R.A. Dickey Prime Cuts Auto

I have to admit that I haven't followed the exploits of R.A. Dickey much this season. He went down to that team in Atlanta, and I kind of lost track of him. I've never been a Braves fan. In looking at his numbers, he's had an okay year. There aren't a lot of guys out there pitching at the MLB level when they're 42 years old. I still like to add to my Dickey collection when I can, although I've been focusing a lot lately on things outside of baseball, like wrestling cards, sketch cards, art commissions, and NASCAR. Dickey is still up there among my favorite players, though, and I really ought to turn on MLB TV once this season when he's on the mound.

I picked up this autograph card from 2016 Panini Prime Cuts a little while ago. It's the base version of his autograph in the set, with a surprisingly low print run of 25 copies for the base autograph. My example is # 22 / 25. It's a sticker autograph, but the sticker doesn't stand out too bad.

I've been working a lot lately and also trying to get some stuff done around the house. One of my projects has been getting all of my stuff moved out of our office room and down to the basement, with the eventual goal of moving our eldest son into his own bedroom and our office down into the basement, where I have begun staging my card collection underneath the future Sorting Table. It will be neat to see what all I actually have in my collection. As I move cards down there, I will often grab a stack of cards from the boxes to flip through, and I usually find several treasures that bring a smile to my face. After I get everything moved down there, I would like to get my cards sorted and then input into the Trading Card Database or something similar, so I can see how many cards I have in my player collections.

A (Kind of) Shocking Announcement

I thought it might happen eventually, but the day has come. Danica Patrick announced that she won't be returning to drive the #10 car for Stewart-Haas Racing in 2018. Although she hasn't specifically said that she won't be returning to NASCAR at all, there also doesn't seem to be much buzz indicating that there will be an open seat with her name on it. She has made statements recently that she's getting ready for opportunities outside of racing, so maybe this is it.

I have to wonder what this means for Danica's cardboard prospects going forward. Panini has got to have a few of her stickers around, so she'll likely show up in products for a while, but without a consistent ride there may not be too much they can do with her. Most of my favorite drivers are out of the game now or on their way out, so I don't know what comes next for me with NASCAR in general and racing cards in particular. 

This Muscle Car Memorabilia card comes from 2012 Press Pass Redline, and it's an eBay pickup from a while back. It's numbered # 02 / 25. The card has a nice big piece of sheet metal embedded in it, and a picture of Danica Patrick's #10 GoDaddy car. There are still plenty of her cards that I don't have yet, but if new ones aren't being produced, I think I'll lose some of my interest in the older ones as well. 

Power Girl Sketch Card by Chris Giarrusso

I forget where I heard about him, but there is an artist by the name of Chris Giarrusso who does daily sketch cards and puts them up for sale on his website. He also does other artwork, and has some published comic work for Marvel as well as his own creation, G-Man, a kid-friendly comic series.

I ordered one of his daily sketch cards, and it came inside a greeting card-sized advertisement for the G-Man comics. It looks like there are four books in the G-Man series, as well as a webcomic. The publication date on the most recent book is in 2015, so I don't know if there are more coming out. The webcomic is still going strong, but I am not 100% sure how the webcomic ties in to the books.

The sketch card I ordered was inside of the greeting card, being presented by the G-Man character. The sketch features a character that shows up a lot on my blog, DC's Power Girl. There are a lot of sketch cards and covers in his shop, so if you are a fan of someone in particular, there is a chance he might have something in stock. Some of his sketch covers are pretty neat. I am always happy to add a new artist to my collection, and I like the way this sketch depicts Power Girl in Giarrusso's distinctive art style.

Some 2017 Topps Allen & Ginter Hit Singles

I missed pretty much an entire day of life earlier this week when the smoke from all of the fires in the western half of the United States triggered an allergy flare-up for me. I've been pretty heavily-medicated ever since, just to keep me upright enough to go to work. My car is also in the shop being repaired from the little incident I had in San Diego, so my morning schedule has been thrown off by either riding my motorcycle to work or bumming a ride from my wife after the kids head for school. This weekend figures to be busy as well, with me working, the kids at a babysitter, and my wife out of town. I guess I shouldn't whine too much. Everyone has a busy life, and I am pretty blessed in all aspects. It's nice to have this blog as an outlet to vent a little bit on, though.

One of my favorite things to do when a new Allen & Ginter checklist comes out is comb the autograph and relic sections for non-baseball subjects who I'd like to add to my collection. There are usually a few folks each year whose cards I try to track down, usually celebrities, athletes from other sports, and oddball inclusions. So far I've picked up a handful of cards from the 2017 Allen & Ginter release, and I thought I'd show them off.

