At the Trade Deadline 37: The Prowling Cat Cleans Out His Clutter, and I'm Reaping All the Benefits, Part 2

The Prowling Cat is running a series of posts offering up excess things from his collection, and I claimed a couple of interesting things from him. In my first post in this series I displayed a 1993 Hostess baseball set, and in this post I am showing off the 1993 CARDZ Animals of the San Diego Zoo set. I was a missionary in San Diego for a couple of years (2000-2002) and I love animals, so this was a perfect addition to my collection. There are 110 cards in the set, with the first 85 separated out into general geographical areas. I selected a handful of my favorites to show off here.

Cards 86-95 feature everyone's favorite thing in the whole world; baby animals! I don't know if that California Condor chick is really all that cute, but the White Rhinoceros, Slow Loris, and Spider Monkey babies all definitely are.

On the top of this scan are a couple of horizontal base cards. They aren't part of the Baby Animals subset, but they do feature animal babies in the photos. Cards 96-100 are a subset called Behind the Scenes, and they show various things that happen at the zoo. This one shows a zoo veterinarian caring for an injured animal. Finally, cards 101-110 are Stand-Up cards, which can be cut apart and displayed.

I scanned some card backs that are representative of each subset. The regular cards have the common name of the animal, the scientific name, a short description of the creature, and a fast fact about the animal. The Behind the Scenes cards are pretty similar, and the back of the Stand-Ups feature instructions and cutting lines.

This is a pretty cool set, and I am glad that The Prowling Cat so generously offered it up. Thank you! My kids also really enjoyed this set. They've watched about a billion nature shows, so when they spotted some cards with familiar animals on my desk they wanted to play a flashcard game to see how many they could identify by the picture alone. They did pretty well and we had a pretty good time learning some new creature names. The next post in this series will feature a non-card item that I claimed from him.

Breaking it Down 24: A Stack of WWE Undisputed from TeamBreaks.com

Recently I posted about a pack of Topps' new high-end WWE Undisputed set. I liked the cards so much that I joined a group break of the product. The breaker I went through was TeamBreaks.com, a one-man show that focuses mostly on UFC products, but also busts other products from time to time. I didn't get any hits from the break, but I did purchase the base card spot and the parallels spot and got a nice stack of cards from them. The Red parallels are the most common in the product, and I wound up with 5 of them in all, with Sgt. Slaughter being the highlight for me. I got to see him wrestle at a live show a few years ago, which was pretty cool.

I got four other Red parallels in the break, including Ric Flair, Dusty Rhodes, Kalisto, and Eve Torres. In addition to the unnumbered Red parallels, I also got four serially-numbered cards. That Eve Torres is a Silver parallel, and is numbered # 09 / 25. Sting is a Purple parallel and his card is # 25 / 50. I also got two Black parallels, one of Brock Lesnar (# 19 / 99) and one of Jimmy Uso (# 87 / 99). The parallels are pretty subdued, with the Silvers especially being nearly indistinguishable from the base cards.

The base card slot in the break landed me 17 cards. Chris Jericho is another guy I saw wrestle at the same show where I saw Sgt. Slaughter. It was a 3-way match and he spent most of the time crawling around outside the ring, peeking up over the edge of the mat to watch Shelton Benjamin and Christian duke it out with each other. 

Here are a few more of the base cards I got from the break. I think Paige is one of the more popular female wrestlers at the moment. The guys I am more aware of are the older ones like wrestlers Rob Van Dam and Booker T and managers Paul Heyman and Paul Bearer. I am familiar with the Honky Tonk Man's name and gimmick, but I don't specifically recall seeing him wrestle. He is still active on Facebook, though, and you can book him for weddings and other events.

A couple more base card scans close this post out. I am familiar with all of these wrestlers to some degree, but I wouldn't count any of them as favorites of mine. They do all help me to fill out the base set, though, and I am going to try collecting all 100 base cards. Only 81 cards to go!

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.

A Nice Supreme Dickey

As I mentioned in my last post, life has been pretty busy for me lately. So it's time for another one-card post. This card is an Autographed Patch Relic card of R.A. Dickey from 2013 Topps Supreme. It's got a nice little blue and white relic swatch and a sticker autograph from the knuckleball thrower. I think the gold background of the card goes well with the Blue Jays colors. This one is numbered # 22 / 25.

I haven't been thinking much about baseball lately as I've been focused in on the Denver Broncos and fantasy football as well as the Houston Rockets and their woes in the early stages of the NBA season. I am curious, though, to see how R.A. Dickey's 2016 plays out. If I am recalling correctly he started off 2015 very slowly, but had great numbers through the last couple months of the regular season to help the Blue Jays into the playoffs. Once there, he had a short but good start against the Rangers in the ALDS and a couple of very bad innings against the Royals in the ALCS. These knuckleballers can hang around for a long time and are very valuable as inning-eaters, so hopefully there will be plenty more Dickey cards for me to collect in the coming years.

This Is What Happens When You Don't Know What You Have

Just about all I have left in my Draft queue is posts that will take a long time to write, and I've got a lot of other stuff going on right now that takes up a lot of time. I hate to have long pauses between posts, but I don't think I am going to be able to generate really interesting content for the blog with a lot of regularity for the next week or more. I am trying to move into a new position at work that could lead into a pretty good career track, and that means putting some time into reworking my resume and preparing for a potential interview. I feel pretty good about my chances, but I don't want to leave anything to chance. I've spent the last few evenings working through some online courses that serve as an introduction to the position.

I also have been working on losing some weight and increasing my fitness in anticipation of a military school I am signed up for in a few months. I've lost around 12 pounds since October, but I've kind of been stuck at that point for a couple of weeks. I am pretty good when it comes to push-ups and sit-ups, but as always my run time could use some work.

