The Case Hit Group Break (Part 2: Pirates)

A nice bonus in most group breaks is an extra, random team in addition to your selected team. I picked the Rockies, no surprises there. And I believe I have the Mets in Nachos Grande's current break, but in Trevor's midsummer break at Bump and Run Football Card Blog, I ended up with the Pirates. No problems with that; in fact if I had to rank favorite teams, they'd probably be up in the top ten or twelve. They usually have some pretty interesting characters, and a rich but often overlooked history going all the way back to Honus Wagner. My Topps Opening Day blaster in 2017 was filled with Pirates, and I had fun with that post.

2018 Stadium Club #255 Gregory Polanco

Gregory Polanco also seems to be having plenty of fun on his 2018 Stadium Club card, flashing a couple peace signs at the camera. This is a view few of us get, a shot looking up the dugout steps that's usually reserved for players. The piercing gaze of cameras look down the dugout regularly, and sometimes even into the clubhouse tunnel, but very rarely out onto the field from this perspective. The full-bleed design lets us see the stadium lights turned on against a rapidly approaching dusk.

A fun fact on the back tells us that Polanco was the first-ever opening day DH for the Pirates, meaning they must have opened the 2017 season on the road for an interleague game. Sure enough, they opened last year in Fenway Park, and took a loss to this year's AL pennant winners.

2018 Stadium Club Black Foil #226 Starling Marte

A more commonly-seen view of the dugout greets us on Starling Marte's card, which is a Black Foil parallel. It doesn't pop quite as well as the Red Foil variety, but it's nice to get a look at the various colors to be found in 2018 Stadium Club.

I can't say I know much about Polanco or Marte, but they're both from the Dominican Republic. Santo Domingo, to be exact, which is the birthplace of a slew of famous ballplayers, including David Ortiz, Pedro Martinez, Albert Pujols, Jose Bautista, and many, many others. It's a pretty small country, but they've sent a significant share of famous ballplayers to the MLB.

2018 Diamond Kings #18 Paul Waner

Same goes for the state of Oklahoma. Hailing from that midwestern state are Johnny Bench, Mickey Mantle, Joe Carter, Willie Stargell, and Paul Waner, a Hall of Famer and the 1927 NL MVP. The Pirates won the pennant that year, but ended up with the misfortune of facing the 1927 Yankees, arguably the best baseball team of all time. It was the only postseason appearance of Waner's career, and his Pirates were swept by those invincible Yankees.

Those of you who read my previous post will notice that this is a new design, as I didn't get any Rockies from the box of 2018 Diamond Kings. That was more than offset by a case hit of Jon Gray (also from Oklahoma), but the box gave up a few treasures for the Pirates stack. The set has that same playing card finish I've pointed out in past years, and a similar oil painting look as you've seen before.

The white-on-yellow text is a touch hard to read, but the back of the card tells us that Waner made the most of growing up on a farm. He honed his craft learning to hit corncobs with a stick, which apparently makes hitting a nice sphere with a thick bat a walk in the park. Of course, being in the Hall of Fame often leads a team to retire your number, and if you look closely on Marte's card, you'll see Waner's #11 on the facade of the third deck, just to the right of Marte's cap.

2018 Diamond Kings Brown Frame #13 Lloyd Waner

The Pirates also brought Paul's younger brother Lloyd aboard, and they played together throughout the 1930s. Lloyd is also in the Hall of Fame, but didn't have quite the high performance as his older brother. And the Pirates #10 is still in circulation, currently worn by Jordy Mercer.

Diamond Kings yielded a hit for me, balancing out the lack of my preferred team. This is a framed border parallel, the Brown version, which is numbered to just 49 copies. It's most likely a bit more plentiful than a Photographer's Proof in 2018 Stadium Club, but 49 is pretty darn scarce.

I'm sure the Waner family back home in Oklahoma was delighted to have a couple pro ballplayers bringing home the bacon during the 1930s while the topsoil was blowing away in the midst of severe drought.

