Xfraction

My recent COMC order included a bunch of inexpensive xfractor autos. They're just cool cards, what can I say?

Logan Kensing has a 1.93 ERA in 3 relief appearances with the Tigers this season.

Some Braves which I will likely send away before long.

These were the cheapest xfractor autos from the world of football and basketball, just a bit over a buck each.

Adrian McPherson is currently with the Toronto Argonauts.

Wilson Chandler is with the Denver Nuggets, but missed this season with a hip injury.

Brett Wallace has been a surprising bright spot for the Padres this year. Well, by Padres standards, at least.

Good ol' Jedd Gyorko is hitting .215 with the Cardinals.

I'll leave you with some refraction action:

Blasting through a card show recap

I made 3 purchases at the card show today. One was 193 cards for $45 from my usual dude, Bill. Another one was 13 cards for $20. And the last one was 20 cards for $1.

It's gonna take me a while to sort out the 193 lot, so today let's look at the other 2 buys. We can say all these cards pictured below combined ran me about the cost of a blaster plus tax (though, full discloser, Oregon doesn't have sales tax).

No two hotter names in the game today than A-Rod and Kris Bryant. Ok, maybe A-Rod not so much, but still, he's still out there getting it done and about to begin a 2-year farewell tour. So a bat relic #'d /299 for cheap sounded good to me. And happy to pick up my first Bryant relic, even if it's a boring unnumbered plain white swatch.

That Alex Cobb auto was cheap and looked good. Hopefully he comes back strong from Tommy John eventually. And Jedd Gyorko is a dude I collect, so that Finest relic/auto is a nice addition to the PC.

You guys know I'm a nut for biblical names, right? Nah, I'm kidding. I need the E's for my goal of spelling out BasEball Card BrEakdown. And I got the V because Gavin Floyd is a guy I collect.

Spoiler alert, these 4 cards won't stay with me for long. Cubs, Pirates, and Braves are always in high demand in my tradebox, so cheap hits from those teams are hard to pass up.

And here are the cards from the nickelbox dig. Mostly Bowman cards of guys I like and/or collect.

So again, not a bad haul for roughly the price of a blaster. I'll be back with the rest of the day's deals in a future post. Thanks for swinging by!

Bonus portion of a trade + a PC 12/25 auto

I've gotten a couple generous trade packages over the past week. Let's take a look.

This first one is from Josh Bob, a relatively new guy on the scene who has been doing some trading but doesn't have a blog (yet?). You might remember his was the trade last week where my priority box to him did a couple laps across the US before being delivered. Well, once it finally did show up, Josh was so happy with the contents that he was compelled to throw together a few more cards for me to balance the scales. That's above-and-beyond trader behavior right there and very appreciated!

A couple steps towards my goal of spelling out BASEBALL CARD BREAKDOWN in letter patch cards! I can now spell ABA CARD. So I could use them in a post about the American Basketball Association. One more B and I can post about the 70s Swedish pop group. I'm not familiar with Bill Hall, and the autograph on his patch isn't very visible, but I'm still very happy about the card. And Josh Willingham I know most for being a top PC guy of Jaybarkerfan, and so it almost feels wrong for me to have this card and not send it to him. But oh well, he's probably got a few of them already. These are both #'d /75. And below them you see a very nice Yankees/Dbacks/Giants Randy Johnson dual relic with a pinstripe and a half. Thanks to cards like this, my Big Unit PC is looking pretty good these days.. Now if only he would sign more autographs so the prices would dip into a reasonable price range. I'd love to top off that PC with an auto one of these days.

A couple turn-of-the-millennium mashers in Carlos Delgado and Vlad, both beasts in their prime.

Some Texas Rangers I collect.

Gavin Floyd on a team leader card, plus a Mantle from the era when Topps would seemingly put every photo of Mickey they could find onto a card. I'd like to think that hat is made of nachos and there's cheese dip in the top.

A couple Goldies including a 2016 Topps rainbow foil parallel, plus an shiny early Kershaw and a Mookie Betts black-border mini. Nice!

Pads in the Hall.

A nice lot of cards for the Matt Kemp PC.

And we wrap up Josh's follow-up package with a few more Padres I collect. Big thanks for the generosity, Josh! I'll definitely be keeping an eye out for cards for you.

 -   - - - -- ---o

The other trade package to feature in this post was a surprise mailing from Jeff Jones of the blog Wish They Still Came With Bubblegum. He's quickly made a name for himself as a guy you want to get into your circle of traders.

