Patches Galore: Some Stuff I Actually Bought from COMC

After selling both of my batches on COMC, I had a ton of store credit to spend. I spent the first batch of credit on tons of Seneca Wallace needs and a few cool cards, and then had that delivered a mi casa. Batch two, and the remainder of that money, went more towards random excellence that caught my eye. And after getting the package today and opening it up, I have to say that this package is probably one of my favorites in a long time.

I know that sounds silly - it's COMC and I can see the images so surely I know what I'm getting. But seeing a scan is not the same as seeing a card, and with several of these cards the in person effect is 1000x better than the scan.

Prime example: 2004 Fleer Gridiron Heroes #GH-BL Byron Leftwich 05/50:
The card design itself is meh - lots of blank space. The player is meh - Leftwich didn't do much for the Jags, Falcons, or Bucs, and now he's a Pittsburgh Steeler (yuck!). But that patch...oh my goodness that patch is beautiful. So nice it deserves a close up:
Now I know the Jaguars are awful, just fired their coach, and may someday move to a different city due to years of terrible play. But I can't get enough of their logo patches. A few months back I posted an excellent Maurice Jones Drew card with an epic jaguar logo head in it that I traded for on a whim. Sadly I traded the MJD, and the empty hole in my relic/auto binder where it used to sit made me realize how awesome these logos really are.

Why Jags logo patches specifically? Jags jerseys have a full body Jaguarlogo in the bicep area of the jersey. The thing is outlined in black, and has yellow fur with black bits in it indicating spots. This alone is cool in a patch, as it's a very unique looking logo. But even better, sometimes cards include the black and white of the Jaguar ear. As you can see, my card above is from the left bicep Jaguar and looks to be the top of the Jaguars head. You can see the head top, plus an ear, plus a bit of the top of an eye. Add in the jersey color itself and that's a four color patch. Beautiful.

So needless to say, this one won't be going the way of MJD - I'm keeping it. And despite no affection for the Jaguars franchise, I may have to start a Jaguar logo patch collection. All the jaguar logo itself, hopefully as many cool heads as possible! We'll see if I start that up anytime soon.

In the meantime I'm okay just looking at all these cool patches though. I saw these because I actually picked up four separate incredible patches in this group of cards, with the next being a Pedro Martinez/Javier Vazquez/Randy Johnson Montreal Expos triple relic, 06/47:
This card is INSANE. I showed off a Braves Big 3 version of this card a few weeks back, and I still like that card but it was real pricey. This card cost me just $7.50 though, and features two surefire future Hall of Famers and...Javier Vazquez. I know Vazquez brings the value down for most, but I actually liked the guy for his non Yankee career, and even for his Yankee career a bit since he was awful there. Besides, his patch isn't the real awesome one. Johnson's is a nice two color from a number piece, and then Pedro's is an insane 3 color (the red stitching is down the far left side) with all sorts of stitching marks. I love weird teams (and the Expos were certainly a weird team), I obviously love Pedro being a Sox fan, mentioned Vazquez above, and who didn't dig the Big Unit? A beautiful card, and I'm curious to see who else is in the set (hopefully some other amazing pitching trios!)

Edit: I looked on Ebay - Found a nice Dodgers one of Shawn Green/Ron Cey/Kevin Brown and a Reds trio of Eric Davis/Deion Sanders/Aaron Boone.

Speaking of other awesome Red Sox pitchers in non-Sox uniforms, here's a Curt Schilling patch I picked up:
Again, wow, what a patch. The pieces are two of the letters from Arizona - I think specifically the N going into the A. Whichever they are, they're awesome, and this card is a nice complement to my other Curt Schilling jersey card that I picked up from BA Benny a while back.

The fourth and final patch card would be my favorite if not for the Jaguar patch. Even with the Jag patch though, it's pretty damn cool, mostly because it's a sweet patch of my favorite current NBA player, Ray Allen:
COMC's scan of this card was a little wonky and make it look as if it had four colors. This one only has three, but with four breaks in it it is still super awesome. The patch is part of the lettering from a road Sonics jersey, which explains all the stitching. I also think this card is especially neat since its a Sonics card and they don't exist anymore (just like the Expos card above haha).

That does it for patches, but not for the package. I also picked up two Seneca Wallace needs. First the highest numbered card I still needed, which is/550:
This is one of the cards from 51/550 to 550/550 in the run, which weren't auto'd. I already had an auto'd version, shown below:
Can you imagine if these had been hand signed instead? Could've been cool, and this could be a good card for a Seneca ttm someday if I ever try.

My other Seneca card is his 2003 Topps card, the Black parallel version:Though I don't care about it, this one is #15/150, which was Seneca's jersey number. So that's neat.

And finally, since I had $0.30 left over, I purchased a Daniel Ray Herrera card from the site:
Random I know, but if you'll recall I went to a Reds-Cubs game a while back and got in person autos from Tom Gorzelanny, Logan Ondrusek, and Danny here. I had cards for Tom and Logan but nothing for Herrera, and so now I finally do and I can put it and his auto back to back in my binder. Which looks awesome! Someday maybe I'll show it off hahaha.