Splurging on Sportlots: Part 1

I mentioned at the end of my previous post that I was expecting this week to be busy, and surprise surprise, it has been!

The weather is getting really nice, really quick. Meaning that any free time (during daylight hours that is) has been, and will continue to be, spent getting things ready for spring/summer. All of the various storms that have rolled through in the last year or so, have really taken their toll on the house's siding, and I've been waiting for a stretch of dry weather to fix all of the various problems before any major summer storms can come and make them worse. It's been slow going so far, but I think I'll be done with as of Friday. It's almost time to start planting things as well, so there's plenty of garden prep to do as well, including my "favorite", tilling :(

All of these hours spent doing extracurricular work has got me plumb tuckered out, mentally and physically (I suspected that it would). As such, I'm not looking to write the card blog equivalent of "War and Peace", at least not this week. So as planned, I'm gonna drop a two-part Sportlots order on you. 

Thanks to an eBay sale, I had some extra money last month (scroll down to find out what I sold), and decided to treat myself to some cards. Normally I would've just saved it for a show, but I'm not feeling the idea of driving to Nashville any time soon, and with eBay being kind of sucky right now, I decided, after doing some looking around, to spend some of my ill-gotten gains on Sportlots. I ended up buying from three sellers (acardman, shaner18, and whoops24), and to my great surprise, wasn't disappointed with anything from them (are the sellers on Sportlots actually getting better?).

Today's post will cover baseball(warning: there's not very much)/basketball portions, and if I can get it done by then, Friday's post will be all football (and I know how excited you'll all be for that one).

I grew up in Mother's Cookies country, but only ever encountered the various Mariners issues (which were so plentiful at the time that you couldn't even give them away). In fact, until my late teens, I was under the impression that the only cards Mother's made were those of the Mariners variety. Of course I've learned otherwise since, but it's still a little off-putting to see an MC card featuring a non-Mariner. This one does spotlight a future Mariner, but it still looks odd to me.

Jamie looks so young here! And to my knowledge, this is the only card in which he can be seen sporting his ill-advised hoop earring. I know that almost of us went through a rebellious phase when we were growing up, and probably made a few poor decisions during said phase, but even so, this earring was an especially bad idea on Jamie's part. I know that he got rid of it fairly quickly, and refuses to ever talk about it, so if it weren't for this card, most people might not have ever remembered what the media dubbed, "Earring Gate".

I guess it's because I wasn't collecting in the mid-aughts, but I am not familiar with Topps Cracker Jack in the least. I remember the mini '91 Topps' that came in Cracker Jacks, but that was about it. I see that Topps did all of the usual stuff with this set, mini's, parallels, 1/1's, etc. I've looked at a few other cards in the set, and am not overly impressed. I did like this card though, which is a mini by the way. 

Speaking of mini's...

This Bo is so mini, it's Micro! MicBo? Bocro? I had actually never seen one of these in person before. I had always just assumed that they were about the size of the above mentioned Cracker Jack cards. Turns out that I was wrong though, as they're even smaller...

I don't know why, but I really love this photo! The only thing that would've made it better is if Bo had been playing for one of the 'bird' teams.

I don't know if anyone's noticed or not, but I haven't been doing much baseball here on the blog in recent months. In case anyone has noticed, and wondered why, it's simply because I still don't have the majority of my player collections inventoried. I'm kind of burned out on adding lists to the TCDB, and am down to adding about one player a week at this point, which makes for some very slow inventorying. I think that Bo is the only modern baseball player that I've done so far, so I didn't have to get up and go look at what I already had while placing these orders. And I don't have very many cards of Jamie Moyer, so it's pretty easy to remember what I do and don't have. Everybody else is a little more difficult.

All of the baseball or bust folks can probably bounce now, as that was the extent of my baseball purchases. Whoops24 had a few more $1 and up baseball cards that I was interested in, but I wasn't looking to go too crazy with my spending. If they're still available in another month or two, I'll probably go back and grab a few of them.

I think it's because a lot of newer collectors are just finding out about it, but I feel like I've heard and seen more talk about the 1988 Fournier Estrellas set in the last year or so, than I had in the previous thirty. Of course most of these people only care about the MJ card, which isn't a bad thing if you're of the sort that doesn't, because the rest of cards in the set can, for the most part, still be had for very little. 

