Into the Mailbag

I haven't gotten cards in the mail in a real long time but in the span of a week I received one bubble mailer and a few PWEs.

It's amazing what happens when you make a blogging comeback.

The wonderful 2002 Reds team card above was part of a nice PWE I received from Fuji about a week or so ago. It's probably one of my favorite team cards in my collection now. There's several cool things about it ... the dirt infield, the interesting uniforms the team was wearing then but my favorite thing is that it's one of the last team photos from old Riverfront Stadium (which just celebrated the 50th anniversary of its opening on June 30th).

There were also cards from players I enjoyed watching when I was growing up, namely Barry Larkin and Sean Casey. 

Some cool horizontal cards. I remember how emotional everyone was when the Reds traded Aaron Boone to the Yankees in 2003.

Another one of my favorite Reds players, Hal Morris, on a card design I've always liked, 1992 Leaf.

It's not just Reds players that Fuji threw in, he also hit up some of my other player collections. I always welcome cards of Hall of Famers.

Charlie Hough is a guy I always liked collecting, especially when I was a kid. I'm not sure why I gravitated towards his cards, maybe it's the insanely long career he had and the fact he played for the Marlins of all teams when they weren't even around when he debuted.

In a separate mailing from Fuji way back in January, he loaded me up on cards for my 1984 Topps set build that I've been working on seemingly forever.

Lots of good stuff, right?

Anyway, look for an updated 1984 Topps waitlist to show up on the blog soon as soon as I get these filed away and can figure out what I still need.

Thanks for all the great cards Fuji! Really appreciated.

The Well Traveled Envelope Arrives in Ohio

So there's a thing going around right now amongst the blogs called the "Well Traveled Envelope". The gist of the whole deal is to re-use the same envelope and the supplies contained within as many times as humanly possible. There's also an ongoing log and note to fill out as well. I was lucky enough to have been selected by Chris of "The Collector" blog as the next recipient of the envelope.

When I opened the envelope, this was the first card I saw. After that, I knew things were going to be good because it's not every day that your open a bubble mailer and find a Renata Galasso Warren Spahn card starting back at you. 

Here's some 1984 Topps I can put towards the set build. Frank Robinson was canned by the Giants 106 games into the 1984 season with an awful 42-64 record. 

Some 2019 Diamond Kings and my first Carl Hubbell card. The Al Simmons I think might be a duplicate as I'm pretty sure it came out of a pack that I ripped a few months back. 

The package was also littered with team collections on the baseball side ... Reds and Expos most notably. I've never seen this Gary Carter card and it's got to be definitely one of my favorites now. I think I've mentioned this before but I really like 1992 Pinnacle. It's got to be the black borders though.

More Expos with the bottom row featuring some 1994 Fleer. About a week or so ago as I write this, the 25th anniversary of the 1994-95 baseball strike just passed which many argue effectively doomed baseball in Montreal. I believe that 1994 Expos team would've made it to the World Series had it been played that year as that was possibly the best team they ever had in Montreal.

Some Reds cards now and we've got some super shiny ones to start with. Blandino hasn't played a single game for the club this year after appearing in 69 games last year as a utility infielder. The Suarez card is one of the refractor variety

Nice mix of cards here, including a somewhat early Joey Votto card. I'm admittedly horrible at placing the year on Bowman cards. The most interesting card to me here is Scott Feldman. It falls into both the "short term stops" variety and the "sunset cards" variety. Feldman pitched the 2017 with the Reds going 7-7 over 21 starts including Opening Day of 2017. His last start for the Reds (and final MLB appearance in general) was August 17, 2017.

Another fun batch of cards. I love it when Topps includes manager cards in the Archives sets. I think they're just fun additions to the checklist. The Scooter Gennett card is pretty neat but again, I'm horrible at placing the year on Bowman cards.

Baseball wasn't all that Chris included in the well-traveled envelope. He also hit me with a bunch of new hockey cards. All five of these Marty's are new to my collection. I particularly like the "hockey heroes" and the shiny Leaf card on the left.

Some cool new Devils cards. I can't place the Travis Zajac card but it looks like it's from a throwback set of some kind. Scott Stevens and Patrik Elias were part of the awesome Devils teams of the early 2000s. The Devils this season should be fun to watch with the addition of P.K. Subban and Jack Hughes.

Oooh! Shiny Coyotes including a really neat card of Oliver Ekmann-Larsson. Speaking of fun teams, with the Coyotes dealing for Phil Kessel, and him joining Oli, Clayton Keller, and Derek Stepan on offense, that should be quite the team to keep an eye on.

By far my favorite hockey cards in the batch were these old school O-Pee-Chee cards. I'm not too familiar with John Anderson but Blaine Stoughton I know because he's a former Cincinnati Stingers player. 