2018 Diamond Kings #19 Roberto Clemente

Moving a bit further down the Pirates timeline, we come to the great Roberto Clemente, Hall of Famer, MVP, 15-time All-Star, and two-time World Series champion. He's also in the 3,000 hit club with Paul Waner.

As this is an unlicensed set, there can't be any MLB logos, but somehow that's a bit less noticeable on older photos. The blocky yellow "P" is pretty conspicuously absent from Clemente's batting helmet, the kind without ear flaps. But on the Waner cards, It's not clear how much image editing Panini had to do.

2015 Topps Chrome #126 Gregory Polanco

Gregory Polanco makes another appearance, but he's all business this time around, and with a degree more shininess. I don't hear much talk about Topps Chrome anymore, which maybe has something to do with the lack of borders in Topps flagship. But I'll always take a shiny card.

I'm always partial to cards that show special patches on the player's sleeves. I kind of got hooked on that mini collection while hunting for cards for Highly Subjective and Completely Arbitrary. In 2014, the Pirates wore a #4 patch, memorializing Ralph Kiner. Kiner, yet another Hall of Famer, led the NL in home runs for his first seven years. He only played ten seasons, retiring at just 32 due to a back injury. He stayed involved with baseball for the rest of his life, getting into broadcasting in the early 1960s, and he was the voice of the Mets right up until his death in 2014.

2018 Topps #591 Daniel Nava

Game 7 of the NLCS is drawing to a close as I write this, so I'll wrap things up with one for my Coors Field Frankenset, newly released onto the market by Topps this year. This happens to be a zero-year card, because while Daniel Nava is technically part of the Pirates organization, he hasn't appeared in a Major League game with them, let alone one at Coors Field. He's bounced around the big leagues since he left Boston in 2015, and it remains to be seen when his next appearance will be.

That looks like Bud Black in the Rockies dugout, occupying his usual spot on the top step. That would place this card in 2017 when Nava was a Phillie, narrowing this down to early August 2017 in an entirely different uniform.

This has been my most prolific month of blogging since April, and it feels good to be writing again and giving proper thanks to the great members of the Cardsphere. Thanks for sticking around, and enjoy the World Series! I'll be trying to figure out which team I can tolerate more.

The Case Hit Group Break (Part 1: Rockies)

I keep signing up for group breaks, including Nachos Grande's upcoming break, so it's only right that this blog gets its money's worth for all the PayPal transactions I've been doing. Over the summer, Trevor at Bump and Run Football Card Blog ran a break for 2018 Stadium Club, 2018 Topps Series 2, and 2018 Diamond Kings, as well as the usual handful of extras that make it in to many shipments. I had these sitting on my side table for months, and it turns out that I did quite well!

Stadium Club is always a favorite, and I have a blaster sitting on my coffee table that I've yet to open. That's definitely more due to busyness than patience, but I'll get to it someday. If I wait another couple months I might just give myself a nightly Hanukkah gift out of that blaster. You know, because the celebration is for the holy oil lasting seven nights plus one extra night.

I've never run one myself, but it seems to be quite difficult to sell all 30 teams, so most breaks these days seem to be good for two team slots, a selected team and a random team. It should be no surprise which team I selected, and the all-powerful randomizer chose the Pittsburgh Pirates as my second team. I'll be splitting those up into two posts, starting with the team that was most recently swept in the playoffs.

2018 Stadium Club #6 Carlos Gonzalez

This year's Stadium Club design isn't necessarily my favorite. Lots of bloggers haven't liked the lettering of the position being so large, and it is a bit more imposing than the faint outline of the team name. This year's set reminds me a bit of 2006 Upper Deck, but let's be honest, there are only so many things you can do with a minimalist full-bleed design.

