I'm wearing Brian Giles' pants right now

Yes, I'm wearing Brian Giles' game used pants right now, no joke, but that's a topic for another day. Lots of incoming cards n' stuff lately piling up, waiting for its moment in the sun on the blog, then to be filed away. Time for a blast of awesomeness.

Oh first, I made a couple new baseball card gifs to show off! I really should do more of these; they're fun and seem to get a good response. I spent some time this morning (took longer than I care to admit) on this Ken Caminiti in honor of what would have been his 55th birthday. He's a favorite of mine.

I also whipped up this Mark Fidrych gif last night to help plug yesterday's post. Love it.

1980 TCMA minor league cards are neat. Just showed off the Fidrych from this set yesterday, and here are a couple other favorites of mine I was happy to pick up. The red borders make me think of McDonald's, though the Julio Franco card is decidedly affiliated with a rival chain.

The Julio Franco card was an eBay win. I took a look at the seller's other items and snagged a couple bonus cards for a buck each including this beautiful Hank Aaron refractor reprint.

The other combined-shipping add was the gold Hoffman. And then the other day I got another minor league card of his for the PC. Still ecstatic he made it to the HOF.

A couple nice new Gavin cards. Score an assist to Doug at the Dollar Store for emailing me with a heads up about upcoming hockey guy Gavin Bayreuther. I was able to pick up this autographed custom for a few bucks. Always cool to add a new "autoGav" to my collection. I wish him a successful career on the ice! And I was also happy to score that Gavin Sheets acetate Leaf Trinity auto for cheap recently. Take a closer look at the upper right corner... Christmas Card, baby!

I got a sweet deal on this lot of 1987 Bohemian Hearth Bread Padres. All the cards are in less-than-mint shape, and I only needed the Gwynn, but it was too good of a deal to pass up. And now I've got dupes for my Templeton and Garvey PCs, with the rest available for any Padres fan who might want to trade. I'm down to just needing Dravecky and Flannery to finish off this oddball set.

Speaking of my Garry Templeton PC, here's my first managerial card of the man.

Another Padres fan favorite, here's a Bip Roberts card from his last year as an active player, bouncing between Detroit and their AAA affiliate before being traded to the A's to wrap up his career in 1998. (I struck out trying to get Bip's early minor league cards from back when he was property of the Pirates.. but one of these days.)

And here's the last Rod Beck minor league card I needed. (Actually, there's apparently a "glossy" version of an '89 San Jose Giants card that I still need.. grrr, can't even escape parallels when dealing with minor league issues.)

And let's close with this lot of Vince Coleman minor league cards. Two from his early days when the world was his oyster, and two from the twilight of his career when he was struggling to stay in the game. Great cards to spice up my little VC PC.

Thanks for reading! I'm going to go take off these pants now!

Check out my shiny cards

Let's take a look at some more cards from my COMC Black Friday order. Any time I have a big selection of cards and want to break it up into multiple posts, I look for groupings to slip up the cards. Today's post features the shiny cards from the order.

I wanted a Jose Abreu auto and this was the cheapest on-card option I could find. I think it's a nice-looking card, and the fact that he's in a Cuba uniform helps, since Panini is allowed to show it.

More Panini. When you catch this just right in the light, it's like there's a bunch of lasers shooting off all around.. very cool.

Sparkly '95 Score parallel of Vince Coleman swiping a bag.

Three shiny Adrian Beltre cards for the PC.

I don't really seek out Sean Burroughs cards, but this auto of the Padre bust was cool looking and really cheap.
AJ Burnett knocks another card off my slow-going 2004 Black Chrome setbuild. Now 135 cards down.

This one kind of pissed me off. It's the "glowing" version of the parallel, and I had long be hoping to score of of these for my glow-in-the-dark minicollection. But it turns out "glowing" in this case does not mean glowing in the dark. I guess it's more of like how a pregnant lady looks "glowing" sometimes. LOL. Oh well. I think I even already have this Piazza, so if a trader bud reading this wants to call dibs, let me know. It cost a few bucks, so give me something decent for it. These parallels are more scarce then the standard "Soaring Star" inserts that have a star pattern as opposed to the rippling waves of the "glowing" version. Now I'm going to assume no glow-in-the-dark version exists, though I'd love to be proven wrong.

That's it for today. I'm getting a backlog of stuff I want to post about.. so many cards, so little time! Still more from this COMC order and my latest card show haul to feature soon.
Thanks for stopping by!

baseball card blog come to life

Hola, amigos. I know it's been a long time since I rapped at ya, but it's been a shitshow of a week. Junk at work. A dearth of sportscards in my mailbox. Trying times, indeed.

Didn't have much to blog about. But hey, my cardboard drought was quenched yesterday thanks to a nice box from Bo over at Baseball Cards Come to Life. Let's check out some highlights.

A fruckload of Francos! Julio is now firmly in my 50 Card Club thanks to this lot. Pretty impressive for only officially making him a "guy I collect" a few months ago. But yeah, playing for as long as he did, and during the overproduction era, and seeing as he's not exactly Griffey when it comes to popularity, it makes sense that one could build up a sizable PC without much difficulty.

The Vince Coleman Colection got a nice boost!

Carlos Delgado cards were represented.

My Marquis Grissom PC had been lacking in the non-1990 Upper Deck variety, but this lot helps it shape up.

Here are some other dudes. I was especially excited to see the Tommy Vardell, the only football player in my "Guys From Granite" minicollection. I think it's just my second card of him.

Here are some cool HOFers.

Fat stacks of a trio of Padres fan favorites. My Caminiti, Benito, and Bip PCs all got a nice boost.

