Ripping Four Rip Cards!

Back at the end of September, I ripped four of my eight 1998 Zenith 5x7 "rip cards."  In that post, I offered up any of the remaining four unripped cards for trade but I didn't get any bites.  Therefore, since the oversized cards are both annoying to store and not something that I plan to personally collect, it's time to rip the 5x7s and at least get four regular sized cards that I can store easier!

If I get really lucky, I'll pull a needed Barry Larkin card from one of the four rip cards...I won't hold my breath that will happen but hey, you never know until you rip the cards!

We'll begin with a pair of Orioles rip cards:

Inside Z26.  Brady Anderson was card #65:  Mariano Rivera.

This was a definite upgrade as far as trade bait goes - there are tons of Yankee collectors on TCDB and I feel like I'm always running out of decent Yankee trade options.  I don't expect that the Rivera card will remain in my possession for a long time!

Inside Z64.  Roberto Alomar was card #52:  Bernard Gilkey

Oof.  Probably not an upgrade here!  Even the photo on this card is kind of dull.

Well, I'd say I went 1-for-2 on the first pair of rip cards, let's see if we can finish strong with our final two 5x7s!

For the last two rip cards, I have one more regular card (#Z67:  Travis Lee) and then an Impulse parallel (#Z29.  Jose Guillen).  Do the parallel rip cards hold better cards inside them?  We are about to find out!

Let's start with the rookie card of Travis Lee.  Inside that, we got #7. Tony Gwynn!

Yay, a definitely upgrade!  I even have a small PC of Gwynn for myself so if I don't get any trade offers that appeal to me for this one, I'll probably end up keeping it and being perfectly happy.  In fact, much happier than I was trying to hold on to the oversized Travis Lee card.

Finally, let's rip that Jose Guillen parallel:

That's #29.  Jeff Bagwell and unfortunately just because you rip open a parallel doesn't mean you'll get some sort of insert.  Lesson learned, I guess!

That does it for the Zenith 5x7 cards that I own.  It was kind of fun ripping them though it also feels really bad to rip up baseball cards.  I'm not sure that ripping cards to simply get base cards is what most collectors want (and it's probably why brands/concepts like Zenith don't exist anymore today)!