A shiny haul of cards to check out

I accidentally put my cell phone (an old flip-phone) through the laundry recently. Dummy. After letting it dry a few days, I turned it on and surprisingly it was fine.. except that the display looked kinda like a Chrome atomic refractor. Honestly, it was pretty cool! Sort of a neat holographic thing going on, but still normal enough to where I could read it without too much trouble. Not that I recommend doing a load of laundry with your phone in it, but in hindsight I'm glad it happened, and I was a little bummed when a couple days later it was back to normal. It's like I had upgraded my phone from the base version to the atomic refractor parallel!

And along those lines, I'm a sucker for a cool-looking, shiny, colorful baseball card. I placed a COMC order last week-- call it a "Hooray, my new job seems to be working out fine and my supervisors like me" gift to myself-- and loaded up mostly on pretty parallels.

I feel it, guys! After 2015 was the first year a Padres batter hit for the cycle (thanks again, Matt Kemp!), 2016 could be the year a Padres pitcher finally throws a no-hitter. And these 3 guys are our best hopes. The James Shields atomic refractor gives you an idea of what the display on my phone looked like for those glorious couple days. The orange Tyson Ross is a Christmas Card (!!!), numbered 12/25 on the back. I'm hoping Andrew Cashner can bounce back from a down 2015, but at least his forgettable season means I could pick up this sweet auto/relic #/50 relatively cheap. What usually turns me off from the Triple Threads brand are the sticker autos for the vast majority of the autograph cards, so this on-card signature is much appreciated. The other Cashner auto card isn't as impressive looking, but it's got a big on-card signature and was too cheap for me to pass up.

Next up is a trio of young Red Sox. Manuel Margot is a Padre now and has been turning heads in camp this spring.

Here we have some Cubs including 3 pickups for my Brooks Kieschnick PC and 2 Rod Beck Pacific cards from 1999.

Finally, I wanted to pick up a Toe Nash auto, and this was the cheapest available. I guess 2001 Topps Reserve was weird in that the product included an already-graded card such as this in every hobby box, with the player signing the top label before encapsulation (the PSA grade is on the reverse; this one is an 8). So it's not quite an auto card in a strict sense, but still a certified autograph.

I learned about Toe's story thanks to a Dime Boxes post from 2014, and had been meaning to pick up a card or few of him since, but I always seem to forget about him when card shopping. But I finally remembered this time.

The rest of my COMC order was loading up on a certain monster of a player, but I'll save that for another post.
Take care, everybody.

Hey, where are the blog awards this year? (trade roundup)

Time for the weekly trade round up, which is kind of a thing here on the blog. This week saw 3 trade packages show up at Baseball Card Breakdown HQ. Let's take a look!

First up is Fuji. When you're talking about the best card blogs around, the top 3 names that pop into my head are Night Owl, Dimebox Nick, and Fuji. And hey, that reminds me, where are the 2015 Card Blog Awards? We're deep into February already and still nothing! Last year there was the Bip Awards, and the 2nd Best Blog Award. Somebody should hurry up and take the reigns to get something going. I really thought I brought my A-game in 2015, and was hopeful I could bring home a digital trophy.. perhaps contending for "Post of the Year" with the original Wallet Card post or something. One of you bloggers out there looking for a series of posts to spice up your blog, you might consider setting up some blog award categories that people could nominate for and vote on.

But back to Fuji, I traded with him once or twice before, but it was long ago, back when I was living at my old place. This month marks 2 years in my current house, and so I was overdue to swap cards with him. He was included in my holiday card mailing spree, and seemed to be pretty happy with the customs and stuff I sent him. This was a pretty nice thank you package I got in return.

The meat of the mailing was this trio of hits. Very happy with that Marcus Giles relic. Have I mentioned I went to school with him? Oh, only a hundred times? Ok, sorry. I just think it's really cool that I had gym class with a guy who's on an UD Masterpieces card. I'm basically one degree of separation from being on an UD Masterpieces card. LOL. Dare I say my big Marcus post from last March might also be worthy of a Post of the Year nomination. Gah, sorry for talking about myself so much in this post.
Also included here are a nice Xavier Nady relic from his Team USA days, and an Andrew Cashner purple swatch from his college days. Shiny!

