 139. I've actually been toying with the idea of collecting the Busch brothers now that most of my favorite drivers have retired, but I haven't quite talked myself into it yet. This would make a good start to a Kurt Busch collection. It's a sticker auto, but he has a pretty nice-looking signature.

The Topps UFC High Impact box promises one autograph, and this Joe Lauzon card was it. It is odd to me that the back of the card says it's a 2015 card, but the boxes call it a 2016 product. I guess maybe there was a delay in the release or something. Joe Lauzon autographs have a bit of a reputation for being set fillers, and I think I've probably got at least one of these already.

Each box of High Impact also promises a Femme Fighters insert. I am trying to complete the set, and I only need four more cards. Ronda Rousey isn't one of the ones I needed, but it is one of the better cards to get doubles of. My other copy is currently on the way from the COMC order I had shipped during the free shipping promotion.

I scanned everything from the Masterwork pack. The Count Doku and R2-D2 cards are base cards. The TIE Fighter Pilot is a Silver parallel, and the Yoda card is a Rainbow Foil parallel from the Force Display insert set. The TIE Fighter Pilot is numbered # 36 / 99, and the Yoda is numbered # 123 / 299.

The promised hit in the pack was this base autograph of Matthew Wood as General Grievous. I don't know what else to say about it. It's a Star Wars autograph that I didn't have yet, but it's not exactly what you dream of pulling from a pack of Masterwork. I've still got three more packs to go, though, although at least one of them is going to hold a manufactured medallion relic.

The UFC Chrome packs didn't have any of the two hits from the box in them, but I did find three serial-numbered cards. This Blue Wave Refractor of Stephen Thompson is the first. I think these fall one per box, and they are numbered # / 75. This one is # 20 / 75.

The other two big pulls were Refractors from insert sets. This Joanna Jędrzejczyk comes from the Fire insert, and is numbered # 89 / 99. I thought this was a pretty decent pull.

The next Refractor was this Museum Collection parallel of Dominick Cruz. I'm not a huge Cruz fan, but he's still one of the bigger names in the sport. Even without pulling a hit, I still feel like UFC Chrome is a fun product to break. The autograph checklist isn't all that strong, but I still feel like you get a decent amount of fun stuff for your dollar. I didn't scan any of the other inserts or base Refractors I pulled, and this was just 1/3 of a box. I thought about ordering a half case or full case of the stuff, but I wanted to leave room in the order for a little more variety in my break.

So that's Day 1 of the breaks. I have my spreadsheet broken out into about 25 days of stuff to open, so there will be plenty more. Tomorrow is one of the bigger days, as I'll be tearing into that box of National Treasures Racing.

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.

2016 Topps Series 1 Inserts

For the price of a couple packs of cards I was able to acquire 5 complete insert sets from 2016 Topps Series 1 Baseball. It seems like most inserts have become devalued these days, outside of a few that are particularly innovative or rare. I know that I am guilty of ignoring most inserts in favor of base cards, numbered parallels, and relics or autographs. It's a shame, because many inserts have creative themes or offer something that isn't covered in the base sets. I would like it if inserts felt a little more special when they came out of a pack. I guess the place to look for inspiration would be the card sets of the late 1990's, the heyday of the insert. There needs to be foil, acetate, crazy colors, and variance in pack ratios so that your flashy inserts are harder to get than your basic inserts. Maybe that ship has already sailed, but I just wish there were insert sets out there that gave me the same feeling I had as a kid in the 90's when I busted a pack and saw a glimmer of colorful foil in the middle of the stack of cards. I get a hint of that these days when I see the colorful border of a nice parallel card, but I'd like it if that excitement extended to the insert sets.

This Pressed Into Service set covers times in baseball history when position players were called on to pitch in games as emergency relievers. It's a good idea for an insert set, and although some of the cards in the set don't feature the players in pitching poses, some of them do. This is one of the inserts I had earmarked to pick up from the 2016 set, and the full checklist was part of this lot.

The Perspectives insert set focuses on photos taken from interesting angles and inserts the insert name and player name into the images. The photography is pretty nice, looking like the sort of stuff you might find in a Stadium Club product. The big gold lettering all over in the backgrounds and foregrounds of the pictures is distracting to varying degrees, but this is a nice enough set that I had it on my list of inserts to complete.

