A New Type of Repack

Until recently, I'd never set foot in the store Five Below. I'd heard of it before and was told they had some cool things but until recently never went in there. What I saw though was fantastic! If you've never been, it's pretty much a hip discount store with toys, games, snacks, candy, trinkets, etc all for five dollars or under (hence the name). I went in with very low expectations but found that I probably could've bought a number of things. I contained myself and walked out of there with two of these repack cubes for me and a bag full of orange Airheads for my wife.

I kid you not when I say that literally every single repack cube on the shelf (and there were about 18 or so) had a Mike Piazza card visible. Half of them had this exact card showing as well. Since this is an O-Pee-Chee card, I just had to grab this cube. I forget which one the other cube had. 

The front proclaimed several things, including cards from "each of the past five decades". That would mean cards from the 70s, right? Nope. The 1980 Indians card was the oldest card I could find in the lot. I'll take it though. Plus early 80s Topps like the Vukovich and the Parker are always fun finds as well.

Here's an interesting card. I've never heard of Brigham's but apparently it was a regional ice cream chain and also a brand of ice cream found in the New England area. In conjunction with Coca-Cola, they issued a 23-card Red Sox set that shared the 1982 Topps design. I'm not sure if these cards were available at the ice cream shops or at the store in the carton. Maybe someone out that way can enlighten me? Regardless, pretty interesting to find a regional oddball all these years later in a repack in southwest Ohio.

Some miscellaneous 80s cards including John Tudor and Walt Weiss, both of whom look very unimpressed.

Early 90s stuff. Meh.

Another promise of the repack was that it featured one "hall of fame card". Well, together with the Mike Piazza card I showed to start with, there's Alan Trammell and Craig Biggio. That brings the Hall of Fame total to five.

1991 Score. Not a bad selection of players here. Rickey brings the Hall of Fame total to six. 

More modern cards from the 2000s. The Luis Aparicio card has to be one of my favorites from the box.

Here's a few cool horizontal cards that I found. I was genuinely happy when I saw the Randy Johnson card from 2002 Upper Deck Vintage. I'm always on the lookout for cards from that set but I'm not to the point yet where I'd consider officially putting the set together. Also, the Johnson card puts me at nine "Hall of Fame cards" for the lot.

The repack box/cube/whatever also said there were two packs included. The 2018 Topps pack was the one shown and the other was a pack of 1991 O-Pee-Chee Premier.

Here's the contents of the O-Pee-Chee pack. Nothing too terribly exciting here. My keepers will probably be Orel Hershier, Mo Vaughn, Jeff Reardon, and Ivan Calderon. Dave Parker I already have somewhere.

And the contents of the Topps pack. I'll probably keep Amed Rosario, Cody Bellinger, Randal Grichuk, and the "Boston B-Boys" card. I'm honestly more happy with the O-Pee-Chee pack than I am this.

There's the contents of a repack from Five Below. I've got another one of these to bust into soon but maybe I'll hold that off until next month. 

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.

Random Cards from Random Repacks

A long while back, the spring to be exact, I opened a whole bunch of 100-card repacks from the local Walgreens. I had every intent to share the findings in posts of their own, but now it's three months later and pictures of these cards have been haunting me ever since. So, instead of doing individual posts, here's some of the best from four random repacks.

Here's a 1983 O-Pee-Chee of Phil Niekro. I never really had an appreciation for O-Pee-Chee until I started reading card blogs. Now, whenever I get an OPC card, it instantly goes into the collection.

Paul Konerko is well know for being the first baseman for the White Sox for what seemed like forever but did you know he had a very brief stint with the Reds in 1998? Yep, the Dodgers sent him and Dennys Reyes to the Reds for Jeff Shaw on Independence Day 1998 and he appeared in 26 games as an outfielder and a corner utility man. After the season, the Reds sent him to the White Sox for Mike Cameron and the rest is history. I love cards like this that recognize a player having a brief stint with a team, especially ones that no one barely remembers them being with.

Oh, also, did I mention this is the Gold Medallion Edition of Fleer Ultra? That's pretty cool. 

Yay! 1981 Donruss! I always liked the design on these cards with the colored frame around the photo and the yellow team name on the lower right. The photos are also something else I enjoy on them. I definitely think between them and the debut issue of Fleer the same year, Donruss is the better overall product.

Here's a nice Warren Spahn card that was a cover card on one of the repacks. Also, bonus points on this for it showing him as a member of the Milwaukee Braves.

This isn't weird at all. I always think this is a Rockies card because the mascot takes up more of the card than the featured player but it's an Astros card of Brad Ausmus. You wouldn't know it though just by looking at it.

I'll take an Andrew Benintendi 2017 Topps card out of a repack, yes please! While this is just the regular version and not a variation, it really doesn't matter to me. While Benintendi isn't someone I've put on my player collection list, I don't mind adding a card of his here and there.

Some glossy Topps cards from the 80s. I love that Willie McCovey card with him in the old school Giants uniform and the fact that it says "captain" as his position.

