Rainbow in the Dark 38: Wa(i)vering Enthusiasm

The Astros have continued to make moves in an effort to bolster a roster that took a step back in 2016 after a promising playoff run in 2015. A couple of those moves will have some kind of effect on my player collections. First baseman/designated hitter Jon Singleton was placed on waivers a couple of days ago, dropping him from the 40-man roster. He will probably be relegated to AAA, and this is a sign that the team might be ready to move on from him completely. There is still a chance that he could play for the Astros in the future, or that another team might show interest in him. It's hard to remember that he is still pretty young, so he might yet pull it together. He hasn't had a lot of cardboard recently, though, so most of my Singleton additions have been parallels from base Topps sets or filling in holes from older releases.

I don't know for certain, but this Pink parallel from 2015 Topps Series Two might be the last non-1/1 card I needed for the 2015 rainbow. It is numbered # 30 / 50. There could be variations still missing from my collection, but I know I've got most of them, including minis, 5x7's, online-exclusives, and all the packed-out parallels.

I saw the other day that this year Topps has released special holiday parallels with snowflakes where the corner 'fog' in the 2016 design would go. I gathered a few of Singleton's 2016 parallels, but there are so many out there. I'm glad I didn't make it my quest to get the full-blown rainbow of his 2016 base issue. I guess there is still time to go for it, but even from 2015 to 2016 it seems there was a large jump in the number of hard-to-get variations, with a great many of them exclusive to one retailer or only available as part of a complete set purchase on the Topps website. Instead of chasing them all, I have given the whole thing a miss unless something cool pops up in my (cheap) price range.

The seller on the Singleton card included a stack of 2015 Topps Football cards as packaging. I haven't really kept up with football cards lately, so it was interesting to look at the card designs and players. I probably wouldn't normally have scanned these, but when I purchased this Singleton card there wasn't much news about him on the airwaves and I thought I would need some post filler.

The design is pretty busy on these. It took me a while to figure out what was going on with those numbers on the front of some cards, as they didn't match jersey numbers. It turns out they are part of a subset called Topp 60, which I presume is some attempt at ranking the top sixty players in the league.

Here are the backs of some cards. You can see the Topp 60 write-ups on some of them. It's a cool idea. It's a subset that I would enjoy collecting if football cards were more of a thing for me. I imagine the Topp 60 is heavily weighted toward the marquee offensive positions, without many linemen or defensive players on the checklist. You have to go where the collector money is, and that usually means quarterbacks, wide receivers, running backs, and the occasional great tight end or J.J. Watt-caliber defender.

Numismatic Philately

Sometimes I pick up a card and it's more because of the card itself than the player depicted on the card. Usually it's because the card has a cool gimmick or some kind of novelty value, but the relevant checklist either doesn't have one of my PC players on it or my PC players' cards are prohibitively expensive / not readily available.

This was one of those cards for me. I don't collect Kennys Vargas, but I thought these Coin and Stamp cards from 2015 Topps were pretty cool. I don't remember exactly how I came across this card, but I was searching for something else and saw this one listed at a price that seemed pretty low. I put in a bid to see what would happen. It helped that the auction description was extremely spare, featuring the card number and player name without much other information. I thought maybe a player collector would find the card and outbid me, but it never happened. This is a 2015 Topps Series 2 Birth Year Coin and Stamp card of Twins prospect Kennys Vargas. I don't know if he's still considered a prospect because he's got 111 MLB games under his belt over two seasons, but I don't know what else to call him.

Here's the back of the card. While the stamp is in a little picture-box window, the coin is encapsulated in a little plastic holder so you can't actually touch it. With each of these cards being serially-numbered to 50 copies, I wonder how many hours Topps' employees spent sorting through piles of loose change to find coins from specific years? This one is # 22 / 50 for Vargas. There are other version featuring other coins (quarters, nickels, and pennies) as well as a truncated autograph checklist with embedded quarters and stamps. I probably won't be chasing anything else from this set, as I just wanted the one card as an example for my collection.

