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.

Another Four-Sport Winner

A sportsball trade package. 

The always excellent buckstorecards found another way to smuggle cards across the northern border and into my collection, sending a bounty of Cardinals, Trail Blazers, (American) footballers and even some hockey guys my way. I haven't really figured how how to incorporate hockey cards into the blog yet (or my life, really), but I have a nice little collection of St. Louis Blues cards brewing. They narrowly missed the playoffs this season and narrowly missed the cut for this post.

Minor league baseball cards are always high on the list of stuff I like to see in these sorts of swaps. I even like the new stuff Topps puts out. I just wish the packs were a bit cheaper and more accessible.

Former Cardinals rotation stalwart Jaime Garcia made his last appearances in a Cardinals uniform in last year's flagship Series 1. This is the gold parallel of his Cardinals send off. I miss the old gold borders from past sets.

Marcus Mariota RC Alert! I don't actually recognize what set this is from, but it's a little more substantial than your average set.

Oh, the perils of being a team collector. As I occasionally have to explain, not only do I collect this type of transitional card (player shown with old team, labeled as a Cardinal), but I also collect the reverse of this. If a card depicts a player in a Cardinals uniform, even if he's labeled with his new team, it goes in my collection. (Same rules apply to my Blazers cards.) Does everyone else do this, or am I just weird?

Speaking of the Trail Blazers, it's former big lug of a center Robin Lopez on some sort of red parallel from the 2014-15 Panini Threads set. I bet you already knew that, though, since it says THREADS in huge letters.

The scanner doesn't ever do a good job at showing this, but you can see right through this Nic Batum card. Cool stuff!

Finally, this is a jersey card from Panini's annual "Black Friday" promotion. At the time Black Friday rolled around, it didn't look like Zach Collins would have much of an impact on this year's Blazers team, but he started logging enough key minutes that they eventually sent former lottery pick/project Noah Vonleh packing. (Actually, it's more complicated than that, and Vonleh likely would have stuck around if the team's financial situation wasn't all screwed up right now.)