Cowboys and Rangers

I'll be attending the WVU/Oklahoma St game at 1 today. This will be the first home conference game of the season so the crowd should be pretty pumped. Baseball will always be number 1, but I do love some good college basketball. WVU has only 1 loss right now and has cracked the top 15. Last week was a great week as they had 3 road games and won them all.  Let's Go Mountaineers!

This post will finally wrap up 2015 for me.  What a year! My apologies to Spiff from Texas Rangers Cards as he sent this right around Christmas. Spiff and I have had an ongoing blind trade for well over a year. He always seems to find something interesting for me.

Joel Hanrahan turned himself into a very productive bullpen piece for the Pirates.  When the Pirates acquired him from the Nationals it seemed that he was more of a throw in piece, but almost immediately he turned a corner to become super productive reliever

The Pirates as a team are not in the business of paying relievers big money so when Hanrahan was approaching free agency the Pirates traded him to the Red Sox. The trade ended up working out for both teams, but in ways not expected. The Bucs received prospects and Mark Melancon. Melancon at the time was coming off a bad year, but immediately refound his form and turned into a top ten reliever in all of baseball. Hanrahan had arm issues and has not pitched in over 2 years. The silver lining for the Sox was that they received Brock Holt who has turned himself into one of the better utility players in the league. 

Love the Museum Collection relic! 

Speaking of Melancon, he is in his last year of his contract. I fully expect the Bucs will deal him at some point. Not good business to pay a reliever 10 million when you are a small market team. 

 The Pirates still remained intrigued by Barnes, but he cannot stay healthy. This will probably be a make or break season.

I have some nice cards of Barnes so it would be cool to see him hit is stride.

 Ike Davis was terrible for the Pirates. Marte and Cutch are the backbone of the franchise.

Stickers!

Thanks for the cards Rob! I still have some Rangers sitting around to send your way.

Thanks for reading.

The Smell of Cardboard

Tim from "I Love the Smell of Cardboard in the Morning" is a busy man these days as right before Christmas he brought home his third daughter. More power to you my friend. My little girl has been a handful so having three is hard for me to fathom. You are way outnumbered in your house. I should send you beer....

Right around this same time his daughter was born Tim sent me an awesome PWE.

A Victoria's Secret parallel of Gregory Polanco.  I don't hide the fact that I love adding cards of the Pirate right fielder so getting them for free via trade makes me very happy.

 I hadn't seen this card before.  Guess I didn't pay enough attention to Chrome. Pretty sharp looking card that honors Polanco's hit streak to open his career.

 I really should gather up my Walk's in one place.  I probably have a master collection. This card here is the best card in the history of cards.  Move over Honus Wagner.

 In reality this was probably my favorite card of the bunch. I have received so many great Ramirez cards in trades this past month. This Bowman's Best parallel is numbered to 200! Great card.

 Even non licensed Cutch cards look cool. I miss the dreads.

 The Van Slyke is cool for a lot of reason. You have a Tim Wallach cameo, Pete Rose slide and Gene Lamont giving the "get down and slide sign".

JR House is actually from West Virginia.  My high school played House's team for the state championship when I was in 9th grade. I think he broke just about every quarterback record that game. The crazy thing was that he was better at baseball. He would go on to be a pretty big prospect for the Pirates, but never got any traction at the MLB level.  He had a cup of coffee in 5 different seasons, but never got more than 40 at bats.

Thanks for the great cards Tim. Hope things are settling down at your house. By the way everyone should trade with Tim.  He actually collects a good bit of Rays players!!!!  His primary collection is Yanks, but he has a nice variety of players on his want list.

Thanks for reading.

Jedi Jeff PWE

I still have a few packages to post to clear out cards I received in 2015.  My good pal Doug just sent me what will be my first post of 2016 cards.

This post will show off some goodies from Jedi Jeff. I love getting mail from Mr. Club PWE. The only issue is my wife sometimes puts pwe's in different spots from my normal blog mail. She has gotten much better, but every so often I have to check in stacks of newspapers and junk mail to make sure nothing slips by.

Josh Bell is the first baseman of the future for the Pirates, but with the acquisition of John Jaso it will mean Bell will continue to develop in AAA.  Makes sense since he had less than 200 at bats at that level. Probably a win/win for the Buccos as their commitment to Jaso is cheap so if Bell tears up Indianapolis he could still be utilized.

 This is one of those Topps 3D cards in which you could enter a code and make the card "come to life."

 Flair had some odd base cards back in the day. I've been on a nice run adding Ramirez cards featured as a Bucco.

 Polanco will probably be everybody's pick to have a huge breakout season this coming year. The good thing about Polanco is that he can be valuable even without the bat. The defense and baserunning are both well above average.

 Both Jameson Taillon and Nick Kingham would have debuted with the Pirates last year, but injuries derailed their seasons. Kingham's arm injury occurred during the summer so it is likely most of this year will be lost too.

 Glasnow is on most top 20 overall prospect lists. He should play a vital role at some point during the season.

I pulled a ton of the Sportdiscs, but I'm pretty sure I didn't get a Cutch. Jeff took care of that problem.

