Prize Winnings

A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to win a contest on The Raz Card Blog. The prize was a base set of these colorful and fun True Heart BBM Japanese lady wrestler cards. They are just quirky enough to be right in my wheelhouse.

Raz has already blogged much of the set so I'll just post a few that I like (and a couple I don't!).

What's up with the frying pan?

I think this is one of the Spice Girls. She's rather frightening.

The next one made me shudder. She bears a remarkable resemblance to a former principal at my school. The woman got her jollies by making everyone else's life miserable. But she hung on to her job because her divisive style of micro-management and intimidation somehow produced decent standardized test scores and in today's world of education that's really all that matters. Honestly, that's all that matters. She was moved to another school a couple of years ago and I'm considering sending her this card and asking her to sign it.

Raz didn't just send my winnings. He stuffed the box with what appears to be a full base set of Ignite NASCAR cards. I'm a gearhead and NASCAR is my favorite form of racing. I think it's changed over the last decade or so, and not necessarily for the better but I still follow it almost weekly. Hey, a race weekend at Talledega will make you love racing and weep for the future of humanity. Trust me on this.

The first part of the set consists of drivers. Tony Stewart is a three time champ but recent off the track issues have reduced his on the track performance, or so it appears to me. He remains my favorite current driver. I hope he can get back to being the 'Smoke' of old real soon. Danica Patrick has had more success as a personality than as a driver but I always hold out hope for a good finish for her.

Both Jeff Gordon and Bobby Labonte are long time favorites of mine. It's a sign of how old I am that I remember when both were up and coming drivers. Now Gordon is finishing his final season on the circuit and Labonte is rarely a factor as he fills a seat on one small potatoes race team or another. But both own championships.

Marcos Ambrose is Australian and currently drives in the V8 Supercar Series for the legendary Roger Penske. I miss his always entertaining interviews on Sirius NASCAR radio. Dale Earnhardt Jr. is another driver I pull for.

The second part of the set shows the car line-up. My father worked for Shell for over 45 years. The Shell car always jumps out at me from the pack.

There are a few special cards as well. Danica Patrick became the first female to win a pole when he qualified first at Daytona a few years back. It wasn't the turning point in her career that her fans had hoped it would be.

Overall it's a great set. Like the Japanese wrestlers it looks really neat sitting in sheets in a binder.

Bur Raz didn't stop with those two sets. Nope, he also added in a stack baseball cards including an awesome acetate Sandy Koufax and some super chromey, shiny Orioles including Eddie Murray and Dylan Bundy.

There is no such thing as an un-awesome Eddie Murray card.

Where do these cards come from? When I buy a pack of cards I get, well plain old cards. But these wild and crazy things exist out there because people always send them to me. Where do the come from? Inquiring minds want to know!

I have this card!!!!

This is one crazy hobby. In the middle of January I posted a card I was in need of for my fantasy football player collection. I'm very, very anal about that collection. I've been known to pass up on a waiver claim because the guy didn't have a readily available card. Yes, I'm that dumb. But whatever.

While researching something else I discovered that I lacked a card for kicker Jose Cortez, a guy I'd had for a few weeks in 2001 and had slipped under my (once thought to be impenetrable) card radar. Googling found me this NFL Showdown card from 2002 (or 2003, there is some debate there). It also showed me that the card was ridiculously difficult to find. I'm still not sure why. I figured I'd spent a ton of time in search of it. Probably even longer than my continuing search for the elusive Randy Burke Colts "card". In the meantime I printed out a internet shot of the card and stuck it in my binder as a placeholder.

Soooo...just four hours after my whining post is published Raz, from the Raz Card Blog lets me know that he JUST BOUGHT THAT VERY CARD! Are you serious? And if it showed up (he said it was a 'sketchy website') he would ship it my way.

To fully appreciate how great that made me feel you'd have to understand my obsession with my fantasy player collection. I usually snag a card of anyone I pick up on our Wednesday waivers before I go to bed or else risk the chance of losing sleep by thinking about picking up a card of that player.

But our long national nightmare is over*. Raz' package arrived Saturday and I've got my NFL Showdown Cortez card. I still am not really sure what they were all about other than the fact that they were part of a game.

The front of the card is about what you'd expect from a card that is part of a dice roll game. If you removed that part you would have a fairly nice looking card. The backs of all the NFL Showdown cards are generic.

But the Cortez card wasn't all Raz included in the envelope. He included some modern Japanese cards including some of current MLB guys. I didn't realize that those existed. I'm fascinated by all the Japanese baseball culture and I like puzzling over the backs of these things.  One of my Japanese card guides has a translation section that helps me figure out the player info and stat categories on older cards. The new ones are easier.

These are the two MLB players of some sort of Topps/Japanese/Sega cards. Like a lot of the modern Japanese cards these have very 'busy' backs.

Last but not least Raz included A&G minis of Manny Machado, Adam Jones and Crush Davis. The Machados are different colors. Never seen that before.

And what's this? A Bob Dylan A&G mini which I've blown up. I only began to appreciate Dylan in the last ten years but in that time I think I've acquired about 75% of his non-bootleg discography.

Now that I've got a Jose Cortez card I'm no longer a worried man with a worried mind. Thanks again, Raz. I'm very very grateful for your generosity.

*=tip of the cap to former President Gerald R. Ford