Repack Bang or Bust Part 5

The last one of these I did was about a 250-card Fairfield box. Well, this is sort of part two since when I bought that box I actually bought two. I rated that last box a Bang! and this one also gets a bang. I needed 115 of the 250 cards. Not too bad.

These boxes advertise that every other box (on average) has either a relic or an auto. The other box had nothing but this one had an auto.

2011 Bowman Autographed Prospects

Havens was the Mets #1 pick in 2008 but never made it to the majors.

1980 Topps #575

This was the oldest card in the box. The Phillies won the World Series in 1980, which was before I started collecting. I'm on a slow motion quest to complete the 1980 Topps set so I'm always happy to get one. 

My last post featured the weird airbrushed 1987 Topps Mike Laga card. That card came to my attention because this card was in the box.

1986 Donruss #578

Nothing really special about this card except it's part of a trend I noticed about this box. There were a lot of cards in it which were near duplicates of cards in the earlier box. For example, this is card #578. The earlier box had card #587 from the same set. These were the only 1986 Donruss cards in either box.

1986 Fleer #380

I collect Lee Smith so was happy to get this even though it's a terrible looking card. The photo is out of focus and the dark blue borders do it no favors. What was with both Fleer and Donruss using dark blue borders in 1986?

1988 Topps Traded #30

This set had a few of these Team USA cards. Pat Combs was the Phillies #1 draft pick in 1988, so of course, I have to consider this as a Phillies card. From this card I realized that there were several Phillies cards in this set I was unaware of. I managed to find the whole 1988 Topps Traded set on eBay for much less than $10, so I bought it.

1990 Donruss #147

Say what you like about 1990 Donruss, but I like it and have about 2/3 of the set. I collect Gary Carter but was missing this one.

1990 Topps #784

This card raises the question "Why do so many baseball cards have light poles in the background?".

1990 Broder Rookies Superstars

I have another card of Ben McDonald with the exact same back, but numbered #1 of 12. It also has a different photo. basebalcarddb.com lists the 12-card set but not the 7-card set. The other box had the Todd Zeile card from the 7-card set.

1990 Star #97

Another of the weird duplicates. This is a set I'd only had two cards from and both were Phillies cards I'd gotten in a trade. So I'd never seen one of these cards in a repack before I pulled #98 from the other box. Now I've also have #97.

1992 Triple Play

Zosky was the Blue Jays #1 pick in 1989 who never really made it. I didn't have a single one of his cards before opening this box. Now I have two. This one and his 1992 Ultra (#156) card.

1993 Donruss #276

The other box had card #277. Also featuring, I believe, the early season dead ivy at Wrigley Field.

1993 Topps Gold #319

These are a relatively rare finding in a repack. The other box had #318.

1997 Select Certified #40

Card #30 from this set (Paul Molitor) was in the other box. The only two cards from this set I've ever seen. I collect both players so I'm happy to have them.

2000 Upper Deck Ultimate Victory #54

I have a handful from this set, all of which I've gotten from repacks. It is a parallel to 2000 Upper Deck Victory but with a soft, thick coating on the front.

2001 Upper Deck Victory #590

This is another set which I've only seen in repacks. I don't know who this guy was but I didn't have this subset so it goes right into the reference books.

2002 Topps 206 #55

I like this set but bought very little of it when it was new. I pulled card #45 (Bud Smith) from the other box.

And finally, 2015 Topps Team Sets #PHP-8

The Phillies team sets don't seem to be available where I live in the Houston area. I'm lucky I can find the Astros set. The other box had the Phillies Maikel Franco card from the set.

1987 Topps Air Brushing

Here's one of my favorite Topps air brushed cards. 1987 #321, Mike Laga.

Maybe the clubhouse guy accidentally put Mike's jersey in with the underwear and it got bleached.

Laga, after 5 unspectacular years with the Tigers (he appeared in 72 games in that time), was a throw-in guy when the Tigers traded Ken Hill to the Cardinals for Mike Heath in September 1986. I don't know when 1987 Topps went to the printer but apparently too soon for them to get a photo of Laga in a Cardinals uni.

So I have a couple of questions:

1. After doing a pretty good job turning his Tigers cap into a Cardinals hat, why did they throw in the towel on the jersey? I mean, here's what this card could have looked like.

