More Jerseys and Autos from Oren

 

Reader Oren strikes again with an amazing collection of memorabilia cards and autographs. 

 

I'm not sure where he finds all of this great stuff, but I am always excited to put together a trade with Oren. This one even topped the last package! 

Andrew Knizner has had a really nice season as the #2 option at catcher with St. Louis, having found a bit of power that we hadn't really seen from him at the big league level.

For all of their shortcomings, Panini does put out some nice looking memorabilia cards from time to time. This dual relic from last year's Diamond Kings set is one of those, at least for me. It looks like last year might have been the last for the Diamond Kings set, as Panini really scaled back their baseball releases after losing their MLBPA license. Has anyone seen or heard of anything else coming out this year besides Donruss and Prizm? I think Diamond Kings would have been a much better fit for a bunch of retired players than Prizm was.

This time, Dylan Carlson shares the spotlight on a Panini jersey card with Alex Kirilloff. Time will tell whether either of these guys will ever fully live up to their earlier prospect hype.

This is probably my favorite of the whole lot. Whitey still has a nice signature for someone who turned 91 last year when the 2022 Topps Archives set was released.

Framed mini cards are best known as being an Allen & Ginter thing, but it's easy to forget that Topps was doing this before 2006 when the first modern A&G set came to be.

Speaking of Allen & Ginter, this card is very... white! I do prefer the mini memorabilia cards to these.

Yadi jersey cards are a bit tougher to come by than your average Cardinal, so I was pretty excited when this card popped out. They even did the rare thing where the jersey color matches the photo on the card.

This one doesn't have a memorabilia swatch or signature on it, but it's still a nice numbered Molina card.

There were also a few non-baseball cards included, like this dual jersey card of former Eagles starting RB Miles Sanders.

Zach Collins rocking a Panini headband?! I didn't know that I needed this, but I'm glad to have it!

The late Caleb Swanigan was part of the same draft as Zach Collins. Hoops autographs usually are on stickers, but they typically have a nice design and this is no exception.

Sunday Funday PWE Round-Up

Catching up with chunky cards from @sanjosefuji and more! 

 

I don't even want to get into how far behind I've fallen in card stuff here or what led to this situation. Let's just look at some cards! The first bunch came over from The Chronicles of Fuji. Fuji managed to cram a sweet stack of memorabilia cards and relics into a small envelope way back when, and I'm excited to finally show them off to you all.

Oooh, even Joey Heisman thinks these cards are pretty sweet!

Of course, Harrington only finished in 4th place in 2001, but he and his school managed to raise his profile enough that he went on to a decently sized (but not terribly successful) NFL career.

Here's a blast from the past -- it's Josh McRoberts, or McBob as he was affectionately known during his short time around here in Portland. This is one of those neat looking letter patches that I own so few of. It's even autographed! It's just a manufactured patch, of course, but it definitely resembles the lettering on the Blazers jerseys at the time during the Adidas days.

The Blazers hits just keep on coming. This signed sticker auto comes from decorated Spanish star Sergio Rodriguez, who spent the latter half of the '00s in the NBA before resurfacing stateside for a season about six years ago. He's still playing professionally these days.

Zach Collins is the NBA's only living and breathing vampire (that we know of.) He's currently a key member of the Spurs after starting his career with Portland.

I think we all know this guy, for better or for worse. There's kind of a strange cut-out for the jersey piece on this card to go along with the wood theme.

Ha is still apparently the only player from South Korea to play in the NBA, which is kind of a cool distinction as he otherwise didn't have much of an impact on the league. He tantalized with his size, but I don't know that the league had as much structure in place twenty years ago to develop raw talent that they do now.

I really liked Gary Trent Jr. while he was with the Blazers and it felt like his trade to Toronto was the beginning of the team's downward slide, even if we didn't know it at the time.

Next up, we have some goodies from long time PWE trader (and Dodger fan) gcrl. A couple of the online exclusive Topps Mini cards were on offer, including this insert from the 2017 set.

This one is even more special as it's numbered to just 25. Ponce de Leon has bounced around a few organizations after his last appears with St. Louis, but he hasn't resurfaced in the big leagues yet.

I also snagged some Allen & Ginter set filling needs from gcrl, including a couple of base cards and this Randy Johnson insert. Will we see a normal late summer release for this year's Allen & Ginter set? I haven't checked the calendars in a bit because my budget for cards has dropped off dramatically of late.

Here's a few more inserts from last year's Ginter set. I kind of want to burn the card at the top.

Lastly, I claimed a few random set fillers from The Angels, In Order back in the winter. (Yeah, it's been awhile!) Those Royals jerseys definitely scream early '00s to me.

The 2014 Topps Heritage New Age Performers design is one of my least favorites. It squishes the player photo over to the side unnecessarily. I get how they were trying to make this look like it should with with the 1965 Topps theme, but it doesn't work for me.

I also claimed this slightly smaller ("mini"...ish) parallel card of Mike Sweeney from the 2005 Bowman Heritage set. I've managed to add some Bowman Heritage cards to my meager set builds since I started trading on TCDB, but that area could still use plenty of work.

Thanks again to everyone who has sent me envelopes of all sizes!

Facebook Can Be Good for Something?

Some Blazers (and a bonus) from @bgmartin76 and a Facebook box break group. 

