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.

Breaking it Down 23: Cards from the Nachos Grande Group Break

The last time I posted cards from a Nachos Grande group break, it took me a whole year to write the post. I didn't want that to happen again, so I made sure to get the scans cropped and ready to go (relatively) soon after receiving the cards. My notes tell me I got the cards on November 16th, so this really is a pretty quick turnaround from receipt to posting. This break ran for a while in October and November and featured several boxes of product from 2015, 2014, and 2012, along with some miscellaneous other bonus items. Per his usual, Nachos Grande added some extras to each package to go along with the group break stuff. I was a little slow on getting into the break, but I was still able to get one of my top teams, the Toronto Blue Jays.

I guess I could have saved it for last, but I am leading off with the hit that got pulled for my team, a Dalton Pompey autograph from 2015 Topps Heritage High Numbers. I don't know much about him, to be honest, but pre-2015 he was ranked by various organizations as being in the Top 50 or so prospects in baseball. He has spent some time with the Major League club during the last two seasons, although his numbers while there haven't been awesome. It looks like he's done some pretty good things in the minors, though, so maybe he just needs a little more seasoning.

These cards from 1982 Topps Baseball were some of the cooler bonus items in the package, especially the Danny Ainge card. He is most well-known for his basketball career, but he started out as a professional baseball player with special considerations made for him to play college basketball on the side. He wound up being drafted by the Boston Celtics and after some legal wrangling retired from baseball to go play basketball.

These are some of the Heritage High Number base cards I got. I had already purchased a full set of these, so I didn't really need them. Kevin Pillar had quite a season defensively, although he didn't get the Gold Glove award due to Kevin Kiermaier's even better year.

I've always liked the Collector's Choice brand, although that Joe Carter card kind of has some overkill going with three Blue Jays logos visible on the card front. I like that Jose Bautista game card, too, although it's not quite on the SEGA Card-Gen level.

That Roberto Osuna card comes from the 2015 Topps High Tek set, which has a staggering array of background patterns and parallels. This is the Pipes background, which is not particularly rare, but is also not the most common pattern. Again Collector's Choice pops up with a cool card. It's a shame that catchers are prevented from painting their masks now due to licensing agreements with the equipment manufacturers. I tend to like it when players like hockey goalies and baseball catchers can personalize their gear a little bit. The other cards in the scan are a cool look at some sets I wasn't familiar with.

I got a couple of Gold parallels from the 2015 Topps Stadium Club box. One is Daniel Norris, who got traded to the Tigers shortly after I made a half-hearted attempt to start a player collection of his cards. The other features the bat-flipping maestro, Jose Bautista, who is a favorite player of mine. I can't afford his cards, though. I wound up with a couple of cards from 2015 Topps Chrome. I can't remember for sure if any of them are Refractors, but I am pretty certain I didn't get anything bigger than a basic Refractor anyhow.

I think that Colby Rasmus came from the box of 2012 Panini Prizm. He is now with the Astros and just recently became the first player in history to accept a qualifying offer. My eyes still reject the idea of Frank Thomas as a member of any team other than the White Sox. That must be a different Frank Thomas.

I scanned the horizontal cards together, so this scan covers some ground I've already been over. I think I like 2014 Topps Stadium Club more than I like the 2015 version. Maybe it's just because I bought several boxes of 2014 and have been gathering Members Only parallels from that set. I don't think I've purchased more than a retail pack or two of the 2015 set. That Devon Travis card jogs my memory a little bit. I think the two previous 2015 Topps Chrome scans were base cards and this one is a Refractor.

I don't sign up for group breaks as often as I used to, but I still get drawn into one from time to time. I didn't scan all the cards that Nachos Grande sent me, but I hit most of the highlights. It was a fun break and I was lucky enough to choose a team that pulled a hit, so I am pretty happy overall. It probably worked out better for me than buying an equivalent dollar amount of unopened wax, which would really only be a blaster and a couple of loose retail packs or 3-5 Hobby packs of low-end product.

A Small Stack of Singletons

I decided to put a few of my recent Jon Singleton pickups into one post, as usually my one-card / one-player posts aren't very popular. This one has been sitting in my Draft queue in one form or another for a couple of months now, waiting for the right time to write words to go with the pictures. This seemed like as good a time as any, since this is a fairly easy post and my wife and I are headed out for a weekend away to attend a workshop put on by the National Guard Chaplains. I was in Arkansas on our 11th anniversary last week, so this trip will serve as a belated celebration of our mutual toleration of each other over an extended period of time.

This first card comes from 2015 Panini Elite Baseball, and is a Members Only memorabilia card, not to be confused with the Members Only parallel from Topps Stadium Club. It features a nice colorful swatch of fabric and is numbered # 16 / 25. I haven't heard much about Singleton lately. Most of the press surrounding the Astros over the last day has been about Colby Rasmus becoming the first player ever to accept a Qualifying Offer, and how that puts the Astros in the difficult place of having to actually pay that offer. Colby is a gnarly-looking dude, but his last name is made up of the first part of my last name and he certainly seemed to be an integral part of the positive chemistry the Astros had going on this year. It will be interesting to see how the offseason plays out after Rasmus' big bombshell.

