Good Luck Ducks, Week 2: Home Opener

The Ducks try to get last week's bitter taste out of their collective mouths as they face Nevada. 

This is the part where I usually talk about last week's game, but I'd rather not remember it at all. Oregon, in recent years anyway, it starting to build a reputation for completely flopping in the second half (see last year's Stanford game, something something repressed memories) and generally failing to look like the same football team that started the game. Wait, I wasn't going to talk about it, was I?

This is the part where I start talking about this week's game and say something about, I don't know, Justin Herbert? Justin Herbert is fine. He'll probably be fine? He knocked knees with some dude on the other team at one point, I think? But last week is just a fading memory.

And here is the part where I say something about whoever the Ducks are playing today. They are the, uh, Wolf Pack? They went 8-5 last season, including a tight Arizona Bowl victory over dreaded Arkansas State. See, I'm prepared.

• The Last Game: We went over this, kind of. Oregon looked like they had a special season going for a couple of quarters, at least. Please wipe my memory.
• Know Your Opponent: Nevada wants to start well in order to pull off the upset this week. Good starts... hmm... maybe not always the key to victory?
• The Unis!: All green. I love this the most. Well, unless they bust out a throwback this season.
• Mario Cristobal's "Crystal Ball" prediction: Mario is "looking forward to the opportunity to get back to Autzen Stadium." As I see it, yes.

• Luke Skyywalker's Crystal Balls say: Nevada is home to the most of the legalized gambling in the western states. Luke and the Crew have probably done their fair share of deeds in the Sagebrush State. If it's an adult show you have to be 18

Game time is 4:30 PM PDT on the Pac-12 Network. Roxy Bernstein, Anthony Herron and Jill Savage are on the call. Go Ducks!

A Double Dose of Loot

Baseball and basketball from @thelootlocker - both kinds! 

It had been quite awhile since I'd picked up a Loot Locker box, but I decided to dive back in after a bit of a difficult work week. I had only dabbled in baseball before and never basketball, or any of the more expensive options for that matter. For this time out, I decided to get the basic baseball box option as well as the same thing for basketball, a first for me.

If you don't know the drill, they put a few hobby packs in a well packed cardboard storage box and add a dash of hobby supplies (and candy!) on top. There are top loaders and penny sleeves for all the sweet hits you're gonna pull. (Of course, this is sports cards, so your mileage may and will vary.)

For baseball, the packs included were (all Topps) 2019 Allen & Ginter, 2019 Archives (x2) and 2019 Chrome. I opened the Chrome pack and set it aside for a future APTBNL post and will show the most intriguing card from each of the rest of the packages. This includes this mini Ozzie Albies of the A&G back variety. It's crazy that I don't hear a lot about Albies these days, for someone who has improved (offensively at least) on his All-Star rookie campaign and is also only 22(!). Of course, I do tend to have a thing for shortstops, but Albies would definitely be someone I'd want to start a team with.

Speaking of excellent NL shortstops, this is Javy Baez's short printed card from Topps Archives. He's a Cub, though, so I'm just going to keep my mouth shut.

The other Archives pack also had a short printed card. It's one of the Padres top prospects.

The hoops packs were (all Panini, of course) 2013-14 Prestige, 2018-19 Donruss Optic Fast Break (x2) and 2018-19 Prizm Fast Break. The 2013-14 Prestige pack was an interesting and welcome choice, as Loot Locker tends to stick to mostly newer if not brand new stuff. They do have a Twitter voting process if I recall, so it's kind of fun to have a bit of a say in what will end up in the next month's loot. I think this set was probably picked because it was the Giannis rookie year, but I had to make do with a sticker auto of this Jon Leuer guy instead. He's actually still kicking around the league and played in 41 games last year in a limited role with Detroit.

The shiny new stuff was all in the "Fast Break" configuration, which offers an exclusive Fast Break googly-eyed parallel and a chance at other more limited parallels. That the parallel landed on a rookie is pretty good, but I honestly have no idea if this guy is going to be good yet or not.

Ben Simmons was the parallel in the other Optic pack. Simmons is one of the stranger players in recent memory, as he absolutely refuses to shoot and plays point guard like a center. He's not like when Jason Kidd came into the league and couldn't shoot at all, because Kidd was apparently content to throw up brick after brick until they had to replace the dented rims. Simmons just refuses to participate in the whole shooting game. It's weird. I kind of like it, actually, but it has to be limiting to the team as a whole.

