Two Unrelated Things

Basketball cards from @ElCaminoBilly meet baseball cards from @flywheels in a blowout. 

Sometimes, I will get stuff in the mail from different people that still carry a thematic similarity. Other times, there's really nothing in common. This is one of those other times. Billy from Cardboard History sent over some Blazers cards from this past season's Panini Revolution set, one of those many Panini sets that comes and goes without me even noticing it, because I focus a lot of my attention on baseball.

It's a flashy set, as you can see. Like everything Panini, everything either is or resembles a parallel of something else. Nurk looks like he's about to be sucked into a pixelated void here if he's not careful.

Rookie Zach Collins gets a slightly different design because of his rookie status. He looks somewhat nonplussed about it.

Billy has done some great work on the basketball side over at TCDB. Check it out if you have some time.

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Meanwhile, on the other side of the sports spectrum, Colbey from Cardboard Collections hosted another Affordable Group Break. This time, 2003 Upper Deck 40 Man was featured, a novel idea that I wish someone would revisit one of these days. I always want baseball card sets to be as large as possible, because it's always informative (and fun!) to get a card of someone who is on the fringes of the league.

Izzy was never on the fringes, though. He was brought in to St. Louis to solidify the back of their bullpen, and did the job well on the whole. I don't think the Cards really had a steady closer after Lee Smith until Isringhausen came along. Also, I realize that I'm using the words "steady" and "Isringhausen" in the same sentence, so I want to apologize to my mid-'00s self.

Okay, fine. This isn't the greatest design. A lot of the photos are closely cropped.

Woody! Does anyone know what Woody Williams is up to these days?

If you're into the Facebook, check out Colbey's Affordable Group Breaks group on that platform. I'd link it, but I'm not really sure how that works -- but let me know if you want an invite or something. (All the breaks are posted on his blog, too.)

Al & Al

Just a couple of bangin' @BubbaStup hits. 

Good news! The cards from my 10th anniversary break are almost completely shipped. There's just a few stragglers left, and I promise they will be out the door before summer is officially over. (Fun fact: Summer is not yet officially over.) Matt from Bubba's Bangin' Batch of Baseball Bits was kind enough to donate an entire unopened box to the break, as we've discussed here, but I never showed off these two great cards that he sent along for my personal stash.

While the Pujols jersey was certainly a surprise, I wasn't prepared for Matt parting with a hand-numbered card from Allen & Ginter, as he is a collector of all things Ginter.

It's a rare "Brooklyn Back"! While I'm not wild that the numbering was done over some of the printing on the card instead of an available white space, I'm guessing that Topps has to dip into a pretty shallow labor pool to get people to do stuff like this. That has to be tedious. Of course, I've also never understood how any professional athlete can sign so many autographs in their lifetime. It seems awful.

I love this card, however, and I am still hoping that Alex Reyes will be able to come back someday and be an important piece of the Cardinals puzzle.

Good Luck Ducks, Week 2: In-State Business

Oregon gets another tune-up. 

The Ducks play Portland State this week in an interstate match against an FCS opponent from the Big Sky. PSU was a replacement for a previously scheduled game against Texas A&M, who likely faced a mandate from the SEC to not schedule games against anything more formidable than a clown college. (I sure do loathe the SEC.) Part of me feels like the Ducks play Portland State pretty frequently, yet I can't actually remember writing any of these previews about them.

Oregon was a mixed-bag last week, uniforms aside. (Numbers were, as advertised, huge.) They took awhile to get going, and then blasted through the competition in the second quarter. The second half wasn't nearly as eventful, but it still seemed a step up (anything would be) from last season's comatose second halves.

Hey, speaking of last season... HAHAHAHA Florida State... wow.

Okay, I'm done with that. Moving it along, the Vikings are a Big Sky conference team with a rich history for a smaller (in sports) scale school, but they went winless last year and seem to be pretty dreadful even amongst their own ranks. This should be a walk in the park. Of note, PSU actually has the highest enrollment (community college aside) of any school in the state, but they're largely a commuter school in a major urban environment, so there's not a lot of campus cheer, exactly. I also pass through it every day on my way to work.

At any rate, it's time to take care of some business this week. Hopefully some second and third teamers get a lot of experience.

