I got that Tork power

 It’s not often that us collectors pull cards of our favorite team or players nowdays, unless you are a Yankee$ or Padre$ fan. It's even rarer when you kind of go on a good streak of having a run of like 3 or 4 blasters or packs where your favorite team ends up being one of the ones with the most cards. When something like that happens, it's only natural to want to brag post about it, so that's what I'm gonna do.

A few weeks ago, I got a value box of 2022 Topps Chrome. I took a picture of the reciept, the box, and e-mailed everything to Topps in order to get in the drawing for the Silver Pack. A week or so later, I got a package from Topps containing a 2022 Topps Chrome Spencer Torkelson refractor. A nice card of a guy on my favorite team who I hope will turn into a stud. 

A week or so after that, my wife got me a blaster of 2022 Topps Heritage High Number, and I pulled a few Tigers, including another Torkelson card. With the Rays and Tigers being tied as my favorite teams, I was pretty stoked. 

Then this past weekend, while at Target, my wife got me another blaster of Heritage and a hanging pack of 2022 Donruss Optic. I got a couple of Tigers in the Heritage box, including another Torkelson, and the Optic pack contained not only the Torkelson rookie from that set, but a Green parallel of the hobby golden boy of the present, Julio Rodriguez.  

Needless to say, I have been pretty stoked with the past 2-3 times I've opened cards (I also got a few Rays in each!), and I almost don't want to open any 2023 products and jinx my luck. 

While I'm not actively collecting Torkelson, I have acquired a bunch of his cards just being a Tigers fan, and I figured I would get them out and post them for the heck of it. 

His Bowman rookie was from a COMC purchase a while back.  I got the Leaf one from one of the card shops near me. The 2020 Topps is a custom that I made and printed out shortly after the Tigers drafted him. The jersey card is from the same COMC order. The Topps ones are a little confusing. The first one only comes in the complete set. The second base card is from Topps Update, and the last one is of course, the Rookie Debut card. Lastly are the Refractor that Topps sent me, and the 2 Heritage High Numbers (one will be going off to Ben, a Tigers fan I've been working on building a trade stack for). 

I finished putting my Phillies Topps cards into TCDB today. I was really hoping to have a few more teams done by now, but I ended up taking our Christmas tree down finally yesterday afternoon, and today I could've probably done another team (next up is the Pirates), but I think I nodded off once or twice, and had MLB Network on and got distracted a little. Maybe I'll get the Pirates in tomorrow after work. Just have the Pirates, Cardinals, Padre$, Giants, and Nationals to log, and the NL Topps cards will be entered into the site. I still haven't come across the missing 1993 Topps Traded cards, but I think after everything is entered, I will go through the 700 ct boxes I have in a few different areas of my card space and just make sure they didn't slip through the cracks and land amongst any doubles in them. 

We've been planning our vacation this year, and after driving across the US the last few years (and seeing Wrigley Field, Comerica Park, and Minute Maid Park), we decided to maybe do a cruise this year. We still might get to see a game, as we'll either go in March during Spring Training and could see a game in one of the southern cities on the way down, or we would go in the summer and could probably hit up a Marlins game if we picked the right week. If not, we'll still have the Opening Day Rays game (where I might get to see Torkelson) and that should be a great experience. I'd just like to cross another park off of our list, and Miami would do it. 

Lastly, I've been working on customs a little bit, just to kind of have something to post of customs since that has been a driving force of this blog (and will continue to be). I am close to finishing all of the missing Rockies cards from the 1996 Topps set, and once I finish them, I'll probably post them and write a little bit about the 1995 team that played the Braves in the playoffs. 

Thanks for checking out my latest post.

-Jeremy