2021 Adventures in Repacks Part 44 - Surprising Baseball

 

Let's do one of these today!

With these as the contents!

Looks like clockwise-from-upper-left means that I lead with the hit this time. And here it is! Not the most spectacular one, but a hit is a hit, even if it is a plain gray swatch.

While Billy Hamilton is a fine player, it is somewhat of a stretch to consider him a superstar. Nice Wrigley Icy on his card, however. The Scherzer Gold Label is a slightly rarer black parallel. 

The 12 card pack is, as usual, all over the place. All 3 of my team collections make one appearance, but that Martinez gets the nod for the best card in this grouping, as well as the entire repack, for being a food issue, and being a team history card. You also get an insert set with Glove Stories, and even some mid-range sets with Showcase and Finest also appearing. Randomness rules!

If you're opening Premier, that's the card you wanna see.

And here's what accompanied it.

Finally, the Pitchers Pack, which was the more consistently interesting one of the group. 1990 Upper Deck brings a pair of interesting photos, with one of the more obvious Spring-Training photos ever to appear on cardboard. There's more Wrigley Ivy, and some Heritage Minors too. Even that final card is interesting...

based on the story appearing on the back of the card.

There you have it!

Mailed Mets

 

And now, the Mets portion of the Ann Arbor mailer. 

If you're going to get an award-winner card for a member of your favourite team, it is hard to beat when that award is a World Series MVP card. 

A sampling of the base Mets. 

And some shininess. While that Mark Clark may not be super blinding, it is a refractor. 

The hits portion begin with some more press proofs from 1997. As with the Jays content, these are limited print, but not serial numbered. Baerga is /2000, while the Wilson is a gold press proof /500.

There's more of this one than those ones, but this one has a serial number attached to it. Cerda came out of the bullpen for a couple season in '02 and '03.

Mini-relic! OK, maybe not a mini in the A&G sense, but still smaller than your standard card by a bit.

Prospect Premiums just seems like the most forced alliteration ever. Nice looking card though.

Two swatches. Two different colours. That's all I ask.

And why not the best of both worlds to wrap this up? I still can't come across cards of Lucas Duda without having the urge to start singing Camptown Races ala Foghorn Leghorn. This remains true even after Lucas' MLB career ended. Still.

All I have left is some miscellany, which will be covered before the week is out. There you have it!

All Over the Place

 Another 2/14 post, as I approach the 3200 point in my collection, and another one that hits many of the portions of my collection.

In lieu of there ever being a The Good Doctor set, I guess Bates Motel cards will have to do for Freddie Highmore content in the collection. Until I add some 2005 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory cards. But at least I can finally add a bedspread relic to the binders.

Showing a photo of the item is certainly one way to show off the official nature of the item.

The Black Diamond edition of Marvel cards was a release that covered pretty much all the films released under the Marvel banner, meaning I could buy an e-pack of this, and get a Scarlett Johansson and a Dave Bautista card in the same pack. But, when it comes to my 2/14 collection, Danai Gurira is the only one I care about. I just had to wait for this to drop to a reasonable price level on COMC, and swooped in.

E-pack cheapness also provided the only hockey portion of this mailer (but I do have a huge box of e-pack stuff I had shipped from that site), so it seems like this French version of his update card is a good enough way to segue into the sporting portion of this. 

I have the base version of this Maxime Boisclair card. Might as well double his total by adding the autograph to go with it. If he'd reached the NHL, Boisclair would have been the second Haitian-born NHLer. 

With these two local (ShopKo) releases, I now have 8 Jeff Dellenbach cards (out of 11 total) and am alone in the lead as the top Jeff Dellenbach at tcdb. WOO-HOO!

Marcus Smith is not a 2/14 baby.

But this card is numbered 02/14. Meaning it is totally worthy of addition to my collection. It doesn't count towards the overall total, but it is still worthy on the Premier Date parllel.

Jadeveon Clowney has had zero base cards so far this season, so this might be my only 2021 card of the former #1 draft pick going into the collection. If it weren't for this card, and its parallels in Immaculate, he wouldn't have had any. Given that there aren't any garnet parallels in the release, this ruby is about as close as I'll get.

Byron Mullens' presence keeps this group of numbered basketball cards from being a complete Rip Hamilton sweep. 

