185

 Recently Night Owl Cards amassed 1,000 different Clayton Kershaw cards.

Even if we're in the era of mass production and able to purchase almost anything online that's still an incredible feat. One that I'm probably not going to reach with my Luis Torrens collection.

As of right now I'm sitting at 185 after the newest addition, the red Topps Now parallel above, came in.

It means I'm only the 1/1 away from the rainbow and 15 away from reaching the 200 Torrens card plateau. This is out of 232 total cards (according to TCDB).

Truth be told I'm not in any rush to reach that mark since I know it's just a matter of time.

I don't think Torrens is going to get the Kershaw treatment and get billions of cards every year (thank fuck) but I do still think it's neat that even this niche collection of an obscure MLBer can get to these levels. Speaks to just how hard Torrens has been working to stay relevant in the MLB these past few years too. They don't just give card slots away to anybody.

Meanwhile I'm not sure I'll ever get anywhere numbers wise with my Thairo Estrada collection. According to TCDB, Thairo has a respectable 311 cards. Of that I think I only have about 25 at most.

That's mostly by design as Thairo got a lot of cards as a token Yankees rookie in 2019 and I avoided most of them outside of just the simple flagship rookie card. I've long since accepted that Thairo won't be anywhere close to the Torrenterion collection and I'm just going after Thairo cards that appeal to me.

Like that Topps Now card above, celebrating how Estrada hit a walk-off dinger for his new team (not long after Torrens had his walk-off BTW). Not bad for a guy Cashman traded away for nothing.

Also his MiLB cards too. I also finally went out and got his Scranton Wilkes-Barre card from 2019 too, effectively completing the run of his MiLB team/league issued cards (as of today).

And since I'm not sure I'll ever have another chance to talk about it, I got Anthony Seigler's latest MiLB card too.

And like Thairo this completes my run of Seigler's MiLB team/league issued cards too.

Maybe one day Seigler will also get a Topps Now card commemorating a walk-off in an MLB game. Fingers crossed. Though I don't think he needs too many more cards TBH. According to TCDB, Seigler has the most cards out of anyone I've shown in this post with 460(!) cards. Though in Seigler's case he has a bunch of Team USA cards as well as the boost of being a Yankees first round draft pick.

Hmmm, I think I'll just stick with MiLB releases with Seigler too. That'd make it a lot simpler.

As always thanks for stopping by and take care.

Checking in on THE Collection

 It's been a long time since I last blogged about Luis Torrens pick-ups. I made a lot but I didn't think blogging about them as they popped up was really necessary. Especially since they were essentially just the same card but merely in different colors.

That said I was able to finally sit down and restore my Torrenterion Collection page where I show my entire Torrens collection. When Blogspot changed its layout a while ago it suddenly became hard to update the old collection page so I had to delete that and create a new one. But I found out the hard way that it's hard to recreate a page that was built up across multiple years. Especially since I wanted to go back and fix past mistakes like my piss poor crop jobs on scans when I was first starting to blog back in 2014 and 2015. It took me seven hours but the page is finally back. If nothing else than because I needed it back online to let me know what I already have.

The collection page is up to date and all of the newest pick-ups are already on there, but here's a blogpost for a few of them that I think are worth talking about.

Might as well get the big 1/1 out of the way.

A certified yellow printing plate auto.

Make that two 1/1's.

If you're wondering about the signature, it's not certified and was already on it by the time I bought the card. Considering that I lost out on it unsigned earlier in the year, I think what happened was that whoever did win the plate got it signed by Torrens somewhere, then sold it on eBay. I don't like supporting people who sell IP or TTM autographs but this is a plate so, eh, gonna have to just accept it this time.

Oh wait, make that three 1/1's. Two plates and a 1/1 blank back from the Topps Vault (their eBay page).

Adding three 1/1's in a single year. Not terrible.

With these I now have 25 different Torrens 1/1's. The fact that it's getting very annoying/hard to get all of them in one shot is a good sign that I'm building up a decent collection.

I picked up bunch of Torrens from 2021 Topps Update and didn't blog about them because they're all the same boring picture and the parallels are really lame. I posted the vintage stock parallel up there because that might be my favorite out of all of them. Not that Topps needs any more useless parallels but I really do miss some of what I thought were cool parallels when I was starting to collect in 2011 like the silks or the Hope Diamond parallels, those looked and felt nice. There's nothing to talk about with the more recent parallels except that no one will ever complete any rainbow because there's like 5-6 different 1/1's.