Even the backs of the Perspectives cards look a little like what you'd find in a Stadium Club set. If we hadn't already seen the sell sheet for 2016 Stadium Club I'd be wondering if this was a thinly-veiled teaser for that product.

I didn't really care about these Wacky Packages cards, but they were part of the lot and I scanned them. For some reason the whole Garbage Pail Kids / Wacky Packages / MAD Magazine / Cracked Magazine scene passed me by. I had cousins and friends who were in to that stuff, but I never really got it.

These Back To Back cards weren't really on my want list either, but now I have them. It's a decent idea for an insert, but the execution is a bit off-putting. The pixelated area between the featured players comes off as looking more like a corrupted JPEG than it does some cool visual effect from The Matrix. The checklist is decent enough.

This is another set that was on my list to acquire. While I've heard mixed reviews around the blogosphere regarding the First Pitch concept, I like the idea of featuring various folks who have been called on to throw out the first pitch in a baseball game. There are bound to be a few cards in the set that don't interest me personally each year, but I like the variety that a set like this allows for in a checklist. I hope that Topps keeps putting the First Pitch insert in the flagship product, because each time it comes out there are a handful of cards that I definitely want to add to my collection, as well as a few others that make me say, "Oh yeah! I remember that D-list celebrity!"

Even some of the non-celebrity cards are cool, as that Rebekah Gregory card carries an inspirational story with it. Sports are one thing that America uses to cope with tragedy, and sports history tends to intertwine with U.S. and world history in interesting ways. It's good to see baseball cards that document that interaction from time to time.

So those are all the insert sets I got in the lot. There was another slightly more expensive lot that included the 100 Years of Wrigley set, but I wasn't interested in that one. I got all five insert sets for $11 after shipping was figured in, good for a per-card price of less than fifteen cents. I am still holding out on a factory set this year for the base Topps set, but it's been hard to keep away from buying packs here and there. I did buy a hanger box when Series 1 was first released and two Toys"R"Us packs a couple of weeks ago, but that's been it so far. The release of Heritage has presented me with yet another test of willpower. I'll probably pick up a couple packs of that sometime soon to tide me over until I can pick up a complete set from some online seller.

At the Trade Deadline 36: The Prowling Cat Cleans Out His Clutter, and I'm Reaping All the Benefits, Part 1

The Prowling Cat has recently been clearing out his clutter, placing excess items from his collection on the block for other collectors to claim before he sends them off to Goodwill. I have claimed a couple of items from the offerings available, and recently received a nice box of goodies in the mail. First up is this 1993 Hostess Baseballs set, which was distributed in 3-card packs paired with baseball-themed snack cakes. It seems that you would need to eat a whole lot of snack cakes to collect the full 32-card set, especially if you pulled doubles. John Kruk seems like a guy who knows his way around a snack cake, so I chose him to headline this post.

The checklist contains many of the big names of the day. I wasn't watching a lot of baseball in 1993, so I don't have many enduring memories of these guys outside of seeing them on the baseball cards I accumulated in my youth. Bobby Bonilla comes up in the news every year because of his annual $1.2 million buyout payments from the Mets, an amount that he will receive annually until 2035. Although that seems outlandish to the layperson, it actually might not be a bad deal for the Mets overall.

It's weird to see familiar names in unfamiliar uniforms. I always associate Gary Sheffield with the Marlins and Darryl Strawberry with the Mets, although both guys spent plenty of time on other teams.

Dennis Eckersley is probably my favorite from this bunch, but that probably has a lot to do with his big-head doppelganger, as featured in 2015 Topps Stadium Club:

The dude's got a serious hair and mustache game, although you can see the real Eckersley has a clean upper lip these days.

Frank Thomas always seemed larger than life. In my memory it seems like he showed up on more posters and magazine covers than most other baseball players of the era, up there in a group with Griffey, Ripken Jr., and Bo Jackson. There are probably other guys who were just as prolific, but those are the guys I remember as being everywhere. 

