Trade Post - Waiting 'til Next Year

I have shared some of my experiences with Panini Triple Play and my desire to collect the entire set and I am making progress thanks to trades like this.  Tom from Waiting 'til Next Year and I swapped a few of our dups to inch closer to completing this set.  This trade puts me about 20 cards away from finishing the set.

This set has gotten its fair share of love in the blogging community and I obviously believe it is well deserved.  It has a low price point, some unique art work and is just an overall well done set.  My LCS has had a much different experience.  He picked up 4 boxes of this stuff and has had virtually no takers outside of me. I bought 3 of the boxes and he packed out the 4th.  A few days back he was trying to get me to buy the last 7-8 packs from that box.  I think I has actually picked up a few single packs as well. Since they are 24 pack boxes, I am guessing I have bought about 80 of the 88 packs he has sold.

On to the cards, here are the Triple Play puzzle cards I scored from Tom:

 I would say that my only big critique of this set are these cards.  I like the idea of the puzzle on the back but I am a little bit bored by the monotony of have the same card front on all 9 of each players puzzle cards, not to mention their base cards.  Regardless, I am very happy to get closer to finishing off this subset of the set.

Here are 4 more cards from the base set.  I love how the eyes from certain cards are highlighted in a Focus subset, great idea even if it is kinda silly to proclaim a cartoon guy is focusing.  I also like the kid pics of a few of the players.  My favorite Triple Play pickup however is this Slugger Eye Black insert.  This completes the insert set for me.

Tom also through in a couple extra cards of, you guessed it, Giants!

As I recall these sets came out with Baseball's Greatest Sluggers, Hitters and Pitchers.  There are quite a few Giants featured and I have all the Sluggers and Hitters.  I do have a gap with some of the Pitchers and now that gap is much narrower with the addition of these Marichal and McGinnity cards!

Finally, my favorite card of the trade package:

 A Japanese card of Giants star pitcher Ryan Vogelsong.  His story is fairly well known, he was drafted by the Giants and bounced around to a few different major and minor league teams and eventually returned back to the Giants 2 seasons ago.  Since his return he has been a very good pitcher, even making an All-Star appearance in 2011.  He arguably should have made the team in 2012 as well as he was leading the league in ERA with quite a few wins at the break.

The front doesn't give too many clues about this being a Japanese card but flip it over and it all becomes crystal clear.  I am loving the mix of English characters with the stats lines and the "Did you know?" and all the Japanese characters.  No clue what it says but still very cool. I can make out that his W-L record in Japan through 2006 was 10-22 which to me makes his performance with the Giants that much more unlikely and impressive.  This is my first Japanese card in my collection and I am very excited to have it.

Thanks for a great trade Tom!