Breaking it Down 22: The Nachos Grande 2014 Stadium Club Box Break from Last October

I wrote this post last Sunday, so quite a bit has changed as far as my playoff comments go. And in an interesting turn of events, Nachos Grande has just announced a group break featuring a variety of products from 2015 as well as some extra goodies. Team spots are $25. You can check the details out here if you are so inclined.

Around this time last year the blogger Nachos Grande held a group break for the newly-released 2014 Topps Stadium Club set. I signed up for the break, claiming the Rangers and Athletics. These scans were buried in roughly the same place as the scans I posted about yesterday, and I never got around to posting about the cards I got in the break. This Yu Darvish Beam Team insert is my big hit from the break. It's a pretty nice card and I like the Beam Team designs. They take me right back to the 90's sets this product was spawned from.

Shin-Soo Choo hasn't set the world on fire so far in the ALDS against the Blue Jays. I am typing this last Sunday, so those two teams played Game 3 tonight which the Blue Jays won to stave off elimination on the back of big hits from Troy Tulowitzki. I tried to watch the game broadcast, but discovered that it was on Fox and that meant Harold Reynolds was on the broadcast team. I just can't listen to that guy. He can't let a moment of silence go unfilled and 85% of what he says is some mixture of irrelevant, annoying, or just plain wrong. He was trending on Twitter and Facebook tonight after he insulted Canadian baseball fans. I didn't hear that part of the broadcast, but I guess there were a lot of annoyed Canadians tuning in. There are a few broadcast teams that I prefer to listen to and a great many that I don't mind hearing, but anything with Harold Reynolds in it just grinds on my brain until I give up. He's a terrible announcer and he dominates the conversation, preventing the other people in the booth from sharing their perspectives. So I watched an inning or two of Game 3 of the Rangers and Blue Jays and then I shut it off.

I am told that R.A. Dickey will be making his playoff debut in Game 4, and that brings all kinds of nerves to the table for me. I want him to do well as a player, so I guess that means tomorrow I will be pulling for the Blue Jays. But before we even get to that my brain will be exploding as the Astros go up against the Royals with the chance to clinch the series at home behind Lance McCullers, Jr. They're going up against Yordano Ventura, who they got to before the rain delay in Game 1. I hope they can do it again.

Elvis Andrus is playing for the Rangers in these playoffs, although he hasn't done a whole lot with his bat. Michael Choice is in the Indians minor league system now, and Profar and Darvish are both injured.

Donaldson is currently with the Blue Jays, and could be the AL MVP this season if the voting swings in his favor. I think Mike Trout is the guy he has to beat. Jose Canseco makes up the lower half of this scan while exposing his upper half in that glamorous Dream Team card from Score. Canseco made headlines last year around the time this break was going on for shooting his finger off while screwing around with a gun cleaning his pistol. The finger was reattached but as a joke Canseco tweeted out that it had fallen off again during a poker tournament and announced that he might auction off the detached reattached re-detached digit. It turned out that the finger had not actually fallen off again, but one forum poster named mouschi (allegedly one of the premier Canseco super-collectors) created a custom card imagining what a Canseco finger relic card might look like. You can view the thread about it here. And this is what his custom card mock-up looks like:

Notice how it's numbered 1 of 10. Canseco had better count his fingers after each public appearance to make sure no rabid collector makes off with them. Thanks for hosting the group break, Nachos Grande! Sorry it took me so long to post about it.