A couple Team USA cards of young guys to watch, plus a Goldy insert. Lindor was the AL ROY runner-up last year, while Joey Gallo still needs to prove he can hit major league pitching.. but when he gets ahold of one, he crushes it.

Some vintage to spice things up, with a couple Vidas and a McCovey.

Nice lot of Gwynns including the classic what the..? "fishing" card, and a cut-out oddball in the style of 1969 Topps.

A Hoyt reprint and some great oddballs.

Some neat looking cards of a couple guys who anchored the Padres' rotation during the pennant-winning season of 1998, Kevin Brown and Andy Ashby.

And the jewel of Jeff's package:

At first I saw this card and thought, "Nice! A Jedd Gyorko auto." Then I did a double take when I saw it was a Christmas Card(!!!) It's always much appreciated when I get a 12/25 card from the cardsphere, regardless if it's a Tony Gwynn auto or a card about blisters. But yeah, it's extra awesome when it's a player I collect, such as Gyorko.

Jedd is an interesting case for me, collecting-wise, as he's the first guy since my 2012 return to the hobby who I started PCing while he was with my hometown Padres, and then he got traded away. It happened back in the day with the likes of McGriff and Bip. While the Cardinals are among my least favorite teams, I'll still be rooting for Gyorko to do well, and I'll keep on collecting his cards, at least casually. I mean, I still collect/root-for Adrian on the Dodgers and Peavy on the Giants, both gone from San Diego before I started collecting again, and both currently on "hated rival" teams.

Anyways, big thanks, Jeff! Very nice of you.  I'll do my best to round up a decent return package for you shortly.

2010 Pro Debut hobby box

Welp, I busted a box of 2015 Pro Debut a few weeks back and it was a fun enough break to where I took a look on eBay for cheap (sub 50) hobby boxes of other years of the product. I ended up winning a box of the inaugural year, 2010 Series 2-- yeah, I guess they broke it up into a couple sets back then. The hotter box is Series 1, featuring Mike Trout and footballer Russell Wilson. But oh well, Series 2 is a cheaper box. Maybe it'll have something nice for me.

Ya'll ready for this? Let's bust it open.

A couple PC hits for me.. Goldy and Gyorko. These are my highlights from the box. In hindsight, probably should have saved $40+ and got them offa Just Commons or something.

More guys who went onto be decent major leaguers. Sorry these pictures kinda suck, but it's hard to get it so that the names are readable thanks to the foil names on a dark background. Yep, 2010 Topps design is not very photogenic.

Some more names I recognized, including a bunch of Mets.

More dudes that ring a bell for me, including MiLB All-Time Home Run King, Mike Hessman.

Here are my hits! Quote-unquote hits, that is. Good news is I got an extra auto (only 2 are promised, yet I pulled 3), but the bad news is all these guys are nobodies. The best name here is Johnny Giavotella, who had a decent 2015 season with the Angels. You might remember I just pulled a nice Giavotella parallel out of 2015 Update a couple weeks ago. It's like the Baseball Card Gods are telling me to start a Johnny G. PC!
The David Cook auto is a gold parallel #'d /50. That's the good news; the bad news is he called it quits a couple years ago, never making The Show.
Shane Peterson performed at replacement-level in 93 games for the Brewers this past season, so at least he made it.
Ozzie Martinez made the majors for a few games in 2010/2011, but spent 2015 down in AA. Shame; that's a nice big swatch of fabric, #'d /199.

Here are my parallels. After only getting ONE freaking parallel in my 2015 Pro Debut box (must have been a parallel "cold box"), I was happy to get a fair amount of color in this box, with several lovely blues. The bad news? All nobodies. My greatest want in the entire universe was to pull a Goldschmidt blue parallel, but I failed. I pulled a base card of him, at least, but it was still a failure on the box with no Goldy parallel. The only decent name here is Adam Warren, who had a solid '15 with the Yanks; Maybe Zippy will be interested in it since it's a Staten Island Yankee card. On the bottom there, you see this was a "Jake Thompson hot box" with both a blue (/369 or so) and the only gold of the box (/50). Jake didn't pitch last season.. not sure if he retired or was injured; up through 2014 he had decent stats in the minors. There's also another "Jake Thompson" in the game, so it's confusing.

Some of these inserts. Mostly nobodies.

And some of these inserts. Shockingly, some decent names in this group. Austin Romine is the one in the lower right.

I could pretty much be talked out of any of this shit besides the Goldy and Gyorko.. so just me know if you're interested in trading. Some of the bigger names might take some convincing. I also obviously have lots of lesser base cards not pictured.

