2010 SEGA Card Gen Lot

My 4th of July didn't go exactly as planned. We were going to take the kids to the water park, but I woke up with a headache, dizzy spells, and an upset stomach. So my wife and kids went to the water park and I mostly stayed in bed. I did manage to go out and get a handful of fireworks in the late afternoon, and after my family came home I went outside to set them off. It kind of stunk to be sick on the holiday, but I am feeling a little better this evening and should be able to make it in to work in the morning.

I have a full set of 2013 SEGA Card Gen cards and a pretty large number of cards from the 2012 set, but I don't have many from the earlier versions of the product out of Japan. A bunch of 2010 SEGA Card Gen cards came up on eBay recently, and I grabbed a fair number of them. For the most part I didn't bite on any of the higher-priced big names, but I got a lot of other guys from the set. Kendrys Morales' Wikipedia page says that MLB mistakenly called him 'Kendry' until May 2011, and you can see that on his card here.

I did wind up grabbing one big name in this lot, opting to pay a little more to get that Lance Berkman card into my collection. Other than that, this scan has a lot of relief pitchers and a couple of starters. And Nate McLouth.

Here are some card backs for you. I love all of the trading card game / video game imagery on these cards, with the star ratings and the power bars for different attributes. It seems odd to me that Lance Berkman has a relatively low total score of 75 and an 8-star rating, but I am guessing that certain attributes are worth more stars than others.

Here are the last eight cards from this lot. Carlos Gomez made the GIF and video circuit today for beating up a cooler with his bat. I hope he feels better now. I like that picture of Rod Barajas in his catching gear.

The seller also included a quartet of shiny bonus cards in the package. The highlight is probably that Jose Bautista in the upper left, but I also like that Refractory Dylan Bundy in the lower left.

Care Package from Fuji

When I got home from New Jersey I had a veritable mountain of mail sitting on my desk. Among the mailers was a package from Fuji over at The Chronicles of Fuji. Inside I found a whole bunch of items that hit many of my different collections.

First up is a number of Hakeem Olajuwon cards. Those Upper Deck holograms were huge for me back in the day. These are the cards I coveted in the 90's. There's also a Manute Bol card hiding down there in the lower right.

I like lists, and those NBA Jam Session cards take a list and put it on cardboard. There's a lot of star power on those cards. The Trading Places insert at the bottom was new to me. I got out of collecting around the time that Olajuwon went to the Raptors, so I haven't seen most of his later cardboard.

Fuji also hit up my Nolan Ryan collection. I'm not a very good Ryan collector, but I like getting his cards when they show up. Out of this lot, I especially like the O-Pee-Chee in the upper right and the Starline card in the lower left. It's also nice to see a couple appearances by the Astros' rainbow uniforms.

There were plenty of Astros in the package, including the Killer B's, player collection guy Jon Singleton, and World Series hero George Springer.

Hologram technology makes another appearance here, with a Denny's oddball of Jeff Bagwell. I've probably eaten at Denny's three or four times in my life, so I wasn't ever exposed to these until I started reading card blogs. There's also a nice-looking Craig Biggio League Leaders card here.

My R.A. Dickey collection got a little boost, too, with a few different things, including two different Bowman Platinum parallels, a shiny foil Stadium Club card, a Little League card (from a Sports Illustrated for Kids magazine), and some Museum Collection and Ginter to round it out.

This slightly over-sized Kellogg's Raisin Bran card was one highlight of the package. I don't think I'd ever seen this one before, so it was a welcome addition to my Olajuwon hoard. It highlights his college career.

This 2017 Topps Series One Jackie Robinson Logo card of Alex Bregman is a solid chunk of cardboard. These were a one-per-blaster inclusion in the retail release of this product, so the card for a given team would be a pretty difficult find.

The last card in the package was this Jason Lane patch relic from 2002 Leaf Certified. This is the Mirror Blue parallel, numbered # 68 / 75. Lane played outfield in parts of 6 MLB seasons, with his only full season being 2005. That means he's played in four more World Series games than most of us have. He fell out of the MLB after 2007, but bounced around the minors and came back as a pitcher, throwing 10.1 innings for the Padres in 2014. I thought that was pretty wild, especially with the long gap in between. I believe he is currently a hitting coach in the Brewers organization.

Thanks for the package, Fuji! There was a lot of variety in here, and I enjoyed looking through all of the cards you sent!

