Birthday cards, Part 1 of 2: A brief vacation from misery

It's been 10 days since my birthday, so this is a very belated post. Better late than never, right? Can't let my three readers down.

My day was going along like any of the other 364 days in any given year, which is to say poorly. I was already depressed, like I am every birthday, thanks to reflecting on what a waste the last year has been and what a failure I am, when I got an email that took me from depressed to pissed. Somebody was planning a meet-up at a Padres home game, so he sent an email to a handful of people to figure out when the best date would be. I was one of the ones it was sent to, which I found incredibly thoughtless since I live in West Virginia and there's no flipping way I could make it. Basically what I read was "Hey, all of these people you'd like to see are going to be at a place you'd like to be. Suck it, Joe." Now, I know it wasn't meant as a jerk move to rub it in that I'm stuck in Garbageland and will always be on the outskirts of everything, unable to do anything I want to do ever, but it still irritated me to no end that he didn't take two seconds to think about the fact that maybe inviting someone to something they have no way of attending is essentially taunting them. It'd be bad enough any other day, but on my day it felt like even more of a slap in the face. So now you know the mindset I was in before the cards showed up.

I wasn't expecting anything for my birthday, because I never expect anything for my birthday. I don't have a family, and over the last couple years I've inadvertently distanced myself from what friends I had and basically became a hermit. If that sounds awful, it's because it is. There is one person left in my life, and that's who showed up with some shoes and a repack box to take my mind off all that other stupid nonsense for a little while. Kicks and cards are great, but mostly it was just nice to be thought of.

My expectations for the box were low, because my experience with repack boxes has been that they have a few somewhat appealing packs visible, concealing a bunch of 2005 Topps five-packs or something similarly crummy and of no interest to me. This one was a pleasant surprise. Not only were there recent A&G and Gypsy Queen packs as the bait, there were also some buried in the middle. Even better is that one of them was a hanger pack containing four packs, but they counted it as one pack.

Out of the 11 or 14 packs, however you choose to look at it, I pulled eight Padres. That was the second pleasant surprise, since I rarely ever pull Padres from packs.

So what if I already had all of them except for the Tatooine Topps card of fellow perpetual disappointment Everth Cabrera; it's still nice to pull a card from your favorite team. I thought of doing a Cardboard Corner post about these cards over at Gaslamp Ball, but on second thought I don't see that happening. One, it has taken me 10 days to get around to this, and two, it just doesn't seem to be a good fit. The audience there isn't a card crowd, so when I do a card post, it's generally of one interesting card, and even then they usually get next to no interest. So there you go.

As you can see, there was some filler in the form of 2008 Upper Deck, but even that turned out well since it's a nice enough set and the two packs of it I got were a hanger and a jumbo, yielding 54 cards. I'll get back to those, though; I'm going to try to chronicle the box in the order I opened the packs. First up was two six-packs of 2013 Allen and Ginter's. As I'll do with the others, I'm just going to show a few highlights from each pack.

I hate the Dodgers and refuse to allow their logo to sully my blog but, man, Koufax was good. Somebody is bound to want this and I'll gladly pass it along; just let me know. That goes for any and all of these cards. A lot of them are cool and I had a grand ol' time ripping into them, but none of them fit into any of my collections. That Robin Yount A&G mini is a short print, which cropped up in 1 out of every 13 packs; the Martial Mastery cards were inserted 1 per 8 packs. Not a bad start.

The Curious Cases cards were also 1 per 8 packs, while the Josh Reddick mini is a 1 per 5 packs A&G back variation. Dime Box Nick probably already has it in his Reddicollection, but just in case, I tossed it in the box I keep putting off sending him. That would not be the last card of this box to meet that fate.

Having done well with my two packs of 2013 A&G, I moved on to the hanger pack of 2013 Gypsy Queen, which contained three packs of six cards each and a "bonus" pack of three framed cards. It irks me when companies label stuff like that "bonus" content. It's part of the full package and calculated into the price, and pretending it's just some treat is condescending. I hate pretty much everything, but being talked down to is very close to the top of the list. That said, the repackers counted it as one pack, so kudos to them for not ripping the hanger-pack-overwrap and counting each pack inside as one pack. Honestly, I'm amazed. The cynical side of me thinks their laziness trumped their greed. Anyway, here's a sampling of what it/they/whatever had in store.

