2025 trade package #20: the Collective Mind

I've been blogging here since the last week of August of 2010. That's 15 years that have included lots and lots of trades with fellow bloggers. Still, in all that time there are some folks I haven't traded with for whatever reason.

Happily, I was able to cross Greg of the Collective Mind's name off that list in September after we made a jumbo-sized deal via TCDb. You can find him there under his username of LoQtus, which is a nice reference to a huge story line from Star Trek: the Next Generation.

Back in June he'd commented on one of my Facebook purchase recaps where I mentioned that the pile included a nice stack of a number of recent football base, especially from 2024. Greg mentioned he'd be interested in a starter lot of '24 Prestige, and I could certainly make that happen.

In total I sent him almost 400 cards between 2024 Prestige and Zenith retail, plus a few other baseball and football items, and in return I chose around 90 baseball and football cards that I could use. Win/win!

Here's what Greg sent my way:

I almost always sort things to scan alphabetically so it was a happy coincidence that scan #1 is a bunch of Tigers legends. Sparky and "Wahoo" Sam Crawford have the best looking cards thanks to the might of Topps' Gallery HOF product, and Crawford sees his same photo used on UD's also fantastic SP Legendary Cuts set. Miggy stars on a Stadium Club card representing a product that deserves to be in the HOF. Cobb and Gehringer (All-Star MVP ring) join in thanks to Panini's Hall-focused Cooperstown product. Gibby was still managing Arizona in the fourth of his five seasons there when his Panini Hometown Heroes card above was made, but he's known more as a Tiger (and to some degree, as a Dodger, but just for one very significant moment!). And of course there's another of my favorites in Grandy. Let's count: one many, two many...

...three many Grandersons! And this one is the best looking of the trio, but that's not much of a competition with UD Documentary and GQ being the other options anyway.

After Grandy there's a nice little run of Griffeys that extends into scan #3. The brands and years are all over the place and that's something I never fail to enjoy. I'd have to say my favorite overall here is the Ultra card because we get lots and lots of views of Griffey's sweet swing but not as many of his fielding prowess.

Occasional deals like this one help me to have a player like Griffey chase overall collection leader Cal Ripken Jr., whom we'll see in a bit in a smaller quantity. Ken's less than 100 cards short of Cal's 1360 as of this posting, and that's not bad!

Mr. Padre Tony Gwynn is next and the second of the big four PC guys in this bunch. I managed to get him over the 1000-card mark at some point this year which is super exciting, and I look forward to having all four over that milestone soon. You'll see more of him in the next scan plus another below, and again there's a fun mix of designs. I can't easily pick a favorite look here but I do really like the photo on the Topps Opening Day base.

There are just three more Gwynns to choose from here but I love that the Pros & Prospects card makes him look like he's breaking the sound barrier thanks to those lines in the middle.

The guys I already mentioned got nice boosts to their collections but I think Maddux, #3 of the four big PCs, got the nicest bump in this trade, both in terms of quality and quantity. '97 Zenith is a particularly nice looking set but the others aren't exactly chopped liver either.

Numberwise Maddux is behind Barry Larkin (994) with 968 on the way to 1000, but the best part is that I don't care who hits it first because I win either way! It's great that he gets an entire scan to himself here, not to mention some more very nice designs like Fleer Genuine/Insider, Leaf, and Sweet Spot. The Topps Moments & Milestones numbered card is apparently my 26th from that voluminous product, and I seem to have way more of this card (#15) than the others (12, 13, and 14) from the 2007 set combined.

Maddux even encroaches on this scan with one more vertical card, but we'll be seeing him again momentarily.

Before getting to the 4th big PC guy I did come up with a couple other Tigers stars. 3x WS winner Jack Morris made the cut with cards from '88 Donruss All-Stars (the oldest card in the deal) and 2004 Donruss World Series Heroes. The latter is actually a Blue Holofoil parallel and numbered /100, and the color works very well for the team it's celebrating. Magglio joins Gibson in Tigers lore with a big playoffs homer of his own, plus you see him here on a 2008 Topps Chrome Trading Card History insert, one of the manufacturer's fun chase cards from back when they gave a shit about them.

