Catching Up with Mark Kaz

I recently rekindled the back-and-forth PWE trades with my longtime friend Mark Kaz, formerly of the blog This Way to the Clubhouse.  Life and work (some good, some not so good) have been conspiring to keep me from posting the contents of Mark's last PWE, but today provided a sign that it's time to get off my butt and get this posted.  The sign?  Yet another PWE in my mailbox.  From Mark.

So, with that being the case let's look at the contents of what is now the penultimate envelope from Mark!

Coming out strong with a brand new addition to my ever-growing Xander Bogaerts collection!  A new Xander card pretty much makes any package a winner, but even more so if the card is an obnoxiously shiny one like this fine example from last year's Bowman Platinum set (an Ice parallel if you're curious).  Xander just moved up another spot on the Red Sox all-time hit list, which means another "Bogaerts Tracker 2018" post coming here soon.

With no offense to Mark in the least, here's a much less exciting card from 2009 TriStar Prospects Plus.  While I'm grateful for any new card I receive in trade, sets like this one are the bane of the team collector's existence.  I don't mind saying this because I'm positive that Mark, being the Mets super-collector that he is, can relate!

Because of the time that I was away from collecting during high school, college and beyond, I almost completely missed out on Pacific as a brand.  That makes getting cards like this one in trade extra nice.  Very cool Dirt Dog RC here, with the portrait photo inset within the baseball printed on a clear acetate-type material.

No, I didn't forget to size this scan correctly, what you're looking at here is a Topps Mini card.  I never seem to run across these in the wild (I want to say they're an online exclusive or something?), so I'm pleased Mark was willing to shoot this one over to me.

Here's a unique one, from a set so high-end the base cards are serial-numbered!  I guess Mark has a fancy side!  I feel bad for the poor sap who paid triple digits to bust a box of this stuff ten years ago, but will happily welcome this card to my Red Sox collection now.

All of the cards that Mark included in this latest batch were great, but there's something extra significant about landing a plain old average, everyday base card from a Topps flagship set that you were missing as a team collector.  Love it.

I went through a brief phase in 2011/2012 where I was accumulating as many Adrain-Gonzalez-as-a-Red-Sox cards as I could get my hands on.  Somehow I never acquired this one though, a Game Changers insert from 2012 Finest.

What I said before about Pacific applies here as well.  There's not much going on design-wise on their 2000 flagship release here, but if you're from the Upper Deck school of "photography trumps design" there's a lot to like here.

We'll close it out with what might be my favorite card from this grouping.  How can you go wrong with a card of arguably the hottest player in the game (at least before he landed on the 10-day DL) playing ping pong?!?!  Answer...you can't!

Mark, thanks so much for the solid injection of Red Sox, and I promise it won't take me as long to thank you for the batch that showed up today!