That's from 2002 Fleer Triple Crown, by the way, a very nice looking set that has great photos. After this break, I'm only missing a single base card from the Astros team set! Richard Hidalgo (#68) is the rogue card, if you were wondering.
Before I dig into some of the Astros highlights, let's take a look at a few cards that came in courtesy of everyone's friend, the Randomizer. I drew the Orioles, which was a really nice second team. I've already passed most of the cards onto Cliff, aka @OriolesRise, but let's have a look at what he missed out on er, I kept. First is a Calvin Pickering International parallel from 1998 Bowman Chrome. I got to see Calvin play at AAA Rochester on the giant baseball road trip we took in 1999 (I swear I will write about it someday) - not once, but twice, as we saw Rochester play an away game as well. On the trip I met Calvin and Ryan Minor in a hotel lobby playing pinball, and they both signed a few cards for me. Talk about a pair of giants - Pickering was listed at 6'5" 283 lbs. and Minor was a much leaner 6'7" 225 lbs. I also really dug this Chris Davis insert from 2017 Donruss Optic.
I hope Cliff doesn't get too sad about what he may have missed, but I only kept four O's cards out of the stack. The other two were this fabulous Ripken from 1997 Sports Illustrated - a phenomenal set that I was really excited to see in the break. This was from a subset of old SI covers in the checklist. The last O was a lovely Mike Mussina from 1998 Gold Label, hands down one of the most beautiful sets Topps has ever issued.* Definitely goes in my Moose mini PC.
* I will fight you on this, don't test me.
But the 'Stros were where it was really at, of course. Given that the club just signed him to a fat extension (hell yes, get yours José!), I'll lead off with these two parallels from 2017 Optic and Gold Label. The Gold Label is a Class 1 Black parallel. I'm so happy the team actually shelled out some dough to keep Altuve around for the long haul. His extension runs through the 2024 season - his age 34 season, and makes up for the fact that he was on the most team-friendly contract in baseball given his player value.
I mentioned that 1997 Sports Illustrated set, and I netted a pair of Astros from that box as well. I was a little surprised to see these were base cards when I went to catalog them, as I figured they were inserts. The Abreu comes from a set of rookies/prospects in the beginning of the checklist, while the extremely period-appropriate SIber Vision card is from a rather long subset - I think it was about two cards per team when I looked. Very cool and different.
I racked up with a five-spot of 1998 Bowman Chrome needs as well, including some most welcome Killer Bs. 1998 Bowman was a great set.
Of course, though, the highlights of the break came from my favorite set in it - 1998 Gold Label. That's a Class 1 Bagwell, and I was really happy to add that one. I'm only one Class 1 shy of the "base" set now - #5 Craig Biggio. The real score, though, was that Chris pulled me a Class 2 (hence the sparkly silver text) parallel of Richard Hidalgo - my first parallel from the set. The different classes can be distinguished by what type of poses are featured, but the easy method is the name text. Class 2 has "sparkly silver" and Class 3 has "sparkly gold" text, as opposed to the standard gold foil of Class 1.
Thanks for hosting yet another awesome break, Chris! Cliff, I hope you like those Orioles - there were some good cards in there.
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