It's been a long time since I last acquired any new 1991-92 Fleer Wheaties. If the shipping wasn't so prohibitive, I'd just try to get some of the full sheets and cut out the cards that I still needed, but as long as it saves money, I'm okay with going the singles route too.

A Wheaties back for anyone who may be interested.

As a kid, I thought that there was almost nothing cooler than the Tony's Pizza Fleer sets. The only thing that edged them out in terms of coolness, was the McDonald's Hoops/Upper Deck sets. I used to have a complete set of both of the Tony's sets, but that was long time ago. Owning complete sets doesn't really do much for me these days, I'm mostly just trying to fill out player collections. 

More Tony's! If I was actively adding cameo cards to my player collections, I'd have to get two more Thunder Dan's, as both Buck Williams and Terry Porter are clearly shown (same goes for the Cliff up above where James Edwards reaching into the frame).

1989-90 Fleer has really shot up in price as of late, which seems a little weird to me, but it's the usual, MJ, and graders. It doesn't really matter to me either way, as long as I can still upgrade a few more cards on the cheap, like this uber-crispy Moses that cost me all of 18¢.

Some months ago I decided to open up my 1989-90 Hoops Superstars boxed set, and pull out all of my player collection needs. Before doing so though, I did decide to check eBay, and despite all of the current card craziness, was still surprised to see how much these sets that you couldn't sell at any price two years ago, were currently going for -- but then again, MJ, and the graders! I already had a loose MJ, as well as a few others, so I decided to sell my set, and just buy the couple more that I needed for 18¢ apiece off of Sportlots. My set sold like six hours after I listed it, the funds of which covered this Sportlots splurge, and then some. 

Oh, and I'm assuming that most of you are familiar with this set, but in case I'm wrong, yes, the borders are supposed to be yellow, my scanner just didn't pick it up very well.

Panini stickers were one of my favorite things to collect as a kid. There was so much variety, and they could be found at every grocery store, for not very much money. All of my stickers are one of the few things that I wish I had held on to when I stopped collecting, but how was I to know that I'd be so nostalgic for them 20 years later. Oh well, most of the singles can still be gotten on the cheap too.

I got a bunch of 91-92's. These can be a real pain to get off of the scanner tray, hence the bad photos.

I don't have a checklist going, but I'm fairly certain that I only need a few more from this set now.

If you didn't know any better, you'd swear I was a Celtics fan. I'm not by the way, I just collect a number of the teams former players. Larry is from one of those team sheets that were given out at games. I always liked the Tower of Power inserts. Top Flight? Not so much.

I still like the '93-94 Hoops set quite a bit, though I never owned a lot of it as a kid, which is kind of weird in retrospect since Hoops was my primary basketball brand. The LJ is a promo, and the other two are obviously 5th Anniversary parallels.

Seeing as how I rarely buy from Sportlots, I took this opportunity to grab some cheap Cliff Robinson inserts and parallels. I didn't scan the back, but this particular Stick Ums is of the Italian variety.

With this blue parallel, my Cliff E-XL rainbow is now complete. Granted, said rainbow is made up of only two cards (base and blue parallel), but a rainbow's a rainbow, right?

My scanner made this Topps at 50 look like absolute 💩.

Ditto on the blue Fleer Brilliants. I've never been a fan of the Mystique set, but a gold for 18¢ was awfully difficult to pass up.

Post-2000 basketball sets do very little for me, but I kind of like the looks of this Fleer Tradition. I also really dig the shade of green that they used for the parallel. It's very close to the color of my bedroom walls (center stage green).

I'm not sure how it is that I've gone the last ten years without knowing that Topps went back to the tallboy well at some point while I was away, but apparently they did back in 2001 with their High Topps release. Seeing as how I'm just now finding out about them, they obviously went over about as well as Fleer's attempt to bring them back in the previous decade. Collector's by in large didn't care for them in the 90's, and clearly still didn't in '01. Given how unpopular they are today, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that I don't think that we'll ever see another set of tallboy's released. I mean seriously, can you imagine what would happen if Panini made a tallboy set? Today's "investors" would lose their collective sh*t! 

I don't have my LJ cards inventoried yet, but was certain that I was buying a duplicate hologram (because it was cheap), turns out though that I didn't already own a copy, so I guess that was a small win on my part. And t's impossible to tell from the scan, but the Metal is a Silver Spotlight.

