A-Z Music Challenge

 Back for my yearly post and it's not even about baseball... for reasons....

A: Alice in Chains

B: The Beatles

C: Creed

D: Disturbed

E: Elvis

F: Foo Fighters

G: Green Day

H: Hoobastank

I: Incubus

J: Jane's Addiction

K: KoRn

L: The Lumineers

M: Metallica

N: Nirvana

O: The Offspring

P: Pearl Jam

Q: Queen

R: Rammstein

S: Shinedown

T: Three Days Grace

U: The Used

V: Van Halen

W: Weird Al Yankovic

X: Xzibit

Y: Yellowcard

Z: ZZ Top

There were a couple of tough decisions having to leave off some of my favorite bands like The Avett Brothers, Bush, Blink 182, Goodnight Texas, Linkin Park, Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Smashing Pumpkins, Staind, Stone Temple Pilots, and System of a Down.

Some were tough to even find bands for like Hoobastank, Jane's Addiction, The Used, Weird Al, and Xzibit.  I like these acts they just aren't top tier for me.  I couldn't even tell you what song Xzibit is famous for but he's the only artist I recognized from my google search.

Some were default winners of the letter like Korn, Queen, Van Halen, Yellowcard, ZZ Top since nobody else really came to mind when I thought about each letter.

These acts were all slam dunks: Alice in Chains, Foo Fighters, The Lumineers, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Rammstein, and Shinedown.  Each of these bands get heavy rotation in my card to and rom work.

Thanks for reading and see you next time.... if there is a next time....

To Blake Snell: A True American Hero

Way to sound like a totally spoiled, entitled out-of touch millenial.  I'm sure your comments will reverberate well with the Health Care Workers and First Responders.  Not to mention the people working in grocery stores and essential services to make a little money to feed their families.  If they have a little left over they might spend it to come out to the stadium and watch you PLAY A GAME for a living.  Now you just pulled down your pants and took a dump on the American worker with your naive comments.

2020 Topps series 1 Hanger Box break

Not too bad from one hanger pack.  The rest of the cards look ok.  I'm not a huge fan of the base set design.

Maybe I'll get another post up within the next 5 years or so.

This Mike Trout stuff with the Commissioner....

I would personally like to tell the Manfred to actually do some work to promote MLB and lay off Mike Trout.

How about get rid of the blackout rules so that I can see my hometown team play when I buy MLB.TV?

How about starting the games a little earlier in the evening so that "kids" can watch them before they have to go to bed?

How about promoting other teams other than the Yankees and Red Sox?  Even their fans have opened their eyes and are sick of their overpromotion!

I'm not afraid to say I'm a Mike Trout fan.  I enjoy the way he goes about his business playing the game the way it is meant to be played.  He plays the game hard and he plays just about everyday.  Baseball is the hardest pro sport to play. Period.  You fail 70 percent of the time and you're an all-star.  It's a grind.

Manfred has some balls to call out Trout for not self-promoting himself and promoting MLB more.  Screw you Commish... Mike is not a glory-hound or narcissist like Lebron James, that other Lakers guy with the loud mouth dad, or Tom Brady. Those 3 jokers play 1 or 2 easier games a week and have time to shoot a McDonalds commercial, design their own shoes, or galavant around New York city with their 16 kids and supermodel wife.  Meanwhile, Trout just finished a 14 inning game at 1:30 in the morning and needs to be at the park at 9 the next morning to play another game at 1 in 90 degree heat before getting on a plane to the opposite coast to play a weekend series.

Manfred is way off base making the comments he did.  He obviously sees dollar signs instead of human beings.  He doesn't know anything about baseball.

I applaud Mike Trout taking the high road and putting out a simple statement saying that the whole thing is overblown and HE JUST WANTS TO PLAY BASEBALL. At the end of the season, he just wants to go home kiss his wife, hug his kids and go fishing, not bask in the glory of all of his accomplishments.  I honestly think he could care less about establishing his brand he just wants to be a Husband, Father, and baseball player.  Kudos to you Mike and I wish you were on the Orioles.

