Texas Two-step

Sorry, I couldn't think of anything clever to title my most recent trade post. I guess I should say most recent trades plural. The two step reference is for Marvin from Trade Bait-The Great Chase who went to school at UT in Austin and another blogger who currently lives in Texas, Brian who ya'll know from the Play at the Plate blog has sent me a bunch of packages in the past few months.

I don't really have a problem with the state of Texas. I just realized that they both have ties to the Lone Star state when I was writing this entry.

I'm more worried about the Sunflower State looming over me than anything else.


If only they wouldn't use OK for a spittoon I'd feel more comfortable.

Alright enough with the dorky jokes, let's see some cards.


No sooner than Marvin had sent over a mess o' cards then he sent over another package fill to the brim with more cool stuff.


I've only ripped a few packs of Philadelphia and I've never pulled any horizontal cards.


This is a nice one of LT and a decapitated Phillip Rivers. Looks like he's a Jet now. I really would like to see a healthy LT play next year. I really like that the horizontal cards don't have logos.


I like this one of Sidney Rice.

I didn't realize that he played for Steve Spurrier. I really wish "the Old Ball Coach" would get it together and start putting together some high powered offensive teams soon. I'm tired of them slugging it out in defensive SEC battles game after game. I guess the recruits at Florida were a little more talented than the ones that he lures over to Colombia,SC.


These cards look exactly like the packages. Shiny and silvery. Like most of you, I like shiny. These were two of the coolest Platinum cards he sent over.


This is one of my first Bo cards. And a shiny one at that!



On the other side of the card spectrum a definitely non-shiny retro-y mini of Montana. Pretty cool card. This card is a sketch card done right. It looks like Montana to me.

The next step in this trade post is Brian from Play at the Plate

Like me, he's been busting a bunch of UD stuff recently too.


I pulled a similar card to this one, except mine was that Romo guy. This suits me a little better. I'm not much of a Cowboys fan. The Romo relic will be included in a stack headed to Dallas.



I like the look of these cards a lot and of course my two favorite current Packers.



I'm not exactly familiar with the Game breakers insert set. I haven't pulled any of these, but that's cool because Brian's got me covered. He sent over like 23 of these. They only feature guys in their college uniforms which is cool with me.



I like Malcolm a lot when he first got to OU. He got some heat when he left for the NFL for not putting enough effort in practice and during games. I'm not sure if I buy that though. People have a weird tendency to either love or hate a player based on heresy. I thought the guy did good while at OU.

Here is a video of some of his highlights. He was quite a specimen and I'm pretty sure he could have caught more of those passes if so many of them weren't thrown behind him. This is a sort of a long video at a little over 4 minutes, but I love to watch good highlight videos no matter the player or team.




The backs of the Game Breaker cards are pretty nice too. I used to keep up with Kevin Smith when he was at UCF. He was drafted to Detroit. So sad. He's nursing some injuries right now. OU has had a lot of players go to the Lions. I really hope McCoy or Trent Williams don't end up there. It's a horrible place to make somebody play football.



Don't know much about this guy. Seems to not really be tearing it up at the next level. He currently plays for Indy.

This short post really doesn't reflect on the insane number of cards that these two bloggers sent over, but honestly I don't think I could do any better than this at showing off a small portion of what these guys sent out.

Thanks again. I hope to dance with the two of you again. I've got some stuff in little packages ready to be sent off to you guys. I just need to find some time to actually do it.

I leave you with another Malcom Kelly highlight.


This was after the 2008 Big XII championship game when we played Nebraska. Kind of cool. I like that you can see the cameraman clean off the lens with his fingers doing the "performance".

Thanks for reading.

#3 Scoreboards in the Background

Well, technically spring is here and this past weekend is daylight savings time so I guess it's safe to post up another installment of SitB. The reason why I say "safe" is because it depicts a player during a snowy day.

It's been relatively warm in Oklahoma these past few days so its safe to look at a card with a depiction of cold weather.


This is card # 489 from 2006 Upper Deck and I'm guessing this was shot in the spring time.


