What The? Huh?!

 

I was wondering if 2025 would be the first year in a while where I would go a long time without buying any sports cards. Then a few days into February I made my first sports card pick-up of 2025 which was that Troy Tulowitzki 2012 Sega Card Gen rare foil there.

There's a card shop called Trickster right across the hall from Mint Ikebukuro. Trickster doesn't deal with sports cards, they deal with cards used for card games but more importantly they also have a nice selection of cards used for arcade games. Which includes Sega Card Gen somehow like over a decade after the game went offline.

I wasn't expecting to find any of these rares in the wild, let alone Tulo's which was the last one I needed to finish the rare foil portion of the Colorado Rockies team set from 2012.

It's kind of nuts to think about how enough time has passed that now we know Todd Helton made it into the Hall of Fame while Carlos Gonzalez and Tulo just fell off the ballot immediately this year.

But as I mentioned before on this blog, when I think of the Rockies I think of the CarGo-Tulo era and it's finally nice to get them from the set I hold near and dear to me from my first serious days in the hobby.

Also picked up some Kancolle cards used for their arcade game which is still on-going. I don't play the games but these two are cute and the artwork is phenomenal (and I am a degenerate).

As always thanks for stopping by and take care.

Thonks

 There's a lot that's been written and discussed about social media and the current state of the internet. How it's all just one gigantic blob of content consumption. Whether we want to or not, the only six websites that still exist are just there to bombard us with content. Some of it is tailored to us, a lot of it is tailored against us, and it's really easy to get burnt out quickly.

That current content consumption landscape is also pretty much the backbone for sports fandom and sports content on the internet. Makes sense, in sports cool shit can happen at any given moment spontaneously. There's no greater rush than seeing a bunch of people (anonymous and unknown to you or not) be caught up in the moment. It makes people who spend their days feeling nothing (read: everyone born after 1993) feel something.

As such there's this constant need for things to be going on all the time. Every five picoseconds that go by without any activity means "ded sporp f". This past winter wasn't a dud because the Scott Boras clients signed at the 11th hour, it was a dud because there were no "PASSAN BOMBS" with league shattering moves every other day. Folks were down bad enough to track a flight from California to Toronto.

But baseball in the regular season is where there's so much baseball happening every night. To the point where we don't even need it all if we're being honest. The 2024 MLB regular season hasn't even been in full effect for a month but already we've cycled through like 5 different headlines. The part I'm not proud of is that I kind of have/had thoughts about each.

- The see through pants and uniforms

I saw someone remark that every manufacturer in the world is in a different stage of not having to give a shit about what they make and that's about the best way I can describe it.

- The Ippei Mizuhara Gambling Scandal

I always thought Ippei was an asshole because he got paid money to hang out with Shohei Ohtani and speak the same two languages that I speak everyday for free.

- The Oakland A's situation

If you think about this for longer than 5 seconds the most cynical side of you completely takes over. Not remotely fun to think about anything related to this.

- The pitching injury epidemic

Gee, who would've ever thought that the league where everyone just copies what the Tampa Bay Rays are doing would end up going through arms before realizing they don't have an army of nameless, faceless pitchers ready to go in triple-A.

- Whatever Jeff Passan/Ken Rosenthal/Evan Drellich writes about next week

I am outraged and indifferent at the same time.

These topics and my thoughts on them are not what I want to talk about though, because these come and go.

No, the thing that made me want to write this post is how I bothered to have opinions on all of these. And how I'll continue to form thoughts and reactions.

Why?

Well this is an unfortunate side effect of having a brain and thoughts. Also this ties back to that spiel at the top about constant content consumption. On the most basic level all of this is content that I consumed. Then during the digestion process I formed thoughts on it but these poisoned me and my body forcefully shat out anyway in a muddied not fully formed state. Because like all of us in 2024, my brain is broken and this is how I "exchange" ideas with others.

But then I took another step back and wondered, are these genuinely my thoughts?

I did think these sure, but how much influence did other people and their reactions have in my thoughts being molded before coming into being?

Often times my first introduction to a topic is someone else's reaction to it. Maybe it's a quote tweet, maybe it's one of those roundtable discussions done on podcasts and discussion panels, whatever. How much do the reactions color my perception before I even know what the main thing is even about?

Probably a lot, especially if I deem that the topic isn't that important and just steal someone else's opinion so I don't have to waste time forming my own.

