2016 Topps Series 2 First Pitch and a Bad Day

The only insert set from 2016 Topps Series 2 that really interested me was the First Pitch set, so I went and grabbed it from an eBay seller. So far my plan is still to buy a factory set to get my base set for the year, and then probably get an Update set from the secondary market.

This was my favorite out of the 20 cards in the checklist. It counts as an Astros card and features a former American President. Every President has their warts, but I tend to be pretty fond of the Bushes overall.

I didn't scan all of the cards in the set, but I did scan a few that were noteworthy to me. I'm not going to lie, the first time I saw that picture of Rosie Rios I thought it was Caitlyn Jenner. According to my Google research, I'm not the only one who has had that reaction to seeing the current Treasurer of the United States. Model Nina Agdal is seen sporting some Angels gear, including what is probably a New Era cap, as she signed on as the company's first female brand ambassador. Spencer Stone is a member of the U.S. Air Force who famously helped to stop an attack on a train in France in August 2015.

I really like the First Pitch insert, and I hope that Topps continues to make it a part of the flagship product. They seem to do a good job of selecting a mixture of noteworthy figures, celebrities, and lesser-known people with feel-good stories for the checklists.

When we woke up this morning we discovered that my wife's dog, Annie, was in so much pain that she couldn't walk more than a couple of steps without falling down. She's been sick and had some pain for a while now, but never so much that we felt she was unhappy. She was always happy to see everyone, got around okay, and never went off her food or water. We monitored her and worried about her, but never felt like her quality of life was suffering to the point where it was time to put her down.

This morning was different. She couldn't walk at all. She couldn't eat any food. We gave her some medicine and that dulled the pain enough that she stumbled down the stairs, but then she had an accident on the floor and that freaked her out to the point that she crashed into to the back yard before collapsing again. All of that added together made us feel like today was the day her quality of life had finally dropped far enough that to hold on to her would be unfair. I went and carried her out to the van for that long drive that comes at the end of a dog's life. We all had a chance to say goodbye to her, and the medicine took away enough pain that she was able to eat a little bit of sausage and wag her tail a bit before we put her down. Big dogs don't usually live all that long, and we feel lucky that she stuck around with us for 11 years.

My wife and I got married at the end of 2004, just a couple of weeks before I left on my first tour in Iraq. She got Annie during that year I was away. They've been pretty much inseparable since, and Annie would always follow my wife from room to room all over the house. She loved to play and eat food and have her belly rubbed. She also really liked to sleep on or near our bed, a habit she picked up during all the time I've been away with my work. Annie was a good guard dog, and she was very patient with our children as they grew and played with and on her. She was my wife's first baby, and it's been hard knowing that this day was approaching. In a way I am kind of glad that she had such a sharp drop-off in health at the end, as it made our decision very clear. Yesterday I would have said her quality of life was good enough that ending her life was not an option, but today it was clear that she was suffering. We will miss her a lot, and it will be tough to get used to not having her around anymore. She's been there for our entire married life, and she's been a companion and a protector for my wife through all the times when I wasn't around. I'm glad that she's not in pain anymore, but it sure does suck that she's not here in the house, sleeping at the foot of the bed or filling the computer room with smelly dog farts.

N20 Allen & Ginter Prize & Game Chickens 21: Silky Cock

Here's another card I picked up from the N20 1891 Allen & Ginter Fifty Prize & Game Chickens set. This card features is entitled Silky Cock and features a rooster of the Silky (or Silkie) breed. This is the 21st card in my collection from this set, bringing me to 42% complete with the checklist.

By way of recommendation, if you want to know more about this breed of poultry, go to a general poultry site first and then search within that site or do a web search with a different term like 'Silky Chicken' or 'Silky Rooster.' I wouldn't recommend just typing 'Silky Cock' into Google and hitting Search. If you don't know why, just maintain your innocence and follow my suggestion. If you do know why, then that's probably the first thing you thought of upon reading the post title. I imagine my hit count is going to be uncharacteristically high on this post.

Silky Rooster head showing walnut comb, from FeatherSite

Silkies are a breed that was developed somewhere in Asia, with rumored origins in China, Java, Japan, and India. I showed the Silky Hen card from this set a couple of years ago. Males have a 'walnut' comb, which looks a bit like a brain or a tumor on the front of the head. These birds come in many colors, but their meat, skin, and bones all have a black tint to them. They lack barb and quill feathers, so they are covered with downy soft plumage.

That's about all I have to say about this one. I'm happy to have made so much progress on this set recently. These are definitely some cool cards.

