What eBay Hath Wrought 66: Acetate Press Pass Showroom

I couldn't come up with a catchy name for this post, but these cards have been sitting in my draft queue for way too long. I am pretty sure they are made of clear acetate, but I couldn't locate them this evening to make sure. Part of the reorganizing process was to take all the cards out of the 5000-count boxes and pile them up on my desk in wobbly, precarious piles. As cards get sorted and cataloged, they get put back into the boxes by set. But the uncataloged cards exist in a nebulous between-state that is quite prone to being knocked over and scattered, generally in the hard-to-reach zone behind the desk, where recovery efforts usually result in further cardboard avalanches. But someday I will locate these two cards again and verify the materials used to construct them.

I think that top silver card is the base version, and the one on bottom is a gold parallel. The checklist for 2012 Press Pass Showcase tells me that the only other regular Showroom card is a Melting parallel that is a 1 / 1. There are also Memorabilia variations that are numbered out of # / 99, # / 50, and # / 5. All of them are priced out of my current personal range, if they are even available. These are pretty cool cards, and I always like seeing the actual cars on trading cards.

Danica has been having a pretty rough season so far in 2014, but not appreciably worse than other folks in her tier, that being the crowd of drivers who dwell week-to-week in the 20th-25th place range. She's had a couple of Top 20 finishes and a couple of runs at the back of the pack, but I don't know if she will put it all together this year. She is currently 29th in the point standings. It's too bad for me that her card prices don't necessarily track with her race finishes. It can be hard to find bargains for this particular player collection.

My other favorite drivers, Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Tony Stewart, have been having different years. Dale Jr. has been running really well, finishing in the top few repeatedly. I think he is currently 4th in the points standings. Tony Stewart has been up and down, with some pretty bad finishes and some Top 10 finishes. I think he is currently 12th in points. It would be nice to see Dale Jr. compete for and win a Championship this year. There's still a lot of racing to go, though, so we will see what happens.

Seeking Redemption 4: R. A. Dickey Tribute Blue Autograph

I guess I just won't learn my lesson. This is my 7th redemption card entered on the Topps site, and I have yet to receive any actual items back from them. Five of the seven redemptions I have in the system are for R.A. Dickey autos and relics, so hopefully he will get them all taken care of at once and I will get a big package full of goodies all at once. My other redemption cards are for a Frank Robinson # / 10 from 2013 Archives and a Real Heavy Metal Autograph # / 25 of Reb Beach. I don't know what the odds are of those being fulfilled, but I would sure like to run a Seeking Redemption post some day that features an actual relic or autograph instead of the all-too-familiar blue Congratulations! card.

What eBay Hath Wrought 65: My Giant

At some point during the process of getting my cards ready for sorting and cataloging, I bumped into this set of die-cut Stadium Club cards. Each card has either the team city or team name die-cut into the edge of the card, and once you get both cards for the given team the words fit together to spell out the full team name. I don't know who the other Washington Bullet is who matches up with Gheorghe Muresan, but that doesn't matter much. I wanted this card. I also wanted a Hakeem Olajuwon version of this card, but Topps decided to use Clyde Drexler and Charles Barkley to represent the Houston Rockets in this set. Boo!

Also included in this lot were some other Muresan cards. I am not too familiar with Stadium Club and the associated parallels, but a couple of these appear to belong to some sort of parallel set called Members Only. I will have to figure it out eventually when I put my Gheorghe Muresan cards into Zistle. For now it is enough to know that I have four new Muresan cards in my collection.

Rainbow in the Dark 12: Finally, a 1/1 for My Josh Reddick Super Rainbow

Even though I had 32 cards in my 2013 Josh Reddick Super Rainbow, I still had not acquired any of the # 1 / 1 parallels. But recently someone was clearing out a bunch of low-numbered Josh Reddick cards on eBay and I was able to snag this Black Printing Plate from 2013 Topps Chrome. I guess this would be my 33rd card in the Super Rainbow. There are still quite a few cards in the rainbow out there that I am missing, but I imagine they will be pretty hard to come by.

