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I don’t know if I’ve ever scanned as much for a post as I did with the 2nd half of the great envelope that Gavin from Baseball Card Breakdown sent me.12 scans!  What was I thinking.   I might have to go on the DL with scanner’s elbow…All kidding aside, Gavin did a great job at knocking a bunch of Blue Jays off the want list.A 6 pack of Heritage, including 3 high numbers!  There was actually 8 cards total in the Heritage portion, leaving me with just a couple more Bautista high number versions to go.There were 7 ’99 Bowman cards in the lot, Vernon Wells didn’t make the cut because he appears later on.There were just 5 2000 Bowman cards, so I threw in a 2000 Topps Chrome Tony Fernandez to make the scan a little more even. A couple of ’85 Fleer Limited Editions that I thought I already had, but didn’t.  The 9 of Spades represented by Tom Candiotti is also new to the collection.Told you Vernon would show up later, as part of a duo of ’06 Fleer Showcase cards.   This is just the start of the Roy Halladay cards.2007 Heritage 2005 Donruss.   Can’t believe I still need a couple more of these.A little Gold Label for you.  Sorry drinkers, no Red or Blue Labels here… Finish up the base cards with Billy Koch from Topps 2000 (yes, I still need some of these as well).  This segues into…1998 Best Billy Koch autograph!  I believe it’s the first minor league auto card of a Blue Jay that I own.  It’s already on the Just the Hits–Blue Jays page.This next one was even better..2004 Topps Chrome Dave Stieb autograph!!  My favorite all time Blue Jays pitcher, I now have 2 copies of this card, and wouldn’t mind owning more.  Shame on me for not adding the other one I had to the hits page before.Last but certainly not least, Gavin sent me a couple cards that I really got a kick out of pulling from the envelope.A couple of his customs.A Vin Scully card!!  Can’t beat that no way no how.  I am going to miss hearing his voice once he retires.  A true broadcasting legend, there will never be another like him.  The Josh Donaldson card was actually in the envelope  twice, so I have an extra one for any of my fellow Blue Jays bloggers/collectors if they want.Gavin, a fantastic envelope, thank you very much!!!  Let’s not wait a couple of years before the next trade, shall we?thanks for reading, Robert

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The title for the first half of this trade post was really easy.  It was good to hear from one of the most creative bloggers out there, Gavin from Baseball Card Breakdown, a couple of weeks back.  Gavin said he had a few cards to send my way, and asked if I had anything off of his want lists, including the 2011 Topps frankenset that he’s working on.  I sent him a few little things, and in return today I received quite the bubble mailer.Today is the vintage, or close to vintage.Gavin promised a ’82 Topps Padres team set.Seeing the 21 card team set reminded me of how much I prefer the older Padres uniforms.   Honestly, I wish they would stop changing every few years and just go back to these. And yes, technically I know ’82 wouldn’t be considered vintage, but I needed something to fill out the post a little.  The 21 cards just about doubled my total for the ’82 set; I now have a whopping 44 cards toward the 792 card quest.  748 left isn’t that daunting a task, is it?It’s not too often that someone can say that they knocked off 20% of a want list, but Gavin succeeded with just 1 cardThe ’73 T want list is down to 4.  Fred Scherman is the final card in the set, #660.  Still need a checklist, the Bumbry/Dw. Evans RC, Schmidt and a rookie shortstops card.  Maybe by the end of 2016 I’ll pick these 4 up.Finally, Gavin sent a six pack of ’68s.  No, they weren’t 6 commons either…Would you rather have this combo as your SS and C?Not bad.   Or how about these 2?There were 3 outfielders in the group of 6, definitely no Tom, Dick or Harry’s here…Wondering why Topps had to airbrush Rusty’s helmet to pure black.  He hadn’t played anywhere else during his time in the majors but Houston before ’68.  Maybe somebody out there knows why this happened.My ’68 pursuit is now over 200 cards complete, 205 to be exact.  Not bad for a set that I never really intended to chase, and now I’ve been picking up cards so slowly that I might be 68 years old before I finish the set.   Hey, it’s not a sprint, right?Tomorrow, I’ll show off the other half of the envelope, which has a couple of autos, a pair of homemade cards (one of which is a legend), and a boat load of Blue Jays.My scanning arm hurts already…thanks for reading, Robert

