PWE Playhouse: 3 From “A Cracked Bat”, More From “Dime Boxes”

I don’t write much about new cards these days, because there generally aren’t any for me. I’ve recently received some PWEs from hobby friends of mine, Julie of A Cracked Bat and Nick of Dime Boxes.

We’ll start off with the three cards from Julie… of late, Julie has a knack of getting cards to me at the end of rough days, and these were no different, having come at the end of a poopy work day.

FIrst up we’ve got this card from 2017 Topps Allen And Ginter. Now I’m not an A&G guy… I count 55 A&G cards out of the over 80,000 cards in my collection. However, I do appreciate the *right* A&G cards, and William Shatner definitely falls into that category.

As a somewhat-lapsed Trekker I, of course, appreciate Shatner for his portrayal of Captain Kirk… But I also loved him as Denny Crane on “Boston Legal” and in a number of other things he’s done. I even like a couple of songs he’s been featured on.

This card is from the “Flipping Out” insert set from last year’s Big League set. I’ve cooled a little on inserts over the past few years, but I’m not walking away from an insert featuring The Polar Bear!

One last one, a 1990 Swell Football Hall of Fame card of Steelers defensive tackle Ernie Stautner.  Ernie was well before my time as a Steelers fan – he retired in 1963 and I started to follow the Steelers 20 years after that – but of late I’ve been picking up cards of Steelers from before their 1970s dynasty.

BTW, there are three Swell cards of Stautner and all three feature this same photo… So those other two are on my “Sure, if they fall into my lap” list rather than my want list.

Thank you, Julie!  Cards from you are always appreciated!

Let’s move on to more cards from Nick…

Mike Mussina should’ve stayed an Oriole as far as I’m concerned… and I would’ve been happier if he just signed with the Indians as a free agent instead of going to The Dark Side…. But I don’t hold it against him… too much. This is from last year’s “Decade’s Best” set.

Also from last year is this Topps Sticker Back of the Mets Brandon Nimmo (who’s off to a very nice start this season). Topps is changing the format of their sticker packs this year (again), and it sounds like I wouldn’t like the changes made… not that it matters because I never see anything as exotic as unopened packs.

I got another sticker where the Met was on the sticker side. Pete Alonso again!

My 2021 Topps Series 1 set stands at 75 cards with the addition of this Mets combo card. I don’t know how hard I’m going to chase after this set, TBH. I started out thinking they were horrible, then swinging to “Well, they’re not as bad as the preview image made them look” and now back to “Yeah, I’m not feeling it”.

And guess what? It’s Pete Alonso AGAIN! Plus Michael Conforto. If you can’t read the text (which is a definite possiblity) it says “GET UP!” on the first line and “METS STARS CELEBRATE” on the second.

Wrapping up with another Swell card… This one a 1990 Swell card of former Mets manager Gil Hodges, who was an early (1982) inductee into the team’s HOF and whose #14 has been retired since his untimely passing in 1972. Gil was a Mets player in 1962 and at the beginning of 1963, and then came back as a manager from 1968 to just before the 1972 season when he’d suffered his fatal heart attack.

Thanks again, Nick!