Hodgepodge

A three-sport @pennysleeves collection of card things. 

 

Sometimes, when there's no overarching theme to the stuff that people send me through the mail, there's not really a good word to use as a descriptor. Hence, I'm calling this stack of cards I got back in the fall from A Penny Sleeve for your Thoughts a hodgepodge. Is "hodgepodge" a word I use a lot in life? Not really. I'm not sure why it came to mind today, but that's what I'm going with.

Quite a few of the cards in this generous package are of the parallel variety. As a team collector, I'm never going to achieve any sense of completeness, but I do know that the base cards I need from the more attainable sets are dwindling over time.

I honestly have no idea who Dee Haynes is. I'm guessing he didn't progress very far in his professional baseball journey. This Bowman Chrome parallel is pretty similar to the X-Fractors you see in the Topps Chrome offerings, but it's not quite the same. It's a bit more disco-y if that makes any sense.

The Panini Threads concept of just showing a player's jersey would work a lot better if they actually used recognizable players instead of mostly rookies. If you saw a Warriors #30 jersey or a (trying to remember who was popular a decade ago) Heat #3 jersey on one of these cards, it would pop, right? Can anyone name this player from the 2010-11 season? (It's Elliot Williams.) Actually, one of the things that bothers me about modern basketball cards in general is that they are focused so much on rookies, when only a handful of them ever have a lasting impact in any given season.

Speaking of rookie impact, Martell Webster was an interesting player who never quite lived up to his loft draft selection (#6 overall in 2005.) This is a neat looking card, though.

One of the fun things about the 2020 Olympics (in 2021) was learning that Rudy Fernandez is still playing hoops. This Certified Potential parallel is numbered to just 100.

Here's another numbered Blazers card. Robin Lopez has started some games recently for Orlando and has carved out quite a career for himself.

The font is a little suspect and I'm not quite sure why the giant basketball has to obscure a large chunk of the photo (there's some mystery guy's feet at the bottom), but this is otherwise a nice looking card of a former Blazer shot-blocking wiz.

Oh man, I don't think we give 1963 Fleer enough love. It's really sad that a set this nice was limited to just 66 cards, but Topps had their whole monopoly thing going on. I need to get the rest of the Cardinals from this set.

There's been a couple of Cardinals and a bunch of Blazers, so why not some football? Finest refractors look great in any sport. I'm sure a lot of you pro-peel folks are cringing at this card with its protective layer intact.

Jon also sent a healthy stack of 2006 Turkey Red parallels. I've selected a few of these cards to show here, mostly at random.

They do look nice, don't they? I'll never get tired of Turkey Red.