Yesterday I showed off the Gold parallels I pulled from a bunch of 2013 and 2014 Topps Mini Baseball boxes I opened in late 2014. Today it's time to display the Pink parallels from that same batch. I'll probably let the pictures do most of the talking here, as pretty much none of these hit on any players or teams I am very interested in. The Pink cards from both years are # / 25. You can see pretty clearly on these scans the condition problems that the colored parallels had coming out of the pack in 2014. Whatever they used to color the borders was a flaky chipped mess.
Matt Cain had a pretty good run from like 2009 - 2012, maybe even 2007 - 2012 as long as you don't put much stock in Wins when evaluating a pitcher. But 2009 - 2012 was the peak and he did come away with a couple of World Series Rings.
Even with his struggles the last three seasons, CC Sabathia has got some good career numbers and one Championship Ring to go along with a Cy Young Award. Yovani Gallardo has got an All-Star appearance and a Silver Slugger award, so he's got that going for him. He's actually kind of had a second peak to his career with pretty good numbers lately.
Eric Chavez has managed to hang around for about 7 years past his prime, which is an achievement in itself. Tommy Hanson can grow a ginger beard. He's been bouncing around a bit trying to hang on in the minor leagues. From what I can tell he is currently in the Giants system somewhere.
Juan Nicasio is a bullpen guy who made 53 appearances for the Dodgers this season. He's also the final card in this batch. I like getting these rarer parallels, but in a 660-card set you don't always pull superstars or PC guys. The boxes were cheap enough that I can't cry and moan too much about my pulls.
These pictures were buried at the bottom of my Scans folder for a very long time, and I've finally gotten around to chopping and cropping all the images. Judging by the contents of the scans vs. what I remember coming out of the average box of these cards, I think the scans are made up of the 'hits' from 4-5 boxes of 2014 Topps Mini Baseball and either one amazing or 2 really good boxes of 2013 Topps Mini Baseball. The scans are dated December 2014, so these were probably the result of some Black Friday or Cyber Monday deals. I've gone ahead and broken the scans out by insert type. Today's post features all the Gold parallels from the scans. This first card is a League Leaders card featuring the 2013 NL Home Run leaders Pedro Alvarez, Paul Goldschmidt, and Jay Bruce. The Gold cards from 2014 Topps Mini have a print run of 63 cards while the Gold parallel in 2013 had 62 copies of each card.
The star of this trio is Adam Wainwright, who was unfortunately injured early this season and missed much of the year with a ruptured Achilles tendon. Somehow he was able to make a very rapid recovery and made 3 relief appearances late in the season, just 5 months after the injury. That didn't help my fantasy teams any, though, as I drafted him at the top of my rotations in a couple of leagues this year.
Anibal Sanchez is another guy I drafted in a couple of fantasy leagues, although not in the early rounds like I did Adam Wainwright. His numbers did plenty of damage to my teams' pitching lines before I dropped him. I didn't do very well in fantasy baseball this year. It was nice to pull a Josh Reddick Gold parallel as he is one of my main PC guys. I haven't added a whole lot of his cards lately, though. The 2014 Mini parallels suffered heavily from chipping and flaking along the edges and corners.
One of the 2013 Gold cards was this World Series card featuring the moments leading up to some man love between Sergio Romo and Buster Posey.
I can't say I have any love for the Giants. Madison Bumgarner has pet Basset Hounds, though, so I guess there is something good about the Giants. Their fans do seem pretty devoted, at least among the category of 'people I know who are Giants fans.' Here's my Basset Hound:
He's kind of a lazy turd, which makes him a perfect pet for me. His fur is super soft, which is pretty much why we keep him around.
Here are the rest of the 2013 Gold cards. Nothing too crazy there. Motte's beard game is pretty strong, so I tend to take notice og his cards. Kyle Seager has been a pretty decent sleeper player in fantasy baseball the last couple of seasons. He hasn't got the big name or the big market appeal, so he comes at a discount in drafts.