Carlos Gonzalez, the Rockies right fielder, can frequently be seen laying out like this to make a catch. I've seen it in person more than once and it's exhilarating to watch. Here, he's doing it on the road, but I can't quite tell which stadium this is. There's an extremely faint outline around the ball, making me wonder if this is an effect of HDR photography. I took a couple photos of my cousin juggling last month, and the HDR software in the iPhone left an outline some distance above the ball itself. It was much more pronounced, so maybe a fancy DSLR and a $4,000 telephoto lens will minimize that effect.

2018 Stadium Club #204 Charlie Blackmon

These come in horizontal alignment, too. We never seem to call it "portrait" or "landscape" in this hobby like we do on our computer screens, just plain old "vertical" and "horizontal".

The photos are pin-sharp, as usual, letting us see pretty much every strand of hair in Charlie Blackmon's beard. And mullet. And even on his forearm. Once you look past that, you can see the well-liked Rockies spring training logo, as well as a prominent bat doughnut as Charlie warms up.

It's pretty difficult to color-code a design like this, but Topps managed to subtly do so on the back. It's a vertical back, and the background is meant to look like you're looking down on the field from the seats in the upper deck. Those seats are color-coded, and they're purple on Rockies cards, yellow on Pirates cards. Those don't actually match the real seats at the ballparks (Coors Field seats are dark green), but it's a clever way to group each team. The upper portion of the back even reminds me of 1993 Fleer Ultra.

2018 Stadium Club Red Foil #290 Nolan Arenado

Colored parallels are still found in Stadium Club, and I ended up with a couple of these. I'm not sure on the relative scarcity of these Red Foils, but they stand out pretty well, maybe a bit more so than in past years. Nolan's uniform number looks ever so slightly odd near the large position letters, but this is a great card which shows the five-time Gold Glover doing what he does best. He might be the best third baseman in the game. "An apparent consensus has been reached" on that. The card says so.

2018 Stadium Club Photographer's Proof #98 Jon Gray

We'll rotate 90 degrees and enhance on this card of Jon Gray. He's had some trouble handling the pressure of the high-leverage games he's appeared in, but I think he'll be a fixture of the Rockies rotation for some time to come. He's certainly good enough to appear in a small-ish set like Stadium Club, which apparently has a new type of parallel, Photographer's Proof.

I honestly had no idea what I had on my hands this whole summer, but this is an amazing pull! It's a 1:2 case hit, or 1:512 packs. It's not serial numbered, but if it's anything like those Members Only parallels, there are probably less than ten copies. A glance at eBay seems to put the print run at just seven.

Design-wise, it seems to be a replacement for the Contact Sheet insert set, using the filmstrip theme on one edge of the card. Trevor kindly put this in a penny sleeve, and I'm amazed at how lucky this pull is! That's why we do group breaks, I guess.

2018 Topps #668 Tyler Anderson

I got shut out of Rockies in the Diamond Kings box, but that's fine. That Gray card will make up for a lot. There were a few Pirates in the box, so at least I got a look at the design. It wasn't advertised up front, but Trevor also added in a blaster of 2018 Topps Series 2, and a few base cards went into my pile. I just finished sorting the factory set, but it's nice to have a few extras here and there.

Tyler Anderson was a regular member of the Rockies' rotation, earning a record of 7-9 this season. I saw him pitch a time or two at Coors this year, and he started NLDS Game 2. He did his best to keep the Rockies in the series, as did most of the pitching, but the offense just didn't get the job done.

I haven't kept up too closely with the 2018 releases. at least not beyond what I see on the blogs. The waterslide set is one I might have a little trouble remembering in a few years.

2017 Topps Bunt Blue #22 Jeff Hoffman

On his 2017 Bunt card, and by extension the Blue parallel, Topps predicted that Jeff Hoffman would "almost certainly" be a member of the Rockies' rotation, but that seems not to be panning out. The key return from the Troy Tulowitzki trade had a rocky six games in the majors during 2018, is currently playing in a High-A league, and didn't make the 40-man roster during September callups. Luckily for the Rockies, they have a few other young stars like Kyle Freeland and German Marquez to hold things down.

