Some Chrome and Some Ink

I'm still plugging away at my Jon Singleton player collection, even though he's headed in the wrong direction on the career progression path, toiling away in AA after playing at AAA in 2016 and splitting time between AAA and the MLB in 2015. He's doing pretty well down there in AA, though. His batting average is still in the cellar, but he draws a lot of walks and that gets him on base at a pretty good clip. I just don't see that translating to the MLB level, except maybe on a team that isn't stacked with talent.

I am still holding out on getting an MLB.tv subscription for the year, as they usually make a pretty big cut to the price around Father's Day. Combined with the discount they give to military/students, I am usually out the door for the price of a couple blaster boxes, which is worth it to me for the amount of baseball I usually get to watch during the season.

I've been thinking about getting a subscription to the WNBA streaming service as well. It's not expensive at less than $20 for the season, but I don't know if I will actually use it. I have good intentions, but I didn't wind up using my trial WWE membership more than once or twice during the month I had it, and I think my WWE interest is even higher than my WNBA interest.

The first pickup from this colorful pair was this 2015 Topps Chrome Orange Refractor, numbered # 19 / 25. I like colorful Chrome cards a lot, a fact that Topps uses to separate me from my money on a regular basis. I especially like the brighter colors, like orange, yellow, green, and pink.

This card also hails from 2015, but it comes from 2015 Bowman. It's the Gold parallel of Singleton's Sophomore Standouts autograph card. It's numbered # 31 / 50. The back of the card discusses his ability to draw walks. The signature itself looks pretty good. I don't know how Singleton usually signs, but a lot of his autographs have really thick lines that run together, like he is just mashing the markers into oblivion when he signs the cards/stickers. I tend to have a pretty heavy hand when I write, but no one is paying me to write my name on something.

Pack of the Day 147: 2015 Bowman Hanger Box

I found myself at Wal-Mart the other day, doing some shopping for something. Digging into the recesses of my memory, I think I was picking up candy to hand out to Trick-or-Treaters on Halloween. So I guess it was a couple of weeks ago, not the other day. Anyway, I discovered that this Wal-Mart had a card aisle again, after some period of time where the card aisle had been removed (or moved to a location which I never discovered).

None of the offerings really appealed to me all that much, but I figured I couldn't go too wrong with a discounted hanger box of 2015 Bowman. All of the Bowman sets kind of run together in my mind, so I don't really know how much 2015 Bowman I have in my collection. It could be a little, or it could be enough to wallpaper a small room. Those are questions that my big sorting question will hopefully answer. What do I have in my collection, and how much of it do I have?

These were the six most interesting (to me) cards out of the thirteen veteran cards in the set. I read an article today saying that the Dodgers would like to move Puig, but are afraid that he might return to superstar status and make them look bad.

There were nine regular prospect cards in the box. Addison Russell played in some meaningful games for the Cubs this postseason.

Six Chrome prospect cards came in the box. This would turn out to be a Josh Bell hot box. Mark Appel got traded from the Astros to the Phillies in the Ken Giles trade. Giles' performance left a little to be desired in 2016. Hopefully Houston can shore up their pitching for 2017.

A good number of the guys I pulled Chrome cards for showed up in the Yellow parallels, including Appel and Bell. Josh Bell was also the subject of the Bowman Scouts' Top 100 insert I got. I like these Top 100 insert sets, but I have never made a real attempt to complete one of them. They cost too much, especially the top few guys each year. I like pulling them, though. They are probably my favorite Bowman insert.

The big pull of the box was a Prospects autograph of Zack Jones. He hasn't done much to make a name for himself yet, but it's still an autograph from a discount retail buy. According to the odds, these autographs only fall 1 per 16 hanger boxes.

That was an okay break for a few bucks. I like the variety that comes out of a Bowman break, even though I don't know most of the prospects by name. It seems like I often pull something interesting out of a Bowman break, like a colorful parallel, a Top 100 insert, or some sort of autograph. They usually aren't all that valuable, but I get excited about them anyway.

The Knuckleballer Flies South in the Winter

I've got just one card to post about today, but recent events have given me an opportunity to make it relevant.

This is a 2015 Bowman Baseball Orange parallel of former Blue Jays pitcher R.A. Dickey, who recently signed with the Atlanta Braves. For some reason I have never cared for the Braves, but now R.A. Dickey and Bartolo Colon are members of the team for 2017, and I will have to pull for them at least a little bit. The card was an eBay purchase, and is numbered # 15 / 25.

