It's Draft Day

The NFL draft is by far the best draft for any of the four sports.  The reasons are pretty simple to understand.

-College Football is insanely popular and potential draftees must spend a minimum amount of years at college before they can be drafted.  That gives the average sports fan more time to learn about the upcoming draft class.

-The draftees audition at a combine that is nationally televised which gives (again) the average sports fan more of a window and rooting interest for those that can be drafted.

-The draft itself is an event filled with block parties, live music, celebrity cameos, and fan interaction.

-With each pick there is suspense that the potential pick could pick traded to another team.  All other sports allow this with the,exception of baseball.

-Once drafted the players have a strong chance to be immediately impacting that upcoming season's games.

I know MLB is trying to make the draft more entertaining to fans, but until the top talent has the opportunity to play in front of it's fans sooner, the fans have opportunity to see the players get drafted, and the scouting of future players is more approachable to fans (more College baseball on television) I just don't see the MLB draft progressing to the levels of the NFL or even NBA.

I began rooting for the Pirates and baseball in general back in 2005 in large part because of Jason Bay, Ryan Doumit, and wanting to see what this high school kid from Florida, Andrew McCutchen, could do.

Above are All my 2005 Topps Update Draft cards of Cutch.  As you can tell I have 15 base and 4 gold.  I would love to add more, but am in no rush as the price has to be right.

By Cutch's debut, Jason Bay was traded.
Ryan Doumit was nearing the end of his club control and many of the other players I rooted for over the past four years were already gone.

The signed 8x10 photo you see above is from Cutch just after he signed with the Pirates.  He was only 18 in the photo.

It's Clear To Me....I love clear cards

The clear parallels Topps has been producing over the past few years have been some of my favorite (and hardest to get) parallels to collect.

The back of the cards are always my favorite to look at.  For some reason it always brings back to those old Fleer Ultra X-Men cards I collected as a kid.  (Images at bottom of the post, provided by various websites)

I just love clear acetate cards.

The front shows the /10 numbering

It features the same image as all other parallels that are available to chase.

Here are some of the old Fleer Ultra Marvel cards I loved as a kid.  I sold my Marvel cards as part of my comic book liquidation in 2012 so all these images were from eBay.

If I were to ever get back into collecting nonsports cards again, one of the above 3 characters would be the focus of my collection.

2018 Update Photo Variants

2018 Update offered a pair of short print photo variants of Andrew McCutchen.

The rarer of the two was his Yankees trade deadline variant.

The back of the Yankees variant discusses why the Yankees traded for Cutch.

The Giants practice jersey variant is far easier to come by.

The back of the Giants practice variant talks about his early season success and how he quickly won over the Giants fan base with a pair of walk off hits.

Why Topps? Why?

You may recall back in May that I showed off an early preview of 2018 Topps Update.  You can see it here.

I was excited to collect all the parallels of Cutch in his new Giants uniform.  I have checked off a few of the parallels, but still need the base.

The initial preview showed a gold parallel of Cutch on a horizontal design.  I really liked how it looked as I don't have many cards of the former Pirate in a horizontal look.

The card however was produced vertically using a closer cropping of the same image.  You can see the gold parallel below to,compare them both.

Which version do you like more?

Small world afterall, the details of a cardboard odyssey

On Saturday I went to the CSA show in Virginia with my brother and had an awesome time.

It started out with a bunch of laughs on the 3.5 hour car ride down which lead to breakfast at the BK Lounge (Burger King) before the show started.  That didn't end well as my brother lost a tooth while eating breakfast.

A similar tooth loss happened to me at Texas Roadhouse earlier in the week.  I guess we have sensitive teeth.

The main reason why we went was so he could meet Mark Brunell and Jimmy Smith (he's a Jacksonville Jaguars fan).  There were a bunch of former superstars like Emmitt Smith, Barry Sanders, Dan Marino, Eddie Murray,  Cal Ripken Jr, etc also there.  Most of the guys I would have been interested in meeting were only there Sunday.

While my brother was meeting the former Jags players I was walking the floor looking for trade bait, supplies, and of course any Cutch cards I could find.

