2013 SEGA Card-Gen Extravaganza 15: Toronto Blue Jays

It's been months and months since I added a team to this series. I started this series of posts way back in May 2014 after I found a complete 2013 SEGA Card-Gen set on eBay. I still love these cards, but they might not be as fresh and exciting to my readers as they were way back then. Let's close out the AL portion of the set with the Toronto Blue Jays. After today it will be all NL teams. At my current pace I will finish the series on 06 September 2017. The Blue Jays get 15 cards in their team set, which is 2 more than the 13 per team average across the entire 390-card set.

The team set starts out with catcher J.P. Arencibia. He had a rough 2013, both on and off the field. He had such a rough time that he closed his Twitter account. After the Jays released him he spent 2014 and 2015 bouncing around a bit. Most recently he signed on with the Phillies' minor league system.

Emilio Bonifacio came to the Blue Jays in the big trade with the Marlins, which is why it seems like half the guys in this team set are wearing Miami uniforms. He got traded to the Royals partway through the 2013 season and subsequently has been with the Cubs, Braves, White Sox, Cubs, and Braves in a series of trades, releases, and signings. Not a lot of job security, but Baseball Reference says he's made $11.545 million so far in his career. I'm sure that makes up for some of the inconvenience.

Lawrie got traded to the Athletics in the Josh Donaldson deal. Donaldson went on to an MVP season in 2015. Lawrie was serviceable and then got traded last month to the White Sox in exchange for prospects.

Jose Reyes was traded to the Rockies in the Troy Tulowitzki deal in 2015, a move he was publicly unhappy with, then he got arrested in the off-season for a domestic dispute with his wife. I used to kind of like pulling his cards, but now I just consider him a lousy wife-beater.

Melky Cabrera signed with the Blue Jays for 2013 after coming off his 50-game suspension for PED usage. A friend of his tried to help him talk his way out of the charges by building a fake website and proclaiming that Cabrera had unknowingly purchased supplements from the site. The site was traced back to Cabrera and he admitted guilt. He played two years with the Blue Jays and then got paid by the White Sox.

Colby Rasmus played a decent role in the Astros big run in 2015. Then he made history by becoming the first player ever to accept a qualifying offer in the 2015 off-season. He's had a bit of a roller-coaster career, but overall has played well. I think the knock on him has often been chemistry in the locker room, something he seems to have fixed with Houston. His hair always seems more wet than it should be. I should probably look into starting a Rasmus PC, but I've probably got too much other stuff going on right now. He's also not a guy who makes it onto a lot of checklists, because he's not really a hot prospect or a star. Those days passed a while back, probably while he was still with the Cardinals.

Now we're getting into the real meat of this team set, with star bat-flipper and home run hitter Jose Bautista. I would PC his cards, but I can't afford them. He's sporting a nice blue glove in the photo, and a nice 8-star rating on his card.

Edwin Encarnacion is another elite hitter to round out the batters in the team set. Four of the top fifteen AL MVP finalists were Blue Jays in 2015, with Encarnacion (12th) coming in behind Donaldson (1st), Bautista (8th), and David Price (9th).

R.A. Dickey is my favorite player, although his star has fallen quite a bit since his 2012 Cy Young season with the Mets. He still goes through periods when his knuckleball is dancing and his numbers are elite, but he also is prone to getting shelled from time to time.

Josh Johnson didn't really work out with the Blue Jays. He has spent the 2014 and 2015 seasons in the Padres organization, mostly working on recovering from his 2nd and 3rd Tommy John surgeries. He's already been ruled out for the 2016 season. I guess he's still in his early 30's and could still come back, but after a certain number of arm injuries I would think you'd just call it a career and be done with it.

Mark Buehrle has had a pretty good career to this point, with a couple of no-hitters (one of them a perfect game) and many years as a consistent innings-eater. He was left off the Blue Jays' 2015 postseason roster and to my knowledge hasn't decided if he'll come back in 2016.

Romero pitched 7.1 innings in 2013 and hasn't been able to put anything together since, struggling through minor league stints in the Blue Jays' and Giants' minor league systems.

Morrow followed up a pretty good 2012 with some mediocre pitching in 2013 and 2014 for Toronto. After signing with the Padres he had a good start to 2015 but wound up on the DL after 5 starts and needed surgery on his shoulder. He got a minor league deal with an invitation to spring training for 2016.

Luis Perez pitched 5 innings in 2013 after coming back from an injury. He has battled injuries on various minor league deals since then, most recently signing a deal with the Blue Jays again with a 2016 spring training invitation.

Casey Janssen was the Blue Jays closer for most of 2013 and 2014, although he had plenty of struggles in the role. He signed with the Washington Nationals for 2015 and pitched in their bullpen for most of the season with mixed results. He doesn't currently have a contract in place for 2016.

It's amazing to me how much the league changes in just a couple of years. This set is still only a couple of years old and it seems like nearly every player has had some kind of significant career change, whether it is a move to another team (or three), a change in career trajectory, legal trouble, or injury. This wraps up the AL portion of the set. I am hoping that it won't take me until mid-2017 to get through the NL teams. I think my current average in this series is about one post every 40 days. I should be able to beat that. I already have the next several teams scanned, but I need to separate and crop all the photos. I don't really need to do the write-ups on the players, either, but I feel like I need to put something in between the pictures and I have a little bit of fun looking up each player and getting a snapshot of their career.