I'm a little more closer with Topps Update Chrome Sapphire or whatever it's called. Only need the two (yes two) 1/1's, because of course I do. This set had no plates but instead the 1/1's are the superfractor and something called a "padparadscha". 

A red border parallel of Torrens from 2022 Topps Heritage. Because retail exclusive parallels are back apparently. I've also learned that Heritage has something called a "French text" parallel numbered to 73 copies, I assume it's an homage to the Canadian market OPC cards. Either way I still need that. Ugh.

A Topps Now card. Torrens' first Topps Now card.

A different Topps Now card, this one actually matters because it commemorates the walk-off he had against the Yankees back in August. The Mariners, being a complete joke of a team, DFA'd him after that. He's since been banished to triple-A and was even used as a second baseman.

Sucks but at least Torrens' last big league moment (as of right now) was ending one of the best (or worst if you're a Yankees fan) games in recent memory.

Also luckily for me there were a few parallels accompanying the 5 cards I ordered. I knew that Topps Now had parallels now but I wasn't expecting to get three of them.

Those three colors there are the /5, the /25 and /49. So I just need the 1/1 and one of the /10's for the rainbow.

So all in all, getting the collection page up and running again was pretty time consuming but it was really nice to just sit down and revisit my collection for the first time in a long time. It also helped me get a better idea of where I was at with all of these rainbows and what I need to look out for going forward. I also appreciate that I know how many cards I have of Torrens again.

184, and counting.

Also I did get a needs list of sorts up and running too. Purely for my own reference. I'm probably missing a few cards but I know I need about 61 Torrens cards, more than half are 1/1's. Great, just great.

Thanks always for stopping and take care.

An Old Friend

 2018, the last time I added new Sega Card Gen cards to my collection was 2018.

Sega Card Gen was at one point the cards people associated with me the most, then came Luis Torrens and a bunch of other things I grew interested in.

The now-defunct arcade game brand was the first base set I ever completed back in 2014, and I have fond memories of it. Some collectors might even remember getting these in a trade back from me when I was first starting to trade (or traded at all).

Since Sega Card Gen got discontinued in 2013, it's been increasingly harder and harder to find these cards. They just did not get enough time be widely distributed enough that they can be found easily. But once in a while you'll get lucky with a large lot. Which is where the Darvish above came from and where a lot of the cards I'm about to show below came from.

The key card in this entire lot was this Hideki Matsui rare. Back when Card Gen was active they'd host competitions at arcades and whoever won got these cool special rares as prizes.

The backs are special with goldish-yellowish tint and have congrats written on them. I'm not sure how much different these cards fared in the game (if anyone ever tried I wouldn't know), but I doubt it made much of a difference.

During the tournaments they also gave away these sealed packs of special EX (think like shortprints) cards for cards outside of the base set. There are a small handful of EX cards I could never track down like Magglio Ordonez or Shoo Shin Choo and though it is possible they're in these packs, I don't really want to run the risk of getting dupes of the few EX cards I do have. So they remained sealed. For now.

Accompanying the prize card, the consolation packs and the Yu Darvish were a bunch of base cards. They were all dupes and will be part of future Zappings and I won't be showing them (it'll be up to their new owners whether or not they get blog-time). But to round out this post I'll share the two additional foil rares in this lot, starting with Matt Kemp.

It feels like it was forever ago when we last saw Kemp in a Dodgers jersey. Though he got a huge contract from the Dodgers that more or less turned into an albatross, what the Dodgers managed to do in not only moving his contract but getting actual prospects in return for him would set the tone for how they'd operate going forward. Not to mention that the prospects LAD got back for Kemp from Cincinnati included Jeter Downs and Josiah Gray. Downs would later be part of the package sent to Boston for Mookie Betts and Gray would be part of the package sent to Washington for Trea Turner and Max Scherzer. Andrew Friedman folks, he's always four steps ahead.

And finally Prince Fielder. Man, the way these names just teleport me back to the late-2000's/early-2010's is something.

Fielder was at his peak in 2012 before things went downhill for him rather quickly, with him eventually having to retire in 2016 for health concerns.

That concludes my first Sega Card Gen mailday in forever and likely my last one for another long while. It's always nice to look back on these, back when I was first in the hobby and everything seemed fun and exciting.

As always thanks for stopping by and take care.