Johnny, Johnny, Johnny, and more Johnny!

I don't think that I'm telling most regular blog readers anything they don't already know, when I say that Johnny's Trading Spot has been a hotbed of activity for what seems like the better part of a year now. Of course, with nearly daily giveaways going on, that is to be suspected. If there's one thing that blog readers like, it's free cards. And with folks only having to comment on posts the day they go live, it's not that difficult to get qualified for a chance at a 9-card PWE.

In the early days of my blog reading, I was pretty good at being able to comment on posts within a few hours of them dropping, but in recent years I'm almost always 3-7 days behind. As such, I haven't been qualified for many of John's giveaways, maybe 10 (?) out of the 200 (?) that he's done so far. Surprisingly though, out of those 10 (?), I've actually won three. And seeing as how those three arrived quite a few months ago, I'm way overdue in giving proper thanks. Today I'm giving said thanks.

The first envelope was nine-pack of Junior, all of which turned out to be needed.

I rarely look for Junior on my own, so a few of these were new images to me as well, including the Topps Chrome here where 2010 Griffey looks like he ate the Score era version of himself.

Sometime between my first and second wins, John sent a bunch of people envelopes fully of original Wacky Packages for reasons that I can no longer remember. Since I was one of those people, please pardon the slight detour while I show most of those off...

I may not remember why I was included in these mailings, but I do remember when my envelope arrived, if only because I had had the Fruit of the Tomb and Snarlamint cards in my COMC watch list. They were there in the hopes that the person would be running a sale during the Black Friday sale, which at the time, was only days away from starting. I believe this envelope showed up the day before the sale started, which couldn't have been more timely if John had tried.

I even got part of a puzzle, which, when completed, will look like this...

I am not well versed at all in being able to tell the different WP series' apart. As such, these are still sitting in a stack, patiently waiting for me to get the sorting bug.

Back to the contest wins...

The second winning envelope started off with a Junior subset (?) that I wasn't familiar with. I only ever collected Collector's Choice in basketball form back in the 90's, so I'm constantly seeing cards from the baseball and football sets that are new to me. 

I had the silver signature version of both of these, so the images weren't new, but the base version of the cards were.

It seems like I only actively look for a handful of guys anymore, Boog being one of them, so to get three that I didn't have all at once was kind of nice.

It may be sun bleached, but this Reggie Roby auto was still a nice addition to his binder. I'd like to think that this was somebody's prize possession at some point, perhaps out on display for many years, hence the fading, but obviously there's no way to know for sure.

The third and, probably final, winning envelope was made up of nine cards from what appears to have been at least a 20-card Junior subset; which was once again new to me. Like a lot of folks, I miss certain things about cards from the 90's, but one thing that I don't miss is all of the subsets and insert sets that were devoted to a single person. Upper Deck was especially notorious for doing them, but was far from the only guilty party. I doubt that I'll ever go out of my way to complete this one, as a page of them seems like more than enough.

I don't know how he's been able to do it, but I'm sure that I speak for many others when I say thank you to John for running these giveaways. And from myself, thank you again for these four mailings. I'm way behind in trying to send some sort of reciprocal package, but am still slowly working on it.

Sometimes they do come back

One of the things that I noticed back when I was first started reading the card blogs was how often former bloggers/blogs were mentioned in passing. I guess it would be around 8 or so years ago now that I first stumbled upon (one of Fuji's posts came up in a Google search) the previously unknown to me world of card blogs, and at the time it seemed like there were hundreds of them, probably because there were. But even so, with names of fallen comrades being bandied about so frequently, it felt like I had just missed a time when there had been thousands (a slight exaggeration, but you get the point) of people writing public love letters to cards on a near daily basis.

I was amazed that so many former bloggers, many whom seemingly dropped off the face of the earth without nary a word, were still remembered so fondly by so many of those that were still around. Eight years later though, I get it, for I too now have quite the mental rolodex filled with defunct blogs, and their wayward operators. Without making a list (which I'm not gonna do), I have no idea off the top of my head how many people have stepped away from their blogs since I started this one, but it's definitely been more than a few. And yet, I'm pretty sure that I remember them all, or at least I could with a little bit of time to think. 