Right next to that blaster of Stadium Club, I have an unopened blaster of Topps Big League, the low-end replacement for Bunt. The mobile app is still active, but I haven't kept up with it regularly for a few years. These Blue parallels were nice, though. Sort of a poor man's printing plate. Beyond the headliners of the break itself, it and the rest of these cards were a nice bonus.

2018 Topps Opening Day At The Ballpark #ODB-COR Colorado Rockies

I'm not terribly broken-hearted about the demise of Bunt. But if Opening Day inserts are gone, Topps and I are going to have a problem. They're continually the best in my book, and they certainly have me eagerly awaiting the next home opener.

This 2018 card shows the home opener from 2017, which was Bud Black's first home game with the Rockies. He's facing the field for his first national anthem ceremony at Coors Field, and little did he know that he'd lead the team to a Wild Card spot two years in a row. In fact, that Wild Card game against the Cubs a couple weeks ago was the first Postseason win that Black ever led a team to, despite over a decade of managerial experience, mostly with the Padres. Before that, the last win he was a part of in the Postseason was Game 7 of the 1985 World Series as a member of the Royals. It's amazing that you can spend over thirty years in the sport between Postseason wins.

I'm sure when Matt Holliday rejoined the Rockies this summer, he and Bud Black had a chat about the 2007 Tiebreaker game. Black, you see, was in his first year managing the Padres when Holliday may or may not have touched home plate.

The Rockies rarely begin the season at home, and that will be the case in 2019, too. They'll face the Dodgers on Friday, April 5th, after a road trip against both Florida teams. They'll be the first to see the new Marlins logo, rumored to debut next month. It's probably best they start on the road, as early spring snowstorms are quite common around here. And the city has embraced the Friday afternoon party we can always count on.

1994 Topps Gold #186 Marcus Moore

Following Mike Munoz in the Obscure Rockies Relief Pitchers category (which you used to actually find in a base set) is Marcus Moore, who appeared in 56 games as a Rockie during their Mile High Stadium years. He was traded to the Reds in 1995, but didn't suit up for them until '96. He earned two saves in 23 games for Cincinnati, then that was it for his career.

I remember the name, and I remember this card, as I remember most from 1994 Topps. I assume we have decided to call it "The Home Plate Set", but it will always be my first factory set to me. This is probably a photo from spring training, as the Rockies never wore black jerseys during the regular season for many years. Ballplayers still wore stirrups back then, and you can spot a little "CR" logo on his left ankle.

And of course, it's a Topps Gold parallel, perhaps my favorite parallel set of all time.

1994 Pacific #191 Pedro Castellano

How about another Rockie I've never shown on the blog before? We'll turn to Pacific for this one, that quirky brand which existed in that weird space between being an oddball and a major producer. Appropriately for this Venezuelan utility player, part of this card is in Spanish, as Pacific frequently used on their cards. Sort of a Latin American equivalent of O-Pee-Chee.

Pacific used gold foil for this 1994 set, which pretty much everyone was doing at the time. Pacific also took a shot at making their own version of the Topps Rookie Cup, a rather flat-looking trophy in the lower right. He's listed as a "1994 Rookie", but didn't actually play during the 1994 season. His career spanned 51 games from 1993-1996, mostly during that inaugural year.

1994 Pacific #205 Armando Reynoso

Armando Reynoso, a member of the Mexican Baseball Hall of Fame, had a card in the same 1994 Pacific set. Mr. Pickoff is in the legendary Wrigley Field on this card, and you can just make out the basket below the foul pole. Reynoso pitched in the Windy City twice in 1993, but judging by the ivy, it looks more like early spring than mid summer, so I will date this one to May 5th, 1993, Cinco de Mayo. Reynoso took the loss in a quick afternoon game, just two hours and eighteen minutes.

I've seen this set numerous times, but I only now noticed the marble-like color-coded design at the bottom, very similar to what Score Select looked like in 1995. 1993 Fleer Ultra had that look too, but Pacific was way more of an innovator than anyone gives them credit for.

