You've Got Mail #79: ARPSmith's Sportscard Obsession

I received this a while back from Adam of ARPSmith's Sportscard Obsession. It turns out I was the beneficiary of another housecleaning by a fellow blogger. For those not in the know, Adam apparently bought a humongous collection a while back and needed to clear out some room. He offered a few teams up, the Reds being one of them, and I quickly jumped on the claim train. Soon thereafter a small Priority Mail box showed up on my doorstep filled with all kinds of wildness.

Big Klu is one of my favorite players to collect from the 1950s era Reds. Sure, they had other great players on those teams like Vada Pinson, Joe Nuxhall, and Wally Post to name a few but the major slugger of those team was Ted Kluszewski. Over 11 seasons with the Reds (1947-1958), he slugged a whopping 251 home runs and finished in the top ten of MVP voting three times. He's definitely someone I want to expand my collection of this year.

Speaking of player collections, there were three major assaults on some of my top PCs including these six Griffey cards I didn't have before.

There was also this really awesome batch of Sean Casey cards.

And a few new Larkins I didn't have as well, including a 1998 Pinnacle. I'll touch on that a bit more later as there were more cards included than just Larkin from that set.

Here are a couple curiosities. Upon finding these in the box, it was the first I'd ever heard of King B and their "quality meat snacks". I though maybe these were just issued in the 80s and 90s but no, it turns out that King B issued these discs from 1988 all the way through 2001. 

As is the territory for any trade package, it contained a healthy batch of late 80s and early 90s cards. These are three cards I know are for sure not duplicates. 

There was also a good batch of mid to late-90s cards as well. I think my favorites have to be the Pinnacle cards of Ron Gant and Pete Schourek though. I think both of these guys get forgotten about in Reds lore but they were both very important pieces of the 1995 Reds team, which was the last Reds team to make it all the way to the NLCS. 

Gant was a major piece of the everyday lineup that year and hit .276 with 29 homers and 88 RBIs in a huge comeback season. Schourek had the best season of his career that year going 18-7 with a 3.22 ERA in 29 starts. What I didn't realize is that he finished second in the Cy Young voting that year and finished 20th in MVP votes, the only year he would receive votes in either category.

Speaking of cards from the 90s, you can't go wrong with mid-90s Score. The cards from these sets were some of my favorites as a kid and they still are today. They have really slick looking designs and the photography is great too (although I wish they'd had a better picture of Jose Rijo).

Finally, some 2001 Donruss cards to wrap this up. I opened a pack of this last year for the first time and had no idea what to expect and I was pretty pleased with the result, even though it was a five card pack. However, I didn't get any Reds cards in the pack but seeing these come out of the package was really, really cool.

A big thank you goes to out Adam for sending these cards over to me. I will have some Giants cards to send to you soon after I finished weeding out any duplicates.