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Panic.  That’s the one word that best describes my condition on Friday night.  As I have mentioned previously, I’ve taken to touching each card that I have in my collection, trying to thin out some cards that I don’t want or need, and also to get some cards more organized and easier to find. Well, on Friday evening I started to clean piles of cards from my desk, because I’m making an attempt to have my desk a lot less cluttered than what it was up north.   About 11PM I came across a small pile that the Night Owl sent me a few weeks back, and I set about putting away the Blue Jays, etc.I then came across this card…I think to myself “boy, I haven’t seen my ’62 Topps cards, let alone my ’68s since I moved in.”The search began. I tore through my entire card closet (yes, an entire closet devoted to cards).  Looked through every monster box, shoe box, and smaller set boxes.   Nothing.Go to my bedroom, where there’s an overflow of set boxes and other miscellany that I haven’t gotten to yet. Shit, not there either.I’ve gone through every box I can see, and I can’t find them.  Now pure panic mode sets in, because I have about 200 from each set, and that would truly SUCK if I lost them in the move.I go to bed about 1230 Friday night/Saturday morning a bit upset, thinking that these cards have just vanished. Move forward to Saturday afternoon.  I’ve done a couple of loads of laundry (yes, real men do laundry) and I start to hang some of my work clothes in my closet.  I move some of my shirts aside, and what do my eyes see, but several boxes of cards hiding behind those shirts that I hadn’t looked through the night before. I open the first box, and these are the first cards I see…My stash of 67’s.  Along with ’69, ’72 and ’74 Topps.  Not exactly what I’m looking for, but seeing these reminded me that I hadn’t come across these in the previous nights search as well.The very next box to it—PAYDIRT!!I recounted this very same story to my wife on Saturday, and naturally she comes up with one of her pearls of wisdom.It’s amazing what you find when you stop looking.  Truer words hadn’t been spoken in front of me that day.I can only imagine the heartbreak I would have encountered had I lost those 2 boxes of cards forever.  What would I have done?  It would have been too damn expensive and time consuming to start over.I probably would have had to resort to something newer, like Topps Now.If Tony L. endorses them, who am I to say no??On 2nd thought…phew, am I ever glad I found them.thanks for reading, Robert

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This coming Friday it will be already 6 weeks since I moved into my new house.  More and more as the past couple of weeks have progressed, I feel comfortable in my new surroundings.  The wife and I are getting into a routine about the household chores, and making plans on how to furnish/decorate the new abode.God bless her, the 3rd bedroom is going to be my den.  I have to figure out how to create a space in the house for her craft area in return (which I’ve pretty much figured out), but it’s a small price to pay to have my own space.  It’s nice to be able to “spread out” with my card collection and start posting again on a regular basis.You may or may not have noticed that this will be my 5th straight day posting; I’m slowly getting back to the old days where I was posting on a regular basis about one crazy thing or another.  Today’s post is a mish mash of cards that I’ve found recently that I thought semi interesting.I bought this half a dozen Mike Schmidt cards many many years ago.  Right now, I think that someone else will likely give them a better home.  Do you want them?  Post in the comments, and we’ll work something out.   Who knows?  Maybe I’ll just send them to you.I found this set of ’85 Blue Jays fire safety cards while going through everything in my collection over the past few weeks.  The card stock is flimsy compared to the sets that were released in the 80’s, but these were cool to find and reminded me that sometime soon I really need to go through my Blue Jays collection again and get them organized (a la Nachos Grande and his organizational project going on). I’m even comfortable in sneaking in the final 3 cards for the serial #’d hockey set that I bought off of COMC into this post.I can see where the Artifacts sets are going to be my weakness for this frankenset.  Especially if they have colors such as the sapphire parallel of Corey Perry you see on the left.  Shameful, yes I know. I even found 5 more ’90 Leaf cards towards that set, including a Dodger player you may have heard of…This card brings images of the HR he hit off of Dennis Eckersley in the World Series.  It also reminds me of the contest going on right now at Night Owl Cards.  If you want to have a one in a million chance of winning something great (or close to a million for all the entries there are, lol), click the link and wish the Owl a happy 8th blogoversary.That was a pretty comfortable post, wouldn’t you agree?thanks for reading, Robert

