A Great Start to the Weekend

Nothing tops coming home and and finding cards waiting in your mailbox.  My trading has nearly ground to a half in recent months, and my buying has largely been via COMC and in person at shows and flea markets.  Trips to the mailbox have been a little less exciting.

But it looks like we're starting the weekend off right, with not one but two packages waiting for me today.  Shane from Shoebox Legends and I both had some stacks sitting around that could use a warm, loving home.

 Shane sent me a great assortment of cards, and a good majority of them were new to me.

 Maybe it's just for me, but some of the most "common" parallels are always the hardest to track down for me.  The Diamond Sparkle parallels are still my favorite of the various foil variations Topps has done in recent years.  Slowly but surely, I'm closing in on the team set.  Very, very slowly apparently.

And while I'm pretty sure it wasn't intentional, Shane even managed to send me a couple new PC cards with his protective fillers.  I've been stockpiling a small collection of League Leader cards.  It's not a full blown mini collection (yet), but any time I see one of the big stat caterogies - homers, batting average, era, strikeouts - it's been working its way into a small pile that will probably get its own binder.  What can I say, while I consider myself pretty in touch with the new stat metrics, I'm still a sucker for counting stats.

And I had no idea Mike Sweeney was the Royals captain.  Then again, it's the Royals.

 

But hopefully this stack of cardboard goodness is just a precursor to the weekend.

 There's a (kinda) local mall show this weekend.  Ok, in reality it's about an hour away...not really that local.  And I really should be saving up my budget for the big Robert Morris show in May.  But...well, hi, my name is Mark and I'm an addict.  But the mall is in the direction we'll be headed tomorrow, so I can totally justify a stop.

 Kate and I are headed to my parent's tomorrow to make some Easter candy.  Every year my grandma made chocolate covered fondant eggs.  They're lightyears better than anything you'll find at the store.  And on Easter day, everybody got an egg when they went to visit.  Since I was grandma's favorite, she would usually let me pick which flavor I wanted ahead of time.  But they were all good.  

 I would bite off the smallest bites I could manage, trying to make the egg last as long as I could.  They were that good.  And grandma only made enough for everybody to have one, which always made picking my flavor that much harder.

Grandma passed the family recipe to my mom.  It's been three years since she died, and probably 5 or 6 since she was well enough to make the eggs.  So this will be the first years we've made the eggs since she died.  It's not meant to be nearly as sentimental as it sounds.  These are chocolate coated goodness, and I'm really looking forward to seeing if we can make them anything close to grandma's.

And, hypothetically, speaking, I may be looking forward to not being limited to one egg!

 There should also be some flea market shopping in store for me this weekend.  I'm planning to make a trip Sunday morning to the flea market up the street that I discovered last weekend.  Kate is hanging out with a high school friend that day, so I'll be free to dig through dimeboxes to my heart's content.

The last card of this post that came in the mail today was an ebay purchase.  One of the things I like about Donruss has been the number of parallels and numbered cards that you hit in a box.  This Neil Walker is the gold parallel /49, though it didn't show up very well in the scan.

I won the card for a whopping $1.04 with free shipping.  I was a little surprised when I ripped open the bubble mailer to find this card inside.  The seller paid $2.25 for shipping the card in a bubble mailer, even it sold for less than half that.  I appreciate the gesture, but I would have been perfectly find with a PWE.  I kind of feel bad the poor guy took a loss on selling the card, especially on a card I already felt like I won dirt cheap.  But at least I'll leave him nice feedback.

 

Mail Call

I don't have many good things to say about Topps' propensity for inserting cheap game used cards with low serial numbers into super duper high end products.  But I can say that I like it when I can add them on the cheap.
At least I can now call myself the proud owner of a piece of some kind of fabric somehow associated with a struggling AAA outfielder that's so incredibly rare that only 26 other copies share the same color scheme (please ignore the 374 other copies that are reeeeeeeally reeeeeally close...but not the same!).

The card set me back a little under $3.  Which is great, because I'd rank it somewhere near some 1991 Fleer cards among my favorite cards in my collection.  

I'm shrinkinggggggg

I know mini cards have been all the crazy for many over the last few years.  And I guess I get the appeal.  They're different.  A throwback to a bygone time in collecting.  Did I mention they're different?  But I've about had enough of the endless parallels to each set, slightly smaller in size and occasionally with a different back.  Needless to say, it's not an area I actively chase.  So a little help is always appreciated when come minis come my way via trade or sheer generosity.

The cards in this post all came a little bit before the holidays from my buddy Todd, a Yankees and Rays collector who is part of a group of team collectors I belong to.  The package was a nice surprise, full of a nice array of Topps Gold cards from the pre-serial numbered days and cards from this year's Topps Mini gimmick set.

The Jose Tabata jersey card at right is by far my favorite mini from the package, if for no other reason than the fact that it doesn't look exactly like a 2013 Topps card in miniature size.  Thanks Topps...

 Todd kept the fabric flowing with this Pedro Alvarez game used card - my first gu of El Torro.  I'm really liking the classic design to the card, and I've written more than enough times about how much I love the 1960 set.

