A Trip To Big D's Sportcards

It was a quiet afternoon on the homestead yesterday, so I decided a trip to my local card shop, Big D's Sports Cards, would make the day a little better.  Jimmy had set aside a cool autograph of former NC State player Julius Hodge.  For those not familiar with Julius, he played at State from 2001-2005.  He was an All-ACC selection several times and was the conference player of the year during the 2003-2004 season.  His two most famous moments at State were aggravating Chris Paul to the point where he punched him in nuts and wrecking everyone's NCAA tournament bracket in 2005 when he made a great play to knock out UConn.  (apologizes for the video quality).

Hodge lasted two years in the NBA playing for the Nuggets, Lakers, and Bucks.  He has since played a long career overseas dominating the Australian Basketball League and Twitter.  Here's my autograph:

Of course you can't go into a card shop and just walk away with an autograph, unless it's an awesome autograph, so I stayed and shopped for awhile and picked up a few nice cards for the collection.  Here's what else I picked up yesterday:

My 2014 Topps set is coming along nicely and Jimmy had a few really nice pieces I decided to add to my growing collection from last month's new Topps set.  I already have three of the class rings (Stan, Rickey Henderson, and Randy Johnson), but decided to add a fourth with this Miguel Cabrera ring.  I'm a pretty big fan of the Tigers slugger and enjoy picking up his cards, even if they have him in a Marlins jersey.  I also picked up an autograph and jersey card from the 2014 Topps set:

Both cards are kind of a roll of the dice for the coming season.  Just two players I have a good feeling about.  Davidson was traded from the Diamondbacks to the White Sox where he will be the team's starting third baseman this season.  He had a "cup of coffee" with the DBacks last year, and while the numbers are not great, there not terrible and I like some of what I see with the former first round pick.  Mainly, half of his hits were extra base hits, 9 of them, with less than 100 at-bats.  In the minors he had an OBP over .350 and had roughly half of his hits come in the form of extra base hits.  Not saying the average is every going to be great, but get on base and show some pop, can't go wrong.  Rondon?  See Tigers bullpen.  He's big and throws really hard.  Rondon is great in the International League, just waiting for him to show up in the American League.  

 

I also picked up two minis from the 2014 Topps set.  Both of these cards seem extra cool given that both were active and very good players at the time the 1989 Topps set was released.  The Raines card would be even cooler if Topps had put down his name as Rock Raines, which was on the original 1989 Topps card.  Speeding things up:

 

A Gold Parallel of Matt Holliday's 2014 Topps card.  I already have the red version.  

Three Shelby Miller cards.....

 

and a Max Scherzer Topps Heritage Chrome card.  A great haul and great day at Big D's.