Fuji is a big Tony Gwynn collector, and must have had some dupes to share. I'm happy to take 'em! The Lords of the Diamond card is particularly eye-catching. That pop-out card at the end is kinda funny.. looks like maybe they recycled the body drawing from Griffey. That definitely isn't an accurate late-career Gwynn body representation!

And Fuji was nice enough to include his own updated auto card. That's pretty awesome. Thanks, man!

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Next trade package is from Tony Burbs. Tony's blog Wrigley Roster Jenga is very entertaining and fresh, and I would definitely nominate it for Best New Blog of 2015, sticking with our theme of theoretical/potential blog awards. It's obviously a very Cubs-focused blog, but you can still enjoy it without being a Cubs fan.

Anyways, like with Fuji, I surprised Tony with some cards back around the holidays, and he was compelled to shoot me a friendly return batch of cards.

I'm a sucker for a serial number, so this Gwynn (/799) and Ian Kennedy (/99) definitely stood out for me.

The package was rounded out by this fine assortment of other Padres of the past.
Thanks, Tony!

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Another strong contender for Best New Blog of 2015 would have to be Wish They Still Came With Bubblegum. Jeff burst onto the scene and quickly made a name for himself, trading up a storm. Took me a while, but I finally got in on that action for our first trade.

Here we've got old favorites of mine Hoyt Wilhelm and star of yesterday's post, my close personal friend Vida Blue. Ok, maybe I'm exaggerating about how close we are just a little.

Mr. Gwynn completes the trifecta of being included in all 3 trade packages this week. Good stuff.
The Caminiti cards might be my favorite of the package, rocking the acetate and hologram action.

See? The square photo is translucent and the back features the mirror image, with the logos amusingly removed.

A couple appreciated upgrades for my 1973 set, and a couple from possibly my favorite insert set, 1993 Topps Black Gold. Great looking cards. Still hoping to see these make a reemergence in Archives one of these years.

Active guys were represented in the package by a slick Giancarlo refractor, a couple Goldschmidt cards, and a couple Padres farmhands.

Closing it out with some former Padres. I don't think we ever had any Ames stores on the west coast, but I like the look of those oddballs. We didn't have any Revco drug stores either (see the Gwynn from a few pictures up). Funny how defunct stores live on through their oddball cards.

Thanks for the cards, Jeff! I've got a stack of Braves here with your name on them that I need to pack up and drop in the mail this weekend. (Update: now en route.)

And thanks again to Fuji and Tony Burbs! All three are award-winning caliber traders in my book.

And the rest of the box from Marcus

In a post last week, I started digging into the box Marcus sent me recently as he works to downsize his collection. Let's go ahead and plow through the rest of it now.

We start with autos, autos, and more autos.

Lots of good stuff here. Love that '87 Joyner. A bunch of Benes (including a couple oddballs). Denorfia on the bottom.

Ah, the Padres team of my youth. With this jumpstart, I wonder if I could put together a signed Padres team set of 1990 Donruss without too much trouble? That would be pretty neat for me since 1990 Donruss (for better or worse) was the first wax I ever ripped. Sentimental value, you know.

Some postcard-sized generic autograph sheets. This might be tough to identify, but let's give it a shot. I'd guess the first one is Nick Hundley (#4). Next is Nick Vincent (#50). The "D" name seems to be Dale Thayer (#55). "AG34" looks like it could be Adrian Gonzalez, but he wasn't #34. Ok, I just looked up #34 and it's Andrew Cashner.. cool! And #45 looks like "Greg B" but again, I can't find a match. Ok, looked up #45 and it's Anthony Bass. I originally thought the last one is was Eric Stults, but now I'm pretty sure it's Tim Stauffer.
I might trim these down to standard card size, perhaps doing something interesting with them like doing sketch cards around the signatures or something.

Howbout a football auto? This postcard sized Stan Humphries auto is pretty cool. Sounds like the Chargers will be sticking around for at least another season, so that's cool, I guess. But ownership has definitely been shitting the bed left and right, and it won't be easy to win back a lot of disgruntled San Diego fans such as myself.

Here's a nice dual screw-down with the Alomar brothers featuring minor league cards from 1988. Pretty sweet.

Marcus added some variety to the box with a few coins, including 3 actual money pieces. I've never been all that big on coin collecting (besides several bucks worth of 1976 drummer boy quarters I've been collecting since childhood), though I do have a few random foreign coins, so I'll throw these in with them.