This guy, however, does not come at a discount. Most years over the last decade or so he has been worth the high pick, but 2014 and 2015 saw most of his counting stats dip a bit over previous production that led to two MVP Awards and plenty of voting consideration in the years he didn't win the award.
Jason Motte and his beard make another appearance in this post, this time with his 2014 card. That grip on Matt Thornton reminds me of an idea I had to photoshop fruit into the hands of players so that they all would appear to be standing around holding apples and pears and stuff. It would work especially well in sets with a lot of close-up posed shots, like Heritage.
Jeurys Familia racked up 43 saves in the regular season and he's come away with 5 saves so far in the postseason. Pretty good stuff. The Astros could have used a bullpen arm like his for their playoff run. The Mets are a game away from a World Series berth. If the Blue Jays and Cubs don't put something bordering on miraculous together it looks like there's gonna be a Royals - Mets World Series for 2015.
Closing things out (shoulda put Familia's card here; then that would have been a good pun) is this trio. Brad Peacock started one game for the Astros this year, then went on the DL with an intercostal strain. He could come back in 2016. Nelson Cruz was an All-Star for the Mariners this year, hitting 44 home runs and batting .302 on the season. Pretty good numbers. Josh Beckett's card shows the chipping and flaking that this year's parallels had, especially along the right edge there. Josh Beckett retired after his 2014 season was derailed by injury. He was in the Cy Young conversation in 2007 and a 3-time All-Star. He put up decent strikeout numbers for a starter throughout his career, so I had him on a few fantasy baseball rosters over time.
That does it for the Gold parallels from this batch of 2013 and 2014 Topps Mini baseball parallels. This is by far the longest of the four posts I've put together for these cards, as the Golds were the most numerous parallels in these sets.
I really like sketch cards, but there are so many of them out there that I can't possibly keep up with everything I like. I have to narrow my focus by limiting my collection to a few characters. I will make an exception here and there for an artist I really like or a card that I just can't pass up (like the Darth Vader lightsaber card I picked up a little while ago), but I try to keep it to a minimum. For Star Wars I stick with Princess Leia; for Marvel I chase She-Hulk, Thing, Cloak & Dagger, Hulk, and Wolverine; for My Little Pony I chase Fluttershy; and for DC I go with Power Girl. If I am chasing a particular artist I try to seek out a card they've done featuring one of those go-to characters.
In the last couple months I have picked up three Power Girl sketches from various sources for that collection. I had been chasing an Amber Shelton card for a while, but the right deal never really popped up. This card sat in my eBay Watch List for a long time before I finally pulled the trigger on it. It comes from the DC Epic Battles card set put out by Cryptozoic. There were a couple of Shelton's Marvel sketch cards sitting in my Watch List competing for my dollars, but I thought this was the best of the bunch. Maybe I am profiling my audience here, bur she recently finished working on a set featuring sketched pinups of dudes in various states of undress, so if you're not into partially-nude guys you may want to wait a couple of weeks to go check out her page [linked here]. Her DeviantArt page features a mix of all her stuff, and actually has this card on it right in the middle of this image.
This is a Personal Sketch card done by artist Anthony Hochrein. It features Power Girl in a slightly different costume. As I understand it, DC Direct put out a line of statues called Ame-Comi Girls which featured various DC super-heroines in anime-inspired versions of their normal outfits. DC took these designs and made a digital comic featuring the characters and then took the digital comic and published a print version.
Going back to the card, Hochrein sometimes will post in-progress shots of his latest batch of sketch cards on Facebook and offer them up for sale. I saw this card in one of his batches and decided to jump in and buy it while it was still in the pencil stage. I think it turned out pretty well, and it was fun to watch as he posted new photos with the flat colors and then the shading and the background and all the finishing touches. I thought about asking for the Ame-Comi Wonder Woman he was working on at the same time, but in the end I didn't like it as much as I liked this one.
