A Swap with Infield Fly Adam

A few weeks back, I completed a swap with Adam from InfieldFly Rule… well, I kinda completed it – I mixed up stacks and sent him some Indians cards, while his Rockies made their way to Ohio (everyone is home safe and sound now, though). I was only mildly familiar with his blog before the trade, but it’s a very good read and has introduced me to cards I had no idea existed.

Adam had recently acquired a big ol’ box-o-Topps base and had some want list stuff for me, as well as some of my hometown nine. Let’s take a look…

The bundle started with a nice stack of Brewers from my youth.

Here is one that I didn’t have…

These conflicting logo-photo cards have always been a bit confounding to me. To me, this is a Rockies card. But, Dante is shown in his Brewers blue. Does this make it a bit of a hybrid? Would it be enough for an obsessive team collector to include in their binders? And what if it still had a Brewers logo, but just a notice about the trade? There are a number of cards like this in 1993 Fleer… Brewers by photo and in-design graphics, but with a plain text notice of a team change. And then there are those cards (1981 Donruss, for example), that note team changes in the biography on the back. There need to be some hard and fast rules for these, I think.

And here’s a Robin Yount from the Bunt series. Always good to get a new Robin.

A big part of the box was 1996 Topps. At 440 cards, it’s the smallest base set since 1953. The choice card of those Adam mailed me was this Todd Helton RC (a very generous throw-in from a Rockies fan).

There is a bit of a muff on the foil in his name… hard to tell in the image, but it looks like they stamped foil that had already been stamped (looks like ‘Davis’ or something). I guess this makes it an eBay 1 of 1. I’ll sell it for $800 firm, otherwise it’s going into the binder.

I actually kinda dig the 1996 set. It’s dated, sure, but the photography is crisp and the look is clean.

And you get entirely un-ironic write-ups like this one about Brewers could-have-been ace Cal Eldred.

Or this odd story about Reggie Sanders. “The only bad thing about his season was when he almost suffocated himself!”

There was also a decent stack of 2004 Topps.

I had always considered this to be an underwhelming set. I love the little figure and uniform number in the corner… but I hate the silver foil, the big team name at the top and the thick border on the photo. This could have been a set defined by that awesome corner graphic, but they tried to do too much and cluttered the very nice photography with all that extra garbage.

But MY GOD, they had unique designs for the subset cards. This is constantly my biggest complaint about new Topps sets. They dream up a million designs for insert sets that no one wants, but make EVERY card in the base look the same. Just look at what could be….

What a great-looking leaders card!

Sporting News All-Stars! With a cameo from Brewer Scott Podsednik!

FISH WIN WORLD SERIES! A beauty!

And more than just a line score and two sentences on the back! This is what happens when you don’t phone it in, Topps.

I also got some 2007s, a design I always thought was underrated.

And some ‘09s, which look like crap and waste a lot of cool photography with awful framing. Like this one of the most annoying person in baseball, Nick Swisher. How cool would this look as a horizontal card?

Anyway, thanks to Adam for the swap. I hope you enjoy the Rockies I sent you… it’ll give you something to sort through as you sweat out the end of the season with my Brewers nipping at the Rox’s heels:)