Gawain knows I collect Tony Gwynn baseball cards and a while back he told me he had asked one of his contacts in America to send some Gwynn cards over. Two weeks ago he sent me this photo.
The tall stack at the back was all Tony Gwynn cards.
We had a chat about sorting through them, and that resulted in him emailing me scans and us discussing the cards on a couple of Zoom calls, until eventually Gawain took the executive decision to just send them all to me for me to look through and return any I don't want.
He timed this well as I've taken this week off work so I've had plenty of time to really look closely through them. I'm glad he sent them to me because there are some cards with variations that are only spottable when you have the cards in hand. I kept finding new minor ways that card companies altered their cards. (And I'm starting to really despise some card companies!)
The result is I have now acquired a load of new cards.
Several evenings of scanning await me. Several blog posts await you, dear readers.
Gawain also took great pleasure in sending me another copy of the Upper Deck "push out" bobblehead that I posted about in a Monday Mixer a couple of weeks ago. The card looks like this:
Gawain wanted me to use the second card for its intended purpose. So I did. When you push it out, the bobblehead looks like this:
As Fuji said, back on the Monday Mixer post, Tony really has his game face on! He's now glowering over my desk space where I am sure he will inspire me when I go back to work next week.
He also needs a bat. I'm going to have to fashion one for him.
As I mentioned, I have a lot of scanning to do, but I wanted to show at least one card in this post from the haul that Gawain sent me, and I've chosen this one because, well, it kind of stood out from the herd when I went through them.
Card Number 132: Upper Deck Ionix, 1999; #R84
Nothing says 90s than the words "Techno, techno, techno"
In terms of design, there are two photos on the front, blotchy patterns, foil bits, the word techno repeated all over it with a 3 instead of an e, and so on.
It was also flipping hard to track down on Trading Card Database! For some reason the Techno themed cards have an R in front of the number, which means they have the same numbers as the "Reciprocal" parallel set. It was very confusing.
That's the Late Nineties Weird Card Challenge. If you can find the bloody thing, then you can add it to your list!
The back has a lot of information on it, and another photo.
They also use Tony's roster number as a design element, just to add even more confusion. I picked it up and thought, "Oh, great, they gave him card number 19!" But that wasn't the card number despite being the most obvious number on the cardback.
This whole palaver bodes well for sorting the rest of the cards. It will keep me out of mischief for a good while, and I'm sure a lot of people will be thanking Gawain for that! But they probably won't be as grateful as I am for the huge haul of cards.
[In terms of blog milestones, this is my 50th blog post. Happy half century to me!]
Total: 132/394
Wowza. That's some stack of cards. Thanks for putting together that bobblehead. Always wanted to see what the intended purpose looks like.
ReplyDeleteI'm tempted to try and collect (and build) a few more
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