The Prizm Fast Break parallel looks very similar to the Optic. Are there any Tyreke Evans collectors out there? Probably not.

Bunches of Blazers from Billy

@ElCaminoBilly more than doubles my Shawn Kemp collection, and more! 

Billy from Cardboard History sent a long a bunch of Trail Blazers cards back in mid-spring which were largely from sets I haven't seen much of, if at all. Everything that I added to my collection was firmly from the Bob Whitsitt/"Jail Blazers" era, which also happens to be the most successful the team had been since the early '90s, at least up until this past season's run to the conference finals.

There were tons of Shawn Kemp cards in the package, which greatly expanded the number of cards I have of him (keepers, that is.) Kemp wasn't around the team long, and was certainly in a diminished state in his time here.

 

Cliffy... no, Clifford was one of the last holdovers from the days with Drexler, et al. He is absolutely throwing it down on this card. Nice!

Here's an interesting looking set that I'd never heard of. Topps Xpectations?! Sounds Xciting!

Here's the headbanded Portland native Damon Stoudamire. Stoudamire anchored two of those Western Conference Finals teams but was also a lightning rod of criticism at times during his Blazers run.

Topps didn't have a ton of history to draw on, but I still like the idea of Topps basketball cards (and Heritage, especially). They've been gone for nearly a decade now, which sucks. Maybe they'll make a re-re-rebirth someday? (I have a lot of issues with Panini, but I won't get into that here.)

Thanks again to Billy!

Bru Destroys the Want Lists

Set needs and more from @marcbrubaker make the want lists more manageable. 

As soon as I make the piles of cards on my desk start to disappear, even more piles seem to appear. Such was the case with this huge stack of cards I got back in May from Marc Brubaker (FKA Remember the Astrodome). I haven't given my set building a ton of attention here of late, but I managed to snap a photo of most of the cards that head towards the sets (instead of the team binders).

Proof!

Along with the full-sized Ginter and Heritage needs that you'd expect, I pulled out a bunch of minis to scan. Look at all of these minis! This array manages to be mostly made of humans, with just one landmark and zero other animals. I feel like there are more animal-based inserts sets lately.

Of course, there were also a few Cardinals cards for the Cardinals collection, including a couple of current closer Carlos Martinez. The way Blogger likes to format images here makes this mini look much larger than the fifteen other minis that I scanned. I should probably migrate to my own domain name (and Wordpress) like Marc did, but that would take me a lot of time and I assume some money as well. It would be nice to get away from Google eventually, but will any of us truly ever get completely away from Google?

Finally, here's a Goldy from this year's Big League set. I still need three base cards from this set as well as countless numbers of parallels if anyone has any extras. Check out the (team) wants here as usual.

Good Luck Ducks, Week 1: Big Time Opener

Like it or not, it's officially football season as the Ducks take on an SEC foe in Texas. 

It doesn't seem like all that much time has passed since the last boring all-SEC college football championship game, but here we are on Labor Day Weekend where, by decree, there must be football of a collegiate nature. Oregon takes on Auburn at a neutral site (Arlington, Texas where the Dallas Cowboys play) in the weekend's marquee matchup. Both teams have plenty of preseason hype and the meaningless (at this point) rankings next to their names. College GameDay alert!

Justin Herbert is back and is expected to be the #1 pick in next year's NFL Draft, and along with him is four year starter and team leading tackler Troy Dye and one of the best offensive lines in the country. Head guy Mario Cristobal led the team to a 9-4 record, hopefully signaling a bit of a turnaround in a team that was spiraling a bit (and cycling through coaches) since their last appearance in the title game when Marcus Mariota ruled the campus. (He still kinda rules the campus.)

There's plenty of preseason hype for the Auburn Tigers (not to be confused with their conference brethren LSU Tigers) as well. They bring in a highly touted freshman quarterback in Bo Nix, who hopes to make up for his ridiculously short name with a big performance.

• The Last Game: The less said about the Redbox Bowl, the better. The 7-6 win over Michigan State may have been one of the most dreadful bowl games of all-time.
• Know Your Opponent: Tigers fans are understandably nervous about Jordon Scott, but also seem to be licking their chops about the prospects of breaking in a new defensive coordinator and scheme at UO.
• The Unis: White with dark green pants and helmets. "Nightmare" green, they're calling it. Yikes. The uniforms are tweaked a bit this year with a new Nike redesign.
• Mario Cristobal's "Crystal Ball" prediction: Oregon's energy is "growing more and more". Signs point to yes.

