TCDB trade roundup: mastodon and walkingshadow

Tonight's a good opportunity for me to get all caught up with my TCDB deals. And oddly enough, both came courtesy of members who are fellow Michiganders!

First up is a small PWE trade with mastodon, who hails from nearby-ish Bloomfield Hills. He proposed a deal for a couple '96 Flair Bip Roberts cards--that's right, he got himself intentionally Bipped!--and I countered it a bit so I ended up with the following:

Phillips goes towards my '95 Finest set chase, which appears to be 38 cards short. The '21 Finest Cronenworth is a card I subbed in for a couple others since I valued this one more. It's my 63rd of the two-time All-Star and yet another first-year off the list. Last up is a '21 Panini Rookies & Stars RC of former Michigan and Minnesota DB Benjamin St.-Juste, which I realized too late I already had. No problem, off to the trade list it goes!

As my most recent deal this was a fun and easy transaction and I'd be glad to work another one with him anytime.

The other one I need to cover this evening is one I made back in August with Benjamin, a.k.a. walkingshadow. He found me through this here blog and we got to discussing dealing some sets. After some back and forth I agreed to head to his place in nearby Whitmore Lake to porch drop off a starter set of '96 Donruss that was 90-something percent full, a '96 Leaf set missing one card, and a stack of Ripkens he didn't have. In return he gave me a complete set of 1992 Stadium Club.

While I already had all of the base cards of my PC guys from the product I thought it would be fun to own all 900 cards. And now that I have it I thought I'd do a quick overview of the set, its design, and the cards that interested me the most.

We'll start with Tigers and non-Tiger player collections. Everything's all mixed in and out of alphabetical order as I pulled and scanned these in numerical order. I love that Cal is card #1 in this gorgeous set.

This was the second year of the product and it stayed quite similar to the 1991 debut, but I can't say there's anything wrong with that. After things got especially stale in the 80s despite the new competition from Donruss and Fleer, Upper Deck came along and put everyone on notice that they'd need to up their games. Topps finally responded in '91 with glossy cardstock, foil stamping, and outstanding full bleed photos. No flagship product has ever sniffed the quality of Stadium Club in my opinion, but I think Topps was ok with that.

The 900-card set was broken up into three series, and that allowed Topps to get photos of players in their new uniforms. Oh, it seems like a good idea to point out to younger collectors that sets used to get photos of players in their new uniforms, whether or not they had "update" in their titles, because that was a thing you did back then, not that I'm pointing that out for any particular reason coughTOPPScough. Anyway, that means you get to see Gibby both in his brief stint with the Pirates in '92 plus his one year with the Royals (below). And more of that amazing photography as well. That's a top-10 Gwynn photo right there!

Since the numbers didn't divide up nicely for scans this last one covering the Tigers and PC guys includes the final two verticals as well as a pair of horizontals. I've always liked cards that show Abbott's necessary unorthodox delivery.

One thing I thought that was extra fun about the first two Stadium Club products was how the backs reprinted the players' first Topps cards. While that and the hitting chart leave relatively little space for the previous year's stats as well as career numbers, this is a feature I've long admired. It was cool back then to see Sweet Lou's '78 Topps first-year and think "I'm gonna get me one of those some day." Which I did!

I also wanted to include a back from the Member's Choice subset. This second card takes a deeper dive into those players' 1991 seasons, as you can see above, both showing something like where they put up their best numbers and also their lefty/righty splits.

The last four scans of this post include cards I grabbed while flipping through the whole set to highlight. If I had to describe the themes, they'd be: posed profiles; awesome action; cool catchers; turning two; and photo fun! Here, Carter and HOFers Molitor and the Big Hurt get some classy posed shots, there are four cool cards of catchers at work, and the game action in the other two is captured very nicely as well!

There are more posed shots than any other category in this scan, but that Jose Rijo card with the funky shades is awesome as well. Getting Pudge and the Kid in the same scan was serendipitous, and I love that Pena joined the group as well since he was also outstanding defensively at the position. Winfield often looked like a giant at the plate because he made his bats look tiny.

The horizontal cards definitely lent themselves more to great action shots, especially plays at the plate and the other bases. These are all nice for those of you who enjoy those mini collections, plus cards with cameos from other players, such as Raines and Brady Anderson.

