Delivery Time! Destroying the Want List! (Too Many Verlanders)

My college teaching schedule is now in full swing, so much so that next week is our "early assessments" for any first-year students that we have in our classes.  It's hard to believe that means we are over six weeks through the semester but then when I look at the calendar and see "October" across the top I know it must be correct. 

That is all to simply say that time has been flying by and I've been super busy.  But luckily for me, I have a few other people out there in the blog-o-sphere (do we still call it that?) that seem to have found a way to carve a bit of time out of their busy schedules to send me stuff.  While I do have a couple of trade envelopes waiting to be scanned, I had to jump my most recent envelope to the front of the line.

You see, this is an envelope from Dennis over at Too Many Verlanders and Dennis went above and beyond in terms of destroying my want list.  Our trade actually goes back quite a ways to when Dennis requested a bunch of cards that I had listed as trade bait including a Cal Ripken, Jr. card that I almost didn't trade away but eventually did decide to send to him.  

Well, I'm glad I did end up trading that card (along with all the others) because Dennis more than returned the favor with a nice selection of cards across a number of different sets that I'm working on.  Since the vast majority of what Dennis sent me actually completes sets I'm working on, I'll be showing off quite a few cards!

1992 Upper Deck

Ted Williams Baseball Heroes

This was the final card I needed from the '92 Upper Deck Ted Williams Baseball Heroes insert set.  It's amazing how often I get down to needing only one or two cards from a set and then completely stall out.  Luckily for me, great people like Dennis exist and occasionally they help me out big time!

As for the set itself, I don't know what it is but I love the UD Baseball Heroes sets.  Heck, I even loved the one-of set that they did in 2008 under the Baseball Heroes name (that's a set that I've had completed for quite some time now, unlike the much older 1992 set).  

While this does complete the Ted Williams insert set, I'm still missing a bunch of stuff from the 1992 Upper Deck set including many base cards plus some of the Johnny Bench / Joe Morgan Baseball Heroes cards from the High Series in 1992.

1995 Topps Stadium Club:

The second set that Dennis finished off for me is the 1995 Stadium Club set for which I was missing five cards (including, somehow, a Cincinnati Reds' card).  I always find it kind of interesting to see which players end up being the toughest to acquire (via trading that is).  Usually it's guys like Derek Jeter or Mike Trout that seem tough to acquire via trades but for the '95 Stadium Club set the only uy that's even close to being a big name is Sammy Sosa (and he doesn't seem to have anyone collecting him these days as it is).  

2009 Topps:

Topps Town Gold parallels:

Speaking of Derek Jeter, here he is as the final card that I've been missing seemingly forever from the 2009 Topps set.  A decade later, I have no idea what possessed me to try and track down the entire gold parallel set of the admittedly junky Topps Town cards but here we are and at least now I can say the set is finally completed!  

As you can see, the card sets that Dennis completed for me definitely run the gamut of brands and years!  We aren't done yet though, not by a long shot!

1997 UD Collector's Choice:

Stick Um's insert:

The Stick Um's set is basically a set full of, you guessed it, stickers from the very much kid-friendly 1997 Collector's Choice set.  I've spoken about the Collector's Choice line quite a bit on my blog over the years but the basic gist of it is that I love the brand, especially the late 90s sets which were the first sets I remember trying to collect via pack buying with my own money.  I didn't know back then what a foolish idea that was...but here we are over twenty years later and I finally have the sticker set completed!  

I should note that the Stick Um's set was extra special to me as a kid because it was an insert set that featured Barry Larkin (surprisingly, Upper Deck seemed to not include Barry in most of its insert sets over the years).  Now the set (complete with a copy of Larkin's stickers) is safely tucked away in its binder!

That's an awesome bunch of cards but we still aren't done with what Dennis sent my way.  However, I think I will wait to show off the next bunch of cards in a future post as this particular post is getting a bit longer than probably most people will want to (or have time to) read.*

*especially in this current era where perhaps Twitter is the desired** medium for baseball card talk!

**not by me though, I prefer blogs still.  I'm old fashioned I guess (if you can call blogs old fashioned)

Thanks again to Dennis for the awesome trade!  More to come from the package soon.