I already had one of these Stripe parallels from 2014 Topps High Tek, but when this one popped up at a reasonable price I decided to get it, too. There are rumored to be only 5-10 copies of each Striped parallel, so I've now got 20-40% of the print run on this Singleton card.

This card is a little more common, with an announced print run of 201 copies. It's the Black Foil parallel from 2015 Topps Stadium Club. The photo isn't exactly exciting compared to what you find on many other Stadium Club cards, as Singleton appears to be watching another pop-out coming off his bat. I still really want to pick up a full base set of Stadium Club from this year, but that just hasn't materialized yet. There aren't as many of them listed as there were when the product was fresh. I might have missed the best price window.

I'll close things up with this die-cut Status autograph from 2014 Panini Elite. I believe this is the Gold parallel. It's a pretty typical sticker auto. I am not sure why, but Singleton always seems to sign with a really thick marker. Maybe the markers start out pointy, but he applies so much pressure when he writes that the tip of the marker gets blunted. I don't know. Anyway, this one is numbered # 30 / 49.

That does it for this batch of cards. There's not a lot else to say about them. If Singleton doesn't pick things up a bit next year I can't see him getting a lot of love from the card companies like he has the last few years. The Astros have plenty of other young talent to take his spot in checklists. Hopefully he will at least have a few base cards and their associated parallels so I'll have something Singleton-centered to chase in 2016.

Combined Shipping Leads to Buying Stuff 7: Daniel Norris Stadium Club Auto

Continuing with the combined shipping lot I've been posting about lately, here is a Daniel Norris autograph from this year's Stadium Club set. I briefly started a player collection of his cards when he was with the Blue Jays earlier this year, but his cards were too expensive and I found I couldn't maintain another player collection. Then he got moved to Detroit and I really lost interest. This card had a decent asking price. I wouldn't pay the seller's price plus $3 shipping just for this card, but splitting up that $3 between 9 different cards makes the per-card price tolerable.

I really need Norris to pitch well today, as he's getting the start against Cole Hamels and the Texas Rangers. I need the Rangers to lose another game so that my Astros can (hopefully) win and gain another game in the pennant race. So just for today I am a huge fan of the Tigers.

I guess now that he's with Detroit, that makes him Daniel Tiger.

Pack of the Day 100: Two Retail Packs of 2015 Topps Stadium Club

My wife picked up two packs of 2015 Topps Stadium Club at Target for me. I've read about this stuff quite a bit on blogs, but I hadn't seen any of it in real life.

The cards are nice and thick, and they feel like the premium cards issued in the 90s. As someone else mentioned, they even smell like premium 90s cards. The first card out of the first pack was Daniel Norris, a guy who I almost began collecting. I bought a few of his cards and then realized that I don't have enough money to add another player to my player collections list. So I will take his cards when I can get them, but I can't be scouring eBay all the time. The photography is quite nice, and the design does a pretty good job of staying out of the way of the pictures. The first pack also contained a Gold Foil parallel, this one featuring Monte Irvin.

One thing I don't remember seeing is a scan of the card backs. Maybe someone posted one, but I didn't remember seeing one so I scanned the back of the cards, too. The backs feature a little bit of demographic information, a head shot photo, a snippet of biographical info, 2014 stats for current players, and a career stat line for everyone.

My packs didn't contain any of the really cool or oddball photos that get featured in most of the set review posts. About the closest I got to something non-standard is that Jay Bruce high five on the dugout stairs photo. It was kind of a disappointing pair of packs, to be honest.

The Lorenzo Cain horizontal shot is decent, but not extremely memorable like the Bip Roberts sombrero card. I would like to get the whole 2015 Stadium Club set, but I probably won't be able to build it through pack busting. Even with perfect collation it would take 3 Hobby boxes to build a set, and that just isn't in the cards for me this year. I am hoping that set prices on eBay come down enough that I am able to score one for less than the price of a box of cards. My pack busting and single purchasing have slowed down quite a bit in recent months.

My wife and I have been trying to get ourselves into a better position financially and that has meant doing things like closing credit accounts and tightening the budget quite a bit. I still haven't been able to pick up a base set of Archives and now I have Stadium Club on my want list, with Allen & Ginter's and Topps Update still on the way this year. I may be able to get those all as complete sets, but I won't be able to bust much wax like I have in previous years.

From reading other blogs I know that many collectors face the same sort of decisions from time to time as their collections move up and down on their life priority lists. With fewer new cards coming in, I will probably be reaching more into stuff that's already in my collection for blog material. That should be okay, as there is plenty of stuff that I didn't get around to scanning or posting as it came in.