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.

2019 Donruss Blaster

I've had this blaster of 2019 Donruss sitting around for a while now. I actually bought it a week or so before Opening Day but due to other things, I haven't had the chance to open it until now. 

If you remember last year, I bought three packs of Donruss from the card shop and thought they were horrible. The pictures, the design, everything except the 1984 style cards was bad. Let's see if Donruss redeemed themselves this year.

Here are the base cards. As is the case with Donruss, there are no logos or nicknames. Not that I mind that too much when photos like this do their best to hide that that. The Rhys Hoskins card is a throwback uniform variation that I noticed after sorting these to be scanned. As far as the design this year goes, I don't really mind it. It's pretty simple and doesn't try to be something it's not (and doesn't have wavy lines all over the place either like last year).

Of course, there are nickname variations. These are painless enough.

The two Reds cards I got in my box. Scooter Gennett is inching closer to coming back and re-joining the team after injuring his quad right at the end of spring camp. It makes me wonder though, who will be the odd man out in the infield since Jose Iglesias has been a heck of a fill-in with both his glove and his bat, and Derek Dietrich I think may have usurped Jose Peraza as the everyday second baseman.

Here are a few of the Rated Rookies. I think there was one of these in every pack. These were literally chosen at random. Garrett Hampson is currently hitting .194/.224/.269 with Colorado and was actually optioned back to Triple-A as I write this. Kopech was 1-1 in only four games with the White Sox and will miss the entire 2019 season due to Tommy John surgery.

I think even the most ardent Donruss/Panini hater can probably find some good in the Diamond Kings cards.

Every year since Panini brought Donruss back, they've had the back end of the base set devoted to old designs. This year it's 1985, which I sort of enjoy. As a matter of fact, my favorite Donruss designs are probably from the years 1982-1987. I wonder what they'll do when they reach 1990 as they've already used it for a base set design in 2017.

As it is with Donruss, there's a boatload of parallels and the the like. The Rizzo is numbered to 484 and the design on the Ryan O'Hearn card is called "Independence Day". The back also feels like it's a vintage stock card or something.

Purple parallels! Very cool and very shiny.

Speaking of shiny, there's a four card "bonus" pack with the blasters and inside contained these super shiny cards. I think my favorite of these is the Jose Altuve "Action All-Stars" card. One thing I didn't notice until scanning these is that the Franchise Features cards have a different player on the reverse side.

And would you look at who's on the back of the Kris Bryant, that being Reds top prospect Nick Senzel, who is doing quite well for himself both at the plate and in the field. After seeing him play, I can see why the Reds released Matt Kemp.

So that's a blaster of 2019 Donruss. It's a definite improvement from last year. I like the inserts and parallels, and especially the "Action All-Stars" set.

Mystery Group Break Expo-se

I received some mail last week from Kerry of Cards on Cards as part of his 10th anniversary free group break extravaganza. Since by the time I signed up for the break, the Reds and Indians had already been claimed, I went outside the box and claimed the Montreal Expos.

The results of the base cards from the minor league Team Best sets. Brad Wilkerson is really the only player I recognize from this pile but I thought it'd be the nice thing to do to at least show the base cards, if only in passing.

I got two autographs out of the Team Best deal ... Peter Bergeron and Michael Barrett. Actually, there were two Peter Bergeron autographs, the other has already been set aside into the trade box.

The other portion of the break was some 1999 Stadium Club, of which I have very little. It was nice to see these cards, especially the Vladimir Guerrero. This also reminded me I might have to look into some of this years Stadium Club.

Of course, not only were there cards from the break but Kerry also threw in some bonus stuff, such as these really cool old Fleer stickers. I'm not really one for stickers but I will admit, these are pretty neat.

It took me a minute to figure out that this was actually a Leaf card, despite the fact it clearly says "Leaf 2005" on the top right corner. I can honestly say that this is the first card from the 2005 Leaf I've ever seen in my life. Also, it being a card from 2005, shouldn't the team be Washington since the Expos ceased to exist after 2004? All that aside, I really dig this.

The oddballs that were included were my favorite of the bonus cards. I never was a Toys R Us kid (we had K.B. Toys in the mall where I grew up) but the recent trips I made there showed that the stores were horribly out of date and also the prices were very expensive. I guess I should all them to the list of defunct retail store chain oddball cards I collect (places such as Hills, Revco, etc.)

