Pack of the Day 14: 2013 Bowman Baseball Retail Box Pack 4

So far this has been a pretty pedestrian box. This pack also has ten cards in it. I guess it is a little odd that I consider a pack that has the promised number of cards to be a bonus, but there it is. First up we get our four veteran players.

Then we have four prospects, a couple in regular form and a couple in Chrome form. No one I've heard of, really, but that isn't really saying much.

The Gold parallel is Adrian Gonzalez, watching a ball fly through the air.

And now we have the return of Josh Beckett passing out mid-pitch, with the questionable facial hair. This is the Orange parallel, which is not a shiny Refractor, but is numbered out of #/250. I wonder if there is a combination of Josh Beckett collectors, Dodgers collectors, and Orange parallel set collectors that adds up to more than 250 people demanding this card? That's the thing I question with a lot of these serial-numbered inserts. Are there enough collectors who want a particular card to justify putting a number on it? I guess a lot of them are lost due to product sitting on shelves, being opened by people who don't care about them, and damage of one kind or another.

I guess I am a little bit smitten by serial numbers on cards. They tell us there were only 50 of each Allen & Ginter's no-number back minis, but I don't get the same rush out of pulling one of those as I would from pulling one with a little foil 43/50 imprinted on the front or the back of the card. Anyway, that's something I've thought about over the last couple of months as I've opened packs and looked at cards online.

The prices online seem to bear me out on my opinion that the numbered cards don't really matter unless there is a very popular player involved. If you're a Harper, Trout, Cespedes, or Puig fan, then you're out of luck unless you can pull one of these from a pack. If you're a Beckett fan, you can probably get one pretty easily.