Demaryius Thomas Mail Day

I'm a Broncos fan. It's been a tough go since Josh McDaniels became head coach. Jay Cutler, Brandon Marshall and Tony Scheffler all were traded away after having differences with McDaniels. For that reason, the offense was entering the season with only two skill players to be excited about, in my opinion, Eddie Royal and Knowshon Moreno. The rest of the skill players are cast-off's from other teams.

Well, this is what I thought before seeing Demaryius Thomas play. In his first game against Seattle he had 8 catches for 97 yards and a touchdown. Last week against Indianapolis he only caught two balls but made the most of them going for 43 yards. He's a big, strong kid that looks to have all the skills needed to excel in the NFL.

I knew that I had to pick up at least a couple cards of his as soon as I watched the Seattle game. I opted to go for his 2010 Topps Rookie Variation and his 2010 Topps Platinum Autograph. Both cards only set me back just over $20 combined. I'm pretty happy with both deals.

On a side note, I love Topps Platinum Football. It was fun product to break last year and it remains as fun this year. The card design on the autographs is fantastic and some of the patches I've seen on eBay are amazing. I'd highly recommend breaking a box or a blaster of this stuff if you're looking to open up some football.

2010 Topps Red Hot Rookie Redemption #10 is Brett Wallace

Well, how's that for timing? Just last night I posted about this redemption and today it was announced. I swear that I didn't have any inside information. If I did, I wouldn't have purchased two additional #10 redemption cards the day before if I had known it was going to be Brett Wallace.

Don't get me wrong, I think Brett Wallace is going to to be a solid big league player. I lived in Phoenix, AZ for a couple years and saw Wallace play for Arizona State. I liked him then and I still do. He's had just over 100 at-bats with the Astros this year, hitting just .215 in that time.

The strange thing about Wallace is his path to the big leagues. He was drafted by the Cardinals 13th overall in the 2008 draft. He rose quickly through the ranks in the minors, by July 2009 he was already in AAA. This is just about the time the Cardinals decided they needed a bat for a playoff run and traded Wallace to the A's on July 24, 2009 as the key part of their package for Matt Holliday. He lasted just under five months in the A's organization before was traded to Toronto for prospect Michael Taylor. Strange enough yet? Wait, there's more. Just over one year after joining the Toronto organization, he was traded to Houston for prospect Anthony Gose. Wallace was assigned to AAA for one day and then was immediately called up to the Astros after Lance Berkman was traded to the Yankees.

Whew, back to the redemption cards. I have three #10 redemptions. Only 10% of the cards redeemed are going to be autographed. I'm hoping that at least one of my three will turn up autographed. I'm going to redeem a full set tonight so I'll report back with my results.

2010 Topps Red Hot Rookie Redemption #10

I've never participated in the Red Hot Rookie Redemption in past years. I've always just sold any redemption card that I had before the player was announced. This year is different. The rookie crop this season is so strong that I couldn't resist putting together a set of these.

The assumption is that the 10th card will be the autographed card. Last year had Gordon Beckham (only 10% signed), 2008 had Jay Bruce and Evan Longoria.

I purchased #1-9 on eBay and sportlots.com. I got my #10 from a hobby box of 2010 Topps Series 2 that I purchased. I really don't have much money in my set. That being said, the excitement of the pending announcement got the best of me today and I purchased two more #10's for $15 each on eBay.

Are you anxiously awaiting the announcement like I am? If so, who are you hoping for?

2 Wal-Mart Topps Value Box Break

I didn't specifically go to Wal-Mart for cards this morning but couldn't resist checking them out. I bought two of the $15 Topps Value Boxes. They had about six of them and none appeared searched. I've read on some of the forums that people will shake the boxes to expose the refractor card. You'll see from the picture below that this obviously hasn't happened at my Wal-Mart.

Each value box comes with one hobby pack of 2010 Allen & Ginter, six retail packs of Topps Series 2 Baseball, one Million Card Giveaway code card and a Topps Chrome Refractor of either Stephen Strasburg, Cal Ripken Jr. or Babe Ruth.

I did pretty well, the better cards pictured below. I got a lot of inserts from the Topps Series 2 packs but nothing really of note. I was surprised to get hits in both Ginter packs, as minor as they are. It was nice to get an extra code card from the 12 Topps packs as well.

Lenny Wilkens TTM Success

Date Sent: 11/8/2009
Date received: 11/27/2009

This is the second TTM return I've received from Lenny Wilkens. He's a very generous TTM signer. I got a nice surprise this time with the addition of the "HOF 89,98" inscription on the card. This is not something I asked for, just a very nice addition by him.

Wilkens is one of only three people to go into the Hall of Fame as a player and a coach. John Wooden and Bill Sharman are the other two. I already have a Wooden autograph via TTM. I'll have to get a Sharman request out in the next couple weeks.

Wilkens also won a NBA Championship as a head coach and a gold medal as an assistant coach on the 2002 USA Mens Basketball Olympic team. He has quite an impressive list of accomplishments on his resume.

This return is one of the reasons that I encourage people to take up TTM autographs. All it takes is a couple stamps, some cards you won't miss if they don't come back and patience.

Replacement Cards From Topps

If you all remember, a few weeks ago I opened a case of 2009 Bowman Chrome Football. Well, in the very first box I got 10 extremely off-centered cards. So off-centered that you could see the name from the other card it was cut from.

I've never sent anything back to a card company for replacement but I thought I'd take a shot with some cards that I don't care about. None of these were rookies, just semi stars or commons.

It only took three weeks for my replacements to arrive from Topps. Thanksgiving was right in the middle of that too. I had honestly forgotten about mailing them back when the envelope arrived. As you'll see from the scan, they're packaged in a little box and there was some foam on top of that protecting the cards.

I'm also including a scan of the letter they sent with the cards explaining their replacement policy. Hopefully someone will find this helpful. Click on the letter picture for a bigger version.

Has anyone noticed the centering problems with this product? Out of the whole case I think I only sent 12 cards to be graded. Most of the cards I chose not to send had centering issues. Some had surface lines.

2007 Playoff Absolute Memorabilia Football Box Break

My insane amount of orders from the Blowout Cards Black Friday Sale came in today. I just recorded a box break of my 2007 Playoff Absolute Memorabilia Football box.

Thanks again to Blowout for the sale. I got a lot of really good deals and they still met their usual turnaround time for shipping. Amazing.