2020 trade package #3: Chronicles of Fuji

I count myself among the people lucky enough to trade with Fuji and I'm always glad to hear when he's sending something my way since I know it'll be great.  That was mostly definitely the case when Mark played Santa last month and sent out a fleet of envelopes all over the country.  Even with my expectations high Fuji's generosity always manages to surprise me.  Check out this latest mailer:

Make no mistake, this package was a hit parade, and this isn't even half of it!  We'll start with Michigan pitching great Jim Abbott on a signature from UD's Goodwin champions.  As usual with the brand the artwork is suspect but the auto is top notch!  Then there's a whole mess of Tigers.  The first of two Miggy relics from 2019 Topps is a jersey from the set done up in the '84 design, which reminds me of the Tigers '84 set I grabbed at Comerica Park last year.  Next is a 2017 Topps Holiday jersey of Michael Fulmer which is somehow my first hit of the former ROY whom I continue to hope returns to full health.

Going a bit older school we have what I considered a pleasant surprise:  a 2000 Topps Traded autograph of former catcher/infielder Brandon Inge.  He could be streaky but put together a few nice seasons in the mid-aughts with his best year coinciding with Detroit's return to the Fall Classic.  That's my first auto of BInge and only my second hit overall along with a jersey, so this was a great inclusion!

Last up in this scan is a trio of nice jersey relics of Trashtro pitcher Justin Verlander.  I may cover this more in a future post but for now to answer what may become a FAQ:  yes I still collect JV, though I've soured on him as a player given his lackluster reaction to his team cheating its way to a title.  Anyway, these relics are quite nice and hail from 2017 Ginter and Heritage and '19 Donruss.

And the bevy of Tigers doesn't end there!  Up top is a very cool acetate auto out of 2002 Topps Pristine of '01 first-round bust P Kenny Baugh.  In a round one short on quality regulars (Joe Mauer, Mark Prior for a minute, Gavin Floyd, Mark Teixeira) Baugh was still a bad miss as he never made it out of the minors, plus he was selected ahead of, among others, David Wright!  That see through auto card is super cool, though, and I'm planning on keeping it for now despite the fact that I rarely hold onto cards of such players.

The other two here are somewhat similarly designed jersey relics of former teammates Miggy and V-Mart.  Cabrera's is from 2019 while Victor's was made the previous year.  I may have looked this up and mentioned it before, but as teammates from 2011-18 they combined for 454 HR while seeing their production fall off a cliff after 2016.  By the way, this is just my second hit of Victor and first of him as a Tiger, so again, nice job by Mark!

And now we're on to the "other sports" portion of the package.  I thought the Jimmy King/Ty Wheatley duo card made for a nice segue between the two games seen her, and naturally I enjoyed the college photos out of the terrific looking '95 Classic Five Sport set.  Biakabutuka's card is also very interesting:  a $20 phone card inserted into packs of '96 Press Pass.  They apparently also could be found in values of $5, $10, and $1996.  Remember phone cards?  That's so 90s.

And I'll give the best card of this bunch its own paragraph.  Glen Rice is probably the best player from the '89 champs and I'm always happy to get new stuff of his, especially when I don't have to buy it myself!  This 2016-17 Panini Excalibur Calligraphy card is a textbook example of how nice his signature can look, and he clearly lives up to the set's name here.  This is my fifth auto of Rice and of course I want to keep adding more.

Last up is the football hits portion, or what I'm going to refer to as the "Long haul" for obvious reasons.  I wonder if any of you can picture my face after I pulled card after card out of this package and thought, "How much great stuff did Fuji just send me?!"  I mean, take a look at the previous three scans and keep them in mind when you look at this bonanza.  Yowza!

Let's start with Touchdown Tim in the upper-left corner.  You wouldn't know it from the looks of it but that card was made by Fleer during his rookie year of '96, and despite the plain look it's nice to have since he doesn't have a ton of signed cards.  Then we have what's just my second auto of DL Ryan Glasgow of the Michigan walk-on Glasgows.  The reason it's difficult to see his name in that scan is the color of the foil--blue, appropriately enough--since it's a parallel version of his regular auto in the set.  As usual with Contenders/Draft I think it looks awesome and love the college action photo they went with.