Lastly, I "only" ended up with two Cals, but one of them is a '97 Burger King card, which gives me five of the eight in a set I'll eventually complete. And while I'm not much of a Ginter fan, I do like the insert celebrating his record consecutive games played streak.

Moving over to the horizontals, Panini's Cooperstown pops up a few more times for Detroit/Philly HOFer Mickey Cochrane, Gwynn, and Mr. Tiger Al Kaline. That quote on Kaline's card from Ted Williams is very high praise, no? Meanwhile, Griffey gets one more appearance, Gwynn gets a few more, including a pair from the excellent Donruss Champions product, and Mad Dog returns. He indeed won his third Cy in '94, and would finish with a consecutive quartet thanks to an insane 19-2 1995 campaign that included 10 complete games, plus of course a World Series ring.

At last we approach the end of the Maddux cards. The Classic Clippings base is quite nice but it stands no chance against the 2005 Elite Face2Face insert that pairs him up with Bagwell and is numbered /1500. Speaking of numbered cards, I thought the 2008 UD Piece of History Cut From the Same Cloth Silver insert /149 was cool as it pairs up Carlos Guillen with the previously seen Ordonez. Those two were instrumental in the Tigers surprising everyone by making it to the '06 World Series.

Lastly, minis of Gwynn, Maddux, and Verlander (just one many!) from GQ and Ginter close out the baseball items. I did, however, include Michigan Football coach Fielding Yost in this scan since he didn't fit in nicely with the rest of the stuff from that sport. The West Virginia alum was a pioneer and innovator of the sport, winning six national championships and lots of games in Ann Arbor and getting his name all over the place, including the current hockey arena on campus (formerly a field house).

The first of three football scans mostly focuses on star WR Braylon Edwards and transfer RB Justin Fargas, but TE Devin Funchess and QB/HC Jim Harbaugh make cameos as well, with the latter being almost literal on a card that includes journeyman QB Mitchell Trubisky.

Things get pretty exciting for me in this scan as I love picking up anything new of RB and former position coach Mike Hart, especially numbered inserts. The Playoff Contenders Round Numbers Gold (/1000) pairs him up with Thomas Brown while the other is a Press Pass Reflectors parallel numbered /500 (and featuring a college action photo!).

I wouldn't usually pick up a card celebrating a Tom Brady interception but that was Michigan-on-Michigan crime thanks to CB Marlin Jackson. He's joined by another star Michigan defender in Jabrill Peppers. The we get a nice little bunch of cards of Denard Robinson, one of which includes The Good Place favorite Blake Bortles.

Last up is this very nice octet of horizontals, all but one of which are college cards, to my great joy. Braylon makes one more appearance from one of his brief tenures with the Jets, and Funchess adds a couple SAGE HIT cards to his collection.

The rest here represent a bunch of my favorites from the draft class I still love the most from 2008. WRs Adrian Arrington and Mario "Too Many" Manningham(s) are joined by RB Mike Hart and QB Chad Henne on some Press Pass and Reflector cards (also /500 like the one from earlier) while Henne gets a solo card from 2008 SAGE Aspire's 5 Star insert, very apropos for today being the first day of the early signing period. I really love the look of the rainbow foil, numbered Reflectors paired with Press Pass's design from back then.

Once again, many thanks to Greg for making this huge trade! It was awesome working with him and I hope to do so again, but until then, keep following him at the Collective Mind as he gets settled in from his recent move and reestablishes his card room.

I believe I'll be back soon, possibly as early as tomorrow if possible, to cover September's show before attending the December version to close out the year. Stay warm, stay safe, and try to enjoy some stress-free holiday planning!

7/2/22 show report: freedom isn't free but dime boxes practically are

(I don't want to forget to mention that I didn't skip June's show, I just ended up with practically nothing to show off since almost all of it was trade bait destined for packages, many of which were shipped out, so it wasn't worth doing a recap.)