Ken Griffey, Jr. is one of those players I've always liked and respected but don't collect. It's a great shot of that beautiful swing, plus he's wearing that sweet alternate jersey. Now, THAT'S a bonus. Adam Jones also falls into that category, albeit to a lesser extent as far as the liking and respecting goes. His 2013 A&G Across the Years card is down here with the Gypsy Queens for one reason, but it's a good reason: I screwed up. He's a San Diego native, which I'll also chalk up as a bonus.

Another Robin Yount! Not just another Robin Yount card, but another Robin Yount mini. Madness. That Homer Bailey No-Hitters insert is fairly snazzy; those were placed 1 per every 4 packs. One of these packs also contained the Andrew McCutchen Sliding Stars (1 per 6 packs) shown at the top of this post. You know that thing I said about Griffey and Jones? Yeah, McCutchen, too.

This is the best of the "bonus" framed cards. It's the best in my eyes because of the throwback uniform, not because I care one bit about Mariano Rivera. The whole Yankee farewell tour garbage moved the needle on my Riverameter from dead center at 'Apathy' a little to the right to 'Mild Annoyance'. And since that's where my Jetermeter already was before this season, you can only imagine how glad I'll be when everyone stops fawning over every single thing that guy who is being outperformed by Alexi Amarista does. You know the worship has gone too far when people are having to change their pants after a friggin' Gatorade ad. Meanwhile, Paul Konerko's last season has barely received a whisper. Wrong set of pinstripes, I guess.

Sheesh, I got a little sidetracked there. I'd say I'll be back tomorrow with Part 2 of this, but it might be longer. Yeah, knowing me, it probably will be. At least I scanned all the cards for it before my scanner decided not to work, instead telling me "DOOR OPEN" constantly, even after much shutting of the top, progressively more forcefully, accompanied by various combinations of words that somehow sound even more vulgar when you mash them up together.

Such is life.

Another A&G Post

I didn't pull any Padres in the one pack of 2014 Allen & Ginter's that I purchased, but I did pick one up in my latest Just Commons haul. While it's a great card of fellow West Virginian Jedd Gyorko, it's nowhere near as awesome as the other card I ordered from this set, sight unseen. I noticed that Judah Friedlander has am A&G card this year; I'm a huge fan of 30 Rock and have enjoyed his work since I first saw him on VH1's "I Love The..." series about a dozen years ago, so it was worth the 15 or 20 cents it cost just to check it out even though I don't really collect non-baseball cards. The front is great (shouldn't this be a Pacific card since it has Spanish and English?), but the back is where it really shines.

(click image to enlarge)

So good. This copy is going to have rounded corners in no time from being shown to everybody.

Gyorkin' It In San Diego

Jedd Gyorko has been everything I'd hoped he would be and then some so far. I have a few cards of him, including the one shown above (can you spot the error?) but I decided to give him the full fake card treatment that I'd previously reserved for Alexi Amarista. It started with just a 1961 Topps but, like a drug, the rush took over and before I knew it I had made four others- 1991 Fleer, 1994 Upper Deck Collector's Choice Future Foundation, 1986 Topps, and 1984 Fleer. They turned out fairly well if I do say so myself; you can check them out over at the mighty mighty Gaslamp Ball.

Jedd Gyorko And A Bevy Of Other Bowmans

Yesterday I received 200 Padres cards in the mail, the majority of which I actually didn't already have. I won two separate Listia auctions of 100 Padres cards each by the same user. Each listing showed only one picture of a binder page's worth of cards, which I assumed were the best of the bunches. Although there were a couple Gwynns and an autographed Lee Orr card showing, the other 182 were a crapshoot. I figured it'd be a bunch of '90 Donruss and a dozen Mike Pagliarulo cards but there were a lot of hidden gems, including a couple fistfuls of snazzy Bowmans. I'm not this biggest fan of Bowman as I find their design clunky and overboard the majority of the time, but I do like their inclusion of players on their first card and other players who may never be on another card.

