This Relic is Not Related to the Event Commemorated by This Card

My brother-in-law and his family came up for the weekend for a family event we were having. My mother-in-law has been here since before Christmas. They are good people and I don't mind them, but I am an extreme introvert and having extra people around really drains my energy. They headed for home on Sunday, and I am hoping to stretch my legs a bit and maybe get a few things done in the man cave downstairs during this week. We'll see how it goes. It seems like there are always things that come up when you have plans. For example, the unplanned events of this weekend for me are my wife's car breaking down and needing a tow to the shop, a trip to the vet for our (relatively) new dog who has come down with something, and maybe helping my sister dig her car out of a snowbank.

Here is a card I've been trying to hunt down for a while now. It pops up with some frequency, but sellers usually want more for it than I am willing to pay. This copy popped up in my price range, and I got it. It's a 2016 Topps Series 1 Postseason Performance relic card of pitcher R.A. Dickey. His 2015 postseason with the Toronto Blue Jays was a bit of a mixed bag, as he had a good start against the Rangers in the ALDS and a very bad outing against the Royals in the ALCS. One really interesting thing about this relic is the disclaimer along the bottom there, which reads: "ITEM IS NOT FROM THE 2015 POSTSEASON". So this relic card celebrating the 2015 postseason contains a relic, but not one from a uniform worn during the 2015 postseason.

Even better is the disclaimer on this side of the card, which reads: "THE RELIC CONTAINED ON THIS CARD IS NOT FROM ANY SPECIFIC GAME, EVENT, OR SEASON, NOR IS IT FROM THE 2015 POSTSEASON." The descriptor text under the relic window says it is game-used, but who knows? I just thought it was funny that Topps made sure to indicate that the relic piece was not from the 2015 Postseason on both the front and back of the card. They really don't want anyone thinking that it was. The card is numbered # 066 / 100.

R.A. Dickey signed with the Atlanta Braves back in November. My wife is from Atlanta, but I have never been a fan of the various Atlanta pro teams. I will root for Dickey wherever he goes, though, so whenever he gets some cards in his Braves uniform, I will be there trying to collect them. Hopefully the move to the NL will help his numbers.

Pack of the Day 139: 2016 Topps Factory Set Hobby Edition

Instead of busting Hobby boxes of Topps Series 1 and Topps Series 2 this year, I decided I would just buy a Hobby set, the one that comes with a pack of 5 serially-numbered foil parallels. As I mentioned yesterday, these parallels can be some of the most difficult ones to find, as most of them stay locked away in sealed factory sets. So even though the print run is usually pretty high, they can be as hard to find as some of the cards that are numbered to # / 10 or # / 5. When I was working on my Josh Reddick rainbow from the 2013 Topps Sets, the Factory Set parallel was one of the worst to find. It took several months, and I eventually found one copy buried on a card shop website. I believe that's the only copy I've ever seen, so I was lucky to be the one who stumbled on it. 

So here's the box. I'm sure just about everyone has seen one of these in a card shop or at the local big box store. There are several different versions of these, each with a different-colored box and a different type of special insert inside. I wanted the Hobby one with the 5-card pack of numbered parallels.

One thing I found interesting upon opening this was that the cards aren't in sequential order. From the side I could see that there were a couple blocks of cards with similar lines visible on the side. Upon further inspection I found that the bands of white I could see were all of the horizontal cards from each series, packed together. They must print the horizontal cards on their own sheet or something. My guess is that these are packed in the order they get cut from the sheet. Series 1 and Series 2 are separate from each other, and the horizontal cards in each series are in their own block in the middle of the vertical cards.

I was kind of hoping that I'd pull some big name players from my foil pack, because one or two of those could probably pay for the set. Out of these three, Billy Hamilton is probably the biggest name, but that's not exactly saying a whole lot. They are cool enough cards. The foil kind of reminds me of the Opening Day parallels without the blue accents. Each one is numbered out of # / 177. The foil treatment does kind of make the people in the background look ghostly.

Wade Miley and Tyler Saladino probably aren't going to do much to inflate my Paypal balance, either. Oh, well. I was going to buy the factory set anyway, and it probably didn't cost me anything more than a hand-collated set would.