My 1997-97 Metal Universe Reebok Silver didn't scan so well. I think I can almost guarantee too that you won't see a worse looking scan on the blogs today, it's that bad. I already had two of the Starquests, but wanted at least one more so that they could fill the row of a page.

That'll do it for this group. If you're one of the few folks out there that enjoy football cards, you might like Friday's post. If you're not one of those few, well, Sunday's post will be baseball related (another card bought from the sale of that Hoops Superstars box), so you can just wait until then to come back around.

Tradin' & Thrifting

                             
Despite never caring much for formal trading, I seem to be doing an awful lot of it as of late. Well, at least a lot by my standards.

Since the beginning of the year, I've completed nine trades on the TCDB, and currently have two in progress. This averages out to just a little over one trade per week, which probably isn't a lot by some peoples standards, but it's exactly my kind of speed. I can move some unwanted cards out, and have some new blood coming in, all while not feeling overwhelmed, or needing to worry about accidently sending someone the wrong thing. Plus too, one trade a week doesn't take away from my blogging in any way (more probably would), so that's a good thing, I guess.

My scanner almost completely washed out the green from this Emerald parallel.

One of my favorite things about using the TCDB, is when I come across a familiar name. Usually it's a fellow blogger, but sometimes it's also just a person that I've had contact with before through the blog, which was the case a month or so ago when I came upon Bizzork, aka Brian, who had participated in a few of my past Free Stuff giveaways. And in his case I know him too from seeing his user name during the COMC Challenges. 

After finding him on the TCDB, I took a quick look to see if we had any compatibility trade-wise, which we did, so I sent of a quick proposal, which was accepted after brief bit of countering.

For someone who never cared much about SI for Kids (the magazine or the cards), I seem to be getting a lot of them all of a sudden (there's more coming in another trade). I never realized too that their size hasn't always been consistent, which is quite evident when looking at these 1993 and 1996 examples side-by-side.

I knew quite a bit of French at one time, and years later started to learn Japanese (that's a long boring story), and thanks to my stamp collecting, can read a little bit of Greek, but I never did pick up any Spanish. Which is kind of odd since my mom was fluent in it (I think that she's lost a little bit of it over the years though), and I would often her here using it to converse with native speakers. We also spent six years living in an area that was heavily populated by Mexicans (and before anyone loses their sh*t, that's how those folks identified themselves at the time). And if that wasn't enough I was friends too with guy from Colombia for about a year during that same time, and he would unintentionally slip into Spanish while speaking on a fairly regular basis -- and yet, with all of that Spanish being spoken around me, aside from a few choice words, I never learned any. Of course I can, and do, still enjoy Pro Set Spanish cards despite not being able to understand the non-English aspects of the set.

1990 Topps isn't terribly exciting, but this Howie is one of the disclaimer backs, so... yeah, I know, still not that interesting.

There were a few more cards involved with this trade, but the post office just had to do what they so often do these days, and try to destroy the contents of everything that makes it's way through their greasy clutches. This particular envelope took quite a beating and a few of the cards, including the best one (of course), weren't salvageable. I don't blame Brian though, it's just one of those things that now happens much more frequently than it used to. Looking at what survived , I'd still call it a pretty good trade though, and wouldn't hesitate to try and do another one with Bizzork.

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Despite them being some of my favorite places to go to, I have not found myself visiting very many thrift stores so far this year. There's no real reason why either, I just haven't made much of an effort to go to any. I think I've hit all of two since Christmas. I had occasion to make it three this past week when my mom asked if I could stop and look for something at the Dollar Tree while I was out, the Dollar Tree that just so happens to be next to Serenity Thrift.

Serenity is very hit-or-miss for me, so even though I was gonna be right there, I didn't plan on going in. Then I got there, got in and out of the DT fairly quickly, looked over at Serenity, and figured why not. I'm glad I changed my mind too, as this turned out to be one of those "hit" times, and I was able to get a couple of pretty cool videos/DVD's...

I'm pretty burned out on war pictures, and have been for awhile now, but having never come across a copy of Force 10 in the wild before, I wasn't about to not get it just because I'm tired of the genre.

Apparently whoever Larry gave this to for Christmas back in '97 wasn't to enamored with it, as they never even took the tape out of the plastic. It's been 23+ years, but hopefully Larry will take some solace in knowing (if he reads this) that I would've enjoyed being given this tape, and will open it, and will watch it -- especially since I haven't seen it since I was a kid.

