3 Cards (Vol 23)

So after my trip to Japan I brought back a big stack of cards. There were so many cards in that stack that I had no idea where to start when blogging about them. So instead of condensing them all into a big post (which most of you will only read a quarter of), I decided to blog about them at a rate of three cards at a time. Maybe some of them will make for interesting material, maybe they won't. Let's find out.

Card #1

Leading us off is one of the very first baseball cards I ever acquired way back in the distant year of *checks notes* 2010. This is pretty near and dear to me because Akinori Iwamura was one of my favorite players when I first got interested in MLB. Here in 2019 I can appreciate other things than I did in 2010 about this card like how it's a bit smaller (it's got a shorter width than your typical card), and how it's one of the few Japanese cereal releases I've seen by Topps. Given what happened to Upper Deck in 2010, that sounds about right.

Anyway the back features a lot of fun stuff. Right off the bat there's a blurb about how Aki Iwamura's favorite number was one. So much so that his jersey number as a member of the Tampa Bay Rays was 1. And according to the New York Times (according to this card), he started training for the season on 1/1 at 11:11:11 AM. Woof!
This is also the only card I have where there's a Japanese recycling logo on its bottom right. Apparently this goes with the plastics.

Card #2

Pretty much all of the Fukudome's I found on this last trip were immediately sent to P-Town Tom. Why? Because well I'm indifferent to Fukudome (regardless of whether he's a Dragon or not), plus Tom's collection would benefit from them a lot more than mine would. But that promotion card there is the lone Fukudome card I brought over for myself since I figure that my collection should have at least one Fukudome card in there somewhere.

This card in particular is an ad for the then-upcoming 2004 BBM Chunichi Dragons set. With a breakdown of the various subsets found in the product.

Card #3

Now here's something you don't see everyday on our corner of the blogosphere, a Playoff Prestige card from 2005. Or really any card from 2005!

This was pulled in a pack by me at around age 11 or 12. At the time I was just happy to pull a Yankee but found it weird how he wasn't wearing the usual Yankees uniform. Then I realized that sometimes cards were made with players in their old uniform and the card companies put a blurb on the side to let collectors/fans know what happened.

If I had to guess this was probably the fourth or fifth Yankees card to ever come into my possession in general. Right after 2005 Topps cards of Jorge Posada, Tony Womack and Mike Stanton. One of these days I'd love to complete the 2005 Topps flagship Yankees team set, but have you seen the prices those fuckers command as singles? My goodness, the 2000's rarity factor is slowly turning into inflation. Which is bullshit.

That's nothing to say of Prestige. Though I wouldn't really want to collect it either. Maybe one day I might have Randy Johnson sign this card, but if he charges nearly $200 again then I'm perfectly okay with this remaining the same way it always has for the past 14 years.

And that concludes another edition of three cards.

As always thanks for stopping by and take care :).

You Should See Me In A Crown

The throne is once again mine.

A while back I decided that having one Torrens superfractor wasn't enough. So I did a little digging around on a card forum and a few DM's later I became the proud owner of another Torrens superfractor. Big thanks to J.B. and R for the assist.

This is Torrens 1/1 number 17 for me.

More importantly it completes something I've been building for nearly five years now.

Yup.

That my friends is the 2014 Bowman Draft Chrome Prospect Luis Torrens rainbow.

I'm still paranoid that some obscure parallel only given out in some weird way sometime in late 2014/early 2015 is going to surface at one point, but for now I've consulted the official checklist three times and I can say that the 2014 ToBoChroBow is now complete.

I honestly never thought I'd see the day this came to completion. The superfractor eluded me and, much like all who tried and failed to build rainbows of their own, I thought it'd stay that way forever. Instead I managed to finish the normal rainbow a good 4 and 1/3 years after the product came out. Dope.

What made matters better was that the individual who had it also had this yellow printing plate. This is Torrens 1/1 number 18 for me now. Turns out that after they pulled the superfractor a few years ago they tried building the rainbow too. But after the red never showed up the project fell by the wayside for them.

Unfortunate, but I guess it turned out pretty well for both of us. As now they've got a bit of Paypal money to play with. Meanwhile I've got one more superfractor and rainbow to my name, AND I'm two more 2014 Bowman Draft Chrome Prospect printing plates away from completing the master rainbow. Yeah, I'm not holding my breath on that one. But it's nice to know that the very plate that slipped my grasp on COMC several years ago wound up in my possession eventually.

2/5 total LT superfractors doesn't make me a majority stakeholder. Nor does the 18 1/1's I have put me in a strong position to be the most elite LT collector out there. Nor does the four Luis Torrens rainbows I've completed. But that's fine, it just keeps me motivated to get there one day.

This was from November, 2014. Yes, at a mere 23 cards, my collection was nothing compared to what people would call a proper player collection. I was far removed from reaching the "super-collector" threshold.

Over 100 cards later, my collection still isn't quite super.

But it's getting there. Maybe.

Obligatory mention that this is the fourth Bowman-brand superfractor I've ever owned (no, I don't have the Pressley anymore). I'd forgotten how amazing these things are to have in hand. Might have to fool around and get more...

As always thanks for stopping by and take care :).

Gotta Go To Mo's

One of things I'm horrendous at is capitalizing on local signing events/meet-and-greets with athletes who play for NY-based teams.

To be fair they're not too common in my neck of the woods (which is a little outside New York City), but they're just common enough that I feel bad when I learn about them after the fact.

But this time I had a chance to know about one before it happened.