2013 SEGA Card-Gen Directory

Baltimore Orioles

Boston Red Sox

Cleveland Indians

Chicago White Sox

Detroit Tigers

Houston Astros
Kansas City Royals
Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim
Minnesota Twins
New York Yankees

Oakland Athletics
Seattle Mariners
Tampa Bay Rays

Texas Rangers
Toronto Blue Jays
Arizona Diamondbacks
Atlanta Braves

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.

2015 Topps Heritage High Numbers Set

Busting packs is a lot of fun, but when it comes to building sets and acquiring inserts/hits that you want it is a lot easier and much more cost-effective to buy sets and singles from people who've done the hard work for you. With that in mind, I went out and completed my 2015 Topps Heritage base set in one swoop by purchasing a complete set of 2015 Topps Heritage High Numbers (including the SPs!) from an eBay re-seller. It actually wasn't as easy as I make it sound, because I am a cheap guy and I had to bid on a lot of sets before I got a cheap one. It's the same reason I still haven't purchased a 2015 Topps Stadium Club set. I just haven't been able to find one at my price, which is admittedly much lower than that set should go for.

I picked out a few of my favorite card for this post. Most of them are Astros, but there are a couple of other cards here that I felt like scanning. Night Owl has alluded to the fact that Colby Rasmus isn't the most attractive dude in baseball, and I have to agree with the Owl on that point. He did, however, hit some timely home runs for the Astros in the playoffs and for that and his epic partying I can overlook the fact that he always looks a bit damp. The Astros fanblogs seem to think he's played his price tag too high for the Astros to keep him unless he agrees to stay in Houston for less money than he can get somewhere else. I picked that Gose card because his hat looks ridiculous. I understand that it's the style these days for some reason, but it looks like his mom put that hat on him for a Little League picture and she's standing off to the side remarking about how cute he looks in his baseball outfit. Mike Fiers threw a no-hitter this year after the Astros acquired him. Against the Dodgers. He benefited from a few calls during that game, but I think that probably happens during most no-hitters. I wouldn't expect him to throw another one any time soon, but it was a good moment for the team.

That Asher dude has got one heck of a last name. I don't know what else you can say about Carlos Correa. He got a little jittery at times during the playoffs and missed a couple of key plays. He also made some really big plays with his bat, glove, and arm that were absolutely bonkers. I'm a fan. We have another hat guy in Odrisamer Despaigne, who is doing his best Fernando Rodney impersonation. Bobby Parnell gets into this post as a 'Beard of the Set' candidate.

Billy Burns gets in because he is a speedy dude who helped out my fantasy teams this year. If I am recalling things right he was especially hot early in the year and cooled off a bit as time went on. Jerome Williams got in because his glove is pink, like bubble gum pink. I haven't done a lick of research on it, so I don't know if he always uses a pink glove, if it was a joke for picture day, or if it is a Breast Cancer Awareness thing. I saw a breast cancer thing the other day where a woman posted what her body looked like during breast cancer treatment, and she was pretty much burnt and peeled from shoulder to waist because the treatments are so corrosive. It definitely sticks with me a little more than another athlete with a pink accessory or a model in a pink shirt. I wonder if any of that stuff actually generates a dollar for research into cures for cancer? I have my doubts. Down on the bottom of the scan is a key piece of the Astros rotation in Lance McCullers Jr. and Jed Lowrie, a guy who spent his usual time on the DL and found himself without much playing time to come back to once he was healed up. Speculation is that he will go to some team that misses out on Ben Zobrist.

Syndergaard is on the big stage, pitching for the Mets in this year's World Series. As I write this, Game 1 is tied at 4 in the top of the 14th inning. Eric Sogard gets in because 'Nerd Power' is something I can support. Corey Hart makes this post because of his colorful tattoos and because he's squinting one eye kind of like a Pirate. Get it? Roberto Hernandez gets in because he's wearing the right uniform and because he used to be Fausto Carmona, All-Star pitcher for the Cleveland Indians. The Astros released him in August.

At this point I am just grabbing Astros from the set and trying to get to the short-prints. It felt like Gregerson did pretty well this year in the closer role, but I hear a lot of clamor for the Astros to pick up a flamethrower to take that role over. Valbuena provided some power for the roster this year and Marisnick played some good defense and came through with his bat a bit in the playoffs. I think the team could do a little better in the corner infield spots than Valbuena, but we'll see which parts of the roster they decide to shore up during the offseason. Preston Tucker's head looks unusually small to me in this picture. Maybe it's just because he's further away from the camera than most guys in this set.

And now we get to the short-printed cards. It is still kind of jarring to see Ichiro in a Marlins uniform, but that's what happens when you get old and really fade. You wind up wearing weird uniforms. I imagine he'll find a way to hang around long enough next year to get to 3000 (needs 65) hits and 500 (needs 2) steals, but I can't imagine there's much more than that left for him in the MLB world. I've said it a few times, but Evan Gattis was one of my favorite Astros this season. I don't know if he'll stick around, though. He is also in the 'Beard of the Set' competition. He wins points for beard shape, but Parnell's beard seems to have more mass to it. I'm inclined to give the award to Gattis. Maybe I am stuffing the ballot box, but I can live with those accusations. Max Scherzer is a favorite of mine, and his cards are always pretty cool because he's got different-colored eyes. I've heard good things about this Kris Bryant guy. He's supposed to be pretty popular among collectors.