Rainbow in the Dark 35: Some More 2015 Singletons

I've picked up a large number of Jon Singleton's 2015 Topps parallels, to the point where I am pretty much admitting to chasing the rainbow of the card. I don't have the 1 / 1 stuff, but I have nearly everything else including the stuff from the mini and 5x7 sets. Some of the cards I was missing, however, were the serially-numbered parallels in the middle tiers (Snow Camo, Pink, and Black). This past week I was able to knock two of those off the list.

This is the Snow Camo parallel. I honestly don't have much to say about it. Singleton is currently battling for a spot on the Astros roster, but I think he might wind up back in AAA. He's one of those Quad-A guys who seems to really pour it on when he's on the AAA club, but can't buy a hit at the major league level. I keep hoping that he will figure it out, but I wonder how long his leash is with all the depth the team has at the moment. This parallel is # 34 / 99.

And here is the Black parallel. I picked them both up on eBay. There have been a few Buy It Now listings that pop up for these cards, but those crazy folks have been wanting $10-20 for these things. I am a player collector, but I'm not 100% dumb. These ones popped up for a few dollars each after shipping and I got them. The Black parallel isn't perfect. It's got a fair bit of white chipping around the border. I'm calling it good enough for my collection. It's numbered # 52 / 64. The Pink parallel still eludes me, but I'll either track it down someday or I won't.

The new Out of the Park 17 game came out today for people who pre-ordered it. I downloaded it and gave it a whirl. I like it pretty well so far, but I am still having difficulty getting used to the interface, which seems to have changed a lot more from 16 to 17 than it did from 15 to 16. I played through the 2016 season with the Astros. I traded for Adrian Gonzalez much too easily and when he started sucking the Diamondbacks gave up Paul Goldschmidt much too easily. With all those first basemen around I eventually traded Jon Singleton away for a relief pitcher, since I had some pitchers get injured. Pretty bad when you don't even keep your own PC guys around in a video game. It was pretty fun, but when I tried to start the playoffs the game crashed and I lost my whole season since I forgot to set up the auto-save feature. Maybe I'll try again another day.

Rainbow in the Dark 34: More 2015 Topps Jon Singletons that Look the Same

I picked up a few more different parallels from 2015 Topps, but on the screen they mostly look exactly the same as his standard base card. This first one is the over-sized Topps 5x7 card that was sold on the Topps.com website. I believe these were sold in team set form, but I could be wrong on that. I just picked this single up from eBay. This one is numbered # 15 / 99.

This card looks a little different from the regular base card in the scan, as it's got a bit of foil to it. A cursory search of the internet tells me that this parallel came in a 5-card pack distributed inside of Hobby-only factory sets. My copy is numbered # 032 / 179.

This card is not serially-numbered and appears pretty much identical to Singleton's base card. It comes from the 2015 Topps Limited set, which is a 'premium' factory set sold on the Topps website for about twice the price of a regular factory set. It is printed on thicker card stock and I believe it swaps out the standard silver foil for gold foil. I have to say I thought the card would be a bit thicker than it was, but you can kind of see the difference in thickness if you hold a base card and this card up next to each other. Future parallel collectors are going to hate these cards. On the Future Stars cards the difference in foil color is more readily visible, but on regular base cards it will just be the logo. These are not serially-numbered, but I think the stated print run for the sets was around 1000. As of this writing the full sets are still available on the site. As with the rest of these cards, I just got the singles I needed from eBay.

I think this about does it for my collection of Singleton's parallels from 2015 Topps. The thing that stinks is that I have a lot of the really hard-to-find ones outside of # 1 / 1 cards and I have most of the unnumbered stuff and numbered stuff with print runs of 99 or more, but I don't have the middle cards like the Snow Camo # / 99, the Black # / 64. ad the Pink # / 50. There are a couple of the Pink parallels on eBay right now with exorbitant Buy It Now prices on them, but I kind of backed into this rainbow and missed the prime window when these things were probably available all over the place. If any of them pop up I'll probably make an attempt at them, but I'm not going to make myself nuts going after them.

Check Out My Cards 7: Some Easy Topps Parallels

I mentioned before that I have inadvertently collected much of Jon Singleton's 2015 Topps rainbow, grabbing up many of the rarer parallels as the year went on. This latest COMC order was a good opportunity for me to pick up some of the more common parallels in the rainbow, something I had neglected to do thus far as I was not consciously chasing every variation of the card. This first one is the Rainbow Foil variation, which I believe is usually packed out at around the same rate as the Gold parallel but is not serially-numbered.

