2021 Panini Prizm Draft Picks

I'm not usually one to go for draft sets in baseball, but this pack was kind of forced upon me as it fell out of a repack thing I bought recently. At five cards, this should be short and sweet.

PDP33 - Tyler Black - The first card appears to be lacking something: a logo, perhaps? I'm not sure if they couldn't get the rights to Black's school (Wright State) because, as you'll see in a moment, the rest of the pack contains college logos and the collegiate license logo on the back. This doesn't. Black was drafted by the Brewers in 2021 and made it to the AAA level last season.

PDP89 - Jose Torres - This North Carolina State product was a third round pick of the Reds and played for AA Chattanooga last season.

PDP216 - Matt Rudick - Here's a Mets draft pick who has played at all levels of their minor league system so far.

PDP151 - Gordon Graceffo - This Vanderbilt righthander was a fifth round pick for the Cardinals and is currently one of their top prospects.

DS-JH - Jaden Hill Draft Standouts - The last card is an insert card. Hill was a second round pick for the Rockies but hasn't thrown many innings in his career so far.

2018 Panini Football Retail

Greetings!

Hope everyone is doing well.  It's my first post of the year, so I hope you all have a great 2024, or at minimum, may it be better than 2023.

We got our final 4 NFL teams all set up for Championship weekend.  It's been an interesting playoffs to say the least.  To celebrate, let's show some football cards.  From my Scanned folder, here's a pack my eldest picked up in one of those football repacks.  

Sorry in advance...not sure why I didn't try to retake these pictures.

Assuming this is a retail pack, here's what he got:

#242 - Michael Bennett

#93 - Derek Wolfe

I believe this was the last year of the "Panini Football" line.  It's as if this was the equivalent to Panini's NBA Hoops, since they have the "traded to" or "signed by" text here on Michael Bennett's card.

#33 - Tre'Davious White

#54 - Kyle Fuller

White is still with the Bills, but he's been hurt the last couple of years.  Bummer how they lost to the Chiefs.

#235 - Jordy Nelson 

#376 - Connor Williams (RC)

There's 400 cards in the set, with the last 100 being Short Printed Rookies.  Here's the checklist if you're interested.  

Lamar Jackson, Josh Allen, and Saquon Barkley were among the rookies that year.  Connor's still in the league, playing for Miami.

#203 - Michael Thomas

#122 - Whitney Mercilus

The design is minimalistic; I like it overall, though I'm surprised they went with a "P" logo instead of their Knight logo.

Here are the backs because Playoffs:

Anyway, that's the pack, short and sweet.  I have at least one more pack in the Scanned folder so I'll get that out before the newer stuff.  

Have a good week everyone, and thanks for reading!

1999 Victory Football

It's playoff time, so let's check out another old pack of football cards. This is another one that I found at a card show recently. Upper Deck released a Victory branded set for several years in baseball (and probably longer in hockey), but this claims to be the first edition of a Victory NFL set.

118 - Fred Taylor - Our first card of the pack is a Jacksonville Jaguar. The Jags were still a relatively new franchise at this point.

289 - Jerome Bettis - The "All-Victory-Team" subset design is a bit weird. The dashes are very strange. When you're The Bus, you're going to obscure some of the letters on this busy looking thing.

92 - Herman Moore - Moore was a star player for a team that didn't often have a lot going for it.

66 - Marquez Pope - Pope was new to the Browns (who were, oddly, an expansion team in 1999) so he's shown at practice here.

243 - Travis Jervey - New team with an old uniform. His last name is one letter off from a terrific sports name.

322 - Jamal Anderson - Here's another busy subset design. Jamal Anderson was a huge star for a short time.

217 - Trent Green - Trent Green somewhat famously turned his excellent 1998 season with Washington, only the second of his career, into a big contract where he was supposed to lead the upstart Rams only to be forced to make way for the Kurt Warner Story due to injury.

220 - Amp Lee - Another Rams guy, Lee was always more of a passing catching back.

194 - Rickey Dudley - Years from now, no one is going to be able to keep track what years the Raiders played where.

293 - Jerry Rice - One of the most famous wide receivers of all-time.