Links:

• ESPN gives Oregon pretty dismal chances at winning out (i.e. all of their games) and winning the conference, which seems pretty ridiculous considering they're one of the same outlets fueling the Herbert Heisman Hype Train. No one in the Pac-12 has convinced me that they're better than the Ducks, nor have I been convinced that the Ducks are better than anyone else... so basically, I give everything a 50/50 chance?
• I totally missed this, and it seems like a huge deal. The Ducks have incorporated the pistol offense this year, with the hiring of running backs coach Jim Mastro. I have been silently critical of this formation, which seems like it can't decide between a shotgun and an under center formation, but what do I know? Mastro apparently invented the thing, so I guess we should give him some leeway. In any case, it seems like its immediate presence in the Ducks offense was underestimated.
• Know Your Opponent: The Vikings (or the Viks as they unfortunately insist on being called) have 57 freshman on their roster. Yikes! (does not rhyme with Viks, I swear.)
• The Unis!: Greeeeeeeeeeeen. I love this.

Apparently, Oregon hasn't played PSU since 2010. That doesn't seem right, but let's check it out anyway.

Game time is 11:00 AM PDT on the Pac-12 Network. No idea who is going to be calling this one, but guess is it will be the same team (Roxy Bernstein, Anthony Herron and Lewis Johnson) since they seemed like they were content to be posted up in Eugene for an extended period.

Another Variety Pack

Buckstorecards is still all about variety. 

Just a couple of weeks after receiving stuff from Sportscards From The Dollar Store (see last week's post), another package showed up in my mailbox. This one was, once again, full of goodies from several major sports. My favorite thing about receiving cards from Canada is that there's often O-Pee-Chee goodness inside of them. This time, there were a bunch of OPC cards from the '70s, which is great news for me and my collection.

How do we know these cards are O-Pee-Chee from looking at the scans?

Check the backs! The 1971 O-Pee-Chee set had some of the coolest card backs around. Look at those crazy floating heads just bursting out of the middle of the card! (Sorry, boring 1975 backs.)

I've been in the Honus Bonus Business lately (HBB?), and this card of the former Cardinals shortstop added to my collection. I'm starting to actually make some headway in this weird, weird set.

I always get hockey cards in these packages, which makes me feel like a bad hockey fan... because I am a bad hockey fan. Maybe this season will finally be the year that I watch some games before the playoffs start. (Didn't I say this last year?)

As always, some excellent Ducks cards were found here. I just scanned a couple of them while saving some whoppers for game days. This low numbered DeForest Buckner card from his rookie season looks great, even though the Ducks don't usually do red.

And here's Marcus Mariota on a numbered card from the brand new Score set. I'm hoping for a big bounceback season from Marcus, who recently worked with his alma mater to assist in hurricane relief efforts in Hawaii. Knowing what he's capable of, it will not surprise me to see him on the leaderboards this NFL season.

Lukewarm at Best

I didn't need this, and I don't know if I even paid the right price. 

I made a mistake on Friday. It wasn't on the level of the worst cardboard atrocities, but I saw a fat pack of Topps Fire on the Target shelf and put the bare minimum of thought into it. At first, I thought the pack was just somehow leftover from last year (they wouldn't put this set out again, would they?!), but no... no... somehow, there was already another new release out from Topps.

Did I like this set last year? No! It's pretty much everything I don't like about cards these days, aside from being fully licensed, of course. Had I given this purchase even 10 more seconds of brain juice, I am sure I would have put it back. Maybe I thought the cards would look... different... this time? At any rate, I bought the pack, took it home, realized I had most likely paid $9.99 for it (why?! blasters are only $20 and you get four times as many cards) and... opened the stupid thing anyway.

The backs are... how do they get away with this, exactly? This isn't the cheapest set out there. Is it actually true that the cheaper the price point is, the better the backs are?

Here's the rest of the base cards in the pack. Lots of, um, art in those backgrounds.

Now that I've gotten all my complaining out of the way, let's look at the trade bait. This Amed Rosario card is numbered to 99, which is the first sign I didn't get completely stiffed on this pack.

Here's Mookie Betts on a Hot Starts insert. People seem to like him, so I'm sure I'll find a home for this.

One of the promised twelve cards in the pack is an exclusive "blue chip" parallel, which is what Greg Bird must be. I didn't notice this was blue in any way until I scanned it.

Can't complain about a Trout card. This is all giving me a headache, though.

Maybe I am just grumpy that it's September now.

Good Luck Ducks, Week 1: Here We Go Again

The Ducks begin a new season in a familiar position, with a preseason Top 25 ranking. 

