Baseball cards take a back seat in this @forgotaboutblay hobby delivery.
As jokes continue to swirl around the internet about the length of a certain professional football quarterback's retirement (it wasn't long), I thought I'd show off some stuff from another stellar batch of cards from Dennis of Too Many Verlanders fame. A good chunk of my football (Ducks, mostly) collection has been supplied by Dennis, so like how the long awaited opening of Spring Training ended up taking a backseat to the news of a certain former Michigan QB deciding to... whatever the opposite of hanging up your cleats is... the football cards are going to throw themselves fully in front of the baseball stuff for now.
First up, the Arik Armstead card from Panini National Treasures is an instant favorite. The design is pretty nice, but it's the throwback uniforms that really seal it for me.
This color parallel ends up clashing a bit with the Oregon uniforms, but there are a lot of colors that clash with their uniforms. (At times, their own uniforms have clashed with themselves.)
Speaking of Ducks uniforms, I actually really liked their jerseys from the Dennis Dixon era. It was easy to call out the crosshair pattern on the shoulders, but I kind of liked it!
Here's another look. This is from a Press Pass jersey card. Is Press Pass still a thing? I haven't a lot of college draft cards since Marcus Mariota turned pro, aside from the odd Panini Prizm thing.
DeMarco Murray won't be the most fondly remembered Philadelphia Eagles player, but the Donruss Dominator inserts look pretty nice.
Flipping over to basketball for a bit, this Panini Totally Certified design always annoyed me. It's great to have a large place for the player to sign, but they've cropped so much of the photo that it makes for a bit of an ugly card. The reason they did this, I imagine, is because they're using college photos due to the longer lead time needed to have these signed on-card. Totally Certified seems to have been banished to the Panini attic for now (it doesn't even appear in Chronicles), while the regular Certified brand lives on.
It's back to football here with an extra shiny Prizm Draft auto.
Here's one last football card before we let the baseball guys have a bit of fun. I did hold back a few of the huge stack of signed cards for a future Ducks post, as I tend to do.
If you're strictly a baseball fan and are still reading this-- thank you! Mid-'90s Score parallels/inserts are a favorite of mine, as they don't seem to be too expensive and yet I still seem to need a ton of them.
Dennis sent a healthy stack of 1996 Flair cards, which offer a high end look in an era of overproduction. They are fancy, but not all that expensive anymore.
Imagine returning to collecting baseball cards after more than a decade off and finding out that someone really made baseball cards like this. Well, that's exactly what happened to me. I found a lot of things about card collecting (Chrome, in particular) to be really eye-rolling when I first got back into it, but this is the right kind of silliness.
This pair of Press Proof parallels from 1997 Donruss claim a print run of just 2000. That doesn't seem like a lot by today's standards, but I bet it would be a huge ordeal to put together a whole set of these.
Lastly, Topps Finest cards are always appreciated here. Two of these gems from 1994 are refractors. I bet you can guess which ones.
