Black November, Epilogue - 2016 Topps Update Series Hobby Box

After rolling the dice on a few products from the Blowout Cards Black November sale, I also picked up a box of a current product, 2016 Topps Baseball Update Series. With the smaller checklist this year, I felt that my odds of completing a set from one box were pretty good. If I hadn't felt that way, I would have just bought a set and skipped the box.

David Ortiz is the cover star of the product. Each Hobby box promises one Autograph or Relic card, so we'll see what comes out of this one.

The pack design replicates the art on the box. Each box has 36 packs, with 10 cards per pack (packs containing a special card may have fewer than 10 cards).

Here are the pack odds and the NPN information. As usual, there are plenty of parallels and inserts to chase.

I was able to put together a complete 300-card base set from this box, as well as pulling 22 doubles. So the collation was pretty good. I selected a few of my favorite photos to scan for this post. Common themes for my favorites were All-Star uniforms, UPF (Ugly Pitching Face), glorious manes of hair, and fielding photos with interesting background scenery like advertising signs or greenery.

Panoramic ballpark shots also made my favorites list a couple of times, along with hat tips. As with any baseball set, there were a lot of standard throwing/hitting torso photos, but there are some gem in here. I do kind of wish for a set with regular rectangular borders, but that's not the direction these things are trending in right now.

I got three coupon cards. The front highlights the existence of the Topps website and their social media pages, while the back offers 50 cents off on various Topps retail products. I just counted up the cards from the box, and apparently these don't count as part of the 360 cards in the box. They are extras, so they don't replace a base card or insert from the pack you find them in.

There were six Gold parallels in the box, all numbered out of # / 2016. I guess for me, the Edwin Encarnacion All-Star and the Tim Lincecum are the highlights here.

The box contained three Rainbow Foil parallels. Bartolo Colon's Home Run Heard 'Round the World is probably the highlight of this bunch. The Mark Trumbo card is nice, too.

I also got a pair of relatively scarce parallels. The first is a Rookie SP photo variation of Mallex Smith. I believe the pack odds are reversed on the SP cards, as the Rookies appear to be much easier pulls than the All-Star SPs. The second is a Negative parallel of Kirby Yates, a pitcher for the Yankees.

I pulled 5 cards from the Ichiro Chasing 3k insert set, which highlight Ichiro's hits on his quest to reach 3000 MLB hits, a feat he accomplished on August 7th.

I pulled six inserts from the 3000 Hits Club insert, which has a checklist full of players who reached the 3000-hit mark during their MLB careers.

I like the Topps Fire insert set, which is modeled on the design of the 2015 Topps Fire Football product. It is a pretty busy design, but it actually feels like a legitimate insert set. I pulled some good names, too, in Carlos Correa, Clayton Kershaw, Kris Bryant, and Josh Donaldson.

I got six of the First Pitch insert cards in the box. I had already purchased a full set of these cards online, so these are all doubles for me. I'll probably have more to say about them when I post about the set as a whole.

I got five of the Team Franklin inserts in the set, which feature players who use Franklin-branded batting gloves. Topps could have done a lot more with this concept, most significantly by including a parallel version with glove relic swatches embedded.

Finally, here is the hit of the box, a Scouting Report autograph of Tigers pitcher Michael Fulmer. This was a decent pull for a box of a basic Topps product, as Fulmer had a very good season. It is unfortunate that this card came out of the pack with fair-sized ding in the corner. You can kind of see it in the card-back scan as a touch of white in the upper right.

That's it for this box and for this order from Blowout Cards. I got about what I expected from this box of cards. I am glad that I was able to complete the Update Series checklist from one Hobby box. The 4-product break overall had some highs and lows, with the Cal Ripken Jr. # 1 / 1 from 2016 Topps Archives Signature Series really moving this break from not-good to pretty-good.

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

Workin' at the Card Shop 6: Another Year of Spring Fever

A week or so ago I went in to the local card shop to redeem the Spring Fever coupons I received when I purchased my Hobby box of 2015 Topps Series 1. When all was said and done I got 5 Spring Fever packs, each containing 5 cards. I didn't pull any autographs or anything out of the packs, but I also didn't pull any doubles. I chose nine notable cards to scan for this post, either PC guys or guys who are popular among the bloggers. I was surprised to find myself including two San Francisco Giants among the chosen, as I find that fans of San Francisco teams are largely insufferable. But I consider Bumgarner and Pence to be faces of baseball, as in 'guys who make amazing faces on their baseball cards.' Bumgarner's Ugly Pitching Face (UPF) is legendary, and Pence is an All-Out Effort Guy who sticks his tongue out and pops his eyes so you know he's turning it up to 11.

I don't like this year's Spring Fever set as much as I liked the 2014 incarnation, as that set was LOUD. The colors on the 2015 set are darker and more muted, and the foil isn't as rainbow-laced either. Maybe the Atlanta Braves called Topps and demanded a more reserved set that respected the traditions of the game. Or maybe Cal Ripken Jr. tore up the Topps employees' new suits and beat them up a bit to teach them respect for veteran players. Either way, the cards are subdued this year and that makes me like them a little bit less. I still grabbed a full set of them anyway. I do still want them in my collection.

While I was in the shop I decided I ought to actually purchase something. I had intended to try out a pack of Panini's Country Music release to see if I could pull a Joe Diffie auto/relic, but in a surprise development the stuff had sold out. I panicked and asked to instead grab a couple Jumbo packs of Series 1 Baseball. The box he had open had three packs remaining, so I grabbed them all. This Manny Machado MLB Silhouette Logo Pin manu-relic (Manny-relic?) was inside one of the packs. I believe all the manu-relics combine to fall one per box, so this qualifies as a box hit. It's a fairly sharp-looking card.

Here's the back of the card, with the usual praise of Machado's superstar potential. We'll see if he can live up to it and put up a few healthy and productive seasons.

One of the other packs contained this heavy card, a Silver-Framed Parallel of David Murphy, numbered # 17 / 20. The Silver-Framed cards are base cards with their edges cut off that are then pasted into thick metal frames. They are pretty hefty cards and make for a nice novelty item.

I believe the Silver-Framed cards are seeded about one per case, so it was pretty lucky to buy three packs and pull a box hit as well as a case hit. I hope that next year Topps brings back the wilder colors on their Spring Fever cards. I need that splash of color to help me get through February.