The Great COMC Post #1 - Baseball PCs and Randoms

I always love my random PC posts more than my typical PC posts.  I mean, it's nice to boost up my PCs and I like collecting who I collect, but the random cards I grab area always so eclectic.  I mean where else will you find a shiny Space Jam sticker like this one:

Sure I don't collect Wayne Knight or Michael Jordan, but I love Space Jam and stickers so this had to happen.  It's too great.

This COMC grab was football heavy, so I am gonna throw in my few baseball PC gets with the randoms this time around.  That doesn't mean they were lame though - I think my first Shin-Soo Choo auto vehemently disagrees with that notion:

This Martiners auto was on COMC FOREVER, and I was just waiting for some extra funds to grab it.  I got some, made an offer, and it's mine now.  Choo has a kind of crazy sig, and I like it!

My other baseball PC gets were all Elizardo Ramirez.  I picked up a few Pristine cards of his, including a /69 die cut parallel and the base:

Phillies ends up looking so weird in the above image.  I love the shiny though.

My other favorite Elizardo card is this gold prospect pairing with Ryan Madson, who is still pitching meaningful innings for the Athletics bullpen twelve years later:

At the time, it feels like Elizardo's star shone a little bit brighter, but it's Madson who ended up turning his stuff into a lengthy career.  I guess you never really know!

I grabbed a few cheapie patches in this lot too.  The first is third three color patch of Austin Kearns:

Apparently card companies liked sticking Kearns with better players but giving him the jersey.  Regardless, this patch was way too nice to pass up, especially with my living in Reds country these days.

I've also always wanted a nice relic of Stephen Davis, so I grabbed this cheap three color one:

I've always loved how Davis went from late round FB/afterthought to NFL star.  I mean, he was the starting FB in 1998, his third season in the NFL.  The next year the Redskins moved him to RB, and he responded with an NFL leading 17 touchdowns and a Pro Bowl visit.  Always cool when that kind of stuff happened.

One good turn deserved a few more, so once I got a relic of Stephen Davis, I grabbed some autographs of a few QBs I enjoyed watching, Aaron Brooks and Cody Pickett (his is /50):

Brooks is pretty well known (and has a real shaky signature), but I'm still surprised at how cheap his autos are.  Pickett was scrappy as heck and I remember cheering for him like crazy in 2005 when he somehow earned two starts with the 49ers.  He was awful (14 for 35, 2 interceptions, 40% completion percentage) but I remember a lot of scrambling and a lot of heart in those games.

I also grabbed an auto of a longtime defensive favorite, Bobby Taylor:

I think I've mentioned in the past how the Eagles secondary of Troy Vincent, Taylor, and Brian Dawkins (and I guess Michael Zordich) was one of my first favorite groupings of players in football.  Taylor never got the credit that Vincent or Dawkins did, but he was a very solid player for many years, thanks mainly to his 6' 3" height.  He made one Pro Bowl in 2002, and it's nice to finally have his autograph.

At this point I was kind of just looking for cool cards of names I remembered, so I was pumped to see these two cards /50 for around $1.  The left is Michael Coleman, former Red Sox superprospect, and the right is the other Ricky Williams, with the gold speckle really going nicely with those Saints colors:

Coleman came from relative obscurity to being the 51st ranked prospect in all of baseball prior to 1998 thanks to a 20-20 2B-HR season over AA and AAA and a triple slash of .305/.377/.524.  He was never given a lot of chances at the major league level and slipped back while in the minors, and so his entire major league career was 70 plate appearances over 22 games, which is a shame.

Ricky Williams had way less fanfare than the other RB out of Texas with that name, but he did play two seasons with the Colts, rushing for 190 yards and scoring four total touchdowns in that span.

I used the above Ricky Williams a lot in Madden 2004, which is also true of Jason Brookins, so I grabbed one of his cards:

He's a guy I always signed because he was so lowly ranked, which was mostly because it had been a few years since he really played any football.  The Jaguars signed him undrafted in 2000, and his one season was in 2001 with the Ravens where he had five touchdowns and over 500 rushing yards.  

They didn't keep him around though, and in 2002 he was with the Packers for just two days due to a weird misunderstanding.  They signed him, gave him a playbook, and asked for it back the next day.  Brookins thought he was cut, so he gave them the playbook and left camp with his Grandma's cell phone to find somewhere to stay.  He wasn't cut, but the team couldn't him through his agent (they had a different phone number on record) and so he got cut and never sniffed the NFL again.  So unfortunate (To be fair he was also involved in a drug raid later that offseason, which could explain why his career didn't continue).

The last two cards are totally random, a Chrome Black hockey card /100 and a Purple MLS card /99:

I've mentioned my love for the Worcester IceCats a few times, and Johnson was a great goldtender for them for a bit, so I'll grab cool cards of his now and then.  Kevin Alston is a family favorite from his Revs days (I almost started an Alston collection alongside my Mike James collection - because I'm a fan of Kevin, Corey, and Rafer from the NBA), and so I decided it's finally time to grab a card of his.  I play a lot of Fifa 16 for the XBox One and Alston is on the end of my bench as a backup left back.  Basically he's a really cool dude.

Anyways, that's the randomness for today!  Hopefully you thought the patches were cool and you learned something about making assumptions from the story of Jason Brookins!  And now I get to consider the insanity of another name collection...ah the Alstons!