Pack of the Day 80: 2014 Topps Mini Baseball Box 2

Here's a second box of 2014 Topps Mini Baseball that I opened up. I was too lazy to scan the base cards. They look like the 2014 Topps flagship set, but smaller. You've probably seen plenty of it. I don't think there were any doubles in the box, but there was a little overlap between this box and my first box. There were 224 base cards in this box as opposed to the 225 in the first box. 26 doubles in this box joined the 5 doubles in the first box, giving me 31 total doubles. 449-31 = 418 / 660 = 63.33% of a complete set so far. I am actually a little (9 cards) ahead of where I was last year after two boxes of 2013 Topps Mini Baseball when it comes to doubles.

In the current configuration our scanner has to be pulled off the shelf and held in my lap for use, so sometimes when I get downstairs to my computer I see that the cards slid around a bit before the scan and not just when I lifted the lid. I am far to lazy to grab them all back up, take them upstairs, and re-scan them, so Sonny Gray is just going to have to live with his card being cut off on two sides. So far the collation on these The Future is Now inserts is better than on the Chasing History ones from last year, where the cards included in one box mirrored almost exactly the cards from other boxes. This is a small sample size, though, so I can't know for sure how collation will be.

This box had two Pink parallels and four Gold parallels. That's one more Pink than the last box had, and right in line with the stated odds. These suffered from the same issues I complained about in the last post, with chipped edges and dinged/white corners. I wasn't very happy about all that, and it still bugs me. As My Cardboard Habit discussed in his post about 2014 Topps Update, though, Topps doesn't care because they don't have a real competitor and they know we will keep ponying up for crap products because we are collectors. I would like to note that the problems he observed in 2014 Update series were evident in 2012 Topps also, so duplicate-numbered cards and inconsistent font size and placement on the card numbers isn't a new thing.

That Dee Gordon card is a good one to get as a Pink parallel, as it goes well with his eye-black (eye-pink?) and armband. It's also a pretty cool shot, with the ball just hovering there frozen in time. I've heard, though, that if you wrap your hand around the bat barrel like that you are bound to wind up with a broken finger. Conor Gillaspie is the other horizontal-format parallel from the box.

For completion's sake and to show off the serial numbers, here are the card backs. The Dee Gordon is # 13 / 25, and Conor Gillaspie is numbered # 54 / 63. Gordon had a pretty good year, going wild on the base paths and bringing in an All-Star berth. Gillaspie apparently has had a couple of passable seasons with the White Sox. Who knew?

For vertical-format parallels I got Gold cards of Alexi Ogando, Zack Greinke, and Scott Feldman. The Pink parallel is Zach McAllister. Outside of Greinke this is a rather weak group, but there are a lot of cards in the set and not everyone can be a superstar.

Greinke's card is # 10 / 63, Ogando is # 03 / 63, Feldman is # 56 / 63, and McAllister is # 13 / 25, the same serial number as the Dee Gordon card above. I guess they were working on the thirteens when they packed this box.

And the promised hit in the box is a Justin Verlander relic card. He looks pretty sleepy in this photo. I do like the design of the relic cards in this year's Mini set. Definitely a better checklist than last year, too. I kind of wish I'd pulled an autograph out of one of the boxes, but if I have to settle for two relics I'd say Verlander and Tanaka are pretty good pulls.

I missed calling attention to my 400th post on this blog, but I did notice that this was post # 420. I've never been a stoner, but the juvenile in me still does a little Beavis and Butthead laugh whenever the clock shows 4:20 or the calendar turns over to 4/20. Maybe Verlander was participating in a little bit of 4/20 festivity prior to having his photo taken. After the game he's gonna go load up on some Doritos Locos Tacos and a large Baja Blast Mountain Dew.