Losing Track of My Trades

I’ll be honest.  My organizational skills have improved in the near decade after starting the blog, but it’s still not perfect.  Usually when cards come my way, I’ll keep them in separate stacks for scanning so I can label them appropriately with notes about where they came from.  However, sometimes too many inbounds come my way before I can scan and I sort of lose track of what came from where or why.  That’s what’s happened with some of the cards I’ve received from Kerry/Madding at Cards on Cards.

I kind of think this is from one of our trades over the past 12 months or so, but I think he’s also sent me random stuff and this could be part of that.  I really don’t know.  The Cubs you’ll see are from a trade (don’t remember what I traded back), but I think the basketball and Frank Thomas stuff is from a different package.

Ultimately it doesn’t matter a whole lot, does it?  The important thing is that I believe both sides are happy with the outcome of the exchange.  I know I am.  There’s a lot more Cubs stuff to show from that trade still to come.  But today, we start with hoops.

Sneaking one Upper Deck in the mix

There are a ton of basketball sets put out by Panini each year and I haven’t even attempted to catch up.  There are a couple of random sets that I tried to collect in the past, and I’m still going for the Past & Present master set if anyone has some inserts I need, but most of my basketball comes from Kerry.

Look at what I’m missing!  So much shine.  The die cuts. The action shots. The inserts.  We saw a little of this through the Pinnacle baseball product, but the baseball production line’s don’t look like this.

I think my favorite of the bunch is the Grant Hill, because it reminds me of another acetate insert from his second year that was one in 2 or 3 boxes.  My binder is 24 hours of travel away right now, but that was my favorite card as a teen.

I could care less why Durant joined the Warriors. Good for him on getting that trophy

Plenty of parallels to be found, of course.  I prefer the Donruss basketball style here once again with the gold border.  The Durant on the right of the middle row pops a lot more in-hand.  Everyone loves stickers, right?

Breaking my rules of showing each card individually

I’m still not really sure how to catalog Star cards.  It boggles my mind that there doesn’t seem to be a good resource for what they produced.  One of these days I’ll have to do some research into at least the people I collect.  I’ve decided to call this the “Blue-Gray Non-Glossy” version.  I know that there is a glossy version that was a more limited set, but also a non-limited that looks the same.  These don’t seem to be super glossy, so I’m making that call since I don’t have the original snap case.  Let me know if anyone knows differently.

Nice of them to zoom out to show the ball

This set also breaks the trend I’ve run into so far of 9-card sets.  Nope, this one is 11 and I’m pretty sure it’s complete as is.  Star is weird, man.  Fascinating, but weird.

Like a gold spotlight

Why did Big Hurt cross the road?  To get the other half of his broken bat.

So many parallels needed

Just a quick transition into the Cubs stuff via Kyle.  Wouldn’t this look better with a gold border? I think so.

Foggy day in Florida

One of the coolest parts of this trade (because I know we’re in trade territory now) is that my Maddon collection doubled from it.  I bothered to write that down at least.

That fog looks really rough now

Sometimes the Rays still feel like they are a team that just started 5 years ago, even though there’s proof that’s not true.

Sunny day, need the shades

Doing what managers do best:  Walking.  I wonder if Topps will bring manager cards back next year, or maybe in update this year?  Would be nice to see them back.

Thanks as always to Kerry!  We’ll see Cards on Cards back on this blog in the near future as well, because he sent a couple larger packages my way and they aren’t going to post themselves.  Wouldn’t that be cool?