Contest Reminder and a PWE Round-Up

Cards from little envelopes.

Before I get into today's crop of cards, here is your final reminder to go and sign up for the College Football Postseason prediction contest. It's Year 16! Can you believe that? It's time to start getting those picks in as the first game kicks off around 9:00 AM PST tomorrow morning.

It's now time for a year end recap of PWEs (Plain White Envelopes!) received in the second half of the year, or thereabouts. First up is a single Victor Scott the Sequel purple Chrome refractor parallel from 2024 Topps Heritage High Number, courtesy of Matthew of Number 5 Type Collection. It feels like it's been a few years since I've bought one of those hot box blaster things that contains those purple parallels, assuming that's still how these cards are distributed. With the 2025 set just around the corner (I think?), I'll have to figure out the best (cheap) option for opening some of those packs for myself.

Next up is another fine envelope from gcrl of cards as i see them. Pittman is the younger brother of Colts wide receiver Michael Pittman Jr. and was a strange case of someone whose on-field contributions never quite rose to his talent level. I don't normally collect Oregon players who transfer out and finish school elsewhere, but Pittman is in a Ducks uniform, so it works.

In addition to the nice autograph above, I also received this Jake Woodford card that's headed to top loader status.

This shows why it gets a top loader. It's one of those odd "Advanced Stats" parallels. I like the different approach to the stats here, but I don't like that all of the player bios are replaced with a boilerplate explanation on what advanced stats are.

Purple Topps flagship parallels are a rare bird, at least around these parts, where we don't have the stores that supply these exclusives (Meijer, I think?)

I completely missed out on the Topps All-Star Game set and am not entirely sure how they were distributed (at ballparks?), so it was nice to snag a few inserts from it. These cards look like they're die-cut or acetate or something, but they are just extra shiny and have a lot of dead space around the design.

I haven't checked lately, but I think Albert Pujols is still in the lead for having the most unique cards in my collection, even though I've never really sought out his stuff. At least it's one of the game's great players and not, I don't know, J.D. Drew?

This may have been the first year since 2009 where I did not open even a single pack of the new Chrome set, so it's been nice to slowly pick off some of my needs from the base set. I'm not against Topps Chrome, it's just that it's priced itself out of my budget.

Like many of his teammates, Nootbaar's name has been discussed in the trade rumors circle, but it would definitely be a "sell low" situation and I've been told that you generally shouldn't do that.

The Hamm King also delivered more Hamm! Excellent.

The third envelope just contained one single item, but it is a great one that has been affixed to my refrigerator since September. This really cool stadium giveaway comes courtesy of Baseball Cards Fan (and great blue heron enthusiast) Peter.

The final envelope of the bunch comes from Night Owl Cards and includes more Cardinals and set needs. The Jesse Haines card is from the 1961 Fleer Baseball Greats set, which caused a bit of a stir from Topps and their monopolistic ways back in the day. The design is excellent, but you already knew that.

Speaking of excellent design, I've said this before and I'll say it again. These Rookie Performers cards look great. I rarely praise modern Topps stuff, especially in the Fanatics era, but I always enjoy what they do with their insert designs that are inspired by the main set and era they're paying tribute to.

Here's another four-pack of minis from a few different Allen & Ginter sets. This year's A&G set is finally out, but I've yet to see any blasters anywhere.

Panini's continuing legal fight with Fanatics has been in the news this week. Everything I've read about it has made my eyes glaze over (to be fair, most details of court cases will do this to me), but it's clear to me that at least Panini tries to do different things with their products, even if both hands are tied behind their backs over the whole licensing thing. Topps doesn't even try anymore.

Here's the kind of oddball food-related baseball card that I really love. Apparently this known as the 1997 Wheaties set, even though the cards come from all sorts of different cereal brands. When is the last time there was anything interesting to cut off of the back of a cereal box?

We'll end things here with a triumvirate of 2025 Topps Heritage short prints. I swear I'm going to focus on putting some of these Heritage sets fully to rest one of these days.

