The Joy of Discovery

Have you ever played a video game and stumbled a hidden door that leads you to a new world?  Or have you ever walked into a restaurant you've never heard of before and walked out bragging to your friends about it?  How about trying a new sport for the first time and realizing you're a natural at it?

If you answered "yes" to any of these questions or have experienced the joys of discovering something new, then you probably walked away with a big smile on your face.  That's how I feel when I read your card blogs and see something I've never seen before.

A few months ago, I started reading The Oddball Card Collector, which is a blog that obviously features oddball issues.  If you haven't already checked out Anthony's blog, I highly recommend it.  Every post is a new adventure.  He covers everything from football police sets to baseball stadium giveaways to basketball food issues... and he provides a lot of details about each set.

Recently he featured the 2004 Upper Deck San Diego Padres SGA set, which caught my attention for a few reasons:

#1:  It's the Padres.
#2:  It's a stadium giveaway.

But the thing that stood out the most was this...

#3:  UD produced a card of The Swinging Friar.

I left a comment on his post and within a few hours I had received an email from Anthony offering up one of his extra sets.  Well... I accepted and within a week I had received a bubble mailer from him that included the amazing mascot card and the other 32 cards to go with it:

But that's not all.

He also threw in a 2003 Padres Keebler's set, which is very similar to the Mother's Cookies sets I collected as a kid.  According to Beckett, partial sets were given out to fans at a Padres/Dodgers game.  Each fan received 20 different cards plus 8 copies of one more card.  The point was to encourage fans to interact with each other and trade their duplicates for the cards they were missing.

Mother's Cookies used the same concept and as you can see these awesome trading cards also feature the rounded corners many of us associate with those sets.

If that weren't enough... he also threw in a few extras.  It's always a good day when I'm able to add a new Gwynn to the collection.  But he didn't just send me one new Gwynn.

Out of the eight Gwynns in the package, I needed six.  Not bad Anthony.  Six for eight is a solid day.  Random fact:  Did you know that Gwynn only had one 6-hit game during his MLB career?

Thank you Anthony for the awesome package of cards.  I've already started pulling out some extra oddballs to send your way.  Hopefully there will be at least a few cards you've never seen before, so you can enjoy the same experience as I did.

Happy Friday and sayonara!