Before we get to the guy who had the biggest day I can cover two of his teammates and fellow '08 draftees.  #1 PC guy Chad Henne is first with a jersey relic out of that year's UD product and then we jump forward two years for a sweet dual jersey out of Sweet Spot of another top guy in Mario Manningham, a.k.a. the namesake of my defunct sister blog.  The latter looks especially cool with, yep, a great college photo.

And now to the man of the hour, Jake Long, who represents a quarter of today's hits, with all of them being autographed!  Two of them--'08 Stadium Club and '09 Topps Mayo--include "just" signatures while the other three--'08 Leaf Certified Materials, Bowman Sterling, and UD Premier--come with relic bonuses.  Again, pulling these out one at a time was a crazy experience, and I'm humbled once again by Fuji's trademark generosity, not to mention the effort I like to credit when people go above and beyond to hit my preferred college collections.

Mark, thanks once again for this stunner of an envelope!  I'm not sure when or how I'll hit you back, but regardless of what you say I intend to do so one way or another.  And in the meantime I'm enjoying seeing the similarly amazing packages popping up on other blogs.  It's good to be a friend of Mr. Fuji!

4/6/19 show report: dime deluge

Now that I've caught up on my 2018 COMC pickups over on TMM, I'm ready to get back to things here.

First, a quick note, speaking of Too Many Manninghams.  I've gotten to the point where I don't feel like working on two blogs since I don't give either enough attention, plus I don't feel like I need the content the two include separated anymore.  This is my original blog and the one that gets the most views, so going forward I'll be posting everything--Michigan stuff included--here.  That way all my posts get the most eyeballs possible, and some of you that are newer readers that didn't venture over to TMM will get a better idea of what I collect!  I reserve the right to change my mind, but for now that's where I'm heading.  I may put in some work over the next week or two getting stuff from over there linked here.

Anyway, on with some cards!

Today I'm recapping April's card show trip to Taylor.  It's been long enough that I don't remember exactly how everything was distributed, but I do recall having a blast because my favorite seller was blowing out all of his lower-end stuff, some of which would have normally been in $0.25 and $0.50 boxes, for $0.10 each.

That led to me grabbing a huge number of things I would have normally ignored, for both myself and trade bait (some of which already went out in packages).  I also made good use of the guy's $1 and $2 boxes, as you'll see below, especially when it came to the Michigan stuff.  In all, I spent $45 very productively.

Read on to see how I did:

We'll begin with the open trade bait portion.  As I think I mentioned before I've started to grab cheap and interesting stuff here and there with the intention of putting it up for trade on TCDB, but I like showing it off here first because trading through my blog is fun.  A previous show post led to one such envelope, which I'll be posting soon-ish.

Anyway, these hits were either $1 or $2 each:  Borbon is a 2007 Elite Collegiate Patches manupatch auto (#171/250) and Gabbert is from 2012 Playoff National Treasures (#03/49), featuring two prime Jags jersey swatches and a bit of pigskin.  Please claim these in the comments!

Moving on to the baseball portion, here's a couple dime adds of former blog namesake guy Curtis Granderson.  While I prefer Tigers stuff it's nice to find anything new of him, even in the uniform of the hated Yankees.

I went a little Griffey crazy this time, and why not for $0.10 apiece?  The '07 Topps Hit Parade insert is cool, but the 2008 Opening Day insert two spots over is even more interesting.  It's called "Flapper Cards" and folds out in a bunch of directions.  The newer Topps insert designs are boring as usual but I do like the photos of young Kenny Jr.

Here's the rest of the vertical Juniors.  While the pair on the bottom is more standard Topps blandness, the Tribute to the Kid set has grabbed my interest and I'm trying to put it together on the cheap.  The trio you see here gives me six of 30, so I'm on my way.

