Renfroe, Hunted

 
After being the lucky winner of the Diamond King's big serial-numbered lot giveaway last December, I got greedy and spoke up for the Golden Mirror variation he generously put up for grabs the other day. But it had been up for a few hours with no one yoinking it, so I figured it'd be ok for me to raise my hand. Royals fans probably don't think much of Renfroe after he struggled with the team in 2025, getting released in May. 

But I have a big Hunter Renfroe PC, accumulated mostly passively by virtue of him being a hot rookie on my favorite team back during the height of my pack-ripping and blogger-trading days, and he was one of those rookies that Topps went nuts over, with tons of rookie-year cards produced. But yeah, he's a guy I collect and I fondly remember him cranking some big home runs for my Padres back in the late 2010s.

As a nod to Kevin, I thumbed through my Renfroe PC with the intention of picking out 5 highlights to feature on the blog, and well...

 
Over a decade on, I still have a boner soft spot for 2015 Bowman/Bowman Chrome parallels, and had to gather these half dozen together.

A couple solid Panini cards here, with a Draft Picks autograph and a Rated Rookie /10 artist proof.

The last card I picked to show off is a Clearly Authentic rookie auto, obtained in trade with Coffee Matt a few years back, if I recall correctly. 

I've been doing lots of organizing and straightening up in the cardroom lately, and was excited to find the fabric sample book I had misplaced, so don't be surprised to see more funky background in my card photos this year, occasionally spicing up the plain white backdrops. In fact, here are a couple alternate shots of the clear card: 

Doesn't look like Hunter has latched on with another team since Kansas City cut him last season, so that might be all she wrote for his playing career, but here's wishing him the best. Thanks again to Kevin for the giveaway and to you all for stopping by.

a couple cheap cards

I received this Tony Clark card in the mail yesterday, coincidentally the same day he shockingly resigned as executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association. My understanding is that he was being investigated for financial curiosities, and that investigation revealed naughty emails with his wife's sister, whom he had given a job with the MLBPA. These days, it seems powerful people just "ignore/lie/power-thru" after they get caught doing something they really shouldn't have (*cough* Epstein files *cough*), so good for Tony Clark for showing himself out, I guess.

I don't PC the guy, but rather I'm trying to complete the full set of Bowman refractor reprints from 1998. The insert set is 50 cards, featuring highlights from the original run of vintage Bowman, plus the Topps' revival from '89 through '96 (Bowman Chrome began in 1997, so these inserts are like a greatest hits of their pre-Chrome years.. "Refractors that never were (of base cards that were)" if you will, so to speak). Tony Clark is an odd choice to reprint with the hindsight that he was never a big star, though at that point he had just followed up a third-place ROY campaign in '96 with a solid 1997 that saw him garner some down-ballot MVP votes. He was an All-Star in 2001 and also had an impressive 2005 season, but he only accrued a dozen wins above replacement in his career, all said and done.

Anyways, I've still got a ways to go with this set, but will be bumped past the 50% threshold once my latest COMC order arrives later this spring. But yeah, I've still been hunting down refractor reprints from the late 90s and early 00s, actively building various runs that I'm excited to post about after completion.

I'm reluctant to say this is the final COMC order I'm waiting on, but I've definitely been trying to avoid buying from them since this batch. You'd figured after tripling their shipping rates that they would use that extra money to hire an additional order picker or two, but nope, they seem to be backed up again maybe even worse than they got during the pandemic, with shipping estimates pushed out for several months. The vibe I'm getting isn't "wow, COMC is doing lots of business" but rather "wow, COMC is struggling and folks are rushing to get their cards out before the site owners pull the plug and complete the transition to eBay-consignment account only". But I don't really know. Times are bad everywhere, it seems, as society is sapped of humanity and herded into an AI curated existence whether we like it or not. But back to bitching about online card shops, Sportlots keep updating their site to make it harder to use. That Canadian online card shop folded (I never got around to ordering from them, but they seemed to get positive marks from the bloggers who did). I've tried to get more active trading at TCDb but it's been an uphill slog and my successful transactions there seem to be few and far between. (I've recently finished sorting a monster box with my available Archives/Ginter/Heritage that I plan to enter in my "For Trade" list soon and hope that helps improve my trade-matching.)

Oh, and the USPS has been sucking lately, too. I had a Nolan Ryan reprint refractor show up in the tracking as delivered that I never got. :( And that Tony Clark card that arrived yesterday took 2 whole weeks to get to me from Florida.

And back to that. the eBay seller had a promotional discount offer to entice you to buy more than one card from him, so I took a quick browse of his inventory and found another card that caught my eye at a good price:

This is the 102nd Dick Allen card of mine to be logged at TCDb, and forgive the language but I'm still downright tickled pink to be his #1 ranked collector there, even now a ways into his HOF inclusion, causing him to default into being a guy that Hall of Fame collectors now collect. I figured a more focused supercollector would have knocked me off the top spot by now. But nope, second-place is currently a 3-way tie with 84.