I appreciate Chris including me in the Well Traveled Envelope challenge. My next mission is to figure out who I'm sending it to next and to dig out cards for said individual. However, it might be a bit before I get to that as I'm working roughly 65 hours this week between two jobs. Should I not fall over from exhaustion by the end of the week, it'll be on it's way to the next recipient soon.

You've Got Mail #77: Off the Wall Cards (aka Secret Santa 2017)

Yes, I know it's February and only a few weeks out from Valentine's Day but last Christmas Matt at BWTP organized another wonderful blogger secret Santa extravaganza. In the draw, I ended up having to buy for Matt himself but the person who pulled my name was Shane over at Off the Wall Cards and someone who I've interacted with on Twitter quite a bit. 

Shane's package arrived just a few days before Christmas and was one of those large size USPS priority mail boxes stuffed to the gills with all kinds of stuff that hit pretty much every collection under the sun. I won't show everything because if I did, we'd be here until next Christmas 

There were these 1982 Topps Bengals cards to start with. While I'm not a big collector of modern football cards, I still enjoy getting older cards such as these, especially Bengals cards and these are a great addition to the Bengals collection.

I wanted to take a moment as well and show the back of the team leaders card. It's so cool that it shows the results of all the games from the 1981 season. It makes me want to go back and look up the records on some of these games. You'll see this card again in the future too for a "Multi-Player Mayhem" entry.

1982 Topps wasn't the only thing in the way of Bengals cards that were included. There was also this smattering of random Bengals.

But here's the most interesting item of the Bengals portion, this sticker/pocket schedule. I checked the front and the back for any info on who may have printed it and there's nothing but a quick gander over at COMC turned up the fact this is a 1982 Fleer Teams in Action sticker. The sticker itself is cool but it's really the schedule on the back that does it for me. Kind of makes me want to go back again and look up the results of those games.

Bengals cards weren't the only thing included. There were these WWF cards from the early 90s as well, including three Ultimate Warrior cards.

Some reprints of cards of defunct teams, from both the Topps 1952 reprint series and 2001 Topps Archives. I wonder if it would be feasible at some point to put together a 1952 Topps set using nothing but the reprints.

Here's something pretty cool, a 1970 Topps poster of Don Mincher, first baseman for the Seattle Pilots. One thing I really find interesting about 1970 Topps is that it features cards for the Pilots but by the time the season started, the Pilots had morphed into the Brewers. One of my collecting goals is to get every Pilots card from both the 1969 and 1970 sets. If you've got Pilots cards to send, feel free to let me know.

Here's a handful of 1984 Topps cards for the set build. This reminds me, I really need to update my want list for that.

I'm not sure if these are TTM autographs or in-person autographs but this is probably my second favorite batch of Indians cards in the package. I think the one I like the most has to be Dave Burba, who was kind of a forgotten about pitcher. He was pretty solid with the Reds in the mid-90s and was part of two major trades the Reds made. He was acquired by the Reds in 1995 as part of a July deal that also netted Mark Portugal and Darren Lewis from the Giants in exchange for Deion Sanders and a few other players. The Reds would then flip Burba to Cleveland on the eve of Opening Day 1998 for a young first baseman named Sean Casey. The rest, as they say, is history.

I always enjoy it when vintage cards are hidden in a trade package and this is no exception. First, there's a well loved 1955 Bowman card of George Strickland, then a 1962 Topps Woody Held, and a smattering of 1959 Topps cards, of which I had none until just now. 

This is a sampling of the 1983 Reds yearbook team set. I really like the card with the aerial shot of Riverfront Stadium and the Coliseum. I look at that picture and realize that 20 years after the fact the stadium would be gone and a new one would be built right between it and the Coliseum. As for how the Reds did in 1983, they finished 6th (aka last) in the NL West with a 71-91 record.

Pretty much this whole post has been about oddballs and stickers so here's more. This time some Star stickers made by Fleer in 1981 featuring the remnants of the Big Red Machine.

Here's more vintage, this time with cards from 1958, 1957, and 1963 respectively and all three of popular Reds players in that era. The Gus Bell card will go well with the Vada Pinson and Joe Nuxhall cards I already have from that set. We also have another well worn 1955 Bowman card, this time of Fred Baczewski, a man whose major league career spanned only three seasons and in 1955, the year this card was produced, pitched 1 inning of one game and amassed an 18.00 ERA.

Moving on to more modern territory, there was a nice selection of Barry Larkin cards, these four I know I didn't have previously. I really should inventory my Reds player collection cards sometime but that's a major project and something I don't have time to do currently.

To go along with the Indians autographs previously shown, here's a nice IP/TTM auto of the newest Reds Hall of Famer Adam Dunn, and it's on his rookie card.