1994 Pacific Silver Prisms #20 Andres Galarraga

Our final card was printed before the advent of serial numbers or a set label on the back, but from what I've read, there was a print run of 8,000 cards. Quite scarce for 1994. The Big Cat appears before a triangular Silver Prism background; there is also a circular background variety.

If you flip it over, you'll find a big purple diamond, as well as a few highlights of Galarraga's 1993 campaign, such as his league-leading .370 batting average, totals for Hits, Doubles, and Home Runs, and a mention that he was the 1993 NL Comeback Player of the Year. It's not an award that has nearly as much prestige as the Rookie of the Year, but apparently it's been awarded in each league since 1965. Galarraga was the only Rockie to earn it until Greg Holland did so last year.

Trevor did an awesome job for me on this break! I feel quite bad that it's taken so long for me to finally put up a post, and I haven't even gotten to the Pirates yet. No case hits in there, but we will get a look at some old-time Hall of Famers and that 2018 Diamond Kings set.

The Trading Post #98: Bump and Run Football Card Blog

Before the season started, the illustrious Night Owl sent an insert card from 1996 Fleer Ultra's Rising Stars set. Despite having a few in my collection already, it had somehow escaped my attention that Coors Field was the featured stadium throughout the set.

Fortunately, Trevor from Bump and Run Football Card Blog was watching out for me, offering a few more cards and getting me about halfway to completing the 10-card set. I still need to get a return package out to Trevor, but I figured today would be a good day for a post, since I'm attending my first baseball game of 2017 tonight.

1996 Fleer Ultra Rising Stars #8 Hideo Nomo

The Dodgers are in town this weekend, so who better to kick off this post than Hideo Nomo, the then-Dodger who pitched the first, and so far only no-hitter in Coors Field history. That happened to occur in 1996, the exact year of this card. I was not present for that game, but this card is a coincidental memento of that event, sort of an accidental Topps Now card.

The photo of "The Tornado", so called because of his windup, even appears to be from 1996, according to the commemorative patch on his left sleeve. That patch is for the team's 35th Anniversary of playing in Dodger Stadium, where they started in 1962. Of course, the Dodgers famously moved to the West Coast for the 1959 season, forcing them to play in Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum for a few seasons until their shiny new park could be built, which is now the third-oldest stadium in the Majors.

Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, while woefully inadequate as a properly-sized baseball park, is getting lots of renewed interest as L.A. bids for the 2024 Summer Olympics, a city that is sure to reuse the iconic stadium that was opened in 1923 if they are selected over Paris, the only remaining candidate. Several other cities have withdrawn their candidacy in response to financial pressures and voter objections, reminding us of the tremendous costs of hosting such an event.

And they're not just financial costs. As we saw in Rio, there are plenty of societal costs, especially for those living on the land where the facilities will be built. And concerns about the environmental impact are partly what led Denver to turn down the 1976 Winter Olympics, the only city ever to do so.

1996 Fleer Ultra Rising Stars Gold Medallion #4 Cliff Floyd

That fact is something that Montreal knows better than most. Olympic Stadium, where the Montreal Expos played between 1977 through their departure after the 2004 season, was plagued with cost overruns and structural problems throughout their tenure. The stadium was built for the 1976 Summer Olympics, but wasn't fully paid off until 2006. Now the city doesn't even have an MLB team to show for it, thanks to a variety of reasons.

Cliff Floyd never became the star he was expected to be, only getting one All-Star selection throughout his 17-year journeyman career. But he was a good candidate for this insert set, and Trevor not only sent the base card, but also the Gold Medallion Edition parallel, which you see here. This parallel just gets a tiny bit of extra silver foil around the logo, quite a bit different from Gold Medallion parallels found in the main set.

1996 Fleer Ultra Gold Medallion #459 Eric Davis

Maybe Fleer used so much gold foil printing those up that they had none left over for a little 10-card insert set. But I'm a little surprised they didn't even emboss Floyd's card, as they did with other insert sets in the 1996 Ultra set.