I don't remember the first time the feeling came over me, but I'm quite certain it was only a week or two into the 2017. I felt like we were going to be looking back on an aberration. An anomaly. The Taggart Year. Let us never speak of him again, because it's time for a brand new Ducks season, and it's time to be cautiously optimistic! There's a new head coach... again.

Oregon has a cushy schedule and carries a #24 ranking into their first game. It's going to be difficult to improve on that, not only with their less-than-lackluster nonconference schedule, but also with the entire Pac-12 Conference getting their collective teeth kicked in last year. The Ducks return with a Heisman Trophy candidate in Justin Herbert, plus all around standouts like Jalen Jelks, Thomas Graham Jr., Troy Dye, Ugo Amadi and Tony Brooks-James. Hey, I named some guys I remember!

Tonight's opponent is the Bowling Green Falcons, an FBS school from the MAC Conference. They're from Ohio, a state which counts Skyline Chili among their accomplishments. Would it surprise you to know that Bowling Green has always reminded me of lawn bowling, something I've never really witnessed but assume is a thing that fancy old rich people do on Sunday mornings.

Here are some links to get you accustomed to Football Season again:

• The Heisman Hype is real for Justin Herbert. As I mentioned last winter, his prospects are going to ride on how many wins Oregon can rack up. And, you know, health. He's definitely got the skills. It was absurd how the entire team looked like they had eaten at Arby's when he was sidelined.
• Jim Leavitt's return as defensive coordinator just about overshadowed the head coaching hire of Mario Cristobal. While Cristobal will most likely get his chance to put his stamp on this team, Leavitt's progress with the defense will be one of the most interesting things to watch after the hugely positive changes made last season.
• Oh, hey, look -- they're selling alcohol at Autzen Stadium now. Hopefully, that will mean that the seats won't be half-empty during the third quarter this season.
• Know Your Opponent: Bowling Green is looking back to a win over Pitt for inspiration, apparently.
• The Unis!: All yellow. The numbers are huge this year in their latest redesign. I guess I'm going to have to reserve judgment until I see them in action. The wings are back on the helmet presumably for the entire season, so I won't be mentioning them anymore unless something changes.

I'm not great with research, but I couldn't find any indication that Oregon has played a MAC opponent before. So let's check out Justin Herbert's first win as a starter, in a game where new starting running back Tony Brooks-James had a standout game, leading the team in rushing.

Game time is 5:00 PM PDT on the Pac-12 Network. Roxy Bernstein, Anthony Herron and Lewis Johnson will be on the call.

Variety Pack

Buckstorecards is all about variety. 

Whenever I get something in the mail from Sportscards From The Dollar Store, I know that it's never going to be boring. Usually all three, and sometimes four, major sports are represented, and that was certainly the case with the stuff I got back in May. I actually got two packages from our friend within the span of a couple of weeks. I'll save the second one for a later post.

Plenty of Trail Blazers were to be had, included a whole stack of Panini Prizm Mosaic cards. I guess I can't fully blame Panini for the rainbow parallel madness that has affected some of their products because they probably learned it by watching Bowman.

The cards all have this diamond shaped design to them, and were made available as a completely separate set from the regular Prizm product. Necessary? Probably not. But they look good.

The base (?) card scanned the best. Biggie Swanigan looks good here. It'll be interesting to see if Swanigan can get more playing time this season with Ed Davis (sigh...) out of the picture.

Boom! From the present to the (not so distant past) with a low numbered Nic Batum card. Batum was one of my favorites in his time with Portland, though I usually find it easy to root for most Blazers. This one is numbered 24/25.

Back to the present we go with Big Zach Collins, or Big Zach as I like to call him. Or just Zach. I don't really talk about him much, actually.

Whenever new baseball prospect sets come out, I am always scratching my head over the player names. I don't know any of these guys! I ended up with a few of these Panini Elite Extra Edition cards, including this Aspirations parallel of a guy named Johan Oviedo. He's young.

Football! AHH! Football (college, anyway) is starting up this week, and I am super not ready for it. Jay Ajayi proved to be the final piece of the puzzle for the Eagles, who shocked the league and won the Super Bowl after, well, shocking the league by being the best team in the regular season.

Ducks... game... in... less than 3 days! I need to work on my breathing routines.

Finally, here's a cool shiny serial numbered Donovan McNabb card for my Eagles collection. When I think of McNabb these days, I mostly think of playing NFL2K, which was pretty great until someone ruined my fun and took their license away.