Robert Mitchum! Lee Majors! Saul Rubinek! Where do I sign up!!!! I've read about this film before, and supposedly it's not very good, but it's gonna be pretty difficult for me not to like a movie with those three guys in it.

Here's one that I actually know nothing about. I'm thinking that it's either gonna be really good, or really bad, and I'll probably have to be in a particular mood to wanna watch it. Also, I've ordered a few Archives Collection discs from the WB shop during Black Friday sales in the past, but never found one for sale anywhere before (my mom has found a number of them though), so it was kind of neat to finally do so.

I'm not sure why I didn't already own Moby Dick, as it's a film that I've always enjoyed, granted I only see it once every 7-8 years or so, but still. This is the only one from this group that I watched since getting them, and you know something... it's still good!

I like a lot of Tyrone Power's work, but this isn't one of his better performances (my opinion of course). The supporting cast is what drives this film. Well, that and the story, as that's pretty good too. I've only seen this film once before, many years ago on AMC (back when they were still commercial-free), and am looking forward to seeing it again.

It's looking like it's gonna be a busy week down here in the land of Sleeves, so I think if I can get the rest of the scans edited tonight, I'm just gonna be lazy and blog about my recent Sportlots purchases this week. Due to length, I'll have to break them into two posts. Neither will win any awards for writing, but they should have a few fun, and slightly different, items contained within, and will hopefully still be worth your clicks :)

What's a herko?

                                          
For all intensive purposes, hockey did not exist in my world growing up. 

My only pre-teen hockey experiences consisted of going to two Portland Winterhawks games when I was young, and having absolutely no clue as to what was going on. Then there was the Wheaties free hockey stick promotion (which I've already covered before) to celebrate the coming 1992 Winter Olympics. And even though I got two of those sticks, my brief interest in street hockey that ensued only occurred because I and most of my friends were just getting our first pairs of rollerblades around that time, and we wanted to be in them as much as possible, so toss in some free hockey sticks and pucks, and now you've got a bunch of non-hockey kids playing street hockey -- or at least what we thought street hockey was.

I may not have been a hockey kid growing up, but I was a sports fan, and did know a few hockey names. Well, a "few" may be a bit of a stretch. I knew two names, Wayne Gretzky (everybody knew that name), and Manon Rheaume. I wasn't one to watch Sportscenter, or any other national sport highlights shows, so I'm not exactly sure how I knew of Manon. My best guess though would be that I read about her in an issue of SI for Kids while sitting in a doctors office waiting room. 

It doesn't really matter though how I knew of her, the point is that I did know who she was, and I knew what she was doing/trying to do. Not being a player/person collector at the time, I doubt that I had any intention of collecting her cards, and yet I did have a copy of the 1992 Classic Draft Picks that led off this post, and what's more, it was the only card from that set that I ever owned. Like 99% of my original collection though, it went to a charity auction in the early 2000's, when I was certain that I would never go back to card collecting again (this is why you never say never, kids!).

Most of the show is a fog a now, but I can recall that even though I had no intention of ever collecting autographs, I was quite taken with two that I saw upon returning to my first Mall 205 card show  (Portland, OR) in over a decade, back in 2010. The first was a 2009-10 Bill Russell Panini Hall of Famed Signatures (which I did get one of a few years later), and the second was one of the many Manon Classic autographs (I don't recall which one though). Both were expensive (the Bill Russell being considerably more so), and since I wasn't looking to spend that much at the time, or looking to collect autographs (that started at my second show back a month later), I passed on both... but I was tempted though!

Fast forward a few years to whenever it was that I stumbled upon the card blogs, and I started seeing the occasional Manon Rheaume card pop up here and there, which I always kind of secretly admired, and vowed to try and get a few at some point. As per usual though, I would not remember that want until I saw another one of her cards being blogged about, and would then quickly forget about it again. 

The opportunity to finally acquire a few of her cards presented itself a few weeks ago when I noticed that my new favorite person to trade with on the TCDB, herkojerko (also known as, John), had a couple on his trade list. 

As great as these cards are, I still have no plans to do hockey, but going forward, will be doing Manon. Wait! That didn't come out right (or did it 😎). What I 'meant' to say is that I think I'll add her to my list of player collections, she can be my lone hockey representative.

This particular trade, which was our second (the first can be seen further down), did contain a few more cards, so if you've got a minute...

