it's A Small World

 Anyone that has done much trading amongst other blogs knows about a small town in upstate New York called Watertown.  When I started the blog in 2008 one of the first places I sent cards was Watertown and I have been sending them there periodically ever since.  Fast forward a few years and someone I knew got married to a girl in North Carolina and a couple years later decided to move to his bride's hometown, Watertown.  The total number of people I knew in the state of New York was two and they both happen to live in the same town of 13,000.  This week I completed a transaction on Facebook with a guy named Matt and this showed up.

There is that city again, small world?   

First off some Pedro cards from 1998.  My late 90s and early 00s want list are filled with regular base Pedro cards I need.

90s and 00 Nomar cards are the same way.  I have a theory for this.  The hobby went into a lull in the late 90s.  At that time tons of people collected Nomar and Pedro; even if they didn't outright collect them they wouldn't have been thrown in with the commons they were sequestrated with "the good cards" even if they were base cards. My theory is a bunch of people stopped collecting cards in this time period and just put them away in a closet/basement.  All those Pedro and Nomar cards are just sitting around waiting to be let back out into the collecting world.

Mo Vaugh is a little like that also but not nearly to the same extent.  I see Mo cards a whole lot more often than I do Pedro or Nomar.  That Donruss Preferred Mo is one of those annoying SP cards tacked onto the tail end of a set.  

It wasn't just 90s cards I picked up from Matt I also got some 2020s stuff including this Donruss Unleashed Mayer card that looks WAY better in hand than it scanned.  

Most of what I got was Panini cards.  Panini seems to make more parallels than Topps and a lot of what I got was parallels. I got lot of base too though.  When I started just outright buying team sets a few years ago I quickly noticed that there are not a lot of people selling team sets for panini products.  I am not sure why that is.  Maybe it is the no logos or maybe Panini buyers are more about the inserts and parallels and the base cards are deemed useless.

This card sure is different today than it was a week ago.  The best batter on the team is now on the Giants.  Heart of the City to persona non grata just like that.  To me it feels like a huge mistake to trade of Devers but I've got my fingers crossed it can turn out like the Nomar trade of 2004.  This card is another card that looks totally different in hand.  I would go as far as to say this is one of the very best looking cards, if not the best looking card, I have seen put out in many years.  It is a refractor and the skyline and water just pop perfectly.  

Thanks for the cards Matt and if anyone else runs into him he gets a recommendation as a good seller from me.