Blasted by Blasters - Blaster 2

 

Second of the four birthday blasters.

Let's see the Inserts, Angels, and other interesting cards found in each pack.

Pack 1

Pack 2

Two-Angel pack! 

And I always appreciate pulling a Votto. He was a fringe PC guy at one time.

Pack 3

Angels Holofoil parallel!

Pack 4

Pack 5

Pack 6

I was really hoping Hendricks would have a great season last year so that the Angels would bring him back. They granted him free-agency.

Pack 7

We had 18 inserts in this blaster, 20 in the last.

And 1 pack with only 1 insert just the last blaster.

Stay tuned for Blaster #3.

Red Cardboard is Back!

You read that right. Over a decade away, but now back to blogging. Go check him out HERE, Follow and add him your blog roll. And get in on the GIVEAWAY!

Blasted by Blasters - Blaster 1

 

First of the four birthday blasters.

Let's see the Inserts, Angels, and other interesting cards found in each pack.

Pack 1

Four inserts and an Angel. nice pack.

Pack 2

Ooh, Black Holofoil PCA card, numbered 07/10

Pack 3

Third Angel in three packs and a Black Gold is always a nice card.

Pack 4

Pack 5

Nice Griffey pull.

Pack 6

Not a very good pack.

Pack 7

Four inserts and an Angel, again!

Great way to finish.

So I guess the SMLB cards are 1-per pack, after that no telling what inserts you'll get.

In total 20 inserts in seven packs.

Stay tuned for Blaster #2.

Blasted by Blasters - Egg

So my birthday came and went, and much to my surprise, unlike me, my family was able to find some Topps product to give me as gifts.

One daughter hit the jackpot at Target and shared the news with the rest of them. She checked the card aisle and found nothing. Somehow she was led to the toy section and found an end-cap with lots of Topps product.

Is this a normal thing for Target? Using a toy section end cap for sports cards?

I've found clearance stuff back there, and there is small section for Pokemon and gaming cards and such, but never an end cap of current sports cards.

For this post we'll start with the egg, I've never opened one of these before.

The egg contains a 59-card pack of 2026 Series I cards, including 2 Holiday Variations and 1 Exclusive card.

Here are the highlights:

Holiday Polka Dots Green/Pink 1:2

 Holiday Egg Tin Exclusive 1 per tin

 Holiday Chicks 1:10

Rainbow Foil, 1991 Topps 35th Anniversary, Titans of the Game.

Angels pulled and Freddie Freeman because a daughter has a crush on him.

The top two rookies (as of this writing) based on TCDB pricing (taken with a grain of salt).

And the rest of the rookies in the egg.

Not sure what I'm supposed to do with the egg now.

Stay tuned for the first of four 2025 Update blasters.

Peel and Stick

My grandbaby loves stickers. She's almost two and can't get enough of them. Her little fingers are really good at finding the edge and peeling them off the backing. She puts them on a blank piece of paper, in no real order or design, just sticks them there until the paper is mostly full then moves on to another sheet. She doesn't care about peeling them up and re-sticking them as long as there are others to peel and stick. She can do that for hours. My daughter loves it because it keeps the baby occupied.

I love stickers too, especially Fleer Baseball Stickers. I've been collecting them for years, including all the variations. I got really amped up about them when I first discovered The Fleer Sticker Project over a decade ago. Man-o-man best blog EVER! Reading all his research behind all the stickers and variations got me hooked.

I don't peel and stick my stickers though. The get handled carefully and put into 9-pocket pages for safe keeping.

My checklist cards do too. 

Many collectors don't care for checklists and would never consider trading for them, but I do.

I love them, baseball checklists, that is.

The cards above all came from Jareb.

Here's a bunch of All Star Game parallels and other Angels from jqs94:

And a trade with Scoot's Collectibles:

Some pretty cool parallels from 2003 Bowman Heritage: Knothole Rainbow and Facsimile Signature.

And a Rendon. Glad he's gone.

Here are cards from crushnmove:

And lastly, one from jamestagli:

I'm not big on Prizm, but they sure have some nice red/white/blue cards.

Nope, wait, another trade came in from Kaline6:

More towards the 1987 Angels quest: Topps Tiffany Update (with a nice airbrushed Greg Minton), and a 1987 Rookies cartoon back of Devon White.

More great Fleer stickers and a couple 1989 Upper Deck towards the set build. The Bill Schroeder is an error card showing Ronn Reynolds on the back.

Smokey and the Pros

Cards are starting to trickle in for my 1987 Angels quest this year. One interesting one came in this trade with BucCollector.

Two oddities in there actually, but let's look at this one first:

This is a Coins of America Smokey and the Pros card, one of a 32-card NNO set released in 1987. It's more like a custom card, with a little cutout of a Smokey poster and one of a baseball card, in this case a 1974 Rich Hand, stuck to a wood frame design. The card is then laminated on both sides. TCDB has the set checklist but without any further information as to how they were distributed. There is no reference to these in my Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards.

Maybe they were handed out at games?

The second is this b/w Joe Rudi:

This card was a throw in as the BucCollector saw that I had a Rudi PC (very nice of him). The only thing I know about the Rudi is the seller said he picked up a stack of about 100 similar cards all picturing A's from the 70's to 90's. Nothing on TCDB for this one either. Possibly a custom card?

Here are the backs of both:

Any help? Fuji?

Bags From Johnny

 

Not BAGs as in Blog Appreciation Gifts like I send out, but bags as in team bags full of cards, four of which were crammed in a bubbler from Johnny's Trading Spot. He does this often.

I've been looking forward to this.

BAG 1

I'm assuming these are part of the P downsizing, along with them being Angels.

This design takes me back to my childhood. 

We had wallpaper similar to this in one of the bathrooms.

And it's about this time my scanner started acting up so I had to take photos of some.

BAG 2

Knocked out a checklist set just like that.

Johnny is my main supplier of baseball checklists and info cards.

BAG 3

Classic Ohtani pose.

Fleer Glossy. You need to look close to catch these and not assume they're regular Fleer, which I almost did had it not been for a famous Johnny stickie pointing that out.

Another year of Montgomery's from him.

BAG 4

A nice reminder that the Angels had one of the worst uniforms of the 90's

Like I said earlier.

Thanks Johnny, as always.