These three guys have shown up in pretty much every trade I've made so far. A lot of folks seem to have extras of Steve Atwater, Dennis Smith, and Ronnie Lott; most of which I seem to need. I don't know why, but receiving Action Packed cards in the year 2021 is just awesome!

I've spoken about some of the negatives that have come from this boom that we're now in, but one of the positives that I haven't covered yet, is that I've really started to appreciate base cards again. This isn't to say that I was anti-base card before last year, I just didn't go out of my way to seek them out, unless of course they were of the vintage variety. These days though, I'm acquiring more of them than I had in decades, and am enjoying doing so. I feel like this is me zigging while everyone else is zagging. The good news too is that I still need an awful lot of base cards, so if things get even crazier, I'll have something to occupy my time until the prices on the more expensive stuff start to come back down to Mars.

College cards aren't normally of much interest to me, and yet here we are! The Penny and Baby Jordan are from a McDonald's set. I don't even remember there ever being a McDonald's Classic set? 

This might ruffle a few feathers, but I've come to realize that I kind of hate Topps Finest, and I think that I always have. The packs were so expensive way back when, too expensive for me. And in my mind they weren't attractive enough to warrant such high prices. I don't think that I've ever opened a Finest pack from any sport. I despised the peels when they started doing them, and still do. I loathe the peel vs. don't peel debates (do whatever the f*ck you want, their your cards!). I hate that I can't take the ugly peels off of old cards for fear that the front of the card will come off with it. And if all that wasn't bad enough, a lot of cards from the early sets are prone to greening. I like the color green, it's probably my favorite color, but blotchy green skin is not a good look. It annoys me too that I need a lot of cards from these 'green' sets, cards that I'm not willing to pay very much, if anything, for. And don't even get me started on the green refractors!

As mentioned, that was actually my second trade with John, I decided to show them out of order if only because it would allow me to lead off the post with something a little different. I liked that trade, of course our first one was pretty good too...

It was about time that Reggie made an appearance! According to the TCDB, my Reggie Roby collection is now 39% complete. I think that it might actually be a tad higher, as they do have a cut signature listed, and I will never buy one of those, so that's one card less that'll be needed to complete his collection, thus raising my percentage a tad.

This is a fun scan, it's like a mini retrospective of Steve Atwater's Stadium Club cards.

I didn't realize how many playing card sets had been made until I started actively using the TCDB. This particular Ditka's Picks is a sunset card, so that's kind of neat.

And here's when I started to have some issues with static during this scan session. Anybody else ever have that problem? If so, do you have any tips on getting rid of it? If it is going to happen, it usually starts doing so when I'm almost done, but is still terribly annoying to deal with for those last couple of scans.

Besides packaging his cards really well, the thing that stands out to me the most about John's cards, is just the overall great condition of his stuff, especially the base cards. He obviously takes pride in not sending out crap, and I really appreciate that.

So in conclusion, I don't know what a "herko" is, but can say that John is certainly no "jerko". And if you ever get the chance to trade with him, I'd highly recommend it.

Free cards, contest winnings, and a surprise

                                         
My mailbox has been jumping as of late [note to self: mounting the mailbox to a pogo stick probably wasn't the best of ideas]. Thanks to a couple of small purchases, numerous TCDB trades, and some generous mailers from my fellow bloggers, I have officially been inundated with cards. First world problem, yo!

I said at the beginning of the year that I'd be dropping down to two posts a week, and that has been working well for me, but I'm thinking that I might have to increase my output for the next month or two if I want to catch up on everything. Either that, or I don't show everything, and that's never been my way -- so you can probably expect to start seeing a few more "LOOK AT ALL MY NEW SH*T" posts in the very near future.

Since mail from bloggers is always the best, I'm gonna catch up on a few of those packages here today, starting first with an unexpected PWE from Matt, he of the recently anniversaried, Matt's Wonderful Blog of Hobbies, that I received a couple of weeks back.

I don't talk about my Tim Brown collection very often, mostly because there's not much of a collection to talk about, but I did so a little while ago, and Matt saw the post, and decided to add to some new Brown's to my miniscule collection. The biggest addition is 2016 Panini Absolute Spectrum Red up top. I did have to look it up to see what it was called, but that doesn't take away from it's coolness, I'm just not familiar with a lot of the newer sets. With the thousands of 1/1's that now come out each year, I don't think most collectors are overly impressed by something that's numbered to /100 anymore, but to me they're still kind of awe inspiring, especially too since it's not like I'm receiving them in the mail everyday.

