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!

Featuring Daniel Descalso

More sports cards from an old trading pal. 

 

I've been pouring my time into adding wants and don't-needs to TCDB of late, but I still need to find some time to show off some stuff that people have been sending me this year. This latest edition features cards from Sportscards from the Dollar Store. If you're familiar with past packages of his (or have just traded with him yourself), you probably know that this is going to cover all of the sports! It's been awhile since anyone has had a Daniel Descalso card to send me, so that was already a big highlight.

The America's Pastime cards from last year's Panini Chronicles set are absurdly thick. I'm sure there are autographed versions of these, but it still makes me wonder what they were thinking they these rolled (or, I don't know, plopped?) off the press.

Hell yeah! Daniel Descalso and Greg Oden in the same package? Now we're talking! This gold parallel features a nice above-the-basket shot that you pretty much never see in Panini's cards these days. I don't have a lot of nice things to say about Panini right now, but I'll save that for some other time.

Doug also sent some junk wax era Blazers cards. While the Terry Porter card was just a SkyBox base need (yeah, really), you've probably already noticed that the otherwise normal looking 1991-92 Clyde the Glide card has a strange number on it. It's actually a Tony's Pizza insert (food issue alert!) While I ate a ton of Tony's Pizza back in the day (I was a teenager), I didn't discover that they had basketball cards until the following season. Those 1992-93 Fleer cards were unnumbered, but otherwise looked just like the base set. It's possible that the 1991-92 cards never made it out to my neck of the woods, but I have no way of knowing at this point.

Here's a trio of Ducks players on their 2021-22 NBA Hoops cards. I'm glad that Chris Boucher is finally making his way into card sets.

Here's a really nice, very limited signed card from Joseph Young. Young is the son of Michael Young, the star from Phi Slamma Jamma that wasn't Drexler or Olajuwon. He had a couple of big seasons at UO after transferring from his father's alma mater but has mostly played overseas since turning pro. Doug also sent me a couple of really nice Ducks football cards, but I am going to save them for certain Saturdays in the not so distant future.

There was also a healthy stack of St. Louis Blues cards in the package, including a bunch from the most recent O-Pee-Chee set. These photos all suffer from the boring, closely cropped thing that are a fixture on so many modern cards: entirely devoid of action. Still, it's nice to get my hands on some cards of the players I know from the recent teams. I did not watch a ton of hockey this past season for whatever reason, but I'm always up for watching a game in theory. I wish Portland would get a team.

Strange Blazers and Weird Cardinals

Interesting cards about from @sanjosefuji including my NBA and MLB teams. 

 

The Chronicles of Fuji brought the strangeness recently! A bubble mailer I received from Fuji back in June included a bunch of unique cards, primarily from my top two favorite pro sports teams. Instead of featuring the usual crop of current team dudes, these cards went way back into the all-time team rosters for some fun (and strange) cards.

Ha Seung-Jin came from an era where his status as a huge basketball man was enough to get him drafted, but he always looked completely out of sorts while on the court. I've looked him up occasionally over the years to see if he ended up having a big career overseas, but there isn't a whole lot of data other than that he was a participant for a lengthy time.

Ah yes, Greg Oden. He certainly qualifies as strange. This is a good looking wood paneled style card, numbered to 50.

Martell Webster is one of several Northwest basketball players who ended up starting a career in hip hop, either as a side gig or a post-playing career thing.

From the other team, Fuji sent stuff from several different years, including a couple of 2004 Topps Total card. This is a classic shot of a first year pro player just waiting for his turn to do something.

Even with the power of the internet at my disposal, I couldn't figure out what this card was at all. It's almost paper thing and lots of info on the back, but the front looks like it was spit out of an '80s dot matrix printer.

It's a super early Yadi card! This is really cool. This is actually a "gold edition" version of his regular Just Minors card. I don't know a whole lot about Just, but they certainly made some weird cards over the years.

The most exciting card of the bunch by far was this Jose DeLeon, my first 1991 Topps Desert Shield card! I've been reading about this gold foil stamped set for nearly thirty years now, but never owned (or even touched) a single copy of something from this set until now. I've gone so far as to have a card or two in my shopping cart at certain websites before, but never quite could pull the trigger.

Lastly, Fuji was one of the latest to help out with my 2020 Turkey Red quest. I knocked off another four from my list today thanks to a recent blaster pickup. Please let me know if you're able to contribute!

On the Brink

Baseballers and basketballers from @CardJunk as I try to make sense of the intersecting seasons. 

