Trade with A Cracked Bat

A few weeks ago, I reached out to Julie from A Cracked Bat about getting a trade going. I found a bunch of  '95 Topps Cyberstats cards to add to Julie's collection, and she hooked me up with a smattering of Tigers and Rays. 

The oldest card of the package was a '65 Topps George Thomas. I've had the '75 Topps Kaline Highlights card before, but got it autographed and then I sold it with a bunch of my autographed cards about 5 years ago. Same thing happened with the '81 Donruss Dan Petry and '81 Topps Alan Trammell. I think I might be getting close to a few of these early '80's sets. 

Julie hit a bunch of cards that I got signed and then ended up selling, including the '82 Donruss Steve Kemp, '88 Topps Jim Walewander, and '89 Topps Pat Sheridan. I love the Coke Tigers cards. Never even knew this set existed. 

The next page hits a bunch of '90's needs. I'm probably close to finishing the '94 Pinnacle set now. My Travis Fryman, Mickey Tettleton, and Tony Clark collections got a big boost in this trade, as you can see on this picture and on the next. 

I have always kind of wanted the '96 Fleer Tony Clark insert. I remember seeing it as the photo for the insert set in Beckett, so I thought it was worth a lot. The '98 Topps Chrome Rookie Class Juan Encarnacion is a refractor, and it looks amazing. The '99 Juan Gone is a base card, and I pulled a Gems subset? card of him from a pack, so those will look nice together. The '03 Total Tim Kalita brings back memories. I met him a few times in Spring Traning, and he always signed for the fans.

The Cameron Maybin '07 Bowman card would've been hot when it first came out. I remember everyone was talking about him when he got drafted. I got that '10 Fu Te Ni card signed when he was in Spring Traning with Detroit, and he signed it in the characters of his native language, and it looked pretty cool. Wish I would've saved it, but I'm happy to have the unsigned card back. The bottom has some really cool shiny cards, with the Finest Castellanos die cut being my favorite. 

I got my first V-Mart relic, as well as a few shiny parallels from some newer Topps sets. 

The early Rays part of my collection got some nice new cards, including some '98 Leaf Rookies & Stars set. I remember everyone was after the JD Drew rookie from that set, and the rookies were SPs. I'm happy to have some cards from that set now. I hadn't even had a card from '01 Topps Gallery, and now I have 3. 

Pete LaForest was a nice guy. I've met him a few times, and have a lineup card signed by him from a game where he hit a walkoff 2B in the 11th Inning. Julie sent me a '10 Bowman Platinum Nick Barnese autograph, which is cool. I love how some of these Bowman Platinum cards/parallels look, and they are even nicer autographed. 

There are some nice relics in this photo, one from Jeremy Hellickson, and 2 from Evan Longoria. One is grey, and the other is white. I actually got another one of these in a trade, and I'd be happy if you sent me even more. This set doesn't have a print run, but I would love to see how many of this card's production I could get. The Jose DeLeon is a National parallel, and is very shiny. 

I haven't purchased a pack of Gypsy Queen in almost 10 years, and thanks to some great traders, I think I'm close to having the '18 set. Picked up a trio of Topps Fire from '18, and a Ray from '20 that I didn't have, a Turkey Red insert of Charlie Morton. Julie helped my Cecil Fielder collection with a '91 Leaf, '93 Triple Play League Leaders. 

More Fielder cards, including 2 '95 SP Championship Series cards. Julie hooked my up with 2 Aubrey Huff and Brandon Inge cards, as well as 2 Allen & Ginter Ben Zobrist's. 

One of the coolest things about the package Julie sent was how she packaged it. She included 4 different '89 Topps packs to keep them from getting damaged. I immediately opened them, and pulled 2 rookie cards of Hall of Famers, John Smoltz and Craig Biggio. Also got a rookie of Sandy Alomar, Jr., and a sunset card of Ron Guidry. 

That's the rest of them. Definitely some keepers, as I had a complete set, but got a ton of cards autographed that were sold, so many of these will fill in holes in the set. Thanks for the great trade, Julie.

In other news, I have completed every missing player checklist. 1951-2019 Topps (including Traded/Update sets from every year). I have also went over the 1995 Topps set and included every replacement player (putting the main set checklist at almost 2800 cards). My next project will be to redo my wantlist, going through my Rays/Tigers binders and updating my list to reflect cards I need, and adding number/names to the list. I hope it will simplify things for anyone trading with me. After that, I'll update my Favorite Player pages and hopefully get everything up-to-date.

I also have a little work to do, but after it is finished, I will have 2 new posts ready. The first one will be a post of every sunset card (customs included). I will add the link to the sidebar after I get that post up. The other one will be an attempt to list each time that Topps issued 2 different cards of the same player in the same uniform in the same calendar-year set (eg. 2 2007 Topps Gary Sheffield Tigers cards, 2 2000 Topps Mike Lowell Marlins cards). Just a kind of screw-you-for-being lazy-Topps post. Stay tuned for those in the future.
Thanks for checking out my latest post.
-Jeremy