More From the Mailbag

I mentioned a post or two ago nice that I’d received a few cards in the mail from various fellow blogger. After the PWE I received from Fuji, the item to arrive was a bubble mailer from Brian of HSCA. I claimed a few cards on his last “Free Card Friday” and along with those, he sent me some other goodies both baseball and football (yes, I collect football ... mostly Bengals cards).

I’ve already filed the football cards in my non-baseball binder but I’ll show off the baseball cards for sure.

These were the two cards I claimed from Free Card Friday, two anchors of the Expos in the 80s. I can’t believe the Raines Expos card had escaped me for this long but now I’m happy to add it to my collection. Andre Dawson had so many stops late in his career and I don’t remember half of them but the Marlins stint I remember for sure. Do you know what Andre Dawson does now? If you guessed funeral home director, then you’d be right.

Some cool random Reds cards. Gant was the 1995 NL Comeback Player of the Year then left the Reds after one season to join the Cardinals. Buddy Bell is the dad of current Reds manager David Bell and went to college just down the road from me at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

Double the pleasure for these Joe Morgan cards from Donruss a few years ago. The regular "Cincinnati" version is on the left and the variant "Big Red Machine" is on the right. Probably one of the better cards Panini has done with Donruss.

These cards have flair! 

Along with everything else, Brian also included two packs of 1993 Donruss Series 2. I'm not currently working on the se (but might in the future) because it's one of my favorite Donruss sets ever.

I'm just going to show these cards as I scanned them because honestly, I don't know which cards came from which pack anymore. I've always liked this set for a few reasons ... the photography was interesting and the lower third had a TV graphics feel to it with the team logo in a diamond and a clean looking name bar for the player and position.

Another reason I like it is that is has great backs. As was the standard with Donruss for most of the 80s and the early 90s, only the previous five seasons of stats are shown. But, more than that, the back features another giant photo of the player that is different from the one on the front, and the "how acquired" field (which I always enjoyed) includes details of trades. For example, this card details the date of the trade with the Pirates and all the players involved. That's really a super cool detail.

I had no clue that Ted Power and Dennis Rasmussen were still playing in 1993, let alone for those particular teams they're shown with.

Since these particular packs were series 2 cards, the real prize is getting Rockies and Marlins cards. I ended up with six of them out of the two packs, only one of which was a Marlins card. I always though these cards were cool because it showed the players in the teams that they were drafted from. If anything else, and I don't end up building the overall set, then I might just settle for the Rockies and Marlins cards.