2016 Topps Baseball Reddick Yellow Plate

I've discussed a few times in the last week that I was scheduled to attend a training course that was cancelled due to the government shutdown, which just so happened to be the final course I needed to get the certification I needed for a promotion and raise two years in the making.

Just after I decided to cancel my travel authorization and get back to work at my day job, I got an e-mail saying that the course was back on and I could attend if I got myself down to Utah by Wednesday morning. So I spent all of Tuesday trying to get authorization from HR to travel, re-booking my room, and making the five-hour drive.

Because of the late start, we are trying to pack 10 days of class into 8 days, but I don't think it will be too bad. I am happy for the opportunity to attend the course and get my promotion in spite of Congress' efforts to deny me.

It's always fun to get a 1 / 1 card of a favorite player, even if printing plates are like the bottom of the barrel when it comes to 1 / 1 cards. I feel like printing plates have a hierarchy to them as well, with the order of value generally going something like Black - Cyan - Magenta - Yellow from best to worst. There are some cases where the yellow plate isn't too bad, though, and this Josh Reddick plate from 2016 Topps Series 2 is one of them. If I remember correctly, the base card has a lot of green and yellow on it, and that makes for a pretty good bit of color on this plate. This card is also pretty similar in composition to Reddick's 2013 base card, which I built a super-rainbow for. I picked this one up on eBay for more that it's worth, but less than I was willing to pay.

Oh, and I saw this on Twitter today. It looks like the 2018 BBM True Heart wrestling set will have kiss cards in it. That's pretty cool. I also have seen a couple photos of wrestlers signing their checki polaroid-style photo cards for the set, so there might be a lot of good stuff in this year's product. I am getting excited for release day near the end of next month.

Josh Reddick Vintage Stock Parallel

I am writing a very quick post tonight, because it's been a long day and a long evening, and I am planning on going to bed soon. There isn't much non-baseball stuff that I want to talk about today, so I'll get right to the cardboard.

This is a Vintage Stock parallel of Josh Reddick's 2016 Topps Series 2 base card. The front features a nice fielding shot, kinda similar to the one in the 2013 set that I built most of a super rainbow for. The main difference is that his back is to the camera on this one. I briefly considered trying for the rainbow on this card, but I never got around to it. The Vintage Stock parallel looks like the regular card, but it's printed on thicker, rougher cardboard and has an old-school logo on the front. This one is also serially-numbered # 26 / 99.

Jon Singleton is Clear, Vintage, Negative, and Supreme

I've picked up a few Jon Singleton cards over the past couple of months. He hasn't played at all with the Astros this year, and hasn't really done all that much in AAA. I have to wonder if he's ever going to get back up to the major leagues. He's still pretty young, but there are a lot of roadblocks for him and his play hasn't helped his case at all. I'll probably keep the Singleton collection going, but the card companies have plenty of other Astros to print cards for and he'll likely be limited to a couple of base cards, if he even gets those.

First up is this 2016 Topps Baseball Series 2 Clear acetate parallel card. These acetate parallels are pretty cool, probably one of the better parallels in the base product from Topps. They can be hard to find, though, as each is limited to a print run of 10 copies. This one is # 03 / 10, and displayed here it looks like regular Singleton is offering a fist-bump to monochrome Singleton.

Sticking with parallels from 2016 Topps, this is the Vintage parallel of Singleton's card from the set. These look similar to the base cards, but they are printed on thicker cardboard and carry an old-school Topps logo on the front. This one is numbered # 73 / 99. I actually wound up with two copies of the Vintage parallel, as I lost track of what I already had in my collection.

And this is the Negative parallel. I bet most kids these days have never even seen a photo negative, but they are probably familiar with the look because of apps with filters and photo manipulation software. I think these parallels look kind of creepy. It might be interesting to build a full set of these and put it in a binder to flip through.

In addition to all the 2016 Topps parallels, I also ran into this autograph from 2014 Topps Supreme back in July. I guess this is the Black parallel of the card, as evidenced mostly by the serial numbering but also maybe those splotches in the background. It is numbered # 1 / 5, and Singleton got the whole autograph onto the sticker. I think I've got a few of his other autograph parallels from this set, but this might be the best one I've found so far.