Like I said in last night's post I had a great time as usual at the monthly card show yesterday. For whatever reason the crowd was relatively small at the time I got there so I had a lot more breathing room and felt better about taking my time. First I worked on the $1 and $2 boxes and then I still had enough energy (and wasn't totally stiff from standing for an hour-plus) so I wandered over to the dime boxes. This time all of the boxes that weren't $1s and up were 10/$1 (he usually has quarter and $0.50 boxes) so I tried to take advantage of that while I could.

In the end I came home with 80 dime cards, 23 from the dollar box, and 20 more that were $2 apiece. Yes, that totals $71 and not that's not what I paid because this guy is awesome and told me my total was $60. Hell yeah! That's why I'm a repeat customer and pretty much make the monthly trip just to head to his table.

As usual, first you'll get a look at the general trade bait I scored that's up for grabs:

Everything here was a dime except for the Erickson ('91 Topps Desert Shield) and Anderson dual relic. Young is /475, Anderson is /200, Carlson is /125, Fasano is /897, Helu is /897, Jones is /249, and Ollison is /299. I'll grab numbered cards from dime boxes all day every day!

And the rest of the trade bait. Treadwell (/599) and the Jets insert (/800) were dime cards. No, Jeff, you don't need either Darboh (according to TCDB), though you're welcome to them if you like having dupes.

If you see anything you want please claim it in the comments!

Ok, now for the stuff I kept for myself:

Part 1: baseball. The first six came out of the dime boxes. The top three are 2020 Topps and Update Turkey Red inserts, and I thought it was cool getting two of Junior on the teams he's most known for. Meanwhile the GQ cards are 2013s. I grabbed a few more since I couldn't remember if I had them or not, and those ended up being dupes, but they'll happily find good homes soon enough. JV is a 2020 Topps Holiday card, and I can never have enough of his cards. And lastly, the Pudge jersey /250 from 2002 UD 40-Man was just $2 so it seemed well worth picking up. I now appear to have 10 hits of his, one of which is an autograph, with the other nine being relics like this one.

Part 2: basketball and football. Everything here except for the final two cards also came from the dime boxes. THJ's and Duncan Robinson's cards were the right color for me to pick up for sure. Transfer TE Asiasi's first Select card at the top was a RC need (my third of 13 if I'm tracking correctly) while I also added Prizm parallels of him and stud C Cesar Ruiz, all from the 2020 product. 2021 draftees Chris Evans and Kwity Paye are next and appear on the retail versions of their Panini Absolute cards from last year. You can tell the versions apart easily because despite both of them having that foil design, the hobby cards are serial numbered and these aren't.

And lastly I came up with two new football hits, both of which I believe were out of the $2 boxes. First is a large 2017 Spectra jersey swatch of the previously seen Darboh, numbered /199. It's my 42nd hit of the former WR, and like Jeff I have a crazy number of his better cards, probably because we keep helping each other out with dupes (mostly Jeff!). Joining him was transfer RB Justin Fargas (whose USC Trojans are joining the Big Ten!) on a 2003 Bowman Signs of the Future auto. Although I could have sworn I already had something of him I was wrong so this is my first hit of Huggy Bear Jr. That makes him the 232nd member of my football hits collection, which is nearing the 1600-card milestone, by the way.

As usual you can expect to see some of what I picked up in some blogger trade recaps once I get them mailed out, and the rest is available here or on TCDB. Until next show, have a great July and stay cool!

9/3/21 card show report: show 'nuff

This is going to be another quick show recap because once again I didn't bring home much, though this time it felt a bit more productive to me as I scored a few cards for upcoming trade packages.

After getting out of work early on Friday afternoon I headed east to Taylor, home of your 2021 Little League Baseball champions! My usual seller still didn't have any dime boxes out so I spent most of my time in the $1s and $2 looking for hits to trade.

My final breakdown was 20 $2s, eight $1s, and four $0.50s for a nice round $50 spent. Most of the cards will be getting dispersed around the country soon enough, but I did end up with eight trade bait items that I didn't immediately assign to any of my usual trade partners:
As you can see, my usual strategy is "get the best type of hit I can find for $1 or $2." In this case all were $2s, but I think they were worth it. Most are football because that's how things shook out--just about all the $2 baseball stuff featured scrubs--but I did end up with a Matt Holiday manupatch, so there's that. These are all up on TCDB but as always, send a comment/message/whatever my way if you'd like to make a deal for any of the above.

