A Crinkly Kind of Trade
June 20th, 2010 by slangon
First off, I just want to take this opportunity to wish a happy Father Day to all you Dad’s out there. To me there’s always a special connection between baseball and my Dad, so I think fathers hold a special place in the card collecting community. I’d especially like to wish a happy Fathers Day to anyone who is celebrating the day for the first time. I was in that boat last year and it was pretty awesome. But I digress.
If you recall, my big pull from the hobby box of 2010 Topps Series 2 that I had busted open recently turned out to be an Aaron Hill Peak Performance Jersey card. As you may further recall, I was none too psyched about that card. My new friend Ted, who recently started his own addition to the sports card blogging community, happens to be a Toronto Blue Jays fan and inquired as to the availability of old Aaron. Emails were exchanged. Cards were discussed. A trade was born.
Like almost every trade that I’ve ever been involved with, there was really one main center piece of the trade, with other cards being thrown in for good measure, some of which were specifically identified, while others were included under the label of “whatever other Mets stuff I can find laying around”.
Let’s start with some of my favorites from the other stuff.
I remember how excited I was when I found out Pedro was coming to the Mets. I only wish he was healthier while he was here. By the way, have I mentioned that I love Turkey Reds?
Did you know that George Foster, along with a few other Mets, put out a rap record called Get Metmerized? Why, George?
A couple of oddball Strawberry’s. Apparently Darryl’s swing was very consistent.
A couple of oddball Doc’s. I love the one with the four shots of him in various stages of his delivery.
A more recent card of The Kid. And by more recent I mean 6 years ago.
My man Keith. Another older newer oldie.
Ted also sent along a few Mets from the National Chicle set, which was cool for me since I really had no interest in buying any, but I was curious to see them. They’re pretty interesting, and I like how the backs give info on the artist as well as the player. Also, I guess like every other retro set out there, there’s back parallels, one of which Ted sent.
(That’s the back of John Maine, if you’re wondering.)
Alright, enough screwing around. Let’s get to the meat of this trade.
Drum roll…
Awww yeah. A Jose Reyes Magenta Printing Plate from the aforementioned National Chicle set. I’ve sort of cooled a bit on my chasing of relic cards and the like, but I must admit, I still always wanted at least one printing plate, just to have one. Now I do and it is of probably my favorite current player, Jose Reyes. It’s also pretty cool that Jose if pretty visible on the plate, I’ve seen some other plates where, depending on how much of the particular color happens to be present in the image, there’s hardly anything on the plate.
I’ve also kind of always wanted a 1/1 card, so this printing plate is performing double duty. By the way, has anyone ever noticed that there’s a tracking code on the back of all Topps cards. (It may be on other manufacturers cards, but I’m too lazy to look right now.) Is that so if someone breaks out in a rash after touching the card, they can track what lot it was from? Weird.
Thanks for the shout-out. I think they claim that the code is there for “quality control”, but we have all seen how far that has gotten them. Seems like they are taking too many vacation days over at Topps there with all these errors in Series 2.