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.

Taking the Scenic Route

Everyone's favorite White Sox blogger, Jeff of 2x3 Heroes, is in the midst of sending out his annual "Tis the Season" packages. I was excited when I got my notification from the USPS that the package was on the way and it would be delivered in a few days. Well, after a few days, no package. I checked the tracking online and it simply said "in route to distribution center". Then, a few days later, the package popped up in L.A., then after a day or so in L.A. it made its way to San Francisco, and finally, after about 10 days of criss-crossing the country, a small priority mail box finally landed on my doorstep. To be honest, I'd kind of forgotten what I'd claimed in the annual year-end give away but it turns out the box contained a ton of hockey cards from all over the place.

The note from Jeff said I took a bunch of "meh hits" off his hands. These are some swell looking hits and I'm glad they're more jersey cards than autograph cards. If you can't make out who the players are on these three it's Ales Hemsky, Roman Horak, and Justin Schultz, unfortunately three names that aren't all that familiar to me.

One name that is familiar to me though is Rick Nash. Nash was the first player selected overall in the 2002 draft and could probably be classified at the first "homegrown" star of the Blue Jackets. 

This card is probably my favorite of the jersey cards included in the box. Glenn Anderson was part of the Oilers dynasty in the 1980s and early 90s where he won five Stanley Cups with the team and made four All-Star teams. He also won a Cup with the Rangers in 1994 and was inducted into the Hall of Fame as a player in 2008.

Relic cards though weren't the only thing that Jeff included. He also put a huge dent in my team collections for hockey. There were six "team packs" in the box and each one was loaded with all kinds of miscellaneous odds and ends. I'll show some highlights.

First, a nice lot of Blue Jackets. Of all my team I follow, the Blue Jackets are the ones I honestly watched the least of last season.

Some nice Devils including a pair of Jagr's. One can never have too many Jagr cards. Too bad it looks like he might be done in the NHL for the forseeable future. Speaking of which, I'm on the lookout for the lone card he had with the Flames from the Upper Deck main set.

More Devils and some mid-90s action with Brodeur and Stevens.

Old school Oilers!

And also some newer ones. 

My Calgary Flames collection really got a nice boost.

My Shane Doan collection for the Coyotes pretty much tripled in size. Also, there were some Jeremy Roenick cards with the really, really old Coyotes uniform.

Team collections aside, there was a nice mixed bag of cards too with these Artifacts and Score cards. I never really buy much in the way of late season hockey releases so adding cards from Artifacts is very nice. The picture really doesn't do them justice.

There was also a really good grouping of 2016-17 Upper Deck, of which I had none in the collection. That'll also put the bow on this giant box of cards as well. Now, I just have to find the time to get them filed away.

Retail Repack Adventures #17

Seeing as the NHL is neck deep in the Stanley Cup Playoffs currently, I thought this would be a good time to go through another hockey repack. Full disclosure here, I took a picture of the actual box but I have no clue what happened to it. To be honest, it may not even be necessary.

Here's the cover card and it's from the same 2015-16 Upper Deck Star Rookies set as the Connor McDavid in a previous repack. Looking at the checklist for that set, I forgot how good of a rookie class there was that year with not only McDavid and Jack Eichel but also Fabbri, Max Domi, Artemi Panarin, Sam Bennett, and Nikolaj Ehlers just to name a few.

Here's a very trippy card of Wendel Clark in a very strange New York Islanders uniform. This particular uniform was worn only for two seasons in the mid-90s by the Isles according to the research I found and it was universally hated. Gone was the traditional orange, white, and blue and in it's place was this weird conglomeration of white, orange, and teal along with a character logo resembling that of a sea captain.

Moving back to more traditional means, I've spoken before of my fondness for 1992 Upper Deck baseball but I've never really checked out the hockey issue from that year. I think I might have to change that at some point. This card of Caps goalie Mike Liut is a "sunset card" from that year. While I never watched Liut play, I enjoy collecting his cards as he was once the goalie for the long gone Cincinnati Stingers of the WHA.

What is a repack without junk wax? Here's a good smattering of some stuff from the early 90s including two cool goalie cards in John Vanbiesbrouck and Curtis Joseph.

Here's more of these random Canadian minor league hockey cards. I was fully prepared to say that none of these guys played in the NHL but from my research, only one of them did, that being Marquis Mathieu. Mathieu enjoyed a brief 16-game NHL stint with the Bruins over parts of three seasons. 

One of my favorite things of these hockey repacks is getting cards of defunct teams, such as the original Winnipeg Jets (now the Coyotes), the Atlanta Thrashers (now the new Winnipeg Jets), and the Quebec Nordiques (currently the Colorado Avalanche. I always forget about the Thrashers when I'm out searching cards of defunct teams.

The utter insanity that is 1995 Fleer was not just limited to baseball cards, it bled over to hockey cards as well. At some point when I have some spare time, I might dig out some of the 1995 Fleer cards I have from various sports and compare them. That should be quite the trip.

And the last card of the box, a nice Upper Deck Artifacts Zach Parise.  That's a pretty good way to end the box and it's a Devils card to boot. 