 This Orlando Merced card is a thing of beauty on its worst day.  Add gold foil and we have a card that may be my new favorite card from 1994.

 I managed to complete the entire team set of UK Mini in just a week from three separate packages - only one card that I knew was coming.  Not bad for a set that I had never heard of a week earlier.

And of course the obligatory mini.  Except that you can't tell that this card is a mini, can you?  Considering it looks exactly like its 2013 Topps Flagship counterpart, no.  Not that I'm bitter or anything.  And the insane numbered of colored parallels (pink?  camo?  really, guys?) don't annoy me.  Nope.  Not in the least.

Breathe deep, Mark.  Breathe deep.

On to 2014!  And hopefully some better releases from Panini.  Please.

Ebay Robbery, Part 1

 A little backstory: on Easter there was a Pirate lot ending that was absolutely loaded.  The seller is a fairly well known Dodger collector, and had large, absolutely stacked, team lots for pretty much every other team.  I don't know if the cards came from case breaks, other lots that he broke up, or what, but I imagine he kept his team and was selling the rest with little regard towards profit.  The lot started at $25, and was listed in a way that I thought I had a chance at getting it for a great price.

I'm going to split up the lot additions into three posts, simple because the stuff in here is so good each card deserve its due appreciation. I've always been skiddish when bidding on higher ticket auctions, simply because my natural frugality often means I lose them.  But my late second snipe was actually well under what I was willing to pay on this lot, and I ended up getting the whole schabang for less than $60 shipped.  Normally I'd be hesitant to drop that much coin on one purchase at one time.  I'm a dimebox guy at heart, after all.  But...this was too good to pass up.

I think it's safe to say this post will be the least impressive of the three, but it should be enough to whet the appetite.  But enough of me, time for more cardboard.

If there was one knock against this grouping, it's that the cards all came from a pretty limited range of sets (2010-12 Topps and Topps Update), and there were quite a few dupes.  There were also a decent number of cards I already had, which I didn't scan, but I'll talk more about that later.

The theme here?  Topps Black.  The lot has given me a huge head start on the Black team sets.  I'll still likely never complete them, but it at least gives me some hope.

 I'm a bit sick of Neil Walker autos.  He's a solid player, and a local guy who is one of my favorite players.  But Topps seems to love including him in every autograph set.  Still, I'm a sucker for anniversary themes.

 Dana Eveland never should have appeared in the bigs as a Pirate.  But he did.  And Topps made a card.  So now it's in my collection.  Cool story, huh?

 Daniel McCutchen may share notoriety for both being the "other" McCutchen, and for having the slowest fastball of any player suspended for PED use.

 I had been kicking myself for passing on this card at a card show a few years back for $5.  It's now in my collection for an average per card under $2. 

 I only had one witty comment for a Daniel McCutchen card.  Sorry.

This card is one of my favorite Pirate photos from recent years, and it's one of a surprising number of Pirate outfielders making leaping catches.  I had been working on the Topps Hope parallels when the set came out, but the supply dried up quickly, and I've been sitting on about 20% completion for a long time now.  I doubt I'll ever finish the team set, but it's nice to add another card.

Opening Day

Opening Day feels a bit strange to me this year.  This is the first time since at least 2007 that I won't be at the Pirates home opener, and it's definitely a strange feeling.  I still maintained a 20-game package for this season, despite being a 5 hour drive from Pittsburgh and had tickets for today, but there was just no way we could make it out there.

So instead, my newly purchased mlb.tv package will have to keep me company today.

The Pirates pre-season commentary in the local media seems to again fixate on whether the team will play above .500 ball and whether they can avoid a second half collapse like the previous two years.  And these are probably the same storylines that most baseball fans grasp on to. 

But this season seems to be telling a very different story from where I sit.  Sure, we can cling to the hope that Russell Martin, Francisco Liriano, and Jonathan Sanchez make a video game-esque turnaround and magically recapture their late 2000's form.  We can talk about the core players and budding superstar Andrew McCutchen.  At times, pieces of this team look like contenders in ways past Pirate rosters never did.  The emerging superstar.  The strong top of the rotation.  Legitimate power hitters.


But realistically, this seems like the last Beta test for a roster that is preparing to usher in their fleet of top prospects over the next few seasons.  On paper, this team simply doesn't match up with the Cards or Reds.  That doesn't preclude a few lucky breaks keeping the team into the hunt well into the season.  It doesn't mean this can't be a .500 team.

But .500 never has or should be the goal, except for the casual yinzer who will now have one less thing to complain about in Pittsburgh sports.  They can now return to bemoaning why Ben Roethlisberger should be replaced by Charlie Batch for next season.


This is a team that I expect to be entertaining to watch, competitive in most games, and one that I expect to bring my some genuinely fun moments over the course of this season.  And that's something that honestly could not be said about many seasons over the past decade.  We are no longer rebuilding.  But the team is definitely still building, and it would be overly optimistic to view this roster as a completed project rather than one having many major components, but still largely lacking both some more major elements as well as the finishing touches.