It's nice to see that colorful Astros uniform make an appearance, with Jeff Bagwell making an appearance on this checklist. He's been on the Hall of Fame ballot for a few years, but his percentage hasn't been climbing at a rate that suggests he'll make it in. I guess it's largely because he played in the steroid era and everyone from that time is under suspicion for PED usage.

This set is pretty heavy on hitters, but a handful of pitchers made it onto the checklist, with Tom Glavine being one of them. This is one of my favorite Rickey Henderson anecdotes:

"During a game in Seattle an on-deck batter overheard Rickey muttering to himself after he struck out. As the next batter was walking past him, he heard Henderson say, 'Don’t worry, Rickey, you’re still the best.'"

Positive self-talk and visualization is a great psychological tool. It seems like there is a line where it can become too much, though. Rickey probably spends a great deal of time on the far side of that line. 

This is probably the most star-studded scan in this post. Most of the others feature at least one guy who falls a bit short or only got hot for a year or two. The lowest guy in this group is Don Mattingly, and he still had an MVP award and six All-Star appearances.

I like all of the cards that used to be packaged with food and snacks. I don't have a lot of them in my collection, so it is nice to add them when I can. The Prowling Cat has been awfully generous with his closet-clearing and has offered up items to suit a variety of interests. I'm gonna have to come up with a good trade package in return for all this goodness.

Blast from My Past 2: 1993 Post Collector Series

I have always loved getting stuff in the mail. It is one of the things that drives me through each day. One of my enduring memories from childhood comes from the time my dad was stationed in Alaska for a couple of years. We had one of those communal mailboxes with the little keyed compartments and I would retrieve our key and make the trek down the road to get the mail almost every day. In the summer I could wear regular clothes, in the winter I had to bundle up, and during the spring thaw I'd wear rubber boots or wear regular shoes and get my feet wet from stepping in slush, mud, or puddles.

Being a kid I didn't have a lot of money, so much of my mail came from sending in cereal box Proofs of Purchase for items like card sets and Matchbox cars. I also made ample use of the offers in the back of magazines and comic books, mostly to order lots of postage stamps, sample catalogs, and anything else that could be had cheaply. Those 4-6 week shipping times were killers. Today we get agitated if an eBay purchase takes more than a week to arrive, but some of the stuff I ordered as a kid could take a whole summer vacation to hit the mailbox! I still check the mailbox every day, even though I know my wife gets the mail before I get home. It's part of my routine. This 1993 Post Collector's Series set was available in 3-card packs from Post cereals, but you could also order a set direct from Post. That's probably what I did, as I have a full set plus 3 cards. I must have pulled the pack of cards from a cereal box and liked them so much I ordered a set.

There are 30 cards in the set, and it is pretty well packed with star power from the early 90's. All of the big names make appearances, dressed in their airbrushed prison ball uniforms. I wasn't always hooked into any avenues for traditional sports cards from Topps, Fleer, and Upper Deck, so these food issues played a key role in my awareness of the stars of the day.

In fact, when I really got into card collecting as a teenager in the mid-90's I was mostly into basketball and non-sports cards, so these cereal cards made up the bulk of my baseball collection. I was too busy chasing NBA players and Independence Day Widevision sets to bother with baseball much beyond checking the standings every so often to see how the Astros were doing. I'd read the sports page in the paper, too, so I'd get whatever the big baseball headlines were.

I don't remember exactly when I started playing fantasy baseball, but Yahoo! has records showing that I've had teams all the way back to 2003. Maybe I played before then, but I can't remember for sure. For many years that was my main connection to baseball. I didn't watch many games, but I did keep up with the stats of individual guys, especially the guys who ended up on my roster. My 3rd-place team from 2003 included such luminaries as Alex Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez, Aramis Ramirez, Juan Pierre, Edgar Martinez, Raul Mondesi, Marquis Grissom, Jim Edmonds, Bret Boone, Roger Clemens, Greg Maddux, and Mike Mussina. Not a bad lineup, really.

I have to wonder a little bit if this kind of card issue would bring more young folks into the hobby of collecting today? I didn't have access to any sort of regular card shop when I was a kid, but food issue sets kept me generally aware of the sports world during my formative years. Maybe I never would have fallen into card collecting without them.