Some miscellaneous Buccos to round out the pwe. I feel like if Studio became a stand alone set again it would be huge within the blogging community. Triple Play was a nice set for the budget conscience collector back in the day. My parents would often buy me packs.

Thanks for the envelope Jeff. Sorry for the delay in posting.  Got backlogged around the holidays. Hopefully my return package arrived safely.

Thanks for reading!

A Bombing During Peace Time

One of the more entertaining card related events for me last year was my battle with crazy man Wes aka Jaybarkerfan. We exchanged just about everything sports memorabilia related you could imagine. Game used jerseys, bats and autograph biography's were just a few of the items that went back and forth between Hazel Green and Morgantown. After about 6 weeks a treaty was signed and all has been quiet......until the week before Christmas. 

Wes always has a way to hit me when I least expect it. The last few months he has been going through a mass reorganization of his collection in which he is narrowing his focus. Well, little did I know he had been hoarding stuff to ship my way. Sneaky! 

While caught off guard I wasn't completely empty handed, so my crazy friend you'll have something coming sooner than later. 

Get ready for a crap ton of photos. I'll let them do most of the talking....

Hanson should see some big league time this year.

I've been trying to nab some autos of Hanson since his debut should be early this coming season. As usual Wes helps.

This is a cool memorabilia card of the former Mountaineer great.

Tavon has had a hot hand the last few weeks of the season.

I was excited to see a Tavon auto in the mix!

You may have heard about Stedman getting shot in the hand back around Thanksgiving. Miraculously he survived and has already been released from the hospital.  It seems like a full recovery is expected.

Strata diecuts are pretty cool!

Pat White and Steve Slaton are by far the most represented in my WVU collection. Slaton had a short career, but was featured in just about every set his first season.

Another beautiful Stedman rookie auto from Finest.

Now for some Steelers!

Could you imagine how dangerous the Steelers would be if Bell stayed healthy?

This was one of my favorite autos in the bunch.

It is amazing how good Brown is now. What a pick he turned out to be.

That was the ultimate hit parade Wes. You always seem to find some great stuff for me. I'm going to return fire very soon.....be afraid. 

Thanks for reading!

Too Many Awesome Cards!

My good buddy Dennis (Too Many Verlanders) hit me with a blockbuster trade package right before Christmas. I went back and looked and this marks the 14th time I've received cards from the Michigan/Tigers fanatic. That amount probably puts him on the Mount Rushmore of Bob Walk trade partners. 

As usual Dennis mixed in a combination of Pirates and Mountaineers in the package. 

I've had a nice run adding manager cards this month. The only sad thing about this card is that Kluszewski isn't showing enough of the guns.

Dennis knows I'm a sucker for the original Frank Thomas!

For as long as the Pirates have been around they really don't have a great history when it comes to star pitchers. Most of the recent Hall of Fame pitchers that played for the Pirates either had a short stay or were at the end of their careers.  Probably the most notable pitcher in modern times was Bert Blyleven, but he only had 3 seasons with the Bucs and he left on bad terms.

With that being said the Pirates do have some great names in history like Vern Law and Roy Face. What a cool looking card of what appears to be spring training. It appears that Vern Law has to poop from the grimace.

A very young Al Oliver. If he could have had a couple more big seasons he would have made it to 3000 hits and the hall of fame.

A very small stamp of the Cobra!

56 Topps Dale Long

These are the kind of manu-relics that I can tolerate. Very nice Pops!

I was glad to see Archives finally add some cool Pirates to the Fan Favorites autos. The set is always one of my favorites every year, but they were rehashing guys like Al Oliver and Dave Parker over and over again. Having guys like Kendall was a welcomed change.

Cutch is like Tekulve, he doesn't have bad cardboard.

It was a stretch to call Bream a fan favorite since he scored the run to win the NLCS as the member of the Braves. He is from the Pittsburgh area so I guess there's that, but I think if you ask most Pirate fans to give you a top ten fan favorites he wouldn't crack it.

Personally I thought it was a cool card and the bible verse makes it unique.


WVU time!

I was really pulling for Sims to get more playing time with the Bucs this year since Doug Martin sucked so bad last year. Unfortunately for Sims, Martin balanced back.

Bulger is probably the most notable Mountaineer to make a big impact in the NFL in the last 15 years.

One of the cool things about collecting Sims cards is that their is a lot of color in the jersey cards. I've been trying to get some of the patches that feature the full Buccaneer, but they still bring in a good bit of money.

Now for my two favorite cards of the bunch. Geno has had a tough go as a pro, but that doesn't stop me from collecting the ex Mountaineer. He holds just about every passing record in school history so he still holds a soft place in my heart. This is an awesome plate from Bowman Sterling.

I chose this card as my favorite because of the great WVU uniform patch. Ultimate Collection is the go to set if you like players featured in their NCAA uniforms. What a great looking card.

Holy smokes that was a ton of great cards. I could ramble on about them forever. Thanks so much Dennis. Look forward to keeping the pace in 2016. I'll be hitting you back with a few more cards here soon since my last package was a little light.

Thanks for reading.