Penmanship Binder Newness

I haven't done a post exclusively saluting legibility in signatures since August. It seems like it is time to go around again with this.

Zach Evans may have only been a sixth round pick, but in terms of legibility, he should have at least been selected in the second round. I'd put him as a first rounder, but the V in his last name is a little off on some of the stickers. Such as this one. But that's a minor quibble, since 8 out of 9 is still far better than many of the draftees today.

Vance Johnson was definitely a mainstay of the junk wax era. I love the 'V' wrapping around the 'J' to connect the two - even if looking at other signatures available show that's just a coincidence with this one. Considering I got this with Panini Rewards points and didn't know my card would have that - BONUS!

I always feel a little disappointed when a player has a nice signature, but they never get a chance to sign it in the majors. Supak was still doing the minor league thing as of last year, though. 

Every letter individually written? An artistic look to both initials? That's one worth picking up! And he did reach the bigs, resulting in a slight deterioration in auto quality. He's now in  the Athletics system, and I admit I had trouble not writing 'Oakland' for that.

There you have it!

2025 Adventures in Repacks - Part 9 - And Now The Baseball

 Back to the repack box, and one of these:

Chrome to open it!

A Hall of Famer and a pretty cool Diamond Kings card. That's a nice start.

You could have told me that Steve Boros was 70-something in that photo and I would have believed you. He was in his late 40s. The previous football versions of this both contained a Steve Broussard entry. This time, it is Naehring that repeats. Lenny looks ready to help the Mets to their World Series run in the 1986 photo. It will still be a bit before Fernando Valenzuela cards aren't a little sad.

Now that's a nice-looking hit! I generally didn't like the silver sticker era of Topps autograph certification, but it does look really nice alongside the stained-glass look of this Beam Team design. It also inspired me to add the Callix Crabbe version of this to my COMC inventory for my 2/14 collection.

An Expo, a Met and a Blue Jay show up, but Will Clark's eye black application is an easy winner among the group. 

Heritage is a perfectly acceptable way to end any repack.

With one of these, the best and most interesting card should be the hit. And here, it definitely was! When you get the inspiration to add a version of that card that will fit in a PC, that's a great card.

There you have it!

Outstanding!

After all, the card does proclaim Daunte Culpepper to be a Statistical Standout!

And is nice to know exactly which game Daunte was a Statistical Standout during.  It's available in the lower corner.

41-0 for the Giants.

The stats don't make the choice of Daunte as the featured player look any better than the score would indicate they should be. Kerry Collins, who threw for 381 yards with 5 TDs in that game, does appear in this insert set. but the relic is instead from a September game against Philly.

Still, I love everything absurd about this card.

Buy Local(s)

 'tis a nice day to show off a few new Jamal Murray cards.

With Panini, they don't really include hometown information on their cards. The first one I had in my possession that actually mentioned that was a relic insert from National Treasures that I added a couple years back - several years into his career.

All it took was Topps to return to the basketball card business for this to show up. Shiny, too!

Much as I like patriotic entries, it seems odd to do so for a player who grew up one hour down the road from the home of an NBA team. 

A card saluting his role in Denver's run to the Championship is a fine way to wrap up these three additions to his PC.

But not the post.

The city of Guelph, just down the road, has made several appearances on recent cards of players like Scott Diamond in baseball and Natalie Achonwa in basketball.

And now, on Tavius Robinson cards.

There you have it!

2025 Adventures in Repacks - Part 8 - The First Hockey of the Year

 

No hockey repacks and I'm on the third month of the year? Time to fix that with a pair of these.

The contents of #1. Thanks to these repacks, I will never run out of sleeves.

I don't want to bust a repack in which contains a 2006 Parkhurst and that isn't the best card in that portion of it. The Foligno wins this group of 5 easily.

2 entries from 2021 make for a really dull 2020s portion.

But the goalie pack is pretty good, with that Ullmark being a super photo and ideal usage of a horizontal layout. The other two are mask binder dupes, which shows how a single card can elevate things.

Even with a couple nice items, still pretty bland on the whole. I blame the sleeves.

But there's all cardboard in the second one!

More bland 2021s, but at least JT Miller provides a decent hockey smile.

While the Canadian Team Franchise pack would imply that they're all from the same team, the Cammalleri card is a traded card, and he's listed with the Habs on the card.  So they're all Canadian team cards still, I just have to ignore the Franchise tag.

Although I'm not sure they can really be considered as parallels in the usual way, since they did appear in standalone packs, but the three junk wax era cards here are all the French/bilingual versions. In retrospect, 35 years later, I'm sad that they didn't translate the front of these cards. Even if google Translate tells me that Speedster is the same in English and French. 

And here's the contents of that MVP pack. That Ice Battles parallel of Gibson is new to my Kitchener Rangers alum collection, And that's all it will take to make the second repack better than the first. Even if Johnny Gaudreau cards are now pretty depressing.

But there you have it!

Everything Else 2/14

 Finally, and for the next few weeks at least, the 2/14 content in my to-be-posted box is empty! And this will be the post that wraps it up.