Today Topps released their first Topps Chrome factory set, which for the first time features the full Topps flagship checklist on Chrome stock. You also get a bunch of fancy parallels (2 Superfractors, 13 Blue Sapphire 65th Anniversary parallels # / 5) and whatnot in the set, but it carries a price tag of $1,500.00 with a print run of 250 sets total. I guess you could probably automatically make money buying a set and flipping the singles, but that's a lot of work and (for me) a lot of money up front.

Well, that's my review of the set. Sorry I didn't post any base cards. I think we've all seen plenty of flagship base by now. If not, imagine the cards pictured above are a little less blurry and take the serial numbering away. Voila! That's what base Topps looks like this year.

2016 Topps Series 1 Inserts

For the price of a couple packs of cards I was able to acquire 5 complete insert sets from 2016 Topps Series 1 Baseball. It seems like most inserts have become devalued these days, outside of a few that are particularly innovative or rare. I know that I am guilty of ignoring most inserts in favor of base cards, numbered parallels, and relics or autographs. It's a shame, because many inserts have creative themes or offer something that isn't covered in the base sets. I would like it if inserts felt a little more special when they came out of a pack. I guess the place to look for inspiration would be the card sets of the late 1990's, the heyday of the insert. There needs to be foil, acetate, crazy colors, and variance in pack ratios so that your flashy inserts are harder to get than your basic inserts. Maybe that ship has already sailed, but I just wish there were insert sets out there that gave me the same feeling I had as a kid in the 90's when I busted a pack and saw a glimmer of colorful foil in the middle of the stack of cards. I get a hint of that these days when I see the colorful border of a nice parallel card, but I'd like it if that excitement extended to the insert sets.

This Pressed Into Service set covers times in baseball history when position players were called on to pitch in games as emergency relievers. It's a good idea for an insert set, and although some of the cards in the set don't feature the players in pitching poses, some of them do. This is one of the inserts I had earmarked to pick up from the 2016 set, and the full checklist was part of this lot.

The Perspectives insert set focuses on photos taken from interesting angles and inserts the insert name and player name into the images. The photography is pretty nice, looking like the sort of stuff you might find in a Stadium Club product. The big gold lettering all over in the backgrounds and foregrounds of the pictures is distracting to varying degrees, but this is a nice enough set that I had it on my list of inserts to complete.

Even the backs of the Perspectives cards look a little like what you'd find in a Stadium Club set. If we hadn't already seen the sell sheet for 2016 Stadium Club I'd be wondering if this was a thinly-veiled teaser for that product.

I didn't really care about these Wacky Packages cards, but they were part of the lot and I scanned them. For some reason the whole Garbage Pail Kids / Wacky Packages / MAD Magazine / Cracked Magazine scene passed me by. I had cousins and friends who were in to that stuff, but I never really got it.

These Back To Back cards weren't really on my want list either, but now I have them. It's a decent idea for an insert, but the execution is a bit off-putting. The pixelated area between the featured players comes off as looking more like a corrupted JPEG than it does some cool visual effect from The Matrix. The checklist is decent enough.

This is another set that was on my list to acquire. While I've heard mixed reviews around the blogosphere regarding the First Pitch concept, I like the idea of featuring various folks who have been called on to throw out the first pitch in a baseball game. There are bound to be a few cards in the set that don't interest me personally each year, but I like the variety that a set like this allows for in a checklist. I hope that Topps keeps putting the First Pitch insert in the flagship product, because each time it comes out there are a handful of cards that I definitely want to add to my collection, as well as a few others that make me say, "Oh yeah! I remember that D-list celebrity!"

Even some of the non-celebrity cards are cool, as that Rebekah Gregory card carries an inspirational story with it. Sports are one thing that America uses to cope with tragedy, and sports history tends to intertwine with U.S. and world history in interesting ways. It's good to see baseball cards that document that interaction from time to time.

So those are all the insert sets I got in the lot. There was another slightly more expensive lot that included the 100 Years of Wrigley set, but I wasn't interested in that one. I got all five insert sets for $11 after shipping was figured in, good for a per-card price of less than fifteen cents. I am still holding out on a factory set this year for the base Topps set, but it's been hard to keep away from buying packs here and there. I did buy a hanger box when Series 1 was first released and two Toys"R"Us packs a couple of weeks ago, but that's been it so far. The release of Heritage has presented me with yet another test of willpower. I'll probably pick up a couple packs of that sometime soon to tide me over until I can pick up a complete set from some online seller.

