New Hoops

A new crop of basketball cards, featuring the Portland Trail Blazers. 

I dove into the deep, shark-filled waters of eBay group breaks to get my first taste of 2018-19 NBA Hoops. My logic was sound: I can avoid buying all of the packs and boxes and just concentrate on the team that I collect. And it all would have worked out splendidly if it wasn't for that lousy collation!

There are 10 Blazers in the 300 card base set, but I didn't get a single copy of the Damian Lillard or CJ McCollum cards, while getting several copies of other cards. Fun!

The base design is, you know, fine. It's Hoops. It doesn't really change. I didn't bother scanning the backs of any of the cards, because if you've seen the back of one (Panini) Hoops card, you've seen them all.

I mentioned a lack of a Lillard card, but Dame actually has two cards in the set for whatever reason. The final 20 cards in the set are part of a "Tribute" subset, and have a different design. Mostly, these are retired players, but there are a few current ones sprinkled in for some reason.

Nurk!

Rookies are shown in one of their media day poses over a dark wooden backdrop. Pretty standard stuff.

Trent was a one-and-done Duke star, and is the son of former Blazers draft pick... you guessed it... Gary Trent!

Big Z is having a big year already. This is exciting.

Ah, but there were inserts, too. Amplifiers crank up the volume in the crowd, apparently. I can't complain about an insert concept I haven't seen before, though.

Two of the Amplifiers out of a ten card set are Blazers, so CJ joins Dame here. He shoots threes at a high volume, but so does everyone these days.

Damian Lillard stars here on another insert design that I'm not as much of a fan of. We really don't need the same photo twice.

The draft picks that they got to pose for these photos are going to probably have a good laugh at these in a few years. Or, at least, we all will. Anfernee (yes, he was named after Penny Hardaway) skipped college altogether, playing out a year in purgatory at a prep school. He looks all of 13. The Blazers are playing the long game with him. It would be cool to see it pay off.

Lest ye accuse an eBay seller of messing with the base cards (why would they?), you can see (ye can see?) that I didn't get stiffed on a hit. Everything is a sticker auto in this low end product, but I was happy to get a brand spanking new Blazers autograph.

Good stuff all around. I just need to find the rest of the team set.

Actual Baseball Cards

Getting back to baseball posts thanks to @marcbrubaker and some Cardinals goodies. 

I'm not sure I can handle the long four months before Spring Training, but it's not like I have a choice. I still have a ton of baseball cards lined up to post about, including this bunch from Remember The Astrodome. I actually received these back in late August, when there was still lots of hope for the Cardinals season.

I bought a lot of cards this summer, but I don't feel like I actually took down any team sets. A Pujols Cardinals card in 2018 is a nice sight, however. This is one of the so-called short prints from the Topps Archives set. I'm only skeptical about calling these short prints, because there are so few of them and the odds don't make them a tough pull. If you do the math on these, I'm not sure that they are any tougher to get. This reminds me of some of the questionable math on Allen & Ginter's SPs over the years.

Here's a terrific shot of the newly crowned Gold Glove Award winner (9th time!) I'm bummed that Kolten Wong didn't win one, and that Harrison Bader wasn't even nominated.

Here's a shiny Waino refractor from a couple of years ago. Wainwright just signed a heavily incentive-laden deal to return for another season. I'm hoping it works out for him and the team, because he's always been fun to watch when things are working right.

Finally, it's a full-sized white jersey swatch from this year's Allen & Ginter set. Marcell Ozuna struggled with shoulder issues virtually all season long. As with all things baseball, let's hope for better fortunes next year!

Good Luck Ducks, Week 10: Chip Kelly Returns

The prodigal coach returns to Autzen Stadium.

Chip Kelly captained the Oregon Ducks football ship in its peak years (2009-2012), after a successful run as Mike Bellotti's offensive coordinator. He championed an increased pace of play, took advantage of inefficiencies, and was generally an agent of chaos. He is and was sorely missed, but has struggled mightily in all of his pursuits since he left Eugene.

Speaking of struggling... what is up with the Ducks right now? They were straight up awful last week, a disturbing trend considering their comatose first half performance the previous week against the superior Washington State Cougars. This most recent Ducks team looked a lot more like the team that Mario Cristobal coached in the bowl game last year, or even one of the Herbert-less games last year coached by the huckster that is screwing up Florida State right now. With Oregon back at home, the hope is for a return to form as they try to position themselves for a quality bowl game.

OregonLive-free links to check out:

• Both teams are coming off of ugly losses, but Oregon is still looking at a likely bowl berth while UCLA is struggling to keep fans in seats.
• Oregon's Calvin Throckmorton, he of the huge last name, has been rock solid on the offensive line.
• Justin Herbert "Don't Be a Fool, Stay In School" Meter: Medium Level. I am starting to suspect someone at CBS is working with UO to put this kind of info out there, though.
• Know Your Opponent: Bruins fans are banking on Justin Herbert being too concussed to go today. Let's hope that's not the case.
• The Unis!: All black in some new Jumpman uniforms. So much for the mundane. Hopefully, the Ducks will slam a few dunks tonight.

