This Week in Small Deals

Some cards from some guys who like to send me cards.

It's another installment of my latest dealings in plain white envelope trades and other single card deals! Huzzah! First off, I'll start with some cards that The Junior Junkie sent. I love getting random envelopes out of the blue, and this one was certainly random.

I have a number of hand-signed cards that other collector's have sent me over the years. I can't verify their authenticity, and I'm guessing in many cases that neither can the person who traded it to me. (If you got something signed in person, you'd probably keep it, right?) But I like to think of myself as an optimist on my good days and treat these cards like I would any so-called certified autograph and slap them into a top loader for safe keeping. I actually didn't have this card from the 1982 Topps Traded set (I only have the expensive Ozzie Smith card) so this is a nice reminder that I should track down a fresh copy for my binders.

Here's Joe Torre, looking a wee bit creepy.

2011 Topps Lineage was an interesting product in hindsight. I don't remember it getting much buzz when it was coming out, but it now seems like the testing grounds for a couple of recently established trends. You see a lot of the stuff they did with this set in the past two Topps Archives sets, and these '75-style minis carried on as a base set insert, paying homage to other years' sets.

Longtime friend of the blog Thoughts and Sox dropped this shiny surprise on me. It's a brilliant serial numbered refractor from the dearly missed All-Time Fan Favorites set. I love it.

Finally, a few of you seem to have noticed my random outburst about NFL Football on Superb Owl Sunday. I became an Eagles fan in the Tecmo Super Bowl era (high school) and still follow the team, though I more or less shunned them when Michael Vick was behind center. Scott Crawford had some tantalizing '80s football trade bait on his blog and I just had to own this Reggie White rookie card. I bought my first packs in 1986 when I was 10 years old, and they were nearly always baseball. I did talk myself into a few football packs and those cards, like the baseball ones from those days, were pretty dog-eared. Even though I seem to remember loving the design, I didn't know nearly enough about the NFL back then to buy more than a few. I'm sure they would have ended up with rounded corners and random blotches on them anyway.