Infusion of 2004 Chrome black refractors

I keep an eye out for bulk lots of 2004 Topps Chrome black refractors, and one such lot popped up recently. It was 79 cards at a buck per card plus shipping. Not quite a steal, but still good enough to get me to bite.

The guy pranked me by shipping them in a box for '91 Fleer Update. I opened up the package and saw that and immediately thought there was a mixup. But nope, '04 black refractors hidden inside.

Some highlights...

There were a few dupes for me in the lot, including Marcus Giles and Fred McGriff here, but since I collect both these guys, I don't mind having an extra copy for the respective PCs. The dupes of dudes I don't collect should make for decent trade fodder.

Big sluggers of the era.

A pair of near Hall of Famers here. (I say put 'em in.)

These 2 guys have been in the news lately... for very different reasons: Ross for being named the Cubs' new manager, and Edmonds for an ugly divorce.

There are some nice photos in this set that if Topps used them today, would likely be zoomed in 2x. It's refreshing when the image can "breathe" a bit.

HOFers! The Vlad is the card I saw in the listing that made me click the "buy it now" button. That guy was a beast!

A couple guys winding down their solid careers on unfamiliar teams.

Closing us out is a nice Dontrelle Willis rookie cup, and (as far as I can tell) the last active player in 2004 Topps Chrome who was still playing in 2019, Oliver Perez. (Fernando Rodney is not in the set.)

This lot took me from 37.17% complete up to 48.25%. Honestly a little disheartening that I'm still not even halfway done. Maybe I'll do a Sportlots order one of these days to get me over the hump.

Also disheartening about his quest of mine?...

The Yadier Molina "first year" card (that I still need) selling for $160+ recently. Ouch. It's not even an auto, for frick's sake!

So yeah, it's a long-term project, for sure.. but I love these cards and I'll keep grinding, and maybe someday I'll finish this one off.

Dimebox Taoism

Oh hey I still have more dimebox cards to show you from that card show two weekends ago.

Griffey holograms! I grabbed 'em all (dupes included), so if anyone needs one, just let me know.

Here are some baseball players.

Here are some more baseball players.

Without the context of this photo, I could tell you that I paid 10¢ per card for a pair of serial-numbered (/150) cards of a player who's high up on the all-time home run list.. and that might be impressive if you didn't know the set or the player.

I should stop buying A-rod cards since I have all I need (some might say more than I need. In fact everyone besides maybe Zippy Zappy would say that), but somehow they still manage to sneak onto my stack, similar to A-rod sneaking his tainted urine passed MLB's drug testers.

Nothing to do with these cards, but we're watching the Game 3 right now and my wife says she honestly isn't familiar with the "Baby Shark" song. Never even heard of it. This from a woman who's a moderator on Reddit, so she typically knows what's going on.

Vlad! A beast in his prime!

Rickey? RICKEY!!

Legends.

I was so happy to snag this Ron Gant. Anytime I can find a card of him after leaving Atlanta seems like a big deal.

More protective coating, you say? Sure thing!

That's So Raven.

2002 Studio. Didn't have much (any?) from this set. Now I've got a few. Six HOFers. (Sheffield was secretly inducted but it wasn't announced in the press.)

2002 Fleer Hot Prospects is the name of the above set. Who knew that Barry Larkin was still considered a "hot prospect" in 2002? Wow! That just goes to show you how prodigious his career was.

The 2 Tinos in the post were picked up just in case the Lost Collector needed them, though I knew it was a long shot.

Here are baseball cards produced with large holes in them. The top row include metal coins in said holes (not the foil-made-to-look-like-a-coin ones, but the actual-metal-coin ones), while the bottom row have translucent pictures in the holes. I think this day must have set my personal record for most cards with holes in them obtained in one day. At least in the past few years.

I'll leave you for today with this pair of Gold Label cards from back when that meant something. Beauties!

A pocketful of dimes well spent, I'd say! I still have more from this haul that I'll likely post about soon (I think I've sorted them into modern baseball cards [big stack], and non-baseball [smaller stack].)

By the way, when I said "That's So Raven" earlier, it didn't have anything to do with cards. Hopefully nobody was like examining the photo trying to figure out what "That's So Raven" had to do with the cards pictured. I was just being silly; Sorry.

Hope you have a great weekend!