This Fancy R.A. Dickey Card Belongs in a Museum

I've been struggling a bit with my motivation to write posts. I've got enough photos in my draft queue to get me into the first week or so of July, but those pictures need words to go with them. I am pretty busy at work lately with some training and certifications I have to finish. They've all got deadlines, so it all hangs over my head quite a bit. I've been trying to make progress on the classes in the evenings, because I need my work time to produce actual work. I have been able to watch some baseball, though, including most of the Astros' recent games. It's nice that they are actually doing some winning, moving closer to the teams currently holding Wild Card spots. There's still a ways to go, but they did at least get to .500 today with a win over the Angels.

The Toronto Blue Jays are another team vying for a Wild Card spot, and they are considerably closer than the Astros at this point. They're a half-game behind the Royals for the 2nd Wild Card spot, but they've lost three in a row to stay under the line. R.A. Dickey has pitched better recently, but his season numbers aren't all that great. I still pick up the occasional card for my Dickey collection, and when I saw these 2016 Topps Museum Collection Meaningful Material Prime Relics hit the market I knew I would be chasing one down. This is the Gold version of the card, numbered # 11 / 35. This is just a good-looking set, so I had to get a copy for my PC. It looks like the relic swatch might be a part of the sleeve trim on the jersey.

Here's the typical back-of-card stuff. I'm still trying to decide how much it matters if the player ever wore the relic embedded in a given card. I like the cards that somehow tie a piece of memorabilia to a game or event, like the recent Topps Strata release with the holographic stickers with codes that could be entered in to see which game the relic pieces came from. I never did actually pick up any Strata cards, but I did look up the codes from a few stickers just to see how it worked. I'll probably track something down from that product eventually. I don't think I would buy a box of Museum Collection because it is out of my price range and most boxes seem to be duds, but this R.A. Dickey card was a nice single to grab from eBay. I haven't really looked for any more Museum Collection cards from this year since I grabbed this card, but they look good enough that I might take a glance through the checklist to see if there are any other players I'd like to chase down.

N20 Allen & Ginter Prize & Game Chickens 20: Henny Game

Here's another card from the lot of N20 1891 Allen & Ginter Fifty Prize & Game Chickens cards I purchased on eBay recently. This one is the Henny Game card. I think the Henny Game is a variation of the Irish Gamefowl in which the males do not develop the typical tail-, neck-, and saddle-feathers that distinguish males in other breeds. I guess you learn something new every day. Or you're supposed to. Sometimes I don't feel like I learn anything for days at a time, but how can you prove that you haven't learned anything at all?

I am rambling here because I don't have anything at all to say about this card. Sometimes you just don't have that blogging mojo going on. And honestly this bird just doesn't hold my interest like some other poultry. I'm still happy to have this card in my collection. Whether I like the pictured bird or not, acquiring this card still bumps my completion of the set up by 2%. This is my 20th card from the set, bringing me to 40% completion overall. The illustration is at least pretty interesting, with bricks, a wooden fence, a house, and some greenery in the background.

N20 Allen & Ginter Prize & Game Chickens 19: White-Faced Black Spanish Cock

Recently I've been working my way through a batch of N20 1891 Allen & Ginter Fifty Prize & Game Chickens cards I picked up on eBay. This is the third card from that batch and my nineteenth card overall from the set.

This card features the White-Faced Black Spanish Cock. I featured his counterpart, the White-Faced Black Spanish Hen, way back in 2014. As I mentioned in that post, this breed originated in Spain and came about by breeding the chickens for larger earlobes until they took over their entire faces. This card is pretty far off-center, to the point where you can see text from the adjoining card along the right edge on the back. I am not too worried about that, although I imagine it will hurt the card's grading when I eventually send in all of my ungraded chicken cards to PSA for slabbing. But my goal is merely to have a full PSA-graded set. I don't have much in the way of aspirations as far as the actual grades themselves go. I just feel like cards this old should be preserved and a card slab feels easier to protect than a tiny bit of cardstock.

Close shot of the White-Faced Black Spanish Rooster, borrowed from FeatherSite

Here is a close-up of a White-Faced Black Spanish rooster's head. The internet tells me that these are one of the older Mediterranean chicken breeds, they lay large white eggs, and although they originated in Spain they are now considered rare in that country. An interesting site I came across in researching this chicken is The Livestock Conservancy, which tries to track and monitor the status of different livestock breeds. Some livestock breeds, like the White-Faced Black Spanish chicken, are in danger of disappearing because they don't have various traits that farms desire. In this breed's case, the breeding that led to their white faces also made them a little less hardy than other chickens, so they fell out of popularity once stronger breeds came about that could lay the same number / quality of eggs. They are listed as Critical on the Conservation Priority List.