2. Laga appeared in 18 games for the Cards in 1986, for a total of 90 games in 6 seasons. His lifetime batting average was hovering around .200. He did have a little pop in is bat, almost 20% of his 84 career hits were home runs, but clearly, he was a marginal player at best. Why did Topps decide to even include him in the 1987 set, especially since they had to doctor a photo?

One more fact about Mike Laga. According to Wikipedia, he is best known for once hitting a foul ball out of Busch Stadium (9/15/86).

April 2017 Reading List

I'm a little late posting this. I've been spending too much time with baseball cards the past week.

It's 100 years or so after some virus (mutated, man-made, who knows?) ravaged the world, killing many people but particularly women. And even now, the virus almost always kills a pregnant woman and her child. There seems to be 50 men or more for each woman. There is little technology and some, like Etta, scavenge for useful items. A small clan run by women called Fort Nowhere, operates within travel distance of St. Louis (hence the cover picture). The clan was founded by the Unknown Midwife soon after the crises. St. Louis is run by male slavers. Conflict ensues. This was pretty good. There seemed to be entirely too much backstory for a standalone novel, and sure enough, it's the second book of a series.

I wanted to read this before I saw the Scarlett Johansson movie. Apparently the movie is based on an anime movie which was based on this manga. The movie has not been well received but we liked it. To me, the movie seems to be an origin story, set prior to this manga. The manga was originally published in 1989-1990. The graphics are stunning. There are 6 interlinked stories in the volume. The author depicts a computer saturated world in 2029, where the main character, Major Motoko is a cyborg (a human brain and spinal column) in a manufactured body. She works for a government security division. The stories examine what it means to be human in a world where computer-brain interfaces are common.

If you were a fan of "The Daily Show" with Jon Stewart, you should read this book. It's consists of excerpts of interviews with numerous people involved with the show, telling the story of how the show came to be and how it grew. I started watching the show around 2004, and missed the early days, especially when Steven Colbert and Steve Carell were mainstays of the show. It is mainly about Stewart's reign on the show. The earlier version with Craig Kilborn is glossed over and there's really nothing about the current version with Trevor Noah.

This book is similar to Robinson's epic "Science in the Capitol" series, in that it deals with the consequences of man made climate change. This book is a bit more localized, focusing on New York City in the year 2140, a city where lower Manhattan is under water but life goes on. It has an enormous cast of characters. The story is mostly realistic, in my opinion. If you read and liked the "Science in the Capitol" series, you'll like this.

Did you know that many scholars consider James Buchanan, the last president before the Civil War, the Worst. President. Ever? Well neither did I. In fact, I probably could not have told you anything about Buchanan. This was an interesting read.

I generally like John Scalzi and was looking forward to reading this but I was a bit disappointed. The Empire of the story is a far-flung human space empire connected by spaceships able to travel through something called the Flow. The Flow is some sort of science fiction concept allowing faster than light travel, without actually breaking the light speed barrier. The Empire is ruled by large rich mercantile families, the richest family of which is the Emperor's family. But something is wrong with the Flow and a scientist has calculated that within 100 years, the Flow will move around, cutting off all the human planets from each other. Clearly the beginning of a new series by Scalzi.

This is Volume 2 of the Ghost in the Shell manga. It's sort of a sequel but the circumstances of the main character, Motoko are way different. She still works security but now for a giant company. The graphics are still stunning but the stories were hard to follow. Motoko seems to mostly live in the network, but able to inhabit various mechanical bodies at will. One reason the stories were hard to follow was that a lot of time she was operating multiple bodies at the same time, while also being represented as an on-line "body". The last 20 or 30 pages was composed of complicated but beautiful graphics but I had no idea what was going on.

This is the book that came before "The Book of Etta". Jane (not her real name) is the unnamed midwife of the title. She's a neonatal nurse in San Francisco as the unknown virus is ravaging the world. She herself gets the virus but survives. She begins a journey across the country, looking for safety, finally ending up at Fort Nowhere, the last ditch stand of the US government's attempt to fight the virus.  A pretty good read.

That Big Bowman Sun

Another full bleed set from Bowman this year. Really, the cards don't look much different from last year. For the base cards they mostly just moved the player name from a horizontal position on the side to the bottom.

They did some funny stuff around the team logo, similar to what they did on 2017 Topps Stickers. The backs are similar to last year, with a block of text and a line of stats. I kind of like the background more this year. The slanted parallel lines of last year were a bit disconcerting.