Reddick hasn't been playing very well so far this season and there is speculation that he will be sent down to AAA to make room on the roster for someone who might hit the ball from time to time. I hope that isn't the case, but when you don't collect the superstars you always run the chance that some of your favorite players won't stick around for long.

What eBay Hath Wrought 64: R.A. Dickey MLB Showdown

I like to pick up oddball cards of my favorite players when the opportunity presents itself. I have read quite a bit about MLB Showdown on Nick's blog, but I was out of collecting during the heyday of the card game.

It seems like the sort of thing that would be right up my alley, although I have a bit of an odd relationship with collectible card games. I love the concept of them, but I never seem to be very good at them. I guess I just have some difficulty wrapping my mind around the relationships between the cards and the vast library of options a game like Magic: the Gathering offers.

I also don't have any 'real' friends, which limits the availability of opponents to play against. I often feel a little regret and self-pity that I haven't found a group of like-minded people to socialize with in person, but I don't even know how one would go about doing such a thing.

I did buy heavily into the Kickstarter campaign of an online Trading Card Game called Hex, but I've found again that my ability to build a deck of cards is terrible and the big losses that result from that keep me from logging in and playing much at all. There is supposed to be a single-player campaign released in the future that allows you to challenge different dungeons and computerized opponents. I am looking forward to that.

I also at some point got this green parallel of R.A. Dickey from 2013 Topps Finest, which is numbered # 197 / 199. There's not much to say about it aside from that. I sure wish Dickey would get around to signing some stickers and sending in a jersey to Topps. I think I have 5 redemptions in their system for his cards.

What eBay Hath Wrought 63: 2012 SEGA Card-Gen Part 3

Here are the rest of the cards from my big eBay purchase. If you are super-interested in the rest of the cards I bought, you can go look at Part 1 and Part 2. First up in this group are a couple of Rangers. Michael Young became a Dodger for a while and retired before the 2014 season. Beltre is still playing for the Rangers. Both players get some nice-looking cards, even though you can't see Young's face in his photo.

They get some pretty stacked stat lines, too, with each player getting a 20 on his card.

Next up are the Rays, with another couple of decent cards. I picked up the Upton because I am drawn to his cards ever since he drug down my whole 2013 fantasy baseball season. I guess subconsciously I feel like if I can get enough of his cards it will somehow erase the past. Shields was another recognizable name in the eBay $0.99 bin.

I don't know how you could say no to an obscure Adrian Gonzalez card for 99 cents. I know I couldn't. Look at all those stars on the front of his card!

None of my Reds cards feature guys in Reds uniforms. Both of them are also currently on the DL. Latos has been pretty good the last couple of years, and can usually be drafted at a discount in fantasy because he's not one of the biggest names out there.

I got some Country Breakfast in this lot. Is it just me, or are the Royals perennially stacked with super-hyped players who never quite get to the top of the heap? Or maybe they are just as good as other players but are held down by playing in a small market. I don't know. It's late enough that I shouldn't be held accountable for what I'm saying. Soria is getting a chance at being a closer again this season, for the Rangers.

Here's a dude with a pretty good arm. Scherzer's strikeout rate makes him an awesome fantasy pitcher. People finally caught on after last season's performance, though, so I wasn't able to snag him in any leagues this year.

It seems like Doumit has been around forever. I guess it hasn't really been that long, though. I've always kind of liked the guy because of his weird Catcher/Outfielder status. The snippet on the back of this card labels him as an 'offensive catcher.' I don't know; I always thought more of Brian McCann as a more offensive catcher. Ohhhhh!

And bringing up the tail of this train-wreck of a post is 'Sexy' Alexei Ramirez, who I believe was given that nickname by one of the Yahoo! Fantasy columnists. It's been burned into my mind so I can't see this dude's name without putting that extra word in front of it. I own him in a couple of leagues this year, and he is off to a really good start. Sexy indeed. I am hoping he'll continue to play well and rack up some stolen bases  for me.

And that does it for this particular bunch of cards. I did make a follow-up order to grab some players that I missed the first time around, but those cards haven't even arrived yet and there's a long line of posts in my queue that should run before I do another Card-Gen post.

