Hanging on

The last 5 days have been a haze.  The week before that was the worst week of my adult life that didn't include the death of my father or father in law.  Things are getting better, but I foresee an extended effort to get things back to normal.  I don't want to go into detail here and now, but I've received a number of emails asking if everything was ok, so I thought I'd let you know I was still alive.

It will probably be a week or so until I can string together anything resembling a baseball post.  I've received a number of packages over the last few days and I hope to give the senders their proper due soon.  

Inter-league play must die!

Maybe that's a little harsh, but I certainly don't think we need inter-league play year round.  It's even popping up on Opening Day.  Can we please get a new Commish for baseball?  Maybe I should start another blog with an anti-Selig slant.  We'll call it "Bud Selig is to baseball as Beckett is to baseball cards."

Naah, that'll never work.  I'm barely keeping my head above water with this blog.  Thank God for trade packages like this one from Cards on Cards.   Unfortunately, I'm 14 1/2 hours into a 16 hour shift so my brain may not process the fact that I'm writing about cards.  We'll see.  

I'm not 100% convinced that's really Dean Palmer on this 1991 Bowman card.  It doesn't look like him to me.

Speaking of 1991 Bowman, I can only guess that this is some sort of MVP parallel.   It's artsy at least.

The "Situation" was only 10 years old when Ruben Sierra was busy being "The Franchise".  No, I didn't know the Situation's birthday, I had to look it up.

Notice anything disturbing about Benji?

Uni-brow!

I've never seen anything like this card.  Look closely.  

Here is the back.  It's Russian.  I had a flashback to my days in the Cold War Navy.

Sam Narron is preparing to throw some kind of pitch.  And some kind of tantrum too.  Check out that lip.

Mini time!  It's Brandon Boggs, circa 2008.

This package contained all kinds of different cards and I thought I'd wrap things up with this Brian McCann. It's really just my effort to make Captain Canuck jealous.

Kerry, thanks for the cards.  Next time I'll try to give them a full on awake post.

What's the Matter? You, chicken?

You know you want to BoBuBingo.

What's holdin' you back?

Go see Crackin' Wax and get in on some good stuff for his next round of BoBuBingo.

Conundrum Solved

One of the definitions of conundrum is "a question or problem having only a conjectural answer."  Now I just need to know the definition of conjectural.  Anyway, when it comes to cardboard conundrums, you don't have to any further than Matt over at Cardboard Conundrums.  He had the REAL answer to a cardboard problem.  I had a stack of cards that I didn't really need and he had a couple I wanted.  

Problem solved.  

You see, he likes Goodwin Champions and I'm not a big fan.  I do like the Military Machines inserts so he sent me the two he pulled.  

It just so happens I pulled the same F105 Thunderchief card, but I didn't realize it.  It shouldn't be a problem to flip it for another MM card I need.  If you need this one and have a different one for trade, let me know.

The M4 Sherman tank is only a museum piece now, but you can bet it was a terrible sight to see rumbling your way back in World War II and the Korean War.

Thanks for the trade Matt.

POW, Right in the Kisser

Blogosphere generosity?  Check.

Punch in the face?  Check.

My love for the 1956 Topps set started with a few play at the plate cards I picked up on the Million Card Giveaway back in 2010.  If money were no object, I'd put together a gem mint 10 1956 set, burn the rest of my cards and my collecting days would be over.  Money is very much an object in the sense that I have none, so I'll give gently and not so gently used 1956 cards shelter in my collection.  Take this Jerry Lynch for example.  The first thing I noticed was the umpire "punching" Lynch out.  The second thing I noticed was the incredible generosity of Derek Hill over at Tomahawk Chopping.  This card and pretty nice stack of others arrived at my figurative doorstep with a note saying "here are some just because cards."

Yea, "just because" Derek is awesome.

Baby-faced Josh Hamilton shows up on this 1999 Bowman card.  "Look ma, no tats!"

Fast forward to this 2008 UD Timeline and the infamous tats are very present.

The popular headline around the Dallas area is "Profar, so good."  It was clever for about 2 seconds and now it's just annoying.  Not Profar, the wordplay.

This 2012 Bowman Platinum Martin Perez scanned like a refractor, but it doesn't say refractor on it so I don't know if it is.  Or isn't.

Let's go purple.  This is one of those retail bonus purple parallels I think.

This is a purple refractor of Alexi Ogando, #20/499.

Let's continue our march around the rainbow with a BP Josh Hamilton red parallel.

I'm a Chrome fan.  Especially when it comes to refractors of my team.  Meet Ian Kinsler, black refractor, #39/100.  He brought along a golden friend.

This is a great action shot of my favorite current Ranger.  The gold looks great and it's #21/50.  Sweet.

Derek, you are the man.  Don't deny it.  Thanks a bunch!

If only everyone could win...

As I said yesterday, the September Contest had 595 entries.  That's 595 comments on posts.  Some of them were simple comments like "I'm in", but the majority were relevant to the post they were made on, so it was great fun to read.  I actually read a few comments from posts that I had completely forgotten about.

One more set of numbers that stand out from this contest are the hits for the three days it was live.  As the blog approaches it's third birthday, I'd never had more than 522 comments on one day (that was a contest too).  On the three days this contest was up, the blog got 643, 742 and 743 hits.  That's a three day total of 2138 hits.  Wow!  Obviously, most of them were the same people looking for posts to comment on, but it's still amazing for this little blog.