Tyler Clippard had a second go-around with the Arizona Diamondbacks this past season, but didn't get any cards out of that deal. That means if I want one of his more recent cards, it is a choice between Total and Heritage from 2020. With the shadows, the rather unique angle of the photo, and the blue uniforms, this was an easy choice.

The final card is for a new face! Yermin Mercedes was a career minor leaguer since his signing in 2011 before finally making his big league debut this past season. To say he made a quick start would be an understatement, as he became the first player in MLB  history to go 5-for-5 in his first start. He didn't stay at that level, but that thankfully made his Chrome auto affordable. And an interesting way to debut in my collection.

There you have it!

Battling Browns

Since Brown is a fairly common last name, I really shouldn't be too surprised if there's more than one person in the NFL Draft with it. In fact, there were 7 players with that surname that were drafted over the three days.  

One of them was Spencer Brown, who was the second guy named Brown picked in the draft, going in the third round. Notably for me and my PC, that was a pick by the Buffalo Bills, and this is the first card of his in my collection.

But, problematic for my collection is that there was a second Spencer Brown in this year's rookie class. This Spencer Brown was undrafted, but signing with the Carolina Panthers. That makes it somewhat of an annoyance when it comes to acquiring cards of the former, when cards of the latter seem to be more plentiful.

At least the second one is also a candidate for my penmanship binder. 

Blue Jays from Ann Arbor

Continuing through Dennis' mailer, here's the Blue Jays content!

Just a trio of Delgados in this, but I really like getting early career cards of his, especially ones where he's still sporting the catcher's gear. 

Here's a whole bunch more randomness before I get to the hits. 

And here we start the hits. I found a box of the 2019 Holiday packages on the shelves at Wally World way back then. Turns out that box lacked the hit. But, at least now I have a 2020 hit in the ol' binders.

It is always nice when a card with more than one relic window will at least have more than one type of relic - even if it is just a different colour jersey piece. 

So, while this is a nice looking card, especially with the Tom Cheek patch visible, the Bautista just feel like a  better card, despite licensing issues.

I have no memories of Ismael Ramirez with Toronto, but he never did reach the major leagues. Still, it is a blue parallel of his autograph, making it a perfect card for the collection.

Ah, my beloved Chronicles. Long may you continue to make appearances in my collection. 

Finally, a card from the earlier days of limited print runs. An unnumbered, but supposedly limited to 2000 copies, may not seem like much now, but this would have felt like a big deal coming out of a pack back in the day, especially when it goes into the team collection. 

Thanks for all these nice cards so far, and I still have some Mets stuff and some miscellany to get to!

2021 Adventures in Repacks Part 43 - Dollarama Duals

 Another one-of-this, one-of-that from the Dollarama, as I picked up a Surprise Bag and a hanger pack. The latter were recently reduced from 15 for $1 to 12 for $1.25, so I'll probably be getting fewer of those as opposed to the Surprises over the next while. But for now, here's one of 'em!

A 10-11 OPC isn't the most expected visible card, I'll get that one and hope for some oddness behind it.

Nothing too odd behind it in the first group, but that face-off card from Forsberg is a pretty nice photo. And that Durham is perfectly acceptable as a mask binder card. 

The second half was pretty bland, until it wrapped up with the great photo choice on the Tabaracci card. You might see the player not touching the ground on a skater's card, but that's pretty rare for the goaltender's card. 

Your final card. 

A few keepers here, but really not anything too notable on the whole. 

All repacked content on the Surprise Bag.

As usual, starting clockwise from the upper left, and that means the 90s pack this time. And that usually means junk wax era stuff, and that's accurate. At least there's Whalers content for Shoebox Legends. Not the Bowman card, but the Vopat. He's listed as being drafted by Hartford on the back. He'd never play a game for them. 

Promise me 4 cards from an Original Six team, give me 5! WOO-HOO!

The 2000s pack was interesting - sandwiching a  player who never reached the NHL alongside 2 who played throughout the entire decade.

When Mario Lemieux is the Superstar promised within the Superstar pack, that's a pretty good way to end it. Turgeon and Nieuwendyk were no slouches either. Poor, poor Randy Wood is really the odd man out here. 

There you have it!

Happiness

 

My 2/14 collection really didn't have enough content where the player is jumping on the scorer's table to celebrate a championship. Here's my 4th Kara Lawson card to change all that!