I did not work on my card sorting project this week at all. Last weekend I made it through a 5000-count box. While I was sorting, my youngest son (he's younger than the middle son, his twin, by all of two minutes) brought his Pokemon cards down to join me in the sorting party. He was also obsessed with the tire and firesuit relic cards from my blasters of 2014 Press Pass Total Memorabilia, asking over and over if he could touch the different swatches of material. I thought it was pretty neat that he wanted to sit with me and sort cards for part of an evening.

Pack of the Day 131: 2015 Bowman Blaster

Here is the danger of going to Target for a blaster of Topps Opening Day. Down on the bottom shelf is the box of discount blasters. Usually in my neck of the woods it's all hockey cards, a couple of Panini football releases, and maybe some Goodwin Champions. But on this day there was a lone blaster of 2015 Bowman Baseball in there with the 40% off sticker. There was also a blaster of something else that I recall looking too good to be true, and it was. It was a regular blaster that someone had stashed in there. I returned it to its rightful place and grabbed the Bowman blaster to 'think about it' while I walked around the store. I justified taking it home because it's a discount blaster of a product that can be fun to open. I've generally had decent luck with Bowman.

Here are the listed odds, for those who are into that kind of stuff. Definitely a lot more going on in this product than you find in Opening Day. Heck, this Bowman stuff has three different base sets in it.

The first base set features Veterans. One thing that I'd never noticed before is that the blank white corners are on the left for this portion and on the right for the Prospects set. That makes sorting a little easier. I just scanned a few of the base cards from each section. I hear that Mookie Betts is a pretty big deal in Boston. The fantasy baseball folks are expecting big things out of him. Houston traded for Ken Giles to shore up a bullpen that was pretty shaky at times last season. Andrew McCutchen is a superstar. Billy Hamilton runs fast, but he needs to get better with a bat. He always gets drafted too early in fantasy because of the dazzling stolen base numbers he can put up, but he hurts you in four other categories. You can always find speed lower in the draft and on the waiver wire.

In the Prospects section of the set I got two of the bigger names in Carlos Correa and Kris Bryant. Not too bad. I also got some of those Yankees, like Greg Bird and Luis Severino. I keep wondering if Zippy Zappy is going to rename his blog again, from Cervin' Torren' Up Cards to Severinoen' Up Cards. It just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? To be fair, Severino is slated to be on the big club Yankees this year and thus not really in Zippy Zappy's wheelhouse. I call that a missed opportunity.

The Chrome Prospects portion of the break was mostly guys I've never heard of, or at least never given much thought to. I recognize Hunter Harvey's name, although I don't know anything about him. Mark Appel was one of the guys the Astros gave up to get Ken Giles. I chose Josh Bell because I like the Pirates' uniforms and Buddy Borden because his name is Buddy and his full name is almost as good as Buddy Boshers.

Now we're getting into the shiny stuff from the break. These are all from the The Farm's Finest Chrome Minis set. The Bradley Zimmer and the Renato Nunez on the left are base models, while the Nick Tropeano card on the right is a Blue Shimmer Refractor, which falls 1:175 packs. 

The really cool thing about these cards is that they feature lists on the back of the organization's top prospects. According to these lists, the Indians have several highly-ranked outfield prospects, the Oakland A's have a mix of guys, and the Angels are pitcher-heavy (as of the time this set was designed in 2015). The Nick Tropeano card is serially-numbered # 066 / 150.

Here's another list-based insert, the Bowman Scouts' Top 100. I've always liked this insert set, but I haven't ever realistically thought about putting one of the annual checklists together. I still like pulling them, though. Joc Pederson is a decent pull. He made the All-Star Game last year, but will probably need to bump up that batting average a bit and / or hit a butt-ton of home runs. He's having a pretty good spring so far.

I think this is the basic Chrome Prospect Refractor parallel of Jen-Ho Tseng's card, which is a surprisingly tough pull at 1:53 packs. In 2015 Topps went to a model of really cutting back on the colored parallels in the Bowman and Chrome brands. I wasn't really a fan of the move, as those products really kind of live and die on cards with colorful borders. I don't know much about this guy, as he's only 21 years old and buried way down in the Cubs' A+ club. The card is serially-numbered # 079 / 499.