The big card I was super stoked to get was this 2009 Topps Black numbered to 58 copies.  Topps Blacks from flagship are always highly sought after.  Topps Blacks from Topps Update are even more sought after.  Topps Black Rookie Cards from Updates, well they are some of the toughest to grab Flagship cards.  Don't believe me?  Try and find a Mike Trout 2011 Black Update.

The back of the card has some specks on it so it won't grade well.  I suspect that it had been placed on other blacks that weren't "dry" from the printing process yet.

To be honest, this great card may have not made its way into my collection had the seller not started small talk about the amount of Pirates I grabbing from his boxes.  He asked how I felt about McCutchen being traded and if I would still collect him.  I informed him that I might have the biggest Andrew McCutchen card collection in the world and told him about my nearly 200 1 of 1s.  Well it turns out that he sold me one of my favorite cards in my collection, a 2005 (draft year 1st licensed card) Topps Update Cyan Printing Plate autograph.  He remembered seeing my collection online and was very impressed with it.  Kevin, if you read this keep in touch and thanks for adding to the collection.

Often times I get the base card of Cutch last as I hope to get them in trades or pick them up at shows or if I absolutely have to get them, add them to my COMC purchases.  Shipping for commons is just too expensive.  I managed to get 5 base cards of Cutch at the show in the 10 cent and 15 cent bins.  So collectively, these 5 cards ran 55 cents (all the 2018 Heritage was in 15 cent bins)

The other Pirates cards I snagged From the 10 cents to 25 cent bins?  Check them out below

Felipe Rivero changed his name yesterday to Felipe Vazquez to honor his sister.  Josh Bell cards for a quarter or less seemed like good value as did the Gerrit Cole UCLA card.

Here's some other Buccos I found that I couldn't pass up

The Stargell is /199.  A New Clemente is always a welcomed addition.  25 cents for a 1st Bowman card of Gregory Polanco? YES!

Some more Polanco cards and a Mitch Keller (Pirates top prospect and MLB #8 overall prospect)

Clay Holmes made his MLB debut a few nights ago.  The Gold Pro Debut is numbered to only 50 copies.  The Polanco Black Friday is also numbered and the Josh Bell green chrome is only 99 copies.

Overall that was a good haul, but the card below got me really excited from a nostalgia standpoint.

Barry Bonds 1986 Sportsflics

The inner child in me couldn't pass this up for a buck.

I got a bunch of other cards, most of which I will be shipping out to some of you, my loyal readers.

ScarJo Finally Appears

October is National Breast Cancer Awareness month.  Visit the official site here.

Breast Cancer will be detected in one of eight women in the US each year.
It is the second leading cause of cancer death among women each year.
On average every 2 minutes a woman will be diagnosed with breast cancer and every 13 minutes one person will die from breast cancer.
There are currently 33 million breast cancer survivors in the USA.

It's important to support the research for cancer.  Breast Cancer is often associated with the color pink so I will be showing off some pink Cutch cards.

In addition, you can expect to see some boobs with each post.  Who doesn't love boobs?

So let's start with what we're hoping to save!

Scarlett Johanson

Here's some interesting facts about ScarJo
She's ridiculously​ hot!

She seems to be ok if you cop a feel in the middle of an interview.

She was born in New York, NY.

She has appeared in countless movies, but I first discovered her in the movie Lost in Translation.

She's ridiculously hot!

In the wake of the cinematic battle of New York in which ScarJo's character, Black Widow, helped recover the Terrascept, the actual New York City hosted the 2013 MLB All-Star game.

Cutch made his 3rd consecutive All-Star appearance in 2013.  He pinch ran for Carlos Beltran in the 4th inning and stole second base off the AL battery of Felix Hernandez and Joe Mauer.  He would remain in the game to play centerfield and went 0-2 at the plate, striking out in both his appearances.

Above you can see my pink border 2013 Update Series All-Star card for Cutch.  This card while difficult to find actually goes for less money than the gold version because so many of the golds were destroyed in production.  It's believed that less than 50 copies of the gold made it into packs and often go for over $100.

Keep giving me names of who you want to see.  I have posts already planned for Britney Spears, Kat Dennings (again), Milana Vayntrub, Ana de Armas, Ariel Winters, and Lacey Chabert.