I'm nearing the end of this massive mail day but just wanted to touch on a few more newer cards that were thrown in before I show the major cards. First, there were these minor league cards

And a bunch of newer cards, including a nice Adam Duvall Donruss card from last year. I've said it before and I'll say it again, even though Panini doesn't have an MLB license, I think they do pretty well with what they've got and Donruss has been one of my favorite products to buy the last few years. I think last year and the year before, they really started to hit their stride.

Now the two big ticket items of the package and two cards off my most wanted list. First, a card that been haunting me seeming forever, that being the 1984 Topps #8 Don Mattingly card. I've seen it for sale at numerous places but the price was always a bit more that I wanted to pay. Now a glaring hole in my 1984 Topps set is complete and I can focus on getting the rest of it whittled away.

Here's another card I placed on my most wanted list and quite honestly forgot it was on there, that being this 1969 Tony Perez. This is really a nice early career card of Perez and trying to find a card like this around here isn't cheap since local dealers then to jack up the price of early cards of Big Red Machine.

A big thank you goes out to Shane for his generosity and all the awesome stuff both pictured and not pictured. Some stuff I scanned in but ended up cutting due to space but believe me, there was a lot of stuff and things that'll take me a while to organize. I definitely recommend getting in on the Secret Santa deal, it's a ton of fun.

You've Got Mail #57: Three Christmas PWEs

It's been nearly a week since I've had time to sit down and write about cards. If you follow me on Twitter, then you'll know why. Last Thursday, my three-year-old son had to go in the hospital with an intestinal blockage. We went in to the ER, thinking they would take care of it there. They did but there were other issues the doctor was concerned about so they admitted him. He was there from Thursday night until Saturday afternoon and my wife and I spent the whole time there with him (save for the hour or so it took me to run home and gather up overnight bags for each of us). I'll save you the details but suffice to say he had to be "cleaned out", as the nurses put it. What that means, I'll leave up to the imagination. Saturday afternoon they released him and now he's doing much better and is back to his normal little self. So, aside from my "Four Favorite Cards" post that was already scheduled before the hospital stay happened, I've been nowhere near the blog scene. I'm just now getting all my bearings back and having time to get writing again. 

Since I'm behind on everything, I figured what better way to start getting caught up on stuff is to combine a bunch of PWEs I received during Christmas time into one post. Yes, I know it's nearly mid-January and I'm just now writing about cards I got at Christmas. Heck, we still have our tree up! While no presents will be going under it anytime soon, here's what I was gifted by fellow bloggers when the Christmas tree was still relevant.

The first PWE was from Oscar over at ATBATT. Actually, he sent me two PWEs, the second of which I'll cover next. The first one though was stuffed with what else but Reds cards. Some of the early 90s ones are duplicates but that's fine. The Tony Perez Gypsy Queen card though is something else. The artistic style of Gypsy Queen is always nice but take a look at the background of that card. It's great isn't it? I'm not sure what ballpark that is but I'm almost certain it's not Crosley Field as Perez is in the road grey uniform. Regardless, it's a pretty awesome card.

The second PWE was more focused on some of my side collections and they were all touched on. First, there were two nice additions to my Dennis Eckersley PC and then two Expos cards, but the ones I were really excited about were the bottom three. I had no recollection that Manny had ever played for Oakland so I took to the ever helpful Baseball Reference to confirm. Turns out that he didn't. He signed with Oakland in February of 2012 and was released later that summer. Guess what, that makes it a zero-year card! The other two cards are parts of collections I'm just starting up, that being buybacks and throwback uniforms. The Valbuena card you've already seen in the latest Walgreens repack.

Next, we have a small four-card PWE from Trevor at Bump and Run cards. The two 1984 Topps cards will help out toward the set build. It's one of my collecting goals to either finish or nearly complete that set this year. I still need to track down the Don Mattingly rookie but I'm waiting for a decent price before I grab it. The other two cards will help out with both the Reds collection and the aforementioned Eckersley PC. 

Closing this out is a nice selection from Adam K. at Infield Fly Rule, the man who benefits from all my unwanted Rockies cards. There were some Indians cards, a nice card of Harmon Killebrew, and some Reds "cameo" cards, which I have to admit are pretty cool. One card I need to touch on though is the 1993 Donruss Freddie Benavides. I've mentioned before that 1993 Donruss is one of my favorite sets but almost everything I have is from Series 1. Being that it's an expansion draft card, it's from Series 2 and I really like the fact that he's sporting a Reds uniform while having the Rockies logo and colors on the nameplate.

A big thanks goes out to Oscar, Trevor, and Adam K. for the great additions to my collection. Hopefully things will settle down some and I can get back to a regular posting schedule and possibly even get my Christmas tree down.