Sanna Umemoto's art is pretty popular if you judge by eBay sales prices, but she seems to be a pretty elusive person online. I can find a lot of other people posting her work, but she doesn't seem to have any up-to-date web galleries that I can find. She does post a few sketches on eBay each month, but I didn't get this Power Girl sketch from her. This came from another eBay seller who appears to be selling off an entire collection of Power Girl sketches. This is a sketch done on her personal sketch card stock and it is dated as a piece from 2009, but he art style has stayed pretty consistent from then until now. I was just happy to be able to add a nice example of her work to my collection for a bargain price, relatively speaking. I've been trying to track down a Sanna U. sketch for a long time, and I was fortunate to get one featuring one of my PC characters. There is another card of hers that I've been watching for months, but the price tag is about double what I can stomach for a sketch card at the moment. I put in an offer on it once, but it got rejected and the seller countered with a number that was still well outside my range. I guess I will keep watching it until it goes off the market or I scratch up the funds to put toward buying it.
I've made some good additions to my sketch card collection lately. There is another Power Girl sketch on the way that was a Facebook commission from another artist I've been trying to add to my collection for a long time, but it hasn't arrived just yet.
I've got about a month's worth of scans sitting in my Drafts folder and lately I don't feel like writing about any of it. So today it's a one-card post because it will be easy to type up. I purchased this card on eBay a couple of months ago. I already knew that I was going to be retiring my Daniel Norris player collection after his trade to Detroit, but this card had a decent Buy It Now price and I thought it would make a good centerpiece for that collection before I put it to bed.
Unfortunately the card was shipped without much protection and it arrived bent with a rather large crease running from the top center down to the middle of the card. The crease was very visible on front and back, and from the top the card was visibly u-shaped in the top loader. There was no way that bend was ever going to press out and I wasn't willing to receive a card like that for the price I paid for it, so I initiated a return through the eBay resolution system. The seller refunded my money but didn't include anything for shipping. I felt bad keeping the card, so I shipped it back to him using my own money. So in the end I paid a couple of dollars to have a pretty negative experience with this card. I guess the seller had a bad experience too, but a couple more pieces of cardboard in the bubble mailer could have prevented the issue so I don't really feel that bad for him.
The card itself was a 2015 Topps Tier One New Guard Autographs Red Ink parallel numbered # 18 / 25. It's a pretty nice design and it was a cool card outside of being shaped like a horseshoe upon arrival. So my Daniel Norris player collection is retired without a real centerpiece card. I guess there are worse problems to have, but I am still a little irritated when I reflect on the situation. I have a lot of eBay transactions and 99.9% of them are great from start to finish, but the one or two that go wrong each year really bother me if I get to thinking about them.
I bought a mini-master set of the recently-released Topps Star Wars: Journey to the Force Awakens cards. I got the base set plus all of the common insert sets. Normally I probably would just buy the base set, but there were enough inserts I wanted from the set to justify getting the whole thing.
Most of the base card backs tell the story of the film depicted on the front, but the cards featuring scenes from the upcoming Force Awakens film have puzzles on the back that form big movie poster-style pictures when they are arranged together.
The set has 110 cards in it and features all the usual scenes from the films. I chose a few of my favorites to show here. The first 80 cards in the set recap the six already-released movies. They are printed on thick vintage-style cardboard and feature the same coloration and patterning found on the original card set from 1977.
Cards 81-110 feature images from the new film. Most (all) of them have been seen before in promotional material, but this set collects them together and adds captions to them, teasing the events from the movie but not really giving a lot away. One thing that kind of bothers me is the way the puzzle cards are included in the checklist. Each 9-card puzzle has another card after it that shows the completed puzzle on the back. The puzzle cards also start on card # 81, which would be the last card slot on the previous page if you are putting your cards in 9-pocket pages. You're not going to be able to store your set in 9-pocket pages while displaying the puzzles on the back without putting your cards in the pages out of order. If you put the cards in order, the puzzles won't display right. If you display the puzzles properly, the cards won't be in order. It's quite a dilemma for collectors.
This is a foil set that shows characters from the new movie. The back of the cards tells you to colelct all 9 cards in the set, but there are only 8 cards in the set. At first I thought maybe the seller had shortchanged me one card, but I dug around and all the internet checklists only list 8 cards. The only legacy character on this checklist is Chewbacca.
