The Manning Turnaround - Part 3

And now, some baseball with a randomizer, where I landed on and up with the Cardinals. Not one of my teams of choice, but there are a good number of Cards fans in Blog-land, so there will a few folks that consider this trade bait.

But I'm keeping this one. These are Fire Die-Cut inserts from Bowman Chrome, and are definitely unique with their curled over look, as if the card was actually burned. Shoebox Legends has already waxed poetic about the Xander Bogaerts version of this, and I will definitely second his opinion. These look great in hand. Who cares if it is pure gimmick?

The back, with the ashy border at the top is also great. What a keeper.

Even better, I was able to slip this into a sleeve and top loader with little trouble.

This one also went in easily, but I put in with the pointy portions towards the top of the sleeve. I think I'd still be trying it to put it in the other way.

Here's the rest of the base from Chrome.

More base - this time from Sterling. I've picked up some Mets autos from this, but no base cards (Toronto has no cards in this whole set). This is my first of those, and I really like the contrast of the white uniform against the black background.

But I also ended up with a pair of autographs as well from this. It is nice that one is a prospect and one is a current member of the roster and one is a prospect. A nice mix of two.

Immaculate brought nothing to me.

But I can't escape Oscars. This time, Taveras rears his head again with a base card from Triple Threads.

And I guess this was the big hit for me from this break. A plain white swatch and a sticker-graph. But, it is numbered to 99, and the auto is legible on the sliding scale of autograph legibility. And at least when you put Kolten's name into google now, there are no references to "picked off" autocompleting.

So, that wraps this up. While I probably didn't get my money back in terms of book value, that's the risk you take. And I still got a trio of hits that a Cardinals fan might not have too hard of a time prying from my hands. Maybe tomorrow, depending on the mailman, I'll finally be able to show off some of the Upper Deck CFL cards.