Around the Horn: Tampa Bay (Devil) Rays

Today, in honor of spring being just around the corner, I decided to catch some rays .... Tampa Bay Rays that is ... for this installment of "Around the Horn". This will also be short compared to the others as I don't have that many Rays cards to share.

The then Devil Rays first started play in 1998 as the first American League expansion team since 1977 when Seattle and Toronto were added to the league. The 1998 team wasn't anything to write home about, going 63-99 under manager Larry Rothschild. That first roster had a unique make-up of older veterans, like Fred McGriff, Jerome Walton, and Dave Martinez plus younger players like Miguel Cairo, Randy Winn, and Esteban Yan.

Perhaps one of the biggest coups that the Rays pulled off before their debut season was signing Wade Boggs as a free agent in December of 1997. Boggs would spend the final two years of his career with the Devil Rays primarily playing third base and doing DH duties. He also got his 3,000th career hit in a Devil Rays uniform. Most of these cards came from repacks and other miscellaneous stuff. Cards of Boggs as a Devil Ray never get old.

After the first two seasons being nothing to write home about, the Devil Rays went out and acquired some heavy sluggers like Jose Canseso in 1999 (where it was his last all-star season) and Greg Vaughn and Vinny Castilla in 2000 to compliment Fred McGriff, who was part of the original 1998 team.

By 2005, the Devil Rays went through three managers (Larry Rothschild, Hal McRae, and Lou Piniella) and never finished higher than 4th. In 2006, they took a gamble and hired Joe Maddon as the manager. In 2008, they rebranded themselves as just the Tampa Bay Rays and with a team that included Ben Zobrist, Evan Longoria, and Carl Crawford plus pitching from James Shields, Edwin Jackson, and Matt Garza, they Rays shocked everyone and made it to the World Series, losing to the Phillies in 5 games. 

Despite the Rays never existing in the 70s, you have to admit these are sweet throwback uniforms that they put together.

It's fascinating to look back and see just who passed through Tampa Bay. When digging out cards for this, I honestly forgot Johnny Damon donned a Tampa Bay uniform at one time.

To close things out, here's a few newer cards. The 1960 style cards from Archives a few years ago are just super cool. I really hope Archives has a good return to form this year, I thought it was a bust last year.

And that's all the Rays cards I wanted to feature. See, I said this would be short.

Only six teams left in the American League ... next up in the series is the Boston Red Sox.

Mystery Boxes From a Mystery Yard Sale (continued)

As promised in Tuesday's post, here's the continuation of the cards from the mystery yard sale boxes with my favorites of the 90s cards I found in the haul.

With the 90s cards, Dime Box Nick would've had a field day with some of these. Some cool double play cards and Trevor Hoffman fiddling with a camera.

Some nice rookie cards and early career cards. Ramon Hernandez might be someone I eventually add to my player PC as I always liked him when he was with the Reds. Finding a Konerko Dodgers card was a treat as well although I'm not a big fan of Pacific.

Eric Davis and Joe Oliver are two former Reds shown here with two teams they definitely don't belong with. Davis spent two seasons as a member of the Orioles, 1997 and 1998. The 1997 season wasn't all that great, with him only appearing in 42 games. However, he had a bounce back season in 1998 with the last great year of his career hitting .327/.388/.582 with 28 homers and 89 RBIs in 131 games. He even finished in the top 20 of AL MVP voting that season.

Joe Oliver spent one season as a Brewer in 1995 after playing in only 6 games with the Reds in 1994. He had a nice season appearing in 97 games hitting .273/.332/.439 with 12 homers and 51 RBIs. After the season, he signed again with the Reds as stayed with them for another two years.

More "short term stops" cards including Tom Candiotti as a member of the A's, Joe Carter as an Oriole, and Eddie Murray as an Angel. Terry Steinbach spent three seasons at the end of his career with the Twins, so that doesn't count as short term but I didn't remember it at all until I saw this particular card.

I thought Sportflix cards were just a fad of the 80s, turns out they lasted until the mid 90s. In case you can't make out the players pictured, left to right its Pedro Martinez, Don Mattingly, and Jeff Bagwell.

A couple of neat Jim Thome cards for my collection of his.

Oooo! Shiny cards!!! I really like the Delgado card but the Kenny Lofton All-Star credentials card is really a cool looking card.

These cards scanned like absolute crap but there were a boatload of Roger Clemens Blue Jays cards in the boxes. Juan Guzman is a press proof card numbered 1 of 2000. I'm not sure if that holds much weight but here's the proof ...

Again, not sure if it holds weight like numbered parallels in today's world. Regardless, it's still a nice card.

I wasn't expecting to find Devil Rays cards in here, especially not first year Rays cards. Seeing Wade Boggs in a Rays uniform is still a weird sight.

Diamondbacks cards were in more supply than Rays cards. I don't have many early cards from either team so these definitely will fit in nicely.

Nearly time to wrap this up so I'll show some stuff rapid fire .... first, some Pinnacle Xpress Peak Performance cards of Randy Johnson and Mike Piazza.

Two Pinnacle Mint Collection cards of Cal Ripken Jr. and Andruw Jones.

And I'll put a bow on this treasure trove of a yard sale haul with some 1997 Fleer.

For three bucks, I'd say that I definitely got more value than that out of this, especially due to the sheer number of 90s cards I found that I didn't already have. I really appreciate my step mom picking these up for me. 

Holiday Blaster Box Battle: Walmart vs. Target

Prepare yourselves, this is going to be a war.