This is one that I thought I'd shown off before, but apparently not. Even my 2/14 binder isn't free of some really garish 1995 Fleers. 

Danai Gurira continues to maintain a comfortable lead in the miscellaneous portion of the collection with these additions from Allure pushing her count to 20.  The closest competition comes from wrester Ayako Hamada who has 8. Left to right, there's an Orange Slice Die-Cut, Sunrise and Yellow Taxi parallels. As I do when I post her Marvel cards, I must clarify that only cards that feature Danai in the role count, not cards of just the character.

There's another significant lead in the soccer portion. Cavani holds the lead with 11 cards, leading Breel Embolo's 4.

A couple baseball entries, including yet another Bowman parallel of Ryan McKenna. This black and yellow one is actually my first parallel of that specific Bowman Chrome entry - it just feels like I've got more than common sense would dictate.

More gaudiness! Here's a Mojo parallel of his Select base, with the parallel being the cheaper option at COMC of the two.

I love the oddball nature of police sets, especially when the player featured has run-ins with such set providers. I don't think Harrell has any run-ins of such, so there is no darker context to this card courtesy of the Amery, Wisconsin PD.

I've never really gone through my binders to pick a top 10 photo selection content. But this celebratory Jeff Graham entry, naturally courtesy of Stadium Club, would be a contender.

Another certain top-10, probable top-5, and potential top 3 entry would be Patrick Ramsey in the penmanship collection. He'd likely be competing against Allen Miller, Darius Songaila and Natasha Wicks for that position. While I have a few of his autos already, those being SAGE entries are a little illegible due to that foil sticker they used to use. Here, its acetate background makes for a perfect scan. 

There you have it!

Christmas in March

 It is time to finally wrap up the mailer from Dennis @ Too Many Verlanders with some bonus included wax. There was the contents of a 2024 Holiday blaster in the box as well. Not the box itself, since that would be too bulky - just the contents.

Contents vs. blaster itself was probably because this made it slightly harder to send the latter. In the mailer, it was just included in a top loader. If only I trusted Mischief around a Christmas tree, I could add it to a tree. But I don't trust her.

Now, the pack-by-pack highlights!

Pack 1:

My first card out of the first pack is the Blake Snell, while the Goldschmidt is my first parallel as a silver glitter. Even if the photos are reruns from flagship, I like the completeness of the City Connect uniforms appearing.

Pack 2:

My first Mets cards of the break came back-to-back here. Gimenez will become the latest member of my "Both a Met and Jay" mini collection.

Pack 3:

Strange collation here - the SP Trout Santa Hat variation is followed up with the regular base card.

Pack 4:

Davis Schneider becomes my first Blue Jays card of the box. At least we get some variety in the gear for this SP variation with CJ Abrams sporting his finest in elf attire.

Pack 5:

The way the background is on the Winn, it almost looks like he's throwing the decoration in the background. In general with these, I wasn't too enthusiastic about how the background worked with the horizontal photos. But with the Carroll, it works for some reason. I'm not sure as to why, though.

Pack 6:

It always seems like the hits I pull head elsewhere, and this one will be packed up and on its way to Portland by the time you read this.

Pack 7:

There's the final SP variation, and it was immediately followed up with the regular base card. Collation can be interesting sometimes. Tovar is another one where the horizontal medium just seems to work. Maybe it is just because the player's positioning allows for the entirety of one of the background decorations to be shown.

Pack 8:

It still works with the parallel too. I'm guessing Vlad Jr cards on the Jays will be a thing of the past come 2026 releases.

Pack 9:

If I didn't recognize the photo as already being used in other flagship releases this year, I'd think that Lars Nootbaar's photo was chosen specifically and solely for this release. The socks are too perfect. The DeGrom is a Blue Metallic Glitter parallel, which I think are one per blaster but am not interested enough to check. At least I got one of a well-known player, and the uniform sported goes nicely with the design.

Pack 10:

Athletics green is just a perfect choice to appear in this set. There's my final Met, and the final parallel. 

I'd have to see other boxes of this to judge it, but it felt pretty average.

It may have taken about a month and half-ish to wrap things up, but that's the recent trade envelope from TMV. Thanks for all these, and I wrapped this up just in time to have another return fire sent to Ann Arbor.

There you have it!

A couple MST3K Adjacent cards

 Back to the COMC to-be-posted box, and a couple cards I picked up since they do have MST3K connections.

So, what does the card of a Tampa Bay kick returner have to do with MST3K?

Maybe there's a hint on the back?

Hmmm. College: Arkansas...

Bobby Joe was one of the football players shown during the stock footage of an Arkansas/Tulsa game during episode 1006: Boggy Creek II, shown here slipping through the blocks on an outside run. Finding rosters for the game, their jersey numbers, and if they got screen time made finding who's who a bit of a challenge, but there were a few out there with cards. Edmonds does seem to be the only one who shows up on screen and has NFL cards, though.

Linda Evans' MST3K credentials are much less obscure.

"Why would anybody want to do this with Mitchell, Joel?" - Crow

There you have it!