A couple PWEs

A quick round-up of a couple recent small maildays. As the card supply dries up, there’s less stuff out there in everyone’s collections that needs to be redistributed.

The first mailday was a couple of cards from Andrew who found a bunch of cards on the sidewalk one day and recognized that one of them was a Stanford guy. This is a little beat up but still a lot of fun to add to the album. I didn’t yet have a Jim Plunkett card either so it was good to take care of that as well.

The second mailday came from The Shlabotnik Report (@Shlabotnik_Rpt) and contained a Giants team set of 1990 Topps Mini Leaders. I always liked these cards since they were similar to the base Topps cards but featured gloss coatings and white paper. The mini size was also a lot of fun. While the Giants had no cards in the 1986 set, by the time the run ended they were up to six league leaders.

There were a half-dozen other Giants cards in the envelope. Four I had but these two were new. Always fun to add some Pro Debut since it’s a set I don’t ever come across. The gold Longoria Big League meanwhile is fun in the exact opposite way since I very much enjoy this set and while I don’t seek the parallels out they’re always welcome.

Now With 49ers

A semi-surprise mailday from Andrew (@earthtopus). He’s a Tampa Bay fan/collector who focuses on the Bucco Bruce Creamsicle era. It’s no surprise that his plain white envelope was a bit of silliness and a bit of trolling.

I’m not a football card collector nor am I really a football fan anymore. But these are all from the era when I did care, sometimes a lot, about the 49ers and it’s fun to be reminded of that part of my youth.

1987 Topps Steve Young. I totally missed “the ”Now With 49ers” when I opened the envelope and thought this was just meant to be an amusing look at Young as a Buccaneer. Seeing that minuscule “traded” stamp makes it even funnier as this is technically now the first card of Young as a 49er. I don’t remember much about him in those first seasons with the Niners beyond never feeling comfortable when he had to sub in for Joe Montana.

But the Young card makes a nice pair, of sorts, with this 1982 Topps card. Andrew just had to remind me of Matt Bahr 15–49ers 13. While that wasn’t how I remembered the game (Roger Craig’s fumble hurt me more), I never really put together that that was also Montana’s last real 49ers game too. Which means it also marks the beginning of the Steve Young era.

LOL this is hilariously dire. I appreciate that Fleer included Tampa in its 1978 set of football action but the dig on the back about “finally broke into the victory column” makes it seem like it took them three seasons to finally win a game instead of the 0–26 record they had before winning their first.

The 1981 Topps Sticker of Doug Williams wasn’t meant to be silly. As with seeing Steve Young as a Buc, it’s also weird to see Williams as one since we’re all used to him with Washington.

What the hell is going on in 1992 ProSet? Is that a fake bottle of rum and a plastic child’s katana standing in for a dagger? And putting a glossy spin on there being two Steve DeBerg eras? Sheezus. I may not like Malcolm Glazer but I’m happy for any Tampa fans who stuck with the team through thin and thin until that Super Bowl.

This spanish-language 1991 ProSet card on the other hand has me jealous that there weren’t any real spanish-language cards for baseball at this time. Googling around lead me into discovering Pacific though so now I have a potential new collecting lead to run down for baseball cards. And I get to indirectly thank Andrew for that rabbit hole.