Late to the Party - 2016 Topps Stadium Club Set

A couple of months ago I finally grabbed a set of 2016 Topps Stadium Club. I think that makes me officially pretty late to the Stadium Club party this year. I picked out a few cards that I liked to scan and post here on my blog. Most of them have probably been seen on the blogosphere before, but I needed a couple more baseball posts to boost my ratio and this seemed like an easy way to do it. I've got thirteen posts in my draft folder right now, and the mix is pretty short on your traditional big four sports:

Baseball - 4

Basketball - 1

Wrestling - 1

Comics - 2

Racing - 1

MMA - 3

Star Wars - 1

I was actually pretty surprised to see so many baseball posts. I don't have a lot of baseball stuff coming in these days. It can be hard to find new cards when your main PC guys are not stars, and in some cases didn't even get back onto the big-league roster this season.

I wish the Astros had built on their success from last year, but the Rangers ran away with the Division and every time Houston got within spitting distance of a Wild Card spot, they would drop a couple of series' to bad teams and lose just enough to keep themselves out of the race. They need something more if they want to be a true powerhouse, but somehow I think they'll keep falling just a little bit short. Maybe I'm just pessimistic right now because they are out of the tournament and other teams are in. Either way, that's a pretty good shot of Altuve and Rasmus.

I like that photo of Dennis Eckersley, too. I don't even know what the A's are going to do now. It seems like they've pretty well blown up the roster, but now what?

That Adam Eaton card proved a little prophetic, as in August he hit a grand slam while blowing a bubble with his gum. That Randal Grichuk photo is pretty epic, and Marquis Grissom is a rare Expos sighting. Finally, we get a picture of creepy Randy Johnson staring over his glove at the backside of squinty Randy Johnson.

Something must be wrong with me if I am posting two Atlanta Braves in the same post, let alone the same scan. I thought the Smoltz photo was pretty good, and I like fielding shots where you can see the faces of fans in the crowd. Just think, that's what you look like when you're watching a sporting event.

That Jorge Soler photo is decent, although wouldn't it be that much better if the photo was zoomed out just a bit more so you could see his whole hand? Same with Smoltz' cap?

I also enjoyed seeing that photo of Robin Yount advertising for Honda. I love my motorcycles, but I never got into dirtbikes. Probably some kind of repressed trauma thing from the time I burnt my legs on the exhaust of my dad's dirtbike. Or the time our new dog attacked me and I fell back into that same motorcycle, knocking it over. I've still got a dimple scar on my forearm from that bite. Apparently the dog's previous owner had been mistreated by their son, who was about my age at the time. Hmm, that wasn't really a place I planned on going with this post.

There are plenty of nice horizontal shots in this set. Here are a few of them. I start things off with a couple of nice batting shots, with Brandon Phillips and Nolan Arenado. The Phillips card qualifies as a Tatooine shot, I believe. Adam Jones gets a nice photo as he prepares to attack a teammate with a victory pie (or is it cake?), a practice the Orioles banned during the off-season for safety reasons.

I thought that Lou Brock play at the plate photo was pretty cool, especially the little details like the bat in the dirt and his helmet about to fly off. Dat butt, tho, on the catcher. Andre Ethier gets a nice circus fielding shot. Again, I wish this photo had been cropped a little differently so that we could see the faces of those four fans in the background. This post closes out with a Cards on Cards picture of Evan Longoria in front of himself on a giant-sized trading card. Meta!

I do like the Stadium Club sets that Topps has put out the last few years. They've got some nice photography. I think the 2014 set looked the most like the Stadium Club sets of the early 90's, but the 2015 and 2016 designs do an all right job of making the photo the focus of the card.

At the Trade Deadline 47: The Prowling Cat Cleans Out His Clutter, and I'm Reaping All the Benefits, Part 7

Here is the final item included in The Prowling Cat's recent closet-cleaning package. It's a set of 1984 Ralston Purina trading cards produced by Topps and distributed in cereal boxes. I remember Ralston Purina baseball cards, but this set is a bit early for me as I turned 3 years old right at the end of 1983. The slightly later airbrushed Post cards fit more into the years when I became aware of trading cards.

Dan Quisenberry is sporting quite the lip tickler in this photo, as well as a big healthy dip in his cheek. I've never liked chewing tobacco, but I've spent a lot of time with people who do during my time in the military and working in freight. There is one guy in particular who comes to mind because he had a small chin and a small mouth, so his wad of chew was always threatening to escape. He had this habit of slurping it back in while wiping his chin with his finger while he talked. It was disgusting, and I always thought it was kind of unprofessional to be a grown-ass man with a pretty constant line of drool running down your chin.

This is a pretty decent lineup of baseball card photos. Although there are exceptions, many of the players don't seem too pleased to be having their pictures taken. The set calls itself the 1st Annual Collectors' Edition, but the only other Ralston Purina set I can locate is a 1987 release. Those cards wisely dropped the word 'annual' from their tagline.

This grouping of cards features a few more smiles than the last batch, but there are still a few mean-muggers here, including Wade Boggs, who once glared so hard at a cinder-block wall that the wall moved several feet to the side to let him pass. It's nice to see Nolan Ryan in those Astros rainbow colors, but the shot is zoomed in so far that you don't get the full effect.

Here are some more nice shots. There is plenty of facial hair on display, with the standout for me being Bruce Sutter's magnificent beard. One thing that stood out to me about this set was how sweaty a lot of the players' faces are. It's like these photos were taken in the very hottest part of summer. A lot of the guys are sporting some pretty nice tans / sunburns, so maybe I'm not too far off.

Gary Carter is probably the most egregious example of face sweat in the set, as in-hand you can actually see it running down to the side of his nose. In that building behind Keith Hernandez you car barely make out the silhouette of the second spitter as he makes his way down to the bushes near the gravelly road.

There was a ton of cool cardboard in this package from The Prowling Cat. I had a lot of fun flipping through it and becoming a little more familiar with food issues from the time just before I discovered trading cards.

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.