Contest Time! College Football Postseason Pick 'Em #16

It's once again time to make the best college football postseason picks and win a prize!

Welcome back to Contest Season. This is the 16th year of the College Bowl Pick 'Em contest, although at this point it's more accurate to call it the College Football Postseason Pick 'Em contest.

Our past winners include Adam from Thoughts on Sox (2009-10), Mark from Stats on the Back (2010-11), AJ from The Lost Collector (2011-12), Royal Dan (2012-13), The Prowling Cat (2013-14), Jeff from One Man's Junk (Wax) (2014-15), Matt of Bubba's Bangin' Batch of Baseball Bits (2015-16), MrHaverkamp (2016-17), Anaconda37 (2017-18), Trevor of Bump and Run (2018-19), GLM1 (2019-20), Johnny G (2021-22), Nachos Grande (2022-23), Pete L. (2023-24), and Ginko-5 (2024-25). We've still never had a repeat winner!

If you want to just get to the free stuff, go to the bottom of the post for the sign-up link and make sure you submit picks for every game. There is a separate sub-contest for the non-ESPN people (or whoever!) which should only require a modicum of thought. If you don't have an ESPN account and don't want to give your personal information to Disney, there are burner email options out there (like Proton Mail)... just saying!

• First place will receive: a 2026 Topps Series 1 value box
• Second place will receive: a 2026 Topps Series 1 hanger box
• Third place will receive: a 2026 Topps Series 1 retail fat pack
• The Worst Place winner will receive: mystery unopened packs

At my discretion, I may include additional cards if possible.

Rules for 2025-26:

• Please email or DM me your contest information after you sign up. You can't assume that I will automatically recognize your contest entry name. [my Blogger profile / my Bluesky profile]
• Participants must sign up through the official ESPN link.
• Points are scored according to the Confidence System. This basically means that while you are predicting which team wins which bowl game, you will also be responsible for ranking how confident you are in each pick. This includes all FBS bowl games, the FCS Celebration Bowl, and all College Football Playoff games. The higher you rank those games, the more points you'll get when they win and prove that you're totally right and deserve all the I-told-you-so's in the world. See ESPN for complete details.
• You can change your picks at any time, so long as your pick is made before the official start time (usually the TV broadcast time) of each game. This is what ESPN calls a "rolling lock" time.
• Don't be a jerk and lose on purpose just to try and claim a prize. There are many, many of us who are bad enough at picking these without extra help.

Click here to sign up, and click on the 'Join Group' link! It's free! First-timers are always welcome! Password: quackquackquack

DEADLINE: There's a deadline of Saturday, December 13th at 9:00 AM PST. That's the start time of the first bowl game.

But wait... there's more! Available to all entrants as well as non-entrants who don't want to use ESPN, there's a bonus contest:

Leave a comment here predicting the final score and winning team of the DUKE'S MAYO BOWL before the Mayonnaising officially begins (the game is on January 2nd) and win a retail pack of new baseball cards. Whoever is closest gets it. Make sure you watch the end of the game because someone will be getting an actual mayonnaise bath!

(h/t to No Context College Football for the wacky photo.)

Future Baseball Plans

The new Cardinals... maybe not the same as the old Cardinals.

I've tried not to dwell on this too much, but my interest in baseball in general has fallen off of a cliff in recent times. When you combine this with the streamlining of baseball card products in the Fanatics era, I could also say my interest in baseball cards is also starting to crater. I can't dispute the idea that the Cardinals lack of success on the field since the end of the 2022 season has contributed to this, but I still think I would have most of those negative feelings even if the Cardinals had been playing more at the level of their 2010s rosters.

While I won't get into my feelings about the state of MLB in general right here, I will show off some cards that Night Owl sent over back in July. Remember the summer? I miss it already. I guess I'm just having those December feelings right now.

I haven't really prepared any changes in the way I'm going to consume baseball games (or not). I haven't really dramatically changed how I collect cards, either. I'm still going to watch Cardinals games, of course, especially as long as there's free MLB TV access to T-Mobile subscribers, although it appears that deal's days are probably numbered with ESPN's pending acquisition of the platform. (Gross.) There are interesting players on the Cardinals roster on any given day, including speed demon Victor Scott II, shown here on the first "true photo" variation I've added to my collection. I wish these weren't such a tough pull, honestly.

