Buried Under a Mailday of Epic Proportions

My mailbox got inundated by cards this past Thursday, with three fat packages plus a postage-due orange slip for a fourth. While "a good problem to have," it's times like these that I dread whipping up the trade post(s), as it's pretty much impossible to properly recap everything without taking a few days off work to devote to it. And so I'll give myself the ol' "here are the highlights" out and keep the commentary to a minimum.

First up is CC aka Twitch, who has established himself as a guy you definitely want in your trade circle.

Giancarlo! That A&G is now the largest card in my Stanton PC (which will be getting several more additions by the end of this post).

Gwynn!

Wil Myers is probably best player currently on the Padres, and as such, I sure like getting his cards these days. This is a nice trio, highlighted by the mini diecut numbered /99. He seems to wear a lot of blue in his career, though I prefer him in the ol' brown and gold.

More nifty Padres cards from recent years.

Some Bowman Non-Pads.. well, Manuel Margot is now a Padre, likely to get the call to the bigs by the end of the season.

CC dropped some football cards on me, highlighted by a Christmas Card and a Michael Sam auto.

And that was just about half of what CC sent. Huge thanks, man! I dropped a package off to you the other day, so hopefully it arrives safely and can sufficiently pays you back for the awesome cards to sent my way.

-   -  -- ---o

Next up is Jason Carter. He's been a big force in the cardsphere for years, with his blog The Writer's Journey being among the oldest still-active card blogs, I think. But this was our first trade. He had some cards up for grabs on Twitter and I called dibs on 3 hits. I was able to convince him that I'd deliver with a quality return package of Reds, and I think he was happy with it.

Some excellent cards for my Pirate PCs, including some Stargells, an Al Oliver bat chip, and some McCutchen cards.

Stan the Man!

Yaz, McCovey, and a sweet Willie Horton auto. But that Vlad base relic might be my favorite here. I'd been wanting a game-used base card for a while (not a base card, a base card!), and Vlad is a great guy to get it of. He was a beast in his prime!

Goldschmidts and a blue Opening Day parallel of Mookie Betts.. love it!

Thanks for the trade, Jason! Hope to do it again sometime once I replenish my Reds tradeables a bit.

-   -  -- ----o

Now it's onto another old-school blogger whom I just traded with for the first time. It's Mark Kaz from This Way To The Clubhouse. He expressed interest in the Mets from my 2016 Stadium Club hobby box, and I was happy oblige with them plus some more Mets that had been loitering in my tradebox for too long. He returned a great bunch of cards for me.

Lots of needs of guys I collect!

More Giancarlo!

I believe Mark PCs Carlos Delgado and Pedro Martinez, and so he had some dupes to share with me. Very nice!

And another big name from Mets history, Tom Seaver.

While those other cards were all appreciated, it was this sweet Andrew McCutchen selection that really stole the show. The black bordered Heritage card is #'d /64, which made it my lowest-numbered McCutchen (for a few hours...)

Awesome cards.. Thanks, Mark! Let's do it again sometime!

- - --- -----o

Ok, that wraps up the cards I received on Thursday, but there was that postage due slip. Friday morning before work, I biked over to the post office to pay them $1.49 for them to release the package to me. Then later that day, another package from the same guy showed up.. this one successfully delivered.

Matt Scott is an amazing guy to trade with, though I guess my post office doesn't like him much! This is like the 3rd or 4th time they deemed a package from him to have insufficient postage. I think I heard that bubble mailers now all have to be considered "packages".. no more getting by with envelope rates.. and that might be where the problem comes from.

Boom! Here's the big one that needed the extra postage. That's a heck of a card right there! Giancarlo and Cutch dual patch #'d 9/10. And to be sent this by a Pirates supercollector can't be understated! Plus he's mentioned that Stanton is probably his favorite non-Bucco these days.
Thanks so much, Matt! Now I have the dilemma of which PC to store this card in, as I collect these two guys with equal enthusiasm. I guess I'll just display it out for a while rather than make the call just yet.

And here's the card from the second package, a kickass acetate parallel of the Padres team card, #'d 5/10. Awesome!


Thanks again to Matt, Mark, Jason, and CC for the great cards!

And for today's bonus 800th Post contest entry chance: be the first in the comments below to correctly identify the player Matt Kemp is excitedly nestling to his bosom on the above 2016 Topps Padres team card.

A trade with postal complications and a sprarkle SP from down the street

Due to a backlog of posts I want to write and limited time to write them, I've been doing weekly trade roundup posts for the past several weeks, grouping trades together instead of dedicated separate posts to every card mailing that comes in. But this past week was pretty plentiful with substantial maildays, so I'm thinking I'll split it up into a couple posts.