This Power of the First Order set shows some of the leaders, troops, and equipment from the movie's 'bad guys.' The back of these cards correctly lists the number of cards in the set at 8. You don't get any biographical information for the main characters or descriptions for the troopers and vehicles, so there's not a lot of content in this set as far as the new movie goes.
The Heroes of the Resistance set has the same formula as the Power of the First Order set. There are images of some new characters, some old characters, and the Millennium Falcon. Again, anything in the set related to the new film is limited to names and images.
The stickers are probably my favorite of the Lite inserts. There are a couple of other inserts that actually have some good text on the backs. Again, these are a throwback to the stickers found in the original Star Wars trading cards.
There are 18 stickers in the set. Although the base set contains a recap of the prequel trilogy, the inserts seem to focus entirely on the classic trilogy and the new movie. I'm not sure why Kylo Ren gets two stickers in this set.
This insert set doesn't really fit into the overall theme of the product, but it features various behind-the-scenes looks at the production of the original films. The card backs have fairly lengthy (for a trading card) write-ups describing some part of the production process. It's probably not any information you couldn't find elsewhere, but it makes for a good set. I think my favorite image is the one on the Lorne and the Sandcrawler card.
The Concept Art insert actually has some content from the prequel trilogy in addition to a horrible MS Word Art border and color scheme. This is an insert that would have benefited from a little lss border and a little more art. It shows the concept drawings for various scenes and characters from the films, with a write-up on the back of what the scene is and who did the art.
This is a pretty cool set overall, but it's obviously a money grab designed to feed off the hype of the new film. It's understandable that Topps couldn't spoil any real content from The Force Awakens, but it makes for a set that doesn't offer much new. Even the card designs are rehashes of stuff that's come before. I was going to pick up the set one way or the other, but I'm glad I bought a cheap set online rather than busting boxes to build it.
I wrote this post last Sunday, so quite a bit has changed as far as my playoff comments go. And in an interesting turn of events, Nachos Grande has just announced a group break featuring a variety of products from 2015 as well as some extra goodies. Team spots are $25. You can check the details out here if you are so inclined.
Around this time last year the blogger Nachos Grande held a group break for the newly-released 2014 Topps Stadium Club set. I signed up for the break, claiming the Rangers and Athletics. These scans were buried in roughly the same place as the scans I posted about yesterday, and I never got around to posting about the cards I got in the break. This Yu Darvish Beam Team insert is my big hit from the break. It's a pretty nice card and I like the Beam Team designs. They take me right back to the 90's sets this product was spawned from.
Shin-Soo Choo hasn't set the world on fire so far in the ALDS against the Blue Jays. I am typing this last Sunday, so those two teams played Game 3 tonight which the Blue Jays won to stave off elimination on the back of big hits from Troy Tulowitzki. I tried to watch the game broadcast, but discovered that it was on Fox and that meant Harold Reynolds was on the broadcast team. I just can't listen to that guy. He can't let a moment of silence go unfilled and 85% of what he says is some mixture of irrelevant, annoying, or just plain wrong. He was trending on Twitter and Facebook tonight after he insulted Canadian baseball fans. I didn't hear that part of the broadcast, but I guess there were a lot of annoyed Canadians tuning in. There are a few broadcast teams that I prefer to listen to and a great many that I don't mind hearing, but anything with Harold Reynolds in it just grinds on my brain until I give up. He's a terrible announcer and he dominates the conversation, preventing the other people in the booth from sharing their perspectives. So I watched an inning or two of Game 3 of the Rangers and Blue Jays and then I shut it off.
I am told that R.A. Dickey will be making his playoff debut in Game 4, and that brings all kinds of nerves to the table for me. I want him to do well as a player, so I guess that means tomorrow I will be pulling for the Blue Jays. But before we even get to that my brain will be exploding as the Astros go up against the Royals with the chance to clinch the series at home behind Lance McCullers, Jr. They're going up against Yordano Ventura, who they got to before the rain delay in Game 1. I hope they can do it again.
Elvis Andrus is playing for the Rangers in these playoffs, although he hasn't done a whole lot with his bat. Michael Choice is in the Indians minor league system now, and Profar and Darvish are both injured.