This is a great group to end with for sure. You've got playoff action, a couple more posed shots, a cool perspective from the batting cage, a pitcher turning on the jets, a high-flying IF, Boggs and the Red Sox in a group shot, and Rickey doing what Rickey did best.

Many thanks to Benjamin for a great trade, and I'll happily file this box away with the rest of my complete sets.

TCDB trade roundup: I've got my mind set on you

I'm back today with a roundup of eight TCDB trades from the past few months. While I don't feel like every post in this series needs to have a theme, I decided to pick one for this post anyway: deals that brought me at least one card for any of the baseball sets I'm working on. Of course, I love to make bigger trades when I can, so these deals also include a number of my teams and player collections, so this'll still be a fun mix of new stuff.

There's a ton to look at, so let's get to it! I uploaded the scans in the order they appeared in my drafts folder, which were named alphabetically by member name, so these aren't in chronological order, which I figure doesn't really matter.

First up is Orioles fan Aschroyer. I swapped a few cards of his team for these:

The set wantlist card in question here is in the #6 spot: Benji Gil's '95 Finest base. I was happy to tack on some Topps-branded Minor League cards of former Wolverines Brewer, Criswell, Franklin, and Nwogu. And because his end of the deal included a Manny Machado RC I didn't care about, I was able to snag a jumbo relic swatch (my first) of Jake Cronenworth from last year's Select. Dig that pinstripe!

Another O's fan, doublee919, had been after a couple Ripken inserts I had listed, and we came to a pretty fair four-for one swap:

The first two are base cards from '94 SP and '99 Topps Opening Day, with an especially nice photo on the latter from back when Topps wasn't mailing it in. The '96 Leaf All-Star Game MVP Contenders card was a fun inclusion from a 90s inserts standpoint. And the set card for me is #3 of the 10-card 2632 insert Topps released in 2015. I now have eight of those and just need #s 6 and 9. And I'm glad they didn't make 2,632 of them!

Floridian FSCGrad777 (who would have thought) originally reached out to me on Twitter, I believe, and we were able to put together a trade I know I was stoked about. I ended up with the following 15 cards in return for just five:

Blomgren and Hajjar are Michigan guys, of course. The Gwynn (Epix!), Larkin (Silver!), and Maddux (Staremasters! #d /1500) were pure "90s inserts rule" picks and there's nothing more that needs to be said other than I love them. Evans was a fun throwback that made for a good throw-in. And the Palmer I believe was a bonus as well.

Even more Palmers, including a Refractor and Atomic Refractor? Yes please! Ripken's a '97 Finest Silver just like his NL counterpart above. Tettleton's '96 Finest Refractor scan actually does it justice, which is great. And the very last card, Andres Galarraga's base from the same product, is the one that lowered the number on another wantlist.

I hit up member George Hayes primarily for a little set help as he happened to be one of the few folks on the site who could move the needle on one of my longest set-builds, and a few others too:

Abbott's a '96 Pinnacle Starburst Artist's Proof because hell yeah! (And '90s inserts rule!) Greenberg and McLain look great in the classy '94 Ted Williams product. Palmer's '94 UD Electric Diamond parallel is another notch in his belt. And then we have four set wants. Servais is from '95 Donruss, down to just one card needed for Series 1. The big gets were Olerud and Gonzalez out of '97 Score Hobby Reserve, specifically the cards with the "HR-" prefix on the numbers on the back. I've been working on replacing the incorrect versions I unknowingly had for years and now I'm back down to two, I believe. And Piazza's card is one I didn't realize counted toward a full set of '98 UD--an SP of him from his brief (five games and eight days) tenure with the Marlins that year before the Dodgers star got flipped to the Mets. So consider that one done. Again.

My deal with Washington state member nwcardsupplies hinged mostly on set wants so it's perfect for this recap. Colin was great to work with and very patient when I realized after we agreed to our deal that my inventory was off and I was missing one of his cards. I was able to buy another copy on eBay and send it his way since there's no way I want a bad reputation on a site that's so amazing for traders. Here's what I ended up with:

Scan 1 of 2 is mostly set wants out of 1994 and '95 Finest, '95 Donruss, and '97 Score Hobby Reserve again (though unfortunately I didn't ask him to check the numbering on the latter and it ended up being the wrong version. Life goes on.) Maddux's '95 Donruss appearance here technically doesn't go towards the set but his PC instead since I'm currently only chasing Series 1 and he's the first card found in the second series.