First up is a relic card from Eric LeGrand, a football player who was severely injured during a college game in 2010. He was paralyzed from the neck down, and worked hard to regain the ability to breathe on his own. He has since regained some of the feeling in his shoulders and arms, and has received several awards for the determination with which he pursued his recovery, including an honorary contract with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the Jimmy V Award for Perseverance, a Subway athlete sponsorship, and induction into the WWE Hall of Fame by being presented the Warrior Award. I believe LeGrand also has an autograph in the set, but I haven't tracked one down yet.

I'm not a huge Shatner fan, to be honest, but a William Shatner relic was available from the same seller as some other cards I purchased, and for a couple of dollars I decided to grab it. I've always been more of a Star Wars guy than a Star Trek guy, and I just never felt the love for Shatner. I loved me some Leonard Nimoy, though.

Brooke Hogan is someone who is more famous for being famous than anything else. She is the daughter of Hulk Hogan, and has made some attempts at a television and music career. I don't actively follow the lives of the rich and famous, but I probably know more than I ought to about celebrity goings-on. I've thought about picking up some of Hogan's autographs in various Panini products, but this Allen & Ginter on-card framed autograph presents a lot better than most of those do.

Olympic gymnast Laurie Hernandez was the big name on this year's checklist that I wanted to track down, and I was able to get her autograph pretty soon after Allen & Ginter released. The American gymnastics teams of the last couple Olympics have been a pretty big deal, and I like chasing down their cards when they appear in Allen & Ginter.

Sticking with Laurie Hernandez, I also got her relic card from the set. This has a plain pink swatch in it, which is fine with me. I saw a couple of relics with sequins and stuff on them, but those went for big bucks and I was happy to get this one without breaking the bank.

There are still a few cards from this year's set that I want to track down, but I am trying to wait until my Gint-a-Cuffs box comes in. My order that includes that box is held up due to a delay in the release of 2017 Topps UFC Chrome, so I still have a couple of weeks to wait. Gint-a-Cuffs might be over by the time I get my cards.

2017 Topps Clearly Authentic

Collectors seem to like acetate cards and autographed cards, so Topps recently came out with a product that is made up entirely of autographed acetate cards, 2017 Topps Clearly Authentic. There is one encased autograph in each box, and there are twenty boxes in a case. Most cases hold 18 cards from the regular checklist and 2 cards from the Rookie Reprint checklist. The regular checklist is made up of 82 cards of current players on this year's Topps flagship design. The Rookie Reprint checklist contains a mix of retired and current players, but reprints their rookie cards on acetate. I believe all of the Rookie Reprints and their parallels are numbered, while only parallels from the base checklist are numbered. Some of the base cards have photo variations, but I don't know if they are seeded any differently.

I'm a sucker for a card gimmick, so I went out and found the best mix of group break slots I could, trying to get the largest number of possible cards for the least amount of money. I wound up with the Phillies and Reds in one break, and the Phillies and Mets in another break. I got shut out on the Reds in the first break, but I got 4 different Phillies in the case. The only one I didn't get was Maikel Franco. First up is this Jorge Alfaro card. You can see from the scan of the back how transparent the cards are. It's a pretty cool effect, and I think they look better in person because running them through my scanner makes them blurry. It has a hard time knowing what to focus on with encased cards.

The next card I got was this Roman Quinn horizontal shot. My only real complaint about this set is that some of the autographs are faint or streaky. I think Quinn's autograph is the worst of the bunch I picked up in that regard. 

Next up out of the case was Jake Thompson. He's been bounced back and forth between the MLB and AAA levels all season, and he's had some struggles. As far as I can tell, though, he's still pretty young and has time to figure things out.

The last card for me out of that case was Aaron Nola, a pretty good pitcher for the rebuilding team. I think he has a cool signature, even if I can't see his name in it. It kind of looks to me like his signature says 'tawns.' It was pretty nice to get four cards out of a 20-card case. It would have been nice to pull a parallel or a Reds card, but I can't complain too much after getting 20% of the cards in the case from one of the cheapest slots in the break. 

In the other case, I had the Phillies and the Mets. I didn't pull any Phillies, and I didn't get any Mets until the very last card in the break. I got this redemption card for a Red parallel of Steven Matz. Matz has had a rough year, starting the season on the DL, having a rough run of games, and then going back on the DL with a season-ending elbow injury. I think that if I were a pitcher, I'd be running far away from the Mets. The Red parallels are numbered # / 50. I'll revisit this one when/if Topps successfully acquires the signed card.

For some reason I also bid on and won this Kenta Maeda Red parallel on eBay. I don't collect the Dodgers and I don't have a Maeda collection, but I went out and got this card. I must have been caught up in trying to gather some cards from the set, and threw out some bids on a bunch of auctions that were closing. This one is numbered # 43 / 50. The signature is a little faint on this one, but it's a pretty cool card.

And that's my foray into 2017 Topps Clearly Authentic. I don't anticipate chasing down much more of this product, but you never know what will happen.