Contested Shots 17: Astros from Section 36

Not too long ago, the Boston Red Sox-centric Section 36 blog held a contest with rules so easy, even I could follow them. All you had to do was post a comment on one of the blog's posts requesting cards for your favorite team. I did just that, and I won! Not only did I win, my comment earned a mention in the post announcing the winners.

The prize was a big lot of Astros cards, several team bags full, mostly from the late 2000's. 

Lance Berkman was heavily-featured in the lot, which calls to mind this prize I won from P-Town Tom in a previous contest. By all accounts, I should have been a huge fan of Berkman and the rest of the Killer B's, but I was pretty busy elsewhere during the decade and didn't pay much attention to baseball outside of the occasional glance at the standings and fantasy sports teams. I can appreciate them in retrospect, though, thanks to cardboard infusions like this one.

There was almost one full team bag of pitcher Roy Oswalt. One good thing about missing a decade or so of sports cards is that all of the designs are relatively new and fresh to me, while those who kept collecting throughout the decade have probably seen their share of them. I didn't scan nearly all of them, but I got a pretty good sampling in here.

Here are a few more of the standouts from the rest of the package.I had to get the great Nolan Ryan in here, and I couldn't pass up the Bob Abreu Classic Best card. Then there are several other notable Astros in Craig Biggio, Junction Jack, Curt Schilling (his one year with the Astros was probably his worst), Joe Morgan, and Brad Ausmus. There were plenty more cards in the package, but if I had the endurance to scan that many cards I'd have to change my name to Billy Kingsley.

I'll close this post out with the hits that were included in my prize package. First up is a Panini Prizm autograph of Max Stassi. I remember hearing some hype about him in the past, but it seems like that has mostly blown over. I guess he's still young, but he's blocked at catcher by Brian McCann and Evan Gattis.

Mark McLemore is the second autograph in the bunch. He played in 28 games for the Astros in 2007, and that was about it for his major league career. He did play from 2002-2011 in the minor leagues and independent ball, though. He also has a pretty interesting signature.

The final autograph is Jiovanni Mier. He was drafted by the Astros in the first round of the 2009 draft and was rated as a Top 100 prospect for a while, but hasn't made much of an impact yet. He's currently in the Blue Jays' minor league system.

This was a fun package to sort through, and I enjoyed catching up on some of the Astros from my missing hobby decade. Thanks for the contest, Section 36!

At the Trade Deadline 43: I Got Zippy-Zapped

A few days ago I got an unexpected bubble mailer in my mailbox. That's not entirely unheard of, but I am always suspicious that maybe I ordered something and forgot about it. I opened it up and found a familiar phrase on a card taped to one in a stack of several (re)packs of cards. I'd been Zippy Zapped!

Zippy Zapping is the calling card of the aptly-named Zippy Zappy from the blog Cervin' Torren' Up Cards. He's been pretty active on the Zippy Zapping front lately, as there have been quite a few reported Zippy Zappings around the blogs over the last week or so.

There are a few things you can almost always find in a typical Zippy Zapping. One of the main things is prospects. He is a fan of the Long Staten Island Yankees, but he carries a vast knowledge of the farm systems of most teams in baseball. I spend a lot of my time after receiving a package from him doing research, as I don't know nearly enough about even my favorite teams' prospects, let alone the prospects in any other system. I didn't scan all of the cards he sent, but I looked at a few lists of the Astros' top prospects and made sure to scan some guys from the Top 10. A.J. Reed is the up and comer who is rumored to be waiting in the wings if Jon Singleton can't get his bat together pretty quickly. Singleton is one of the guys I collect, so I am hoping he can hit well enough to keep Reed in the minors for a while still. 

Carlos Correa was last year's darling, playing his way to the AL Rookie of the Year award. Zippy Zappy included some nice cardboard of the young shortstop, including some prospect cards, a nice Diamond Kings card I hadn't seen yet, and his Heritage card from the 2015 High Numbers set. I haven't started a Correa PC yet, but I probably should. I guess I prefer to collect prospects like Singleton who haven't lived up to the hype. Their prices are lower.

These 2014 Bowman Draft Picks and Prospects Black parallels were all in sleeves with tags priced in Japanese Yen. I am pretty sure these parallels are from the Asia-exclusive version of the product, which includes several color variations not available in your standard Bowman product.

These brightly-colored parallels are all serially-numbered, with that Vincent Velasquez Prizm Draft card being an eBay 1 / 1, numbered # 001 / 100. It's the first one in the print run, yo! The other guys feature more pedestrian serial numbers. Velasquez is the only name I really recognize in this group, although Joshua Magee seems like I remember him in some back part of my brain.