Other than that I scored one card for myself in the $0.50 boxes: this 2003 Flair RC of Huggy Bear's kid Justin Fargas, the former Michigan RB who transferred to USC after two seasons and a leg injury, and then appeared in 92 games over seven seasons with the Raiders.

Justin has 22 cards that meet my Michigan RC project requirements: nothing autographed or including relics, and no college photos where he appears with a team other than Michigan. This one is my 12th, so I'm making reasonable progress on his list.

Flair and its related brands had their ups and downs over the years, and in my opinion this design is decent but nothing too exciting. As with pretty much everything at the time the rookies are numbered, in this case to 500 on the back. Considering two of his first-years I have yet to track down are numbered /100 or lower, that's middle-of-the-road. And $0.50 isn't the worst asking price for it since I'd probably have to spend that much or more on, say, Sportlots. Hopefully I'll be able to find more stuff like this in that seller's quarter box in the future, though.

I'm not entirely sure what I'll be posting next but I may be getting close to finally recapping, likely over two or three posts, that huge Facebook haul. If I take a while longer to get to that, though, it's because I still have a bit of work to do there, mostly deciding what to keep and what to dump at this point. Rest assured you'll see lots of the great stuff I'm keeping and what's available, and then eventually some of it will be hitting mailboxes, maybe one near you!

2019 Sportlots purchases: Rookie Blue on a Bye

The boys in Maize & Blue may be on a bye week but that doesn't mean I can't have my own Michigan Football Saturday.  Today I'm covering 62 new cards for my Rookie Blue project where I'm chasing every RC of each guy to suit up for Michigan (excluding autograph and relic cards).  Since this is a chase I started when I was still posting on Too Many Manninghams, the checklist I'm working from is currently here while the album containing what I've picked up so far can be found here.

And now on to the new stuff for today.  In the past I've generally shied away from buying these RCs on Sportlots because most of my spending leans toward the $0.18 site minimum price.  This time, though, I finally bit on some that were in the $0.45-$0.75 range, especially from one seller who had a bunch I needed, many of them numbered.  My overall spending has been down this year and this purchase was very productive so it was pretty easy for me to justify it, especially after surveying the damage to that checklist I mentioned above.

So here's the main event:  62 new RCs of 35 former Wolverines!:

2008 draftee and PC guy Arrington's numbered '08 Stadium Club RC is my 17th of his 19.  Former OL Baas only has five to chase but they've been tough sledding, and the UD pair above gives me three.  Touchdown Tim gets his 30th of 32 thanks to '96 Score Board Lasers, a card I hadn't caught for my checklist until recently.  Michigan-to-W. Illinois LB transfer Bowens had just one card for me to chase:  that 2005 Topps Total.  Alan Branch (who kills QBs) gets numbered '07 Gridiron Gear Retail (ugh) and Select first-years to put me one short of his 26 RCs.  Finally, you can see two Butts (hehe) out of three in this post, in this case '17 Playoff and Rookies & Stars.

Campbell's '99 Fleer Focus was a huge add for me here because that numbered RC was impossible for me to find for under $1 until recently on Sportlots, and now I've tracked down all three of his cards.  Former Cowboy Charlton, who's doing pretty well when he, you know, actually gets playing time, gets within one card of halfway to his 20 after the '17 Select you see.  You'll also see Chesson again below, and for now Rookies & Stars and Prizm from 2017 are above, followed by fellow '17 guy Darboh's own R&S.  Darden's '74 Topps fixes an earlier misstep when I thought his '75 was the RC for some reason, and I'm glad to have that fixed, not to mention a new vintage add!  And then we have three out of a five-card run of transfer RB Fargas:  2003 Bowman Chrome plus Fleer Authentix and Focus (the latter of which are numbered).  Some of you might recall that that "Rookie Authentix" piece in the middle can be removed, another goofy Fleer innovation of the time.

