Not long after Night Owl's shiny contribution to my modern card collection arrived I received a similar gift from Jeff who authors 2x3 Heroes, another favorite blog of mine.

Like Greg's cards these will end up in a few different places..... my Orioles current favorites binder (and yes, I realize how silly that sounds given the current crew), my fantasy baseball binder (or the baseball 'live' box I keep of guys I may need for my fantasy binder)...or my O's Stars binder i.e: Murray, Brooks, etc.

We can start off with that Zach Britton card up top. I'm disappointed but not surprised that the scan doesn't really convey what it looks like in hand. It's sepia(?) or something and all chromified. I'm sure there is an actual name for it. I'll just say it's unique enough to boot the Britton I have now in my fantasy binder. EDIT: I pulled this back out to look it over and I see it's a 'chrome refractor'. As is one of the next pair. 


Above and below are two different Trey Mancini chrome cards. I confess to not knowing (or having forgotten) if Topps Chrome is a seperate set or a variation of the base set or what. But there are so many around that I'm guessing it's a stand-alone set. Either way Topps does crazy things with the coloring on these.


Hey, it's Manny Macado, Oriol Dodgers star! Somewhere along the line the number of Dodgers followers has surpassed the number of Brewers fans in my Twitter feed. (Getting all the Brewers tweets was odd in the first place but that's for another time.)

This Machado is a different sort of Chrome card. I swear I don't know how contemporary card collectors keep this stuff straight. The little shield indicates it's the 30th anniversary of the '87 design. Scanners just never give the full picture on these. Pun intended.


Jeff included a couple of Gypsy Queens, both destined for my newly re-organized stars binders.  Adam Jones' decision to nix a trade to the Phils and remain onboard the sinking ship that is the Orioles franchise shows either amazing loyalty or increadible stupidity. And Adam Jones isn't stupid. As I said about Machado recently...I hope AJ gets a ring before he hangs 'em up. And that's gonna take him moving on sooner rather than later.



Topps loves to use the same picture over and over but with Eddie Murray I'm fine with this one.


Big League Adam Jones. Other than my wishing that Topps had used the 'happy bird' logo on the Orioles I think this set a A-OK.


BL Manny wearing the MLB money grab Players Weekend uni. Dopey concept but it makes for a nice card in this case.


Oh Dylan. I get the feeling Bundy will head off to another team and pull a 'Jake Arrieta' by winning a zillion games and a Cy Young.


I got trey Mancinis in this package. ::groan::


Mini AJ. This may be the only card I already had but seening how disorganized my minis are there's just no telling. Organizing my minis is way down on my hobby to-do list.


And finally a Topps regular Brian Matusz. His best days came before I was back into baseball.And they didn't last long. Here's an odd fact from Wikipedia: "Despite the fact he only appeared in one game for the Cubs during their 2016 World Series season, he was given a World Series ring."


ANOTHER EDIT: I went back and pulled this one out again because I remembered wondering about it when I scanned it. It had a different 'feel' to it, not quite as glossy as most Topps base cards. And it felt thicker I think. Anyway it's numbered 81/91. And it has a foil Topps logo which I think is not on all their cards from 2016. That's all I know.


Big tip of the cap to Jeff for these babies. Nice adds for me and a bit of an education as a bonus!

Joe Shlabotnik of the ever-entertaining Shlabotnik Report recently packed a manila envelope full of goodies and fired it my way. What he included hit a bunch of my collections so without any much further ado let's take a look. But first a note...I scanned about half of the contents of the envelope. I figured I'd show off a representative sample of the stuff Joe sent.

Joe mentioned that he'd been to a postcard show which stopped me in my tracks. A POSTCARD SHOW?!?! How have I remained unaware of these all this time? A quick search turned up a show calendar and what do you know? There is a Houston show scheduled for March. I'm all in.

I'm holding back one postcard because it ties in very well with a post I have scheduled for tomorrow. The one below is of the remarkable Teddy Roosevelt of course.


It's not from his lifetime but it's old enough that it predates the use of Zip Codes as you may be able to tell from the reverse side.


This next one is of the entire Roosevelt clan.



