Trade with Play at the Plate

I have odd feelings for Fleer these days. When I got back into collecting a few years ago, I seemed to mainly gravitate towards Topps. They were the leader to me and had the best designs; 2009 flagship and Allen and Ginter. Upper Deck, Pannini didn't do much for me. I liked some of the designs and the photography, but I always seemed to stay with Topps for the most part and focused mostly on finishing those Topps sets.

When I was a kid things weren't that way. To me Donruss, Topps and Fleer were basically all good. I didn't discriminate too much in those days. 1980 and 1982 Topps, 81-85 Donruss and 82 and 83 Fleer seemed to be the majority of card purchases in those days until Garbage Pail Kids came along. I shifted over to GPK for the remaining collecting years until June of 2009 when I got back into collecting.


Fleer was already on it's way out in 2009. I would come across some Fleer Ultra or Tradition in repacks. I was really fond of repacks back then; they were a cheap and easy way to sample a bunch of stuff that I hadn't seen before.

Another way of sampling things that I haven't seen before and that is the 2002 Fleer Tradition that I've shown above.

These cards came to my home courtesy of Brian at the Play at the Plate blog. He and I have traded quite a few times. I haven't don't much trading or buying this year. Add to that list trade posts. This package arrived probably at least a year ago and I still haven't gotten around to writing about it. I don't know what exactly the problem is with me. I just a horrible person I guess.

Anyway, I would have probably never come across cards like these had it not been for my trade partners.



I'm not sure who some of these players are. Obviously Piazza is a household name and and actually I'm pretty sure that I've heard of Tsuyoshi Shinjo, but I don't know in what context exactly.

The fronts look a little like 2008 Goudey which of course is taken from 1934 set. I gu



I really do like the backs of these cards more than the front. The player silhouette is taken from the photo on the front.

A nice little touch is the glove icon that contains the card number.



I had a really cool idea for a Jose Reyes themed post, but I never got around to doing it. Maybe one of these days. For now I'll just show this cool chrome card Brian sent over.


Adding to the list of cards that I didn't know existed is this 2000 Gallery Mike Piazza. Nice die cut design, but my favorite part of the card is the that it's translucent.



Lastly here is a Bowman Chrome card of Enrique Cruz. Brian sent over a few of these, this is the one I chose to upload. I don't know why exactly except this guy looks too young to be playing pro ball. Maybe I'm just getting old. Of course this is 12 year old card so Enrique might be looking a bit older like the rest of us.

Thanks for the cards, and sorry it took me this long to get around to showing off my part of the trade.

Calling Mr. Clete Thomas!

I've had a keen interest lately in a particular Detroit Tiger; Outfielder Clete Thomas. Until recently he's a been flying under my radar. One thing is I don't keep up much with the Tigers and Mr. Thomas has been battling an injured shoulder for most of the season.


I have a few of his cards already:

A really cool Heritage Rookie Stars of 2008 to go with my...


...even cooler Heritage ad panel of Clete with a couple o' Rays.

In my rush to put my '09 Updates in a binder I had forgotten about this gem:

A nice action shot of Thomas running to third.

In case you think I've become a Clete Thomas player collector, that's not quite true. No offense to Mr. Thomas. I think it stinks that his injury could have possibly killed his chances to stay in the majors, I'm not that keen on collecting every one of his cards. I'm just looking for one:

2008 Allen and Ginter card NO# 209. If you missed it before , I had bought a "complete" set off of Ebay but it was missing this one card.


Thanks to Brian from Play at the Plate I can finally put Mr. Clete Thomas in his rightful place in between Bruce Jenner and Carlos Lee. You can tell from the scan that Bruce is super excited to see Clete, but Carlos is a little bit more subdued in his reaction to Mr. Thomas sharing a binder page with him.



That's not all Brian sent. In the package was a couple of players that I am really interested in getting every card made of them.


These two cards have eluded me all year. The awesome action shot of David Wright doing what he does at the hot corner.



And an even better shot of not one, but three priceless expressions on one card. The main subject Reyes is obviously showing a lot of emotion and is the focal point of the card, but look at the umpire and the Marlins player's leg up in the air. Not to mention his shocked expression too. A really nice card. I think there's something to the diagonal white baseline running through the frame and Jose's white uniform that makes the photo stand out more.

Sorry for the short post, but I love the cards. Thanks a bunch Brian. Now I can put the 2008 A&G base and SP set to bed!

The value of a good trade

I received some pretty cool cards in the mail from Brian at Play at the Plate. He always sends me pretty cool cards, and this time they had a definite Oklahoma flavor.


First up is a couple of former OU greats Rocky Calmus and Roy Williams.





They are pictured here in their rookie cards with the logos of their nfl teams. I don't believe these two are in the league anymore, but I love getting their cards in the mail.

It took me a while to realize that their were no OU or NCAA logos on these cards. Doesn't really matter to me. I still like them. I pride myself on being able to pick out little details in photographs and it took me a while to notice that Rocky's jersey is just a Tennessee Titans jersey painted red.

I can never seem to pull any former OU players. I'm wondering if pack searchers have developed an infra-red system for searching out players in crimson and cream.