You might recall that over the holidays both Walmart and Target had "holiday value boxes" from Topps. Each one had some sort of gimmick to entice you to buy them and were displayed prominently in the card aisle of each chain. Since I got my hands on both, I though it'd be fun to compare the two in an all out duel to see which one comes out on top.

First up in this battle, (most) everyone's least favorite retailer ... Walmart.

2016 Topps Walmart Holiday Box

I'd heard of these showing up in Walmart stores across the land but seeing as our Walmart stores where I live are usually about a month or more behind the times (looking at you, Ecto Cooler), I was skeptical that these would be in any store near me. If they were, great. If not, I sure wasn't going to go tracking them down either. A quick check of my local Walmart while the family and I were grabbing some groceries and I found these in a giant pile on the bottom shelf so grabbed the first one I saw.

I'm sure everyone has seen these by now. It's just the standard 2016 design except the smoke effect has been replaced by snowflakes. I'd say this is a pretty healthy batch of young stars right here.

Here are a few nice horizontal cards. I really like the Ichiro card and it probably could be a picture on a Stadium Club card if you take away the snowflakes.

You can't really tell from the scans but these are what I call the "sparkle" cards but in reality they're called "metallic snowflakes" and are parallels. I kind of like them as the snowflakes actually stand out from the card and have a bit of texture and sparkle to them.

Each box promises one hit and here's what I got ... Jorge Soler, late of the Cubs and now with the Royals. It'll be interesting to see how he fares in Kansas City. What's not so interesting is that this is a plain white patch. Oh well, at least it's a semi-decent player.

Overall grade: C+ ... I'm still not the biggest fan of the 2016 design. Adding snowflakes to the card seems to take up a bit more of the actual picture than compared to a standard card (see below). Still, even with the promised hit, this amounts to nothing more than a blaster box with no inserts except for the metallic parallels.

Next up ... the holiday mega box from Target.

2016 Topps Holiday Mega Box

I've seen next to no mention of these on any of the blogs I follow but I got this (along with a WWE blaster and some repacks) for Christmas from my wife. This box doesn't promise any hits but it does promise two packs of Chrome Update cards, which are exclusive to these boxes.

Here's the layout, five packs of Update and two packs of Chrome Update as promised.

Nothing exciting here, just you're standard base cards. These were the best of the batch that came out of the Update packs, I think my favorite here has to be the Adam Duvall card, despite the All-Star uniform.

This is interesting, two Jay Bruce cards and each one has him with a different team. His production dropped off severely after his trade to the Mets at the deadline last year. 

These are the insert cards, two of the 3000 hit club cards which I really like, one Aubrey Plaza first pitch card, and one Kirk Neuwenheis gold parallel. 

Here's the first of the Chrome Update packs. Only four cards per pack, which is typical for Chrome. For all its faults, I will say that the 2016 design chromes up pretty well. Nothing extraordinary in this pack though.

The last pack of Chrome yielded an Eddie Murray 3000 Club insert and a Miguel Sano rookie card. I liked this pack better than the first, primarily due to the Eddie Murray card.

Overall grade: B ... The inclusion of the Chrome cards, the fact there were insert cards, and a lower price point than its Walmart brethren gives this one a better grade but not by much. 

Despite the fact that the Walmart box includes a hit, I can't really give it a win. Mainly due to the fact that there are no insert cards aside from the parallels ... none, zero. At least with the Target box there was a decent variety of All-Star cards, base cards, and inserts. Also, the Walmart box was $5 more than the Target box. Aside from that, most everything else is a push.

Retail Repack Adventures #4: Revenge of the Repack!

This is becoming a bad habit of mine. Not the fact that I can't leave these things alone whenever I step foot into Walgreens, but the fact that it seems that a new month of posts starts off with one of these! I bought this particular repack back towards the end of January and since then, I've been in a self-imposed drought in an attempt to stretch my card money as far as possible. Enough about me though! Let's dive in to this repack!

This repack was chock full of Topps from all eras, including these 2008 cards. My collection has a gaping hole regarding cards from 1994-2011 (I got back into collecting in 2012) and these repacks are helping to ever so slowly fill in that hole. I was pretty happy when the Mike Piazza card fell out of the box, especially considering that it's his sunset card.

As I mentioned, more Topps cards. The Cano was the cover card of the stack. I'm slowly learning to love the 2010 Topps design too.

Hey look! Parallels from the mid 90s! Bip is a foil version and big Cecil is from the Score Gold Rush line.

Here's something you don't see cards of every day, Wade Boggs in a Devil Rays uniform. This will get added to my personal stash as will the Pujols, even though I'm not a Cardinals fan at all.

Here's another 2010 Topps card, this one of Max Scherzer, before the Nationals backed up a Brinks truck to his front door a few years later. The Cabrera card is pretty cool. I remember Topps doing a bunch of the "Super Veterans" cards back in the day but don't remember many recently so this was a real treat to pull out of this package.

This 1992 Upper Deck pack I've already covered in the first edition of my new ongoing series called "Back Packs". Read about it here

Just like the last repack, this one was stuffed to the gills with 2012 Topps. I think I like these more than most people, simply because it was the first pack I bought when I got back into collecting. This was the best of the batch that was included, any duplicate will wind up in eventual trade packs.

Finally, the requisite Reds. Hatteberg played three seasons for the Reds at first and was Votto's backup during his final season in Cincy. To be honest, I'd kind of forgotten about him. Cairo was a solid player on the two Central Division winners in 2010 and 2012. It's also a sunset card as 2012 was his last season.

This was a nice solid repack and I'll be on the look out for another next time I hit up a Walgreens.