New basketball cards have become infuriatingly scarce lately, and very costly once actually located. Long before some weird Michael Jordan revival drummed up interest in thirty year old cards of which countless hundreds of thousands (if not millions) were printed, the Luka-frenzy and the Zion-mania started keeping cards out of the hands of the common people. Group breaks are a great thing to fall back on, however, especially with basketball cards where I have far fewer trade partners available to me.

I joined a Facebook group, Ben's Cards and Collectibles Box Breaks, awhile back (Colbey of Cardboard Collections is among its members) and immediately snagged some Blazers spots. The prices are really low, and you get to decide when the cards ship in order to keep costs down even further. Here's a few of the cards I received.

Here's a trio of Blazers from the 2017-18 Panini Revolution set. This particular box was a Chinese New Year box, and the first two cards are of the Chinese New Year variety. (CJ's card is a mere base card pattern, which can be difficult to tell with this set.)

Optic is something I never saw anywhere on the shelves this year, but at the last card show I attended, the dealers had plenty available. It's funny how that works. I've been chipping away at this team set through trades and breaks, but still could use plenty of help. There's a bunch of Dame inserts in this one, and I was fortunate enough to grab two of them.

I haven't bought many baseball slots as it seems that the Cardinals are often reserved already, but I did get to take my chances at last year's Finest. This is a pretty nice looking Yadi card.

From a (basketball) Chronicles break came this Zach Collins rookie card numbered to 150, as it's a blue parallel. I used Zach's name for one of my fantasy teams, and may have ended up cursing his whole season... if not the whole NBA season... if not... well, I'll stop there. Hopefully we'll all see him being a weird vampire dude on the courts again soon.

Young and Patchy

Cardinals and Blazers gems from @CardpocalypseNC officially kick off "Catch Up Month". 

I'm finally back from two separate baseball-themed summer vacations, so it's time to get to work. By work, I mean, post about cards that have been sitting around for months. My goal is to be completely caught up before the month is over. (Where have we heard this before?)

First up is a slick batch of Cards on cards and Blazers on cards from Tim of I Love the Smell of Cardboard in the Morning. The card of the recently demoted Harrison Bader comes from one of those fancy online-only sets that Topps likes to use to line our email inboxes with targeted advertising these days. It's a bit thicker and glossier than your average Topps card, which makes me think it's probably similar to the pricey Topps Now stuff they've been doing for several years now.

Meanwhile, the Yadi photo variation is always appreciated. Even though the 2017 design is one of the worst things I've seen slapped on so-called cardboard, it's always cool to see a memorable moment captured on a baseball card. This one is headed to Erin's collection.

The NBA offseason is so short these days that we're already talking about training camp, contract extensions and things of that nature. CJ just got paid ($$$$), extending his stay in Portland to at least five years by adding on three and one hundred (seasons and million dollars, respectively.)

Zach Collins is someone that a lot of people are excited about, at least in Rip City. Zach is entering his third season and figures to get a ton of minutes now with several frontcourt mainstays departing and Jusuf Nurkic expected to be sidelined for quite awhile yet. He did just suffer an injury in offseason workouts recently, but training camp hasn't been ruled out for him yet.

While shiny Prizm cards are all the rage these days, Zach's green rookie parallel is no match for this super cool (and thick) patch card. It's numbered 13 out of 25.

Thanks again to Tim!

Another Four-Sport Winner

A sportsball trade package. 

The always excellent buckstorecards found another way to smuggle cards across the northern border and into my collection, sending a bounty of Cardinals, Trail Blazers, (American) footballers and even some hockey guys my way. I haven't really figured how how to incorporate hockey cards into the blog yet (or my life, really), but I have a nice little collection of St. Louis Blues cards brewing. They narrowly missed the playoffs this season and narrowly missed the cut for this post.

Minor league baseball cards are always high on the list of stuff I like to see in these sorts of swaps. I even like the new stuff Topps puts out. I just wish the packs were a bit cheaper and more accessible.

Former Cardinals rotation stalwart Jaime Garcia made his last appearances in a Cardinals uniform in last year's flagship Series 1. This is the gold parallel of his Cardinals send off. I miss the old gold borders from past sets.

Marcus Mariota RC Alert! I don't actually recognize what set this is from, but it's a little more substantial than your average set.

Oh, the perils of being a team collector. As I occasionally have to explain, not only do I collect this type of transitional card (player shown with old team, labeled as a Cardinal), but I also collect the reverse of this. If a card depicts a player in a Cardinals uniform, even if he's labeled with his new team, it goes in my collection. (Same rules apply to my Blazers cards.) Does everyone else do this, or am I just weird?

Speaking of the Trail Blazers, it's former big lug of a center Robin Lopez on some sort of red parallel from the 2014-15 Panini Threads set. I bet you already knew that, though, since it says THREADS in huge letters.

The scanner doesn't ever do a good job at showing this, but you can see right through this Nic Batum card. Cool stuff!

Finally, this is a jersey card from Panini's annual "Black Friday" promotion. At the time Black Friday rolled around, it didn't look like Zach Collins would have much of an impact on this year's Blazers team, but he started logging enough key minutes that they eventually sent former lottery pick/project Noah Vonleh packing. (Actually, it's more complicated than that, and Vonleh likely would have stuck around if the team's financial situation wasn't all screwed up right now.)