Going old school didn't work so well last week, so let's check out UCLA's last visit to Eugene.

Game time is 4:30 PM PDT on FOX. Tim Brando, Spencer Tillman and Holly Sonders are on the call. Go Ducks!

Ginter Duplicity

Allen & Ginter jersey cards on offer. 

I still need tons and tons of cards from this set, but I've had a bit of a run with pulling jersey cards from retail packs in 2018 Topps Allen & Ginter. Is anyone interested in one of these cards of the nearly-World Series MVP, the second of which I pulled from a blaster I bought myself for my birthday.

The Price(s) joined these two speedy fellows, also up for grabs. Let me know if you're interested in any of this stuff. I have plenty of want lists of all sorts of things at this point!

Monday Night Breakdown

Five cool @breakdowncards on a cool Monday night. 

The Blazers won and my vacation starts tomorrow night, so I'm feeling pretty good about things at the moment, even though this is officially day one of many with no baseball. Oh man, now I'm starting to get sad again. Fortunately, here's some cards from Baseball Card Breakdown to cheer me up. I acquired these several months ago, and please don't talk to me about how it's almost November.
First up is Matt Carpenter's very blue "silver pack" parallel, which is numbered to cool 115 for some reason.

This one is an always tough to find "vintage" parallel of the Cardinals defense ace, numbered to a cool 99.

Swagerty didn't make it past the AA level, which isn't very cool... but I'm sure he's a cool person! Most people don't get to pitch professionally. Do any of YOUR friends pitch professionally?

Gavin makes great customs, and was kind enough to hand me this "what could have been" 1978 style Topps card, featuring Ozzie Smith. It goes into my Ozzie binder. It's very cool.

Wait, how did this Cub sneak in to this post? Not cool! Not cool!! (I needed it for a set.)

Football Binders: The Keepers

Looking at the few things I kept from the Goodwill football binder. 

I'm not a big football collector, but as many of you know, I do have a stash of Oregon Ducks alums that I'm still working on cataloging. I also kept some Eagles cards, a team I don't usually make a huge deal out of around here. The years that these cards came from (first half of the '90s), however, is right in my sweet spot of Eagles appreciation. I miss the old kelly green unis, basically.

Mark Bavaro finished his NFL career with the Eagles. This is a Special Effects parallel, but unfortunately the "effects" were mostly lost in the scanning process. You can see that his name is shiny, though.

This is apparently a Colors parallel of Byron's 1993 SkyBox Impact card. The only difference I could tell between this and the base card is the foil "impact" stamp.

Here's a pair of rookie year Charlie Garner cards. Garner spent the first half of his NFL career with the Eagles, usually playing behind someone else, before going on to spend his two best seasons with the 49ers.

Former Duck Chris Miller, who now coaches in the Portland area, was featured on one of those early '90s Fleer insert sets which focus on a single player. I am quite sure I didn't have any of these before. I just need to find the rest of the set.

Apparently, the Collector's Choice football answer to baseball's "silver sigs" parallels are just slapping a foil team name on the card and calling it good.

One of several Fleer All-Pro inserts I kept, this one prominently features the NFL logo (aka The Shield).

Clyde Simmons was also featured on the 1993 design.

Former Cal QB Dave Barr was apparently drafted by the Eagles, though he never played a regular season down with them.

This is old enough to be in my collection already, but I had to keep it just in case. My Eagles cards just sit in a box, aside from Randall Cunningham, of course! (Sadly, there were no Randalls in the binder.)

Another Fleer All-Pro design, with a superhuman Eric Allen.

Fred Barnett was my favorite go-to target in Tecmo Super Bowl, which is where a large chunk of my Eagles fandom came from.

In between his lengthy stay with the 49ers and his better known Broncos career, Bill Romanowski stopped off in Philly for a couple of seasons. This is a strange practice photo.

In case you missed it, here's more about this Goodwill find.

Good Luck Ducks, Week 9: Into the ZonaZoo

The Ducks head into the desert for some Pac-12 After Dark action. 

After blowing a huge opportunity last week by completely failing to show up in the first half against the Cougars, the Ducks try to regroup this week as they head way down south to Arizona. The Wildcats have been disappointing this season so far, with their only conference wins coming against the lifeless Oregon State Beavers and an up-and-down Cal team.

Oregon's big O-line injury seems to have hurt even worse than expected, but with a week's worth of practice to right the ship, they hope to avoid the major missteps (pre-snap penalties, especially) of last week's first half debacle. A big game from Justin Herbert (who else?) would help things tremendously on the other side of the ball.

Some links:

• The ZonaZoo is currently accepting members for a fee. I don't remember having to do any of that stuff when I was in school.
• The Herbert Heisman Watch is dead, folks. All of the attention has turned to whether or not he comes back next season (please come back!)
• Know Your Opponent: It is Homecoming, and a night game... it's gonna be lit?
• The Unis!: All white with black helmets. Switching it up a bit this week after all.

Going old school this week with a throwback to 1995. There's a whole playlist.

Game time is 7:30 PM PDT on ESPN. Clay Matvick, Don Orlovsky and Paul Carcaterra are on the call.