Contest Results and More Cracked Wax

 

The March Radness winner revealed! Plus more @CrackinWax #CrackinWaxMailDay things. 

The big college basketball tournament is in the books and, as a result, we have some prizes to award. It came down to Baylor vs. Gonzaga in the final, two of the very best teams in the sport this year. Baylor steamrolled the team from Spokane giving them their only loss of the season, which means The Diamond King has taken the top prize in both contests this year. Congrats! In second place came Bump and Run, with Stadium Fantasium (aka bbcardz) taking third. Bringing up the rear was Ape Island, aka i.hate.espn, who must also hate picking winning teams. If your name is in bold, please contact me as you've won some sort of prize! 

The rest of you are probably here for the cards. I'm a bit behind on posting about stuff I've received in the mail, but there's a couple more rounds of Crackin' Wax breaks to get through. First up this time is a 2019 Topps Gallery break. I usually avoid this set because I really don't like most of the artwork, but I didn't get very close to finishing my team set whenever this first came out. The other incentive was that the Padres were only available as a random team due to Tatismania or whatever. I actually lucked out here and ended up with the Padres in addition to my actual team. 

Yeah, I'm not a fan of these. Supposedly that's Manny Machado on the left?

Fernando Tatis Jr. rookie cards were at insane levels when I joined the break. I'm guessing there's been a bit of a selloff since the scary injury news with him hit. I can imagine the Padres are probably sweating a bit now after signing him to that massive contract, along with all of the other spending and maneuvering they did this past offseason.

Unfortunately, the 2020 Donruss Optic break was short on cards for me and short on cards I needed. I did end up with this holo Goldie parallel for my collection. It seems like Panini baseball cards are starting to be taken seriously in the market right now, though, because... well, everything else is. Maybe I should start making my own cards.

I also bought in to another 2021 Topps flagship break. The Diamondbacks are often the team that gets dumped on me. This flashy 1986-style silver pack card of Daulton Varsho (guessing he's Gary Varsho's son?) will be headed to my trade box.

The best thing from these breaks was this Harrison Bader black parallel, numbered to 70. Even though they don't look nearly as nice as they used to, I always love the black parallels that Topps puts out.

It's April, so... Merry Christmas?!

My Secret Santa gifts from @GeoffCards are right on time. 

 

No, I can't blame the postal service for severe mail delays. I am still very behind in catching up on sorting and posting about the stuff I've received from people lately. There's actually a pretty good chance that I will catch up relatively soon, however, as my mailbox in 2021 has been pretty quiet. I entered a Secret Santa type group with some fellow Crackin' Wax break regulars and ended up with some pretty nice stuff.

Payton Pritchard's cards haven't quite gotten the attention than Justin Herbert's football cards have, of course, but I'm still seeking them out whenever I can find them. This is my first signed card of the guard who was a four year starter for the Ducks, running the point even as a freshman on the team that made it to the Final Four back in 2017.

There are actually two Pritchard cards in this Prizm Draft Picks base set, and I still need to track down a copy of the other one -- it looks like the green parallel at the top of this post.

The gift package wasn't all Pritchard and the Ducks, however. A few choice Cardinals were included as well, like this Tommy Pham black insert numbered parallel from a few years back.

There was also a KK auto from last year's Panini Absolute, a set that mostly escaped me, probably due to the cost.

Lastly, there was a Project 2020 card of the late, great Bob Gibson, shown here with the full stash of cards in the package from this photo that I put out on Twitter shortly after receiving the goods. This is actually the second Project 2020 card that crossed my desk last year, both of which were a complete surprise. I've since re-gifted the other card since it wasn't a fit for my collection, but a Gibby card clearly must be.

I'll say this much. There's so much about Project 2020 and other similar offerings that Topps has produced of late that embodies exactly what I don't want as a card collector. And yet... now I will forever own an actual piece of cardboard history from the craziness that was (and pretty much still continues to be) 2020. For a better look at the card, you can check this out from Topps.

Lazy Contest Update

 

'80s Hit Chasing

Inserts gone wild. 

 

It seems like insert cards are something that came from the more recent era of trying to strike it big with a simple pack of cards, but they've been around for seemingly forever. Non-base cards have been a part of many baseball card sets going back to the '60s at least. When I personally started collecting in the '80s, I'm not quite sure I appreciated the "special" cards that you could find in packs, but I know that they were sometimes sought after. I know there especially was a decent market for the Fleer All-Star Team inserts that debuted in 1986, which even came with stated odds on the packs.

The Topps All-Star Glossy set was a bit unique in that it was only included in rack packs, and it used the now ubiquitous glossy UV coating, which really wasn't widely used until the '90s were well underway aside from a few specialty sets (e.g. Tiffany, Fleer Glossy.) These were one per pack inserts that were always on top of the pack at the grocery store, making it easy for a "flipper" to seek out certain players in the pack to sell for a premium. 

