Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Trade with Spiff

Spiff, who runs the Texas Rangers Card blog, proposed a trade of random Phillies/Astros cards for Rangers cards. I said let's do it and a few weeks later a box of cards arrived in my mail box. In the box were about 210 baseball cards. I already had a bunch of them but 55 were cards I didn't have which I think is a pretty good average for a random selection. Even better than that, 5 of the cards are going into my card reference books since I didn't have any of them.

This is a 2000 Upper Deck 2K Plus insert. It was a 1:23 insert in 2000 Upper Deck Series 1. It has a heavy gloss, refractive foil background with copper foil. It's strangely attractive. This was also available as a die cut (numbered to 100) and a gold die cut (numbered to 1).
The Billy Wagner card is a 1996 Bowman's Best Preview. This was a 30-card set inserted into 1996 Bowman. The '96 Bowman's Best had either a gold or silver background. This looks just like the silver background version. The only way to tell them apart is that the Previews were numbered with a BBP prefix. The finish is similar to Topps Chrome. I already had the gold and silver Refractor versions of the previews. All I need now is the Atomic Refractor version.
The 1986 Fleer Limited Edition was a 44-card set which Fleer produced for sale at McCrroy's Department Stores. There were no McCrory's in the Philadelphia area where I was living then so I never saw any of these. Fleer produced a similar set in 1987.
The 1988 Fleer Exciting Stars was produced for Cumberland Farms convenience stores. There were Cumberland Farms in the Philadelphia area but I missed this when it was new. This was also a 44-card set. Fleer produced a number of 44-card sets in the mid to late 1980's like this.
This is one of the checklist cards from the 1992 Classic Best set of minor league players. This set also featured a tribute card to Mike Schmidt which I already had. I had no idea that this checklist card featuring Mike existed.

Now all I have to do is fill the box Spiff sent with Rangers cards and send it back.

1 comment:

Spiff said...

Glad to see that you got the cards and that there were a few you could use. Sorry the ratio wasn't higher. Maybe next time.