What eBay Hath Wrought 63: I've Got a Fever

Actually, what I've got is a nasty case of allergies. It hit me pretty hard last night and I spent most of the night tossing and turning because my head hurt and I couldn't breathe. This morning I felt terrible and I stayed home from work so I could try to recover a little bit. I still hurt all over and my head is a bit fuzzy, but I should be okay unless I do something stupid like mow the lawn. The main thing for me is that my face doesn't itch and my nose isn't running.

I visited my LCS a couple of weekends ago and bought some Topps Heritage that also came with a couple packs of Spring Fever promotional cards. I liked them so much that I went out and found a cheap set on eBay. I can't see myself buying enough packs to complete the 50-card set on my own, so this felt like a pretty good buy at 50 cents per card.

The set features some nice bright colors and a refractory sheen. The checklist is made up of the usual cast of big stars and young guys with some hype behind them. I think that with the little palm trees in the foreground, the players on the cards look like giants from some monster movie like Godzilla or King Kong.

I've been slowly working on getting my card collection sorted and entered into Zistle. It is quite a project, but I have done a pretty good job of adding all newly-acquired cards into the database as they come in. One big project I tackled was to get all* of my Hakeem Olajuwon cards entered into the system. I was kind of surprised at how many cards of his I didn't have. I guess I'll have to work on that. One of the hardest things about getting the cards listed was trying to find out what exactly they were. There were so many sets put out in the late 90s that I had some trouble finding out what some of my cards were.

*I know there are stragglers, but I got the vast majority of them entered in.

I've also had a pretty steady stream of trades/trade requests going on in Zistle. Unfortunately I have become a little overzealous in the trading department, sending away cards that I don't have duplicates of, so instead of filling empty spots in my sets I am just moving an empty slot from one place in my collection to another. Oh well, I will just have to pull the cards before I finalize my trades from now on. But for the most part I have been able to turn a lot of doubles into new cards for my collection.

I have also been trying to move some cards here and there on eBay, to turn cards I don't necessarily want into cash that can be used for cards I do want and/or shipping money for trades. That has gone pretty well. Some cards sell for a lot more than I expect and some cards undersell, but it all tends to even out.

Another exciting thing going on in my life right now is Fantasy Baseball! I don't get to watch a lot of sports on television, so I tend to focus heavily on my fantasy teams. I even got into a Fantasy Bloggers' league this year, which is pretty cool. It is my first keeper league, so that has been a bit of an experience. In keeper leagues you keep a certain number of players from last year's roster over into this year rather than drafting an entirely new team every year. The hockey and basketball seasons are just wrapping up, too, so I have a big pile of fantasy rosters to track and adjust right now.

There is also a fantasy baseball thing going on over at Tribecards, where the big annual card giveaway extravaganza is going on. I don't even know how to describe it fully. Every manager started out with a list of players they like. Tribecards ran a simulated draft and allocated players to each manager. He opens a buttload of packs throughout the season and any cards of your players get sent to you at the end of the year, or whenever he gets around to it. Any unclaimed players that come out of the packs get picked up in a supplemental draft each week, and then any players that manage to get unclaimed repeatedly are randomly added to managers' stacks.

And if that wasn't enough, he also managed to find a roster management game that allows him to simulate a baseball season for everyone in the group, using players that they have drafted. It's like a big baseball nerd nirvana. I won my opener last night against a team from Utah. Beating a Utah team makes opening day especially sweet for me, as I hate Utah's lone pro team, the Jazz. I actively hate very few teams, but the Jazz are right up there at the top of my list. Even though my blog feed updates with some reliability, I find myself going over to Tribecards a couple times a day to make sure I didn't miss anything.

And that's about it for this post. Spring Fever is a pretty nice set, although I wouldn't want to try to put it all together by buying boxes of cards at the card shop to obtain packs. I do feel a little bad buying a set online, because it is likely that a card dealer out there didn't make the packs available to customers, and instead just busted all of their packs to blow sets out the door and farm any high-dollar autographs they might pull. I guess that's how these things work.