And this is the Gold parallel. This copy is numbered # 1626 / 2015. There wasn't a lot of other stuff available for Singleton from 2015 Topps, so these two cards were all I came away with from this purchase. I don't know what Singleton's status will be for the 2016 season. He had a pretty good 2015 in the minor leagues, but the numbers didn't carry over to his stints on the big-league roster. Most of the press out there seems to focus on how the Astros can avoid playing him by acquiring a third baseman and moving Luis Valbuena to first base. For now, his cards are relatively affordable and I'll keep picking them up when I can.

2015 Topps Series 2 First Pitch Set

A month or two ago I picked up the final ten cards in the First Pitch insert set from 2015 Topps Baseball. These cards were released in Series 2, adding to the fifteen cards released with Series 1. I believe I also picked up the Series 1 set at some point, but I never blogged about it. The premise behind the set is that it features various people, usually celebrities, who have thrown the ceremonial first pitch at MLB games. The card fronts carry a decent amount of information, like the date and location of the appearance along with the person's name and a photo from the event. The card backs have a little write-up about the pitch, sometimes sugar-coating the more wayward tosses. There weren't really any subjects in the Series 2 set that I absolutely had to have, but they are a pretty solid group.

I should like Stan Lee more than I do, but he always has struck me as a bit full of himself. His work has undoubtedly been a big part of my life, though, to the point that I named two of my sons after comic book characters he co-created. Maybe without his personality and endless ability to self-promote we wouldn't have access to the library of Marvel characters. There are a lot of Giants, Cubs, and Dodgers in this set, but I guess that's to be expected. Although the Series 1 group had more cards that I was interested in, I think this is a pretty good insert that does something a little different from the usual cookie-cutter insert fare. It would be kind of cool to keep this going as an annual insert set as there are always new people throwing out first pitches. 

2015 Topps Jon Singleton Silver-Framed Parallel

I am running short on time today, so this is a quick one-card post. I picked this 2015 Topps Silver-Framed parallel of Jon Singleton up on eBay at the end of June. These cards are pretty cool, but they are kind of difficult to store. Even if you find a top loader thick enough, they like to slide right out of the plastic because of their weight and their slippery metal cases. This is a pretty decent photo of Singleton and the card is fairly rare, with my copy being # 03 / 20 in the print run.

I watched the start and the end of tonight's Astros game. It was unfortunate to see that they lost a close one 1-0 to the Rays. The pitchers have been outstanding lately, but the bats just haven't been keeping up. They've got what projects to be a tough series against the Dodgers coming up and the Angels are right there behind them in the standings. I hope they can get it going soon.

Another White Whale Hunted Down: 2015 Topps Jon Singleton Acetate + 4th of July Camping Recap

I've been trying to track down one of the clear acetate parallels ever since Topps started putting them in their base sets. I have been chasing less-popular players since they tend to be the cheapest, but the bidding always seems to go a little higher than I want to pay. A couple of weeks ago this Jon Singleton card from 2015 Topps Series 2 popped up in my feed with a fairly reasonable price. Singleton's stock has dropped quite a bit since he was sent down to AAA at the start of the season, so I was able to get it for the opening bid. This copy is numbered # 01 / 10.

Singleton got called back up to the Astros a little while ago, but hasn't done a whole lot yet with the opportunity. In theory George Springer's recent injury opens up a bunch of playing time for the next couple of months, but Singleton might have to start hitting the ball in order to get a share of it. They don't play the same position, so there isn't really a direct route to playing time for Singleton, but people are going to have to shuffle around to fill that spot.

I was watching a game between the Astros and Red Sox this weekend and tried to come up with a list of my favorite Astros to watch. I always try to watch Singleton's at-bats when he gets them, but my top three must-watch guys right now are probably Evan Gattis, Carlos Correa, and Jose Altuve, roughly in that order. Gattis is a big dude, and with the beard he's got he looks a lot like one of the guys I worked with at FedEx. He seems to usually have good at-bats, and it always feels like he's on the verge of a big hit. Correa doesn't quite have the stage presence that Gattis does, but it seems like he's had at least one huge hit in every game I've watched over the last couple of weeks. I don't think Altuve ever stops talking, and he is pretty electric on the basepaths.