• Luke Skyywalker's Crystal Balls say: 2 Live Crew frontman Luke (aka Luther Campbell) is a noted Miami Hurricanes enthusiast, so he can't be giving love to a team from Alabama. Let me hear you say, "Hey hey and more hey"

Game time is 4:30 PDT on ABC. Chris Fowler, Kirk Herbstreit and Maria Taylor will be on the call. Go Ducks!

Night Post

They only come out at night. 

Back in May, I received what is my estimation the 347th package of cards from Night Owl Cards. You've probably heard of this guy before. I do seem to pull a lot of Dodgers and we've been exchanging cards for what is probably coming up on a decade for now. The passage of time is crazy. Night Owl primarily does his blog publishing at night, and so do I -- or at least I did back when I was on a more regular posting schedule. I am not really sure what you'd call what it is that I do any longer, but I do try to keep this place active and show appreciation for the stuff I receive from folks all over the country.

My scanner, however, did not really appreciate this Bill White card from 1969. It's cropped a little aggressively, but I can assure you that there is a real border on all four sides on the card itself.

Here's another chance for me to gripe (I think I do this a lot more than I used to) about how the Topps gold parallels ain't what they used to be. But they ain't. I like the shiny metallic look that they used to have. This is just a different splash of color applied by a computer application. It's boring.

I actually really like this one, even with how much real estate the name of the insert gets on the card. Perhaps it's because it's Ozzie that I'm a bit more forgiving. It's kind of cool.

I promise that I'm not going to pick apart every card I scanned here, so I'll just say that with two readily attainable full parallels (blue and gold... ish? goldenrod?) in both of the Big League sets so far, I'll probably feel like I'm never going to finish off these sets. There's a lot of cards. It's nice to pick another parallel off the list, however, especially one with this kind of star power.

Night Owl also sent a stack of set needs, including this pile of hair on the set that paid tribute to the set that Bill White was shown on earlier in this post. If you had asked me earlier today, I wouldn't have guessed that Jayson Werth was still in pro baseball as recently as 2018, but here you go. (He spent some time in AAA Tacoma, apparently.)

Thanks again to the legendary Night Owl Cards -- there's another Night Owl trade post in the queue, I'm sure.

Gum-Free Cards from Community Gum

Trying to get over a frustrating rain-shortened loss with... cards. 

As I've mentioned previously, I'm trying so desperately to catch up with the cache of cards I need to post about on the blog by the end of the month. I'm definitely not going to make it. In fact, I've only thrown gasoline on the fire by my call to get more trades going. What's wrong with me?

Tonight's cards were sent my way by Jon of Community Gum back in April. The bulk of these were set needs, especially from last year's Allen & Ginter offering. However, I'm just going to focus on the Cardinals here because I really want to dwell on tonight's frustrating loss or something.

Matt Carpenter might be back in the Cardinals lineup, but I'm not sure that he's Back. With some of the contributions from the call-ups and prospects this summer, I knew the point that the team started to get healthy again was going to make for some frustrating lineup decisions, but this is something that I feel like almost every team goes through at some point or another. (And yes, I might be thinly advocating for the benching of a guy in my so-called PC here, but I'm a Cardinals fan first and a whatever-you-want-to-call-me collector a distant second.)

This is a great looking photo from last year's Archives set, and it's surprising that I missed this card because I felt like I opened a lot of it. I know that a ton of the old-timey photos on modern Topps cards are colorized, but they still can look nice. Sometimes.

I like shiny cards as much as the next guy, but can anyone honestly name the year of any given Finest card based on the design, once you get past the first couple of years? I certainly cannot.

All of the cards are "the good stuff", but now we're getting to the good-er stuff. Yes! I need more cool Jack Flaherty cards like this numbered-to-100 parallel from last year's debut Big League set.

And then there's Panini Chronicles, which is just such as weird idea. I believe this is from the first year (2017) that Panini tried this out, and I'm still not sure what I think. Certainly, like every other Panini baseball set (minus perhaps some of the fuzzy mock-art Diamond Kings cards I suppose), it suffers greatly from a lack of logos. This one is a blue parallel of sorts in a set that is more parallel and inserty than anything I've ever seen, short of those Moments and Milestones sets that Topps rolled out last decade.