A month or so ago, I posted about some teams in my tradeboxes that were becoming unwieldy due to the fact that I rarely if ever trade with collectors of those teams. Reader Josh Bob graciously expressed interest in the box of A's cards I was looking to clear out, and we eventually worked out a bigger trade around it.

Here's the cream of the crop I got from Josh. Love the Mookie Betts auto. It's a stickergraph, but on the plus side, it's numbered /225. I've reasonably bulked up my Betts PC over the offseason and am hoping for a big year for him. The Al Oliver second-year card is a nice addition to that PC and had been on my Desperate Dozen wantlist for some time. And while I don't feel one way or the other about Gaby Sanchez, this autograph gets me one letter closer to my goal of spelling out BASEBALL CARD BREAKDOWN in letter patch cards. I can currently spell A CARD.

The Giles Bros. make an appearance, including a gold Marcus.

Some more Padres I collect. I believe these were all needs for me.

Gotta have my Gwynn. That 83 Topps reprint is a 2016 Berger's Best insert. Nice to see Tony get the nod to represent that classic set over other iconic rookie cards they could have gone with, such as the Boggs, Sandberg, and Strawberry.

Josh also included several more assorted Padres not pictured, but lets close it out with these few more highlights. Mitch Canham is a guy I bought a cheap auto of at the recent card show. In the comments of that post, Tony L. pointed out that Canham was a 1st round of the Padres out of Oregon State University. Despite these ties, I don't have much desire to collect his cards, though this is a great looking Sterling card featuring catchers gear. It was funny to receive this card in a trade just days after finding out who the guy was.
Also pictured is a Josh Bard refractor, another 1990 UD Marquis Grissom (!), and a Kershaw.

Big thanks, Josh!
I sent him a Priority Mail box stuffed with A's and a Simspons custom set, and while shipping Priority Mail usually means you can rest easy and be confident it'll arrive within 3 days, this has been a strange one. Check this out..

Josh lives in in the Boston area. The package I sent from Portland traveled cross-country to Rhode Island.. then came back to Portland (just to the post office, not returned to me).. then back across the country to Boston! The hell?! As of drafting this post, it still hasn't been delivered, with the "Priority Mail 2-Day" service stretching over a week now. Hopefully it finally arrives in the next day or two, no worse for the wear! I've had packages inexplicably go through Hawaii on their way to me, but I think this is the first instance I've been involved with where a package has crisscrossed the country like that.
(UPDATE: Looks like it has now finally been delivered and was worth the wait. Josh emailed, "I'm in shock! ... This made me want to start a blog just to tell people how awesome you are as a trade partner!" Haha, nice! Do it!)


In contrast to that package racking up frequent flyer mileage, the other trade package I'm featuring in this post came from just a few blocks away. I had been building a little stack of cards for fellow Portland resident, Kerry from Cards on Cards throughout 2015, and sent them off in a holiday surprise PWE. He recently hit me back with a great batch of cards..

Here are a couple Matt Kemp cards. And take a closer look at that boring old 2015 Topps Update card on the left.. specifically around the helmet region.. it's the Sparkle SP! Very nice! It's the first sparkle SP in my collection (--that I'm aware of.. I've probably thumbed through a couple and not realized it. I would have missed this one were it not for Kerry's post-it. I doubt anyone is sad to see that line of variations discontinued in 2016.) And that blue Chrome refractor is a great looking card as well. My Kemp Kard Kollection (wait, maybe that's not wise alliteration to use) has really grown in the past few months. I've picked up an auto and a "1/1 blank back" that I don't think I've shown off yet. And in part 2 of this week's trade roundup, we'll see some additional impressive Kemp cards traders have kindly passed on to me.

Mickey Mantle in the house.

As a Cardinals fan, Kerry had some Musial dupes to share. Love that diecut!

Some more legends of yesteryear.

Always love adding to the Ted Williams PC.

Here are a few active guys I collect. Great stuff.

Another 1990 UD Marquis! It's definitely time for me to page the stack I've got built up and see where my total is these days.

While I'm not a big basketball collector, there are a few guys I like picking up cards of, and Kerry hit a bunch of them.

Finally, here's a Mickey Mantle that I forgot to include in the photo with the other Mantles. Wow, nice looking card! It's cards like these that make you wish Topps and the Mantle Estate would hammer out a new licensing agreement. Sure, most of the Mantle cards Topps put out over the past decade or two are kinda pointless and forgettable, but then occasionally you get a winner like this 2008 Stadium Club card.

Big thanks for the trade, Kerry!

