A Trade Post That I Was Putting Off Because I Was Mad
April 26th, 2011 by slangon

Not mad about the trade mind you. Mad at the Mets.

A while ago, I had bought a few random packs of 2011 Heritage and slapped together a post yammering away about my thoughts on the set. In that post I had mentioned that, although I liked this years heritage set a bit more than I thought I would, I wasn’t planning on chasing it so if anyone was interested in swapping some Mets from the set for whatever cards I had, I was willing to listen. Well, Joe from Cobb and Halladay got in touch and offered me a mess o’ Mets for some cards he needed to help finish off his set. Cards were mailed. Packages were opened. Fun was had by all.

This all went down quite a while ago, and I had been meaning to show the cards Joe sent, but then the Mets happened. They quickly went from a promising start to a steaming pile of sloppy play and bad pitching and unclutchiness. No matter how hard I tried to sit down and write about the cards he sent, I was way too pissed at my team to even look at their tiny little cardboard faces staring back at me. Of course, being the schizophrenic Mets fan that I am, all those bad feelings were erased by a little 4 game winning streak against 2 sort of sub-par teams. So now, while I’m still feeling good about the team, here’s what Joe sent.

I can’t think of this guy without thinking of this. (By the way, is it just me, or does that cowboy bear a striking resemblance to Johnny Damon?) Maybe now that he’s back in the minors, I can get it out of my head.

After a bunch of uber-crappy starts, Mike finally put together a good start his last time out and picked up his first win of the season. Turns out he was terribly sick, but gutted it out and pitched really well. Is it bad to hope that he stays sick all season?

Speaking of pitching really well, after Chris Young went on the disabled list (Anyone surprised by that?), Dillon Gee was brought up to fill in. In 2 starts, he’s gone 2-0 with a 2.31 ERA.

This is one of my favorites of all the cards Joe sent. I actually didn’t even know it existed since I never really took a good look at the ’11 Heritage checklist outside of the base cards. It looks pretty awesome. There’s something really cool about the mix of the wood grain, the Mets logo and the red and blue bars at the bottom. It seems a little weird that they put Shea Stadium on there, considering they didn’t play there until 1964. Details.

K-Rod has closed out 6 games this season, including 4 saves. If he finishes 49 more games, his 2012 option will automatically kick in, which means the Mets will have a closer who is making $17.5 million. Mariano Rivera makes $15 million.

Unlike most things associated with the Mets lately, it’s good to see Carlos back playing and looking healthy. He’s actually played in 9 games straight. He’s got his average up to .296 with 3 dingers and 9 RBI. He’s even stolen 2 bases in 2 attempts on those crusty knees of his.

Josh has yet to get a hit off of a left handed pitcher this year. In his short career so far he’s sporting a lofty .128 average against southpaws. Apparently, Ronny Paulino is close to finding his way back from The Twilight Zone or wherever the hell he’s been. Good thing considering he’s hit .338 off of lefties in 531 plate appearances.

I guess managers really don’t make a difference. Jerry Manuel was a real laid back type of manager and the Mets stunk under his watch. Terry Collins is supposed to be “fiery” and “passionate” and the Mets still stink. Maybe they need to get a manager whose first name doesn’t end in “erry”.

I had written a post about R.A. a while back talking about how I was kind fascinated by him both on and off the field. Recently, I was reading about how he wore a full Darth Vader costume around the clubhouse complete with a thing to make his voice sound all Darth Vader-ey. Apparently he thought it was funny to walk up to someone dressed like that and say things like “I would like a turkey sandwich.”

Every year, I sign up for a few fantasy baseball teams, and every year I do bad. What makes me a bad fantasy GM? First off, I inevitably end up picking guys with my heart rather than my head. This year, I picked Angel Pagan because I was convinced he was going to have a big break out season. Secondly, I always do things like sit Ike because the Mets had an off-day and then forget to reactivate him and then he goes on tear where he hits a home run every day for 3 straight days.

This final card is by far my favorite, for 2 reasons. First, it’s just a cool card of one of my favorite young players. The second reason has more to do with how my collecting habits have changed recently. Over the course of the past year or so, I have more or less cut out buying packs. I’ve gotten to the point where I’m not really interested in 99% of modern cards. Also, I kind of got tired of shelling out money for packs and then end up with maybe 1 or 2 cards that I like and a whole stack of cards I could care less about. Since most of the pack I do (or did) buy are retail rather than hobby, it’s not even like I might end up with some kick ass hit that I could sell or trade for something really awesome. Hell, even if I were buying hobby packs, with my luck I still wouldn’t pull anything worth while. All in all, I just got to a point where I’d rather spent my pennies on beat up old vintage and if the occasional modern card comes along that does catch my eye, just buy it outright rather than try my luck with packs.

All that being said, one thing I do miss about busting packs is that gambling aspect. You put up your cash hoping for that big hit. As a collector, there’s nothing like that feeling you get when you rip open the wrapper and see that that slightly thicker card in the middle is not one of those inserts they throw in to fool pack searchers and you know you got something. I will say that I miss that feeling.

So you could imagine my joy when I was thumbing through the cards Joe sent and at about the halfway point came across this.

I was completely not expecting it, which made it that much sweeter. Although, that photo looks awfully familiar.

So there you have it. An awesome trade with an awesome blogger that brought me some awesome cards. For one day at least I’m able to enjoy little rectangles of cardboard with pictures of players from my favorite team on them. Let’s see how long that lasts.

5 Responses to “A Trade Post That I Was Putting Off Because I Was Mad”

  1. Didn’t they move Gee to the bullpen, even with his success so far?

    And the Mets Flashback card almost looks like a poster on cardboard. I dig it, too, even though I’m not a Mets fan. The more I see of this year’s Heritage, the harder it is to stay away…

  2. That card of Pelfrey is one of the worst I have seen. That indent from his hat is beautiful.

  3. Yep. They moved him to make room for Chris Young, who’s coming off the DL.

  4. r.e. The Mets card: they were always planning to move into Shea Stadium,. The stadium was a big deal and was greatly hyped in the 1962 Yearbook. So it makes sense to have Shea on there, whether Topps did that on purpose remains to be seen, but Shea was always part of the plan of the Mets. If they had built that stadium in 1957, the Dodgers and/or Giants would have never left New York. I still blame Robert Moses.

  5. I actually did know that Shea was planned in ’62 but I never thought about the fact that if they had just built a new stadium 5 years earlier there might be no Mets and the Dodgers or Giants might still be in New York. That’s kind of fascinating to think about.

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