I bought this card on eBay a few months ago. Once I got to looking at it I realized that it looked pretty familiar, because I already had a copy. I had pulled the same card from a box I bought during last year's Black Friday / Cyber Monday sales. Oops. It's a Press Proof parallel of Hakeem Olajuwon's Scoring Kings insert from 2014-15 Donruss Basketball. Pretty much everything in this product has many levels of parallels, so there are all kinds of serial-numbered cards in a given box of this stuff. It's a cheap, fun break without much in the way of big hit potential but plenty of color and inserts to keep it interesting. This Olajuwon card is # 158 / 199. This is the kind of thing that happens when you lose track of your want list or your collection as a whole. I don't usually wind up making a lot of duplicate purchases, but I get bitten every now and then. I imagine it happens to everyone a couple times during their collecting careers.

Pack of the Day 113: 2015 Topps WWE Undisputed

When Topps announced that they would be releasing a new high-end wrestling product called WWE Undisputed I knew I wanted to try some of it out, but I couldn't stomach the $200+ price tag on a box of the stuff. I found an online breaker who was selling the product by the pack and decided to give it a try. The pack promises 5 total cards, with one being an autograph or autograph relic card.

First up are the base cards and parallels I pulled. The cards are quite thick and remind me of the Star Wars Masterwork cards that were released earlier this year. The design is a bit different, but the thickness and texturing on the cards feels similar. The photos of the wrestlers are glossy cutouts and the backgrounds have a matte finish. That Edge card is a Silver parallel and is numbered # 17 / 25. It doesn't have a special finish or anything, just a slightly different pattern on the background. None of these are really wrestlers I collect, but the cards are cool enough. I guess the Bret "The Hit Man" Hart card is my favorite from this batch. I'm not sure which Hogwarts House that uniform on Cameron is supposed to represent. Slytherin, maybe? I remember watching Edge wrestle in my late teen years when my sisters and I would gather around the TV in my room and watch wrestling every week. My wife and I also saw him and Lita beat Kane when WWE RAW came to Idaho in 2005.  WWE is a great event to attend live, even if you're not that into wrestling. The best part of that event for me, though, was getting to see Roddy Piper and Sgt. Slaughter wrestle live. There was a several year period where the WWE came to Boise, but I don't think they've been back since 2010. I wish they would because going is a lot of fun, but we seem to get passed over for a lot of that kind of stuff since we're stuck in a black hole between Denver, Salt Lake City, Portland, and Seattle.

The card backs feature a few demographic tidbits like height, weight, and hometown. This is followed up by a few bullet points with highlights from the wrestler's career. It's a nice, clean design.

There are a couple of inserts in the product. I pulled a Famous Finishers card of Undertaker's Tombstone move. It's a decent insert, although the idea has been used a few times before. I guess it's hard to find a lot of things that haven't been done yet on cardboard, though, and a wrestler's signature closing move is a pretty big part of their persona. The Tombstone isn't the most photogenic move out there.

I pulled a decent hit card, with an Autograph Relic Card of Dolph Ziggler. I'm not too familiar with him, as he came around after I'd moved away from following the WWE very closely. A brief look at his Wikipedia entry tells me he's probably a decent guy. I would get back into watching the WWE, but I've got so many hobbies that it's hard to make time for it. Based on the box breaks I've watched of this product, this Dolph Ziggler relic auto is a pretty common pull. I guess they had a lot of his stickers.

The back of the Famous Finishers card features a write-up about the move, as well as a particular highlight of a time when the wrestler used the move in a particularly memorable way. It would be cool if the picture on the front matched the highlight on the back, but it doesn't. The back of the autograph relic features the standard congratulatory message.

Overall this is a pretty nice product, in my opinion. Like any hit-driven product, you are going to miss far more often than you hit. There are some pretty good names on the checklist, as well as the usual array of filler hits. I would really have liked to get a hit featuring The Iron Sheik, John Cena, or maybe Randy Orton or The Big Show. The Diva hits appear to be pretty popular. Notable names that are missing include Hulk Hogan and Paige, but Pete Rose makes a surprise appearance for Topps in a non-baseball product with an autograph in the checklist. I don't know that I'd pony up for a whole box of this stuff, but it would be a nice product for the occasional pack or single hit purchased from eBay.

Princess Leia Topps Star Wars 5x7 Sticker Print

Topps continues to put out wall art and prints to sell on their website, and apparently people keep buying them. I am one of the suckers, although usually I buy singles from someone who has purchased a set to break down and resell. This is a 5"x7" Sticker Print of Princess Leia that I got from eBay. Unfortunately it is just a print in the design of the trading card-sized stickers and not actually a giant sticker. From what I've been able to gather, the print run on the Blue version is 49 copies of each print, while there is a Green version limited to 199 copies and a Red version limited to 10 copies each. My example of this card / print is # 17 / 49.

The holiday weekend was all right. We stayed home for the most part, venturing out once to see some family for a few hours. My wife made some really good food for Thanksgiving, and we've been eating the leftover turkey, pie, and rolls for the whole extended weekend. Outside of that, my kids put together a big LEGO kit to play with and I worked on some online classes for work.

We have been making progress on paying off the various financial mistakes of our 20's and early 30's, which unfortunately means that I've had to sit out this year's Black Friday / Cyber Monday deals. I've been watching the Dave & Adam's Card World sales, and there is some really good stuff available from them. I know a lot of people hit up the COMC sale at this time of year, but for me the big draw is the Dave & Adam's Card World and Blowout! Cards sales. I need to set aside some money this year so I can be ready for the sales next year.