Pack of the Day 128: 2 Packs of 2016 Topps Series 1 Toys"R"Us Edition

My twin sons turned five just over a week ago, so we took them out to dinner and then to Toys"R"Us to purchase some stuff with their birthday money. They chose a couple of LEGO kits and some Hot Wheels stuff. While they were doing that, I was looking for the trading cards so I could grab a couple packs of 2016 Topps Series 1 with the exclusive Purple parallels.

I grabbed two packs. There wasn't anything of interest in the regular packs, so I just scanned the Purple Toys"R"Us cards for this post. They are pretty cool, I guess. I got a couple of decent names in my packs, with Jose Abreu and Max Scherzer probably being the best of the bunch. Matt Kemp takes a fairly distant third place, with Erick Aybar following just over the horizon and Martin Maldonado and Travis Jankowski getting participation trophies.

There's not much more to say about these. They're a fun novelty but I can't see myself chasing any more of them. I'm just kind of waiting on 2016 Topps until the factory sets come out. I'm a little bit excited for Heritage, which released today I believe, but I usually just pick up that set once prices come down on it. I'd like to bust some packs of something this year, but my other collecting priorities always seem to push that down the list. I'm not sure Heritage is the thing that's going to jump up to the top.

I was on the news today as a bystander. Well, my car was. I was in the car, but you can't see me. I was on my way home from work and I saw that traffic up ahead was slowing down. Then I saw a police officer standing on the other side of the highway trying to throw a spike strip across the lanes. Pretty soon after that a pickup truck came down the highway with three or four police cars in pursuit. The truck drove around the spike strip and then the police cars went around the spike strip. A little ways back the police nudged the truck and it wrecked. When I went home and saw the news the video from the traffic camera picked up right as I was driving past. That was pretty cool.

Pack of the Day 122: The First Cards of the Year - 2016 Topps Series 1 Hanger Box

Some of my posts recently have had a pretty negative tone, discussing my problems with eBay transactions and my ongoing bad experience with the Topps redemption replacement program. Now it's time for something a little more positive; the first new cards of 2016! I stopped at Target on the way home today and they had the new 2016 Topps Baseball Series 1 cards on the card shelves. I selected a hanger box from the pegs and brought it home with me. And the first card of 2016 is:

Matt Kemp of the San Diego Padres! I guess it could be worse. The picture is all right. I am still warming up to the design. I think I would prefer that the photographs look a little more natural. I like the look of the team logos in the lower corner. I'm glad that the card fronts feature both team names and player positions. The card numbers look a little better in person, but I like them to be darker than they are. Those are my initial impressions of the set. 

I didn't scan all of the cards in the box. I have to leave some surprises for other people to find. Noah Syndergaard's card just about got pulled off the scanner by that heavy trophy at the bottom of his card and all that foil at the top. Jayson Werth had a run-in with the law last year, but his beard game is on point. I'll pretty much always scan a Max Scherzer card, I didn't realize that Jarrod Saltalamacchia had moved to Arizona. Maybe I knew it at some point last year, but as of today I didn't remember it.

That Kris Bryant guy is pretty popular, or so I've heard. He gets a little trophy and some foil across the top of his card, too. Gattis remains among my favorite Astros. They won't be catching many people by surprise this year, so hopefully Houston can live up to last year's promise.

There are celebration shots in this year's set, with this hanger box producing a photo of Huston Street getting an involuntary shower.

There are some decent horizontal cards in the set, with Melvin Upton Jr. and Jay Bruce standing out among the cards I got. I like seeing two Astros on that League Leaders card. The inserts in the pack kick off with that Rusney Castillo card, which I believe comes from the Perspectives set.

The other inserts I got are a Yu Darvish MLB Debut card, a Warren Spahn Amazing Milestones card, a Garrett Jones card from the Pressed Into Service set which highlights position players who have been called on to pitch in games, an Addison Russell from the 100 Years at Wrigley insert, a Roger Clemens from the Berger's Best checklist, and a Rainbow Foil parallel of Adam LaRoche. I was mildly disappointed that I didn't get a First Pitch insert, but there will be plenty of opportunity to get some of those this year. So far the inserts that interest me most are First Pitch and Pressed Into Service. The others I probably won't bother too much with.

That does it for this Pack of the Day post. I imagine there will be plenty of 2016 Topps up on the blogosphere over the next week. I like the cards well enough, and this hanger box made a nice start to the new collecting year.