Pack of the Day 83: Box 3 of 2014 Topps Mini Baseball

I've got a bit of Mini Fever, and here are the results of another big break of 2014 Topps Mini Baseball. First up is a little breakdown of the base cards in the box:

This box produced 225 base cards. There weren't any doubles within the box, but when it came to working on my set build there were only 80 new cards added to go along with 145 doubles. At this point I still have not pulled any triples, but have 176 total doubles across three boxes, or close to 80% of a box. For the set I moved up to 498 / 660 of the cards, or 75.45% of a base set. At this point any further boxes are likely to contain a lot of duplicates. Adrian Beltre hates to have his head touched, so a card by Topps featuring a teammate in the act of touching his head makes for good comedy. If I were a better detective I would know who that teammate is. He seems rather pleased with himself. I'm kind of surprised they didn't save this photo for Stadium Club, although the flagship set does usually have a few photography gems to go along with all of the torso shots and cropped-off limbs.

It would be a lot easier for me if all the parallels in a given box were horizontal or vertical. When you have a mix you either have to feature some cards sideways or split things up into a million different scans, which means more cropping and re-sizing work. At least this horizontal-format card is Puig, even though it's only a checklist. And from what I hear, Puig is like three guys back on the HOT list. He got supplanted by Jose Abreu, and then Abreu has supposedly been passed up by this Kris Bryant guy. At least Puig has some decent-looking cards because he's always violating the unwritten rules of baseball by celebrating and having fun. *Brian McCann's nose starts bleeding* This card is # 36 / 63, which is sort of a symmetrical number and probably qualifies as an eBay 1 / 1.

I also got Gold cards of these other three guys. Alex Cobb is probably spitting a substance into his glove to rub on the ball later. That Lonnie Chisenhall picture gets me every time. That has got to be the least flattering uniform in all of baseball. I guess throwbacks are cool, but some of them should stay in their own eras. I always think that Aramis Ramirez card is a Ryan Braun card, but it's not. It's Aramis Ramirez. Speaking of Ryan Braun, in my Cost Accounting class we did an example problem in class, in which a company called Louisville Sports is contracted with making corked bats for a Green Bay Brewers player named Ryan Brown. Cost Accounting is pretty boring, so they put little stuff in there like digs at sports cheaters to spice it up and add an edge to otherwise boring problems.

Ramirez is # 09 / 63, Chisenhall is # 21 / 63, and Cobb is # 03 / 63.

I got one Pink parallel in this box, this one of Mariners outfielder Michael Saunders. The rumor is that Seattle is looking to move him and get some other pieces for their outfield. He played pretty well last year when he wasn't injured, but his time on the DL led to criticism from the GM and counter-criticism from Saunders' agent. Don't fight with your GM, folks, or you'll get shipped off to Canada. Just ask Josh Donaldson. Of course, Saunders is from Canada so maybe he wouldn't mind getting shipped there.

edit: I just heard that Saunders was traded to the Blue Jays for J.A. Happ. I guess there's something to this theory of mine. 

This Pink parallel is serially-numbered # 24 / 25.

Probably the hit of the box was this Yellow Printing Plate of A.J. Ellis of the Los Angeles Dodgers. I'm not a Dodgers fan, but it's kinda cool to get a printing plate out of a box. Yellow printing plates are probably the least of the four plate types (my personal order of preference is black-blue-magenta-yellow), but a 1 / 1 is still a 1 / 1. 

The promised hit of the box was this Prince Fielder relic card. Some of the shine is taken off of this one due to Fielder's lost year, which was a part of the Rangers' collective lost season. Still, he's a name-brand player and so far my relic pulls have been much better this year than they were in 2013. 

As a whole the box was pretty good, although I didn't make as much progress on the base set as I wanted. That is to be expected, though, as I get closer to that 100% completion mark. At around this point last year I think each box was getting me only 5-7% of a set in new cards and a while lot of duplicates.