I'll give your eyes a minute to recover before we move on.

1996 Ultra Rising Stars #6 Chipper Jones

There are several players found in this set that could be part of the mythical "Hall of the Very Good", like Jim Edmonds, Ryan Klesko, Nomo, and maybe Manny Ramirez. But Chipper Jones is the only one of the ten that's a sure-fire bet to be voted in to the real Hall when he's eligible next year. As the card mentions, he was runner-up for 1995 NL Rookie of the Year, losing out to set-mate Hideo Nomo, the fourth of five straight Dodgers to win the award. But Chipper, whose stellar career ended with a frustrating loss in the first-ever NL Wild Card game, did indeed become a future MVP candidate as this card predicted, even winning it in 1999.

Jones' career mostly overlapped with the Braves' residence at Turner Field, one of the key venues built for the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. Of course, the Braves moved to the new SunTrust Park for 2017, making Turner Field one of the shortest-lived MLB ballparks in recent memory.

Like many Braves of the era, Jones (or C. Jones, when Andruw was his teammate) was a thorn in the Rockies' side, and many fans in the Rockpile, the center-field bleacher section where this Coors Field photo was taken, got a distant view of him at the plate. I only saw Chipper in person once, on April 28th, 2007. Jones went 1-4 with 2 RBIs and a walk that day, behind a strong pitching performance by John Smoltz.

I remember having awesome seats for that game, right behind the visitors' dugout, so close you could hear the Velcro rip when players removed their batting gloves. That game also happened less than 24 hours before Troy Tulowitzki turned an incredibly rare feat, an unassisted triple play, one that Chipper himself lined into while hitting from the left side.

2014 Topps Green #117 Anibal Sanchez / Bartolo Colon / Hisashi Iwakuma LL

That about does it for the Rising Stars cards, but Trevor wasn't done there. I mentioned that I like green cards, so he found a couple for that preference of mine. This league leader card from 2014 Topps is obviously one of the green-bordered parallels, a shade that clashes slightly with Bartolo Colon's Athletics jersey. Anibal Sanchez took the top spot that year with an ERA mark of 2.57, a player who threw a no-hitter in 2006 that couldn't have come at a worse time for my fantasy baseball championship run. Hishashi Iwakuma rounds out the top three, while ex-Rockie Ubaldo Jimenez squeaked his way into the top-10 as a Cleveland Indian.

Three photos is a lot to squeeze onto a card to begin with, but somehow the green border makes it feel more crowded. It makes me appreciate the single-photo League Leader cards that Topps is using this year.

1994 Stadium Club Team #116 Willie Blair

The green theme carries on with this one of pitcher Willie Blair, and it's from an infrequently-seen team set that Stadium Club put out in the early 1990s. As in 1993, only a handful of teams were represented in this set, and while I do run across the Rockies from time to time in the Denver area, finding other teams is surprisingly difficult. In case your chosen team appears in this set, keep an eye out for First Day Issue parallels. At the end of the day, this is still Stadium Club.

2006 Fleer Ultra #147 Matt Holliday

Fleer and their family of brands found themselves under the ownership of Upper Deck in 2006. They wouldn't have much longer to go, but they did put out this Fleer Ultra set, keeping the full-bleed design going for a little while longer. A simple band of silver foil with a little upside-down crown on it gives us the player, position, and team, along with a redundant but more stylish printing of the player's last name above that.

Holliday is hitting in Wrigley Field here, as we can see Cubs catcher Michael Barrett behind the plate and wearing a hockey-style mask. You can even barely make out the bear logo on the top of his helmet. I wasn't that up-to-date on my decade-ago Cubs catchers, so I had to break out the magnifying glass for this one. In that same area, we can see that Holliday, uniform #5, is using a bat labeled #19. This was way before Charlie Blackmon, so that bat belongs to Ryan Spilborghs, currently part of the Rockies' on-air TV broadcast crew.