Donaldson is currently with the Blue Jays, and could be the AL MVP this season if the voting swings in his favor. I think Mike Trout is the guy he has to beat. Jose Canseco makes up the lower half of this scan while exposing his upper half in that glamorous Dream Team card from Score. Canseco made headlines last year around the time this break was going on for shooting his finger off while screwing around with a gun cleaning his pistol. The finger was reattached but as a joke Canseco tweeted out that it had fallen off again during a poker tournament and announced that he might auction off the detached reattached re-detached digit. It turned out that the finger had not actually fallen off again, but one forum poster named mouschi (allegedly one of the premier Canseco super-collectors) created a custom card imagining what a Canseco finger relic card might look like. You can view the thread about it here. And this is what his custom card mock-up looks like:
Notice how it's numbered 1 of 10. Canseco had better count his fingers after each public appearance to make sure no rabid collector makes off with them. Thanks for hosting the group break, Nachos Grande! Sorry it took me so long to post about it.
I've been digging through my scans folder in an attempt to get everything cleared out, and I found a batch of photos tucked in between a bunch of 2014 Topps Mini scans. After some research I determined that this was a long-lost Zippy Zapping from the writer of the Torren' Up Cards blog, who is known for sending out very generous packages to unsuspecting bloggers. The date on the scans was 06 DEC 2014, so this thank-you post has been a long time coming. Probably the highlight of this first scan is the Robinson Cano Bowman card and its Chrome companion.
Mike Zunino's Chrome card down in this scan has its base twin up in the first scan. I probably should have scanned them together, but I didn't. George Springer has been playing well for the Astros in the playoffs so far (I am writing this last Sunday evening, just after Game 3 of the ALDS against the Royals), and I really hope the Astros can close the Royals out in Game 4. I guess by the time this post goes live we'll know how things worked out. I know people have mixed feelings about the All-Star cards in Topps Update, but I think they're okay. I like to see players in uniforms different than the ones we're used to seeing them wear. That Felix Hernandez card is pretty good; probably my favorite card from this scan.
I sat here for a little while trying to come up with something to say about any of these four cards, but there wasn't much there. Zunino and Montero got almost the same base card photo. It's a good thing Montero has that goatee or we're have no idea who was who.
Robinson Cano makes another appearance in this scan, this time on a Donruss card. There are several sets here, representing three different decades of cardboard.
It wouldn't be a Zippy Zapping without some prospects in the mix. If you keep up with his blog or his comments on other blogs, he manages to know something about nearly every prospect in the minor leagues. I can't even keep track of four or five big-league rosters, let alone all 30 teams and their attendant minor league systems.
Zippy Zappy included a hit in the package, this Bowman Chrome Prospects Refractor Autograph of Dylan Unsworth. A little bit of Googling tells me that he is attempting to be the first South African to make the major leagues. He made it as far as AA this year and he is still pretty young, so there is time for him to achieve his goal. This autograph card is numbered # 011 / 500.
This Franklin Gutierrez card comes from Topps Attax, another in a long line of fairly short-lived baseball card games. I like the idea of sports card games, but in practice it seems like they don't work out well. I am not sure why. I guess this kind of game is a niche hobby within a niche hobby, and you just can't get enough people together in groups to build a robust community. I don't even know any other baseball card collectors in person, let alone baseball card collectors who might also be into gaming.
One of the hallmarks of a Zippy Zapping are cards from SEGA Card-Gen, a set of cards that went along with an arcade game in Japan. This component of Zippy Zappings is likely to go away sooner rather than later, as the game has been cancelled and I have noticed that the eBay and internet pipelines for these cards are drying up. I got lucky in this Zapping with a card from way back in 2010. I have a fair number of Card-Gen cards from 2012 and 2013, but this might be my only 2010.
Thanks for the Zippy Zapping! I feel really bad for losing this in my scan folder for so long. This was a great batch of cards, and it was poor sportsmanship on my part to leave this post on the shelf for so long. I hope you can forgive me someday!