This blaster wasn't quite done giving up decent stuff, though, as I also got an autographed card of Alex Balog. He appears to still be in the Rockies' system, pitching for their Modesto A+ club in 2015 and also in winter ball in Australia. He's not even projected to be in the majors for a while, if he even gets there. He lists The Great Gatsby as his favorite book, which makes him either a liar or a nerd. This autograph is the Silver parallel, numbered # 018 / 499. They are seeded 1:144 packs, which makes this another pretty tough pull.

I can't complain too much about this blaster. I got some decent cards among the base stuff, a couple of good inserts, and three relatively scarce serially-numbered cards. That's not too bad for a discount blaster. The hits probably aren't good enough for me to say, "I made my money back on this break," but maybe if you combine them with the Bryant and Correa base cards and add in the rest of the cards and squint real hard you could make a case for it. Breaking Bowman is a lot more fun than it should be, but it would be even more fun with a little more color in the box. Maybe I am looking at the past with rose-colored glasses and Bowman has always been this way, but I seem to recall a bit more shiny and colorful stuff in previous years of the product.

Check Out My Cards 8: Jon Singleton Bowman Parallels

This is the last post about my recent COMC order, which I used to build up a couple of UFC player collections and add a number of Jon Singleton cards to my collection of his cards. I've already shown off a couple of common 2015 Topps parallels and a nice relic-auto hit from Panini, but I also grabbed a handful of Singleton parallels from 2015 Bowman. First up is this Silver Ice parallel. The Cardboard Connection page for the set says that Silver Ice parallels were only one per box in 2015, which is much more rare than they've been in the past. At least that is my recollection. And my recollection would be wrong, because the entries for 2014 and 2013 Bowman both show the same seeding for Silver Ice cards. 

This is the Silver parallel, which is the most common of the serially-numbered cards. This copy is # 014 / 499. The Silver parallels feature printed-on serial numbers rather than the foil-stamped numbers that the less common parallels carry. I wonder if that was a cost-saving measure, and what the difference is between the production processes for each method?

This Purple parallel features the foil-stamped serial number # 030 / 250. There's not much else to say about it. It's interesting how the border color influences the way the rest of the picture looks. The blue parts of Singleton's uniform look a lot more purple to me in this photo than they do in the other cards in this post.

And this is the card that set me off down the 2015 Bowman road in the first place. It was a reasonably-priced Orange parallel with a nice low print run, being copy # 08 / 25. There wasn't much in the base Topps rainbow for me on COMC, so I went with these Bowman parallels instead. I was pretty happy to fill a few more spots in my Jon Singleton collection, especially this rare Orange parallel.

Combined Shipping Leads to Buying Stuff 8: R.A. Dickey Bowman Gold

Well, yesterday's post imploring Daniel Norris to pitch well didn't work out. He only lasted 1.2 innings on his 75-pitch cap as the Rangers beat the Tigers in a 7-6 game. To make things even worse, the Angels won and the Astros lost, dropping Houston to a half-game deficit in the race for the second Wild Card spot.

R.A. Dickey takes the mound for the Blue Jays tonight in the second game of a double-header. It looks like they will clinch the AL East based on the result of the first game, but I still hope that Dickey pitches well and takes them to a win. Dickey's numbers aren't that great this year overall, but he really turned a corner once June rolled around and has pitched very well since. The knuckleball still betrays him here and there, but he has put together a lot of good starts.

Today's featured card comes from the same eBay lot I've been discussing for the last few days. It's Dickey's Gold parallel from 2015 Bowman. It's numbered # 32 / 50. Again, not a card I would pay the asking price plus $3 shipping for on its own, but combined shipping brings the unit price down enough for me to justify it.

An Astros No-Hitter and a 2015 Bowman Gold Jon Singleton

On Friday night pitcher Mike Fiers, recently traded to the Astros from the Brewers, threw a no-hitter against the Dodgers in a 3-0 win. I didn't watch the first few innings, but I turned the game on in the 5th or 6th inning and had a good time watching to see if Fiers would be able to finish the thing off. Those last couple of outs were pretty tense, but he got it done. Even more important, the Astros won the game to keep them moving in the right direction in the standings. They beat Zack Greinke on Saturday night, too, which was especially good because the Angels were busy being blasted by the Blue Jays. The Rangers have been making a go at things lately, too, and have caught up to the Angels in the standings so that both teams are just a few games behind the Astros for the division lead. The Astros will have another tough test on Sunday, going up against Clayton Kershaw in the final game of this series, after which they will head to New York to face the Yankees.

