Gint-a-Cuffs VIII: Pack 12

Funalu'u Beach: +2 (Natural Wonders +2)
Jimmy Carter: +2 (Laureates of Peace +2)
Giancarlo Stanton: +2 (The Numbers Game +2)

Pack Total: 6.00
Running Total: 53.00

Average Per Pack: 4.08
Box Pace: 101.92

2013 SEGA Card-Gen Extravaganza 12: Seattle Mariners

It's time for another installment of the 2013 SEGA Card-Gen set. This post features the Seattle Mariners. The Mariners' team contains 13 cards, which matches the 13 players per team average across the 390-card set.

The set jumps right over the catcher and first base positions to get to Dustin Ackley at second base. 2012 was the last season that Ackley played most of his games at second base, though, as in 2013-2015 most of his playing time has come in the outfield. Apparently now Seattle has got another guy at second base. His numbers in 2015 haven't been very good at all, but he was a valuable player from 2011-2014.

Kyle Seager is a pretty good player but that doesn't translate as well to the fantasy baseball world, so I was under the impression that he is doing much worse than he actually is. He must be a plus defender or something. I don't know. All of the Mariners' home games are blacked out on my MLB.tv subscription because they are the 'local' team, so I don't actually get to see much of them.

At shortstop is Brendan Ryan, who in this photo looks like he should be named Cletus. It's been a little while since he was very relevant. He is currently in the Yankees organization, and it looks like he has spent much of this season injured and/or in the minors. It was interesting to see that he was drafted out of Lewis-Clark State College, a little school in the northern part of my home state of Idaho.

Michael Morse got his first big-league playing time with Seattle, but was traded to the Washington Nationals for a few years before being traded back to the Mariners in 2013. He spent part of 2013 with the Mariners and then got traded to the Orioles. In a bit of perfect timing, he signed with the Giants for 2014 and won himself a Championship ring. He is currently in the Marlins organization.

Michael Saunders has put together some decent stretches of playing, but has some injury history and even had a spat with Mariners management in 2014 over his perceived (lack of) work ethic. That got him traded to the Blue Jays, where he injured his knee tripping on a sprinkler. He might make it back to the Blue Jays some time this season.

Eric Thames didn't even play Major League Baseball in 2013, which makes his inclusion in this set an interesting choice. After playing in the minors for Seattle and Baltimore in 2013, he found his niche as a superstar in Korea's top baseball league, where he is among the league leaders in many batting categories.

Seattle's Card-Gen roster gets two designated hitters, both shown on their cards wearing other teams' uniforms. Morales played with the Angels until he was traded to the Mariners before the 2013 season. After the season, the Mariners granted him his free agency and he signed with the Twins, only to be traded back to the Mariners partway through the year, This year he plays for the Royals. I saw him hit a home run this evening against my Astros, but it wasn't enough to keep the Astros from sweeping the 3-game series as they won the game 6-5. My eldest son has started taking some interest in watching baseball games with me, learning about outs, innings, and runs.

Ibanez bounced around quite a bit in his career, playing three different stints with the Mariners, the team that originally drafted him. His 2013 run with the team lasted just one year, and he spent parts of 2014 with the Angels and Royals before calling it a career. He finished with 2,034 hits and 305 home runs over 19 seasons, placing him somewhere in the Hall of Pretty Good.

King Felix is the one superstar on this otherwise pretty mediocre roster. He gets a full 8-star rating and plenty of big numbers on the back of his card. He is a perennial All-Star and Cy Young contender. It's a shame that he has to toil away on a Seattle team that never really puts it all together. I guess getting a pretty good photo on his 2013 SEGA Card-Gen card is an okay consolation prize.

Hisashi Iwakuma came into the league in 2012 as a 31-year old rookie after a successful career in Japan. He has been consistently pretty good for the Mariners, with a really good 2013 in which he was an All-Star and 3rd in the Cy Young vote. He started off 2015 pretty poorly, which pretty quickly turned into a DL stint. He has been making minor league rehab appearances lately, so he could be returning to the Mariners pretty soon. I hope that he does well on his return, as he is one of my fringe PC guys.

Lucas Luetge made 63 appearances for the Mariners in 2012, about half that with 35 appearances in 2013, and about a third of that number with 12 appearances in 2014. He pitched 2.1 innings in an April game for them in 2015, and he has spent the rest of the season in AAA. He fills a basic bullpen slot. I guess the Card-Gen game needed a few middle-of-the-road bullpen arms so players could go cheap on their relievers and spend their points on power hitters and ace pitchers.