I'm kind of torn on these hockey boxes and to be honest, I quite prefer the baseball ones. Yes, it's a good way to amass some hockey cards but honestly, half the cards in them either go to the trade box or the donation bag for Goodwill. I usually only keep the "star cards" or players I collect so I'm not sure if investing in these 100-card hockey bricks in the future will be worth it. The baseball ones are much better as I know the cards and most of the players.

You've Got Mail #85: The Collector

Over the years I've found one truth about card collecting to be evident ... there is no wrong way to collect. What works for one person will not work for another person. Some may be deeply into team collecting or player collecting. Hey that works. Others, like me, may be more scattered around the map where I collect a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Recently, frequent blog commenter and author of the simply title blog "The Collector" Chris dropped me an email about wanting to do a bit of a swap. I agreed and soon there after a rather large envelope was dropped on my doorstep by the completely unfriendly mailman, who I tend to believe collects nothing but sneers while he's making his rounds. While I won't hit on everything that Chris sent, I'll touch upon the highlights for me.

These Topps Finest cards I've never seen before and they're pretty neat cards. The Reds from 94-97 had a pretty formidable team with a solid line-up and some pretty good pitching. I often think that people forget about Pete Schourek and John Smiley being part of that rotation. Eddie Taubensee was a solid defensive catcher as well. 

I always dug Jose Rijo and I thought it was so cool when he made his comeback in 2001-2002. While he wasn't the same power pitcher he was in the early 90s before he got injured, it was still pretty remarkable to see him comeback from all those injuries and pitch another season and a half. Fun fact, he was the starting pitcher for the last game at Cinergy Field/Riverfront Stadium. Speaking of players who came back from injuries, Devin Mesoraco is healthy this season for the first time is what seems like forever. However, he's been supplanted in the depth chart by Tucker Barnhart, who won a Gold Glove last season. 

Old school Reds cards are always welcomed too. 1981 Topps is one of those sets that most people tend to forget about as is falls right in between two really nice sets, 1980 and 1982, and it's one I don't really see a lot of singles available from. I think that might have a lot to do with the fact there wasn't a very strong rookie class with Tim Raines, Harold Baines, Kirk Gibson, Fernando Valenzuela, and Bob Walk being the top RCs available. This particular card was not one of the top rookie cards in the set as none of these guys would up being ... um, well ... household names. I'll be setting this card aside to do a standalone post on it one of these days.

This is my first experience with 1991 Fleer football and I'm not fully convinced that it's an improvement over it's baseball cousin. Sure, the bright yellow border is replaced by a green border but there is nothing in the background except for a generic sunset color. The name plate on the bottom looks like it was done on a typewriter.

On the flip side, these are some pretty awesome looking cards. The photography on these Fleer Ultra cards is just phenomenal, especially for 1992. The Bengals themselves were not good in 1992, their first season under Dave Shula. Tim Krumrie recorded 4 sacks that season along with 97 tackles and Tim McGee had 35 receptions for total of 408 yards on a Bengals squad that finished 5-11 that year, good enough for dead last in the AFC Central.

One of my side collections is "shiny cards" and do these ever fit the bill. I don't get the chance to buy much O-Pee-Chee Platinum, mainly because singles are impossibly hard to find around my area, but I do love getting them in trades. There's really no good reason I haven't added Mike Smith to my official hockey player collection, I think that might have to change here soon. The card that really takes the cake of these in the Jaromir Jagr team logos die-cut. The picture just really doesn't do it justice.

Chris also hit upon two of my main hockey player collections. First, these two cards of a young Shane Doan. This past season was the first season is as long as I can remember without Doan at the helm of the Coyotes as captain and I think they felt it, finishing with 70 points (29-41-12 overall) and the second worst record in the league. They do have a nice foundation with Clayton Keller, Oliver Ekman-Larsson, Max Domi along with Derek Stepan at center and Niklas Hjalmarsson on defense so it'll be interesting to see where they go next year.

Long time readers will know that Martin Brodeur is my top hockey player collection. His cards make up about half of my Devils cards alone and these are some really awesome adds to the collection. While I'm not out to get every card of his ever, I'll keep getting cards of his until I feel I have a decent amount. That's pretty much the way I manage every mini-collection within the collection, once I feel I have a decent amount of a certain thing, then I ease up.

One of the final aspects of my collecting is teams, both old and new. I like collecting defunct teams because it tells the history of the sport through cards. Such as these 1991-92 NHL Pro Set cards of the  long gone Hartford Whalers. While I'm not too familiar with these particular players, I'll be looking them up at some point.

As far as current hockey teams, the Devils are definitely my favorite. They made it into the playoffs this season as the first wild card but got assigned the buzzsaw known as the Tampa Bay Lightning in the first round. As much as I would like to see it, I don't think they'll get past that round. Here we've got a few Devils past and present with Cory Schneider, Adam Henrique, and Joe Nieuwendyk to put the bow on this trade package.

While there was a ton of other stuff Chris included that didn't necessarily make the cut to be featured here, I appreciate all that was sent and it afforded me a nice amount of quality quiet time to sort these. Thanks for the trade Chris!