Griffeys from the Griffey-man (oh, and a contest result)

First of all, thanks to all of those who took the time to (try and win free cards) participate and to those who pimped the contest. As expected (and hoped, of course), I got 3 times more readers than usual and 4 all new followers. I'm probably the most popular French baseball cards collector in the world. That's something. It's also from lack of competition, but STILL.

I'll give the results right away so that those who aren't really interested in the rest can go smell daffodils or chase butterflies instead of just scrolling to the bottom of the page. The correct answer to the number of Griffeys that The Junior Junkie sent me was....94 !

Two contestants were very close to the correct number : John Miller (101) and Jupiterhill (88). So congrats to Jupiterhill, you win a free entry to Matt's and my trans-Atlantic mutual box breaks ! Simply send me an email with your address and the team of your choice and I'll hook you up. Fyi, the bottom card was Bowman.

Of course, this contest wouldn't have been possible without the participation of one of my favorite bloggers out there : TJ. I'm always overwhelmed by his generosity, as he once again delivered and handpicked most of the cards I was missing for my Griffey base card collection, even though he collects as many Griffeys as is humanly possible to accumulate. And naturally, he didn't stop there.

Those are cards from his Randomactofcardness project. An awesome idea (he leaves random cards in public places, with the # on the cards, all numbered to...Well, to infinity. And that's a lot. People will then tweet using the given # and start collecting junk wax era cards just like that. Not sure how well I'll do in France, considering how Twitter isn't a huge thing here but hey, I got hooked thanks to a card I found on the ground, so why not !)

Those are some bad ass New Orleans beads. I could claim back the throne of France with those, but I like my head just where it is.

A Bautista variation SP I claimed a few weeks ago (yeah, I'm very greedy) with a custom top loader. Awww.

Anyway, back to the bulk of the package : Griffeys !!

A&G !

I'm not a big Bowman fan, but those 94 & 95s look really nice.

Let the boredom begin. They really all look the same to me, even though 12 years separate the first from the last.

I absolutely love that 1990 Leaf.

Great job on the 2014 SC.

That leaping one is really cool, I just might try to grab more from that set (and stay away from that grey bordered one).

Maybe they thought the 2009 would be his sunset card ?

And finally, my favorites : UD !

There were also 20-something other non-base cards that I needed for my collection. As it turns out, TJ has sent me about 140 Griffeys in just two packages. And I've accumulated 220 in a year. So that show how important he is to my own Griffey collection. I am now only missing 23 different Griffey base cards (from main brands, of course, I'm not counting the 36 000 different sets from the 2000s). I'll probably just pick some up from time to time on Comc or justcommons.

Thanks a million times, TJ. Let me know what you'd like me to send you in return !