Back to the card, this is a Blue Ice Prizm parallel of Dick Allen's 2025 Panini Prizm card. It's my first of the 33-card rainbow, though I also have a Red Pulsar Prizm and Ruby Wave Prizm pending in that eventual COMC shipment. I didn't remind myself of that fact until after snagging the Blue Ice one, so I got lucky not to double up. I like that the card shows Dick in his later Phillies stint, something you don't see on many of his cards, especially an action shot. On the downside, lawyers have instructed the cardmakers to remove logos and wordmarks from the photo due to the fact that another cardmaker paid a lot of money to have lawyers say that only they can make cards that have those special logos and words. Man, everything bad in this world always boils down to greed. Humans be greedy, put that on our headstone.

LOL, I'm sorry this quick post showing off a 2-card mailday turned into a lot of negative ranting! I just thought it was a crazy coincidence the random Tony Clark card showed up in my mailbox the very day his career took a sudden tumble. 

For a more positive coincidence, I'll mention that this past Monday I was out walking the dog making our way home and I saw what I first figured might be a crow with a big piece of bread in its beak (lots of crows around here), but as it flew closer, it became clear that, no, it was a bald eagle! Came in kinda low but it was quick and I didn't want to take my eyes off it to fiddle with my phone, so no photos. Don't see those very often in my neighborhood, and so to get a bald eagle flyover, on Presidents' Day no less, was a neat experience.

Oh, and another happy thing to mention.. I was supposed to have jury duty today, but thankfully I got an email yesterday saying nevermind I'm not needed. I wouldn't mind being on a jury, but what had me stressed is waking up early enough to get downtown by 8am. I'm a night owl like Night Owl and don't usually get to bed until around/after midnight. But instead of being sleep-deprived waiting to see if I get called in, I got to sleep in and then ramble out a blog post with my morning. So that's cool! :)

Rod rules

Remnants from Padrographs Rod's holiday pack ripping have been popping up on the blogs recently, and I've again been fortunate enough to be included on his Nice List. Rod swung by my house last month with a reusable grocery bag full of goodies including north of a thousand cards, mostly recent stuff. Took me a while, but I've finally got it sorted enough to pick out some highlights for a post.

After this instant-PC, looks like I'm rooting for Marcelo Mayer to breakout as Boston's next superstar. And he's a fellow San Diego area kid, so that's cool.

My Blake Snell PC pretty much doubled thanks to the stack from Rod, with the eye-catchingest ones pictured above. 

Elly De La Cruz is a fun player to watch/collect.

Tatis additions are always welcomed, especially fun stuff like this.

More shiny cards of guys I collect.. love it!

Funky stuff here with a modern Manny Machado oddball that has a nice gold swirl effect in-hand, a Corbin Carroll card you could play with if you're brave enough to pop it out, and a Jackson Merrill mini parallel.

Big ol' box o' Gwynns! By the handwriting on the box, looks like it originated from a local card show dealer I've bought from in the past (back in 2019, boxes of 1970 and 1972 Topps with similar writing on them). Sure, this box is mostly overproduction era, but there are undoubtedly a few needs for me in there, plus other modern Gwynns were mixed in with the other cards from Rod. So yeah, I'm due for a Gwynn PC update (he's one of the few guys I try to keep logged at TCDB). And I don't mind restocking on extra junk dupes because they often come in handy for cardart ideas.

I tried to get cute with this photo of some of the more visually interesting football cards of the lot. That's Adam Thielen in the back, Nick Bosa and Justin Herbert in the front.

My first pass through the boxes, I didn't know who Drake Maye was, just to give you an idea of how little attention I've been paying to football in recent years. But I've since ascertained that he's had a great season and helped lead the Patriots back to the Super Bowl, which is happening one of these days coming up, probably on a weekend, I'd assume. lol  But yeah, cool additions for my modest pigskin collection.

Excited to find a bunch of 2025 Topps Chrome Disney cards in the boxes, as these are all the rage with a certain segment of card collectors, right? I seem to recall I tried bidding on a Christmas Card of one of these things and getting blown out of the water. Remember how canary diamond was a 1/1 parallel back in 2011 or so? Well, this pair is unnumbered but I'll pretend they're really rare. Cheshire Cat is a nice pull. That Alice in Wonderland is one of my favorite Disney flicks, with the original Mary Poppins and sleeper pick Bedknobs and Broomsticks rounding out my top 3.

Last thing to show today isn't a card but a nice replica jersey of Yu Darvish's City Connect uniform.

Very cool item to diversify my collection a bit, not just my Darvish PC, as I don't have much stuff like this. (I still have the partially cut-up pants that I used to make some custom Brian Giles game-used relic cards years back. I should really do something with what I still have unused. Maybe I could make cardart cards out of the pants or something?) But I'll resist taking a pair of scissors to this jersey. Yu is out for the year and likely to retire rather than slog through another long rehab as he pushes 40, but his agent wants to make sure he milks the Padres for all they can get before he walks away from that contract. Oh well, he had a solid career but collectors who've been keeping his cards in their "maybe HOF?" box will likely be cutting bait if they haven't already. I still luv Yu, though, and really dig this jersey.

Thanks again for the cool stuff, Rod!