Oh, the things we do as bloggers

So I found myself with time to kill one day last week while waiting for my son to show up for a lunch meetup. I wandered into the WalMart in the same block and checked out the card section. Alone among all the other usual packs and boxes was this little 'gem'.

A Graded Card!! Says it right there on the front. Now I knew damn well I wasn't gonna come away with a 1910 E98 Cobb graded 8.5 by Beckett. Here's a closer look at the label:

A couple of Ty's buddies are shown on the sides of the blaster.

The famous 'randon insertion'. I can just imagine how 'random' the E90s were inserted.

There was no price on it and I didn't see a shelf tag so I guessed $20 and figured at that price or lowerI'd at least get a blog post out of it. So, I found one of those 'check the price' thingys and sure enough, $19.99 was the tab. I added a couple of boxes of Peet's Decaf K-Cups to my basket and I was outta there.

I let this thing stew for a few days and opened it Tuesday night. Here's what was inside:

A graded card, six packs of actual cards, a 'bonus' item and two of those gawdawful Triple Play packs.



Did I spoil the surprise? My graded card is a 2011Topps Jacoby Ellsbury graded 10 which Beckett described on the label as "Mint or Better".

I'm not really sure what's better than 'mint'. Maybe we should consult rock legend and lead guitarist for Spinal Tap, Nigel Tufnel...

BTW...the Beckett label must be an old version. The only other one I have is silver. But I'm no expert on the grading companies. As for the card...well, whatever. I had a thought or two about sticing it up on the Beckett Graded Card Resistry. I figured a Better Than Mint 2011 would at least get me into a tie for the #1 spot among 2011 Ellsbury collectors. But in order to register that wanted my cell phone number. Not happening.

Back to those packs. I'm going to show just a few cards from each of the sets represented. They were mundane to say the least. Here they are in the order I opened them:


Upper Deck 2008 X

A-Rod is a die cut card.

 Ryan Howard is a shiny, chrome-kinda card. Whatever happened to him anyway. Gone in a flash.

That's the full pack, Four cards. The Mauer is sort of a nice card.  When i buy stuff like this I try to find a use for the cards and usually that means sticking as many as possible in my fantasy player binder. Even if I like the card that already in there I can justify (somewhat) spending on a blaster just for the hell of it. Mauer will go in that binder. And since I like having as many different kinds of cards represented it's a welcome addition.

Next, Pinnacle 2013 from Panini. Eight card pack.

It was an A-Rod hot box because here he is again.

These next two are going into the fantasy binder for sure. Since they are both catchers in full gear you don't notice the lack of logos/uniforms. Plus, they are actually pretty sharp.

Oh man, did this LaRoche special card scan poorly or what?

 From the one pack of 2017 Topps Series 2 comes an Albert P. Notheing else worth scanning.

There were three 2019 Topps packs. The Tucker and Ray cards are nice additions to the fantasy binder.

Adan Engel's card is pretty neat. Love the throwbacks. Sox wore these when I was at their place a couple of summers ago.

The 'bonus' item, as seen in the pick, was a generic pack. Turned out to contain three Topps cards of a set I was not familiar with. they were 2008 Topps Dick Perez cards. I think they were found in the complete set boxes but I could be wrong. Looking at Google gave me a headache and nobody really cares about this stuff anyway.  Plus, they are ugly. Perez mucy have knocked these things out faster than a boardwalk sketch artist.

The Triple Play packs remain unopened and I'll give them to my elementary PE teacher friends to use as prizes.

Well, that's it. My $20 experiment in blind blaster boxes. Worth it? Nope. Do it again? Heck no! But regrets? No, it was fun and as I suspected, I got a long blog post out of it.

Plus a couple of useful cards. Anyone want these Perez things?  

Dollar Tree packs..Part 2

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.

I like Big Cards and I Cannot Lie

The eighties were an interesting time for collectors, especially demented "I need one of EVERYTHING!" team collectors like I was. It it was Orioles related, I grabbed it up. Dealers and shop owners knew it and they 'put stuff back' for me knowing they had a sure sale once I walked in.

These 5x7 Topps Orioles and Diamond Kings cards were part of a box I pulled out the other day that contained noting but oversized cards. In addition to these Topps and Donruss it held postcards, Perez-Steele art cards, Hall of Fame commemoratives, those postcard foldout thingies that had twelve 'Top Sluggers' that sort of stuff. If there really is a sucker born every minute, I took care of an hour.

If you thought Eddie Murray looked badass on his regular '85 card the giant one just compounds his badassedness. And doesn't it look like Mike Boddicker knows a secret about you and knows that you know he knows it?

Classic Cal follow-through pose.

I was always on the fence about Diamond Kings. I think Dick Perez did better things elsewhere but these were pretty special at the time.

I've always been a sucker for anything Warren Spahn.

Softball style jerseys are garbage. Even for bp.

Brooksie!