So long 2008...
Hello 2009.
This trade started a little strangely. I bought a pack of 2008 Topps Baseball Updates & Highlights Presents 2008 Topps Heritage High Numbers Series when it first hit the local hobby store and I ripped it on a A Pack A Day. The big hit was a Jermaine Dye jersey card, but one reader spied a different card out of the pack. Here's the exact comment:Why do I feel like Charlie Brown and I'm looking at you like you're Lucy, holding my coveted Joe Shlabotnik?That comment came from morineko of Olagato House and it referred to this guy:


Included were some Braves Timelines cards. The Timeless Teams Smoltz is above, the '95 SP short print of Brandon Jones is below. Both are needed for the set and greatly appreciated. My box is scheduled to arrive on the 5th so get ready for a retro UD gimmicky box break! Also included were the base cards of Smoltzie and Chipper.
There's a few other Bravos in there including Smoltz, McCann, Kotchman, Sammons and Nunez.
Wrapping it up is five cards from my 2007 Updates & Highlights want list. I'm pretty sure that list is out of date now. I think I'm going to delete it until I can properly catalog the set again. I know for a fact I need the McCann card though, I'm surprised I didn't have it already.
Is Matt Ryan. Man, was I so totally wrong. Off to face the Cardinals in the playoffs. How's that for an unlikely playoff matchup, Falcons and Cardinals? Who wins in a matchup of two of the NFL's most hapless franchises? Maybe the Big One will hit California this Sunday and it will drag Phoenix down into the Pacific ocean with the rest of Cali and the sea will swallow up both teams. Any non-baseball Cardinals fans out there? Not Stanford. NFL fans. I'm curious.

Kris also sent a second chipper with this odd bit of schmutz on it:
It's a little red blob that looks like it's embedded under the UV coating. Whatever it is, you can see an imprint of the red blotch on the other Chipper. It's a /1 blob card! The newest gimmick!
80 Ryan Braun
1 Chase Utley
133 Chin-Lung Hu RC
23 Tom Glavine
41 Adrian Gonzalez
43 Felix Hernandez
57 Joe Mauer
16 Jake Peavy
88 Hideki Matsui
82 Manny Ramirez
85 Matt Holliday
125 Josh Banks RC
142 Greg Smith RC
143 Nick Blackburn RC
34 Brian Roberts
28 Ryan Church
I love Hank, I love the '56 Topps set. This to me is the pinnacle of all baseball carddom. It's got that classic Aaron portrait that was so good, Topps used it on his '54, '55 and '56 cards. It's got the red and blue team color bars for the name and position. It's got the great photo of Willie Mays sliding into home. Yes, Willie Mays. Topps either goofed or got lazy and painted a Braves uniform on the Say Hey Kid. No word if Mantle forged Hank's facsimile signature.
The back looks great too. Nice, simple 1956 Topps design on light card stock. All the necessary info is efficiently displayed leaving plenty of room for a huge cartoon. The middle toon shows how Hank hit a home run in every NL ballpark as a rookie. Of course there were only 8 at the time, but still. I got this card in a lot on Yahoo! Auctions a while back before they went belly up. This was one of a lot of 18 '56 Topps cards but I didn't even see the other ones when I saw the auction. I saw Hank, then a Buy It Now price and clicked so hard my mouse was wobbly for a week. Luckily I needed most of the other ones in the lot, not that I cared. The card is kind of warped, there's a tear in the bottom edge and someone tried to poke Hank's eye out, but it's my favorite card of all time so it's Gem Mint to me.
3-Every New Years I resolve to __________ my collection.
4-If I could spend a day with one person from baseball history, it would be ________.
2-Who is your favorite baseball player?
3-What is your favorite team?
4-What is your favorite baseball movie?
5-What is your favorite baseball book?
6-What is your favorite card?
My answers:
One of these days I'm going to get sick and tired of the shenanigans in this hobby and dump it all to work on my Morgan Silver Dollar collection.
I'm kind of shocked I haven't really discussed this on the blog yet... Carlton was my first real player collection.
Anyone need some '87 Topps? How about '86? '88? '90? '84? '93? I got Fleer, Donruss, Upper Deck, Score, Pinnacle, Leaf, Ultra, and a bunch of others too. I just need to find 'em...
If I could spend one day with Babe Ruth, I know one thing... Even if I didn't see one pitch of baseball, I'd still have a helluva good time.
This is the Chipper that lives in my wallet.
You knew that already.
If I could only have one baseball card book, this would be the one.
I love it so much it's in my Saul Bass parody logo over there!
No team has ever done that in a season. You still need to lose 10 straight next year if you want to suck as bad as the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, but hey, now you have a goal to shoot for in 2009.
King of the Jungle. The Gridiron, not so much...
I wanted some football cards to open today while I watched all the games with playoff implications so I got this 4 packs and an auto thing for $9.99. The distributor on the back is MJ Holding company and there's a web address on there too. So, four packs and a draft pick autograph. Looking at what is offered on the front There's about nine bucks full retail value for the packs and a 2008 Hit autograph in there. Let's see what is actually in there...
Swap the Chrome for a Legends pack and that's pretty much what's on the package. I'm happy about the low series pack since that's the one with Matt Ryan. Upper Deck, eh... Topps, eh... Legends is very interesting. There could be another autograph in there and hey, Legendary players. Let's start with the Hit pack and go on to the 2006s from there.
W00t! Got the Matt Ryan! The pack is a success! As for the rest: Hawkins was a 4th round pick of the Titans and has 4 catches this year. Sam Keller didn't get drafted and sign with an Arena League team. Too bad they just suspended the 2009 season. Brandon Flowers is a second round pick of the Chiefs and plays cornerback when he's not touring with the Killers. Brink was a 7th round pick who is on the Texan's practice squad.O'Connell was the third round pick of the Patriots who now has to look up at Brady and Cassel. Eh, I got the Ryan. Everything else is packing material. Next.
The Ryans rookie with the little foil stamp on it confused me. I'd never seen on of them before. They fall 1:10 packs so they can't be that rare. Not a bad pack, Three decent rookies, a couple of defensive backs and the Concussion Queen.
This was an odd pack, all quarterbacks and running backs. Even weirder is half the base cards have the position stamped in capital letters (LT, Johnson and Westbrook) and the others are all in lower cases. I tried to scan the foil, but you see how well that worked. LT's card is cool, but the Rex Grossman card is hideous. He looks like a flailing turkey. The Favre looks good though and Hackney is still hanging around the league holding the clipboard for the Broncos. Ok, now for the pack I'm really looking forward to:
Steve DeBerg? Steve DeBERG?? STEVE DEBERG?!? Oh my God.....
7th round pick of the Bengals (probably simply because he was a Bearcat), cut in training camp, signed by the Panthers for their practice squad, dut again and is now on the Patriots' practice squad. Not quite the McFadden, Flacco and Ryan autos shown on the front. The card was also put in the package with no protection whatsoever, so the top right corner and bottom edge has dings.