Brrrr. Just looking at it makes me cold. I think I might have a slight form of S.A.D. I think I'm pretty much the only person that I know that has some form of it. No offense to those who really have S.A.D., but I really, really dislike the cold and overcast skies. Or at least I hate having to do stuff outside on those days. It's really depressing. However, shooting portraits during a cloudy day is actually pretty good. No hard shadows on the face that I have to even out with lights and reflectors.

Back to the card. Keeping with the SitB theme there is definitely a scoreboard. You can't miss it. The dark scoreboard makes the snow stand out better than if it their was a bunch of empty seats in the background. It is spring baseball after all.

You'll notice that even though he's wearing a Nationals uniform he's listed with the A's. Apparently he was the 2003 AL Cy Young award runner up to Roy Halladay while with the White Sox. Loaiza would eventually retire with the White Sox in 2008.

Alright cool. I'm off to enjoy some sunshine and get try to get my internal clock set back to "real" time. I'm done with hibernating.

retro saturday derailed!!

Saturdays are usually my day to check out the card store or go by the flea market to check out the card selection. Recently I've been pretty busy so I haven't had the chance to really do any leisure activities, but this Saturday I was looking forward taking the day off to look around for old cameras, books and cards. The flea market was lame and the one card shop guy was closed for inventory. Crap!! Why close on a Saturday for inventory when that should be the day that most everybody goes out to get cards. Or at least I would assume that Saturday would be the best day for card shopping.

Anyway, with my card shopping thwarted, I had to go to the "fake" hobby shop to check out what kind of cards they had.

The "fake" shop is a place called Vintage Stock which I believe only has locations in Kansas, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas. It's a used CD, DVD and game store that also has a limited selection of cards and comic books. Over priced cards and comic books.

I needed to satiate my need for cards so I picked up some random packs of stuff.

First off is the Garbage Kid Flashbacks. I didn't know these existed until last night when I read Dayf's posts here ,here, and here.



These are pretty cool. Vintage Stock also has the GPKs from the eighties too, but they are stickers as well as the new ones. I'm not much of a sticker guy. I'd rather have the regular cards instead.

The packs contain 10 stickers and I pulled 4 parallels in my pack.







and two stand alone cards:



These are the Where are They Now? cards.

pretty cool. Sort of like a When they Were Young insert set, but a little more interesting and not so cute. A little creepier take on the Topps flagship set.


I know that I'm not going to try for the Heritage set. Or for that matter any of the Heritage sets. I like them all actually, but I don't really want to actively collect the set, picking up a random pack here and there is cool for me. Having said that, I needed to grab at least one pack to see what they're like.

First up is Okmulgee's own Ron Gardenhire.

Pretty cool for a manager card. It's not a faux vintage miscut card. I just scanned it funny.


I like Ichiro.


I think he's a favorite of a lot of collectors. I have seen "variations" of this card all over the blogs, and by variations I mean why do card companies reuse the same darn photo year after year. I've seen this pose on many different cards. I don't have any of those cards so I guess this'll be going in the binder.


A sleepy frenchy.

It says on the back that after the trade he led the Mets in HRs, doubles, runs scored and RBI's. I'm not sure how big of an accomplishment that was considering,but anyway. "welcome to the team!"

And of course a chrome of a Texas Ranger.


By my estimation I have pulled about 7 to 8 chrome cards and three of them have been Rangers. I'm a Ranger magnet.

Not a bad pack of cards though.

I didn't get much in my two hobby packs of 2010 Topps. This was my first chance to pick up hobby packs of the flagship. I was hoping the odds of pulling something cool like a million card giveaway or the Legendary Lineage cards would be better.

I didn't pull any Million Card giveaway cards, I did pull an LL card that I've had my eye on for a while.




Jose is out for 2-8 weeks with a hyper thyroid problem. I don't know what that means, I just hope he's healthy. I want to watch that guy get busy this year.


Another Met in the pack. This time a backwards Piersall. This is also a really nice insert set. It also sort of fits in to the retro theme today.

