Combined Shipping Mailday

Bored browsing online leads to weird places, the above Metal Red Pelle Lindbergh caught my eye, as it should, it is an awesome looking card. I noticed it was a Canadian seller, so the "sellers other items" search began.

Custom Card: 1988 Topps Stephen Cardullo

A small tribute to the recently released Stephen Cardullo in the form of 1988 Topps. Cardullo was signed by the Rockies before the 2016 season after 4 years of independent league baseball, winning the Canadian-American Association MVP in 2015. He eventually earned a call-up and hit two home runs, one in each game of a double-header, on his birthday (disappointingly no Topps Now cards though). Earned a spot in the 2017 roster mostly due to Ian Desmond being hurt. Not a household name, but a great story, Purple Row recently has a great article on him that is worth the read.

To Peel or not to Peel (aka Golden Mailday)

I fought the urge to call this post "From now on, we'll all be taking golden showers" but couldn't resist mentioning it. A couple recent acquisitions in my current parallel madness phase I am going though. Really nice looking cards, but I am not thrilled with now they scan, this was the best one with the scanner lid open, any tips on scanning refractors?

Recent COMC Order

COMC mailday also means my other online purchases come though the mailbox service, the above Rocket Ismail autograph was liberated and returned to it's rightful home in Canada. This was when the CFL was a big deal with Wayne Gretzky, Bruce McNall and John Candy buying the Argos and signing The Rocket to a big deal. This is from the 1991 All-World set that might beat any junk wax era in terms of production. Oddly the 100 card base set has 10 Rocket Ismal cards, not including the above auto and a Promo card.

Custom Card: 1996 Upper Deck SP - Ryan Hanigan w/ Parallels

I love doing customs, especially when I am happy with the result, and I am very happy with this one. Instead of modifying an old scan, I built this from scratch, obviously using 1996 SP baseball, one of my favorite designs of all time, with a few tweeks. Foil is nearly impossible to duplicate digitally, so that is gone giving it more of a 2007 SP Rookie Edition feel. Also gone is the gold foil border, replaced with a black border, trimmed with gold. Another foil element was the SP logo, which I redid adding the gold faux-foil border as well. The last thing that bothered me was the team name. I replaced the all caps team name with something more normal, and added the full position instead of the abbreviation.

Panini Fake Patches (aka Maybe Topps isn't so bad?)

Wow, look at that card, 4x Hall of Fame Quarterbacks, 1/1 laundry patches, that is the kind of card people pay big money for. But wait? Game-used Mitchell and Ness jerseys? Mitchell and Ness doesn't make NFL game jerseys. This is a $600 per box product with Jerseys they went down to the sporting goods store and used. Panini released a statement on this basically saying that this card was made in error, along with three other laundry tags. But trust us, everything else in the product is legit, really it is, trust us, buy more boxes.

30 Year old Socks

My Pelle Lindbergh collection is coming along nicely, with the latest addition being my second relic card feature hockey socks. It is labeled as jersey, but as a good hockey playing Canadian, I am pretty sure those are socks. In fact I was playing hockey when I won the auction for this card, set the bid in the dressing room and it ending while I was on the ice.

This is from 2014-15 Masterpieces, a set I really like and have a couple really nice cards from. Upper Deck has only done this set in 2009 and 2015, hopefully we see a release a little sooner than a six year gap.