Up next is a guy who owns the spot next to Rusty Kuntz in the Dirty Name Hall of Fame, Charlie Furbush. He has been a pretty good reliever for the Mariners, putting up decent numbers in the middle innings for the last few years. But his main contribution to the world of baseball is his name.

Tom Wilhelmsen spent much of 2012 and 2013 as the Mariners' closer before giving way to Fernando Rodney and returning to a role in the bullpen. He hasn't been all that great this year and he wasn't really a great closer either, but he filled the role for a while.

And that's it for the 2013 SEGA Card-Gen Seattle Mariners. The team is surprisingly short on star power for those of us who still associate superstars like Griffey Jr., A-Roid, and Randy Johnson with the team.

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

Pack of the Day 98: 2015 Bowman Value Pack

My son's Kindergarten class had a musical presentation the other day. When I arrived at the venue I had to park three blocks away, and once I got into the building there were about 200 angry people in the lobby, complaining because tickets were all sold out and they weren't able to get in to see their children perform. Apparently the grade school song and dance routine is a hot ticket in this town. My wife was able to see our son perform, as she had volunteered to assist the teachers backstage. Outside in the foyer, some angry mothers were becoming unruly and I decided to get out of there.

Although lately I have mostly been buying singles and sets rather than busting wax, sometimes you just need to open a few packs of cards. With a little time to kill, I made up an excuse to go to Target. I considered buying a loose pack of 2015 Bowman and maybe one of 2015 Gypsy Queen, but the local pack searcher had been around at some point and all of the Bowman packs had been removed from the gravity feeder, felt up, and the unwanted packs were all shoved into the Gypsy Queen gravity feeder. I am not sure how you feel up a Bowman pack for hits because most of the value in Bowman comes from colored parallels and autographs. It's not really a relic-heavy product. I don't usually shy away from the loose packs because I think the guy made off with all of the hits; I avoid them because the pack searcher in our town is pretty heavy-handed when it comes to his search methods. I've found many a card with peeled edges and dinged corners after he gets done plying his trade. The blasters of the new WWE Chrome set called out to me and I considered the repack selection, but I eventually settled on a value pack of 2015 Bowman, with 3 packs and a bonus of three Yellow parallels. 

First up are the three Yellow parallels. I'm not familiar with any of these dudes, so the only real notable thing for me here is the amazing Photoshop job on the Jairo Labourt card there on the right. Bowman usually has some pretty obvious editing on the photos, and every so often you find a card like this one that really goes the extra mile. It's like a throwback to the vintage edits you see on cards from the 70s.

Each pack contains 4-5 veteran cards, 3 prospects, 2 Chrome prospects, and 0-1 inserts, for a total of 10 cards. At least that is how these three packs worked out. I want to apologize to any Adam Wainwright fans who are out there. I drafted him in some of my fantasy leagues, which pretty much doomed him to suffer that season-ending injury he sustained a couple of weeks ago.

I did manage to hit a few Astros among the various prospect cards, although I managed to avoid any of the really popular ones. Colin Moran is the representative in this pack. The back of the card says he is rated as the Astros' seventh-best prospect this year. I recognize Tyler Naquin's name from previous iterations of Bowman.

Here are the two Chrome prospect cards from the first pack. Again, I don't recognize these guys. I don't know how I feel about the card design this year. The partial borders and one-sided balance of the player name and team logo are a little distracting, but I also think the cards look good. I guess I'm just used to either having no border or an all-around border.

This pack contained a colored parallel, a Purple Chrome Refractor of Victor Reyes. These fall 1:105 packs, so I guess that's pretty good. I have no idea who Victor Reyes is, though. The card is numbered # 144 / 250.

I'm not really familiar with any of these dudes.

David Price hasn't exactly been an ace this year. You can blame that on me again, as I drafted him for a fantasy team. Iwakuma has also not been very good and is currently out with an injury, but that one isn't my fault. He is a good pitcher, but his K-rate isn't good enough for most fantasy leagues with an innings cap. Liriano and Yelich have some nice photos on their cards, although that Liriano card is a good candidate for a Panini product as most of the logos on his uniform are obscured.

Jairo Labourt's awesome Photoshop makes another appearance, this time in shiny Chrome. Matt Andriese is a pitcher in the Rays organization. His card says he's their 15th-rated prospect. And that does it for the second pack.

