A Tribe Called Quest, BBM, SNL, /5, /50, and Alfredo Simon's Old Name

I still have quite a few more cards to post from my last COMC purchase.  Here's a hodgepodge post to get the random stuff and one-off stuff out of the way.  So let's check it out!

First up is a "rookie card" of A Tribe Called Quest, one of the greatest rap groups of all time:

Fuji posted a few of these a while back, and it was cool timing because I had just grabbed this card a few days before.  These guys are on constant rotation on my Spotify playlist, and their album Midnight Marauders is one of my favorites of all time, so it's cool to honor them in cardboard form.  Also RIP Phife Dawg - it's been a hot minute now since he passed, but Phife was a big part of Tribe and so it was a shame to see "The Five Foot Assassin" succumb this year in his battle with diabetes.

Completely changing gears (which will happen a lot in this post), we next have two cards of Jose Lopez from 2015 BBM.  One is a base card and the other is some kind of insert:

Lopez has been in Japan for a few years now, and so once a year I'll check for his BBM cards on COMC or Ebay and they usually are pretty cheap, which is great.  He's back to hitting 20-25 homeruns a year in Japan like he did at his 2009 MLB peak, so it's great to know that Jose is finding success overseas these days.

When I was buying the Tribe card, I decided to look for cards of different celebrities.  I found a bunch of Bill Murray cards in an SNL set, and decided to go all in and just buy a bunch I liked:

Murray was on SNL before my time, so two of the sketches are kind of foreign to me, but the bottom left card references his lounge singer character, who is simply amazing.  I also missed Land Shark, which is the Chevy Chase card in the middle, but my father-in-law loves it and I like Chevy's work like Fletch even if he is a dick in real life.

The four remaining cards are just a nice cross-section of 90's SNL.  Obviously Chris Farley's Chippendales sketch is the classic, but Mike Myers' Lothar of the Hill People, Rob Schneider's Makin' Copies Guy, and Jon Lovitz's Devil are all amazing too.  I used to watch SNL (and Kids in the Hall) after school every single day, so it's cool to have cardboard to put with those memories.

Just a few cards left.  The next two are just nice PC gets, with one being /5 and the other being /50:

Dantzler is the /5, it's a National stamped card (you can see the stamp to the right of his butt).  And then Shantee Orr's card is a gold parallel /50.  Both very nice.

Which leaves us with a card featuring Alfredo Simon's old name - Carlos Cabrera:

Simon had one excellent year in Cincinnati a few years ago, so excellent that he ended up getting traded to the Tigers for Eugenio Suarez.  He then was awful, so awful that he is now back in Cincinnati (though on the DL).  So he's pretty forgettable to most, but my wife and I watched him pitch a few times so I pondered getting an autograph of his.

That would've been it, but I did a little research on him first, and the guy's history is SO SKETCHY.  Here are the weird details:
- I think most people know that Simon supposedly killed a guy once in the Dominican Republic.  If you didn't know, he shot bullets into the air, and the charge was that they landed and killed one guy while wounding his brother at a New Year's Eve party in 2011.  He was charged with involuntary manslaughter, but was eventually acquitted.
- Simon was sued for $15 million dollars by a woman in April of 2014 who claimed he raped her.  Charges were never filed, but there's supposedly still a civil suit going on out there.
- Finally, Simon was signed by the Phillies in 1999 as Carlos Cabrera, 21 months younger than Alfredo Simon.  He was in the Phillies organization until 2004, when they realized who he really was, and then they traded him away with Ricky Ledee for Felix Rodriguez.  So...there's that.

Anyways, after all that weirdness I decided I didn't want an autograph.  But I did want one of his pre-name change cards, because that's kind of random.  So now I have one!