Stick(er) and Move

Don’t forget to sign-up for our Absolutely Free 2003 Leaf Baseball Box Group Break, if you haven’t already.  Teams are filling up quickly and you don’t want to miss out on some 100% free cards!

The 2012 Topps MLB Sticker album will be coming out soon.  I haven’t had a reason to buy any packs of 2012 cards for my personal collections yet.  The active players I collect haven’t been in series 1, Opening Day or any of the Donruss releases.  Heritage will change, but I may need to save up and packs will be far and few between.  At least none of my guys are SPs this year (unlike Marmol in 2011, which I still don’t have).  Even if we hadn’t busted 5 cases of Series 1, I wouldn’t be buying any for myself on the off chance that I’d get one of the two Frank Thomas inserts.

Simply put, I’m itching for some stickin’.

But before I get started on this year’s album, I would love to put last year’s to rest.  I’m dangerously close.  I only need the Brian McCann sticker #149.

I didn’t get this close on my own.  I needed to enlist the help of several people.  One of those people was D from Potch Wheeler and The Cardboard Heroes.  I traded him some leftovers from a group break I took part in, and he sent back a half dozen stickers and a handful of Kerry Wood cards.

Oh, stickers. How I love thee!

I lost my cheat sheets in the mess that is the card room, but the best I can tell those 6 stickers finished off two teams!  This is the first time I get to do this, so I’m pretty excited.  Before and After Time!

Marlins Before

Finally I get the Chris Coghlan sticker to cover up that disgusting face Josh Johnson is making.

Marlins After

Now with more teal!  Let’s do one more.

Rockies Before

Good ol’ Tulo was staring at that last empty space for a while behind the Fowler sticker.

Rockies After

I didn’t make the connection until now that my first completed pages were a set of expansion teams.  How about that?

2 down, 28 teams, 1 legends and 2 logo pages to go.

The definition of Victory

Those team pages aren’t the only things this trade completed.  In 2 consecutive trades from 2 people, I was also able to finish my 1999 Upper Deck Victory needs.  It’s the small things, people.

I'm "rivet"ed

Ha!  Get it?  His name is Wood, but it’s written in metal!  I guess metallic wood would have looked a little odd.  I have seen more creative Metal Universe cards, but I’ve also seen them look much much worse because of it.

Who's on second?

You know, I like the Upper Deck design, but I also realized that I can’t tell them apart most of the time.  I was searching for this in my binder for this post and I could have sworn it was a 2008 or ’09 card.  Nope.  ’06?  Sorry.  I was a little shocked to see it in with the 2001s.

Gets me every time

Here’s a design I recognize.  I bought maybe 3 packs of 1999-00 basketball cards so I’m familiar with this look from my Kevin Garnett and Karl Malone.  I’m a sucker for shallow depth of field shots facing the pitcher head-on.  If I could see a little more of the batter, that would be best, but I’m not complaining.

If you don't look at his ball grip, he'll be pissed

This photo is a precursor to the studio shots you’d see in 2009 OPC.  I’m not sure how I feel about that style being used on something without a border, but I will reiterate that the First Edition cards look better with no foil than the regular Upper Deck set does with it.

Same picture as last time

I’ll keep giving a quick recap on the Documentary cards probably until they’re all finished.  I’m keeping a tally for all the documentary cards I receive for each player I collect, and each player will have it’s own running Win-Loss record.  Kerry Wood has 10 cards in the set and this is the 2nd one I’ve shown.

So, the card says the Cubs found themselves with an “early” 11-0 deficit, but the box score on the back shows it didn’t reach 11 runs until the 6th.  I don’t consider that early anymore.  Jason Marquis took the loss, so that means Kerry Wood had nothing to do with the game on the card once again.
Cubs card record: 0-2

Even at 300 dpi, this scanned like crap

I miss Skybox.  They were almost always my favorite basketball cards to buy and the limited experience I’ve had with the baseball stuff has been pretty good too.  Sure, it’s trying to be a little too “Ultra” with this set, but at least they still have the wacky motion graphics going on.  Look at those blue and red flaming legs!

And with that, I’ve now shown off over 50 different cards from my Kerry Wood collection.  I have 138 at this current moment, so obviously there’s a few more to go.  Still, I have to thank Potch Wheeler and The Cardboard Heroes again for his generous trade and for helping to bring me closer to completing my collecting goals.

Nope.  No Group Break questions this time.  You didn’t really think I’d make it that easy, did you?