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I’m pretty sure that my latest serial numbered project will probably take just as long as it’s baseball counterpart has.  To be honest, I’m not worried, because I know that I will enjoy putting the serial numbered hockey set together just as much, if not more, because of the variety of cards that will be coming in. You can take the boy out of Canada, but you can’t take the Canada out of the boy…Speaking of Canada, one of my favorite multi sport bloggers, Doug from the Sportscards from the Dollar Store blog instantly sent out a care package of serial numbered cards to get the set off to a flying start.  I have a feeling that he’ll be a regular contributor to this set!  It took me a few minutes to figure out how I was going to scan 19 cards to show off.  A half dozen scans later, I have a post to put together.I’ve been so out of touch with hockey products over the past decade that a lot of these cards that will come in will be brand new to me.  My favorite of this 4?  Nope, not the JS Giguere Crown Royale card in the upper right, it’s the Tony Esposito SP Essentials in the lower right.  The card is from the 10-11 SP Authentic set, and I love the dual photo of Tony in his goalie gear on one side, with a faded head shot on the other.  Magnificent!  The Shane Doan Board Members card is actually an acetate card, which is the reason why it probably scanned so well.You probably will not see a whole lot of Victory cards in this set, so the Martin Straka on the left will be a rare sight indeed.  What jumped out right away about the Dion Phaneuf card in the center was that he had the ‘A’ on his chest instead of the ‘C’ which he wore during most of his time in Toronto.  I figured the card was at least a few years old and sure enough it’s a 2010-11 Certified Mirror Red.  Even though he’s 23, Nick Cousins is still new on the NHL scene, only having played portions of the past 2 seasons in the black and orange.There’s a couple of young Washington Capitals stars on this scan, but the card that instantly caught my attention was the Nail Yakupov Panini card from the Toronto Expo.  I believe that there’s still hope for Nail now that Edmonton has signed a couple of veterans and hopefully starting to turn the corner. There’s the Coyotes captain again, this time featured on a 2015-16 Artifacts card, a product that will probably be seen quite a lot in this set.  I’m not too sure where Dana Tyrell is right now, I couldn’t find any stats for him for the 2015-16 season.  He was traded to the Columbus Blue Jackets the year before, and only found the lineup for 3 games.  On the other hand, Paul Martin is still going strong well into his 30’s, coming within 2 wins of his first Stanley Cup last year in San Jose. I hadn’t heard of Cody Kunyk until seeing his card in this lot, that’s because he’s appeared in just 1 NHL game, which was just enough to get him on a card.  Nate Guenin’s NHL path has had a lot of twists and turns, and it wasn’t until his age 31 season that he became a regular on a NHL roster in Colorado.  If you’re wondering who the rookie on the Nashville Predators is, so was I!  Serious fail from Donruss here, not having put Ryan Thang’s name on the front of his card.  He’s of the same ilk as Cody, appeared in 1 NHL game earning him a rookie card the next season. Nikita Zadorov was part of the trade on draft day 2015 with Colorado that saw the Sabres pick up Ryan O’Reilly.  That trade will be tilted heavily in the Sabres favor for a long time unless Nikita and the others that Colorado picked up start to develop.  I thought the Patrick Marleau card was an insert, but actually it’s part of the base set from 08-09 Artifacts.  I thought that Martin Gerber had a longer and more distinguished NHL career, but it turns out that during his 8 NHL seasons, he was the #1 starter for his team in only 2 of those, and won just 30 games in a season once.The least I can do to thank Doug for his amazing generosity is give a link to his COMC store, maybe there’s something there that you’ll want or need?Thank you Doug, your envelope was greatly appreciated!!thanks for reading, Robert

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