I do nearly all of my trading via TCDB and have managed to add a bunch more Cardinals Topps gold parallels in the past year. The original gold bordered look still reigns supreme, as shown here on Miguel Cairo's card from 2004 Topps.

Will Panini continue to run out its zombie baseball products in 2025? What about the other sports? I know that Panini has a lucrative contract with the WNBA that has been extended by several years, so the company itself won't be going away any time soon. Fanatics supposedly has no interest in acquiring them, and I'm doubtful that they would suddenly start cranking out fully licensed Donruss cards even if they did. If anything, Fanatics seems to want to focus on it's core brands and do the laziest thing possible by applying the same design templates to a million cards a year.

Considering Paul Goldschmidt's Hall of Fame track and the six seasons he spent with St. Louis, I don't think the Goldschmidt want list will ever have a finite endpoint, even though he is no longer a Cardinal.

With Willson Contreras moving to 1B this past season, Pedro Pagés has actually caught the most games the past couple of seasons for the Cards. The entire catching situation is a bit murky right now, though, with Ivan Herrera showing star potential as a hitter and next to zero potential as a backstop. Toss in a couple of prospects on the rise and a cult hero in Yohel Pozo, and you've got a quandary on your hands.

JJ Wetherholt is the prospect of the moment. I honestly thought he would get a late call-up last season (maybe in the 40-man September active roster era), and he certainly has a chance to make it difficult to keep him down much longer if he has a big spring. Will the Cardinals be dreadful again next year? Absolutely. The most frustrating thing about this rebuild is that they should have started it years ago, if that was truly their intentional all along.

Night Owl also tossed in some more set-filling needs, including these inserts from the 2025 Topps Heritage set. Of course, they look very similar to cards from other Heritage and Archives sets, but Fanatics (or whoever) apparently decided they needed yet another insert set of random players on old designs.

We end things in true Night Owl trade envelope fashion with a few more minis from Allen & Ginter sets. Each of these names are of players I haven't thought about in a few years.

Good Luck Ducks, Week 14: Dirty Dawgs

 

It's Rivalry Week as Oregon takes on Washington.

The Ducks Big Ten conference schedule will end in the same way as it did last season and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. It's time to face the Washington Huskies as the last test before leaving it all up in the hands of the CFP committee. Theoretically, the Ducks could still end up in the conference championship game, but they would need Michigan to pull off a fifth straight win over their hated rivals as well as take care of business today.

Oregon knocked off USC last week in a very satisfying way, all but ending the Trojans chances of making it into the playoffs themselves. While the injuries, particularly to the Ducks talented receiving corps do continue to concern, they were able to spread the ball around once again to an array of ball carriers and pass catchers. Two Oregon tight ends came up big once again, and I'd like to see them utilized even more while they have a lot of their talented wide outs sitting on the bench.

The Huskies are led by sophomore QB Demond Williams Jr., who has put together a nice season for his 8-3 squad. Washington is more of a run dominant team this year and the talent disparity between the two schools has narrowed considerably since last season, which will certainly make winning on the road a tougher challenge this time around.

Notes and miscellany:

• There have been plenty of big moments in this rivalry, but since the move to the Big 10 it feels like something is missing. I think the hatred felt more... organic, maybe, when it wasn't the scheduled last week of the season. Now it feels a little more manufactured perhaps. There certainly isn't a week's worth of hype about the game all over the local news channels like there was with the Civil War. For now, at least, this is just going to feel like the last game of the regular season and not much more.
• Opponent fun fact: While I'm not much of a dog person, I can certainly admit that huskies are pretty cool looking dogs. Of course, Washington's live mascots over the years have been Alaskan Malamutes and not actually huskies, strictly speaking. Prior to adopting the Huskies as their official team name in the early 1920s, however, Washington's mascot was named Sundodger. As in, you know, there's not a lot of sun in Seattle! Apparently it wasn't very popular.
• Opponent history: Washington leads the all-time series 63-49-5. After winning three consecutive close games from 2021-2023, they were blown off the field in Eugene last season. Let's hope this game is more like that game and not the ones that came before it.
• Game time is 12:30 PM PST on CBS in Seattle. Go Ducks!