Check out the back...one cent postage 'Domestic and Canada'. Have you tried to send anything to Canada lately? What did we do to piss them off?  Nevermind, I think I know.

Hey, hey it's LBJ! I'm a member/supporter of the LBJ Museum in Austin. They have been sending me info for years on their terrific events. Every one of them seemed to be held on a weekday. Now I'm retired and work conflicts are no more. I'm gonna make some appearances up there.


Of course Joe shoved a ton of Orioles cards into the envelope. Modern, vintage, foreign, shiny and on and on. The enigmatic Chris Davis kicked off the post with a nice reflective Bowman. The O's are committed to Davis for awhile...for better or worse.

These next cards are from the 90s. I knew that without checking the back even though I was nor real familiar with the sets. Gold foil, big script fonts...yup, the 90s.

This Jimmy Haynes is even a Laser cut thing. I have nothing like this in my collection. I see something this and I wish I had stuff like it when we were flipping cards at lunch time in the St Mary's School playground in Jersey in the 60s. It would have been like hurling ninja stars at a wall.






Here's a Pacific Eddie Murray. Is there anything in the hobby more 90s than Pacific? It's from his chunky period. You can divide his career up kind of like Elvis' into Skinny Eddie and Fat Eddie. Just don't tell him I said that.


More cards with gold embossed lettering. Flairs..with their goofy stylized font adornments.


Leaf Studio cards...if they gave awards for the 'Set That Looks Best In A Binder' Studio makes the nomination list, at least. That sig is in gold despite how my scanner makes it look.


Alan Mills. Baseball needs two rules: 1) no more than two catcher visits to the mound per inning (call it the Brian McCann Rule) and nobody wears a number higher than 66. Just because.


Jimmy Key...big honkin' script font.


Man, I like this Fleer set. Borders, decent team caps, readable names, colorful-ness. Pretty cool.  So sue me.


O-Pee-Chee Orioles! I have scattered examples of OPC Birds in my collection but these were all new to me. I prefer the OPC's that look just like the Topps versions but have the OPC logo/trademark.


Modern Orioles! Dig those stirrups on AJ10. OK, here's a third rule for baseball....no more pajama-style pants.


Modern shiny Orioles!


I always forget that Jones was a Mariner. Nice trade, Baltimore.


There were more Orioles cards from the above sets. And amazingly I think only one was a card I already owned.

Joe also remembered my Manchester United love and hit me with several cards of Red Devils including the great David de Gea. Lord knows where the Reds would be this EPL season without him.


I have been to several Houston Dynamo games in previous seasons but I somehow missed this past year. But I do spend many Saturday morning with the Man U Supporters club watching EPL at a bar across the street from the Dynamo stadium a.k.a. The Orange Oven.


More de Gea. Do you ever wonder if anyone actually plays the games with these cards?



That was a cool shipment of cards, Joe. Many thanks! Oh, and here is the late,great Jimi Hendrix doing his classic 'Hey, Joe'. This one's for you.

I spend the last week or so in a race against a failing CPU as I scrambled to salvage everything from my desktop before it headed to the Computer Graveyard.


It was slow going and I'm lucky that I've been pretty good about backing up my stuff. There was only a couple weeks worth of scans, pictures and documents that needed to be saved. But when you have to reboot every twenty minutes it seems like a lot more than that.

Then it was a trip to Micro Center for a new machine and the real work began....getting this thing set up like I want it and wrestling my printer/scanner into submission. This will be my first post typed up on my new computer.

During the height of the shit storm that was changing machines I received a couple of packages in the mail. Both were similar in that they contained cards for my 1970 set build plus shiny Orioles. First we'll take a look at the one from Brian at Highly Subjective and Completely Arbitrary.

That 1970 Willie Stargell at the top had the (dubious) honor of being the first card scanned with my new set up. No card in history has probably endured more verbal abuse that that one. But it's a great card, right? I saw Stargell hit a simply ridiculous homer in the Astrodome in this 1972 game. It banged off the scoreboard in centerfield and sent the game into extras. The Pirates won in 17 innings.