Probably to keep my head from exploding at the sight of so many prospects, Zippy Zappy also included a number of cards featuring old guys from the Astros franchise, like Bagwell, Berkman, Qualls, and Tejada. There were others, but I have become a lazy scanner in my old age. My main memory from this group is drafting Tejada in fantasy baseball for a couple years after he was useful. I do a lot of dumb things in fantasy baseball, but luckily other players also are irrationally attached to players who have outlasted their usefulness or are prone to chasing prospects too early. Everyone has a weakness.

And here are some guys who contributed to the Astros' big run last year. I especially like seeing the progression of Keuchel's beard. I think Evan Gattis is still my favorite Astro, even though I don't really collect his cards like I should. It's hard to divert myself from my Singleton collection even to chase my favorite player on the team. I've gone too far down the rabbit hole.

Another Zippy Zappy signature is SEGA Card-Gen cards from Japan. The video game associated with these cards was discontinued, though, so these have all but disappeared from the usual acquisition channels. Zippy Zappy himself has announced that his supply is drying up. These are some of my favorite cards, so I am extremely grateful that he sent me three of them from his diminishing inventory. The 2010 and 2011 sets are not well-represented in my collection, so I was very happy to get two cards from 2011 in Wilton Lopez and Carlos Lee and a card of star pitcher Roy Oswalt from the 2010 set.

I didn't scan everything that Zippy Zappy sent, but I did scan a little of everything he sent. I am super grateful for the packages I receive from other bloggers and I do my best to pay it forward in the packages I send out. Zippy Zappy is one of the bloggers I am indebted to, as he has dropped some really nice cardboard bombs on me. Thank you!

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!

Contested Shots 11: Prizes from P-town Tom's Game of Skill and Chance!

P-town Tom of the Waiting 'til Next Year blog recently held a contest with the Grand Prize being the above graded Lance Berkman card and a lot of cards from your favorite team. To enter the contest you had to guess the total number of runs scored in the 6th grade intrasquad softball game for the team he coaches, with the tiebreaker being the time the game would take in minutes. After the dust cleared and the tiebreaker was invoked, my guess of 43 runs and 135 minutes was closest to the actual result of 45 runs and 156 minutes. I was really happy to win this contest, as that card featuring Lance Berkman in a sumo suit is just ridiculous and amazing, especially since it is graded and encased. That would have been prize enough, but P-town Tom also included a whole bunch of cards featuring Astros players. I didn't scan all of them because I am lazy and lack the scanning stamina of Billy, but I scanned a good number of them.

A number of the cards were from a time period when I was out of collecting entirely, so the sets are largely new or at least a little unfamiliar to me. I'm not a huge fan of the logo the Astros were sporting from 1994-1999, but at least Derek Bell's mustache game is on point.

Here are some shiny new cards as well as a shiny old Stadium Club Members Only card and a grizzled Butch Henry. Foltynewicz went over to the Braves in the Evan Gattis trade, which I think is a pretty good deal so far. He's been struggling for the Braves this season, while Gattis has been a key part of the Astros lineup.

Here's another mix of old and new cards. Jim Deshaies is taking some time out to shake what his momma gave him. Every time I post the phrase man-butt on my blog I see a spike in page views, so I am doing it again here in reference to Jim. I was happy to see Jon Singleton make an appearance in this prize package. I still haven't gotten around to grabbing a Stadium Club set from this year. The 2000's are a black hole for me as far as sports cards go. I'm sure there are a lot of you who can tell those designs right off the bat, but I have to look at the details to identify even flagship Topps sets.

There are a whole bunch of B-nmaes on the Astros, so some folks called them the Killer B's. I was aware of the Astros during this time period, but during their 2005 run to the World Series I had other things on my mind (I was newly-married and living in a makeshift barracks in an old bakery in Iraq) and at best kept up with the standings when I could. I missed out on some of the greatest baseball the Astros have played in their team history.

Closing this post up are a cool logo sticker, a couple of small cards, and a shiny Bowman Chrome card showing one of the Astros' arms of the future. I logged in to MLB.tv just in time today to see Jed Lowrie hit a Grand Slam to put the Astros up for good over the Twins, so it's been a good day to be an Astros fan, Now if the Angels can just hang on to beat the Rangers it will be an even better day.

Thank you for the prize package, P-town Tom! I had a lot of fun going through the cards and discovering some sets I haven't seen a lot of before.