Is it my imagination or are these prospects gleaming in the light of the big Bowman sun.

I'm trying to come up with some Icarus reference for this last card but nothing is coming to me.

I did manage to pull one hit from the blaster, a Prospects Autographs Green parallel, serial numbered to 99.

Stephens was the Reds 18th round draft pick in 2012 and just made it to Triple A this season. So he's probably not going to be the next Cy Young, but still, an auto is an auto, even if it's a sticker auto.

1995 Mr. Turkey Baseball Greats Tug McGraw

It's hard to pass up on a card issue called "Mr. Turkey Baseball Greats". At least it is for me, if the player in question is a Phillie. And not just any Phillie, but Tug McGraw, one of the heroes of the 1980 Phillies World Series championship. Post-career McGraw cards are rare anyway, and he's as likely to appear on such a card as a Met or a Phillie.

Although the copyright is 1994, both baseballcarddb.com and beckett.com list this as a 1995 issue.

It's kind of a weird set. The other four cards are Bob Feller, Al Kaline, Boog Powell, and Warren Spahn. Mr. Turkey was (and maybe still is) a trademark of the Bel Mar Foods Co., a meat packer in Michigan. If the company still exists (I did a bit of searching, but it wasn't exhaustive), the company may now be owned by Sara Lee.

What these 5 players have to do with each other or an upper midwest meat company is beyond me. And I have no idea of how they were distributed. I imagine they were stuffed with the gizzards in fresh turkeys available in Michigan supermarkets.

Note that the cards were not licensed by ML Baseball. Tug's cap is air brushed, but that's clearly a Phillies uni, not a Mets uni.

Hall of Fame Inductee Jeff Bagwell Cards

Jeff Bagwell finally got nominated for the Baseball Hall of Fame this year. I've already made one post recently about him, and I've got enough Bagwell cards (536) to do several more. With this post I want to show some recently acquired Bagwell cards.

I was idly searching for Bagwell cards on eBay the other week and came across an offer for 30 different Bagwell cards for $10.75 (including shipping). The seller was nice enough to actually list the cards he was offering and I saw that I needed 27 of them. Most were 1990s inserts and parallels.  Here are my favorites.

1992 Score 100 Rising Stars #35

 24-year-old Bagwell looks like he just ran in off the high school playing field on this card.

1993 Topps Inaugural Rockies #227

Topps put out an entire parallel set to honor the new Rockies and another for the Marlins inaugural season. I believe these were only available as boxed sets. I had one other from the Rockies set but I've never seen one from the Marlins set. Pretty rare, I'd say.

1994 Pinnacle Power Surge #16

Not only a Bagwell card I didn't have but an insert set I didn't know about. This goes right into the reference books.

1994 Stadium Club Golden Rainbow #108

1994 saw a sharp rise in parallel sets. And this was how it was often done, putting foil on the front, or if the card already had foil, putting different foil. These weren't particularly hard to get in packs of 1994 Stadium Club.

1994 Upper Deck Electric Diamond #480

I always like this parallel. My recollection is that it was a tough pull in 1994 Upper Deck.

1995 Fleer Update Headliners #1

I have several cards from this insert but never noticed the text on the story from "The Fleer Times" behind the photograph on the front. It's describing a Phillies game where Tony Longmire hit a pinch hit home run to win a game over the Cardinals. Since Tony Longmire only hit 3 home runs in 1995 it probably wouldn't be too hard to find what game it was. I looked at the other cards I have and they all have the same background.

1995 Ultra Hitting Machines #1

1995 Ultra Hitting Machines Gold Medallion #1

I had the Frank Thomas version of the base card. Now I have the Gold Medallion version as well.

1996 Collector's Choice Crash The Game #19

Pretty extravagant finish for a contest card.

1998 Leaf Fractal Foundations #149

Leaf had a pretty complicated system of parallel cards in 1998.

1999 Sp Authentic Home Run Chronicles

1998, of course, was the year of the Home Run. I only have a few of these cards and find them unattractive. Lots of gold foil nonsense on the front. Since the card mentions a specific home run on a specific date, you'd think that maybe the photo would be of the player hitting that home run. Not in this case since the Astros were at home and Bagwell is in an away uniform.

2002 UD Superstars Keys to the City

This is an insert in a 2002 multi-sport set that I never heard of.