I'm not very computery, but I think this is one of those arted up photos (digitized photos?), as opposed to an actual artists rendering.

Was fantasy football around back in 1997? I never heard about it if it was. And if it wasn't, I don't understand the point of the card. I do like the look of it though, I'm just curious as to why it is.

A few non Tim Brown's made it into the envelope as well. I can't quite put my finger on it, but there's something awfully similar about these cards 😉

Thanks for the surprise mailing, Matt. All were new to me, and all were greatly appreciated!

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Next up is a prize from, Brendan aka Elliptical Man, of The View from the Third Floor fame. 

A couple of bloggers ran Super Bowl contests, all of varying degrees of difficulty. Brendan was one of those bloggers, and since his contest was the easiest (I didn't even understand how to enter Kerry's, sorry Kerry), it ended up being the only one that I participated in. 

The contest was a simple guess "the total points scored" affair, and even though I don't remember what my guess was, I 'guess' I ended up being closest. I will say for the record too, that I knew the Bucs were gonna win before the playoffs even started, and not because of some grand conspiracy, no, I just knew that Tom Brady wasn't going to let his team lose this past post-season. I didn't have any clue on the score though, that was just pulled out of my backside.

The winner got their choice of prizes, and I chose the "Ghost Cards" lot, or in other words, the retired players lot. Given a choice, I'm always goona go with past greats!

In case you haven't noticed too, there was a lot of neat cards in here, featuring guys that actually accomplished things. I'll take these cards over current rookies any day of the week!

This last group is especially interesting. Bob St. Claire is a guy that I collect, and don't get "new" cards of very often, so I was kind of excited to see this one, even if it did use same photo that graced his 1990 Pro Set card. The Sayers is a rookie reprint (obviously). You can't ever go wrong with retired greats from 2018 Classics. And the Bledsoe is a Prizm Prizm Silver, very shiny in person!

Thank you very much for the contest, and the prize, Brendan! You might be the most difficult blogger for me to try and figure out what I could possibly send you, but I will crack the code at some point.

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And finally, there's not a lot of Free Stuff posts anymore, but Kerry, of the long-tenured Cards on Cards, is still plodding on with the occasional Friday giveaways, one of which popped up just a couple of Friday's go.

Stan Humphries is quickly moving up my player collection list, at least in terms of how much I enjoy collecting them. Numbers-wise, I still don't have very many of his cards, which is why this one was an easy claim. I hadn't seen one of the SC football Super Teams in person before, and am really impressed by it's overall attractiveness. The foil sections really pop. Barry Sanders was an easy claim too, why? Because it's Barry Sanders, duh!

Despite the many offerings, I only made one other claim, and it was a little bit bigger than your standard trading card...

Anyone know what's in here before I open it? I'll give you a sec to guess

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Give up? 

Look at that beauty! Apparently these were in a magazine, but I never saw one before.

I love this breakdown of the various subsets, all of which were included in the opposite pages sample.

I've seen a lot of people rag on 1991-92 Fleer over the years, but I've always liked it. Was is it the best looking Fleer set ever? No, of course not, but it wasn't the worst either. And it looks a helluva lot better than most of today's sets. That's a hill that I'm willing to die on btw. I appreciate Fleer for trying something different at the time, and like I said, I like the design, nothing else ever looked quite like it. I also dig the fact that there's so many different versions of this set, you've got the normal set, these nifty promotional samples, this was the first year of Fleer and Tony's Pizza brief partnership, so you've got them in that form, and there's the uber-great Wheaties cards (just picked up a few more of those too). 

I was quite content with those couple of claimed items, but if you know Kerry, then you know that he's almost always going to try and toss in a few more items, it's what he does!

Even with the possibility of extra cards being added, I would've never expected this one. Kerry has now provided both of the cards that I needed from this set (Ronnie Lott being the other), and as much as I dig the design, it's kind of nice to know that I don't have to get anymore of them if I don't want to.