Pack of the Day 172: A Rack Pack of 2017 Topps WWE Heritage

This is a busy time of year, and it's hard to get myself to sit down and knock out a blog post sometimes. I do feel obligated to post, though, so it's lucky that I have a backlog of relatively easy posts sitting in my draft queue. Some of them aren't that exciting, but at least it's something new for people to see on their blogrolls.

Topps has been putting out a WWE Heritage product for a few years now. Some of the designs hearken back to earlier Topps wrestling sets, and some apply designs from other sports to the wrestling theme. I will usually pick up a pack or two each year to check it out, and then when the prices drop I'll pick up a box if the chance arises. The price usually gets pretty low after a year or so. I actually have a box of 2016 WWE Heritage on order right now, sitting alongside my Gint-a-Cuffs box for this year. The whole order is being held up because I pre-ordered a box of UFC Chrome, and the release date on that product got pushed back by a month or so. Ugh, I might not even get my Allen & Ginter box before Gint-a-Cuffs ends.

But enough about that. I picked up a rack pack of 2017 Topps WWE Heritage from Walmart a couple of weeks ago. It's got 15 cards in it plus a special Daniel Bryan tribute card, for a total of 16 cards. In other wrestling-related news, I got tickets for my family to see the WWE Live event here in Boise at the end of September. I am pretty excited about it. I've never been to a WWE Live show that wasn't fun.

Here are the odds from the back of the pack. There is the usual assortment of parallels, along with some inserts and hits with all their associated parallels.

This set is inspired by the 1987 Topps Baseball design, with the woodgrain texture that is so familiar. I thought the use of the Future Stars logo on new wrestlers was a nice touch. The card backs feature a fairly lengthy write-up of the pictured wrestler.

Here are the fronts of the rest of the base cards. NXT wrestlers get yellow text boxes, while RAW wrestlers ger red and SmackDown wrestlers get blue. The Rookie Trophy also gets put to use, as seen on Alexa Bliss' card. The All-Star design from 1987's baseball offering gets repurposed as a Legend set, as shown by the Scott Hall card in the lower right, with the classic WWE logo in the corner.

This Kalisto card is a Bronze parallel. It's a pretty understated parallel, standing out by being just a little darker shade of brown on the woodgrain. I'm assuming that other parallels are more obvious,

Here is the promised Daniel Bryan Tribute card. There are 40 cards total in the set, but I think this might be one of those inserts that Topps runs through several products over the year, so you have to buy some of everything to complete it.

The rest of the cards in the pack are inserts, which focus on SummerSlam events. The inserts in Heritage tend to be pretty extensive, with large checklists. That's why so much of the pack is devoted to them. They're really more subset than insert. I am not sure if these are based on past designs or if they're new retro-looking designs. The first insert is a Bizarre SummerSlam Matches insert featuring Kane.

I cut off the bottom of these cards in the scan, but I didn't feel like going back and re-scanning them. I got four cards from the Thirty Years of SummerSlam set and two cards from the SummerSlam All-Stars set.

Since he's up there in the scan, I have a little Brock Lesnar anecdote to share. A new guy just started in my section at work, and when I was talking about going to the WWE event he told us that he wrestled on the same team as Brock Lesnar in high school. He showed us some pictures of the team and said that Brock is pretty much the guy you would expect him to be from looking at him. So make of that what you will.

I had the same scanning issues when I did the backs of these cards, but I'm guessing you can imagine what the borders of the cards look like.

That's the end of this pack. I like WWE Heritage, but I also usually find myself bypassing it for something else. Maybe it's a perceived-value thing, as I will buy discounted WWE Heritage all day. I have similar feelings about the baseball Heritage line.

Breaking it Down 37: Phillies from a 2017 Topps Chrome Group Break

I bought into a 2017 Topps Chrome group break, choosing the Phillies spot largely with the hope of pulling some colorful Refractors of Maikel Franco or Pat Neshek. That didn't happen. I got a bunch of base cards that I didn't scan and a few basic Refractors that I also didn't scan.

I did scan the inserts and hits, though. My single insert from the break was this Freshman Flash card of Jorge Alfaro. He came to the Phillies in the trade that sent Cole Hamels to the Rangers. He's been doing pretty well for the team in 13 games so far this season.

I also got Alfaro's base autograph. The Phillies aren't very good this year, but it seems like there is a lot of buzz about their young roster. This team could be a contender in a few years. Alfaro seems to be pretty consistently ranked within the Top 100 on prospect lists.

Roman Quinn is the other Phillies player whose autograph I pulled in this group break. He's spent much of this season injured, a problem that has plagued him throughout his career. If he could get healthy, he'd probably be up at the MLB level, but his most recent injury is reportedly going to keep him out for the remainder of this season.

That's all I got in this group break spot. Not a lot there, but this kind of stuff is a gamble.