Here are a bunch of oversized cards. Even that Sheffield in the corner is larger than a standard card. The Fernando(s) and Dale Murphy could be available if anyone needs them.

More jumbo cards and postcards.

Here we've got a Padres program from 2013, and then a few issues of Pocket Pages from 1993-1994. Gotta admit I wasn't familiar with Pocket Pages the publication, but they seem kinda cool. The best thing about them is obviously that they contain cards...

They even got some shiny on 'em. What do you guys think? Should I take these out and cut them up into individual cards, or keep the magazines intact? I'll probably cut them up unless someone yells at me not to.

There were a bunch of 1971 Topps cards, a few of which will likely be needs or upgrades for my setbuild, though I haven't checked yet. Also included were several 2011 Topps parallels which I can put toward that frankensetbuild.

Mini mania! Anybody working on 1975 Topps Mini needing those 3 cards? Let me know. Here we also see a Goose need from 1986 Fleer and several Bowman mini refractors.

So many Rymer Liriano cards! Bummer he never quite blossomed with San Diego. They recently cut him loose and he wound up with the Brewers. All the best, Rymer!

A couple of my all-time favs, Dave Winfield and Eric Owens. Pretty sure I needed most of these.

More Geese, including a duo from his early days as a White Sock and a trio from his latter days as an A.

Greg Maddux 1/1!!! Ha, no, that's from the annoyingly deceptive A&G Dick Perez insert set or whatever where Topps went ahead and included Perez' handwritten 1/1 on all the mass-produced cards, leading to great confusion and disappointment among collectors. The Adrian refractor also made me scratch my head a moment...

Numbered 99/60?! That's unpossible! LOL, ok, so maybe I'm looking at it upside-down and it's actually 090/660.

While the Padres were definitely the stars of the box, non-SD fellas could be found as well. A couple Mike Trout cards. Bryce Harper mini. Rainbow foil 2015 RBI LL. Gerrit Cole rookie. An addition for my Non-Yankee Babe Ruth PC. And favorites Willie Stargell and Paul Goldschmidt.

And so that's gonna wrap it up. There were plenty more cards I could show off and write about, but in the interest of time, let's call it good.

Again, big thanks, Marcus, for passing down these cards to me and please just say the word if/when I can return the favor with anything!

A highly successful and completely awesome trade

I gotta think Highly Subjective and Completely Arbitrary is a strong frontrunner for the award of Best New Blog of 2015. Brian burst onto the scene with a fun, fascinating blog and quickly built a reputation as a very generous trader to boot. It took me a while, but I finally got into the action and completed my first trade with him. I can't recall ever trading with a Twins collector before, so I was happy to majorly thin out the Twins section of my tradebox on him and also scrounge up some other stuff he might be able to use in his collection.

Brian hit me back with an awesome bunch of cards heavy on my favorite PCs. Let's check out some highlights!

Some glorious Goldschmidts! That hockey-style Archives insert was the specific card from a trade bait post that motivated me to reach out about a trade.

A couple more young stars of today, Mike Trout and Giancarlo Stanton. Nice selection here!

The Giles Bros. were represented with a flying Marcus rainbow and a #'d /500 Brian. I hadn't noticed it before, but that first Marcus card seems to have the wrong facsimile autograph... definitely doesn't look like his signature. [Gavin does some quick research.] Looks like it's an uncorrected error in 2007 flagship. The Chrome and Opening Day versions have the correct signature.

These Flair cards sure are snazzy looking

It's my understanding that Chris Sale's been having a great year.

Rod Beck in action!

Nice infusion for my McCovey PC!

And some more Padre greats of yesteryear. I always get a kick out of new-to-me pictures of Winfield rocking the brown and gold.

Great Marquis lot featuring an invaluable 1990 UD #9.

Caminiti cards!

Gotta love Bert Blyleven.

Gavin Floyd!

Here are a few Chrome Padres, highlighted by a purple refractor Cashner.

Let's close with a pair of Pops. It's funny how 1988 Donruss does nothing for me.. but Donruss Originals in that design always catch my eye. What a wonderful world it would have been if Willie Stargell was still patrolling the field for Pittsburgh in 1988.

There's still a fat stack of more neat cards I haven't shown, but let's call this post good here.

Thanks again for the trade, Brian! My Twins tradeables are pretty bare now, but I'll be keeping an eye out for cards for you so hopefully we can get another trade going before too long!