Article I read that got me fired up: https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2018/07/angels-ownership-responds-to-manfreds-comments-about-mike-trout.html#comments

See you all in about 4 more years....

Birthday Blaster: 2014 Topps Update

My 31st birthday was last Friday the 5th and my 4 month old daughter surprised me with a blaster box of 2014 Topps Update.  Here's the most interesting cards I pulled out of the box.

While I am happy to have a red bordered parallel of an Oriole show up in my box, I wonder what Topps was thinking in the case of picking a photo of Nick Hundley.  Sure it's a fun photo but years from now when I'm flipping through my album of 2014 O's team sets, I won't think that I will think much of Topps "spoiling" the card.  Actually I don't think much of it now.  Surely there is a more "boring" photo they could have used to commemorate Nick's season with the Orioles.

Moving on, I pulled this decent looking insert of the hottest player on the planet.  Not much else to say other than its for trade.

My guaranteed manu-relic happened to be of a player I respect but a team I detest.  I don't need this card so it's for trade.

I guess it's appropriate that the first blaster box that my daughter buys me that I get a pink parallel out of one of the packs.  The particular odds on pulling a pink parallel is 1 in 230 packs.  Upon closer inspection, you can see he's wearing a pink necklace, presumably for Mother's Day. So doing a little bit of research, Elias did pitch 5 innings on Sunday May 11th.  He left in line for the win up 7 to 5 but the bullpen blew the lead.  Any Roenis Elias supercollectors out there need this card?

Here's another one of those pesky red bordered parallels.  Man, there were 20 of those suckers in this box, I would have much rather just had the regular old base cards.  Anyways, I was sad to hear about Taveras crashing his car and passing away.   Drinking and Driving don't mix.

Here's a list of all of my 2014 Topps Update cards I have for trade:

Blue Bordered Parallel: US-118 McHugh, 132 Colvin, 243 Chavez, 266 Smyly, 272 Ellis, 293 Koehler
Red Bordered Parallel: US-35 Stroman, 56 Street, 89 Drew, 113 Taveras, 117 Lackey, 136 Navarro, 144 Rondon, 157 Smith, 163 Santiago, 167 Francoeur, 195 Laird, 225 Avilan, 232 Carroll, 268 Shoemaker, 274 Withrow, 285 Allen, 291 Mcgee, 324 Amarista, 327 Gomes
Red Hot Foil: Us-120 Wolf, 314 Dickerson
Gold Bordered Parallel: US-226 Coghlan
Pink Bordered Parallel: US-220 Elias #d 26/50
1989 Mini Diecut: TM-BB Butler, CG C. Gonzalez,  Vizquel
Fond Farewells: FF-MM McGwire,  PM Molitor, WS Stargell
Future is Now: FN-GP1 Polanco, JA1 Abreu,  OT2 Taveras, NC2 Castellanos, YV1 Ventura, MW1 Wacha
Power Players: PPA-AG Gonzalez, FH Hernandez, GS Stanton, JU Upton, MTR Trout
World Series Heroes: WSH-JP Papelbon
World Series MVP Manu-Relic: WSP-MR Rivera

Multi-Trade Post

Everybody knows that trade posts do not usually yield a high amount of views or comments but I feel that they are very necessary for my blogging.  I like to personally thank my trade partners with an email letting them know I got my package and I also like to shoot up a trade post so I can let everybody else know that there are incredibly generous collectors all over the world.  I didn't trade much during the baseball season this year but I'm slowly getting back into the swing of things.  I think from here on I will be featuring several different trades in one trade post.  So here is a quick recap of the last 5 deals that I've made:  

This blue sparkly Dylan Bundy came to me from Night Owl.  We've traded at least once a year over the the last few and he always comes up with quality cards I can add to my collection.  The only problem with this card is the picture itself.  I hope Dylan makes an appearance with the Orioles this season so that Topps has another picture to make cards out of.  I'm sick of seeing the same photo on all his cards.