Good Luck Ducks, Week 13: The Trojan Revealed

The Quack Attack hosts a familiar foe from southern California.

The penultimate game on Oregon's schedule has the Ducks facing off against a former Pac-12 opponent. It's, um, not my favorite opponent. I've had this whole thing against LA-based sports teams my entire life (thanks, parents, I guess?!) and that's not likely to ever change. USC, by all accounts, are having a pretty good season, but they haven't been truly relevant -- or at least worthy of national media attention -- since Reggie Bush and the Trojans lost to Vince Young and the Texas Longhorns in the title game 20 years ago.

The Ducks faced little resistance from Minnesota, resulting in a nice break from the intensity of their recent schedule before they face their west coast rivals in the final two weeks. Oregon's playoff prospects seemingly hang in the balance today against another formidable opponent, but it surely won't be super comfortable to end the regular season up in Seattle against the dreaded Huskies. The run game seems to be in full force no matter who they throw out there, and despite the extremely depleted receiver group, Dante Moore has been able to find a lot of success when he is in position to throw the ball. If the Ducks can stick to their game and control things on both sides of the ball, this should work out well.

The Trojans are led by QB Jayden Maiava, a junior who played his first full season for UNLV before transferring as is the norm these days. As a fellow Hawaiian, it's tempting for this Ducks fan to compare him to Marcus Mariota, but Maiava appears to be much more of a traditional pro style pocket passing dude than Mariota was in college, and he already seems to have garnered some NFL draft interest should he decide to go into it early. Oregon's pass defense has been stellar this season, which is not something I'm always accustomed to. It will be interesting to see how they can stand up to the challenge today.

Notes and miscellany:

• The Ducks are wearing black again today, which is all well and good, but it'll never be as fun as it was under the lights against the Trojans on Fight Night in 2009, when... *record scratch*... wait a second! They didn't even wear black that night?! Oh, how the memory fails you.
• Opponent fun fact: Well, here's a good reminder that the "Trojan", despite evoking ideas of being a malevolent nuisance/computer virus type of thing, is actually kind of a loser -- historically speaking, at least.
• Opponent history: USC leads the series 38-23-2, but Oregon has won three straight and seven of the last nine meetings.
• Game time is 12:30 PM PST on CBS in Eugene. Go Ducks!

Good Luck Ducks, Week 12: Gopher Guts

It's a Friday night party as Mighty Oregon hosts some greasy and grimies.

We're already three-quarters of the way through the college football schedule now, as the Ducks are back on a short turnaround for a special Friday night appearance against Minnesota. In a conference jam packed full of eighteen schools, I suppose that there just isn't enough room for everyone to play on Saturday (or at least that's how the theory goes.) It appears that it's Oregon's time to play on a Friday this season.

The Ducks held off Iowa in another rainy slog, but there were more positive vibes around this win than the Wisconsin game. For one thing, Iowa is a legitimately good football team that just happens to run an offense that's stuck in some far away decade. To Oregon's credit, they were able to match the Hawkeyes at every step, resulting in one of the most run-dominant Ducks games on both sides of the ball that I can ever remember. Atticus Sappington (there's that name again!) and his 3 for 3 field goal performance, including the game-winning kick, won the day and kept Oregon's record at one loss.

The Minnesota Golden Gophers come in to Autzen Stadium with a 6-3 record, coming off of a blowout loss to Iowa before an OT win against Michigan State. They've been outscored 83-6 against ranked opponents (two of them) this season and most of their wins have come against subpar squads, but they do have an excellent pass rush that can't be discounted. While Dante Moore has adjusted to a more run-heavy offense as the season has progressed, you'll still expect him to make his share of drop-backs. Fortunately, the Ducks offensive line has held up fairly well this season, and their array of ball carriers should keep the Gophers guessing. Health is not on the Ducks side in the receiver camp, so they could be making use of a number of players that haven't gotten as many targets as they were forced to last week.