Here's a card that doesn't fit in to the retro theme, but I wanted to show it off anyway.

A nice horizontal Kershaw card.


Now for some retro football in the form of Topps Mayo.

This guy had a pretty interesting life.


He has the nickname of "The Father of the American Prohibition." He also was captured in the Spanish-American war and held prisoner for a month in Cuba. According to wikipedia he was a Victorian era Richard Dawson, stopping to kiss admiring young women during speaking engagements.

This was probably the biggest hit of the day.

A Harvard back mini.


Exactly!!


Of Joe Namath. That's cool. I like Broadway Joe. I have this base card, but until now I didn't have the mini.

Alright, I guess that's it for now. In two days it will be time to try and get my Million Cards sent to me. I'm mainly looking to get my lone vintage card sent to me. a 1971 Skip Pitlock.

Thanks for reading.

trade with wicked liquids

I recently I completed a trade with Wicked Liquids. Actually I guess I shouldn't say recently. It's been a while since he sent some stuff over. I've been crazy busy and haven't had the time to post much. I have just enough time to read over the blogs then get back to work.

Anyway, Wicked Liquids guy is a football and baseball collector like me. Unlike me he went to the University of Texas at Austin. To those of you who don't follow college sports that's the polar opposite of my university which is the University of Oklahoma. That's our biggest rival. I'm not sure how they feel, maybe Texas A&M is their big rival? Anyway, I won't hold it against him. I hope he doesn't think ill of me. He didn't bip me so that's a good sign.

Cool! I'm really hoping I don't get bipped as I don't really have enough ammo to re-bip someone.

Wicked is close to pulling off completing the entire Goodwins and Ginter sets with relics, autos; the whole shebang! I'm envious. I wish I had the means and interest to pull off the entire set. Who knows, maybe one of these days I'll finish it up.

Anyway, he sent me a bunch of stuff. Most of it I hadn't seen before. That's the best stuff. No kidding. I really don't mind a bit of random in my trades.



He sent some 2009 Rookies and Stars.




I love Peyton and Reggie.

My first SP Threads card.

I hate to sound stupid, but is this a die cut?

I ask because it's got the weird funny border on top.

Some base SP. Did I mention I haven't seen these before?

They're really beautiful cards. These are marked SP Rookie Edition even though the players on the cards aren't even remotely rookies even more. I'm guessing it's because the players were high round draft picks out of college? I'm too lazy to look it up.


Carson Palmer. I'm pretty sure he was ranked highly coming out of USC in 2002. He started the current trend of Trojan QB's taken in the first round.


Cotchery.


A Vince Youn... Hey wait a second!!!

Hmmm. Marvin snuck a Longhorn in my pack! I really like these horizontal cards. The position surrounded by a little circle on the left of the card is nice.


Here's some more SP. This time a regular base set card?


I love the look of these. This will go nicely in the Aaron Rodgers binder.


... a bunch of Topps Mayo for my set needs.

I love the college game so much more than NFL. Of course that's mainly because I live in a college town and we have no NFL teams to root for.

That's why I get excited when I see college uniforms depicted on cards.



Some cool UD Football Heroes cards. I've seen these on the blogs and Joe from Priceless Pursuit sent me A.D. cards from this set.


These are the first that I've seen with the Legends logo on the side.

They've got nice write ups of the players on the back instead of stats.

These cards are shiny!!!


Whoo hoo!


... and finally the cards that I commented on wanting in the first place.



I almost forgot about these cards. They got lost in all the other stuff he sent over.

I really like the Ryan Grant card. He's a pretty good RB for the Packers. Juaquin was a WR at Oklahoma that was a lot of fun to watch. My favorite play of his was in '09 against Texas Tech in Norman.



The clip shows two different angles on the catch and yards after catch. This is a pretty decent example of why he was fun to watch. Not crazy exciting, but he did this type of stuff a lot it seemed.

Cool. I love all the cards. Thanks again Marvin. Sorry it took me so long to send my package over to you. (and do a trade post).

Thanks for reading.