Here's an Astro who is looking forward to September call-ups where he might get another chance at getting back on track. Unfortunately the struggles he had during his earlier stint with the Astros have continued after his demotion back to AAA, and he just isn't putting up much in the way of numbers there.

This 2015 Bowman Gold parallel has been sitting in my scan folder for quite some time, so I thought I ought to get it posted so that I can move it from there into my 'Posted' folder. It is numbered # 42 / 50.

Pack of the Day 102: 2015 Bowman Retail Pack

I bought a pack of 2015 Bowman a couple of weeks ago. I guess it probably came from Target? I don't remember. It didn't really have much in it that interests me, so I set it on my desk and it has been floating around near the scanner ever since. Since new card acquisitions are kind of slow lately and I have a bunch of longer posts I haven't got around to yet, I scanned the cards so I would at least have something for the blog.

First up is the Veterans part of the base set. These are the non-prospect guys, although that Javier Baez dude in the lower right is kind of straddling that line between prospect and non-prospect. I guess he qualifies for the RC logo, so he can't be in the prospect set any more. Greg Holland at least has a decent photo on his card. I think he might be on every one of my fantasy baseball rosters this year. There is a whole lot of blue in this scan.

The most notable card on that top row is the David Dahl card. It has the Bowman Chrome logo and the printed name and team logo instead of the foil name and logo, but it doesn't have the Chrome treatment that makes the card all glossy and silver like the Chrome cards on the bottom row. I just noticed that, so I guess it was worthwhile to revisit this pack so that I could discover a great oddity.

I really like those Bowman Scouts' Top 100 inserts. I guess there is just something about rankings and lists that appeals to me. When I was a kid collecting basketball cards I had a monthly 'Hot List' where I ranked my top 20 or so favorite players and tracked their rankings over time. Once I came up with my list I would swap their cards all around in my binders so that my collection was in order by Hot List ranking. I don't really recognize any of the names on this list, except maybe for Bradley Zimmer. I like Bowman as a product because there is all sorts of stuff in the packs, but when it comes to the prospect cards I usually don't have much of a clue.

Jon Singleton 2015 Bowman Red

I picked up this card for a decent price on eBay recently. It's the Red parallel of Jon Singleton's 2015 Bowman card. Singleton's cards have been available at a pretty deep discount since he got sent back down to AAA at the end of Spring Training, but I imagine they'll heat back up here pretty quickly as his recall to the Astros is imminent. He recently had a 10-RBI game and is pretty much mashing the baseball. That kind of stuff tends to get people pretty excited. Here's his grand slam from that game:

While I am glad to see that he is playing well and flirting with promotion, I imagine that when the call does come his card prices will go back up, causing me to miss out on low-numbered stuff like this card. This one is numbered # 3 / 5.

Now that school has ended it's been hard to gain some direction in my life. Today I finally dug in and started working on getting my office/hobby room cleaned out and organized. Over the last couple years I've been focused so hard on school that shipping boxes, comics, cards, games, books, and magazines all just piled up down there. I made good progress on that project, and soon I should have enough space to finish the big card-sorting project I tried to get through during the Christmas holiday break.

The Houston Rockets somehow won Game 6 in their playoff series with the Los Angeles Clippers to force a Game 7 tomorrow. I really hope they can pull it off, but that will be a tall order. I was following Game 6 on my computer as I don't get cable or satellite and can't watch the NBA except the finals, which are televised on ABC. The Rockets were down by 19 points and I closed the browser window in defeat. I came back a while later and they were up by like 12 points with just a little time left in the 4th quarter. I had to refresh the screen a couple of times to make sure it was right. If they can get past the Clippers they will have the tough task of trying to beat the Golden State Warriors in order to move on to the NBA Finals against whoever emerges from the East bracket. But before all of that they have to win this Game 7.

