The harbinger

Something strange has been happening.

Over the course of the last six weeks or so, four of my fellow bloggers have seen fit to send me something. And these haven't been just any old something's, no, these mailings have all been of the extremely thoughtful variety.

I'm at a bit of loss as to why I've been on the receiving end of so much generosity all of sudden. I haven't done anything of note for anyone in real life, or online, as of late. In fact, I've been feeling kind of prickish for the last couple of months, and have done very little to hide it. I'd like to think that this hasn't been one of those instances of good things happening to bad people, but if it isn't, I don't know how else to explain it. Although, I suppose with my ever increasing forgetfulness, that I did something awesome for somebody, and either can't remember it, or didn't realize that I had even done it? Or maybe, I'm about to do something awesome for someone, and these have all just been a universal pre-thank you. I think I'll choose that one. So, lookout world, I'm about to do something awesome! 😉

In the meantime...

I fully intend to post about all of these recent gifts, although I'm doing so out of order. I just covered the second one the other day, and am now circling back to the one that kicked all of this off.

I don't recall when it was exactly, but I got an email from, Greg, everyone's favorite Borg connoisseur from The Collective Mind, asking if I'd be interested a couple of extra Bo Jackson Star sets that he had picked up during he and his friend's annual week-long card shop crawl (I don't know how they do it!). Not having much to send out to people anymore, I usually decline (politely) offers like this, but having never come across any of these at a show, or even online, that I know of, I found myself unable to turn them down.

Having only been acquainted with them since returning to collecting, I admittedly know very little about the early nineties Star sets. I know that a lot of popular athletes of the time got their own sets, and that the sets are usually "limited" to a certain amount that were produced, but other than that, I've got nothing. 

Not being right in front of me at the moment, I believe that this Silver one is from '91. A couple of decent images in there, but I think I like the variety...

... offered in this Gold 1990 set a little bit more! I have my Bo binder arranged a little differently than my other player collections. I have his baseball playing days Royals, White Sox, and Angels separated by team, with the post playing days stuff after that. The playing days football is separated from the post playing days stuff. Broder's are separated as well. I guess now I'll be adding some Star pages to the mix as well.

Greg sent about two team bags worth of stuff to go along with the Star sets, which was way too much to scan, so I'm just gonna hit some of the highlights. I've seen a lot of Bo Broder's over the years, but this one was new to me. It's one of those double-sided affairs.

Moving on to some of the non Bo's...

I never bought any packs of Skybox Impact, and aside from possibly a Reggie Roby, I'm not sure if I even own any cards from the set. Apparently Ronnie was featured somewhat prominently throughout one of it's subsets. One of these days I'll have to look and see if anyone else got this many cards in it.

Few guys can say they could hit as hard as Ronnie Lott, Stevie Atwater is one of those guys. Both guys probably wouldn't even be allowed to play in today's NFL. Two of these four were new, and the other two were much appreciated upgrades.

I think I've only mentioned Mike Alstott once on the blog, and that had to be a couple of years ago. How Greg was able to remember that I do not know. There were a lot of Alstott's in this package, which is kind of good news/bad news sort of thing. The bad news is that at some point since I mentioned him, I realized that he has a lot of uninteresting cards, and decided to shelf the idea of collecting him. I took what I had, which wasn't much, and just added them to my random binder of 90's football. Now for the good news, most of the cards that Greg sent were pretty neat, and will also be going to that binder, or possibly a second one, as the first one is getting awfully full. I seem to like a lot of different 90's football cards, many for different reasons.

I have the foil version of the card on the left, so that'll be nice to be able to pair them up now. And I thought that I had scanned them together, but I'm not finding it. Either way, there was three copies of the middle card included, which is something that I'm all about. The card on the end is an insert, and like most 90's inserts, scanned like 💩.

Greg must have the memory of an elephant, because I'm pretty sure that I've only ever mentioned Jim Everett on the blog once before as well. At least I haven't stopped collecting him though, I'm just not doing so actively at the moment. I'm sure if I ever start going to shows again, I'll pick his collection back up. In the meantime, I'm just setting aside any cards of his that I come across. There were about a dozen cards of his in this mailer, many of the shiny variety, and yet, my favorite of the bunch was the very un-shiny 1993 Topps in the top left corner. Such a great action shot!

Though a longtime fan, I didn't realize that Stan had gotten so many neat cards over the years until I started actively seeking them out.

See what I mean! Of the 50 or so cards that I now have of him, I can't say that a single one is uninteresting. He's gotta have some, everybody does, but I just haven't seen any of them yet.

Many thanks to Greg for the Bo sets, and for all of the unexpected extras that were accompanying them. 

Also, sort of inspired by this mailing, I decided to put back up some want lists, at least temporarily. People do occasionally ask me about such things, so hopefully this'll prevent them from having to waste any of their time sending me an email. Also, even though it worked out okay this time, the lists should prevent any confusion as to who, or what, I'm currently collecting. They're still a work in progress, but since I always get so uncomfortable having anything like that up, there's every possibility that I'll take them down again before they get finished. I'm so uncomfortable even mentioning them, that I'm more than half tempted to delete them right after this post goes live. I guess if you're reading this a couple of days from now and there's no longer any pages at the top of the blog, you'll know what happened 😓.