Yes, there were flippers in the '80s. Fortunately, though, there wasn't an eBay in the '80s. While opportunists have always existed in this hobby (why wouldn't they?), the whole thing has gotten out of control lately. There's a big leap from someone going down to the local market to buy a 99 cent rack pack with... I don't know... Dwight Gooden showing on the front of it... to what is happening these days with people stalking vendors and operating massive bot armies to buy up anything and everything. Even Pokemon cards. Even. Pokemon. Cards.

If you jump back in the time machine with me back to 1984, though, it couldn't have been an easy task to put together the 22 card glossy All-Star set. Of course, that's the real fun of collecting. Virtually no one who has "flipped" a case of blasters has ever known the pain of missing five cards from a twenty-two card set, even if you could buy the whole thing for five or ten bucks.

It's officially Opening Day, folks. Ozzie Smith is here for it.

Mondays Means PWE Round-Up

Cards the cheap and somewhat reliable way including stuff from @nightowlcards and @acrackedbat on a Monday. 

 

It's late, it's Monday and it's been a bit. It must be time for another P. (Plain) W. (White) E. (Envelope) round-up. First up is a few things I claimed from A Cracked Bat back in December. 

I don't really know why I thought it was a good idea to try to collect as many mini Allen & Ginter cards as possible instead of being satisfied with completing the regular set. These are always fun to look at, however, though all of the different flavors of mini ensure that no one can put together a complete set of anything unless they go the popular "Frankenset" route.

Jack Flaherty inserts just can't be passed up. Flaherty takes the mound on Opening Day, which is just three days away now. Wow!

Here's a whole collage of Ginter minis from the venerable Night Owl Cards. Minis were stuffed in all sorts of nooks and crannies of a couple of envelopes. This actually doesn't even represent half of all of the minis that were sent my way. See if you can spot the non-human!

Night Owl also sent a few regular sized needs, including the legendary Eddie Murray.

Last up is some stamp-themed stuff from The Angels In Order. This "stamp" card is from a set released in 1992 that I'd never seen before. I think these might be baseball card-sized reproductions of actual stamps from the island country in the Carribean (St. Vincent), but I'm not totally positive.

I wonder if four dollars got you a whole sheet of stamps or if each individual stamp cost four dollars?

I also received some actual stamps in the form of this fearsome foursome of 1982 Fleer stamps. These are very cool, although they are so thin that one of these almost got permanently lost inside my scanner. Yikes!

Free Stuff Friday: Vol 14

Now with extra Sport Kings. (Sportkings?) 

 

A brand new Target opened in my area recently. I had made plans to be there on opening day to see if there was anything interesting in their trading cards area, but I completely spaced it and missed the opening by a couple of days. As you might have expected, there wasn't really anything worth picking up by the time I was there. I did see a few Sportkings (aka Sport Kings Gum) blasters on the shelf and figured it might be worth a blog post at least. I double checked the checklist and saw that Randall Cunningham was on it, which pretty much sealed it. Will I find the Randall?

The cards, purportedly made by college football card manufacturers SAGE, are interest enough I suppose. The artwork is mostly fine, save for this monstrously freakish Maurice Cheeks card. What did they do to you, Mo?! Why does it look like you weigh about 700 pounds?

I found the Randall! He's also on the autograph checklist, and each box contains a bonus pack that contains some kind of hit. I wasn't quite that lucky, however.

I also didn't notice that there was a Cardinals card on the checklist, so this Ted Simmons was a nice addition to my collection.

Everything else from the box (excluding Cunningham and Simmons) are available. Feel free to claim away below. The usual rules apply.

The Froome card is creased for some reason.

Jesse Burkett is also creased, despite these being pristine looking cards inside pristine looking packs. Weird.

Old Tom and Mo Cheeks could be getting ready to wrestle.

This Froome card is not creased, however.

 Speaking of Froome, here's the card from the bonus pack. Any Tour de France fans out there?

Crackin' Donruss Wax

#CrackinWaxMailDay 

Donruss '21 is another new product I'll probably never see in the stores. Fortunately, @CrackinWax had a couple of boxes up for breaking so I was able to at least sample this product that is usually cheap and readily available. As you can already see, I did pretty well with this break. It's so frustrating, however, to say that I'd probably trade it all for being able to actually open my own cards.

The base design is, with the usual caveat, fairly solid. It's very Donruss-y. When stacked against the current Topps flagship design, I feel like I actually prefer Panini's offering.

As usual, there are blue foil parallels. Blue and red always bounce off of each other to make a striking design.

There's a new crop of Independence Day themed parallels this year, which I've professed a fondness for in the past. These are just covered in blue stars and again have a sturdier cardstock.

The Panini rule is that catchers in full gear will always look better than the rest of the cards. Here's a good example.

On to the trade bait section of the post. This looks like some sort of parallel (purple?) and it's numbered to 2021.

This is a pretty fun one. This mimics the 1987 base design a little bit, includes an economical jersey piece and is a parallel version that I'll just go ahead and call Candy Cane.

Lastly, here's another Braves numbered card. If I recall, some of the hobby inserts are usually numbered to 999 while they have unnumbered retail counterparts. That might be what's going on here. In any case, it stands out pretty well.