We went on a multi-family camping trip Thursday-Saturday for the 4th of July holiday. It was supposed to go through Sunday morning, but by the time Saturday morning rolled around everyone had about had enough of the heat and the hard ground and wanted to sleep in their own beds Saturday night, so we all decided to take off a little early. My mom and brother were there, as were 3 of my 4 sisters and their families, making a total of 10 adults and 11 kids on one site. There was a little creek on one side of the campsite and a hillside separating us from the rest of the campers, so it was actually a pretty good setup. Each day had about the right mix of activities and sitting around.

Thursday evening was set aside for getting there and getting set up. The campground had an alligator for some reason, so we went and looked at that. It obliged us by getting up and swimming over to have a look at us, probably hoping that we were planning on feeding it. For some reason the chicken run was set up next to the alligator's pen, which brought to my mind The Far Side comic strip.

Friday we went to look at some fossil beds, only to realize once we were there that the fossil beds are essentially a very warm hillside full of rocks. Luckily a sign directed us to town, where the Fossil Beds Visitors' Center was located. There we got to look at various fossils of prehistoric horses, mammoths, sloths, and saber-tooth cats. There was also a display about the Japanese internment camps that were set up in the area during World War Two. I can't say that I am surprised that Japanese-Americans were rounded up and sent to camps at that time, but I do feel bad that it happened and that not many people are even aware of it. One of my coworkers has family who were sent to live in the camps, and because it happened locally we learned a little bit about it in middle school and high school. We also stopped at a fish hatchery and saw hundreds of thousands of little fish in big tanks. There was also a nice little park area with Rainbow Trout and Sturgeon in it. It was shallow enough that you could reach down and pet the Sturgeon. There were 4 or 5 of them and they were all probably between 4 and 8 feet long. Before and after the outing everyone had plenty of time to mess around in the creek and hang out together. I skipped a lot of rocks, even though I knew my arm would hurt for a couple of days afterward (and it sure does). I just can't stop myself when there is a nice flat rock in the area. I have to throw it. 

Saturday involved more playing in the creek and also two trips to the swimming pool before and after lunch. The pool was actually three pools fed by hot springs. Cooler water was mixed in to varying degrees, so each pool offered a different temperature. I think everyone had a good time, but it was obvious by the time we left that everyone was pretty ready to get out of there. When we got home (about a two hour drive) we decided it wouldn't be worth it to drag three tired kids out to watch fireworks. We had some sparklers and a couple of other small fireworks left over from last year, so the kids got to see those as well as whatever the neighbors were setting off. We also got to see a few airburst fireworks that were being sent up in the surrounding neighborhoods. The kids had a really good time, which was a nice reminder that sometimes you don't have to go all out on a bunch of fountains and projectiles to have a decent 4th of July celebration. As they get older that will probably change some, but for now sparklers and ground bloom flowers are good enough.

Workin' at the Card Shop 7: Two Autographs from One Pack

I had some time to kill between work and an appointment I had, so I made a visit to the local card shop to have a look around. I planned on picking up a little bit of 2015 Topps Series 2 and hopefully a couple packs of 2015 Topps Archives. He had Archives in stock, but none of the boxes were open yet. I felt bad about asking him to open a box so I could buy two packs from it, so I wound up with a Jumbo Pack of Series 2 and a couple packs of 2014-15 Panini Donruss Basketball instead. The Jumbo pack of Topps contained 50 cards. I won't show all of them, but I'll show some of the ones that caught my eye:

The first thing I noticed was the weird coloring on Billy Butler's uniform. "Self," I said, "That is probably an airbrush job on his Royals uniform. I took it a step further and went and found the image that was altered to create this baseball card:

View image | gettyimages.com

The other guys I chose for the scan were either Astros or showing off some Ugly Pitching Face (UPF). And that's it, really. I have a hard time with some of the little colored circles containing the player's position abbreviation. The light blue ones and the bright yellow ones are a bit distracting.