A big heap of cards from my two favorite teams arrived the other day, courtesy of old-school card blogger Cardboard Junkie. This blog was around when people still had to use clicky things to navigate to their favorite "websites" instead of sliding their greasy fingers across a tiny piece of a glass-like slab. The Grouchy Junkie sent over some Blazers cards, some Cardinals and a bunch of set needs from the wayback machine (circa 2006-07). I thought I'd lead with some basketball cards because the Blazers are on the brink of elimination in the NBA Playoffs, with a Game 5 against the Warriors set for tomorrow night. It's been a remarkable season for Damian Lillard and a bunch of relatively unknown guys, a team expected to finish at the bottom of the conference and win no more than 25-35 games. Hopefully there are even bigger things on the horizon for this fun to watch group.

I remember getting these cards in my cereal and noting how frustrating they were. They're just slightly too big to fit in a normal 9-pocket page, or penny sleeve, or top loader, or really anything. It's not even a Topps Big Baseball situation. It's just kind of random. I'm pretty sure I had the Hakeem Olajuwon card from this set and maybe another one, but definitely not The Glide. This is now my 176th unique Drexler card.

I am pretty sure this is my first Blazers McBob card. I miss Fleer. Ultra wasn't always the best, but it certainly held its own.

I've been reading Breaks of the Game lately, David Halberstam's informative but somewhat rambling book about life in the NBA at the end of the '70s. It focuses on the Blazers in particular. It's definitely helped fill in a lot of information gaps in my brain, having been raised to listen to and watch the Blazers since birth. I heard a lot about the '77 championship team and have seen the final game in its entirely, plus a bit of archival footage. My first memories of listening to and/or watching games came about a few years later, so the book has done a good job filling in the years after the Bill Walton blowup. Lloyd Neal's card is from the championship season, when Topps was experimenting with card sizes (this set is HUGE, dimensionally speaking).

From Walton-to-Oden, the franchise has been cursed with serious injuries to core members (not to mention poor draft choices and, for a time, mismanagement.) This card actually comes apart in the middle and can be slotted back together. I don't know, it's weird.

On to baseball... St. Louis baseball! (Portland baseball was exterminated.) There are several Bo Hart candidates on this year's team, players who get inexplicably hot from the moment they are called up. Jeremy Hazelbaker and Aledmys Diaz could quality, although Diaz was a guy that was imported from Cuba and given a serious MLB contract. Hazelbaker is a guy who had been flushed out of a couple of organization's minor league systems before ending up on this year's Cardinals. This year's team has beaten up on bad teams and has looked feeble against good teams, good enough for a just-barely-above .500 record.

I've mentioned this several times recently because I'm excited about it, but I will be up in Seattle to catch the series against the Cardinals next month. The last time I got to see St. Louis play here in the Northwest, Bud Smith was on the mound and things did not go well.

Carlos Martinez has, once again, looked like the best pitcher in the Cardinals rotation. He was pulled early from his last start and has been pushed back a couple of days (until Saturday) for his next outing. Supposedly he's not hurt. Supposedly!

HAMM! No one has sent me more than one Hamm so far, so JediJeff remains Hamm King for now.

For a number of years, there was no flagship Fleer set even as there were many other Fleer sets. Some have decided that Fleer Tradition replaced (Plain Ol') Fleer for these lost years, but how do you explain this 2002 Fleer set?

I wonder what Scott Rolen is up to these days. I wonder if he has Tony La Russa's face on a dartboard at home, just for when he gets bored?

Every time I get a Tyler Johnson card, I'm reminded of my plan to collect a an autograph of every member of the 2006 and 2011 World Series teams. I should get on that someday. I have a few Tyler Johnson autos at this point, but I am less optimistic about Scott Rolen.

Waino hasn't pitched like an Elite pitcher this year, but he is showing signs of "turning it around", which in baseball lingo means competency.

As mentioned above, part of this trade package was a bunch of cards from 2006/2007 sets, Bazooka and Allen & Ginter. This one is headed straight for my Cardinals collection, however. I don't have many Grudz cardz in a Cardinal uniform as he just spent the one season with St. Louis. He did well.

With the Cardinals currently playing the Angels in a series in Anaheim, I thought it best to leave you with this card. If both teams had a chance to reconsider the Pujols contract today, I wonder what would happen. How much would the Cardinals offer Albert in hindsight? Would the Angels want to sign him at all?

Cursed

The Portland Trail Blazers are cursed. It's high time that I finally admit this to myself and publicly as well. My sad admission comes on the news that promising young guard Elliot Williams will likely miss the entire season with a torn Achilles tendon. This news actually made me sick to my stomach. He suffered through double knee surgery to miss his rookie season, and finally found himself on the court and making strides last season when he injured his shoulder. An Achilles injury can rob someone of their explosiveness, and is especially worrisome with a player whose best skill is his explosiveness.

Does any of this sound familiar? Greg Oden, the number one pick from now what seems like ages ago, is gone. He may or may not ever play again. He missed his rookie season with a major knee injury and would proceed to find himself on crutches more often than not for the rest of his Blazers career. He supposedly plans on sitting this upcoming season out before making another go at basketball, and if he ever wears an NBA uniform again it almost certainly won't be Portland's.