Cards of Hall of Famers, mostly junk wax but the real standout here is the 1999 Topps Wade Boggs, the final year of Boggs' career. His sunset card would come the next season in the 2000 Topps set

It seems like every repack nowadays has a plethora of 2012 Topps, which is a set I really enjoy. I've mentioned previously, packs of 2012 Topps were the first packs I bought when I got back into collecting. The first two, Jim Thome and Manny Ramirez are interesting as the Thome card is a sunset card (meaning his final card issued during his career) and Ramirez is a zero-year card (meaning a card issued of a player featuring him on a team with which he never played). Darvish and Cespedes were two of the bigger rookie names that season and both came out of the same pack. Finally, the the Ichiro card has a fantastic picture on it. 

Finally, a pretty trippy card of Javy Lopez, known primarily for being the Braves catcher during the dominant run of the 90s. I'd had no clue he played with the Orioles but looks like he played out the last few seasons of his career there. I don't think I've ever seen a Donruss Zenith card before but in person it's pretty neat.

In regards to repacks, I think I might be done with them for the short term, unless I decided to go for the 50-card, 4-pack variety at Target. I will say that I really enjoyed throwing the best cards from multiple repacks together instead of reviewing the repacks one by one and talking about filler cards.

The Yard Sale Cards: Baseball Junk Wax

I had planned to have this up a few days ago but in between being crazy busy at work, my five-year-old being sick which led to me subsequently picking it up, I haven't had much time to write the past few days. However, in my last post covering the yard sale find, I documented some of the vintage and early 80s cards I came across. Now, as is the standard with any typical yard sale find, these are typically brimming with junk wax. This was no exception. While sifting through the literal mounds of cards that were contained, I came across tons of 1992 Donruss, 1989 Topps, and the like. I'll spare the details of showing those but I will show of some of the more eclectic and my favorite junk wax finds.

Starting off with these seemingly innocent stickers. I wouldn't normally show stickers like this as they're a dime a dozen for the most part when it comes to junk wax bulk lots but there's one little thing that makes these special ...

If you flip them over and look at the back, they're O-Pee-Chee stickers! How four random O-Pee-Chee stickers showed up in a yard sale in rural southwest Ohio, I'll never know.

Some Topps Big ... I still have yet to find a way to properly store "oversized" cards like this. I've still got a box of 1989 Bowman to rip into that's going to give me a nice glut of cards this size.

Some nice cards from the pile of 1991 Topps, including some pretty awesome horizontal cards. My favorites are the Clemens and Fisk cards but also the Sandy Alomar card where it looks like he's floating in mid-air.

Here's an interesting card, a 1989 Donruss All-Stars Pop Up of Ryne Sandberg. I don't remember ever having one of these when I was a kid. I suppose if I could then I could pop it up and see what it looks like be then where would the fun be in that. The one thing that really made this neat for me is seeing the logo for the 1988 All-Star Game in Cincinnati on the back. I might have to keep my eye out for more of these as I think it'd be cool to get more of these pop-ups from that game.

I was pretty pleased to find this Willie Greene card in amidst the 1990 Bowman. Greene was the primary third baseman for the Reds from 1996-1998 and would also play a bit in the outfield. He was drafted by the Pirates in 1989 but never played a game for them (which makes this a fabulous zero-year card) and was traded to Montreal with Moises Alou and Scott Ruskin for Zane Smith in August of 1990. He never played a game for the Expos either and he and Ruskin were both traded to the Reds in December of 1991 along with current Nationals manager Dave Martinez for John Wetteland. Greene was with the Reds from 1992-1998 and probably had his best season in 1997 with a .253 average, 26 HRs, and 91 RBIs.

I've had the random itch recently to open a box of 1990 Donruss. Why? Not sure. However, if I want to bust something from 1990 though, Fleer might be a better choice. I always enjoyed this design with the ribbon at the bottom and the great photography.

Speaking of great photography, Upper Deck always had great photos (and still does to this day with their hockey cards). Tim Raines and Fred McGriff aren't officially on my player collection list but I will never turn down cards featuring them.

Here's a bunch of Topps Glossy cards. There's three from the 1986 All-Star set and a 1989 Roberto Alomar. I never gave a second though to these when I was a kid and always figured they were some kind of insert card from packs. As I'm older now, I definitely appreciate them more.

With big lots of cards like this, there's always some interesting stuff to be found, like these old school Stadium Club cards. The Robin Yount and George Brett cards are part of the member's choice line. Also, Wade Boggs in a batting cage and another nice card to add to the pile of Eckersley's I already have.

But finally, the star of the show as far as the junk wax goes ... these Collect-A-Book! I never had these as a kid I've seen these here and there online and I've heard people talk about them online but I still never had any until now. The variety here is crazy as well from Cal Ripken and Barry Larkin to Billy Williams and Yogi Berra and everyone in between. I think of all the things from the junk wax pile, these are by far my favorites.