A Labor Day Weekend PWE Round-Up

 

A few more PWEs if you please. 

 

Heading into the long weekend, it's time to look at a few more small envelopes that were sent my way earlier this year. First up is a batch from A Penny Sleeve for Your Thoughts. Jon had a series of giveaways awhile back and I ended up claiming one of the cards. A few friends like this fancy card of the Oregon Ducks mascot came along for the ride.

I still don't have all of the various old TCMA sets completely sorted out in my brain, but someday I'll end up with all of my team needs here. Gibby's photo is a bit washed out here, but at least it's not colorized.

The Fleer Greats sets of the '00s are some of my favorites. I am surprised I didn't have this card already, but now it's mine for real.

The Topps Turkey Red offerings for NBA are a bit weird, as the players are drawn with all of these weird backgrounds that are supposed to show them on a neighborhood playground or perhaps a community gym. These are red parallels, of course.

The card I claimed is actually a red parallel from the more familiar baseball Turkey Red counterpart. For a spell, Cliff Lee was one of the best pitchers in baseball.

Next up is a few cards from gcrl that I received back in May when the Big League set was a bit newer. I had trouble finding packs or blasters of the stuff initially, and even resorted to buying a couple of overpriced fat packs at a baseball game to satiate my cravings for a dumb new Topps product.

This is actually the second 1998 Leaf fractal-something-or-other card I've posted in the last week or so, but this is a "Foundations" card instead of the previously shown "Materials" one. I am not sure about what they were trying to do here. It's another glossy, shiny numbered card from the '90s that I needed, though.

I still haven't seen any 2022 or 2021 Bowman Heritage cards, packs or boxes in person since the online exclusives were bundled together and released earlier this year, aside from what I've received in a couple of trades through the mail. I am hoping these end up showing up in future quarter boxes someday down the road.

Camo parallels are not typically my favorite thing, this Panini Prizm rookie card of Kolten Wong from 2014 has such an Atari 2600 look to it that I can't help but love it. I should try to find more of these.

The last little bunch of cards came from The Diamond King. I believe this was another blog giveaway/tradeaway from last spring. I picked up a few Allen & Ginter inserts for my 2020 set build, including this pair of old historic structures.

This is the first card I'd even seen from the 9 Ways to First mini set. The odds for these must be a bit lower than other minis I've seen. I always appreciate when one of these insert concepts is actually baseball themed, even though I do like the sets with weird animals and such.

Speaking of weird animals, who doesn't love a good sea creature? I often flip on the nature shows that they run all day on BBC America on Saturdays to put on in the background when nothing else is going on. That tradition will probably have to end if I can ever finally manage to break away from having a traditional cable subscription. It's way past time to cut the cord.

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.

A Big Box of Bo Cards

 
@BoRosny, not Bo Jackson. 

Right before the big blog anniversary group break, long time blogger Bo of Baseball Cards Come To Life! contacted me about trade involving a vintage project he had going. I cobbled together what I could, vintage-wise, and made sure Bo had a sizable package coming back in the group break. The sheer volume of what I got back was crazy, though!

Check these stacks of (mostly) '00s set building fodder! Great stuff. I don't see a lot of cards from these sets in trade packages anymore, now that there's more than a decade between these sets and the present day.

Let's look back into the past at some of these.

Ooh, a Bowman exclusive rookie card? What does that even mean? Tell me, Omar Infante!

Here's Jason Isringhausen, not long before he became the Cardinals closer for the mid-'00s years.

It's FOX broadcaster Eric Karros. Karros was coming up right when my interest in cards was dying out.

It's Tim Raines... Jr? Huh.

Besides the wonderfully black & white 2001 Bowman Heritage set, there were cards from other sets. Like this guy. Bear Bay is the name. Baseball on the sun is his game.

2002 Bowman Heritage brought us the weird signature box, but The Big Hurt isn't fazed about it.

1953 Topps is such a nice design.

Hey, it's the recently deposed Cardinals skipper in a Giants uniform!

Speaking of Cardinals, Bo included a healthy share of Cardinals for my team collecting needs (aka the biggest needs). It doesn't appear that I had a first year (2006) Allen Craig card in my collection, so this is certainly cool.

Speaking of cool, I am always pleased to add another Jim Edmonds card to my collection. And yet, I need so much more!

I always thought @ithrow88 was one of the best Twitter names.

One thing I have discovered in trying to figure out what was going on with cards in the long period of time where I didn't care about cards is that Tino Martinez had a lot of Cardinals cards. That surprises me, for some reason.

We end with a Finest card, which was in its 9th year at this point. Did they still have the protective coating for this set? I always want to peel that stuff off, but I don't for some reason.

Some Old Throwbacks

I enjoy these older new sets fashioned after much older cards. 

Mr. Haverkamp was the big winner way back in January for the annual Cards on Cards bowl pick 'em dealie, and as a big thanks for his prize, he sent me a big stack of old cards from sets I collect. Specifically, these are mostly from sets that came out before this blog was a thing (10+ years ago) and I wasn't really collecting. I really like these sets, and should probably spend more time on them. Fortunately, thanks to one gracious contest winner, I am a bit closer to these goals. I am in the process of digging up some stuff to send back because I certainly wasn't expecting to receive anything back for sending out a prize.

There were a bunch of cards in the package, so I just chose my favorite from each set.

Carl Everett doesn't (or didn't... does anyone know what he's been up to these days) believe in dinosaurs, and almost in a comical way. I have no recollection of him actually playing for the Mariners. He was one of the guys who showed up on prospect cards in the early '90s when I was still a teenaged collecting geek who went on to have a career largely out of my consciousness.

Every card I've ever seen from the 2002 Bowman Heritage set has a facsimile autograph on the front where Freddy Garcia's name is. Did they misplace his rookie contract? Did his autograph look like something mildly offensive? I don't know the story behind this. It's strange to think that Garcia was at one point considered Seattle's ace.

Did you know there was another Garciaparra? Me neither. His tale isn't nearly as tragic as Larry Yount's, but his Wikipedia entry is rather short (and short of intrigue).

Mr. Haverkamp sent me two foil parallels from the 2007 Bowman Heritage set, and the other one was a good-for-nothing Cub. We get cheatin' Manny by default.

Speaking of cheating... nah, this obviously isn't Starling Marte. I like the older Heritage sets before MLB and Topps came to the agreement to tighten up their rookie card/prospect rules because they contain a lot of names that came and went before I ever heard mention of them. I do think it limited their collecting appeal a bit, though.