Blog Bat-Around: Alphabet Title Challenge

Nachos Grande created the latest Blog Bat-Around in the form of the Alphabet Challenge where you take the letters of your blog title and match each to a player you like.  He allowed the flexibility to choose first or last names, which helps to prevent it devolving into "Player I've heard of that starts with Q or Z."  Here are my picks.  Some alternate sport choices are also present, especially when they outrank the baseball guy.

 

My number one baseball player collection guy.  This is easy so far.

Honorable mention - Sean Taylor.

 

Priest Holmes, my only real foray into supercollecting.  Two fantasy championships from him made me a fan.  First two letters - my two most favorite guys in each sport.  This is going well.

Honorable mention - Braden Holtby, goalie for the Washington Capitals (for his first few years).

 

 

Going for the first name this time.  The older era guys are just more revered.  I didn't actually see him play, but just like him better.

More of this letter to come, so no Honorable Mentions yet.

 

 

Another vintage favorite...

   

O is a tough one, but I've got one guy in my PCs. 

Honorable Mention - Alex Ovechkin

 

Sparky is one of those distinct character guys.  I really have no opinion on whether I prefer his Philly days or with the Yankees.

 

For the second L, I'm going a little off the beaten path.  Laich was a longtime member of the Capitals team with Ovechkin, Backstrom, & co.  He was a significant name and fan favorite, but the real reason I put him here is that for a while he was married to this gal:

Unfortunately, they divorced last year.  She decided she wanted too much freedom and couldn't be married, had to explore her sexuality, etc..  Such a shame.

 

I was a fan of the scrappy shortstop when the Cardinals were making their championship run in the mid- to late 2000's. 

  

Could have gone several directions here, but lately I'm into players that jumped teams a lot.  Clayton is a PC just for that reason.  He has been joined by Edwin Jackson, who is the current record holder for playing for the most franchises.  (Fun fact - all three of my PC's with 'J' names are Jacksons - Bo, Edwin, and Grant.)

Honorable Mentions - Cecil Cooper, Cesar Cedeno.

 

Tenace's tenure with the Swingin' A's of the mid-70's has been well documented in cards the last couple years, especially with Heritage and Archives.  He's got a ton of coach cards with the Toronto organization that I've only scratched the surface in collecting so far.

Honorable Mention - Joe Torre.

 

   

Ivan DeJesus is probably better known with the Cubs, but I just remember him on TV at some point.  Plus, he shares the same birthday as me - January 9.

 
I don't know another player that I associate more with one card design than Vida Blue and 1971 Topps.  There must be five or six images inside that black frame from different products over the years.

 

 

Yeah, I know it's pretty blasphemous to show Dewey in something other than his Bahsten uni, but I like the Orioles.  Not sure if I watched a lot of him while he was there....

 

 

Normally, I would go with a PC guy here, and I have a lot of choices - Mike Mussina, Bake McBride, or Jim Marshall (football), but this guy is one of the bright spots on the Washington Commanders and I still watch football (of any pro kind these days) and honestly not much else.  If the team finally sells, it will mark the beginning of a fresh start that we've needed since 1999.  Any improvement will be a milestone.  Scary Terry should be instrumental in that.

 

 

I is another tough one for names.  After DeJesus, Arturs Irbe is the only one that comes to mind with any vague connection to my fandom.  He wasn't on my favorite teams.  He was just notable for that old school helmet.  And I always like the Russian guys.  

These last few letters aren't providing a lot of solid choices.

 

 

Mike Nelms was one of the top kick returners in the whole league back in the 80's.  That's all you really saw him do.  And he did it well.

 

If you've seen the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary "The Best That Never Was", you know the story of the running back from Mississippi.

On his way to eclipsing Herschel Walker’s record for the most touchdowns in high school history, Dupree attracted recruiters from schools in every major conference...Dupree took the attention in stride, and committed to Oklahoma. What followed, though, was a forgettable college career littered with conflict, injury and oversized expectations... Eight-time Emmy Award winner Jonathan Hock will examine why this star burned out so young and how he ultimately used football to redeem himself..

Everybody loves potential - especially in card collecting - and this guy had bucketloads of it.

Honorable Mention - Doug DeCinces.

Well, that was a wacky list.  But I love these kinds of posts.  We can make lists out of almost any theme or phrase.  Keep the ideas coming!

Too Much "Hoozat Dude"?

Was browsing blogs today and saw the first post about the new 2023 Topps Flagship cards.  I really haven't read very many posts about them, but a couple other people said there had been a whole lot of hype around the new issues.  I guess it's all on social media now instead of across dozens of blogs, so that's why I haven't encountered any.