I can't remember if I've told this story before or not, but back in 1993 we moved from Beaverton (west of Portland) to Gresham (east of Portland). I loved where we lived in Beaverton, it was my favorite place we ever lived when I was growing up, and even though we only lived there for 2 years, it was still very difficult to leave. It didn't help too that I absolutely hated the apartment complex that we moved to in Gresham, it was right on a busy road, and was surrounded by nothing but other apartments and businesses. The previous two years had been spent roaming around countless acres of forest/creek areas (most of which is now gone) in what was almost a Lord of the Flies existence. That may be a bit of an exaggeration, but us kids were practically feral, and lived by our own code. I might go into that more in-depth at some later date, but the point is, it was very difficult to try and adjust to my new concrete jungle, and I was pretty miserable there. It didn't help too that I only ever made one real friend there (this after having dozens for the previous two years), Steven, who I just recently mentioned. I guess his older brother, Scott, was a friend too, but I always thought of him more as a protector/bodyguard (a lot of teens in this new world thought that they were gangsters, and would try to prove it any time they could. And you know nothing says "gangsta", like picking fights or trying to attack an 11-year old).

Anyway, amongst all of the establishments that were now around me, was a 7-Eleven right down the road (2-3 blocks away). 7-Eleven was never my kind of place, so I rarely went in there. But on one particular afternoon (probably on the weekend) back in '93 or early '94, I found myself in there with Steven, and who of all people should walk in? None other than Jerome Kersey himself! I remember that we were the only two customers in there at the time, and I was looking out the window/towards the door while Steven decided what he wanted, when a silver Mercedes (my memory says Mercedes, but I guess it could've been a Beamer too) pulled up out front. A tall black guy got out on the drivers side, while an attractive blonde (who was also tall) stepped out from the passenger side. Both were dressed extremely nice. Being a basketball fan, and more specifically, a Blazers fan, I instantly identified the tall guy as Jerome Kersey, and I'm assuming that the blonde was his wife. As he was walking in, I nudged Steven and said "Hey, Jerome Kersey just walked in". Steven not being a sports fan in the least, said "Who?", which probably generated a 'Really?' look from me, decades before "Really?" was a thing. But I digress, as Jerome came in, I heard one of the two guys at the counter say "Hey, it's Jerome Kersey!", and a few seconds later heard Jerome say "No autographs". The pair must've only needed one thing, because they were in and out within two minutes or less. I had gotten his autograph at a signing a year or so prior, so there was never any thought of me bothering him for one, plus it's not like I always carried around some Jerome Kersey ephemera just on the off chance that I would see him in the wild someday, so no regrets. It was kind of a surreal experience though. In retrospect, it was about the last place that I would've ever expected to encounter a Blazer. I have always kind of wondered how it was that they came to be in Gresham that day. I wish too that I would've seen what they stopped in for, as I think it would've made the story just a little bit more interesting. I remember too that Steven and I went back to his apartment afterwards, and he said "Hey, dad, we saw..." turns to me and asks "who did we see again?" Me: "Jerome Kersey". "Oh yeah, we saw Jerome Kersey". His dad wasn't overly impressed either, but at least he knew who Jerome was. Despite Steven and his dad's lack of interest in our encounter, I thought it was cool. It probably doesn't make for the most interesting read though.

As for the two Franz cards, the '94-95 that shows Jerome with Otis Thorpe on his hip is kind of interesting, if only because they'd be playing together by season's end, as Otis was traded to the Blazers with like 30-something games to go that season (that was part of the trade that sent Clyde Drexler to Houston). Both players would be gone before the next season though, with Otis being traded to Detroit during the offseason, and Jerome being selected by the Raptors in the expansion draft, thus ending 11 great seasons with the Blazers. A lot of fans were upset when Clyde left, but he had let it be known how unhappy he was in Portland, so I was basically of the 'good riddance' mindset when it came to him. Jerome on the other hand, gave no indications that he wanted to leave, and even though he was starting to slow down some by '95, he was still one of my two all-time favorite Blazers, and I was not happy about him being left unprotected in the draft. It's 25 years later, and I'm still not happy about it!

Anywho, thanks again for the free stuff, and extras, Kerry! I've got a small stack with your name on it, which I've been meaning to package up and send for months now. Hopefully this latest mailing will inspire me to get to doing that.

On an unrelated note, the weather here has gotten really awesome all of sudden, and I very much hope that it's doing the same thing where all of you live too!

You said it!

I don't know if anyone's noticed or not, but soccer's popularity in the U.S. seems to be on the increase. It had already been trending upward pre-corona, but that growth has increased ten-fold over the last year or so. It's gotten to the point where people are even paying large sums for soccer cards now. Soccer cards!

No one asked, but for the record, just in case anyone ever did; I don't care how popular it gets, or how valuable the cards become, in my mind the "sport" will always be...