Baseball is Back!

 

Baseball cards are back as well, and they brought a few other sports with them. 

 

Let's hop in the wayback machine and check out some cards that Sportscards From The Dollar Store sent quite a few months ago -- last year, in fact. Yes, that means that I'm quite a bit behind in the blogging show-and-tell here, but I'm not going to explain myself or make any apologies for it. We're here to look forward, and forward we shall look!

Along with a really nice '78 O-Pee-Chee HOFer came a few Cardinals cards, including another one of those "so weird, it must be Panini!" cards that features a silver ink autograph on a leather swatch. If I'm not mistaken, this might be the one year (2019) that they brought typically high end Leather & Lumber brand to retail, which would also mean it was my first dip into the Panini Points realm.

Like many a pitcher with a rocket arm before him, Trevor Rosenthal seemed to burn hot quickly and then more or less disappear. Since departing St. Louis, where he was a full time closer, Rosenthal has logged big league innings for four other organizations but hasn't made it back to the big leagues since the cursed 2020 "season".

Well, I assume you all know all about Stan the Man's story, so let's just take a beat and enjoy a cool looking card. I'm sure that photo has to be colorized, but I don't care.

Moving on to tackle football, buckstorecards always finds me some really fun Oregon cards. Bonus points should be awarded for catching a Duck in Duck gear.

There's no gear here at all, and this weird Panini Day set seems to have a lot of unaccounted inserts in the TCDB files, which can be a bit frustrating. No, I don't really want to figure out my own checklist for this set. Panini can be a real nightmare when it comes to that stuff.

Haloti Ngata is a very large man, so it must have been difficult to fit him in the frame here,. They almost nailed it, but not quite.

I really like the design of this old Topps Finest Donovan McNabb relic. It has a honeycomb thing going on.

This one isn't bad, either. There's no honeycomb, but there's still a hexagonal jersey swatch.

On the other hand, I feel that this design is unspeakably awful. The glittery background almost reminds me of "snow" on an old TV set. This might have looked better with more of a television theme to it, but what do I know? They don't consult me on these things for some reason.

Here's a Turkey Red design that I don't recognize. Did they ever make tobacco cards that looked like this? (I mean, besides the sticker signature, of course.)

I'll always wonder what Joey Harrington's pro career would have looked like if he had started off with a better franchise that didn't rush him to the field because they didn't really have any other options. He was never a big numbers guy, but he was more of a leadership pro. In the right system, I wonder if he could have thrived.

It's the man of many nicknames, FredEx, The People's Champ, etc. (Most of these he gave to himself.) He only really had that one memorable play, but it was definitely a stunner.

Here's another "bonus points" Ducks card.

Here's the first of a pair of fancy looking Dion Jordan "material" cards. Jordan has a ton of cards, and almost all of them are with him wearing Dolphins gear. He didn't really get a chance to make an impact in the pros until he got to Seattle, though.

How long are these rookie photo shoots for the NFL? There are so, so many different cards out there and so many dorky poses that they have to make.

This counts as a little bit of a patch, doesn't it? I can see a little bit of color there that isn't white.

I wish the careers of De'Anthony Thomas and Patrick Mahomes had overlapped a bit more. I could see DAT getting utilized more as a gadget type player once Mahomes started getting more established.

Our last Duck of a very excellent group of Ducks cards is a "Gold Zone" Score parallel of Penei Sewell, numbered to just 50. You can still find some interesting cards in a lower end product.

There's even a basketball card in the mix. Al-Farouq Aminu was a consistent presence in the peak years of the Blazers "Dame Time" era.

Sports cards with no printed name or photo on the front are a bit weird. I can assure you that this is a Brian Elliott card, a longtime goaltender who was still active in the NHL as recently as last year.

I do love a good team photo, even a hockey one. This is apparently from a 1990-91 Kraft Singles set. I'm not sure if it was a regional thing or a wide release, aside from the copyright info on the back telling us it was a Canadian release of sorts.

Even More Bird Team Cards

 

Ducks, Eagles and Cardinals battle it out. 

 

I'm showing off again. This time it's a package from Dennis of Too Many Verlanders, which means a healthy helping of cards from my favorite bird teams. With the majority of my card activity getting pushed towards TCDB, it's always nice to get a surprise blind mailer in the mail with lots of goodies from an old blogging friend.

Jeremiah Trotter is one of those rare players who had three separate stints with my team. He also played during the Donovan McNabb era, one of the rare points in Eagles history where I was more or less locked in with what they were doing as a fan. (The other times I really followed the team was in the early '90s after discovering Tecmo Super Bowl, the championship year and since Jalen Hurts became the starter.)

John Hightower has a great name for a wide receiver, but he hasn't been able to do much in the league so far.

Because of the gigantic preseason rosters but the relatively restrictive active rosters during the season, Donnel Pumphrey is one of many NFL players who has appeared on a bunch of pro football cards but has never made an official appearance in a counting game. Of course, it's hard to look like a real player when they don't let you wear full pads on your card to begin with.

DeMarco Murray bombed in his one season as an Eagle after a massive season with the rival Cowboys. It was said that he was truly a product of his offensive line, and the Eagles couldn't protect him, I guess. It's either that or he was a secret spy for the bad guys.

Here's another great football name, especially for such a large guy who played on the line.

Todd Pinkston caught a ton of flak for being one of the best of an extremely untalented receiving corps early in Donovan McNabb's career, but he was always solid in 2K for me!

A red bird team slipped in here. Matt Adams certainly looks like he could play a little football.

