Finally! The 2015 Topps Stadium Club Set

I've been trying not to bust packs too much lately, as it seems to be more cost-effective to buy collated sets and cherry-pick the hits I want from online sellers. I miss out on the thrill of pack-busting, but I guess that's what repacks, group breaks, and the occasional hobby box are for.

With that attitude I didn't purchase much 2015 Topps Stadium Club at all. I saw plenty of it on the blogs and picked up a few singles here and there, but I was waiting on the base cards until I could pick up the whole set in one go. It took a while, but I finally had a set fall to me at my (cheap-ass) price ceiling. I got it for about 19 cents per card, which I thought was a pretty decent deal. I flipped through the whole thing and picked out a few favorite cards to scan here. I tried to ignore some of the cards that have already had plenty of run in the blogosphere, so you won't find Bip Roberts, Ernie Banks, or George Brett here. I'm no Yankees fan, but this Mariano Rivera card shows how I reacted once I actually landed this set for my collection.

If you're going to use zoomed-in shots of players on your cards, that Josh Donaldson photo is a good example of how to do it. At this point it is hard for any Jose Bautista card to live up to the 2016 Topps Series 1 bat flip card. It would be awesome to be a fan who shows up on a baseball card, but it would be significantly less awesome to be a fan on a baseball card making a derp face.

That J.J. Hardy card is pretty chaotic. I guess the Orioles won't be mixing baseball with Twister again anytime soon. Not pictured on that Dale Murphy card is his mom telling him to clean up all that baseball stuff before someone trips on it and gets hurt.

It's nice to see an athlete showing proper form for the Anthem. So many times on TV broadcasts I see athletes dancing around or focusing on something else during the National Anthem. Football players seem to be the worst offenders in that regard. I guess not all the players are from America but for me it's not a negotiable thing. Bo Jackson was so cool back in the day. I don't even like thinking about the Astros right now. They've got a lot of expectations piled up now, and I have to wonder if their bats can be hot enough and their pitchers can throw well enough to stay in the mix this year. Evan Gattis will play a big role in the team's fortunes once he gets back from hernia surgery.

I don't have much to say about this batch of photos. Just nice photos all around. Stadium Club is a cool set. Maybe if every product looked like Stadium Club it would be too much, but I don't know. What cards out there look better than Stadium Club?

For a while there Yoenis Cespedes must have had his bags all packed, because he moved a few times before finally signing a deal with the Mets. Doug Fister was brought in to (probably) fill one of the back-end rotation spots on the Astros' roster. Hopefully he'll be able to put a poor 2015 behind him.

I picked these cards more for the photos than I did for the guys pictured on the cards. Felix Hernandez showed up to Spring Training this year having bleached his hair and goatee. The look has been universally panned by press and teammates, but Hernandez says he plans to keep the look all year in spite of the criticism.

In the lead paragraph I said I would try to avoid photos that had already seen a lot of run on the blogs, but I couldn't leave out that Eckersley card. It's probably my favorite card in the set. I watch a lot of A's broadcasts on MLB.tv, so I see the big-head A's quite a bit over the course of a season. I'm not sure why it works out that way, but if the Astros aren't on the A's are usually my go-to team. Next on the list would probably be the Blue Jays and then whichever matchup on the day features the most players on my fantasy baseball team.

In hindsight I think the Derek Jeter or Fred McGriff cards would have been better to close the post than that Scherzer card, but I wasn't really thinking about that when I did all the scanning for this post. Oh well.

I'm glad I was able to finally add the set to my collection. My patience paid off in the end, as the price was about 65% of what I anticipated a full set would cost me. There were a couple of cards missing from the set when it arrived, but I was able to purchase the missing cards on Sportlots quickly and without much expense.