Here's where things get much more interesting as we venture back into the 90s.  Card #1 is a '93 Stadium Club insert shared with what-if guy Darryl Strawberry:

Denny's holograms are always great, including the '95 version seen above, produced by UD.  Meanwhile, the Pinnacle insert below was a mystery to me until I flipped it over and discovered that it was an exchange card for a pin from the 1995 product:

Sweet!  A couple UD inserts of Ken as a Red give way to more recent Topps appearances.  That's an awesome haul of 22 new cards of one of my favorite PCs, all for the low, low price of a dime per.

Gwynns were harder to find for whatever reason, but I did come home with this pair.  The super cool 2001 UD insert on the left was a bit of an omen for the day since he seemed to be hiding, but there's always next time!

Greg Maddux was kind of in the same boat, but they can't all be like Griffey was that day.  The Finest card is from a 2017 insert called "'94-'95 Recreates", which initially confused me because I thought "That doesn't look like either of those designs!"  Instead these are done up using the '94-'95 Finest basketball look, a pretty reasonable way to change things up.

Cal, like his fellow Junior today, wasn't in such short supply, for which I was grateful.  I got to go all the way back to 2000 and Aurora's Pennant Fever insert, one that I thought was a great value for just a dime.  The 2018 Gold Label Class 2 card looks terrific as well.  And I even went old school with a 1988 Topps Sticker, shared with former Expos P Neal Heaton:

This nine-spot gets me pretty close to 900 Ripkens, a milestone I'll soon be celebrating!

And now we move on to the Wolverines portion, which is a bit smaller in number but in general higher in quality:

The football dime portion comprises this trio.  Rookie year inserts of Amara Darboh and Taylor Lewan go with my seventh (of 21) RC of new Giant Jabrill Peppers.

The $1 and $2 boxes treated me quite well in terms of some new football hits.  The Darboh autograph is my 14th hit of his while PC guy and tackling machine David Harris got his 28th (and just third relic).  The other three were all new to the hits collection.  

Ryan is one of a number of recent walk-on Glasgow brothers to don the Maize and Blue.  The DT was selected in 2017's 4th round by the Bengals, and he's seen here in his Michigan garb on a 2017 Elite Draft picks auto.

Mallett is well-known in college and pro circles, a QB with a million dollar arm and $0.10 brain (appropriate for today!).  He appeared in 11 2007 games for Michigan, often in place of an injured Chad Henne, then transferred to Arkansas when HC Lloyd Carr retired and turned things over to Rich Rodriguez.  Mallett put up some nice numbers in two seasons with the Razorbacks, then was drafted by the Pats in the third round in 2011.  He bounced around for a few pro seasons and has been out of the league since 2017.  I'm currently collecting his non-Arkansas RCs and thought it would be fun to add one or more hits, like this National Treasures dual jersey (same set as the Gabbert above) #d 19/99.

Like Mallett, Ritchie played a bit for the Wolverines and then transferred.  In his case he got some playing time at RB in '93 and '94, then headed west to an equally excellent school, Stanford.  Jon was taken by Oakland in the third round in '98 and carved out a respectable seven-year career with the Raiders and Eagles.  I'm looking for his non-college uni RCs as well and was happy to pick up a surprise hit of him as well, a 2000 Fleer Tradition Autographics auto.  Man was that a great looking set, and filled with Wolverines too!

The three new guys give me a total of 218 different subjects in that football collection.

Last up is $0.50 worth of hockey that was absolutely worth it.  In general I may have ignored some of these before, but now that I'm logging a lot of my stuff into TCDB and actually keeping track of what I have, I'm glad to pick them up as well.  The pair of Pacioretty inserts are nice, plus I came up with two recent Wolverines in Motte and Werenski.  But most productive was my latest Marty Turco addition, a 2007-08 Upper Deck insert called Hometown Heroes.  I was actually just down in (or at least near) Dallas a couple weeks ago so this is fairly relevant, plus it just flat out looks great:

That's it for this show, but I still have May's appearance to get to (which included a double blogger meet-up!) and something like seven trades to cover.  Maybe you can look forward to slightly more frequent posting as I'll be able to focus on just one blog!