Tres Mas Muchachos

Or something like that.  I didn't do a spell checker on my Spanish.

Three more 1992 Upper Deck Minor League cards down.  These came in from my trading buddy Zenus, The Prowling Cat.

Thanks for reading and following up with some needs Zenus.

A New Way To Roll

I've posted in the past about forgetting who sent me some cards.  I'd get an envelope, open it up, put some of the cards in a 9-pocket, lose or reuse the envelope on another trade, then forget who the cards came from when 2 weeks later I finally get around to scanning the 9-pocket page with the cards.

Well, that's all going to change now.

And that's because I finally caught on to how probably all of you handle your incoming cards.

Just tear off the return label and include it in the scan of the 9-pocket page with the cards.  How many years have I been trading and it's taken me this long to figure this out?

As you can see, these cards came from Tim Wallach Cards.

Of course the torn off return label wont be a regular part of any post about cards received, it's only shown here for demonstration purposes.

And then I'll proceed to showcase the cards, like this one.

And this one.

Good stuff.

Note to self: "Duh"

Finally The Angels Rid Themselves of Ernesto Blown Save Frieri

Goodbye Frieri.

I cant tell you how tired I am of you blowing games the Angels had in the bags.

Jason Grilli?

Fine. Anyone else will do. And at this point Grilli starts with a clean slate even though he's been blowing saves as well.

I got this Grilli custom signed at an Autograph Wednesday event at Rangers Stadium several years back.

First Completed Page Of The 1980 Set

If you remember a while back I picked up a bag of cards at a local junk mall for a couple bucks.

You can read about it here.

In a nutshell, 462 cards from 1980 Topps.

Well I finally got around to adding those 462 to the cards I already had, and then adding in the cards that had been send to me by generous bloggers and putting them into a binder.

The page above is the first of only three complete pages so far, but most of the other pages are only lacking one or two cards (that's page 13, cards #109-117 for those counting).  This means I'm very close to finishing this set.  Like 197 cards close to finishing this set.

Thanks for everyone who's helped out so far.

Fuji Promoted His Minor Leaguers

San Jose Fuji just knocked out more than half of the remaining base cards I needed for the 1992 Upper Deck Minor League set by sending me a whopping 32 cards.  Now I only need 30 more.  I still need a bunch of the inserts too, but those will prove to be very difficult to obtain I fear.  My focus is on the base set first.  Which is now within reach.

Is that a young Chipper chatting with Tony Tarasco?

Better than that, I like the way their jerseys say "B-Braves".

Jorge Fabregas Has Lost His Luster

I've been picking up Angels team sets here and there, mostly on ebay from a couple of great sellers that sell team sets cheap.  If you're a team collector and want to build up your team sets check out kmmdcards and hoosier-40 for great deals.

Anyhow, I picked up a team set of 1994 Bowman recently.  I had a handful of the 24-card set already but figured I would just knock it all out at once and have some dupes for autographs, rather than pick out individual cards one-by-one on sportlots or whatever.

Part of the team set was this Jorge Fabregas card:

Nice looking card huh?

Aside from Jorge having his hand in his crotch it's a pretty good pose.

I set to work at getting the set into the 9-pocket pages.

I knew I already had this particular Fabregas card but when I got to the page in the 1994-1996 binder I found this:

Whoa!

Jorge is missing his gold foil!

Sweet!

But where did this card come from?

Surely I would have noticed this before, or remembered that I had this card with no foil.

Except I didn't and I hadn't.

Pretty nice little combo set.

I actually prefer the non-foil version.

Reminds me of the 1992 Stadium Club set which I love and is currently a side autograph set project.

Lesson learned...keep your eyes open.

Will They Ever Learn?

Anyone who ever played in the Major Leagues, and was willing to oblige, has signed his name to a baseball card or something similar. I'm pretty sure that anyone who ever played in the Major Leagues will consistently be asked to sign cards for the rest of their life.  And I also believe that everyone who played in the Major Leagues and signs cards, knows that Sharpies are the best choice for autographs, and that ballpoints, pencils, markers, or other type of writing tools are frowned upon by the collecting community.

The focus of this post is my most recent TTM return, Darryl Scott.

On Monday, May 12 Card Buzz posted a TTM return from Darryl Scott, a former Angels player who's autograph I did not have in my All-Time Angels collection.  He posted this card:

A beautiful 1993 Fleer Final Edition.

Look at that nice bold blue sharpie signature!  I thought "Sweet, I'll throw a couple cards in the mail for Darryl to sign with that nice bold blue sharpie too!"

A couple weeks later I got them back.  No nice bold blue sharpie autographs though.

Ah Man.  He used one of those frowned upon other writing tools.

Dang it!

I only mailed these a week after Card Buzz, Darryl, where's the nice bold blue sharpie Man?!

I can't imagine you wore it out already.

if I were really ate up about autographs I'd remail two new cards and include a nice new bold blue sharpie for him to use.  But I'm not ate up.

In Darryl's defense though he did take the time to thoughtfully answer my personal questions, something very few players do anymore.

All-in-all I am pleased to have these cards back with an autograph in any form, my rant is all in fun, 

but again....DANG!

Completed Angels Team Set - 2000 Skybox Dominion

Nice 9-card team set for the 2000 Angels.

Interesting that there is no description of this set in my Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards.

There is a checklist, but no description.

Anyhow, you can clearly see that Skybox chose to embarrass the Angels by using photos of them wearing the most hideous uniforms ever.

I like the black-and-white backgrounds on the veteran players, and the gold background to differentiate the rookie cards.

I also like the placement of the foil lettering.

You can see that I have one of the cards autographed: Trent Durrington.

The backs are pretty standard, and I noticed that the players aren't posed or looking right into the camera...

Except this guy:

Cree-pee!

Completed Angels Team Set - 1993 Fleer and Fleer Final Edition

Twenty-three cards in the regular set (series 1 and 2), thirteen cards in the Final Edition.

The team set not only goes in alphabetical order but in numerical order in the two series 187-198, 568-578, and for the Final Edition F179-F191.

One thing to note is that on several cards you can see the black initals "DJ" on the right arm sleeve of some of the players.  This was to commemorate the passing of Deron Johnson who was an Angels coach for 13 years.

It was interesting to note on the back of the cards that Gary DiSarcina's had the only head shot, all the rest were of the full-body or from the waist up type.

Notable Rookie Cards from the Final Edition: Jim Edmonds and  JT Snow.

The Angels didn't have much of an impact in the 1993 Fleer insert sets, these two being the only cards.

These are from the Rookie Sensations insert set found only in Series 1 and 2 cello packs.

Sorry about that fiber on the scan.

Add Another Olympian To The Stack

Inching closer to getting the 1988 Topps Traded Team USA set signed; the 1989 Topps Big is the advantage to sending out the '88 Traded cards, they pair up nicely. The 1991 Upper Deck set I've been working for years, and have no real hopes of completing.  

Sure is fun though.

These came back in 133 days from the University of the Pacific where Ed is a baseball coach.