Million Card Giveaway Last Ditch Effort

I made a last ditch grab for some 2010 Topps Update packs in an attempt to get some of those pesky codes that expire very, very soon. After the second code I entered turned into a special autographed card of a Hall of Famer, I knew it could only be downhill from there. And it was. I traded my way into a couple of late '60s Cardinals cards that I will probably have shipped, even though it's not really worth it. Other than that, I'm stuck with cards from 1979, 1980 and a 1985 Berra Father-and-Son card. Yikes. Steve Kemp here was my first redemption of the day, with a Thurman Munson code that came from a hobby pack. One of the local shops has hobby packs for $1.75, which seems to be fairly reasonable. I actually pulled a Black parallel from one of the packs today, which I'm going to send on to a Red Sox collector.

My second code of the day resulted in this. Nice. This was an Ichiro code in one of those 7.99 blister packs at Target that includes a bonus code card. Either I was hax0red!$$!!111 as the kids say (do they say that anymore?) or someone figured out how to read the code card through the blister pack. Or... shenanigans.

Code 3, courtesy of Mickey Mantle, came from one of the retail packs in the blister pack itself. I guess I'd be pleased if I was a Tigers fan, but there's no way I'd get these puppies shipped. If anyone out there has any interesting Cardinals cards sitting in their queue that you don't plan on claiming, please let me know.

Also, I do have some ToppsTown codes if anyone is into that. Let me know and I'll scan them for you.

The Why of Cy / Fun With Topps Million

I'm a little late to this party - what else is new? - but I received a package the other day from our good friends at The Topps Company. As you may recall, the second code that I entered into the fancy machine turned up all gold bars as I received a virtual Luis Aparicio 2002 Topps Archives Reserve Refractor Autograph From The Future. Well, something like that, anyway. (By the way, why does no one want to trade me for my 1991 Roy Smith? I see all of the trade offers that other bloggers have received and I feel like Roy is a bit jealous... or at least I am.) I realized that there was a price to be paid for "winning" these cards as each one would cost you a few bucks in shipping fees, which I think is why it took me so long to request delivery for the Aparicio. I never thought that a few measly dollars would prevent me from getting a fancy autographed card of a Hall of Famer, but it just sounded like a minor nuisance that I would eventually deal with. As it turns out, however, I went to the site and Topps was pretty much begging me to take the card of their hands for free. I actually thought that maybe I had done something wrong or that there was something wrong with the website when I requested delivery of the card, because they never asked for any payment information. I then read the fine print and realized that certain "valuable" cards would be shipped free of charge with tracking info on Topps' dime.

Tell me, though, how does this make sense? My Aparicio card is shipped to me for free, yet what incentive would I or anyone else possibly have for requesting a 1991 Roy Smith for close to $3? I thought the object was to give away cards. It's not like there's a shortage of 1991 Topps cards in this country or anything. There's actually a reasonably good chance that I could get an entire set of 1991 Topps for a few bucks if I tried hard enough.

Please don't send me a bunch of Roy Smith cards...

Moving along, I did plunk down $10 for a Topps cereal box over the weekend. It was my first cereal box from this set after picking up a few from last year's. I've actually already managed to get every Cardinals base card from the set and am just missing a number of Cardinals inserts for the team collection. I do need a ton of the Turkey Red inserts, though, and figured I'd take a shot at a Pujols refractor thing. As you can plainly see, however, I got stuck with Cy Young. Again. This makes 3 Cy Young refractors out of, I believe, 4 cereal boxes purchased from the past two years. (The other one was a Roberto Clemente.) Nobody needs 3 different Cy Young refractors unless you are the sort that has a Cleveland Naps pennant hanging above your fireplace. Can I trade these in for something else? Anyone?

Buying the cereal box also guaranteed me of receiving another code card, my first since the initial post a few months ago oddly enough. Everything shown as redeemed recently on the main page was a vintage card, so I figured I was relatively safe from receiving another Roy Smith card. I ended up with this Dodgers pitcher from the late '60s. I was hoping that this would be on Night Owl's wantlist, but I have no such luck. Hopefully it will draw more interest than good ol' Roy.

