Cards from Carolina

You all may remember Sluggo who I used to set up with at shows. He moved back to North Carolina but we still trade via the mail (although I've been slacking at getting his package out). He sent me a bunch of cards for my PC's last week.

Let's get started.

As you can see, I keep getting a ton of Robert cards from everybody. That tends to happen when he gets a ton printed in every set. Kevin knows I tend to have most of the base so he always pulls shiny and insert cards for me.

I'm closing in on 50 cards of Colson Montgomery who I have high hopes for (if we don't trade him). I had hopes for Colas as well but he's gone now.

4 more shiny Sheets, all of the Sox variety which is all the better.

The top 3 are all base Chrome, the Darboh is the Green (#'d to /150) and the red Lazer of Ojabo. All 5 of these players are PC except for Swords but that's only a technicality because she's still playing for Michigan. I'm sure I'll end up PCing her as well.

Roman Wilson is probably the least popular of the next 3 but I keep getting a ton of his cards. These 3 give me 37.

Blake is the second most popular and with these 9, I'm up to 47 of him.

The most popular is JJ, now if he could stay healthy long enough to showcase what he can do. Sooner or later, Minnesota is going to give up and go another route and I want him to succeed. Him and Corum were my favorites of that 2023 Championship team and they are both really good humans. These 2 give me 41 of JJ.

Kevin even managed to hit a couple of my Tier 1 collections that I don't add to a whole lot. I only added 4 of each player last year. The Refractor Konerko puts his PC at 801 cards and the Prism parallel of Aparcio puts him at 148.

He's already started my next box as he's been picking up a couple of collections and is busy sorting them to start doing shows down there. I'm sure he won't do as well as up here because he won't have my pretty face and sparkling personality with him but he's going to take a shot. (Yes, that was sarcastic).

Quick LCS pickups

I finished up some sorting this morning, I added 48 more cards total to my collections. 14 cards to my player collections, and 34 additional to my White Sox collection. Once I finished all those up, I ran to my LCS to drop off what I just finished sorting. I wanted to make sure I got more to sort for the weekend since we aren't doing a show.

You can say I brought home a few. It's all baseball and all from the Hollister's which means I should be able to find myself some stuff. I'll go ahead and start it after I finish this post. It's a quicky and I'm going to try to get another one out tomorrow since I should be home all day.

When I went to my LCS last weekend, I picked up a few cards out of his $3 box which he ended up just giving me, no charge.

The 2 autos were from the box. I grabbed the Pilkington just because he was a Sox and I figured I wouldn't be paying anything for it. The Grandal, while I'm not a huge fan of his, I am of those Black Chrome autographs. I would have paid $3 for that.

While I was there, we were talking about 2024 cards. I asked if anybody had given him any back yet and they hadn't. I told him I wanted to at least see some live instead of just photos so he grabbed a packed and opened it. Right on top was that Jose Rodriguez, which he gave me as well so that's my first 2024.

Fun Saturday in KZoo

We set up in Kalamazoo on Saturday. The last time we set up there, John (John's Big League Blog) and Dennis (Too Many Verlanders) met up with us and bought some cards. KZoo is a little over an hour for us and around an hour and a half for Dennis and John lives there. Dennis and I traded some cards so we didn't have to pay postage.

First off, he contacted me about a Valient set on Facebook that he found. For those that don't know, the Valient set is the NIL set of the Michigan team. There are 110 cards in the set and I believe each player is represented and I believe they all get a cut from the set. They sell packs of the set and they aren't cheap, which is why I didn't have any. I don't think I would have normally dropped as much cash as I did on a set but we just won the National Championship with this team so I though if I was going to do it, I should do it on this team. It was a great price for the set so Dennis grabbed one for each of us and he brought it to the show.

These are what the cards look like and they are the 4 players that I already have PC's of. I'm sure there are a lot of other players that I'll have PC's of but I didn't feel like guessing so I'll just wait until I pull future cards of them then add them to their PC. That's cards 8 and 9 of Corum, 3 and 4 of Edwards and only my 2nd of Wilson. This is a really cool set and I'm glad I bought it and super happy that Dennis gave me the opportunity.

He also dropped a few other cards in the box with the set.

These 3 are Sox collection cards. 2 inserts and a color parallel. That's my 280th card of Abreu. The top 2 player never really grew on me in their terms with the White Sox.

This card is also a Sox collection card, but also a player collection. This Fisk insert surprised me because I've sorted a lot of A&G plus there is a bunch in the list stuff that I sort but I didn't have it yet. This is my 388th card of Fisk.

