Cyber Week Breaks: Day 21 - Baseball Fighting and a Good Deal on a Danica Autograph

I skipped a day of posting yesterday. I'm sure I had a good reason for it. Like the title says, today's post features baseball fighting, and the least expensive Danica Patrick autograph in my collection. Also some UFC cards. The breaks for today are 3 packs of 2012 Topps Baseball Series 2, a box of 2016 Topps UFC High Impact, and a pack of 2017 Topps UFC Knockout.

First up is the 2012 Topps Baseball. I got the last hit of the box in this batch of packs, a Golden Moments Gold parallel relic card of Jonathan Papelbon, numbered # 54 / 99. I promised baseball fighting in this post, and here it is:

He famously went after Bryce Harper in 2015 after they exchanged words about Harper not running a ball out. More exciting to me from this batch of packs was the Coco Crisp Black parallel card, which is a nice addition to my rather dormant Crisp player collection.

The Crisp card is numbered # 25 / 61. Pretty good stuff. He didn't sign anywhere after the 2016 season and took a job as a high school baseball coach, so I think he's probably done with pro ball.

The High Impact box finally dropped something other than an Al Iaquinta autograph, which I was pretty happy to see. Even better was that the autograph is from a decent name in the UFC, Amanda Nunes, who is the current Women's Bantamweight champion. My Femme Fighters insert was Tecia Torres, which is a duplicate for me. Still, the Nunes autograph makes this box a winner.

The Knockout pack was pretty good as well. First up is this Tier One Autograph card of Joanna Jędrzejczyk, who only recently lost the Women's Strawweight title to Rose Namajunas after successfully defending it 5 times. This is the base version, numbered # 018 / 199.

The second hit in the pack was this Fight Mat Relic Card of Lyoto Machida. This is the base version, numbered # 69 / 99. I still think it's funny that Topps puts 'FIGHTER-WORN MEMORABILIA' on the front of these mat relic cards. The mat is an important part of the action, but it's not really worn by the fighters. You wouldn't sell a piece of basketball court as player-worn.

A while back I saw that Danica Patrick had a new book, Pretty Intense, coming out, and there were autographed copies available for pre-order through Barnes & Noble. I missed out on it because it was one of those things I just kept putting off for a while.

Then on release day I went back to the Barnes & Noble site and saw that signed copies were available again, so I ordered one. It was like $24 including shipping. I thought it was pretty cool, and they sold out again pretty fast, so I'm glad I checked when I did. It's too bad it wasn't an in-person signing like the one I went to in September for Charlotte Flair, but Boise isn't exactly a hot spot for celebrity appearances. I think Danica did a signing in New York City, which is a little bigger than Boise. Actually, New York City probably has more people than the whole state of Idaho, and maybe a couple of our surrounding states as well.

I flipped through the book a little bit. It looks like a decent look into Danica's personal workout, nutrition, and mental health regimen / philosophy. I may eventually pick up an unsigned copy to actually read through.

That does it for today, and I guess for this year.

Cyber Week Breaks: Day 9 - Knockout Saves the Day, Plus LEGO

Today was going to be kind of a boring break, in my opinion, but the two boxes of 2017 Topps UFC Knockout I ordered from the Topps website arrived and I added a mini-box from the product to today's offerings. Each box of Knockout includes four mini-boxes, and promises 2 autographed relic cards, 2 autographed cards, and 4 relic cards overall. That works out to a relic and some kind of autograph per mini-box, along with a couple of parallels and six base cards. I didn't photograph the base cards, but they look like the parallels with less color. The other stuff I busted today was a box of 2016 Topps UFC High Impact and 3 jumbo packs of 2012 Topps Series 2 Baseball.

The first parallel from the Knockout mini-box was this Blue Tecia Torres, numbered # 42 / 99. I am a little bit of a Torres fan, because an Invicta fighter (Sharon Jacobson) I know trains with her. Torres' only loss is to current champion Rose Namajunas, and she's won three fights in a row since that loss.

I also got a Green parallel of Khabib Nurmagomedov, numbered # 037 / 215. My hits from this box were pretty darn good, with a Nate Diaz Tier One relic card numbered # 107 / 125 being the promised relic in the box. This is the base version of the card, which is seeded at a rate of 1:6 packs. The big hit of the box is a Miesha Tate Tier One Autograph Silver Ink parallel, numbered # 08 / 10. These are a tough pull, at 1:61 packs, or about every 8 boxes. It's a nice-looking card, too, with an on-card signature and a dark background to help the ink really pop.