More accurately I found out a day before the event lol.

That tweet you see there was promoting a special meet-and-greet that my local-ish Modell's was doing where Austin Romine was going to participate in an in-store appearance.

I'll be the first to admit that I've said things about Romine the player before (mainly on Twitter), but I still like the dude as a person and an IP/TTM autograph of his has eluded me forever. So I wasn't going to pass this up.

I just needed to make sure to get to Mo's around 5:30 to get a wristband in order to get an autograph. Turns out that not a lot of people came (at least not at the start when I was in line) so they just scrapped the wristband idea and just said "f' it, let's see what happens if/when the line actually does get huge". Apparently having a meet-and-greet in a suburb on a Monday night (which was also Tax Day) does not immediately lead to a high turnout. Although I'm sure a fair number of people did go though, the line was at least 50 people long when I was in it.

Romine will forever be special to me now because he's the first guest athlete I've ever seen arrive early to an event. Usually everyone is a good 15+ minutes late. In Romine's case he was five minutes early and was signing well before 6 PM. Kudos to him.

The event made a note that only items purchased in the store would be eligible for signing. A lot of people bought balls on the spot, and I thought about that. But instead I decided to risk it all on a hangar pack of 2019 Topps Heritage and hope that I'd pull a Romine that way.

By some "miracle" now I had a purple refractor from 2012 Topps Chrome. Yes it's weird how Romine's not even in the checklist but don't question it, the receipt still shows I clearly bought baseball cards.

In all seriousness I'm glad I managed to get this signed because this is (in terms of overall appearance), the nicest Romine card I have. These purple refractors are a beaut. Even Romine himself was impressed with how nice the card was.

In addition to that they gave away these signed 8x10 photographs of Romine. Everybody in line got one and I was stocked because I got two autographs of Romine in one night.

After that I got a picture taken with him. I gave him a card of his own (another weird pull from the set he wasn't in) as a present, he appreciated it.

And that's the story of my first in-person Austin Romine autograph, as well as my first IP auto here in 2019 (that's actually for me).

It's also the first time I've been able to go to a special event that wasn't at a card show or a ballpark, and just a regular old retail sport I've been to dozens of times before. This is right up there with the time I went to a J.T. Miller signing at a bar.

So big thanks to Romine and Modell's for the awesome occasion.

And as always thank you (the readers) for stopping by :). Take care.

2019 IP Auto Count: 2

Another One

Source: The Yankees will call up Thairo Estrada to replace Troy Tulowitzki.

— Mark Feinsand (@Feinsand) April 4, 2019

The Yankees are calling up Thairo Estrada to replace Troy Tulowitzki on the active roster, @feinsand has confirmed.

— Bryan Hoch (@BryanHoch) April 4, 2019

That's right folks, my second favorite player of all time, Thairo Estrada, is getting his first MLB call-up!

In the span of six years I've developed two very important player collections. Estrada is the oft-forgotten one, but he's been one of my favorites regardless. I blogged about Thairo a lot in 2015 and since then my blogposts about him have significantly gone down. I attribute a lot of that due to how little cardboard there is of him. Though then again, his Bowman stuff finally came out and I decided to ignore all of it completely.

Regardless, it's still awesome to see my second ever favorite prospect make it to the big leagues. Hopefully he can make a big impact by taking a infield job and running with it.

As always thanks for stopping by and take care :).

126 MPH

On July 3rd, 1938 in merry old England, history was made.

The LNER Class A4 4468 Mallard, yes it's named after a duck, traveled at 126 mph (230 km/h), the fastest recorded time for a steam locomotive. Here in 2019 the thought of a train going 126 mph isn't particularly impressive anymore, but at the time it was what put Britain back on top after it beat the German DRG Class 05's record of 124.5 mph. Only this time they stayed on top and haven't been knocked off since (although some Americans might think otherwise).

The run wasn't really a "oh we established a record while undergoing routine work" run as the big wigs at the LNER specifically had breaking the record in mind. So much so that they reduced the number of cars that Mallard was to pull from eight to six. Of which one was a dynamometer car, a car used for maintenance and test how the locomotives perform. The car also verified that Mallard travelled 126 mph.

Of course Mallard didn't maintain 126 mph for long though. It wasn't built to go at such high speeds. 100 mph? Sure. But going 126 ended up pushing Mallard past its breaking point, it slowed down to the 70's immediately before stopping and being taken in for repairs.

Allegedly Mallard managed to keep its 126 mph pace for one whole mile before things fell apart. But either way LNER had shown themselves that they had pushed the envelope. After getting repaired Mallard and others in her class ran mostly passenger trains for many years until the war started and it was busy doing whatever oddjob the war effort demanded of it.

Today Mallard itself can still be seen on display at the National Railway Museum in York, England. The very dynamometer car that recorded Mallard's historic run is also preserved there. Every once in a while it goes out on a little run usually to entertain train enthusiasts or because it's a significant anniversary of Mallard establishing the speed record. Only 19 more years until the 100th anniversary folks. Maybe then I might take a little trip to England and go for the spectacle. Also because I'm curious if the old York is all that different from New York.

Anyway I've had this model for about 10 years now. I finally brought it to the states with me from Japan and I thought it'd make for an interesting topic.

If nothing else I'm glad I can show off this beautiful model. It's quite nice and makes me really wish I had the time/patience/money/space for a HO/OO gauge railway set. But I don't so in storage it remains, just like the real Mallard.

As always thanks for stopping by and take care :).