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.

First of the Dollar Tree packs

Trips to a couple of different Dollar Tree stores yielded a total of six of their '30 Cards for $1' repacks. I'm not going to post every card and I'm sure not going to cram all 6 packs into one post.

I'll do a couple at a time and I only scanned the cards that interested me. That varied wildly from pack to pack. This first pack brought me two shiny cards of current big leaguers. Up top you see Ryan Braun and Corey Kluber. Right off the bat I had two cards that I could use in my fantasy baseball binder. Both guys had cards there already but I value variety and these chrome-ish cards easily boot Braun's Topps base card from a couple of years ago and Kluber's '17 Heritage.

Roy Oswalt and his rather awkward follow through grace this Fleer card. I scanned the Pacific card of  Roberto Hernandez simply because it's an attractive card.

It;s the Crime Dog and Kirby Puckett. I think each pack I opened had at least one 1990 Donruss.

Josh Hamilton in his pre-tattoo days on a '01 Stadium Club. Fuji's pal Jose Canseco on a Donruss Gland Slammers which I take to be some sort of oddball. A boxed set maybe?

Lee Smith and Chili Davis because Lee Smith was a bad ass and 'Chili' may be the best first name ever printed on a baseball card.

Carlos Delgado hit almost 500 homers in the bigs during a career I missed almost completely. I wasn't watching baseball from '96 through about 2010. Until I flipped over this card you could have told me he had 8 career homers and I'd have believed you.

I appreciate the art of photographing baseball team pics. And I love the traditional team card. But this one with the Angels behind a cloth covered railing or whatever the hell that is is just stupid.

Chris Bosio pitched a no-hitter in 1993 and is currently the Cubs' pitching coach. He got into hot water with his comments about Eric Thames in April.

I like this Donruss Gabe Kapler card. Never seen this design before.

I think I got a minor leaguer or two in each pack. I remember when Star was pumping out minor league sets like Pez.

Upper Deck makes an appearance, as does Frank White.

This Stadium Club card of Kerry Wood is the only card I came across that could be labeled as having a defect. It's impossible to see in the scan but the shiny coating is dulled on about the right 2/3 of this one.

For the curious here is the 'header' card that comes in each sealed cello pack. I'd never heard of PressTine before. .

Oddly Dollar Tree also has the 5 for $1 repacks available. Go figure. And...and this will whet your appetite for a Dollar Tree run...they sell ONE DOLLAR STEAKS!!!! Check it out:

The stores I visited didn't have this banner but both had window posters advertising the $1 ribeyes. I was too shy to snap a photo but I found this picture online. I likewise couldn't find a frozen foods section in either store and there was no way I was going to ask about the steaks. Luckily for all of us a gutsy reporter in Buffalo threw himself on the sword and actually tried one. His funny report can be found here.

Now, on to the 2nd pack...

For this pack I just took the top 12 cards and scanned them in pairs. here are Jack 'Best Pitcher Not In The Hall' Morris and Ian Kennedy. I scanned Kennedy because his card will go into my FBB binder.

Adam Everett and medical miracle Tommy John. I'm curious...what did they call the procedure he had before he had it?

Dusty Baker and Roberto Alomar. Probably the best cards in the pack. We need more cards of managers pointing, don't we? And the Alomar card is really, really nice looking.

I dunno what this NL East Origins card is, I forgot to look at the back when I scanned it. The Matt Lawton card is just here because I like this Fleer design.

I still mix up Jack and Will Clark.

Darren Daulton and another young, tat-free Josh Hamilton. Daulton wrote a book a decade ago. Here is the Amazon description:

“If They Only Knew” is about the interesting world of the metaphysical and the author’s beliefs and personal experiences with it. Daulton delves into issues of ascension, such as dimensions and levels of consciousness, the Mayan Calendar and December 21, 2012, creating one's own reality and a lot more. The book's message is clear - Open your mind to new ideas and know that there is more to our life than only what we can see, feel and touch!

Well alrighty then!

There they are, the first two $1 card pack and a steak buying tip. Would I recommend the card packs? Yes!! Despite no Orioles I thought the packs were well worth a buck if only for the rip action.

Would I recommend the steaks? Hell NO!!

Dollar Store cards..... ugh.

I'm posting this in giant size so you can see the card edges. I pulled this from a plastic bag of cards I had in a prize box at school. The bag was a $1 multi-sport repack from a local dollar store. I'd bought a bunch of them at one time and had given most away. I decided to open one just for grins. Sticking out of the otherwise neat little stack were some obviously uneven edges. I pulled the card and saw it was this Fred Lynn and I was puzzled at first. I flipped it over and saw that it wasn't a regular card. Google told me it was part of a Topps 1990 box bottom. So a (poorly) hand cut box bottom card made it into a repack.

And the rest of the pack wasn't much better. A Don Aase card that shows him to have red hair. From the condition of this one these cards came from some kid's shoebox. Maybe that explains the hand cut Lynn.

A 1981 Topps Bobby Bonds. Again with the hair issues.

Donn "Two N's' and two L's" Pall. Don't remember him at all.

There were stale basketball cards including this one of a guy named Bison Dele. Who names their kid 'Bison'?

And one of this guy who apparently played for the Mave Ricks.

A hockey and a football card, neither of which were worth scanning. One Oriole from the 1986 Fleer set. At least it was a guy I liked to watch, John 'T-Bone' Shelby. He has two World Series rings, an Orioles '83 ring and one he earned with the '88 Dodgers. T-Bone is a coach for the Brewers and has a son who plays minor league ball and one who plays baseball at the U of Kentucky. He once tossed me a baseball at Arlington Stadium as he came in from pre-game warm-ups. I gave it to a kid.

This Bowman card of a one time Yankee prospect named Yhency Brazoban features a sig that has to rank among the worst ever. I have second graders who can sign better than this.

And finally a Topps Stolen Base Leaders card from 1983 of the ever charming Rickey Henderson and his NL counterpart Rock Raines. Raines got over 50% of the vote in the 2013 Hall of Fame balloting. It was the fourth straight year that his total has gone up. I'm not sure he'll make it.

The rest of the cards were even less inspiring. I can't get motivated to scan any more of them so you are missing out on cards of two guys I have actually met. One is an Upper Deck card of Hoopster Orlando Woolridge (his nephew is a friend of my sons) and the other is a Score from the 1988 set of former Astros reliever Dave Smith.

I also opened a 20 card baseball only repack and got a Clayton Kershaw card. And a Mike Piazza, and two Norm Charltons, back to back no less. Woooohooo!