Or alternatively, if I hear one opinion, there's a high likelihood I want to adopt the other opinion just to be contrarian. Especially for a lowstakes nothing burger topic like sports.

Thinking all of this does not make me feel particularly great. It just makes me feel like a dolt.

It also opens up more questions. Am I alone? Do other people think like this at a subconscious level? What constitutes as someone's genuine thought?

Blah. No more.

I think the best solution is to just take breaks from social media altogether but doing so would hinder my ability to find titties on the internet. Twitter is just swamped with totally real women who are definitely not bots with nudes in their bios these days.

In conclusion, less thinking with my brain. More thinking with my dick.

Goodnight. Take care.

A Whole Bunch of Names

  Despite how I've bombarded several mailboxes and yelled all of your ears off about how I'm downsizing, today's post is going to be the polar opposite. The cards I've accumulated in the time in which I'd been dumping hundreds of cards onto other people, or more specifically the cards I picked up in January before I went cold turkey in February.

The theme for most of these is rather simple, these names were the first names I'd seen when I was wide-eyed and first getting into sports and sports cards. A lot were Tulo and CarGo from those early 2010's Rockies teams but those will get their own post. Here is everything else.

Tim Lincecum

Starting off with this really cool Lincecum jersey card. The "A Cut Above" inserts from 2012 were up against stiff competition in what was a good time for die-cuts. These flimsy cards just didn't tickle anyone's fancy compared to the sturdier and shinier offerings around at the time. But when I saw there was a relic version, I was mildly interested.

Especially since the guy on it is Lincecum, who stopped being the Freak we all know and love in 2012. He'd still show flashes of his former self like when he no-hit the San Diego Padres twice later on, but the Padres didn't start being good at baseball until 2021 so take that with a grain of salt.

Takuya Asao

リリーフ投手としてMVP賞をとれのって普通に凄くない？いつかメジャーでも活躍するの見たいよ。

In 2011 Takuya Asao won Central Legue MVP honors as a reliever. He wasn't even a closer, he won the MVP as a set-up man! This is the year after he set the single-season NPB record for holds (47 in 2010).

Anyone who watched the Chunichi Dragons at the time remembers him being absolutely filthy. He would've probably been a dominant reliever in the big leagues too. Unfortunately he got overused and his arm wore down, but his peak was absolutely insane.

Chris Sale

Once upon a time people thought Sale would never be able to find prolonged success as a starting pitcher and that his lanky frame would doom him to just being a reliever. Well several successful seasons with the Chicago White Sox and Red Sox erased that real quick. Sale has a lot of rookie autographs from 2010-11, but I opted for the more wallet friendly option of a sticker autograph applied on a horizontal insert nobody liked from his sophomore season.

Dellin Betances

This is probably the first Betances card I've added to my collection in a LONG time. Now I have both New York Yankees rookie autos from 2012 Topps Chrome in shiny blue (the other rookie is Austin Romine). 2012 is unfortunately when Betances' chances of being a starter died, things got so bad he got demoted to double-A. But there he was moved to the bullpen and from 2013 onwards he enjoyed a very successful career as a dominant four time All Star reliever.

Yoshinori Tateyama

It's easy to forget but Tateyama did actually come stateside and played in MLB in 2011 and 2012. Tateyama hailed from Osaka, Japan and actually went to the same high school that another Japanese MLBer Koji Uehara went to. They were both in the same grade and both teammates on the high school baseball team.

Tateyama joined the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters in the second round of the 1998 Draft. While initially he was tried out as a starter, he eventually converted into a reliever and in the 2000's he was a mainstay in the Fighters bullpen.

Tateyama joined the Rangers in October of 2010, it was right when the Rangers were about to become back-to-back AL Champs, but more importantly it was right when they were heavily scouting Tateyama's Fighters teammate Yu Darvish (spoilers: they got him too). Interestingly enough in 2011 the Rangers also traded for his old high school teammate Uehara from the Baltimore Orioles. So in 2012 he had teammates at different times in his life in Japan on the same MLB team. That's kind of nuts.

Tateyama bounced around 2013 and 2014 going from the Rangers to the Yankees to the Hanshin Tigers before calling it a career after the 2014 season. Since then he's gone back to being involved with the Fighters, at first by being a part of the TV crew covering the team but from 2023 onwards he's been the pitching coach for the Fighters. Makes sense since he was also the pitching coach for the Samurai Japan team that won Gold in the 2020 Olympics.

