Sunday, December 29, 2019

My Secret Santa Brought Me Turkey


A heaping helping of one of my all-time favorite sets from @cardboardgreats plus some Redbird needs. 

I entered this year's Secret Santa pool, currently operated by Jon of A Penny Sleeve for Your Thoughts (I happened to draw The Lost Collector). My Santa was Henry of Cardboard Greats, who is a fan of those New England area teams. You know the ones.

Turkey Red is a favorite of mine, and something that tends to get buried in my want lists as the primary sets from their revival are now well over a decade old. As such, it was very exciting receive a stack of these cards, all from the 2005 edition.


Here's one of an active(ish) player, with CC set to hang it up after suffering an injury in the playoffs this past fall.


I really love the color parallels in these sets, which is what made the 2007 set (and subsequent smaller releases) a bit disappointing. Eric Hinske isn't a name we've heard in awhile!


Here's Johan Santana on another red parallel. This one is a variation as it has the Turkey Red ad back instead of the usual text. It's interesting that Santana stuck with #57 for his entire career, considering most guys switch to a lower number once they begin to get established. It must have had some sort of significance to him.


I had never seen one of these gold parallels before. This card of the Hall of Famer (and current Nugenix pitchman) Frank Thomas is numbered to just 50. I didn't even mention these on my wants at the time, but will gladly take any of these. They are so much nicer than the Chrome parallels from the 2007 set.


Henry, er... I mean, Santa also knew that I am a big Cardinals fan, and hit up my want lists accordingly. I can't help but post a scan of every Fleer Greats card that I acquire, including this Dizzy Dean from 2002.


There were several cards from the 2005 Bowman Heritage collection included. David Eckstein will represent the bunch.


Flashing forward to 2019, here's an insert from the current Panini Prizm set. Can someone grant Panini an exception to the Topps exclusivity thing and get some logos on these cards? There's a reason Prizm is so popular in other sports.


And for the grand finale, it's a Paul DeJong 2019 Topps Heritage autograph. There's not much more to say here except that I love it!

I'll have a couple more holiday-related things to show off this week, and then we'll head back to catching up on stuff from the fall.

4 comments :

  1. I had no idea that you were such a fan of the '05 Turkey Red set, now that I know this, you're probably going to be receiving more sometime in the very near future. BTW, I never knew of the gold's either, they look pretty good though. And I'm all for Panini being able to show logos in their Prizm baseball sets, I really wish that they would've been able to do so for the 2013 edition.

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  2. Gold bordered Turkey Red HOFer.....that's a complete win-win!

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  3. That gold bordered Thomas is awesome! The DeJong autograph isn't too shabby either.

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  4. Henry sent some nice singles! I've never seen a gold parallel from this set, either.

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