I saw a physical Drake's product in the grocery store for the first time ever last week. Until I learned about the cards they put out, I'd never heard of them. The cards I've seen though for them have always been pretty cool and I'm always happy to add one to my collection. Also, a Tim Raines SI for Kids card? Sure why not. 

It's odd that I would mention Kaybee (or K.B.) Toys earlier and there just so happened to be a Kaybee Toys card in the package. It's from the 1990 Kaybee Kings set. Zellers I'd never heard of so I had to look it up on Wikipedia. It turns out that it's a defunct Canadian discount retailer and in 1982 they issued an Expos "pro tips" set that came in three panel sheets.

As much as I liked the oddballs and other stuff Kerry included, this card, by far, was my favorite of the package. Since Panini launched the Diamond Kings line, it's always been one of my favorites. The card stock, the variety of old school and current players, the beautiful inserts, and of course the fact that it feels like a high-end release at a pretty affordable price point. I've always enjoyed the Heritage Collection inserts and this card, such a simple card with a black background and the player in a gold circle to me just screams "awesome card".

That's a wrap on the group break. Thanks to Kerry for putting it together. It was fun to participate and I appreciate the cards you sent over.

Halloween Weekend Card Show

Every year as an early birthday present, my wife lets me go off to a card show. Typically, I'd go to my preferred show, the monthly show at the Nutter Center in Dayton but this time I decided to venture down to Sharonville, a northern suburb of Cincinnati, for a show being held at the Clarion Hotel.

I had memories of this show from way back in the day when I used to work for a card shop. On occasion, the owner would send me off with a car load full of stuff from boxes with loose packs to dime boxes to jersey and autograph cards, to set up with at the show. After a while, he just started doing the show himself, I think perhaps because he took better stuff with him, but regardless I still had fun running the table.

Having said that, it's been at least ten years since I've been to this particular show and for once, in the days leading up to it, I wasn't excited for card show day. I'm not sure why. Maybe because the little voice in the back of my head was telling me to wait for the Nutter Center but I was bound and determined to go.

I got a later start than I wanted and pulled up to the hotel about 10:15 for a show that started at 9:30 and the parking lot was already packed. I headed in and over to the giant conference room I remember the show being in so many years ago and yes, there it was. Like it had never left. I knew I was in trouble though as the first vendor I saw in the door had two tables of triple digit vintage. I had a feeling good deals were probably going to be scarce.

I was right.

Dime and quarter boxes were nearly non-existant. I found exactly one true dime box throughout the whole show, the rest were either 50 cent or dollar boxes (which really isn't a bad thing but I'm on a budget here!). Some vendors had boxes out that had no price on them, which should've been a big red flag for me but I dug anyway. I found some gems, managed to negotiate a fair price, and still walked away with a feeling like I'd been had in some instances.

Complaints aside, it was still a card show and I did manage to find some good deals. Let's see what I got.

I'll start off by showing off most of the finds from the only true dime box of the day. While the box was mostly 2017 Topps base, it still had a good handful of miscellaneous stuff including some from this years Gypsy Queen and Allen & Ginter. The dealer running the table mentioned it was the first time he'd put together one. That Randy Johnson Expos card is a short print by the way so seeing it pop-up from a dime box was super cool.

I think the 1987 style inserts are cool so when I found three of them, I set them aside. I almost decided to put the Clemens card back but it'll go good with the "quick stops" cards (aka "short term stops") I have in my collection. The John Goodman card I had my eye on since it came out as I've always been a big fan of his. Plus, he played Walter in The Big Lebowski, which is one of my favorite movies ever.

Some of the Donruss throwback style cards from this years release. Despite the fact that Panini doesn't have an MLB license, that still doesn't stop me from enjoying the fun that Donruss brings to the table every year.

Speaking of Panini, Diamond Kings is always one of my favorite releases of the year. They're a premium style product at not a premium price and you're always guaranteed to get a bit of good stuff. Getting all of these for 10 cents each pretty much made my whole day up until the very end of the show (which I'll get to later). Yes, the base cards are nice but those Heritage Collection inserts, those are just gorgeous.

And a few more things to wrap up the dime box portion. I became a big fan of Scooter Gennett this year as he had a great year for the Reds who picked him up off the scrap heap in Spring Training. 

Moving on from the dime box, I managed to score a few buybacks from a 50 cent bin, however I only paid a $1 for these. 