Tateyama gets the honor of the longest blurb out of anyone I will talk about in this post because his career is just truly fascinating.

Johnny Cueto

In 2012 the Cincinnati Reds only used six starting pitchers for the entire season. Johnny Cueto, Bronson Arroyo, Mat Latos, Homer Bailey and Todd Redmond. Redmond only made one start in what was his MLB debut while the other five made 30+ starts each. That was rare even then and absolutely unheard of now given how nobody knows how to keep pitchers healthy. That version of Cueto will always be the version I choose to remember him by.

Hanley Ramirez

It's kind of crazy how the 2010's had such a big array of fantastic shortstops that they've all gotten lost in the shuffle for various reasons (mostly injuries). Hanley was also on a really great HoF caliber path but by the time he was traded to the Los Angeles Dodgers his best years were somewhat in the rearview mirror. Then he went to the Boston Red Sox and the decline got uglier.

Victor Oladipo

Oladipo was once one of the biggest up-and-coming names when I was getting into basketball. He was really coming into his own as the guy who led the Indiana Pacers to a competitive first round playoff series against LeBron James and his Cleveland Cavaliers that went a full seven games. They lost but the prevailing notion was that they would pick up where the Paul George-era Pacers left off and they might even get as high as the second seed in the Eastern Conference.

Fast forward to 2024 and unfortunately Oladipo is turning into one of those players you toss around in "imagine if they never got injured" hypotheticals. Injuries thwarted any momentum he or the Pacers had during the late 2010's and in the 2020's Dipo suffered more injuries as he also kept bouncing around as a journeyman.

Even so, I did want a certified autograph of his showing him as a Pacer, there's strangely not a whole lot of them out there on the market. You can find plenty of him as a Magic/Thunder/Heat but it's like everyone already scooped up the cards of him with the team he had the most success with.

Clay Buchholz

The first time I heard about Buchholz was in an article where someone in the comments called him Clay Buttholes. That comment has not left my brain for even a second since. Also this 2013 Topps Replacement Autograph is neat solely because I like the novelty of cards created to be replacements for redemptions.

Ryan Braun and Carlos Gonzalez

Braun is definitely someone who people haven't thought about since 2014. 2011 was when he was at the peak of his powers and NL MVP over Rihanna's then-boyfriend Matt Kemp. Over time it'd become known that Braun used performance enhancers to reach that peak and was cast into the abyss.

As for the card I want to be clear that I picked this up because I wanted a cool 2011 Topps card of Carlos Gonzalez and this is my first dual relic from the 2011 Topps Diamond Duos insert set. Braun just happened to be on it too.

Daniel Bard

I actually did have another copy of this at one point in a trade I made with Ryan of This Card Is Cool over a decade ago but that one was eventually moved. Now that Bard's made a name for himself again with Colorado, I was more than willing to re-add this card from the Topps 60 subset to my collection.

Mark Buehrle

Buehrle's stint in Miami feels basically forgotten at this point. Though considering what a disaster that team was it's probably for the best.

Robinson Cano

Letting Cano leave was a good financial and baseball decision for the Yankees, but I do want to see the alternate reality where Cano hands the baton off to Aaron Judge.

Jared Weaver

Weaver anchoring the Los Angeles Angels rotation feels like an eternity ago and also like the last time that team cared even the tiniest bit about good pitching.

Cliff Lee

I've talked before about Topps 60 and how it's kind of confusing that the player on these cards aren't even number one on the list of whatever the achievement at the top of the card is. Like here Lee is commemorated for having the fifth best career ERA in the Division Series (min 20 IP) with 1.11 as of the time of 2011 Topps Series 1's production.

Ryan Zimmerman

Zimmerman's contributions to helping the Washington Nationals start to establish themselves as more than just the Zombie Expos has also been forgotten, but it is fun to remember how he was there to help fans through some awful dreck years until Stephen Strasburg and Bryce Harper finally arrived.

I did get a Trevor Story TTM autograph WAY back when he was still just a top prospect but I finally got to add a certified autograph to my collection. Story has so many autograph cards out there that the market for it kind of nuts. I'm picky and wanted an on-card autograph with logos and this 2017 Gypsy Queen offering (a parallel limited to 150 copies at that) was somehow the cheapest option on COMC.

