Trade Post: The Angels, In Order

I've been sluggish on the blogging of late.  Blame the summer heat, or something like that.  Tom over at The Angels, In Order emailed me a while back after he saw a comment I left about my modest Charles Johnson collection.  He had a stack of cards that needed a good home, and I was happy to oblige.

For the early part of my collecting life, I collected just about anything but Pirates cards.  Steelers, basketball, and some meager player collections of my favorite players - Charles Johnson, Ripken, Jeff Bagwell, and Junior.  He wasn't a star by any means, but I learned to appreciate CJ's amazing defense.  My dad had been a catcher playing up through high school, and any time we were watching a game I was sure to get a dissertation on how well or poorly the catcher did his job behind the plate.

The Marlins became an expansion franchise the year I started playing t-ball.  Something about the ridiculously 90's color scheme stuck with me even as I grew up, and I've always loved the jersey sets the Marlins wore before they introduced black and screwed the whole thing up.

While I haven't been very active on this blog or in trades this year, blogging has helped me revitalize my interest in the random, cool, and otherwise amusing cards I collected as a kid but tried to shy away from as a an adult collector just focusing on "my team."  I give major credit to this for Dimebox Nick in particular.  It has been fun remembering that it's ok if the focus of your collection is that it has no focus.

The down side?  I now have another 10 binders of random cards, on top of the 13,000 Pirate cards I have.  Thanks guys, thanks a lot.

But revisiting my Charles Johnson collection is just part of my expanded collecting interests.  I haven't had the chance to really talk a lot about the great side collection pickups I've made from the National due to my lack of posting, but I'm hoping to have a new page up soon listing my various non-Pittsburgh collections.

Tom also threw in a few great Pirate cards, which were much appreciated.  I've been slacking in adding Pirates from 2014 for a variety of reasons, so they were much appreciated.

Better yet, the trade lined up with my trip to the National, giving me an excuse to pick up some cool Halos cards for Tom while digging through boxes.  I always enjoy finding cards for others when digging through a box, and it makes the dig go faster in my opinion.

Thanks for the great trade, Tom!