Night Owl also sent along these 2 '89 diecut minis for my team set.  My scanner decides to trim the edges of these cards making them into regular rectangles.  I actually wish they were rectangles with the original white borders instead of diecuts but I'm not making the decisions at Topps on how to make cards. 

These 1993 Upper Deck cards came to me from a relatively new blogger by the name of Jimmy who runs the S.Mack Talk blog.  He's still finding his footing here in blogger land so go on over and check out his blog.  Yes I'm building the 1993 Upper Deck set.  In my opinion its Upper Deck's best base set and I'm using the cards for a future project.

If you read blogs you probably know where these minis came from.  Nachos Grande, the Allen & Ginter and Legos wizard made these awesome custom mini Ginters and included them in the package. I think these might be 1/1s since I'm not sure if he has sent a Manny or Crush out to anyone else.

Chris also included this Electric Diamond parallel from the 1994 Upper Deck set of Mike Devereaux.  1994 UD is such a let down from '93's effort but this card stands out for awesome photography.  I'm really thinking about sending this card out to Mike to see if I can get it autographed.

This Frank Robinson manu-relic comes to me from a guy named David Gao.  I don't think he has a blog but he was interested in some of my Cardinals tradebait.  I don't immediately recall what I sent him in return but I'm happy to have this card for my collection.  I'm not the biggest Frank collector around and I still hold a bit of a grudge since he kinda ruined my National experience a few years back by having everybody who bought tickets stand in line for half the damn day.  I coulda been roaming the show floor but instead was stuck in line because my ticket had already been scanned and I was told if I left the line, I wouldn't be allowed to return without buying another ticket.  I know its kind of a silly reason to hold a grudge but I'm an imperfect person.

Thi cards was send to me by a guy by the name of John.  I don't think that he has a blog either but he did have a Zistle page that I was able to pick out some 2014 Topps cards as well ans this Shawn Green Rookie card.  The last card I'm going to show off is a Blue Jays card?  Yeah, it's for my somewhat unnannounced-but-you-can-find-the-wantlist-here-on-my-blog project.  I'm going back through the years collecting rookie cards of all the "big name" players.  I guess you can call it my personal fan favorite rookie card collection.  I plan on making a full post about all of my PC's in the near future so stay tuned for that.

Thanks again to Night Owl, Nachos Grande, Jimmy, David and John for trading with me.

So Long Nick Markakis...

Enjoy him Braves fans!

A Tour of my Man Cave part 2: the Other Side

I hope everyone enjoyed seeing part of my man cave in my previous post.  I would say that I'm very organized and I know exactly where every card in my collection is at any given time.  Some people might say I'm OCD about my cards but honestly if it wasn't this organized, there'd be no way I'd know exactly what I have and don't have.  Anyways, on with the show:

 I guess this is where you could say the magic happens.  I've got my scanner/printer on the far left, my label/postage printer next to it, my scale, toploaders and penny sleeves, my "Cards of the Moment", a stack of blog business cards in front of a box of tradebait I have stashed away for people I trade with on a regular basis.  You can also see my Mac on the right of the picture.

 Just to the left of my printer is where I keep my 3 Cal Ripken PC binders as well as my Nick Markakis and Nolan Reimold binder.

 Above all of those I have a shelf of Orioles knick-knacks.  Bobbleheads, action figures, statuettes, signed baseballs.  There's a little bit of everything up there.

 Farther to the left is my signed 8x10 collection.  All of the Orioles greats are up there.  The cool thing about each of these is that I got to meet each and every player!

Here's the meat of my signed 8x10s.  There's Cal, Eddie, Brooks, and Palmer.   I've met each one of those guys too!  So that pretty much wraps it up for my man cave.  The only thing I didn't show is my TV and my Xbox 360 and games.  I'm pretty sure everybody knows what all of those things look like though.