Aside from the vast selection of football cards, the baseball products that were all over the place included Update and Topps Fire. The Kris Bryant was from a dollar bin (and yes, I realize it's a 2016 card) but the others were from one of the unmarked bins. It's the first time I'd seen these in person and they are awesome. Plus, I wasn't expecting to see a card of Hank Aaron in a Brewers uniform in a modern product. The Willie McCovey card is a parallel I believe.

I'm normally not a big collector or buyer of Chrome but these were too nice to pass up. 

I found these on a second pass through a 50 cent bin that I'd missed on my first lap through the show. I know I'll never be able to afford boxes or packs of products like this so finding cards in the bargain bin is super cool.

Stadium Club was all over the place too and most of them were in dollar bins or vendor were commanding an unreasonable price for bulk singles. I think I'll have to try to get some more of this as  it's just tremendous. The Gehrig card is one of the black parallels but my favorite has to be the Warren Spahn card, just for the fact it includes a ton of old school ballpark ads in the background.

Of course, I can't go to a card show and not come back with some Reds cards. Even though I don't care much for 2016 Topps, I knew I didn't have the Lorenzen and the Diaz. I didn't know Barry Larkin was in A&G this year so that's definitely a new card to add to the Larkin collection. My favorite of the batch though has to be the Johnny Bench Stadium Club card.

Newer cards weren't the only thing I bought. As I mentioned previously, the first table I saw had nothing but high priced, triple digit vintage. I did manage, however, to find someone towards the back corner of the room with a 50 cent bin of late 60s and 70s cards. I spotted these two Pilots cards right away and I'll add them to the Pilots collection. My goal is to get a complete team set from 1969 and 1970.

All five cards above were also in the 50 cent vintage bin. The photo on the George Scott card is just amazing. I think Stargell might be a duplicate but I'm not sure. For 50 cents though, I was willing to take that chance.

Here's a bunch of other baseball cards I got that didn't really belong in any of the other scans above. How can you not like this batch? You've got Reggie as an Oriole and Roger Maris as a Cardinal. Everything else is just cake.

I like to keep my options open at shows so even though I'm not much of a basketball collector, I couldn't really pass these up. Especially for cards of three bonafide NBA legends. The Shaq card I think is one of those special cards given out at the National.

Hockey cards were definitely in short supply. The only person who even had any was the aforementioned person where I got the 50 cent vintage cards. Every card shown above here was only a nickel each. 

He also had a binder full of vintage hockey cards. I took a gander through and came up with these. To be honest, I'm not too familiar with any of these guys and the only one I've heard of is Jacques Lemaire. The Flames cards I got because they'll go well with the defunct teams collection. Phil Roberto I just had to get because honestly, how often do you see pictures of fights on hockey cards?

A few other random hockey cards I managed to dig up, including two of my favorite players to watch from two of my favorite teams to watch.

My best find of the day though had to be at the very last table. Normally, I try to shy away from vintage dealers who have showcases on their tables but I noticed this particular person had really good prices on everything. Now, to be clear, this wasn't the initial vendor I saw. I'll also say that of all the card shows I've ever been to, he was by far the nicest vendor I've ever ran into. Most if not all vendors there would give me a quick "Hi" which was quickly followed by them looking back down on their phones to check their fantasy football teams. Not this guy, he was genuinely interested in helping me find some cards to fit my budget instead of shoving high priced stuff in my face, provided me his business card, added me to his email list, and seemed just happy to be there. That being said, I bought four nice cards from him as my last purchase of the day.

Behold! My favorite purchase of the day! These four cards set me back a mere $12 as the guy gave a me a deal and gave me and extra 20% off the low price he quoted me already. The Sam Mele card is only the second 1952 Topps card I have. The rest are from the 1960 set. Sure, they're a little beat up, the back of the Mathews card has very minimal paper loss, but for three bucks each, it was hard to pass up. The guy I bought these from said he recognized me from the Dayton show as well and would be sure to let me know the next time he'd be back in the area.

My budget going into this show was $50. I came back with $12 left so I think I did ok for myself. What's left I'm going to put towards getting some more storage and organization stuff. Did I get amazing deals? Not really aside from the last four cards. Will I be going back to this show again? Probably not any time soon as I definitely prefer the smaller scale and the selection at the Nutter Center show.