Pack of the Day 105: Freebie 2012 Panini Cooperstown Blaster

I already showed one box of cards from my order from Dave & Adam's Card World, a Hobby box of Cryptozoic's DC Comics Super-Villains. Part of the shop's incentive program is a tiered group of gifts you can choose from based on the size of your order. My choice for this order was a blaster box of 2012 Panini Cooperstown Baseball. I don't usually go much for Panini's baseball stuff, but it was free and I've found myself grabbing various Panini singles lately for my player collections. Maybe I am softening in my old age.

Here are a few of the base cards that stood out to me. Nolan Ryan was my first favorite baseball player. I can't afford his cards, though, so I haven't built up much of a collection for The Ryan Express. Alexander Cartwright is apparently known as the father of modern baseball and played in the first recorded baseball game in 1845. He was also a firefighter. Harmon Killebrew is a local guy who lived in a town pretty close to the town where I went to high school. He also was a pretty good ball player. Catfish Hunter allows me an excuse to show off a picture from my personal life:

This past weekend my boys and I went on a camping / fishing trip with my dad. We didn't catch any Catfish, but we did get a nice big pile of trout out of the lake. I'm the bigger guy in the middle of the picture. The nights were a bit cold but we all had a good time. The boys really liked being able to hook and reel in their fish. Here's a close-up of the fish, the real stars of the show:

Anyway, it was a good time. The fish are delicious. In addition to fishing we went on a canoe excursion around the lake, visited a fish hatchery, and messed around at the campsite.

Getting back to the cards, here are some of the horizontal cards from the blaster. The Bruce Sutter card is a base card, but the rest are all from various insert sets. In the upper left is Gary Carter from the Field Generals set, a checklist that celebrates Hall of Fame catchers. There is a Hall History card of Honus Wagner, which is kind of an Inception card because it's a trading card about a trading card, in this case the famous T206 Wagner card. Finally we have a Postcards insert showing part of the Hall of Fame grounds during the winter.

I was happy to pull a Tony Gwynn card, with this one being an Induction insert showing Gwynn with his Hall of Fame plaque. The card in the upper right is a Bronze History insert that shows the plaque of Al Barlick, an umpire who worked a lot of games. It is numbered # 359 / 599. That Reggie Jackson card has a wood texture on the face of it. It looks like it comes from the blaster-exclusive Hall of Fame Classes Team insert set. It looks like individual players have multiple cards in the set, so maybe this set features players who had Hall of Fame credentials with multiple teams. Finally, I pulled an autograph, with this one being an on-card autograph of Dave Van Horne, a long-time broadcaster for the Montreal Expos. This one is numbered # 013 / 500. It's maybe not the most exciting autograph, but I'll take it. The dude has got some excellent penmanship. I was signing some documents the other day and they wanted me to sign my full legal name instead of my regular scribble signature. It was hard. It looked like I was trying to write with my off-hand. I had extra loops and letters and weird gaps and lines all over the place. I'd hate to be the PSA guy who tries to authenticate that batch of my signatures. That does it for this blaster box. There isn't much else to say. I didn't pull anything mind-boggling, but I did get some nice cards and an autograph. Not bad for a free blaster box.