Cards from the Conroy household

I told the story last month of how posting a photoshop custom of Sean Conroy lead to an email exchange with his mom and how I was able to gift a few printouts of the fake card to Sean, and he was kind enough to sign and return 3 of them for me. But the story doesn't end there.

His mom asked if I could print out a few more copies of the card for her to give to friends and family during the holidays, and I was happy to oblige. She also told me my gesture inspired them to dig through her husband's old card collection and come up with a lot I might be interested in. We agreed to a fair price and now I've ended up with a few cards from the Conroy household, which I think is pretty cool. I know it isn't easy to part with cards you've had since the early 70s, and I really appreciate the kindness to offer them to me.

Let's take a look at the cards!

A couple nice HOFers in Killebrew and Jenkins.

Great lot of 71 stars. I think I had these in my setbuild already, but they're some nice upgrades, or failing that, PC additions. Not pictured, Earl Weaver.

And how about the two biggest name rookie cards in the set? Sweet! Never noticed the slightly similar poses on these two.

Closing it out with a few 72s. Despite the boyhood photo, I still don't believe Stargell was ever young; he was always "Pops" right? Likewise, Darrell Evans was middle-aged when he was born, I'm sure. Don't let this early photo where he's not wearing his glasses fool you. Same with Bobby Grich sans mustache.

A big thank you to the Conroy family for these cards!
Have a great weekend, everybody.

Collecting Cards is Mathematical!

Waiting Til Next Year snuck in a little contest within a post a couple weeks ago where the first to solve a math problem got a cardboard surprise. I noticed nobody had submitted an answer yet, so I set off to solve the equation. After several minutes of working on it, I couldn't get the numbers to work out, but I gave the closest answer I could come up with. Turns out Tom flubbed the numbers a little in the question, leading to the problem not working out as presented. But hey, I still got a prize for my effort! A nice one, too!

Cash Money! I've got a decent collection of Andrew Cashner cards going now (my Cashner Cache, as I like to call it), and this is definitely among the cream of the crop, boasting an autograph, serial number, and not 1 but 2 swatches of material from a uniform that the man may have worn in a game back in his clean-shaven days as a Cub. The rumors that he's on the trading block make me sad. He's really the only current Friar I actively collect. Honorable mention to Jedd Gyorko, but after that, I'm pretty indifferent to the rest of the roster, to be honest. Kind of sad to say that about "my team." So yeah, I hope he sticks around in San Diego.

Thanks again for the great card, Tom!

Next, I swung a quick trade with Roger at Sportscard Mask-a-Rade. He posted about updating his trade bait, so I took a look and found some interesting cards I wouldn't mind clutching tightly in my clammy grasp. Rog gave me a great deal, only asking for a couple relics I picked up cheaply as trade bait at the last card show. Doing the math on this trade (keeping with the loose theme of this post), I definitely got the better end of the deal by at least a ratio of 2:1, so I'll need to balance the numbers next time we trade.

These 3 Mickey Mantle World Series commemorative pins medallions are really nice! Manufactured relic-type cards fall into the category of cards I love receiving in trades, but have no interest in purchasing myself. Apparently a 3-card set with one each as an exclusive bonus with Target factory sets of 2011 Topps, these are great additions to my Mick collection.

But my main interest was this Fleer/SI Greats of the Game auto:

Love Al Oliver! Thanks again for the awesome trade, Roger! Seems landing decent Pirates cards on the 'sphere these days is tricky, with at least 3 active bloggers being big Bucco collectors.. most prominent of which likely being Matthew Scott at Bob Walk The Plank.

Speaking of Matt, I got a surprise from him in my mailbox yesterday, too...

NOOOOOOOOO!!!/YESSSSSSSSSSSS!!!

How bittersweet! A surprise mailing from Matt (yay!!) but I have to stand in line and interact with the surly pricks behind the counter at my local post office to get it (boo!!). A postal worker somewhere did the math on Matt's PWE and came up with a solution of -23. Twenty-three lousy cents due. Grr. I believe the last package Matt sent me was also marked that much postage due, but that time the postman was cool and delivered it as normal anyways. Not so lucky this time. (And I'm just now noticing the mailman dated this October instead of November.. derp. I hope that doesn't complicate matters further with the a-holes at my post office.) I'm tempted to be a dick and pay with a credit card, since I know they have to pay a fee for each transaction.. but nah, I'll just scrape up a couple dimes and 3 pennies. Hey, there's math rearing its head again!

But anyways, thanks in advance, Matt!! Looking forward to the mystery card(s) awaiting me behind enemy lines! And thanks again to P-town Tom and Roger.