2024 trade package #9: My Sports Obsession

My next big old box o' cards in May came from buddy of the blog Jeff of My Sports Obsession. It's been long enough that I'm not 100% certain but I think he gave it to me when we met up at the Kalamazoo show that month (spoiler alert for an upcoming post!). Jeff, please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

Either way, it was absolutely stuffed with goodies, many of which I'm sure he generously set aside for me while sorting through boxes and boxes of stuff for his awesome side gig. Here's the goods:

Could you really have a set called "Classics" without a guy like Sparky? No, no you couldn't. Jeff's been one of the biggest contributors to my collection of Baez. And this time he made a HUGE contribution to my stack of Miggy cards with 18, or two full scans' worth! These five are a nice start but I prefer some of the ones below.

Diamond Kings and Gallery are brands that always look really nice as far as I'm concerned, and I was happy to get the Gallery parallel as well. I was also happy to see that Topps used one of my favorite designs, 2001's, for Archives. Miggy and Pujols were indeed the active HR leaders at the time that card was made, and with cheater Nelson Cruz having also retired after 2023, Giancarlo Stanton is your current #1 (420 at the time of posting this) and only player over 400, with Trout (378) and Goldschmidt (357) behind him.

I'm sure some of my fellow Midwesterners are begging for the snow we tend to get around the holidays, but I say let the heat stay as long as possible! Check out Cobb's crazy grip on that Archives base. Cronenworth and Elliott, both Michigan Baseball alumni, are among the PCs in this post that Jeff and I share and I'm always thankful when he's able to help me out. Meanwhile, Griffey's one of my biggest player collections, yet he found a way to gift me a nice bunch I needed.

It'll never not feel weird that Junior wore a White Sox jersey for 41 games in 2008, but at least order was restored when he finished his career in Seattle after that. Mr. Padre is another guy that got a nice bump from this stack, and plenty of those were interesting as well, starting with a wax box card and including a Fleer box set issue plus Stadium Club's even better Chrome version.

Archives, Gallery, SC Chrome again, and even a Pinnacle throwback? Sign me up! It's getting pretty late for Dick Mountain to join a team in time to chase the playoffs but you never know. Barry's another shared PC guy and I'd been wanting that cool Stadium Club base of him walking his dogs for a while. Now I don't have to track it down myself. Maddux looks professorly on a Chrome Ginter card and very distinguished on another Gallery appearance.

The suddenly depleted Tigers rotation could certainly use a healthy Mize right now. Jeff did a nice job sending me a Pudge pair where he's pictured as a Tiger on each. Turnbull's a dingus but the various black/orange Topps parallels do work well with the team's colors. And did Jeff send me too many Verlanders? Maybe not, but he did send me 22 many Verlanders!

Most of them depict him as an Astro (with a few Mets thrown in to show off) which makes sense since we're coming up on the seventh anniversary of the deal that sent him to his first ring with Houston, not to mention the Tigers to their perpetual mediocrity. Anyway, look at how shiny some of these are! There's a few excellent brands in there too.

A quintet of Verlanders (hey, a Tigers card!) close out the "regular" standard orientation stuff while a mini Baez joins two horizontals that start the x-axis run (including yet another excellent Stadium Club photo). But first, we have what's easily the biggest card in the bunch: my first autograph of my fellow Michigan alum and not-so-fellow HOFer Ted Simmons! This was a huge surprise to me as I'd been wanting an auto of Simba for quite a while but had yet to pull the trigger. Bonus points for it being on another Archives card honoring the 2001 Topps design, plus his signature is impeccable. Wow! This makes him the 39th Michigan Baseball guy in my hits collection for the sport. If I recall correctly, Jeff had picked that up for me at the show earlier that day, though again, I could totally be making that up.

And after all that goodness there's still some baseball left, of the horizontal variety. Topps and Stadium Club give us a couple more looks at Miggy finishing his classic swing. Griffey and Gwynn each get cool Archives base appearances, plus Tony's Denny's hologram has me feeling nostalgia for the 90s (but not Denny's--BARF!). And there you see the last three of the 22 many Verlanders.

One page of basketball cards made the trip as well. A pair of Jett Howards bookends his dad. Poole's first season in Washington was decent. Franz and his brother Mo have Germany undefeated thus far in Paris with the quarterfinals coming up on Tuesday. And Webber is yet another guy Jeff and I can help each other out with as he has a ton of cards out there.

Lastly, your National Champion Wolverines were well represented in this box, requiring three scans to cover all of them. I'll eventually land cards of Bell as a Niner but I'm happy to keep piling up college cards as well. I don't like Brady personally but do respect his college and NFL success. Star WR Nico's Red Cracked Ice card looks amazing, and bonus points for being a college uni photo! Blake "The Great" and "The Don" formed a championship duo in the backfield and I'm champing at the bit to add more of both of them as well. Grbac's a 90s insert and that's always a plus in my book. And Buckeye-killer Haskins is another of quite a few Michigan uni cards you'll see in these scans.

I wasn't kidding--look at all of these! There's a lot of defensive talent in this scan, too, between Hawkins, Hurst, Hutch, and Paye. Denard's actually a Ginter card but he was enough of a sensation to cross over into the product that occasionally dabbles in baseball. Schoonmaker is another Harbaugh era TE success story.

Mazi, Turner, and Thomas would have fit well with the above scan as they also starred on the defensive side of the ball. I'm still short on cards of transfer RB Charbonnet but I'm holding onto cards of him with UCLA even though I don't count them towards my UM collection. And finally, what a great way to end things with champion QB/RB duo Corum and McCarthy? I guess Jeff took "Go Blue" seriously this time!

Jeff, thanks again for this generous stack of cards that hit so many of my PCs, especially the surprise addition of the Simmons! I've got a pretty nice pile to get to you at some point plus a few other items to go with the cards, and I'll have to figure out if I'll be shipping everything to you or seeing you at an upcoming show (speaking of which, everyone should make sure they're following Sluggo's Sports Cards). And here's to another great season of Michigan Football coming up in just a few weeks. GO BLUE!