FredEx basically had just one memorable play in his Eagles career, but boy was it memorable! He caught the 28 yard pass on 4th-and-26 that eventually sunk the Green Bay Packers in the 2003 playoffs. He was a big star at UCLA in the old Pac-10, but he was otherwise best known for being very quotable and thinking very highly of himself.

I was certainly a big fan of Correll Buckhalter, part of the three-headed monster in the backfield that included Duce Staley and Brian Westbrook. It was a shame that he couldn't seem to stay healthy.

We end things with another Cardinal and one of those rubber hockey puck looking manupatch cards. I always like tracking these retail exclusives down because they're usually pretty affordable since they're not taken too seriously by the card bros. (You know who you are, card bros.)

Good Luck Ducks, Week 8: Top 10 Showdown

The first big conference game of the year brings ESPN College Game Day to the yard. 

 

After a bye week, a rested Oregon Ducks squad is back at Autzen to host Chip Kelly's UCLA Bruins. This is the first Chip Kelly team that quite honestly has been any good since he left Oregon a decade ago. UCLA is led by super senior QB Dorian Thompson-Robinson and his scrambling attack. As usual with any Chip Kelly team, they can be fairly unpredictable on offense with an overall goal of keeping the defense out of rhythm.

The Ducks cruised to a win two weeks ago at Arizona and haven't really been challenged by anyone other than Washington State since the opening week debacle. This is the time of year where it actually starts to make sense to start ranking teams, and as fate would have it, both of these teams find themselves in the top ten and looking for control of first place in the conference. This is the first season since expanding from ten teams where divisions have effectively been eliminated except for the purpose of scheduling. This year, the top two teams in the team will face each other in the conference championship game instead of the two division winners. This means that Oregon can't afford to lose to a southern opponent and still expect to get an automatic spot in the December game in Las Vegas. Of course, playing in front of the home crowd with an offense that's really been rolling, losing will be the furthest thing from their minds.

Notes and other things:

• UCLA, of course, is one of the two schools moving to the B1G in a couple of years. They're deserting the only conference they've ever known for more TV money and a potentially wider audience. To me, this seems like it will cause the larger conference to lose its identity, but it might also be the push to make conferences themselves largely irrelevant. It's an interesting shift that flies in the face of tradition. I'll miss the way things were but not the ridiculously overrated and overhyped LA schools.
• Something that hasn't been seen so far this season in Eugene: cold, rainy weather. That's definitely in the forecast today, although It Never Rains in Autzen Stadium.
• College GameDay is in Eugene right now. If you made it down early, you might have scored some free donuts or something. It's interesting that ESPN picked this one as the game is one of the few top tier games today that is being broadcast by FOX.
• UCLA has never been involved in the College Football Playoff discussion and hasn't been to the Rose Bowl since 1998, the first year of the now defunct BCS playoff system and the only BCS appearance they would make. And yet, they are off to greener pastures. Must be nice.

Game time is 12:30 PM PDT on FOX in Eugene. Go Ducks!

Featuring Kevin Kolb

Ducks, Blazers, Eagles and maybe even one Cardinal card headline a package of things received in December. 

 

While I may not be buying new (Topps) baseball cards for the time being, there's still plenty of things to show off here on the blog. From the country up north came another great package from Sportscards from the Dollar Store that, as usual, featured cards from all the sports.

Second year cards of Justin Herbert have naturally been a bit easier to acquire, but I still don't have a ton of them. I stopped signing up for the Chargers in group breaks once Herbert had passed his rookie year, and the prices were starting to get out of hand.

This NBA Hoops Rookie insert of Jermaine O'Neal is really nice looking card for such a budget brand. The "rookie" lettering printed on the card is embossed.

Here's a pair of Bowman Sterling jersey cards from Jonathan Stewart's rookie season. The green parallel on the left is numbered to 299.

And yes, here is Kevin Kolb! If the black borders and block lettering seem familiar, it's because this is from a 2007 set, and Topps used the same basic design as baseball for the other sports. I honestly haven't thought about Kolb in quite awhile, but it's a fun card.

It's too bad that The Original Whizzinator will always be Onterrio Smith's legacy, because he was a terrific running back when he was actually on the field. It looks like the Whizzinator is actually still a thing. There's a website! (I'm not gonna link it.)

I'm going to have to remember to go back and try to fill in my collection with as many Penei Sewell cards as possible from 2021, because offensive linemen don't typically get a lot of cards beyond their rookie year. This is a really nice one, although all of the different colors tend to clash with Sewell's Ducks jersey. Look for Penei's brother Noah to join him in the NFL at some point. He's pretty good as well. I believe there's four Sewell brothers in all.

All of the stars and glitter give this one a bit of a holiday or winter feel.

Here's the lone Cardinals card of the lot, but it's a good one. I'm a big fan of high end base cards, which I know are the source of disappointment for anyone who likes to spend big money on boxes of just a few cards.

Finally, in his fifth season in the league, I have my first Chris Boucher card. He was a favorite of mine at UO. He never got a proper rookie card as he was still injured when he entered the league and went undrafted, and his first official card ended up being in a Panini Instant set that commemorated the Warriors title that year.

From the most recent Panini Chronicles Draft set comes this triple jersey card of the Blazers second round pick. It's a blue parallel that's numbered to just 99.

And here's the Blazers other rookie on a similar triple jersey card. This is the base version, so it's unnumbered. Portland entered the draft with zero picks, but ended up trading their way into Greg Brown, who is a raw prospect but a terrific dunker, and then signed the undrafted Trendon Watford. Watford played his way into the team's rotation before they ended up tearing almost the whole team down about a month ago. Watford even recently signed a long term contract, which is a huge deal for a dude that didn't even get picked.