Second round of the Dollar Tree '30 for $1' packs. Like before it's a mix of stars on nice designs, nobodies on bad designs, stars on dull designs and nobodies on nice designs. You Follow?*
Hey, how cool is that? The first Oriole I pull is Cal Jr. on a really nice Donruss card! OK, so someone just sent me this card not long ago. That's fine. I have a couple of Orioles binders it fits into.
This pack didn't have many really sharp cards. But we got some stars and guys that interested me. The meteoric Tim Lincecum for example. The days of the Giants being 'my' NL team are long past. So I never had a reason to root for him but I did. He was fun to watch for those four years he was at the top of his game. I watched him pitch last year against the Astros in a game my son attended out in Anaheim. It was hard see him struggle.
And there was an '88 Donruss Canseco. I was OK with that year's Donruss design.
From that same set comes Paul Molitor. He's paired with an '87 John Kruk.The same Kruk card came in another pack.
I'd forgotten that Molitor is currently managing the Twins. After we got home from the Astros game on Sunday the weather turned lousy so I found the Royals and Twins on MLB.tv and was able to catch an incredible sequence involving a Royals dinger, a flubbed catch of that homer by a fan and epic trolling by Torii Hunter and the Twins broadcasting network.
Check it out here. I can't find a better video although I'm still trying. What that vid doesn't show is that the broadcasters (Hunter in particular) and camera guys never let up on the kid. They showed him taking a selfie and Hunter cackled something like "Hashtag it 'I suck!' The guy walked around the outfield stands after his 'error' and the broadcast followed his every step. They even sent the roaming reporter to interview him as they replayed his flub endlessly. I found it funny but at the same time you had to feel for the kid. Hunter later sent him down a signed ball and the Twins Network gave him $100 in lottery tickets.
Next up is Craig Lefferts and Dwight Evans on mid-80s Donruss and Topps. I know I had a reason to scan these but I can't recall it now.
Below on the Score card is the guy who probably gets a lot of requests to sign cards of recent Cardinals star pitcher C-H-R-I-S Carpenter. This guy was a reliever and came along just prior to the Cardinals' star and had no 'h' in his first name. I also got another card from this Donruss design that I found I liked. This one is Jimmy Rollins.
Finishing up with a couple of Reds..KGJ and Pete Rose.
So all-in-all a decent enough pack. Worth a buck for sure.
And now on to the next pack. #4 of the six I bought.....
Two nice looking cards to start off with. A Panini Classics from 2014. This Lloyd Waner is the only Panini I pulled I believe. He's paired with another card of Carlos Delgado. This from the SP set that produced the Alomar card in the first group of packs.
There were a bunch of Mets in this pack. I was never a fan of those unis with 'racing stripes' down the shoulders. That Livan Hernandez card from 2007 reminds me that the '07 cards are all mysteries to me. It's one of the few sets that I didn't even buy one pack of at Wal Mart or target as I usually did. I wasn't collecting then, or even following the game, but I was always curious as to what the cards looked like in hand.
Pet peeve of mine is cards like that Finest of Chuck Finley that have the cello across the front. His scanning partner is a Mets prospect Satoru Komiyami who went 0-2 in 25 games in 2002. That's a nice Fleer from that season though.
Mike Piazza and Alan Trammell. Piazza, of course, made the Hall of Fame in '16 in his fourth year on the ballot. Trammell missed in his last shot on the writer's ballot last year. He got 40% and will have to wait for some of the other committees to consider him. Looking at the bottom of his Baseball Reference page it says he is higher in WAR than the average HOF shortstop and is over 100 on Bill James HoF Monitor (100 meaning he's a likely Hall member). Read into that what you will.
This Eric Munson 2001 Stadium Club combines a player I don't know with a set I've never seen. It's a terrific card though. The Vince Coleman Diamond King is one of Dick Perez' better efforts i think. To me he's either very good or outright awful on his DKs. Then again I am far from an art expert.
I decided to peel the cello from the Finley card. I was able to do it without dinging the card with my Exacto blade. MUCH better! It's a real beauty in hand. The scan doesn't do it justice.
So four packs in I'm happy with what I got for my money. Two packs left. I'll hold off on those for a few days. I have some other posts I'm working on that are overdue for publishing.
*Tip of the cap to Robert Shaw as Doyle Lonnegan.
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