Dennis also hit me up with this Woodson and a couple of other guys who probably aren't any good. Ok, maybe good. I like the name of the insert, 3D with 3 top defensive players. This is my 60th card of Charles Woodson.

I did also buy 1 card while at the show, from Kevin. This Aqua of McCarthy earlier Bowman U. I wish it was the new Bowman U where they had a license because I hate when they make the helmet a solid color. This, and the other 2 at the top, are my 8th, 9th and 10th card of JJ.

It was a great show and a good time with some friends. Dennis also invited Jason and his wife who actually live just North of us. I believe Dennis met him on TCDB and trades with him. He's also the guy that made the Mike Hart jersey that Dennis gave me for Christmas. If you don't remember, here it is, along with the rest of us, including Kevin.

Thrice is Nice

I started posting one player a post because I was only getting cards from Sportlots and only once a month. It was my way of stretching out my posts. Well now that I'm getting new cards all the time from lots of different places, I've decided to do 3 players per post. I checked, and I'm 58 posts behind so this will help me get caught up. I'll random the first player and then pick the other 2 in accordance to who the first player is so they are all at least related somehow. I realize you all don't really care but I like to have a set plan in place.

As he always does, Fred at work gave me this and I went yep, I have it. I don't. I've narrowed this player down to 4, let's see who it is.

All of these are base except the Stadium Club in the middle, top row. It's the Sepia parallel. 

This is the gold parallel which is numbered to /99.

These 2 should give away where I got the last 3 scans of cards. I've shown a bunch of these 582 Montgomery's before. The last 3 scans were all payment cards from my LCS for sorting cards for them.

I picked up this card at the Lansing card show, It's the purple parallel. I paid $1.50 which was discounted from $3. It is a rookie so I went ahead and paid for it.

Those last 3 scans all came from Sluggo. All of them are parallels or inserts. That coin card in the top scan is extremely thick.

These 20 cards give me over 200 with 203. The best part of all those Moncada's, I paid only $1.50 for the purple, everything else was free.

These top 3 cards of Eloy are from Sluggo. A couple of shiny parallels and a 2022 Heritage. He gave me a bunch of Heritage as you can see with the Moncada as well.

Fred gave me these 2, you've already seen the top one with Moncada but they are both on it. The 1963 look-a-like is an Archives from last year.

These 6 came from my LCS as payment for sorting cards. I'd say some pretty decent cards for free.

I bought this from Curtis who is a guy who sets up next to us in Plymouth. He lives right down the road and this is the only show he does and he's always there. He's a cool guy, other than being a Cubs fan but nobody is perfect.

I paid a buck for this, down from $2. I also picked it up at the Lansing show in a box we bought from Hollisters so while technically, I paid Sluggo for it, I have it marked from the Lansing show.

These 13 cards give me 142 cards of Eloy.

These 2 came from the LCS, also freebies for sorting. This is a fairly new collection so I need a bunch, especially from his previous teams.

These 5 came from the cards we are sorting that were dropped off at Kevin's. We are sorting out what we are going to keep before we sell them off by the box. They are mostly commons so I'm not getting a ton of PC cards but I'm finding a bunch of 80's for my Vintage Collection.

This is another one of the Heritage's that I got from Sluggo's.

These 8 cards give me 20 of the newly formed collection.

Finally

We officially have baseball back. The Sox had split squad games yesterday (didn't play today) and won them both against the Cubs. The game I got to see had Andrew Vaughn hitting the first pitch he saw out. He was the only starter in the game. Liam Hendriks pitched an inning as well. Also got to see Jordan Nwogu for the Cubs, he didn't start but he got a couple of at bats.

Speaking of White Sox, let's see some.

My 3rd card of Yermin, who's still with the Sox and my 59th of Rodon, who's no longer with the Sox. You should recognize the Gallery as you've seen them in the last couple of posts. Sluggo opened a blaster of them.

I ran across this in our dollar boxes when I was sorting in some newer cards.

Sluggo also opened some 2022 and hooked me up with all these cards (and 1 PC card). All base cards except the Royal Version of Crochet who I'm hoping to see a lot of this year. I think I read that he's going to be taking the long reliever roll that Michael Kopech had last year since he will be starting this year. Gavin Sheets as well, I'm hoping they find a spot for him starting as he did well last year. That's my 1st rookie card of Sheets but I have 4 other Bowman from a few years ago.

