Instant Winnings

My weekend got kicked up a notch by an unexpected box of various good cards. Friday evening I won a cardsphere giveaway, and Saturday morning I had the winnings in hand. The Diamond King has been doing good work this holiday season running giveaways where you enter by committing to send cards to someone just to be nice. I was the lucky winner of the box of serial numbered cards, and since Kevin was in my neck of the woods for the Portland card show, he swung by with the winnings.

My first pass through the box was just picking out "PC guys" of mine, some highlights of which I'll show off below, but there are plenty more other keepers for me, plus some good trade fodder, with some teams that are in-demand in my traders (Can never have enough Braves for Johnny, for instance). I actually had a big project over the fall where I sorted my non-keepers, at least into groups of sets.. like getting all my available Ginter cards together. I officially dissolved my "sorted by team" trade box that served me well during the bustling blog-trading days, circa 2014-2019. I ended up filling a large flat-rate box of cards for my designated "you can dump any unwanted cards on me" buddy Billy to help my quantity get down to more manageable levels, and now I need to get around to further sorting by set and finally get a decent "for trade/sale" collection entered at TCDb.

That big box I surprised Billy with was from before Kevin started his contests, so I can't use that as one of my giveaway-inspired mailings, though hey, that might've helped me karmically with the randomizer. But no, I did mail off a couple surprise PWEs in the meanwhile, including one to a Twitter bud, but I've been meaning to mention that I haven't really been on Twitter/X and BlueSky since mid October, so if you talk to me there I might not get it for a while. My laptop got logged out when we dealt with a wifi issue at home, and it was so nice not feeling the need to doomscroll, so I've just resisted logging back in. I'm still logged into X on my phone, but I rarely use my phone for social media unless I'm bored and away from home (last time was after Thanksgiving dinner, before that was the dentist's waiting room).

Anyways, enough rambling! Let's check out some #'d cards!

I thought the Mattingly made a fitting first card in this post since he was the star of my previous post, but also because the gray wood on that parallel isn't too far off from the bleached border mods I make, and I coincidentally gave Kevin such a Mark McGwire '87 mod as a little thank-you when he stopped by.

I was happy to score another Gavin Lux auto, even if his stock is no longer on the rise. Tony Gwynn addition (shared w/ Garret Anderson) was another top card for me in the bunch. And I got a kick out the semi-interactive Scouting Report card that opens up to...

Cool Ichiro stuff.

Hobby heavy hitters Jeter and Junior.

Shiny cards of Padres team leaders Machado and Bogaerts.

This was supposed to be a grouping of "bad boys" or troublemakers or whatever, but that's a stretch including Pedro because I think everybody's forgiven him for the Don Zimmer toss by this point. 

I watched the new Alex vs. Arod doc on HBO and would recommend it to any baseball fan, even if you hate Alex Rodriguez, as I think you'll understand him better, even if you still don't forgive his mistakes. 

As for Robbie Alomar, he could be forgiven for spitting on an umpire that one time, but tougher to overlook is his irresponsible penis behavior. But as a Pad in the Hall, I still reluctantly collect his cards, and that's a nice looking green refractor.

Vlad Jr and Sr representing. Not often a manufactured relic excites me, but that Sweet Home thing looks pretty neat with the refracting piece of plastic featuring Rogers Centre in it.

Additions for a couple of my biggest active-guy PCs, Trout and Soto.

Colorful page-worth of cards. Loves me some gaudy-as-hell shiny! A couple more in the next photo.

When I first saw the Bench/Fisk card, I was faced with the Sophie's choice of which PC to put it towards, since I collect both backstops with equal gusto. But rejoice! Later in the box, I came across another of the /500 cards, so problem solved.

Coming to the end of the post, but yeah, lots of great stuff in there. Sort of feel like I got to enjoy a card show (or few) vicariously through Kevin, without the back pain and time navigating through the seas of slabs and pokemon, as these are exactly the kinds of cards I'd be adding to my stack from Bill's bins if I was still a card show regular.

A couple more big names to close out on. Oh hey, Nolan and Kirby both wore number 34. I collect Tom Glavine too (and was rooting for the Braves over the Twins back in '91), but he gets superseded here.

Big thanks again to Kevin for the awesome cards! It was a 660-count box, and I'd estimate at least half are keepers for me. As I say, the rest will likely get added to TCBb soon, but anybody reading who might want to swap PWEs based on team (ie, if OhioTim still reads and is interested in the available Cleveland cards, etc. Or like any of my Dodgers or Mets buds due for a trade with me..), just drop me an email or TCDb message or whatever (but again, I'm not on X or BlueSky much now, so don't message me there), and we can hopefully keep the holiday cheer and cardmail flowing.