Scan the second opens with five more cards destined for set storage. The first is the start of my chase of '95 Skybox E-Motion's Cal Ripken Jr. Timeless set, and next to it is another from 2015 Topps's 2632-themed chase set. Then we switch over to another Junior, Griffey, and three of his 2016 Topps The Kid inserts. My pursuit of that set now stands at 16 of 30, so not bad.

The others here are sweet PC cards of a couple favorites. Barry's is a '98 Score Showcase parallel while the late Tony Phillips appears on a '96 Fleer Update Tiffany parallel and '98 Score Angels team set Platinum variation.

My transaction with Puma1125 is the biggest swap you'll see in this post as I sent him 85 cards towards his '95 Score wantlist and got a solid 36 back that I wanted:

This one brought back a great mix of years, brands, and players. A couple of old Evans cards from his pre-Tigers days, a post-Detroit Granderson, two of Griffey (showing off that sweet swing), two more of Gwynn (I love me some 90s Score parallels, as this post makes obvious), and a couple more of ace closer Hernandez.

Herndon and Lemon were '84 Tigers favorites (and beyond), of course. I keep sneaking in new Larkins wherever I can, even low-end stuff like Classic. And Maddux continues making a good number of appearances in trades I'm showing off this evening.

Peaches and Stanley are also Tigers favorites from the past. The two Ripken inserts were a win for me, especially the '97 Topps All-Stars card from one of my favorite Topps products of all time. I managed to pair up Tram (1982 Topps Squirt) and Lou ('87 OPC Stickers) for a double-play in this scan. And then we have four of the five set wants from this deal: Jim Thome from '94 Finest and then a trio for my own set build of '95 Score Series 1 (which is now complete!).

The final set card (and baseball fodder here) is Donnie Baseball's '96 Score subset appearance, the last one I needed for the last of my extra sets that are for trade. As you can see I was also able to tack on some fun football PC additions like Anderson's Michigan uni Classic issue, some '93 Topps Gold, and a 2008 Cleveland team set issue of Braylon.

My deal with RJeng is another that involved a mistake I had to correct as I'd mis-IDed one of the cards I'd sent him and had to find a replacement on eBay once again. It all worked out, though, and my side included these:

Another '95 Finest base, this time of former Pirate Esteban Loaiza, is the lone set card. The injured Mize is seen on yet another RC for his collection, in this case '21 Bowman Chrome. Larkin's cameo here is courtesy of Topps' 2021 Double Headers insert I've mentioned before, and it reprints his first Topps card (not necessarily RC) on the front and final base appearance on the back:

For all my squawking about too many reprint sets this is one to which I'll give a thumbs up. Fellow 90s star Gwynn is last up with a Denny's hologram from '94 when they were made by Upper Deck. Sweet!

Colorado resident twprkj was the other half of tonight's final deal, another one that involved a bit of a screw-up. We agreed on a three-for-four deal where I got the larger end, and unfortunately the most valuable item in the PWE I sent his way, a ~$5 basketball RC, got absolutely mangled. He was actually content to just take the loss but I told him I'd handle it, and after a bit I was able to nab another copy of that card on eBay and send it his way along with a couple bonus cards--in a BMWT, just to be safe.

Here's what he sent me:

'95 Finest figured in the first and last trades in this post, go figure, and why not '90s slugger Jeff Bagwell? Pinnacle's 2013 Swing for the Fences acetate (or acetate-adjacent) inserts look amazing and I knew I needed to have one. You won't see Ryan LaMarre pop up on here too often since I've nabbed most of his easier to get cards, but here's one I didn't own: his 2016 Ginter SP RC. And speaking of Ginter, here's another trade where I found a way to up my Larkin collection thanks to a 2020 Chrome mini. He also threw in that Detroit olde English "D" sticker which looks awesome. I'm not sure if it's from any licensed baseball product or just a standalone thing but I'm happy to have it either way.