Yes, the team that drafted Sam Bowie over Michael Jordan and Oden over Durant has a curse, and I don't know what to do about it. I am stuck with this team. I root them on each season and I curse the names of the players like Bill Laimbeer, Vlade Divac, Sean Elliott and Shaquille O'Neal who have bedeviled them in various ways throughout NBA history. I should have been shocked that such a promising young player like Elliot Williams had another season end before it was even close to beginning, but I was just sad. And it's all the more strange that I actually got somewhat excited about new basketball cards hitting the shelf recently. 

I picked up a 5-card pack of 2012-13 NBA Hoops to post on APTBNL and also grabbed a jumbo pack because I figured there might be a Blazer inside. It turns out, as you can see, that I did pretty well in that department. I snagged both of the Blazers top draft picks, who up until this point remained relatively uninjured. There's actually talk that the Lillard kid may contend for Rookie of the Year, last won by a certain guy named Brandon Roy that was The Franchise until his knees turn to chalk dust. I am also going to pretend that this Roy player is still retired and never played for anyone but Portland because LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU LA LA LA.

I thought I'd be equitable and show off some non-Blazers cards from the jumbo pack. Here's another awkward studio pose of a rookie from draft day, presumably. The NBA is really going for the retro look this year with the caps and the novelty basketballs. These draft day caps scream 1990, which fits very well with the resuscitation of the NBA Hoops brand. Austin Rivers, I should mention, is the son of former player and current Celtics coach Doc Rivers.

I don't actually know who John Henson is, but he really wants you to know that he belongs in the draft and isn't some dude who happened to be wearing snappy clothing and sneaked in the back door.

One of the only good things about the last abomination of a season was the new Wizards uniforms. They're fantastic. I hope they never change, though I've never been sold on the Wizards name itself.

Booooooooooooo. Karl Malone is the enemy. Every NBA set seems to like to pad its numbers with past stars, but Malone was the only retired player that I got in my jumbo pack.

From one of my least favorite players of years past to one of my least favorites of present day, here's "El Heat" forward LeBron James. I won't own this card long, I can assure you.

As I mentioned last week, I received a bunch of Blazers cards recently from Life and Baseball Cards. I figured since I was already on the subject, I'd show off some of the goods from that portion of the trade.

There's going to be a lot riding on the shoulders of LaMarcus Aldridge now with the Blazers effectively in rebuilding mode. Can Aldridge withstand the possibility of some of his peak years being wasted on a team that doesn't have much hope of making noise in the playoffs, let alone making the playoffs at all? He's already tasted the playoffs twice in his career. I am fearful of him becoming the next Kevin Garnett, who couldn't ever get over the hump with a shallow supporting cast in Minnesota during his prime before moving to Boston to win in his twilight years. I am also fearful of him realizing the situation he is in and wanting out. After all, it seems to be a pretty popular sentiment in the NBA right now.

This is a great card. Rainbow lasers are shooting out of Buck. One of the unfortunate turns of events in Portland is the complete overhaul of the coaching staff, which came as a result of Nate McMillan's firing last season. One of his assistants was Buck Williams, a nice link to fond past memories. It's too bad that they aren't really keeping any of these guys around now under new head coach Terry Stotts.
  

Last season also marked the comeback and the end of Joel Przybilla's career as a Blazer. He probably doesn't have many more meaningful NBA minutes in him, which is weird thing to say about someone who is a gifted professional athlete and four (!) years younger than me. On an unrelated now, I am sad now.

Sergio Rodriguez played in the Olympics? Sergio Rodriguez played in the Olympics!

This man had his own book and movie before he ever set foot on an NBA court. His Wikipedia entry is rather fascinating. I'm not sure why the first sentence in the section on his NBA career is just some random sentence about some stats he accumulated in one game, but who am I to criticize Wikipedia editors?

I'm also fascinated by this Rookie Slam! card. Martell Webster is a good dude. I root for them, even though he plays or most recently has played for a division rival.

Lonestarr included some jersey cards in the Blazers mix, which was a really nice surprise. Here's a pensive looking Greg Oden who at the time had still yet to take the court in a NBA uniform. Yet, he has a "game used" jersey swatch somehow. I feel like Oden made this face a lot.

This jersey design from Panini is kind of a cool concept. It's supposedly an actual piece of the uniform Webster wore during the Blazers Christmas Day game in 2009, when the Blazers beat the Nuggets on national TV. I probably should have saved it for the holiday, though.

And finally, here's a non-Blazer card. Aaron Brooks is a former Oregon Duck, one of the few that is still active (along with Luke Ridnour and Ivan Johnson - I guess?)