Question for you team collectors out there: Do you consider minor league cards like this as belonging to the respective major league parent club? These cards kinda suck in that they don't list anywhere which parent club they're affiliated with, so I may have to do some research when I sort these up by team into my trade box.

So there you go. The box was nice in that I got a bonus hit and several parallels, but a dud in that all my hits and parallels weren't of notable players. Not a single goddamned one. Ah well, such is the risk of busting a minor league product. Oh, and there were several dupes in the box, too. Still fun to crack open, I suppose. But yeah, after this fruitless break, I think my itch to rip has been satisfied for a while. I don't plan on busting more boxes until Xmas (hopefully I get a couple boxes of cards as gifts).

In other news, I just sold the Stan Musial auto I bought back in May. Sad to see it go, and I enjoyed it while I had it, but at the end of the day, I wasn't that attached to it. After spending a lot on cards in recent months, I felt like I needed to sell something nice to help balance out. Nearly doubled my money on it, at least. Stan and I will meet again (Still on the hunt for his 2004 Retired refractor auto.)

Thanks for getting through this post! Hope you all have a nice holiday.

End of October trade recaps

A big chunk of my Halloween was spent whipping up custom cards, and I'm happy to say the prize packages from my recent contest are now in the capable hands of the USPS.

Two trade packages showed up for me this past week, and now I'm going to show off the cards I got.

First up was a stuffed PWE from Mr. Mark Hoyle...

Nice selection of 76 Topps of dudes I collect. Good stuff!

And some 74s goodness too. Reggie's 74 base card still eludes me, but these couple other cards with him are pretty cool. Also a nice 2nd-year Goose and a Kitty.

Mr. Hoyle rounded out the package with some more recent stuff.

Thanks again for the trade, Mark! Hope my return has shown up by now.


Next up was a sweet bunch of cards from Lonestarr.

I love Rod Beck.. tempted to round up all 9799 numbered copies of this parallel. Plus nice additions to my Vlad and Giancarlo PCs.

Pete Rose lot. A couple cool shots here.

Lonestarr snuck in some neat American Football cards, including a couple Gavin Escobar cards and a Reggie Bush.

'89 Bowman in the house.

These Padres cards lit up my eyes. Austin Hedges melty insert and Gyorko DK. Awesome!

We close it out with some Dodgers. Actually, the Piazza is a Padres card featuring a Mets photo. And the Kemp says it's a Padres card, but I'm not convinced.

Big thanks, Lonestarr! I'm very happy with the cards. Put some in the mail to you recently, so they should show up soon.

Thanks for stopping by.

Smells like . . . Victory

Happy 4th, all!

I recently completed my first trade with Tim B. of I Love the Smell of Cardboard in the Morning. He hooked me up with the following good stuff!

My honeybunny, AJ Lee! I've been wanting her 2014 Topps and/or Chrome card for a while now, so I was very happy to find it among the cards from Tim. But truth be told, I don't think it's really all that flattering of a photo. It makes me think of this:

Bip! Always love getting cards of Mr. Roberts.

A few nice McCovey cards.

Khalil Greene! That rookie auto refractor may very well now be the nicest card in my modest Khalil Khallection. Great looking khard!

A couple sweet 2013 parallels of dark horse, Jedd Gyorko! He got sent down to AAA for a spell, but is back now and was the hero yesterday, pretty much single-handedly beating the Cardinals. Let's hope he keeps that shit up!

I know we're celebrating America today, but let's tip our cap to our neighbors up North.

Tim snuck some other sports on me too, with a 4-pack of Marshall Faulk (my fellow SDSU alum), Ricky Williams (another San Diego-raised guy) from his stint as a minor league baseball player, and Michael Jordan (no San Diego ties that I'm aware of.. but let's not hold it against him.)

2004 Topps Chrome black refractors are amongst my all-time favorite looking cards! Here's one more down to finishing the set (I've still got a long way to go). Plus a sweet Gavin Floyd rookie.

I also love these 2011 Topps diamond parallels or whatever they are. So sparkly!

And liquorfractors are also on my shortlist of all-time favorite parallels. Someday I'll seriously work on a frankenset of sparkly 2011 Topps parallels. Tim definitely helped me out on that quest.

Go Padres!

Some greats!

Finally, a really nice Marcus Giles relic.

Thanks so much, Tim! You really nailed it with this trade! Hopefully the cards I sent you in return can hold a candle.

And again, Happy 4th of July, everybody. Be safe.