My first certified Charlie Blackmon autograph. This is from that 2018 Topps Clearly Authentic set where every card came prepackaged in a one-touch magnet holders. I promptly freed this card the moment I got it since the case was a little scuffed and therefore useless (I have extremely high standards for one touch cases and even the tiniest blemish is a big no-no). On top of that this card was moving around in that case and made an annoying clicking sound. I can't handle hearing one of my cards get worse.

Ubaldo Jimenez autographs from 2011/2012 are either high-end stuff that doesn't interest me or cards that show him as a Cleveland player. Blarg, had to compromise with one of these more modern offerings.

I think Ryan McMahon is probably the best position player on the Rockies right now, or at worst second behind Nolan Jones. McMahon's a perennial Gold Glove candidate despite being asked to move around all across the infield to accommodate how the people constructing the Rockies roster have no clue what they're doing. He'd be a really really good utility-man on an actual contender.

Mark Montgomery

The year is 2012. The countdown to Mariano Rivera's retirement has already started, and along with it a search for his heir apparent. If you also read a list of the top prospects in the Yankees organization around that time, one of the fastest risers of note was a reliever named Mark Montgomery. Armed with a fastball and slider, he was striking out hitters at an incredible pace and was aggressively pushed to double-A by his season season as a professional. Then his velocity dipped a bit and all that momentum just stopped. He did manage to stick around as a professional for a good while as he was still active as of 2019, pretty impressive considering it practically feels like he stopped existing after 2014.

Lovely Labrynth of the Silver Castle

I only play Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links at a casual level so I have no clue how to play Labrynth and I don't want to read what these cards do so I probably will never learn how to play the deck. What I do know is that Lovely here has big boobs and is conventionally attractive, good enough for a degenerate like me. Although the secret rare sparkle effect makes the art harder to see.

Justin Verlander

This post started on an insert that only existed in 2012 and it's going to fittingly end on another one too. I had forgotten all about these Mound Dominance inserts. These were so obscure and uninteresting that I had no idea there was even a relic version. Normally I wouldn't think much of a boring grey jersey card (even if it is limited to 50 copies) but knowing it's from a one-and-done bumps it up to mildly interesting for 30 seconds territory.

One day Verlander will get the recognition he deserves as one of the greatest pitchers of all time. But that won't be right now since in early 2024 he's just seen as that old guy who stunk for the New York Mets in 2023. We can also blame him for his brother Ben getting famous too.

Alright that concludes this extremely long scan dump of names from a decade ago. This covered enough ground from back then that if there's ever a follow-up,

As always thanks for stopping by and take care.

The First Team

 When I first blogged about the 2012 Sega Card Gen set it was as someone who had just finished the base set. One of the things that I never really got to go into was the process of building that set. How I made a ton of trips to my local arcades in Yokohama and not-so-local card shops in Shinjuku and Shibuya to build that 408 card behemoth.

At this point a lot of the details are hazy but I do remember one thing. The first team I assembled was the New York Yankees. At the time I was still a Yankees fan, and naturally I wanted to finish that team first. It wasn't too hard because that team was full of big names who were easy enough to find at shops, the only issue was that they were expensive.

Anyway fast forward to 2023 and the first team set I completed from the rare foil subset was also the New York Yankees.

You see during my trip to Japan I picked only two MLB cards but boy did those two cards count.

CC and Tex there helped me finish the seven card rare foil Yankees team set.

Along with them the set featured Alex Rodriguez, Derek Jeter, Robinson Cano, Curtis Granderson and Mariano Rivera. A real who's who of great players at the time.

I suppose if I expanded it to prize cards there's also the Hiroki Kuroda foil rare but that's neigh impossible to find or get, and it's not even in this 60-card rare foil checklist anyway.

So there we go, a decade in the making. Technically some other teams who only had one foil player were already done before the Yankees (like the New York Mets who only had David Wright or the Toronto Blue Jays who only had Jose Bautista) but I'm going to go with this because there were multiple foils. A actual challenge.

As always thanks for stopping by and take care.

Good Lots, a Set Collector's Best Friend

 For the second year in a row I was able to luck into a really really good lot of Sega Card Gen cards on Mercari.

I'm not a set collector, but I'm familiar enough to know that the set collector's best friend is buying cards in bulk. And boy did this latest one fill in a lot of holes in two aspects of 2012 Sega Card Gen.

