What Does Estrellas Mean Anyways?

Fellow Angels fan Rob reached out to me after reading my entry about the 1984 Topps set I was trying to complete.  He had some '84 Topps available, and was willing to send them my way.  He too is collecting the set as well as the 1982 and 1983 sets, so I was able to send some cards in return.  He's also tackling the 1992 Donruss set, which I was also able to help him out with.  Got lots of those sitting idle in a box.

As it turned out, I was able to tackle most of the 1984s I needed through other trades, but Rob was willing to send some Angels around, particularly some 2003 Donruss Estrellas, which I hadn't heard of.

Not a bad design.

The rows of grey boxes give them a punch-card look which works well.

Look at the angle of Glaus' bat.

Looks like a mini bat he's about to tomahawk chop.

Ah-ha.

Aside from the dreaded re-use of the same photo,

when I saw the center card it looked familiar so I went to the 2003 binder and sure enough I had one already.  But only that one card, I don't have any of the others.

I was very happy about that.

And a mini poster to boot.

I have to assume these were a one-per-pack insert.

The baseball stitching design on the 2003 Donruss Estrellas logo is really sweet.

Kinda ominous like a snake about to strike.

1995 Topps Prospects card with Mike Sweeney (not the Royal) and George Arias.

Sweeney played only 1 year of rookie ball ending with a 17.47 ERA.  I wonder if he got injured and just decided to give it up.

Arias played 4 seasons with the Angels and Padres, then went to Japan for 3 more years.

Add to those a handful of other cards and I got some pretty cool Angels stuff.

And then there were these: 

1977 Topps strip cards!

The card on the left is perfect, Angel Paul Hartzell surrounded by Dodgers Tommy John and Stan Wall.

Dave Chalk makes it on the other strip with a nice Goose Gossage pre-stache card.

Rob said he was given a stack of these strip cards but didn't know much about them.

He figured maybe they were test strips.

There are no perforations so they aren't like some old stadium giveaways I have.

I looked around and found some on ebay but no description of how they were issued.

And my Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards doesn't mention them either.

Hmmm.

Whoops!

After just publishing this post I went back to Command Central and found another bubbler Rob had sent for helping with the '92 Donruss set.

It included these:

I absolutely love 1996 Leaf Signature Series cards!

What a great design, one of the best ever.

Thanks Rob!