Workin' at the Card Shop 8: A Switcheroo at the Local Card Shop

note: This got kind of long, so here's the short version. I had a disappointing experience with my local shop's Father's Day event due to a faulty assumption. I bought a box of cards, too, and if you scroll down to the pictures you can read about that.

I mentioned a couple of posts ago that the local card shop was holding a Father's Day promotion this weekend, and I assumed that the promotion involved the 2016 Panini Father's Day packs that are available this weekend at card shops everywhere. I marked the date on the calendar and blocked out some time to go down there at lunchtime today (I'm working the weekend).

My assumption was based on the fact that it was labelled as a Father's Day event and the Panini Father's Day packs were released this weekend. I was wrong. When I was in the store looking around, he pulled out a bin of silver packs, but they were not the 2016 Panini Father's Day packs. They were assorted packs of other promotional cards from the last few years, mostly of the variety you might find in a bin marked 'Free - Limit 5 Per Person' on a dealer table somewhere. But I was in the store and I was committed at that point, so I spent 23% over the best online price on a box of 2016 Topps UFC Top of the Class cards, which I will show when I get done with my rant. I'm not going to even show the promotional packs I got, because they honestly aren't worth the effort. I wound up with a couple duplicates of some 5-card NBA promo and some 5-card NFL promo, both a few years old. When I got back to the office I looked at the details of the event and noticed that the shop owner never actually said it was a 2016 Panini Father's Day event. Instead the event listing said:

Everyone gets a FREE Silver Promo Pack just for stopping in on Satuday, June 18, for Father's Day! No purchase necessary. One FREE pack per person. Want more Silver Promo Packs? Get 1 additional pack for every $14 spent...

I guess it's bad on me for assuming that because Panini's Father's Day packs are released today and silver in color, the shop's Father's Day promotion featured those packs. He also had posted a Father's Day greeting on his shop's main page earlier in the day with pictures of Panini Father's Day cards, although they may have been cards from a different year. I had actually gone back and forth about whether I should attend the event at the LCS or just buy some Father's Day packs online. I know the LCS prices are inflated, so why spend $14 there to get a $5-6 (the going rate on eBay at the moment) pack of Father's Day cards? I bid on a couple lots of Father's Day cards with the reasoning that if I won them I would stay away from the card shop. I didn't win them, so I fell back on my original plan to get some Father's Day packs at the LCS. That plan backfired and now I'm irritated. I'll have to pick up some Father's Day packs online at some point to make my experience whole. I should have done that in the first place. I posted on the shop's Facebook event page that I had been expecting the Panini packs. The shop owner apologized and noted that the event description did not specifically mention this weekend's Panini promotion. Apparently there were some gems in that bin of packs as well, because the shop owner is posting pictures of hits that people have pulled from their free packs. Maybe my frustration at the mix-up is compounded by some bad luck in selecting my packs.

I read an article a while back about disappointment in relationships. The basic assertion was that disappointment in relationships is caused by unmet expectations, and that the best way to avoid disappointment in a relationship is to communicate your expectations to each other and also to consider the other person's point of view when you first feel disappointment. My expectation was that I would be opening up a few packs of Panini Father's Day packs, looking for the first Panini NASCAR cards. The shop owner may not have even thought about the Panini promotion and expected his customers to be happy about getting free promotional packs with their Father's Day gifts. I guess I am not mad at him specifically, but I am disappointed by the situation.

I feel like I want to support the local guy, but there are a lot of obstacles in the way and I don't get a lot of perceived value out of the relationship. What is the point of driving 20-40 minutes round-trip, paying more once I'm there for a limited selection of items, trying to make small talk with a guy who I find difficult to talk to, and often feeling a bit let down by the whole expedition? I've had some good moments at the shop, too, but for the most part I usually come away feeling like I am not getting enough back for it to be worth my while. I'll probably give it another try in a few months or sometime next year, but for now I'm going to stay away from the local shop. He's been around over 20 year, so there is a customer base there and he isn't likely to miss the couple hundred bucks I usually spend with him annually. I can get more for my money online and I usually get a better experience to boot, probably because online shopping makes it easier for me to manage expectations and outcomes.