The Ichiro above is an "EX" card. I used to think it stood for exchange but now my understanding is that it's short for extra since these are extra short printed cards beyond the base set.

This latest lot came with five of these EX cards. This is absolutely huge to me because these EX cards were cards that were distributed in all kinds of weird ways, and these five specifically were distributed with cases. You see there was a brief promo during the 2012 Sega Card Gen season where instead of a normal card you'd get a redemption card and then you called over someone who was working at the arcade, give them the redemption card and then pick one case out of eight different cases. Each case came with one unique EX card.

During my time playing 2012 SCG I lucked into three of them and turned them into Ichiro Suzuki, Junichi Tazawa and Ike Davis. I gave one of these cases to The Lost Collector a few years ago.

Thanks to this lot I was able to get Yu Darvish, Hisashi Iwakuma, Norichika Aoki and Justin Morneau. Even got a second copy of Ichiro out of it! Cards of Ichiro from the day he got traded to the New York Yankees will always be cool.

Now all that's left for these EX cards distributed with cases is Munenori Kawasaki.

And for the other EX cards that were distributed in different ways (ie contest prizes) there's still Carl Crawford, Francisco Rodriguez, Grady Sizemore, Shin-Soo Choo, Joe Nathan, Magglio Ordonez and Roy Oswalt. Oy vey.

For whatever it's worth I've never seen the Sizemore/Choo/Nathan/Ordonez/Oswalt cards out in the wild except for screenshots on the Card Gen website.

So I need eight more shortprints. Now I know how Night Owl felt when he was building the 2008 Heritage set.

But enough moping about what I don't have, time to get back to being happy about what just came in.

Like more rare foils! The Curtis Granderson, David Wright and Jose Bautista foils were dupes but there is no such thing as bad Card Gen dupes. Especially not for superstar foils. Given where my head's been this past season I'm particularly thrilled about the Carlos Gonzalez foil.

Of those foils, Stephen Strasburg is the only one from 2013. 2013 Sega Card Gen is a set I will never collect because I never played it (I missed it entirely), but similar to 2009-2011 SCG I do still appreciate any I can get.

The lot also came with a few base cards, like eight Japanese MLBers from 2012 and one Iwakuma from 2013. The 2012 cards were all dupes.

And finally this lot featured 11 non-Japanese MLBers, one which was an Adrian Beltre from 2013. Everything from 2012 is a dupe. The Clayton Kershaw was always a favorite of mine because of the Brooklyn throwback unis but I've come to also appreciate the Miguel Cabrera since it gives the same aura when I see old photographs of Ty Cobb or other players from the early 1900's just sitting around and with a stern face like he's analyzing everything going around him. Also the Yadier Molina is great because it's a rare backstop catch at the net shot. Which sounds like a collection Dime Box Nick would have.

All in all this lot provided me a ton of fun with four new EX cards, four new foils and two new base cards from 2013 to my collection, along with some nice cards to just have around even if they are dupes.

2012 Sega Card Gen, the set that keeps on giving all these years later and all these kilometers away.

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

Nearly Burned Out, Needed Cards to Heal

 Last week I was feeling severe burn out at work. I needed to really relieve some stress. I did a couple of things. I slept, exercised, drafted angry emails, became really passive aggressive with coworkers, vented on social media, anything to keep me sane in the moment. At the risk of being over dramatic that brief moment was pretty overwhelming and I needed a coping mechanism bad.

The most dangerous but also what ended up being my favorite outlet was just going hogwild on watch-list hits on eBay.

This Kyle Freeland 2014 Bowman Chrome blue refractor autograph was on my want list for weeks. Mine.

A Todd Helton autograph in general was on my want list for months, and after using rewards points to shave off most of the price, I managed to bring it down to $7. Solid deal for a future Hall of Famer. Mine.

Okay I don't want to repeat that same description ad nauseam so here's a bunch of scans.

In some ways this is basically a smorgasbord of stuff I've been known to collect. Just missing Luis Torrens and some Yankees prospects somewhere.

This is also just the baseball stuff.

Also quick shout-out to my former local card shop American Legends. I was in my old neighborhood for errands and stopped by to purchase supplies. I went ahead and purchased the T206 Chase in that store too. It reminded me how underrated it is when you're able to physically hold and inspect the card I want before committing to buying. Also y'know, not refreshing the tracking number every other hour and being worried the USPS is going to send to the wrong address or something.

As always thanks for stopping by and take care.