Here we get quite a variety of shots among the veterans in the pack. We've got Corey Dickerson swinging the bat, Jake Lamb celebrating, Chris Sale throwing angrily, and Elvis Andrus fielding.

The three prospect cards in this pack are three more guys I've never heard of. Edmundo Sosa is so far down on the Cardinals' farm system that his games are played in a local fishing pond.

The Chrome prospects in this pack are two more guys I've never heard of, but at least Domingo Santana is an Astro. 

Closing things out is another Astro, this time on a Gold parallel numbered # 31 / 50. These Gold parallels fall 1:564 packs, so they're a pretty rare find. I got pretty lucky in these three packs with two numbered parallels, although really they aren't big names and probably aren't worth much. Bowman is fun to open because of the variety of cards in the packs, with veterans, prospects, Chrome prospects, and all kinds of colorful parallels.

Pack of the Day 75: 2014 Allen & Ginter Blaster Box

I was able to find some 2014 Allen & Ginter at the local Target, so I picked up a value pack (3 packs plus a pack of 3 exclusive minis, which may or may not be crimped on the edges by the pack-sealing machinery) and a Blaster Box (7 packs + 1 bonus pack, also known as 8 packs).

I started out thinking I would scan all the cards from the blaster, but like Night Owl did halfway through his post, I came to the conclusion that I didn't have time for that. So I scanned six of my favorite cards from the group. Out of these, I think the best card has to be the Mike Piazza card, although I can't 100% say why I feel that way. All I know is that I pulled it from the pack and said (inside of my head), "That's probably the best-looking base card in here." Maybe it's the mustache. I thought Will Clark had a decent photo. I am pretty sure the Werth photo has been reused at least once in other Topps products. Another egregious example of a reused photo is on Didi Gregorius' card, which has been reused at least twice now. If mustaches qualify you for inclusion in the Top 6, then Buffalo Bill Cody gets in for sure. I guess most people know Felicia Day from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but I know her from her web series The Guild, as well as her typically nerdy posts on her Facebook page. I will probably try to track down her auto in this set.

The Pastime's Pastimes set is a great concept, and some of the players have legitimate hobbies listed on their cards, but a large percentage of the cards I've pulled so far list philanthropy as the player's hobby. I'm not saying that philanthropy is bad, but I am saying that I would like to hear about your real hobbies. The best hobby out of this group comes from a badly outnumbered Red Sox player, Dustin Pedroia, who enjoys watching Bigfoot documentaries and wears a Sasquatch t-shirt. Now that is a hobby. I sure got a lot of Orioles in this box. The main thing the Orioles have going for them in my world is that they are probably my favorite AL East team, which I suppose is sort of damning them with faint praise.

Sometimes I think the Natural Wonder-type cards lose a little in the translation to cardboard. Lake Retba is famous for being a funky color because of salt-loving algae that turn the water pink. I think Topps could have found a better picture for it that maybe shows the water a bit more. They will airbrush an entirely new uniform onto a baseball player, but they won't add some pink to a lake?

I think the Coincidence set is retail-only, and features odd occurrences that may or may not have been accidents. Festivals and Fairs is pretty self-explanatory, as is the World's Capitals set. Running with the bulls just seems like a really stupid thing to do. Maybe I am just too risk-averse.

There are plenty of minis in this set, and they come about one per pack which isn't anything new for A & G. The Ty Cobb card is the black-bordered parallel, and I don't really like this year's black-bordered cards as much as last year's. It looks too busy by far. Larger than Life features the heroes of Tall Tales, and then there are a couple of base cards there too.

More base cards in the form of Longoria, Machado, and the Polar Vortex. Some of these are A & G back parallels, which seem to fall more often than regular base cards. Maybe the A & G back is the default this year? I don't really know. The World's Deadliest Predators card is pretty cool. That is a set I will be trying to put together.

Closing things out, I pulled a Masahiro Tanaka relic card from the blaster, which is one of the more desirable relic cards in the set. I don't have a lot of interest in it, so I tossed it up on eBay pretty quickly. It should at least cover the cost of the Blaster Box. The design on these is pretty good. I like the layout and the frame. The player picture takes up a decent amount of space and the relic with its little nameplate looks all right. I wasn't expecting to pull anything really nice out of a retail purchase, so this was a nice surprise.

Here is the back of the card. I scanned it for the auction, so I might as well put the picture on here, right? I like the design of this year's set. It's not a big departure from other A & G sets, which I guess is kind of the point. I am looking forward to Gint-a-Cuffs VI this year, and I will probably try to put together a set along with some of the inserts.