All coming together

Before I get started on today's post, I want to throw another blog at you. I've mentioned my cousin Sluggo here many times and he has moved up here and it's his dream to run his own card shop. He's starting a job in a week but he only plans on keeping it long enough to establish some work up here so he can buy a house. After that, he's going to open a shop. He's already looked at a few places but he wants to get a house first so he's not looking real hard yet. We made the decision to start listing stuff on Sportlots, right now it's all commons (over 13,000 cards) but it's a start. I'm helping with all the online stuff so I've spent a considerable amount of time listing all those cards and I have plenty more to list as I get the time.

Back to where I was going, I set up a few accounts for him on social media (including a blog) and I'm hoping to get some follows. He has the inventory to start a store and has some really awesome cards so I'm hoping to get over to where he's staying and click some pics and start posting more on social media. You can go to the blog - https://sluggossportscards.blogspot.com/ and check out the links in the first post. It's a pretty basic blog (and social media) at this point but I'm hoping to do more with them in the near future. Please give them a follow

Since my notepad that I keep my list of posts won't load up so I can't post it into the random, I'll pick one. Since we are talking about my cousin, I'll show some heritage that he gave me. Right now, I'm working for cards so I keep whatever I find in the common boxes that I want. A bunch of these are the SP's though so he let me pull those as well. He's bought me a couple of higher dollar cards at our last trip to the LCS, you'll see those when the random pulls them up.

We'll start off with the 2021. I had gotten some from Fred but these 4 were all new to my collection.

I let the pictures fall where they lay so we'll jump around a bit. These 3 I needed for the 2017 team set.

I needed all these for the 2020 set. They are all high numbers. The Seby Zavala is a SP, that wasn't supposed to be in there.

Here we have the short prints that he gave me. Minus the Seby up there that I scanned in the wrong one. They obviously like to put Abreu in the SP's every year.

2020 Panini Sox

 This is the last of the 2020 Sox team collections posts this month. Apparently the random wanted to knock them all out in fail swoop. I still have a bunch of player collection posts coming though so I'm far from finished for the month.

This will be a no logo post though.

Up above I grabbed 3 players of both the Prizm and the Select. The Abreu on the bottom is a little weird. The only white jersey like that is their 1983 copies and those have red and blue so I'm not sure why they took all the color out. Maybe it clashed with the background. I'm nowhere close on those team sets. The Select shown are the only ones I have from that set. I have 4 cards of Keuchel, 6 cards of Grandal, and 118 of Abreu (he might have been here longer.) I paid $.18 for all of the above.

Next up, we have the Diamond Kings. I like that they brought back the Diamond Kings but I hate that they are pretty much the same every year. Not much difference at all. This is only my 4th of Mendick, my 16th of Collins, and 532 of the Big Hurt (again, he might have been here a little longer.) I picked these up at a quarter a piece.

2020 Topps Sox Needs

 Wow! Didn't realize I hadn't posted in 5 days. See what happens when you go back to work. Stupid responsibilities.

Today's random came back with some more 2020 Sox. I seem to be on a team collection kick right now, I was on Sportlots last night and started purchasing 2019 Sox needs. I guess I'll just work down the years every week or two. I also made some purchases on baseballcardstore.ca, trying to complete another set for the Vintage collection. I also threw some 80's Sox needs on that order.

Today's post will be the Topps portion.

All those 2020 Topps are from Series II as I hadn't purchased any. I'm only the Luis Robert short (big surprise), minus all the short prints that is (all 8 of them). The short prints are ridiculous, there are 4 different ones just of Robert. I paid $.18 for each of the above.

In a familiar story, all of these Big League cards would complete the team set, except I need the Luis Robert. I also ran across the Orange version of Grandal for a quarter so I grabbed it. I paid $.18 each for the rest.

I picked up a couple of the Chrome versions as well. Being as Chrome is popular, these are the only 2 I have so a long way from that team collection. It does amaze me that I can pick up the Abreu on the cheap considering he is having a MVP season but he reminds me a lot like Konerko was to us. Very under rated for many years. I don't remember Konerko having a season like Abreu is now but still, same concept. He flies under the radar and they keep pitching to him. It works for us. I paid $.18 each for both of those.

I also paid $.18 for this Yasmani Grandal. I actually grabbed 6 from the Finest team set but the rest were in player collections so you'll see them later, and probably already saw a couple. I'm still 3 short of this team set. I'm sure you know who one of those are.