After I took care of the issue mentioned above, Eric expressed his appreciation a couple times in messages to me, then sent me the following wants, which proved that there were no hard feelings and that he's a good dude:

The Henne card is (I believe) a base offering from Panini's 2014 Rookies & Stars Longevity product (and not the Longevity parallel of the Rookies & Stars product. So confusing!) It's been long enough (pun intended) since former Dolphins #1 overall pick Jake Long suited up for St. Louis that I initially associated the Rams team card from 2015 Topps with current CB David Long, even though he wasn't even in college at that point! And the biggest surprise was a jersey relic of WR Amara Darboh from 2017 Panini out of an insert called Squires Jerseys. I didn't have this one yet so it's relic #14 and hit #43 of the former Wolverine, but given his Darboh collection is also one of the best on the site, I wasn't remotely surprised that the TCDB images of the card were provided by Jeff.

I've still got quite a few trades to cover, some large and some small, so you should expect a few more posts like this coming up reasonably soon, though likely without a theme, at least an intentional one. In the meantime, I hope some of you take this post as a sign to get trading on TCDB!

TCDB trade roundup: floored by four

What do I have for you today? Four more deals! These are a bit larger so there's more scans, and I'll try to keep the writing to a minimum so I can just get these done and put away.

sportzcommish, a.k.a. Joshua, is definitely one of the best traders on the site, and I learned that while helping the member who ran last year's TCDB Secret Santa (Dan, vrooomed, whom I've mentioned a few times here) make things right for a number of folks who participated in good faith and got stiffed by some jackasses who didn't send their end. Joshua sent some stuff to a few of those folks, and I thought I'd show my appreciation by sending him almost 120 cards from his wantlist, pretty much all of which came from my Facebook collection.

While adding those to a transaction so they could automatically get added to his collection when he received them, I came up with around 50 cards I could use from his tradelist, so I decided to let him know why I was PIFing some stuff to him while asking if he'd like to make a deal, to which he agreed.

I got the following mix of cards of all four sports, including Tigers, baseball PCs, vintage, and more!:

90s Tigers, a modern Tiger, Mr. Padre, and a new Rich Hill! Hill is from the 2017 Topps Dodgers team set.

These four guys each won at least one ring (Morris, of course, earned three).

The horizontal/odd-sized baseball includes a George Kell ('82 G.S. Gallery All-Time Greats) and '82 Fleer Stamps of Lemon and Parrish, adding to the '84 Tigers fun.

Nine more cards for my '95 Score Series 1 set build (still need three). Anyone remember Goose pitching for the '94 Mariners in his sunset season?

Basketball and the first bit of football. As a reminder, Fargas transferred to USC so I collect any non-Trojans cards of his.

Shiny Grbac! Mini Harbaugh! And a pair of the proudly outspoken Jon Vaughn who's been advocating for fellow victims of serial abuser Dr. Robert Anderson.

And a bit of hockey too with four players including star F Mike Cammalleri, hockey John Madden (who I still like more than football John Madden), and two of my all-time favorites in Morrison and Turco.

Many thanks to Joshua for a smooth trade and helping out when some Secret Santa participants got cheated, which is obviously not in the spirit of the season. It looks like he's disabled trading to take a break for now but I could certainly see dealing with him again in the future.

Next up is Yankees fan in Iowa jayoneill. I don't do this too often yet but I actually initiated this deal after seeing that Jay could help me quite a bit with my 1995 Finest baseball set build. We managed to put something together around those (and a couple other fun items you'll see below!) in exchange for a mix of Yankees and inserts, largely from the Facebook lot, plus a few inserts and hits he had his eyes on. Here's what I got:

28 cards for the '95 Finest set knocked off a nice chunk of my wants! Also Henneman is a Tigers PC guy so that was nice. I still need almost 50 to finish off this set but considering I started with a partial set from the collection purchase and have acquired the rest in trades I'm pretty happy with how that's gone.

And I was also able to sneak these into the deal! I don't get to add to my Freehan collection that much these days so tacking these onto the deal was a major coup for me. On the left is his appearance from 1965 Topps Embossed, a set I'd seen very often but didn't own an example from until this one. How cool does that look? And joining it is a '71 Topps Coin. This is my first of those as well and it's fun to compare it to the more modern examples like the ones from the 80s/90s to see that the earlier ones are very similar in terms of quality. The design is also a classic. I'm still four items short of the century mark for his collection but I'll get there.