This scan begins with the other two Fargas RCs, Mystique and UD's Honor Roll, which are also numbered, and I'm now half way to his 22.  Gold is a guy from 2000 so his stuff can get a bit of a Brady bump, but the Playoff Momentum above, my 7th of his 9, wasn't bad.  Fellow '07 draftees and PC guys Hall and Harris appear on numbered cards from Select and SP Authentic, and while I need three more of Hall's 23, the Harris is the 24th and final RC of the former tackling machine, sewing up another player.  Here-and-gone dual-sport guy Henson gets a nice trio highlighted by '04 Fleer Greats along with Playoff Honors and the college-themed Prestige for 18 of his 37.  And lesser known 2017 DB Delano Hill marks the first of three appearances of Panini Phoenix with one of his two rookie issues.

PC guy Marlin Jackson's 25th of 30 first-years is from '05 Ultimate Collection like Baas's above, and we'll see that product (different year) in a couple more scans.  '97 Ultra (and its great design!) was the last of three I needed for transfer TE Damon Jones.  Speaking of that position, I landed a couple more for Bennie Joppru:  the gorgeous '04 Donruss Classics plus Fleer's Avant, both numbered, which get me to 25/32.  I'm short just one of WR Marcus Knight's 15 rookies thanks to this 2000 trio of Fleer Showcase and Leaf Certified (both numbered) plus Playoff's Absolute (surprisingly not numbered!).  And I was thrilled to knock off a beautiful pair of numbered college uni RCs starring '04 DB Jeremy LeSueur--Classics and Elite, which leave me three short of his nine.

CB Jourdan Lewis is 2017 Panini Phoenix guy #2, which is also RC #2 in his collection.  Former #1 overall pick Long joins Arrington from '08 Stadium Club for his 19th of 22 rookies.  Transfer QB Mallett gets a big boost with six cards, all from 2011 Topps brands, to get him up to 8/10.  And we get the first of a pair starring another QB, John Navarre.  This one's from 2004 Fleer Platinum, and I was surprised that it was a numbered card given the brand's history.

Navarre's other issue is from the previously mentioned Ultimate Collection, and his pair puts him at 13/25, as his stuff continues to be a thorn in my side.  Do-everything dude Jabrill Peppers is '17 Phoenix player #3, and the 8th of his 21 RCs is from a product that's grown on me a bit.  Next you can see two of the three Jon Ritchies I found, representing another backfield guy that transferred from Michigan and ended up with the Raiders.  These are from '98 Bowman Chrome and Skybox Premium.  Aaron Shea is yet another 2000 draftee and here you see him on a shiny and numbered Pacific Prism Prospects card (his 11th of 15) which is a good reminder that the Brady from this set and others will be super expensive.  I happily checked off another player by adding RC #9 of 1999 WR Tai Streets from Leaf Certified.  Toomer joined Biakabutuka above from the '96 Score Board Lasers set and I now need just two of his 23.  And finally this scan includes a numbered pair of LB standout LaMarr Woodley--2007 Donruss Classics and Leaf Certified Materials--that go nicely with a third card below.

This mostly horizontal scan starts with a trio from the love-it-or-hate-it 2017 Panini Unparalleled set, including the previously seen Butt (7/14) and Chesson (8/13) plus the lone RC of DT Ryan Glasgow, part of the amazing walk-on family at the school.  The well-traveled Dhani Jones has two RCs and you can see one above, which he shares with a couple other Giants in 2003 Topps Total.  Another Giant follows as transfer CB Will Peterson (#2 of 4) appears on his numbered 2001 Titanium Post Season that uses a kick-ass die-cut design.  Ritchie's third card is also a die-cut from '98 Crown Royale, and gets me to 7 of his 12.  WR David Terrell looks a bit lonely without fellow Bears draftee Anthony Thomas on a 2001 Fleer Legacy RC that puts him at 27/53 rookies and 149 cards overall, one short of his RB counterpart.  And lastly, we have one more vertical card that didn't fit in a group of nine:  Woodley's numbered 2007 Topps Performance base, which puts him at 20/26.

This post plus some fun results on the field today definitely made this a fun college football Saturday for me.  And for those of you who prefer the diamond, I'm now done posting football pickups and should have something like five baseball posts to close out this series.  Thanks for reading and GO BLUE!