A Little Bit of Everything

I couldn't seem to find even five minutes to post this week, and I'm way behind on thanking a few generous folks, as well as sending out numerous trade packages.  While I work on some of these things today, here for your enjoyment is a random smattering of cards that have joined my collection from all over the globe:

Seemed like an appropriate time to post this card from the fantastic 1960 A & BC Gum soccer set, given that I watched the Newcastle/Aston Villa draw earlier this morning.  I've shown some cards from this set before, but Jimmy here is one of my newer acquisitions.  He looks to me like he could be a cast member from The Sopranos (both in look and in name).

Scoular is actually the first card on the checklist, which is kind of cool.  There were two 42-card series that made up the 84-card set.  I believe the second series cards are more rare, but in my experience these are extremely difficult to come by, period.  This particular card crossed the Atlantic from England to join my collection.

This awesome piece of cardboard was sent to me recently by my friend Marc B.  I don't believe he has a blog I can link to, but he lives in my neck of the woods and we traded some cards last year.  He reached out to me a while back and let me know that he wanted to send some cards my way.  I had no idea what was coming, and did he ever shock me! 

What Marc sent was easily one of the largest, and most thoughtful, packages of cards I have received in the nearly 7 years I've been writing this blog.  I will have several posts devoted to the contents as soon as I get through the enormous backlog of scanning, but this beauty featuring two of the top speedsters of the '80s is a good preview of what's to come.

Here's a card I picked up in my last trip to the hobby shop, from a 6-for-a-dollar hockey bin.  Bowman is arguably the best coach in the history of the game, and since coaches sadly don't get much love in this hobby I've got precious few of Scotty here.

During that same trip I took Glen Hobbie here home with me.  It cost me just a dime, which seems unbelievable until you look at the back:

This Zdeno Chara card hails from 2003-04, before his time with the Bruins.  This was a time when Topps actually had a hockey card license.  I wish that were the case today.  I don't like Upper Deck having an exclusive license for NHL hockey cards anymore than I do Topps being the only game in town on the baseball side of things.

Marc B isn't the only person I owe a thank you post to.  A couple weeks back Jared of Catching Up with Collecting contacted me and sent me a nice bubble mailer of Red Sox cards.  Jared's blog is very enjoyable, if you haven't had a chance to check it out yet I highly recommend adding it to your reading list.  Check out this great post as an example.

Anyway, I needed the majority of what Jared sent over, and I'll be showing off those goods in due time, but here's a preview in the form of my very first Ted Williams card!

A couple posts back I showed the Orange Refractor of Will Middlebrooks' 2013 Topps Chrome card, here's the Purple Refractor.  I love the photo on this one so I'm trying to pick up as many versions of the card as I can.

Finally, here's an oddball that's approaching 50 years old now!  The Red Sox were one of a couple of teams that Topps issued sticker sets for in 1967.  I never had any of these until recently when I won a small lot of them that broke down in price to just a few bucks each.  Dalton was your standard utility infielder/pinch hitter, but had an amazing year and World Series in the "Impossible Dream" 1967 season.

That's it for today, I'm off to sort out some trade packages...