Cards on Cards Wins the Day

Well, Redemption Day (also known as Presidents' Day in some parts) came and went today and a lot of people apparently spent a lot of time mashing buttons and clicking on things in futility until something went their way. I do have to admit to checking the Topps website for the new Million Card Giveaway thing last night around midnight EST and then again around midnight PST. I didn't lose sleep over it, of course, and as I got ready for work this morning I read that the madness had begun and people were slowly starting to redeem their codes. For my part, I only had 2 codes which came from purchasing a grand total of 10 regular retail packs plus a jumbo rack pack. And as you may have read elsewhere, this didn't go so well to start with.

Once I got to work, however, things got a bit more interesting. I was starting to see some of the more interesting cards (way more vintage than I expected) that others were getting when I got an e-mail from Chris Olds of Beckett fame. For the most part I have avoided the whole Beckett issue on this blog as they tend to be a very polarizing entity. For full disclosure, I used to buy the magazines religiously when I was a teenager and was particularly obsessed with the price guide. While I don't feel that it ever completely drove my collecting habits (I was never a "prospector"

and couldn't have afforded to be one anyway) I did use the pricing as a starting point for trading with people and judging the quality of my card shop/card show purchases. Beckett was gospel back in the day.

Today I am a Beckett subscriber. I only pay for the baseball online price guide, and I do so primarily because of its reference data and checklists. It's certainly not without its flaws, and don't get me started on how frustrated I get with all of the downtime (scheduled and unscheduled) with the site since they redesigned it, but it's there and I use it. This doesn't mean that other sites do not have their place. I certainly would love for more competition to be out there and I do use Zistle to catalog my player collections (well, one so far.) I've never been to their forums and likely never will, but I did start hearing about their Free Stuff Friday contests. Last Friday, I entered a few of them just for the heck of it as they required little-to-no work, and filed the experience way in the back of my mind - somewhere near the phone numbers of people that I instantly forgot as soon as I started using a cell phone.

And then, this afternoon, this happened:

Most of last Friday's contests were sponsored by Panini (basketball cards! icky!) and I apparently ended up with some sort of high end "box" containing a "pack" containing 5 "cards". Okay, I should probably calm down on the quotation marks. Cool-headed logic would seem to dictate that I should probably sell the thing the moment it hits my door, but I can see myself opening it up because it's exciting and I don't usually win stuff. I could always sell the cards themselves, right? And I'll definitely keep my fingers crossed and hope for a Blazers card.

Eventually, I finally managed to get one of my Topps codes to get through after trying for hours just to sign up for an account, and that's when I ended up with Mr. Smith up at the top of the post. The second code proved to be much, much trickier to enter. I probably tried a grand total of 20 times, each time getting a blank white screen, until I finally got a message that stated that my code had already been used. I then went to look at my collection and then...

Wow! What in the world is this? After showing it to Erin, she was quick to point out that the card is not actually a 2001 card but is a 2002 card as you can see by the logo. Secondly, although I had heard rumors of autographs and other such prizes being part of this larger contest, I had no idea that Topps would stray from straight up regular base cards in the codes that you can redeem right away and would then go ahead and give out a certified autograph from a non-base set. Aparicio is a Hall of Famer, of course, so this is certainly nothing to sneeze at.

Part of me thinks this was just my lucky day (in the trading cards world, anyway) although the cynic in me thinks that something wacky and unpleasant will end up happening with this redemption. The same cynic also wonders if I was selected as a winner in the Beckett giveaway not just out of sheer luck or lack of other entrants, but that I was handpicked because I had never entered a contest before or posted on the forums and might be more apt to promote Beckett to others in the future because of this. I mean, there's zero visibility in how people are selected for these things, right?

Then again, maybe I should just shut up and take the cards.