I had a well worn Joe Morgan so this one from Brian is a welcome upgrade. I wish the 'Stros would go back to those 'shooting star' unis. They wore them as throwbacks a time or two a few seasons back. They are sharp.

A couple more '70s from Brian:


Bernie Allen and Cookie Rojas. Rojas' card isn't miscut like my scan makes it appear.



Rick Reichardt is #720 in the set, the end of the checklist. I only wish it was the end of my needs list! The smaller, cramped font Topps used for his position makes this card look odd.


Cisco Carlos always reminds me of my Strat-O-Matic playing days. He pitched for the White Sox and Senators which were always in my 6 team solo leagues.

Shiny Birds! Cal and Manny whose card is retina scorching for sure.


I wonder how many Bowman cards Topps produces every year. I have received a ton of these and no two are of the same player. The Donruss Cal Jr throws back to his rookie card design.


Thanks so much Brian!

The second package came from Fuji who is a fellow teacher and like me is enjoying a bit of a break from the grind.

Fuji's cards dovetail quite nicely with Brian's....70s Topps and some recent Birds. First up is a nice high number Jim Lonborg.


I had to look twice at the front of Lonborg's uniform shirt. I had forgotten about the red trimmed lettering the Bosox wore back then. Dressed To The Nines tells us that they wore these roadies from 1969 until 1972. 1973 marked the beginning of the doubleknit era and a new look for the Sox' jerseys.

Another 1970 is Padres manager Preston Gomez. He is most remembered for twice sending up a pinch hitter for pitchers who were hurling no-hitters. I hadn't remembered his partial season as Cubs manager in 1980.


The more I see of Dylan Bundy the more I think he looks like a young Tony Dow.


'Chromafied' Hyun-Soo Kim grabs a slot in the fantasy baseball binder.


Man this Adam Jones card is ..... bright! And that's clearly Camden Yards reflected on his batting helmet. You think Topps could call 'exclusive' on showing stadiums, too? I mean if you have to Photoshop out a team's colors is showing their stadium crossing the legal line as well?


Here's a Fleer Mickey Tettleton from 1990. That was about the last year I collected cards until a few years ago. It wasn't too long after this card was issued that baseball and I agreed to a trial separation.


I looked Tettleton up on Baseball Reference. I was shocked to find he was only an Oriole for three seasons. I'd have sworn it was double that.

Thanks so much Fuji. You and Brian are both among the truly good guys in this hobby. I appreciate your taking the time to send these my way and especially for chipping away at my 1970 set needs.

Final disclaimer: In the mess of the last week it's entirely possible that some of these cards got 'crossways' and I am crediting Brian for a card Fuji sent or vice versa. My usually foolproof system was pushed to the limit and beyond.

Jones again, from Heritage. I bought some Heritage in packs...no Orioles. So this and the Macho Manny Machado card below are welcome.



Henry Urrutia. He's a Cuban guy who attempted to defect twice and was successful the second time. He's been in the O's organization since 2013 and had a couple of runs in the bigs.

I don't hate the '16 Topps design as much as most people. I tend to like cards that feature team color coordinated elements. Sue me.


Here's something you don't see every day...an Aurora card of Brady Anderson. I had no idea what Aurora cards were but at first glance it seemed like something Pacific would have put out and it turns out that I was correct. Here is the card:

And here is part of the 2011 Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards entry that popped up in a Google search:


Being from 1998 kind of explains why I had never heard of these things. I was away from baseball in the second half of that decade. The good news is that because of that I missed the Joe Carter Experience in Baltimore.

Finally take a peek at this:


It's just so randomly random. 1990 Star Company Wausau Timbers card of the coaching staff. Back in the day there were several competing companies pumping out minor league sets. Star, Classic, ProCards and Best are the ones that I remember. I think Larry Fritsch published sets as well although I can't recall seeing any of those  outside his catalogs.

So my question is "How does a 1990 Best Wausau Timbers Coaching Staff  card end up in Night Owl's collection?"  Beats me but I'm happy to add it to my small box of Orioles-related minor league cards.

And thanks to Night Owl for getting me out of my blogging doldrums. I actually found another envelope in my mail today which I'm betting contains some Orioles cardboard! Looks like I'll have another post soon.