292 - Doug Flutie - Flutie's notoriety always seemed to eclipse his actual accomplishments on the field.

420 - Sedrick Irvin - Each pack promises one rookie card, and we get this guy on a trampoline, apparently. I'm not sure if these were short printed or if there just weren't very many rookies in this set.

The last thing in the pack is this bonus sweepstakes card.

1994 Classic Pro Line Live

Here's a pack I'd never seen before when I ran into it at a card show recently. Many of us are familiar with the Classic brand name from their late '80s/early '90s run at some baseball card themed games or their draft pick sets in various sports. I had forgotten that they also at one point had a full license to produce NFL cards, but at this point, who didn't? We had a pack of the 1995 set posted here a few years back. I'm not entirely sure about the branding here. Why is there seemingly three brand names? What makes it "Live" exactly? And there are basketball preview cards in a football product? Very strange, indeed.

387 - Doug Nussmeier - First up, we have an Idaho quarterback in his Senior Bowl uniform. I'm curious if there are any Senior Bowl (or other college all-star type games) collectors out there that want all the cards in these one-off uniforms.

332 - Trev Alberts - I vastly prefer football cards in college uniforms to seeing players in their offseason workout attire. There's just something odd about seeing these guys out of pads on cards.

319 - Natrone Means - Here we have a full fledged NFL player and also, perhaps not coincidentally, the first player I've heard of in this pack. Means was a huge back, at least by mid-'90s standards, though he wasn't particularly tall.

378 - Lamar Smith - These cards have a very Fleer look to them, so much so that I felt like I needed to check the copyright information to see if Fleer had taken over the brand at some point. (An internet rabbit hole tells me that Classic was ultimately absorbed by the ill fated Score Board (not Score!) brand in 1995 before shuttering a couple of years later.)

361 - Chuck Levy - These cards seem great for college team collectors like myself.

368 - Thomas Randolph - Yet another college player aka Classic Pro Line Rookie.

353 - Henry Ford - Not the automobile legend, apparently.

339 - Aaron Glenn

110 - Johnny Mitchell - We finally have another guy in a pro uniform. Note that the logo changes from Classic Pro Line Rookie to Classic Pro Line Live.

69 - Anthony Smith - I give '90s football cards a lot of credit for actually including players who aren't skill position players and aren't rookies, because it seems to be pretty rare these days.

19 - Carl Pickens - With a name like that, I was always disappointed that Carl Pickens wasn't a defensive back instead of a receiver.

123 - Greg Lloyd - Well, this pack is certainly backloaded with veterans.

143 - Nate Odomes

55 - Bruce Matthews - He of the famous football family.

401 - Sterling Sharpe - Again, I swear this isn't a Fleer set. Instead of a "Pro Visions" card, we have this illustration thing that purports to be one of five different ones included in the set. Apparently if you collected all five, it fits together as one large illustration. I wasn't able to find an image online of all of these together.

PB8 - Jerry Rice Spotlight - This one per pack "bonus card", commonly known as an insert today, featured Rice on an almost-but-not-quite-dufex design.

1994 Flair Series 2

 

Way back in 2010, I posted a pack of 1994 Flair Series 1 here. Now that it's 2024 (!), let's check out a pack from Series 2 in what is now a thirty year old pack of baseball cards.

309 - Greg Vaughn - These cards were still the fanciest looking cards of the day.

274 - J.T. Snow - The card backs match the front design well, and feature a third distinct full color player photo.

357 - John Smoltz - It's the first Hall of Famer of the pack.

291 - Danny Bautista - Bautista's son is a minor leaguer in the A's system.

392 - Shane Reynolds - Reynolds spent most of his career with the Astros, netting him a lone All-Star nod in 2000.

383 - Kurt Miller - I was going to complain about the '90s-ness of the Astros card above, but then just look at this thing.

314 - Chuck Knoblauch - You could remember Knoblauch for being one of the prime examples of "the yips" or you could also remember him for having one of the earliest examples of a buyback autograph inserted into baseball card packs.

410 - David Segui

258 - Lee Smith - Here's our second HOFer of the pack.

7 - Kirby Puckett Hot Glove - The last card of the pack is a die-cut insert card and third Hall of Famer.