Pack of the Day 98: 2015 Bowman Value Pack

My son's Kindergarten class had a musical presentation the other day. When I arrived at the venue I had to park three blocks away, and once I got into the building there were about 200 angry people in the lobby, complaining because tickets were all sold out and they weren't able to get in to see their children perform. Apparently the grade school song and dance routine is a hot ticket in this town. My wife was able to see our son perform, as she had volunteered to assist the teachers backstage. Outside in the foyer, some angry mothers were becoming unruly and I decided to get out of there.

Although lately I have mostly been buying singles and sets rather than busting wax, sometimes you just need to open a few packs of cards. With a little time to kill, I made up an excuse to go to Target. I considered buying a loose pack of 2015 Bowman and maybe one of 2015 Gypsy Queen, but the local pack searcher had been around at some point and all of the Bowman packs had been removed from the gravity feeder, felt up, and the unwanted packs were all shoved into the Gypsy Queen gravity feeder. I am not sure how you feel up a Bowman pack for hits because most of the value in Bowman comes from colored parallels and autographs. It's not really a relic-heavy product. I don't usually shy away from the loose packs because I think the guy made off with all of the hits; I avoid them because the pack searcher in our town is pretty heavy-handed when it comes to his search methods. I've found many a card with peeled edges and dinged corners after he gets done plying his trade. The blasters of the new WWE Chrome set called out to me and I considered the repack selection, but I eventually settled on a value pack of 2015 Bowman, with 3 packs and a bonus of three Yellow parallels. 

First up are the three Yellow parallels. I'm not familiar with any of these dudes, so the only real notable thing for me here is the amazing Photoshop job on the Jairo Labourt card there on the right. Bowman usually has some pretty obvious editing on the photos, and every so often you find a card like this one that really goes the extra mile. It's like a throwback to the vintage edits you see on cards from the 70s.

Each pack contains 4-5 veteran cards, 3 prospects, 2 Chrome prospects, and 0-1 inserts, for a total of 10 cards. At least that is how these three packs worked out. I want to apologize to any Adam Wainwright fans who are out there. I drafted him in some of my fantasy leagues, which pretty much doomed him to suffer that season-ending injury he sustained a couple of weeks ago.

I did manage to hit a few Astros among the various prospect cards, although I managed to avoid any of the really popular ones. Colin Moran is the representative in this pack. The back of the card says he is rated as the Astros' seventh-best prospect this year. I recognize Tyler Naquin's name from previous iterations of Bowman.

Here are the two Chrome prospect cards from the first pack. Again, I don't recognize these guys. I don't know how I feel about the card design this year. The partial borders and one-sided balance of the player name and team logo are a little distracting, but I also think the cards look good. I guess I'm just used to either having no border or an all-around border.

This pack contained a colored parallel, a Purple Chrome Refractor of Victor Reyes. These fall 1:105 packs, so I guess that's pretty good. I have no idea who Victor Reyes is, though. The card is numbered # 144 / 250.

I'm not really familiar with any of these dudes.

David Price hasn't exactly been an ace this year. You can blame that on me again, as I drafted him for a fantasy team. Iwakuma has also not been very good and is currently out with an injury, but that one isn't my fault. He is a good pitcher, but his K-rate isn't good enough for most fantasy leagues with an innings cap. Liriano and Yelich have some nice photos on their cards, although that Liriano card is a good candidate for a Panini product as most of the logos on his uniform are obscured.

Jairo Labourt's awesome Photoshop makes another appearance, this time in shiny Chrome. Matt Andriese is a pitcher in the Rays organization. His card says he's their 15th-rated prospect. And that does it for the second pack.

Here we get quite a variety of shots among the veterans in the pack. We've got Corey Dickerson swinging the bat, Jake Lamb celebrating, Chris Sale throwing angrily, and Elvis Andrus fielding.

The three prospect cards in this pack are three more guys I've never heard of. Edmundo Sosa is so far down on the Cardinals' farm system that his games are played in a local fishing pond.

The Chrome prospects in this pack are two more guys I've never heard of, but at least Domingo Santana is an Astro. 

Closing things out is another Astro, this time on a Gold parallel numbered # 31 / 50. These Gold parallels fall 1:564 packs, so they're a pretty rare find. I got pretty lucky in these three packs with two numbered parallels, although really they aren't big names and probably aren't worth much. Bowman is fun to open because of the variety of cards in the packs, with veterans, prospects, Chrome prospects, and all kinds of colorful parallels.