I've seen cards like these in the card shop. I hate to sound like a cheap skate, but unlicensed cards of former players aren't really worth 9-15 dollars per card.

Having said all that I still really, really like the cards. Especially since that's the only card I have of Roy "Superman" Williams in an OU uniform.

Here's where the Superman nickname comes from. Close your eyes Longhorn fans.



I really shouldn't embed anti-Longhorn videos in a post about OU, but I can't help it. It seems that every video on youtube has OU/Texas highlights or lowlights whichever way you want to look at it on their website.



Here's a really nice card of Juaquin. I'm guessing by the empty stands and green and gold t-shirts that it's at a Baylor game. Poor Baylor.





A couple of nice Press Pass cards. I only opened one blaster of this. I didn't pull any cool autos. I pulled a few OU guys, but I didn't get these two cards. These are pretty nice, except that Bradford's card is obviously from last season when he was injured. I'm really hoping everything works out for him in the NFL.

Gerald McCoy's eyes look really fierce in his card.

A couple of Thunder players in their pre-Thunder jerseys. Earl is a Pacer now.
I'm thinking that Fleer baseball and basketball might be something that I need to check out more. Brian has been posting up lots of cool Fleer Ultra cards lately.

The Sonics logo and jersey color scheme is really nice. It sucks the way teams are moved and sold to other cities. I'm glad that we have an NBA team though. I was really surprised the way the season went last year. I wish we had been more patient and tried to buy out George Shinn for the majority ownership of the Hornets. It would've been a lot less creepy to keep the Hornets than to take over another cities' team.



Pretty good player that got dogged a bit in the local sports media early on. Ended up with a pretty nice season. Goes to show that maybe the talking heads should have a little patience when evaluating people. Nice looking card too. I like Westbrook and Durant the best. I really hope Durant stays around a long time. He'll only get better.


Thanks again for the cards. I'll try to get to my trade posts a lot sooner next time. I've been a bad procrastinator for a few months now.

Thanks for reading!

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.

Play at the Plate Contest

Brian at Play at the Plate is having a Groundhog Day Contest based on guessing his percentage of pulling a base set of 2010 Topps Baseball from gravity feeders.

Go check it out!

play at the plate part two

This is another trade post that I've been procrastinating at posting. I've traded twice now with Brian from Play at the Plate.

He had mentioned that his son is now collecting and likes the Topps flagship and the Texas Longhorns. Whoo hoo! That's good for me as I need to get anything Longhorn related out of my household. Sorry not a big Longhorn fan.

Anyway, here is the original post: A Collector is Born.

If anybody is still looking to get rid of their series one and two cards this would be the place to unload them.

To his credit he sent me a bunch of Topps Mayo. Maybe not a bunch, more like a brick of cards. I'm still undecided about Mayo. I really like the new ones better than the 2008 cards. I think almost everybody does.


This was the first one in the stack. Nice to start off with a Packer.





This was the most awesomeness card he sent over. It looks like a cold day when they took this shot. Groovy hair too.


These posed head shots look pretty forced in Mayo though.


He sent me a bunch of minis too. I don't know why the minis of current players are in black and white and the inserts are all...


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..in color. This David Crocket mini I pulled from a hobby pack is in color. (obviously!)

The scans I've seen of the other minis like the Team Namesake cards are all in color too. I'm not sure if these are parallels, or if they are all like that.




Here is a card I forgot to show off last time. It's a local guy who did pretty good last year in college and was able to go to the pros. Unfortunately he was drafted to the Clippers. At least he's in a warmer place this winter.

Speaking of warm places, here is one heart warming story about one of the best trades Brian has received: unexpected generosity

It's worth a look.

Sorry to keep posting stuff from your blog, but I just feel like shedding some light on some of the cool things I've read from your blog that other people might not have had the chance to see.

Thanks again for the cards. I think you've unwittingly started me on a path to collect the Mayo set. Yikes! I'm not sure I need to start a new set to collect, but It'll be fun to try.

trade with Play at the Plate

Brian from Play at the Plate sent over some cool cards in exchange for my Neftali chrome and a few others I set over.

He sent me a bunch of shiny cards in return.

I've pulled a few of these Dick Perez cards, but never a chrome version.









These Ticket to Stardom cards are nicer in person than they look online. The design is sort of growing on me. They seem a little thin, but not much more than other current cards. I like that the player is shown coming out of the frame and the team colors around the photo border.


I like cards that have a line of stats, but also a nice bio or recap of a certain event or game.





The Masterpiece cards are always nice. But compared to the Ticket to Stardom, they're really not that much thicker. I think it's just the "canvas" layer on the front that makes them feel a little thicker or well made.




I think this is the first A&G card that has a player in an action shot with the watercolor background instead of the natural background. Maybe it's just the first one that I've noticed.


When I look at this card the first thing I think of is Beardy! Funny how that works. He's having a custom card contest over at his blog. You guys should check it out.




This is one of my few experiences with a non licensed product, and yet I immediately knew that this was an OU player. Looking at it more closely, I realized that it was devoid of any team logos on the jersey or helmet. Still, it's a pretty cool card! I love to get any OU guys either in their college or pro uniforms. I'm really glad that he sent me these cards.

Check out his blog sometime. He's a big Rangers fan. Thanks for the cards!!