I did pick up a box of cards while I was there, so at least I can close this thing out with some kind of cardboard, even if it's not necessarily the cardboard I wanted to show off today. Here's the box top:

This is a hit-driven product. You get 5 cards in the box, with 1 insert, 1 insert parallel, 2 autographs and 1 relic.

There aren't any base cards in the product, but this Top of the Class insert set might as well be a base set. In my mind it is the base set. My base insert card is Jon Jones, who is apparently a pretty good fighter, but can't stay out of trouble when it comes to drugs, the law, and the court of public opinion. I'm not a fan.

This is my promised parallel of the box. It's a Silver parallel of Dominick Cruz, numbered # 22 / 25. This is a 1:9 box pull, so not too bad. I am also not a Dominick Cruz fan, but he owned the recent fight to defend his title against Urijah Faber. I guess I have to give him props for that.

Every product has subjects who seem to pop up in every box, and Johny Hendricks is one of those guys in this one. He got beaten by Stephen Thompson in his last fight, and hasn't fared all that well since losing his belt to Robbie Lawler in December 2014. Stephen Thompson happens to be fighting tonight in the Fight Night headliner, while Hendricks has a fight coming up soon against Kelvin Gastelum. In short, this relic is a dull grey bit of shirt and I'm not too excited about it.

My first autograph is kind of another dud, a base autograph of Michael Chiesa. This is another $1 hit. Chiesa is riding a three-fight win streak, with another fight coming up in about 4 weeks against Tony Ferguson. I don't have any reason not to like him, except that I picked PC guy Jim Miller over him in their fight this past December, and Chiesa submitted Miller.

I don't know if it's a good thing to keep score this way, but so far I'm losing on this box. The two hits are $1-2 cards, and I could probably get about $5 total out of the Jones and Cruz cards. So I'm at $7-9 at the 80% mark of the box, or about 15% of the cost of the box.

The second autograph of the box is a pretty decent card. This is a base autograph of Joanna Jędrzejczyk, the current Women's Strawweight Champion. This is a pretty good pull, probably one of the better base autographs to get in this product. It doesn't quite save the box, as it's a $20-25 card, but it's nice to pull something from the top 10% or so of the checklist. Although I probably only got about 60% back on the sticker price (it would have been over 70% on the current internet low), this card made the box feel like a winner. It would have been nice to pull a couple of PC cards, but this box was okay.

In terms of cardboard collecting it was a bit of a roller-coaster day. My experience at the card shop left me feeling pretty negative, but I think I've worked my way through most of that. I probably won't go back there for a bit, but I'll get some Father's Day packs on eBay and everything will be okay. My box of cards was good enough, and it's been a pretty decent sports day for me. Evan Gattis hit a home run, the Astros beat the Reds, Randa Markos won her UFC fight, and my UFC Pick'Em luck so far has been better than usual. I've got plenty of reasons to be happy, and really in the big scheme of things none of these things are worth getting too worked up about.

My 3rd Favorite Part of Baseball Season

It is officially my third-favorite part of baseball season. Actually, I'd hate to rank things like that, so maybe this is chronologically the third event of baseball season which I classify as a favorite. It is Father's Day weekend, which means that MLB.com has reduced the price for MLB.tv by 50% to $49.99. My military discount (they offer a student discount, too) decreases the price further, bringing my total cost to $32.49. This big drop in price is why mid-June is officially the start of baseball-watching season for me, and that makes this one of my favorite parts of baseball season. In case you were wondering, my first and second favorite parts of baseball season are when fantasy baseball starts drafting and when the first baseball cards for the new year are released.

Today's card features a player who is not currently appearing on MLB.tv, because I didn't spring for the extra MiLB.tv package that allows you to watch minor league games. This is a Jon Singleton Gypsy Queen Relic Gold parallel from the 2015 Topps Gypsy Queen product. I got it for a song from eBay. Well, maybe for a couple of songs if you go by the prevailing iTunes music prices. It is numbered # 20 / 25 and features a nice red relic swatch. You have to go one parallel more rare to get patchwork in this set. I've read some different opinions on Singleton lately. Some think he's likely to get another chance to prove himself at the major league level, while others think he's on the brink of being released altogether. I don't know. I'll probably still keep chasing his cards as long as they keep making them, though. It's a habit for me now.

Anyway, if you were on the fence about signing up for MLB.tv because of the price tag, it's a bit cheaper now. There is also a program where you can sign up with a group of friends for a discount, but I haven't looked into that very much because I don't have friends socialize with people who like baseball. But the discount gets progressively larger as more people sign up together.