Ginter Mini Treasures from The Basketball Card Blog

For the second time in as many month's, I received an extremely generous supply of unwanted 2008 Allen & Ginter minis from a fellow blogger. This time, the loot came from The Basketball Card Blog, where all resources seem to be reallocated to an Allen & Ginter style basketball set that Topps put out last year, best known as Murad. And like last time, I will post an image of every single mini that I received, because they're fun to look at in strips like this.

There were a dozen of the regular back minis. I am really starting to think an entire regular mini set might be attainable someday, even though I am still stuck at a handful of short printed cards short of the regular set.

Bengie Molina and Kevin Youkilis are of the regular short printed variety, while there were also five of the Allen & Ginter back versions. (NOT-SO-SUBLIMINAL MESSAGE HERE. SIGN UP FOR MY MARCH RADNESS CONTEST NOW. THANKS.) Getting now former Cardinal Rick Ankiel on a variation card was a nice touch.

I had completely forgotten about EDGAR RENTERIA and his special capitalization. Renteria had a pretty nice run as a Cardinal, and I really didn't see him ending up as one of those guys that bounces around for the rest of his career (Boston, Atlanta, Detroit, San Francisco... is he still there?) A black bordered version of Jeanette "The Black Widow" Lee is very fitting. I remember seeing her run tables like crazy during many bored Saturday afternoon hours on sports channels in the past.

Here's something I didn't expect - a few inserts, including a rare shark card. The Bull Shark will join the Tiger Shark I already have in my collection as I'm now 40% of the way to a full on Shark Arsenal. And then there's Stephen Drew... what did Stephen Drew's card do to stand out?

Ah ha! This is awesome. As you can plainly see, Stephen Drew's card is in fact a hand-numbered Bazooka back parallel mini. I was lucky enough to pull a Nick Johnson Bazooka back in this set out of a pack, but didn't get anything like this last year. It's stuff like this that makes the writing and preparation here worth its while. It's also stuff like this that makes me seriously delusional about tracking down more cards from this set. If I was going to make any modern baseball card set a long term project, however, I think 2008 Allen & Ginter would make a strong candidate. I liked last season's set and I may like this year's as well, but there's something about the 2008 set that really grabbed me. Maybe it was just because it was my first look at A&G.

Thanks again to G_Moses down at The Basketball Card Blog. It's live, you know... from Rip City. And that city, quite frankly, is better than your city. (Sorry about your city.)