Stacks of 20+ cards of Ron Gant and Reggie Sanders. I never really thought about it before, but these guys had very similar careers. Both played for the Reds, Braves, Cardinals, and Padres. Some good years putting together their power + speed potential, but thanks in part to injuries, ultimately fell short of their promise to be one (two) of the greats. They're both eachother's top result in their similarity scores at baseball-reference.

The Kenny Powers Archetype minicollection got some nice additions with stacks of David "Boomer" Wells and Rod "Shooter" Beck. Another couple of guys who weren't all that different. But Boomer lived through his demons.. Shooter wasn't so lucky.

I still need to crunch some numbers and weed out dupes, but I'm pretty sure Bo knocked Trevor Hoffman off my wantlist and into the 100 Card Club. Gracias!

And this was all just about a third of the cards Bo sent. Plenty more I could show off, but let's keep it somewhat tight and end the post here.

Big thanks again, Bo!

Catch ya'll next time, hombres.

A rare encounter with a mythical 2¢ box

A dealer at the card show yesterday had a "50 for $1" baseball box. Needless to say, I diligently flipped through it. When I came to the end, I counted up the stack I had amassed, and as if written in some long-ago prophesy, I had unknowingly selected exactly 50 cards. It was one of those moments that's like a higher power giving you a friendly wink from above.

What follows is what I got for my one-dollar bill.

Lots of quality here. The Rod Beck RC might be my favorite of the scan, but hard to deny that football-ish helmet Charlie Hayes card. (Hey, speaking of football, happy Super Bowl Sunday. Go Seahawks, I suppose.) Love the Podres coach card, too.

Bipped myself a bit.

Wiki leaks. He probably poops, too.

A couple Crime Dogs highlight this scan. I always liked Mike Sharperson a lot for whatever reason (just seemed like a cool, happy dude, I guess) and was sad when he died. Glad to have his "one true rookie" now.

Dan Walters remains the only baseball player I've ever had sign a card for me; Might as well collect him (when his cards are two cents, at least). Looks like Carlos Delgado is king of this purchase, with 4 different cards featured in this post. (BTW, Carlos Delgado is the best player in history to get booted off the Hall of Fame ballot after his first year.)

We close it out with a couple early Edmonds and some old timers.

There you have it. Possibly the best dollar I ever spent. No single card that'll blow you away, but a bunch of additions to various PCs of mine and other players I like. Plus, every card came in a like-new pennysleeve, which I appreciate since I'm not a binder guy, so that's like worth a penny each right there, so it's like the cards essentially cost me one cent each once you factor that in. So yeah, good buy.

As I handed the guy my buck and was on my way to the next table, I checked out his little box of $2 encased cards. It was mostly certified autos of never-was prospects, but one name I knew was Clint Barmes, probably the least-exciting of all the Padres' offseason acquisitions. I kinda felt like "tipping" the dealer for the sweet 2¢ box, so I went ahead and bought the Barmes from him too.

It's a 2006 Bowman Originals buyback auto of 2005 Bowman. Sure, whatever. #'d 243/430. Kinda cool for a couple bucks.

So there are the cards for today. Thanks for checking them out. See you next time.

2015 Archives anticipation

According to Cardboard Connection, looks like 2015 Archives is going to feature designs from 1957, 1976, and 1983 in the base set. I'm pretty happy with that. Those designs haven't been beaten into the ground yet. 57 was obviously used in Heritage a few years back, but otherwise not much dead-horse-beating here. 83, especially, is one of Topps finest moments that they don't salute nearly as often as they could (2 photos required.. not conducive to lazy cardmakers). Inserts include designs from 1968 Topps Game which is kind of a cool idea, as well as 1990 Topps, which might be too soon since it was just a base design in 2013 Archives.. I'd probably have rather seen 1991 used there. But still, no major complains about the designs they picked for this go-round.

Maybe I should be ashamed to admit it, but Archives is honestly the only current product I really have any legitimate excitement for. It's what first helped get me back into the hobby back in 2012. And while I may buy a small handful of other various blasters and hobby boxes throughout the year, only Archives really makes my heart flutter with anticipation. So June can't come soon enough for me. I look forward to giving Topps my money for a hobby box or two.. and the inevitable disappointment from not pulling any decent hits, like always.

Anyways, let's fill this post out with a couple older Archives cards I picked up recently.

Hopefully the Fan Favorites Autographs checklist for 2015 Archives packs a few pleasant surprises. Obviously none perked me up more on the '14 checklist than Bip Roberts' first-ever certified auto. I gobbled up a bunch of them, working on a rainbow of sorts. Even though I already had this /10 purple parallel, I grabbed another one for a decent price in a eBinge a while back. Now I've got #s 09/10 and 02/10. I also picked up another /50 gold parallel because the other one I had was # 13/50 and I wanted a less-unlucky number. But I can't find it at the moment (I'm overdue for a good sorting of the cards I've gotten in the past few months), so no scan for that one today.

Vince Coleman is an old favorite of mine from my early days of collecting. While I'm much less active in adding Vinnies to my collection these days, I was happy to pick up my first auto from him thanks to this cool-looking card (A way better photo than they used on his original '86 Topps card which just features a boring portrait shot.)

This Tewksbury was actually bundled together in an eBay auction with the Vince Coleman, so it was a nice little bonus for virtually no more money. I specifically remember him fondly for his stint on the Padres team of 1996 when San Diego finally got back into the playoffs after a long drought. I could go for some more of that. Hopefully all the off-season moves they've been making lately will pay off in the form of an exciting 2015.