It's always a bit sad when somebody closes up shop, but there's always the hope that they'll come back at some point, like Tom, from The Angels, In Order, did earlier this year. People that leave don't always write a goodbye post, but Tom did, and after reading that post, if I would've been betting on whether or not he would've ever been coming back, I would've bet on no. Thankfully, I'm often wrong, and after about a year away, Tom came back! 

Since returning, Tom has done a couple of trade bait posts that seem to have generated a lot of interest, two of which I've even participated in; though not to the extent that some others have. But even so, I've netted a couple of neat things thanks to his posts.

I know at some point not too long ago that I mentioned having an ever increasing urge to collect Dave Winfield, but I've been fighting it, if only because I didn't want to take on anymore player collections. Yeah, about that, I think I might be fighting a losing battle.

This and the next card weren't part of the trade bait posts, but were instead cards that Tom saw on my cheap wants list, and offered to send them. This is the first card that I remember being desired by collectors, and even though I had quite a few copies at one time, those were all given away many years ago. It's nice to have one again.

Carney is another guy that I've been very tempted to collect. I haven't looked, but I can't imagine that he has too many cards out there, and wouldn't think that too many of those that are have been pushed into the stratosphere by the boom crowd price-wise. I only saw this particular card for the first time earlier this year in one of Night Owl's posts. I never collected this set, or even owned very many cards from it, so there's probably quite a few of them that I still haven't seen. And speaking of seeing things, you'll be seeing another copy of this card in the next post, as two showed up on the exact same day; and that wasn't a bad thing!

I had no idea there was 2016 Topps MLB Wacky Packages set, and from what I can gather, this particular card is from a minor league subset(?). Not that I care about any of that mind you, no, I just wanted it because the parody features one of the traditional monsters (vampire, Frankenstein's monster, mummy, etc.); which I've started seeking out in WP form.

I think I stopped collecting baseball cards in 1992, and stopped collecting Panini's baseball stickers after the 1993 set. And because this was the last baseball set that I worked on (never finished it), I have some strong nostalgia for it. I don't have any interest in going back and working on the set again, but if the opportunity arises, as it did here, I won't mind picking up a few choice singles. The foily sticker sure scanned weird though, I wonder if it was because of the black construction paper that I've been using behind the cards? 

Thanks again for the cards (and stickers), Tom. Hopefully you're back for good this time, as the blogs are a much better place with you around 😊.

On an unrelated note: Jeremy, from Topps Cards that Never Were, mentioned the other day that he's thinking about going all in on the TCDB, but has some questions before doing so. It doesn't appear that anyone has answered them as of this writing, so if anyone has a few minutes, maybe you could pop over and help him out. Despite having been a member of the site for a few years now, I still don't have a firm grasp on all of the the ins and outs (Dennis is my go to for TCDB questions), so I'm hardly the one to answer such questions -- but I know that there's a lot of folks who could, which is why I'm mentioning it here.

I know that name from somewhere

I've made a few purchases this month. Actually, scratch that, I've made more than a few purchases this month. Probably more than I should have. 

I don't keep track of such things, but I've probably acquired more cards this past month than the previous two years combined. Sportlots adding their new non-sport category to the site has been like siren song to me, I just can't seem to resist checking out all of the new stuff that keeps getting added every day. And the cheap prices haven't been helping either. I've been knocking off wants left and right, many of which had been highly sought after (by me) for years now. 

A lot of the things I've been getting have been available on COMC, unfortunately they're often being sold by people who think that just because they have the only one on the site, that any interested parties will be willing to pay 20-30 times more just because it's the only one available. I'm not that kind o buyer. I can easily pass up fifty-cent cards with $20 price tags on COMC, but apparently have no willpower when it comes to those same cards when they have a twenty-cent price tag on Sportlots. So, the bad news is that I've been spending more money than usual this month, but the good news is that I won't have too many more modern (post 1980) non-sport wants after everything that's been bought shows up. I'll probably be able to get back to my normal routine of one or two purchases a month come November.

Given that I've probably already bought over a hundred cards so far this month, I highly doubt that I'll ever get around to discussing the majority of those on here, but I did want to cover at least one small order, if only because I was so pleased with the cards themselves, the way in which they were packed, and the quickness in which they were received. The seller who managed to complete this trifecta is called Triplutz, although the outside of the envelope said WaxPackHero, which is a name that sounds terribly familiar, but I can't seem to place where I've seen/heard it before. For the time being, I'll just assume that it's one that I've seen on the TCDB; I don't have enough time to be racking my poor overtaxed brain over such things.