Ok, so on to the three winners.  I don't know how everyone sets up their blog, but I get an email every time someone comments on one of my posts.  I took ALL the comments for the period of the contest and put them in a new folder.  Once the contest was over, I used a random number generator to pick a number between 1 and 595.  The comments were in chronological order so I counted down to that number and that was the first winner.  I then took all of that persons comments out of the contest folder and repeated the sequence two more times, each time using a smaller number to reflect the removed comments.

Before I reveal the winners, let me just say thanks for all the great comments and participation.  It was great fun reading through all of them.  Two people left more than 100 comments (Richard Nebe Jr from Dawgbones, a Phillies Phan with 213 and Night Owl with 103.)  Unfortunately, neither of those guys was a winner, although they may find a little something in the mailbox in the near future.  The three winners were...

The Daily Dimwit (63 entries)
P-Town Tom from Waiting 'til Next Year (6 entries)
irondequoit from Old Foul Cardboard (19 entries)

Congrats to the winners!  I'll be buying you each a rack pack and mailing it out after payday (the 16th).
Go ahead and email me your address if you don't mind.  It'll speed the process.

Thanks everyone!

I'll have your winner tomorrow because...

I spent my free time last night sorting my Rangers.  I know it doesn't help those of you who are waiting on the September Contest results, but I'm glad to be caught up.  Again.

I was able to complete four team sets with what I received in trade packages.  1984 Fleer, 1989 Score, 1984 Topps and one that I can't read because I was really sleepy when I wrote the year down.  I knocked off big chunks from the want list as well and I'll be updating those tonight sometime.

Nobody cares about that except me.

There were 595 comments left for the September Contest.  595!!  That was so many more than I expected it's crazy.  Thanks to the insanity that reigned for the duration of the contest, I'll be picking THREE winners using a random number generator.  I promise to have the results for you in the morning.

Get your shine box!

I should have said check your mailbox.

The week off from blogging helped me do a little organizing, which helped me get about half my pending trade packages ready. 

I mailed packages to the following zip codes today:

13601
23666
73069
19027
61615
21117
85338
76522
92688
58104
Martin in the UK. 

If you don't see your zip code and we have a pending deal, I'll be attempting another mass mailing next Friday. 

Have a great weekend everyone.

This ain't no Tweet

It probably should be, but I don't tweet.  Not yet at least.

I'm still enjoying my week off from blogging and trying to get caught up on trades.  I have 10 or 12 packages going out today.

I really just wanted to update those of you who are waiting on the results of the September contest.  I should have a "Winner" post up Monday.  There were nearly 600 entries so it's going to break the randomizer I think.

Oops, I think I went over 140 characters.  

The contest is over...whew.

Commenting for the contest is now over.  Thanks and I'll have some kind of recap and winner announcement soon.

Last Chance for the September Contest

I'll be closing the September Contest later today so get your final comments in...and I'll spend the next 17 days sifting through them.  Seriously, some of you have gone completely bonkers and it's been fun reading some of the comments.  I've run across a few posts that I didn't even remember.  

Now on to important stuff.  The Rangers showed up big time last night even if it was the Royals. Yu Darvish had a perfect game through 5 innings and ended up giving up 3 hits and 3 runs in an 8-4 win.  It was a power show for the Rangers on the mound and at the plate.  

Geovany Soto hit a 3 run shot in the 2nd inning.  It was his 3rd as a Ranger.  

Josh Hamilton hit his 38th homer of the season in the 3rd inning.

Adrian Beltre hit his 28th homerun in the 6th inning.

Nelson Cruz followed Beltre with his 22nd homerun of the season.  It gave the Rangers a brief 6 run lead.

Michael Young even got in on the act and belted a two run homer in the ninth, just his 5th of the season.

I was even rooting for the Angels yesterday since they were playing the A's.  I'll be rooting for them again today.  Go Angels!

September Contest Reminder

First off, if you missed the September Contest post, it was up early yesterday evening.  Check it out if you feel the urge.  

Did you see Jurickson Profar's MLB debut last night?

He's the second youngest player to ever homer in his first at-bat and then he tacked on a double in his next plate appearance.

Not a bad first impression Profar, not bad at all.

The September Contest: No limits

I know this is a day late, but I saw a number of contests go up yesterday and did not want to compete with them.

I've been distracted this last week by my wife's medical stuff and a new problem of my own so I haven't come up with any groundbreaking ideas for the contest. So here's what we'll do.

Find a post of mine somewhere between #1 and this one and leave a comment. It can be "I'm in" or an actual comment about the post you read or anything you want to say.

For every comment you leave you get one entry in the contest. There is NO LIMIT to the number of entries you can get, but only comments made after the start of the contest will count. So if you've been with me since the beginning and you've left 400 comments, I appreciate every one, but they won't count for this contest.

The prize awarded will depend on how many entries are received. The more comments, the better the prize.  I'll start out with Chrome Rack Pack and go up from there.

Good luck and have fun.

          EDIT** Only one comment per person per post will count.  Example: If you comment on this post twice, only the first one will count.  It hasn't happened and I don't think it will be an issue.  Thanks.