2017 Topps Gypsy Queen Autographs #GQA-RT Raimel Tapia (AU)

The "hit" of this trade package is an on-card autograph of Raimel Tapia, one of the Rockies' top prospects. In fact, Tapia was just called back up to the Majors yesterday, so he might even play a bit tonight. Trevor put this one in an Ultra-Pro penny sleeve, easily the highest-quality sleeve I've ever seen. It's thick, almost like that sealed Mickey Mantle card that Topps put in their 1996 Factory Sets, if you ever ran across one of those. But more than that, it even has a little Ultra-Pro hologram on the back in the lower left corner. I might have to pick up a few of these for my higher-end cards.

I wasn't really aware that 2017 Gypsy Queen was even out yet, as it's not something I tend to seek out until it hits the discount boxes. But it's a nice card for the autograph collection, and I hope it will become a conversation piece if Tapia lives up to his potential.

I'm awarding extra bonus points to this card for its obvious location inside Coors Field, with a great, if a bit blurry, shot of the manually-operated out-of-town scoreboard in right field. It's blurry, but I think there's just enough information on the Giants/Cubs matchup we see under Tapia's right arm to date this card to September 4th, 2016. Those white numbers on the right side of the scoreboard signify the current pitcher's uniform number. 47 on the Giants facing 41 on the Cubs translates to Cueto facing Lackey, in Chicago.

Tapia got on base a few times that day, and advanced to third twice when DJ LeMahieu was at the plate, once in the first after being picked off but advancing to third on the pitcher's throwing error, and again in the 5th when DJ hit a long fly ball. Hard to say which of those two scenarios this is, but I'm leaning toward the 5th inning, since it seems like Tapia has slightly less a sense of urgency than if he had just escaped being thrown out.

2012 Absolute #44 Demaryius Thomas

With Trevor running primarily a football card blog, it should come as no surprise that a few Broncos made it into the envelope. Demaryius Thomas, one of the Broncos star wide receivers, looks like he just made a catch while playing against the Minnesota Vikings. Panini was resurrecting Donruss brands way back in 2012, using the Absolute set for this card, along with a little inspiration from Upper Deck thanks to the copper foil.

I never played football as a kid, but I've watched enough to know that the way DT is holding the ball out in midair like that is just asking for a fumble, especially since it looks like he's about to block an incoming Viking on his right.

Football cards are significantly easier to date than baseball cards. You know the year the card was printed, you can usually make a good guess as to whether it's a home or away game based on the jersey, and as long as there's some indication of who the opponent is, that's pretty much all you need.

This photo was taken on December 4th, 2011, as the Broncos were visiting the Vikings. Thomas had 4 catches for 144 yards, on the way to a 35-32 win. The Broncos won it with a field goal as time expired, which was pretty typical of the way the Broncos won games in the Tim Tebow days.

2016 Prestige Xtra Points Green #63 Von Miller

This is a road game, as the Broncos typically wear the all-white uniforms away from Denver. I can't determine the opponent, but that's okay, as the shiny green foil more than makes up for a bit of ambiguity. The front of the card also has a rainbow finish, and the rest of the background behind Miller fades into the darkness a little bit.

Miller, the Broncos' star outside linebacker, has been racking up sacks for several seasons, amassing 73.5 since beginning his career in 2011. No Bronco has ever been on the cover of a Madden video game, but Miller was briefly the "cover athlete" for the iOS/Android mobile version of the game. Whether he was on the splash screen or the icon, I don't know. But that alone sets him apart as a Bronco. He's sure to become a Ring of Famer when all is said and done, and his MVP award earned during Super Bowl 50 is only a small part of that.

So that catches me up on trade packages, but I still have plenty of birthday gifts and card show purchases still waiting their turn. Thanks again to Trevor, and here's hoping the Rockies keep up the great season so we're not waiting for the Broncos by the time August rolls around.