Surprise Cards from SumoMenkoMan

A few weeks ago, in the middle of a crazy week at work, I received a surprise mailer from Ryan of the Sumo Cards blog. Apparently, during his travels with Fuji, he'd grabbed a bunch of Reds from a bargain box for me. 

First, a few 1993 Donruss cards. I've always been a fan of 1993 Donruss because of the pretty simple design, although I'm less familiar with series 2 than series 1. The Reggie Sanders and Cesar Hernandez cards are from series 2. I don't recall Hernandez playing with the Reds, turns out he didn't make much of a splash. Just 61 games over parts of two seasons.

Jose Rijo and Pete Schourek were anchors of the Reds pitching staff in the mid-90s. Although Rijo got injured during the 1995 season, Schourek finished second in Cy Young voting and helmed a staff which also included John Smiley and Tim Pugh. Dave Burba and David Wells were late season additions that propelled the Reds to the NLCS that year.

Hal Morris was always one of my childhood favorites and whenever I get cards of his, I'm pretty happy. Plus, I don't have a lot of 1995 Topps, so that's good too.

Speaking of 1995 Topps, two of the Reds top pitchers during the mid-90s. Jeff Brantley is now part of the Reds TV and radio broadcast team. John Smiley's last good run was with the Reds. After they traded him to the Indians in July of 1997, he was pretty much done. His career ended with a broken arm/shoulder injury not long after that.

I always enjoy some early 80s cards. The Reds of 1981 were starting to come off the high that was the 1970s "Big Red Machine" but still had some steam left. However, due to the split season, they didn't make the playoffs.

Here's something I wasn't expecting, a Tom Browning rookie from the 1985 Topps Traded set. Browning had an excellent rookie campaign in 1985 going 20-9 with a 3.55 ERA over 38 games. He finished second in Rookie of the Year voting and 6th in Cy Young voting

Here's a card of Mike Bell, the brother of current Reds manager David Bell. I'd forgotten Mike Bell ever played for the Reds.

Some mid-2000s action. I really like the Austin Kearns card. I remember the days when Kearns and Adam Dunn were supposed to anchor the Reds teams of the future. 

And a few shiny Bowman Chrome cards to close things out with.

Much thanks to Ryan for sending these my way. It was nice to receive a completely unexpected package.

You've Got Mail #79: ARPSmith's Sportscard Obsession

I received this a while back from Adam of ARPSmith's Sportscard Obsession. It turns out I was the beneficiary of another housecleaning by a fellow blogger. For those not in the know, Adam apparently bought a humongous collection a while back and needed to clear out some room. He offered a few teams up, the Reds being one of them, and I quickly jumped on the claim train. Soon thereafter a small Priority Mail box showed up on my doorstep filled with all kinds of wildness.

Big Klu is one of my favorite players to collect from the 1950s era Reds. Sure, they had other great players on those teams like Vada Pinson, Joe Nuxhall, and Wally Post to name a few but the major slugger of those team was Ted Kluszewski. Over 11 seasons with the Reds (1947-1958), he slugged a whopping 251 home runs and finished in the top ten of MVP voting three times. He's definitely someone I want to expand my collection of this year.

Speaking of player collections, there were three major assaults on some of my top PCs including these six Griffey cards I didn't have before.

There was also this really awesome batch of Sean Casey cards.

And a few new Larkins I didn't have as well, including a 1998 Pinnacle. I'll touch on that a bit more later as there were more cards included than just Larkin from that set.

Here are a couple curiosities. Upon finding these in the box, it was the first I'd ever heard of King B and their "quality meat snacks". I though maybe these were just issued in the 80s and 90s but no, it turns out that King B issued these discs from 1988 all the way through 2001. 

As is the territory for any trade package, it contained a healthy batch of late 80s and early 90s cards. These are three cards I know are for sure not duplicates. 

There was also a good batch of mid to late-90s cards as well. I think my favorites have to be the Pinnacle cards of Ron Gant and Pete Schourek though. I think both of these guys get forgotten about in Reds lore but they were both very important pieces of the 1995 Reds team, which was the last Reds team to make it all the way to the NLCS. 

Gant was a major piece of the everyday lineup that year and hit .276 with 29 homers and 88 RBIs in a huge comeback season. Schourek had the best season of his career that year going 18-7 with a 3.22 ERA in 29 starts. What I didn't realize is that he finished second in the Cy Young voting that year and finished 20th in MVP votes, the only year he would receive votes in either category.

Speaking of cards from the 90s, you can't go wrong with mid-90s Score. The cards from these sets were some of my favorites as a kid and they still are today. They have really slick looking designs and the photography is great too (although I wish they'd had a better picture of Jose Rijo).

Finally, some 2001 Donruss cards to wrap this up. I opened a pack of this last year for the first time and had no idea what to expect and I was pretty pleased with the result, even though it was a five card pack. However, I didn't get any Reds cards in the pack but seeing these come out of the package was really, really cool.

A big thank you goes to out Adam for sending these cards over to me. I will have some Giants cards to send to you soon after I finished weeding out any duplicates.