Notes and miscellany:

• A lot can happen in three weeks, but after Indiana survived a scare at Penn State last week, it's looking increasingly less likely that the Ducks will have a shot at playing Ohio State this year, unless the playoff bracket happens to swing that way. There could be an advantage (i.e. rest) of not playing in a conference championship game, of course. Oregon has a lot of work to do, however, as they haven't consistently looked like a playoff team over the course of an entire game in quite awhile.
• Opponent fun fact: Maybe this should just be renamed "Know Your Mascot", but it turns out that the so-called golden gopher is actually a certain type of ground squirrel and not a gopher at all. (We have an abundance of squirrels locally crawling all over the neighborhood, but as far as I know, none are of the "ground" variety.)
• Opponent history: Minnesota holds a 3-1 edge, with their most recent meetings occurring in the 1999 (Oregon win) and 2003 (Minnesota win) Sun Bowls.
  
• Game time is 6:00 PM PST on FOX in Eugene. Go Ducks!

Bubbling Up

The latest in a long line of excellent trade packages from Too Many Verlanders.

The year already feels like it's slipping away from me, so I know that it's well beyond time that I finish up some posts about trades I've received in 2025. I really don't want to head in 2026 talking about something I got, like, last summer. Since the vast majority of what I add to my collection has been coming from TCDB for the past few years, the bubble mailers full of surprise goodies have been something to savor. This particular one came over from TMV back in June, when things were finally starting to heat up here in Portland. Of course, we're now well into November and I've been looking for breaks in the gloomy weather all week to just to have a few moments to sweep a bunch of leaves off of my deck.

Anyway... cards! David Freese cards! While Randy Arozarena's 2020 playoff Babe Ruth act wrecked a lot of Freese's postseason records, he was pushed down the lists a bit more by some prolific players this year.

Vintage Blazers?! Nice! I am fairly certain that a bunch of these are going to end up being upgrades over what I already owned when I finally crack open the Blazers binders again.

A Bol Bol rookie rookie? I'll always take these! He may not have spent more than a blink at UO, but I'll always be fascinated by him.

It's a 20 year old parallel of a Hall of Fame Cardinals player? You can't knock that.

Three Blazers, er, legends all signed this slab of wood, or so the scan would have you think. They actually signed clear stickers that were affixed to this wood-like card-shaped object. I did like Jarrett Jack for a time, but he was made expendable when Brandon Roy came around.

Dion Jordan seems to have a ton of "hit" cards from his rookie year, or at least I seem to own a disproportionate amount of them. I will never mind this as he will always remind me of the tremendously fun Marcus Mariota era.

I think Jalen Reagor was supposed to be a speedly slot receiver type when he came to the NFL out of TCU, but he didn't seem to progress beyond a third option to pass two and made some costly errors on the field in his two seasons in Philly. It looks like he is out of the league now. I kind of like the design on this relic card, however, or at least the placement of the Eagles logo.

There's that man again (and his signature!) 

Jordan Matthews played more football for the Eagles than Reagor. However, after being a heavy target early in his career, he eventually became more of a guy you call up on the phone when you run out of healthy players.

The early 2010s will always be a special time for me and watching Oregon football, even though Chip Kelly is kind of a turd. Kenjon Barner was a huge part of that, and it was fun to hear him join the broadcast during a Ducks game earlier this year.

Jimmy Baseball! Now that he's been off the air for a full season, it's easier to enjoy his baseball cards and playing career.

Arik Armstead is with the Jaguars these days, and has certainly come along way from his days at Oregon when he was a two-sport player (football AND basketball... both kinds!)

The last one up is certainly the most special one, at least for me. As I continue to contemplate how I want to spend my card budget dollars, I know that excellent cards of the Wizard need to take precedent over any random blasters I decide to buy on a whim.