Of course my favorite card of the whole batch was Jedd Gyorko's 2011 "1st Bowman Card", #83. Amazingly, this card wasn't pictured or included in the description; I have a feeling the winning bid would have been driven much higher if it had been. I have never been one to get caught up in prospects or to buy someone's cards before he's even made the majors, but Gyorko is the exception to that rule. I have a handful of Jedd's cards now; the only West Virginian I have more cards of is John Kruk.

Today would have been Mike Darr's 37th birthday. I wrote a little piece about that over at Gaslamp Ball earlier today. It's rather succinct, so if you want to take a minute to go read that, I'll be doing my best Richard Marx impression, right here waiting.

As with Darr, I got the base and Chrome versions of this Gary Matthews, Jr. card. I feel like I've already said everything I have to say about Matthews already: He was lousy for the Padres, went elsewhere and sucked there too, came back to San Diego and sucked a little bit more, did some HGH, put together a decent season capped by one amazing catch, got a ridiculous payday, and went back to sucking.

 A little over a month ago I got my first Juan Melo card and said "I'm betting there aren't a lot of cards of him out there". I still don't know exactly how many there are but now I'm up to a grand total of three including this one and a minor league card that was also included. For now, I'm going to say the same thing about Omar Ortiz, who is a newcomer to my collection, and maybe a couple more issues of him will show up in my mailbox this April or May. As for Ben Davis, this is far from my first card of him but this one is a welcome addition. Something I didn't know about him until I was doing a little light research earlier is that he was good friends with Mike Darr and likely would have been in the vehicle with him if he didn't happen to be tired from traveling when Darr invited him.

 Matt Clement was the last Padre to wear 31 for the Padres before they retired it in honor of Dave Winfield. He was traded to Florida for Mark Kotsay and went on to be on the short end of an 18-pitch at bat culminating in a home run by Joey Cora's little brother Alex.

That's a very fascinating jersey being sported by Sean Burroughs. It's just like the BP/ ST jerseys of the era but it's gray instead of navy. I've seen it once or twice before, also on shots of minor leaguers so maybe they had an excess of gray jerseys and/ or a shortage of navy ones and just sewed the chest insignia on the grays, gave them to some kids, and hoped nobody would notice. If anyone has any more information on this, please let me know.

Nate Freiman, called Nathan here, had a solid season for AA San Antonio last season and was picked up by the Astros in the Rule 5 draft. Ruben Rivera recently resurfaced in the WBC and has been playing in Mexico for the past six seasons. The Dustin Hermanson card didn't photograph well but I can live with that.

There were a lot of other good cards out of the 200 in addition to these Bowmans; I got a couple Gwynns, Hoffys, and Kruks that I didn't have before that I'll feature here in the next day or two. A smattering of current players showed up too, along with a bunch of old minor league cards. I know I said I was trying to get away from doing acquisitions posts but this recent batch really lends itself to being milked for about a week. I promise I won't drag it out that long, though.

Another Trade With All The Way To The Backstop

I just got done putting together a return package for Marcus of All The Way To The Backstop so I thought it was about time to do a post about the cards I got from him last weekend. There were so many good cards. Above is what appears to be the entire '86 Fleer team set- minus the Tony, the Garvey and the Hoyt, which I already had and sent the doubles of to Sam. If it isn't the entire team set, it's close enough.
I can never have enough Joey Cora cards. Duplicates, I don't care; I want them all. Marcus knows the way to my heart and included four- one I didn't have a copy of.
Speaking of him being in the know about who I'm all about, he sent these two Jedd Gyorko cards. Jedd, for those of you who don't know, is batting .355 in AAA and making the concept of trading Chase Headley a distinct possibility. I've been a fan of his since before the Padres drafted him in 2010- he was born and raised in West Virginia and played for WVU.
Yes, another Dave Staton card! I've added a few to the collection since the Sisterhood project began. On a side note, I've always liked those BP pullovers Lolich and Dade are shown rocking.
As much as I dislike Boch and his current employer, I still collect his cards as a Padre and that's a nice one I didn't have. I've always liked that 'Dream Team' Robbie Alomar card; I'm glad to get a new copy.
Lastly, here are a couple of current Padres. It's always good to pick up newer cards through trades as I rarely buy new packs. Thanks again to Marcus for the new Friars cards; I hope he likes what he's getting back.