I've said it a lot - I stopped caring about the flagship set after 2020.  When the pandemic messed up the season, and then even when they could play, there were no fans, I really lost interest in watching baseball.  It just got weird.

Another contributing factor was that my two local teams weren't very good.  The Orioles did make impressive progress this past year, but I still didn't keep up with them.  And the Nationals have purged all but a couple players from their championship season, so I couldn't tell you who plays for them now.

That statement is true for the rest of the league as well.  Since I don't watch, I don't know the players very well anywhere.  Except for the stars and some of the regular starters.  

 Got me to thinking - How many players in Series 1 do I recognize by name?  

Not bad, they are getting closer to real LL cards

So I found a checklist that I could paste into a spreadsheet and then went through and separated the team cards, the league leaders, and the special combo cards.  Those account for 35 cards of the 330 in Series 1.

Of the 295 players that are left, I kept the ones I knew well - the stars like Juan Soto, Bryce Harper, Kris Bryant, etc.

And the names that I recognize from years before, either watching games or on the cards.  The Marcus Stromans, Darin Rufs, Alex Verdugos of the world.  Guys I recall names, but might not be able to pick out of a lineup.

I made a third column of names that were sort of familiar, but I wasn't positive.  Guys I may have heard of, but have no clue about otherwise.  Tyler Stephenson, Kendall Graveman, Matt Chapman, and three guys named Duran.  (Only one of which I probably have heard of - most likely via rookie hype in cards.)

The rest I deleted from the list.  Sorry, never heard of you...

My totals look like this:

Known players = 105

Unsure players = 31

Team/LL/Special cards = 35

So basically, the conclusion is that I only know about 30% of Series 1.  Maybe 40% if you fudge the numbers for the uncertain ones.  Now I do understand that Series 1 is only half the set.  And they sometimes keep the bigger names for Series 2.

But in the end, it's still way too few to be spending time & money chasing their cards.  And I even like the design for once.  Guess that's why I can't relate to collecting stuff like Bowman.

It was even more pathetic for my favorite teams.  I recognize four guys (out of 11 + team card) from the Orioles and a whole ONE guy from the Nationals (out of 10+ team card).  Sheesh!   I kept seeing O's & Nats as I was deleting a lot of the rookies.  I killed almost all the listings with "RC" next to them.

How many of the players in Series 1 do you recognize?  And does it affect your enthusiasm for the cards?  

The Crown Jewels Of A Database Trade

It's about an hour and a half until the Super Bowl kicks off this evening and I'm avoiding the television but still sitting behind a screen as usual.  Been making some great trades on the Trading Card Database site, but this will be the first loot post for one of those.  

This batch was part of a trade with user CFoster11_23 that also included a lot of baseball list hits and Washington football singles from my wants.  I selected just under 250 cards, and sent 386.  That's the kind of trade I like, though I need to move out a lot of stuff, so if the ratio was higher, I don't mind a bit.

I shipped two major batches from the same sets off - 2015 Score football and 2019 Topps baseball.  I got this killer starter for 1998 Pacific Crown Royale baseball.

Nope that's just the beginning....

Ka-Blam!  I only need about 22 cards for the rest of the base set.  

While looking at these on the Database, I noticed the images were only at about 70%.  I figured I might as well try to fill them in, but I knew these wouldn't drop through my bulk scanner very well.  Boy, these are tough to scan even on a flatbed!  With only one straight edge, you have to align them with the edges of the glass plate.  And then the middle is open, so I put a regular card against the edge and lined up one CR card and then slid the other card away.  Not easy to keep them from moving.  Then you have to flip them over and do it again!  I got the first few dozen done and had to quit.  Will revisit that later.

Here's what the backs look like.  Those straight sections low on the sides aren't 90° angles either.

They do look cool all stacked up together.  Almost makes a 3-D crown.

Believe it or not, I got inserts too!  And two of them are complete sets!

These All-Stars are nice looking.  And how's THAT for fancy die-cutting? 

I'm sure these get beat to hell in the wild.  It'll probably be fun finding the other 17 with the points intact.

The whole set of Diamond Knights - which is only printed under the secondary photo on the back.

All of these cards are shiny like Pacifics generally were.

This was back in the late 90's when Roy Firestone was a prominent journalist.  There are 26 of these.

The other complete stack are the Pillars Of The Game.  Silver shiny in big doses.

Finally, there are these game-looking cards - Home Run Fever. 

Never seen this before, but if you press a thumb on the spots...

They reveal the numbers behind.  But it's not permanent like a scratch-off....

I opened the window and let the cool air flow across it, and they turned black again.  Cool!

My wants are up on the Baseball tab.  Will definitely be putting these in pages and a binder.  

How many of you like die-cut and ornate Pacific products?