Here's the (apparently poorly scanned) backs in case anyone's interested.

I made sure to thank Jay for working with me to get that many Finest base cards along with two very cool vintage pieces, and it's no surprise his feedback sits at 100% with more than 300 deals done. I'm sure we'll be swapping cards again at some point.

Longtime member (since 2009!) suomibear8 (a.k.a. Aaron) is up next with a stack of cards coming back to me that rivaled that of Joshua's above. This is another one where I reached out first to get the trade going and I'm glad I did because of the 50+ cards I got back, most of them baseball:

Two Tigers--Cochrane still counts, as I always say, and I'll forever remember Evans with the '84 team (and more)--three many Grandersons, and four Griffeys. The back of that Pinnacle of Junior mentions that Rickey became a hero of his while Henderson was a teammate of Griffey Sr. with the Yankees in the 80s. Pretty cool!

Six is a nice number of new Gwynns. In the 80s and 90s was there a better pure hitter to watch than Mr. Padre? Herndon and Jackson were fun Tigers OFers a few decades apart. Maddux is of course one of my big four PCs along with Griffey/Gwynn/Ripken, and I ended up with a couple more of him in this deal as well.

Maddux was one of the top pitchers in the 90s while Morris was in that category the decade prior. He and Parrish made for an impressive All-Star battery.

Junk wax, 2000s, or present, I'll take any Ripkens I don't have and that's why he continues to lead the pack with over 1100 cards!

Three more Grandersons remind me that at some point I may go back to this blog's original title, though I'll probably never see his PC eclipse that of JV, for whom I have more than double of Grandy's 225+ cards! Gwynn's got both of them beat combined with more than 750 including this pair from the mid-90s. And I was excited to snag a new bat relic of '84 World Series MVP Alan Trammell out of 2006 SP Legendary Cuts. I now count 11 hits in his PC, six of which are now relics. Sweet!

These 10 cards all go towards my 90s baseball set builds from the Facebook collection: 1995 Donruss and Score plus 1996 Flair (silver text, gold background).

The tiny football trio includes cards of Jim Harbaugh (under duress!), TE Tony McGee, and RB Butch Woolfolk (1983 Topps), who had a nice career himself and then saw his son Troy suit up as a DB decades later.

Once again I have nothing but nice things to say about this member and how well our transaction went. Aaron was easy to work with and nice enough to include that Trammell bat, and that's why his feedback is flawless after almost 200 deals.

Last up today is a member named abide who wanted to split up the deal I offered him into two separate trades, which ended up working just fine. For whatever reason the USPS wasn't fine with one of the envelopes he sent my way, and it eventually made it back to him, after which he got it to me in short order. Besides that, everything went smoothly. I sent him some '96 Flair, a few nice Chipper Jones cards, a handful of inserts, and two hits. Besides what you'll see below I was very happy with the return that included cards for Jeff, Matt, Doug, and Paul (and I mean some nice inserts and hits!). Here's what I was able to keep for myself:

Griffey/Maddux/Ripken hail from Pinnacle inside while Gwynn is in the next scan (different set, though). I can always use more Larkins. Three nice Palmers include a pair of Finest Refractors, with the 2001 version numbered /499. Tram looks great on the 1996 E-Motion XL design.

Besides a quartet of '96 Flair for my own set, Gwynn makes his first appearance while Dean-O and Cal get their second. Hell yea, 1996 Topps Laser! And I scored two hits of my own of '97 National Champ QB Brian Griese, jerseys from 2001 Titanium Postseason and 2002 Absolute Memorabilia (#d /150). Did anyone do memorabilia cards better than Donruss/Leaf/Playoff back then? The answer is clearly "no." Griese moves up to 28 hits in my football collection.

USPS issues aside this trade went very well with both of us happy with the deal after some countering, which I'm always willing to do. Maybe we'll be able to figure out another trade, especially if I can add more trade bait.

That's four more trades worth of cards that I can put away, and we'll see how many I get to next time!