A couple lots from Sportlots [HT throughout]

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Wanna see some cards from a couple Sportlots orders that arrived yesterday?
(No? Screw you, here they are anyways!)
Let's do it, bitch.

Rod Beck! Embossed. Electric. Rainbow. Red. Cubs. Baby. Remember that season of Eastbound & Down where Kenny Powers has to take care of a baby? I'm pretty sure it was based on that baseball card at the end there. I should mention that each card featured in this post was the 18¢ Sportlots minimum, plus shipping from 2 sellers.

Giancarlo "The Man" Stanton! How's your vision, buddy? Hoping for a strong 2015. How many fingers am I holding up? Giancarlo? Hey, over here!

At the rate I've been picking up Goldschmidt cards lately, he'll be inducted into my 50 Card Club pretty soon.. and 100 Card Club by the end of the year.

Story time!!! So the other day I found out Mike Jacobs here attended Grossmont Community College in El Cajon in the late 90s just like me. You might know I collect players who went to my high school, and while Jacobs didn't attend my high school, going to the same JC as me-- at the same time, no less-- is probably grounds for PCing, too.

So I figured I'd pick up a few of his cards in this Sportlots order, even though I never gave him a second thought before. He looks really familiar in that Bowman card. In fact, I've got a suspicion that I had a class with him. It was an "Introduction to Baseball" class, taught by the manager of the school's baseball team.. obviously an "easy A" elective specifically created to boost the GPAs of athletes, and as you can imagine, much of the baseball team was in that class. I was a baseball nut, so I took the class, too, along with a few other non-athletes who just liked baseball and wanted an easy A. I may have ended up with a B, but that's because the class was early in the morning ("early" for me at the time, anyways) and I only showed up about half the time. (The following semester I tried to try out for the team, but it didn't go my way, and my dreams of being a ballplayer fell on their sword. Still bums me out to think about. I coulda been a star.) Anyways, the class dealt with the rules of baseball and history and stuff like that. Well, one of the questions on a quiz was about cities with a ballclub, and one of the choices was Tampa Bay, and one of the jocks scoffed, "Haha, Tampa Bay?!" And one of the smarter jocks had to explain to him that, yes, Tampa Bay did recently get an expansion team. I thought that was hilarious, and was my first realization that just because a guy is good at playing baseball doesn't mean that he knows shit about the big picture of the game. Anyways, I'm not saying that I'm 100% positive that the clueless jock from the story was Mike Jacobs... but it might've been. Definitely might've been. I'd put a couple bucks on it being him.

A couple Gavin Floyd cards. Hey, I just now while drafting this, just this very second found out he recently signed with the Cleveland Indians for 2015. Woot! (or should I say, "Woo woo woo woo [places hand intermittently over mouth while making these noises in a racially insensitive manner, but I don't mean it in a racist way. I love Native Americans. Seriously, I'd rather not celebrate Columbus Day.]) Good luck for a successful 2015 season, Gavin! Coincidentally, that minor league card on the left looks like it could easily be an Indians card with some quick logo photoshopping.

Should I pick up a few more Wilhelm cards?
Eh, couldn't Hoyt! Pun credit: Stealing Home of Some Trait Bait, Some of the Time. Seriously man, when was the last time you posted any trade bait? Your blog title is false advertising! :P

Bip in Blue! Love those blue "baseball's best (or whatever they're called)" '90 Donruss cards. It makes me wonder.. If the flagship set of '90 Donruss was blue, and a less-common sideset was red.. would I be as enchanted by the red (and conversely as blahed by the blue)?
Probably, yeah. Definitely!
And if a fire at Topps in early 1988 resulted in 95% of the printrun of '88 Topps being destroyed, causing the set to be much more scarce, I'd probably love that set. But as it stands, I think it's shit.

The Felix Fermin and '06 Bowman checklist weren't part of either order, but were thrown in as bonus front-and-back protective cards. Definitely appreciate when sellers/traders do this, and try to do the same myself whenever I can. (If you get a trade package from me, there will likely be junk wax bookending the cards.) Sometimes people think these are the "real cards" from me and I feel distraught about it when they show them in their "trade recap" posts. I mean, if by some miracle you need them, GREAT!, but hell, I pretty much expect you to throw them away.

Someday I may try to scrape together 1991 Stadium Club, so I guess it's a cool bonus card to get. (It's a bittersweet set for me thanks to buying it on eBay a couple years back, noticing much of the key cards were damaged, and returning it for a refund, eating the return shipping cost.) As for the checklist, well, Tom at Angels In Order has been on a checklist collecting kick lately (!!! somebody wants checklists!!!), so maybe I can get a trade going with him to unload a few checklists, including this one.

As for other cards not pictured.. well, there were a couple each for 2 upcoming "Guys From Granite" posts, so you'll have to stay tuned for those.
Also, the 2 Sportlots sellers responsible for all the cards in this post have something in common: they were the only sellers left on Sportlots that had 10+ copies available of Marquis Grissom 1990 Upper Deck #9. I cleaned them both out. I'll need to do a Marquis Mania post one of these days to update that project. I've got a fat stack of that card waiting to be paged.

That's it for today. Keep it real, yo. Does anybody bother reading the hidden text? I hope so!