That pretty much brings my Singleton PC up to date. He's got too much MLB time to show up in the prospect sets anymore, and he's spent too much time at AAA this year to show up in the pro sets, so I don't know how much future cardboard he'll get unless something changes. There are still plenty of cards from the past to chase down, but those don't pop up much anymore. My baseball collecting has slowed down a bit anyway, so I guess it's not too horrible that there isn't much for me to chase lately.

I was happy to see the Denver Broncos win the first game of the season tonight against the Carolina Panthers. The Broncos defense did just about all it could there in the 4th quarter to give the game away, but Graham Gano missed the potential game-winning field goal and the Broncos escaped with a 1-point victory. The only bad part about it is that Gano is the kicker on my fantasy football team, and I could have used those points.

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 2 First Pitch and a Bad Day

The only insert set from 2016 Topps Series 2 that really interested me was the First Pitch set, so I went and grabbed it from an eBay seller. So far my plan is still to buy a factory set to get my base set for the year, and then probably get an Update set from the secondary market.

This was my favorite out of the 20 cards in the checklist. It counts as an Astros card and features a former American President. Every President has their warts, but I tend to be pretty fond of the Bushes overall.

I didn't scan all of the cards in the set, but I did scan a few that were noteworthy to me. I'm not going to lie, the first time I saw that picture of Rosie Rios I thought it was Caitlyn Jenner. According to my Google research, I'm not the only one who has had that reaction to seeing the current Treasurer of the United States. Model Nina Agdal is seen sporting some Angels gear, including what is probably a New Era cap, as she signed on as the company's first female brand ambassador. Spencer Stone is a member of the U.S. Air Force who famously helped to stop an attack on a train in France in August 2015.

I really like the First Pitch insert, and I hope that Topps continues to make it a part of the flagship product. They seem to do a good job of selecting a mixture of noteworthy figures, celebrities, and lesser-known people with feel-good stories for the checklists.

When we woke up this morning we discovered that my wife's dog, Annie, was in so much pain that she couldn't walk more than a couple of steps without falling down. She's been sick and had some pain for a while now, but never so much that we felt she was unhappy. She was always happy to see everyone, got around okay, and never went off her food or water. We monitored her and worried about her, but never felt like her quality of life was suffering to the point where it was time to put her down.

This morning was different. She couldn't walk at all. She couldn't eat any food. We gave her some medicine and that dulled the pain enough that she stumbled down the stairs, but then she had an accident on the floor and that freaked her out to the point that she crashed into to the back yard before collapsing again. All of that added together made us feel like today was the day her quality of life had finally dropped far enough that to hold on to her would be unfair. I went and carried her out to the van for that long drive that comes at the end of a dog's life. We all had a chance to say goodbye to her, and the medicine took away enough pain that she was able to eat a little bit of sausage and wag her tail a bit before we put her down. Big dogs don't usually live all that long, and we feel lucky that she stuck around with us for 11 years.

My wife and I got married at the end of 2004, just a couple of weeks before I left on my first tour in Iraq. She got Annie during that year I was away. They've been pretty much inseparable since, and Annie would always follow my wife from room to room all over the house. She loved to play and eat food and have her belly rubbed. She also really liked to sleep on or near our bed, a habit she picked up during all the time I've been away with my work. Annie was a good guard dog, and she was very patient with our children as they grew and played with and on her. She was my wife's first baby, and it's been hard knowing that this day was approaching. In a way I am kind of glad that she had such a sharp drop-off in health at the end, as it made our decision very clear. Yesterday I would have said her quality of life was good enough that ending her life was not an option, but today it was clear that she was suffering. We will miss her a lot, and it will be tough to get used to not having her around anymore. She's been there for our entire married life, and she's been a companion and a protector for my wife through all the times when I wasn't around. I'm glad that she's not in pain anymore, but it sure does suck that she's not here in the house, sleeping at the foot of the bed or filling the computer room with smelly dog farts.