These were the best horizontal cards in the pack. I was glad to get an Astros team card. I included Wei-Yin Chen because he got hosed by the Orioles recently and I read an article about it, so his name was stuck in my head when I sifted through these cards.

To give the non-pitchers a fair shake, I have included Kolten Wong and his Ugly Fielding Face (UFF) in this scan. Max Scherzer gets in for some UPF and because he's kind of a PC guy. Marwin Gonzalez gets in because he's an Astro and Adeiny Hechavarria makes the cut because I picked him up on a fantasy baseball team recently to play shortstop, because that position is a minefield in fantasy this year and whoever I drafted for that position was putting up terrible numbers.

I chose Moustakas because of the great fielding shot, another Astro card in Jed Lowrie, Carlos Gonzalez because he's on one of my fantasy baseball rosters, and I don't know why I included Jose Fernandez but then this popped up on my Facebook feed and gave me a reason:

I love it when a (failure to) plan comes together!

I pulled an autograph in the pack of a guy who was drafted in 2004, has played since then in the minor leagues, and pitched 6.0 total innings across 7 games in 2014 for the Giants as his only Major League service to date. The only real notable thing I saw on his Baseball Reference page was that he managed to hit three batters during those 6 innings. That Career High number in the corner of his card is celebrating his 11.6 minor league strikeouts per nine innings ratio in 2014. I got a Gold parallel of Danny Santana, another guy who is on at least one of my fantasy baseball rosters. My First Pitch insert features Jon Hamm, an actor whose work I don't really follow at all. I had to look him up. Madison Bumgarner rounds out the scan, with an appearance in a decent-looking insert set called Stepping Up

That Edgar Martinez card looks like it fell right out of 2012 Topps Baseball, and I don't think of that as a compliment. Wei-Yen Chen makes another appearance in this post, this time on a Black parallel numbered # 46 / 64 (a palindrome!). Mike Piazza shows up in some sort of bat-themed set about which Night Owl has remarked, "I think Topps did an excellent job of making bats look like loaves of bread in a deli." And finally, Willie Mays appears in a set that presumably discusses famous comebacks in baseball history.

But wait! That's not all! I also got one of those Call Your Shot! code cards in my pack. I went to the site, entered my code, and this screen loaded:

The autograph selection is random, meaning that if you 'win' a 'prize,' you click through to your cart, pay Topps $4.95 for shipping and handling, and probably eventually get an autograph in the mail. From what I've heard, the players on the screen are just a partial list. The Full player list available here link goes to a broken page labeled as the B-level list. I have seen copies of the A-level and C-level lists and they are each several pages long, covering a huge number of players. So it's pretty random. Going through some Blowout forum threads on people who have already received their cards from the Series 1 codes, it looks like Topps is just sending out whatever happens to be nearby. I have seen some 2013 Topps Five Star of Jason Heyward, some Bowman Sterling of Didi Gregorius and Oscar Taveras, a Jim Rice Five Star card, a Marcus Stroman from last year's base Topps set, and some other stuff along those lines. I guess whatever I get probably can't be any worse than an Erik Cordier sticker autograph.

The two packs of Donruss basketball didn't contain anything too amazing. Mostly they just reminded me how out of touch I am with the current NBA. I manage to keep track of the Houston Rockets and most of the major stars and fan favorites, but 95% of the other guys are unrecognizable to me.

Here are three guys that I recognized from the packs. Beverley is said to be a pretty good player, but during the few opportunities I had to watch him it seemed like maybe he was showboating a little too much and needed to take better care of the ball. I've never liked Pau Gasol very much. He seems too much like a soccer player or something. Maybe he's just an emotional and expressive dude, but I find him irritating. Klay Thompson and all of the Golden State Warriors are jerks, and they will remain as such until the Houston Rockets can manage to beat them in a playoff series.

Here are some of the inserts that came out of the packs. It seems like I can't buy any basketball cards without pulling a Zach Randolph card of some kind.

Oh, and here are two more inserts featuring players I don't like all that much. I guess I should have asked the shop owner to open a box of Archives for me to pick a couple packs from.