Joy of a completed insert set: 2004 Topps Chrome-Town Heroes

Pretty sure this is the first memorabilia set I've ever completed. I don't often chase relic cards, but I went after these as part of my quest for a black refractor parallel set of 2004 Topps Chrome. While they're not technically included in that base black refractor set.. well, they're black and they're refractors and they're from the same product, so I added them to my needs spreadsheet. Overall, I'm at 37% complete with my parallel setbuild, but it feels good to get all the relic cards taken care of, at least.

From what I can tell, Chrome-Town Heroes (a clunky play on "Hometown Heroes" in case you didn't catch it) was not a regular insert set that popped up year to year, rather appearing only here in 2004 Topps Chrome as far as baseball goes... though there were also Chrome-Town Heroes in 2004-05 Topps Chrome Basketball, where they were all relic cards, but the similarities end there as those have a much different design and are all horizontal. The basketball versions have refractor parallels that are #/25 (and many of the base are also numbered, from as low as 206 to as high as 1000). But lucky for me, the baseball version has no parallels (not even "non-refractor" versions) and none of the cards are numbered.

So let's check out these 21 cards.

 

My only real complaint about this set? Team distribution! How can the A's have so many damn cards?! FIVE of the 21 cards are Oakland players. Cubs aren't too far behind, with 3 cards. Zero of my Padres, or several other teams for that matter. Would have liked to see more variety in team selection, but I guess those were just the stars they had plentiful jerseys/bats from available to cut up.

Many different sources were utilized putting the set together, and I've searched my email archives to refresh my memory. The A-Rod card was picked up on Listia, which is kind of a trip for me because it feels like forever ago that I was active on that trainwreck of a site. Semi-retired cardblogger SpastikMooss traded me five of the cards (which he had picked up with me in mind on COMC). COMC was also my source for many of these, though at least a couple were won on eBay, including the final card I needed, Albert Pujols. My cheapest purchase was Palmeiro ($2) and the most expensive was Frank Thomas ($7.75), both via COMC.

So there you have it. My first completed memorabilia insert set. Thanks for stopping by.

An Epic Zapping for the Ages

It's that time of year where there are lots of posts about people's hauls from the National card convention, and other posts that are like "who needs the National when I got all these cool cards showing up". This here is in the latter category.

I got a Twitter message a couple weeks ago from Zippy Zappy with a tracking number saying, "It's not much, but I wanted to send you something." Well hot dang, I wasn't expecting a flat-rate Priority box to show up!

Probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 2000 cards. Fun digging through everything, picking out lots of keepers.

Sweet Jeter blue refractor, /250 and shiny Brian Giles need.

Man, so many cards to highlight in this post. As you can see, there were some football cards in there too.

Arenado RC and a 2012 Trout insert.. pretty nice!

Bryce Harper heads an impressive lineup of 2012 Bowman RCs here.

..more here, such as Didi and Manny.

Good mix of stuff.

Much of the box contained cards from teams that Kenny was a bit overstocked on, tradeably speaking.. with the Tigers and the Royals seeing the most cards. Love that Dave Henderson Cyber Stats!

A smattering of Phillies cards in with this batch.

There was a good deal of hockey cards in there too. I picked out some familiar names and found an silver auto. Awesome!

Some pretty girls from Japan. Now that's lovely!

And a girlie toy that seems to be still in-package. Ha! What do you say, Kenny, do I assemble this or leave as it?

A couple more neat Japanese cards.

A few minor league programs to check out.

A 2008 Topps Yankees team set plus a few older cards I might be able to use.

A few Star Wars cards highlighted by a hefty manurelic.

Oh my! Looks like Zippy decided to part ways with much, if not all, of his Arod collection! All these pictured in that box there are Alex Rodriguez cards. This boosts my Arod PC from being respectable up to being pretty damn impressive.

I know that besides some Yankees fans, Arod isn't all that sought-after by collectors these days. But still, he's got some terrific cards. I hated the guy for a while when he was playing, too, but then there near the end of his career, he became a sympathetic figure to me and started rooting for the guy. Figured I'd put together a sampling of his cards.

Bunch o' relics!

I wouldn't be surprised if a few of 'em are cards I sent to Kenny back before I started collecting Arod.

Just more nice Arods.

Almost done.

Gold and foil aboud on these.

But the biggest card of the box...

Certified Topps Alex Rodriguez autograph! That's a great looking card. This breezes past the faded autograph that had previously been my best card of the PC. I remember seeing this on Kenny's blog in the past and admired it.. never thought it'd end up in my collection. How cool! He said in the note that this is like a thank-you gift for taking all the other cards off his hands.. lol.

Thanks so much, Zippy! That was an incredible surprise box of cards. Very appreciated!
I'll get working on your return soon.