Despite my going on about non-sport cards for the last ten minutes, astute observers may have noticed a very non non-sport card leading off the post. Well, yeah, there are some sports cards being added to these orders too, plus blog psychology dictates that a post whose first image is baseball related will generate more clicks than one that starts with a non-sport card. Think I'm lying? Go through this post and tell me which card would've garnered more mainstream attention than that nifty Classic Bo (and other guys). 

I haven't seen any on the blogs, so I'm not sure if either card company still does it, but I really miss card backs that compared the stats of certain players like this. Is it just me, or do we never hear about Ruben Sierra anymore? That was quite a season he had back in '89. He led the A.L. in RBIs, slugging %, total bases, and led the majors in triples. He finished second to Robin Yount in the MVP voting that year too. And looking at the numbers, one could make the case that he should've won it. He put up very similar numbers two years later, finishing 8th in the MVP voting. Though, Ripken was the clear winner that year, and it doesn't even look like there was a close second. 

This is just a neat card all the way around.

With Topps getting the NBA license back, I can't help but wonder if they'll do another Archives set for basketball again. I suppose they could an NFL version now, too. Sounds like it's tailor-made for more cards featuring the '87 baseball design. Because that's what everyone is clamoring for, right? Right?

I probably had multiple copies of both versions of this card way back when, but those are long gone. At least I now have the gold one again.

Hey, it's my first ever Wacky Packages of any kind! And hey...

... here's my second! I've been trying to get some of the monster themed cards from the various WP sets for what seems like years now, and have had zero luck in doing so; until now. Granted, these are only from the 1991 set, but still, I finally got two off of my list. I like how "Vlad Bags" rolls off the tongue, but since my world still revolves around videos, blank tapes included, I think I appreciate the effort that went into designing "Mummorex" just a little bit more.

It's a bit hard to tell, but these are both 5-Stripers. The Wild Card Stripes are the devil of any collection that features a player from the early 90's. These may be the lowest on the stripe totem pole, but even so, I'm very glad to have them out of the way.

Some "influencer" out there must've done a thing about 80's title cards, because they sure have jumped in price over the last few years. Enough so that it couldn't have happened on it's own. It would've been nice to know that it was coming so I could've tried to finish my collection before the influenced were told to buy en masse. I still need about a dozen from the 70's through the 90's, this having been one of them. Thankfully, this guy had it listed for a pre-boom price.

I know that there are other people out there who collect every single player that I do. I'm not foolish enough think that any of them are that obscure. But, I do wonder sometimes if there's a collector out there for each and every celebrity and/or comic character that I collect. Sentinels are a perfect example of this question, I mean I'm sure plenty of people have Sentinels cards sitting in sets, but does anyone else have just a Sentinels collection? I do, though it is only a couple of pages worth of cards. This one was an upgrade for me. My old copy didn't fare so well in the box that it had been sitting in during my ten-plus year hiatus from collecting. A couple of moves probably didn't do it any favors either.

Sherri Martel... prrrrrrrr. I know I'm not alone when I say this, but Sherri Martel was one of my earliest crushes. I loved everything about her as a kid, or at least what little I knew about her way back when. It probably didn't hurt too that she was one of those rare women that just kept getting better looking with age. I also appreciated then, and even more so now, that she was always willing to mix it up with the guys. Looking back, she took some crazy bumps (and what other woman was jumping off the top of cages at that time!), unfortunately some of those crazy bumps are probably what led her to become addicted to pain pills and alcohol, which undoubtedly contributed to her untimely death. She doesn't have nearly as many cards out there as she should (a lot of them are modern parallels), but even so, it's always nice to be able to add a new one to my modest collection of hers.

Triplutz is one of those sellers that offers free shipping to a Sportlots box, which I will probably be taking advantage of in the very near future. The only reason I didn't do so this time was because not all Sportlots sellers are created equal, and I wanted to know how accurate this fellow is with his descriptions before placing a larger order with him (which is my standard operating procedure for that site). This guy obviously knows his stuff, so if you're ever inclined, you might want to take a look through his offerings. You won't be disappointed.