Moving on to the scheduled breaks, here are my pulls from the box of High Impact. Tony Ferguson is the autograph from the box, and I think he is another fighter whose signature is new to my collection. The Femme Fighters insert is Cat Zingano, whose card I already had. I only need a couple more cards from the Femme Fighters insert, so I'm expecting a lot of doubles from here on out.

The three packs of 2012 Topps Series 2 Baseball didn't have much that was very interesting, so I took pictures of the 1987 Topps Mini inserts and a Nolan Ryan Mound Dominance insert.

We were planning on going to see the new Star Wars movie today, but it didn't work out that way. Instead I built some LEGO kits I had kicking around under my desk. First up was kit # 70902, the Catwoman Cycle Chase. The kit has 139 pieces that go together to make a jewelry shop, Catwoman's motorcycle, Catwoman, Batgirl, and Robin. This is a smaller kit, but it was a pretty fun build. The motorcycle looks like a proper custom chopper, and the jewelry shop has enough detail to fit into any retail shopping scene, if you are a person who is building a custom LEGO city.

I am adding a picture of the interior of the jewelry shop to go along with the conversation in the comments. There's not a whole lot to it.

I also built kit # 75168, Yoda's Jedi Starfighter. This one has 262 pieces, and is made up of the ship, Yoda, and R2-D2. This isn't the first time this kit has appeared on a trading card blog, as San Jose Fuji built it last March.

Combined Shipping Leads to Buying Stuff 10: Combined Shipping is a Powerful Drug

The first card in this post is the only card I meant to purchase, but things got a little out of hand when I saw that the seller offered free shipping with the purchase of  items. I am usually able to pass up on these offers because sellers often don't have enough cards I want. This time I did track down 10 items from the seller's inventory to purchase.

Here is the card that started me down this path. It popped up in my feed at a very low price for a low-numbered UFC card. It is the Gold parallel of Jessica Penne's 2015 Topps UFC Champions card, and it is numbered # 16 / 25. As a bonus, it features a cameo by one of my PC fighters, Randa Markos. Penne would win that fight by decision. I will pick up nearly any UFC parallel card that is # / 25 or less if the price is right.

The problem with my Randa Markos collection is that, to my knowledge, she doesn't have any relics or autographs out there. I am lucky if she gets into lower-tier products with a base card and some parallels or maybe an insert. She is absent from the checklists of most hit-driven products, so I have expanded my player collections to officially include Julianna Pena. As part of the combined shipping lot, I picked up this Fight Mat Relic Card from 2016 Topps UFC Knockout. It is numbered # 076 / 188, and you can see in tiny print under the disclaimer that this relic piece comes from the TUF 18 Finale, a tournament that Pena won.

Randa Markos' next opponent is Carla Esparza. They will fight at UFC Fight Night: Browne vs. Lewis in February. This card is Esparza's Gold parallel from 2016 Topps UFC Knockout, numbered # 44 / 99.

I also picked up this Green parallel of Leslie Smith from 2015 Topps UFC Chronicles. It is numbered # 088 / 288. Smith has had an up-and-down career in the UFC so far, last defeating Irene Aldana in December.

The last UFC card in this lot is this Silver parallel of Tecia Torres from 2016 Topps UFC Knockout. It is numbered # 022 / 227. Torres lost a fight to Rose Namajunas in April 2016, and has an upcoming fight against Bec Rawlings in February.

I closed out the order with a couple of Hakeem Olajuwon and Shannon Sharpe cards for those particular player collections. I think the top left Olajuwon is from 1999-00 Skybox E-X, and the top right Olajuwon is from 1997-98 Flair Showcase. On the bottom are a 1999 Topps Gold Label and a 1998 Flair Showcase card for Sharpe.

There are apparently only nine cards in this post. There is a 1997 Pinnacle Shannon Sharpe card that should be here, but I don't see the scan for it, and the Leslie Smith Green parallel was from another order and ought to be replaced by a Cat Zingano card that also isn't in the scans for this post. I was twisting my brain around trying to match the cards in that order to the cards in this post. That's what happens when you let cards pile up before you scan them. Either way, I originally went to buy the card at the top of the post and wound up ordering 9 more to go with it, including some of the cards pictured here.