COMC Badge and Pages.

       Pitchers and catchers report today! Simply one of the best days of the year and not a moment too soon.  The weather has been rainy and dreary and football is over so the dead of winter is at hand.  But nothing combats and destroys the wintry blues like pitchers and catchers reporting.  A close second is going to the mailbox and seeing a big ass box from COMC.com full of all the weird shit that site has to offer. Sticking with the sorting theme from last post, here you see the layout of the grid of goodness that going through a box of 206 cards that were all chosen for their specific nature to my collecting needs.  Each pile is a player collection or a photo collection or a theme collection or a sport collection.  I cannot think of a better way to spend my afternoon where my clothes stay on (not that I am above sorting cards in the nude).

The packing list covers up my nephew's blocks, which I was too lazy to remove from the coffee table.

There is far too much here to highlight each card so let's stay on message and look at the pages that were created and/or completed from this batch. 

Here is a page of 2002 Topps Ten that was completed with the acquisition of a Rangers-clad A-Rod card.  I found a small vein of these cards in an old shoebox and a moment of weakness made me find a few others and when I got to 8 I dejectedly decided it needed a ninth for a page.

Not this is a terrible set in and of itself, mind you.  It's just, well, boring.  It's like one big league leaders subset and the design is underwhelming. It is also an orphan set in that they only did it one year, though I think they did basketball the same way in 2002 as well.  Sports card companies just couldn't help themselves at the turn of the century and just cranked out whatever they felt like it.  Not every page is a winner.

Oh, but then there's this one, the diametric opposite of that Topps Ten page.  These are the 2016 Topps Bunt Program cards. 

I can't say I quite understand the Bunt online cards but I do like their physical manifestation.  They are everything a kid-centric set should be: bright, bold, colorful, and imaginative. These inserts have big logos, a fun baseball theme, faux wear, and good backs (which I neglected to scan ¯\_(ツ)_/¯).   I got the Papi in a lot I got on Listia and decided to find him 8 buddies to make a page.  This was a joyous one to put together. These Bunt cards are everything Opening Day isn't (and that's a good thing).

And to complete a bizarre trio, here is a page of the 1991 Pepsi Flavor of Baseball Superstar cards. 

I am not a big Pepsi drinker in the first place but I never knew these cards existed until one day recently I was looking for Dwight Gooden cards and found his (gloriously bad) version from this set (click on that, it looks like he's pitching in a rec league).  They are everything you want in an oddball food issue.  They have a gaudy product logo, a dense and inexplicable title, no official MLB logos, poor photos, poorer cropping, and a derivative design reminiscent of one of the most terrible over-produced sets of all time.  And as a topper, due to what I can only imagine was crappy cutting, they are all a little wider than 2.5 inches so they barely fit in a standard page (I had to look for one that was a tad bigger, owing to Ultra Pro's sometimes awful quality control).   This page is like good camp, it couldn't be planned for, it just had to exist. 

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And as a total non-sequitur, I recently earned my red founders badge on COMC.com doing their infamous challenge. 

I doubt many of you are impressed but if there is anyone anywhere that I could brag to and get a positive response from this information, it would be on a baseball card blog.  Most people given this fact would tilt their head at me and stare like a confused dog.  All it really means is I need to sleep better and/or leave the house more.