Members of the Club

Today is a scheduled day off for me (we work 9-hour days instead of 8-hour days so we get a day off every two weeks), and I've been trying to stay busy doing productive things instead of vegging out at my computer all day. It's gone pretty well, I guess. The current project is moving wargaming miniatures and LEGO kits into the attic so I have room to sort and organize my comic book and trading card collections. The other stuff will eventually come back out of the attic, but right now I need the space and those are the easiest things to move. All the packing and climbing around has kind of tuckered me out, but that's okay. It's good to be making progress. With all of the clutter in the basement, it's hard for me to enjoy any of my hobbies to any great extent.

I've picked up a couple more Members Only parallels from 2014 Topps Stadium Club over the last couple of months. With a rumored print run of less than ten each, they are pretty rare, but I've managed to acquire a couple dozen of them. Jeff Samardzija only spent half a season with the A's, moving on to the White Sox in 2015 and the Giants for 2016. He was recently announced as the Giants' fourth starter for 2017. I was kind of surprised to see that last year was his first season above .500 as a starter (he went 8-4 as a reliever for the Cubs in 2011), although I know pitcher wins are kind of an empty statistic. It seems like he had bad luck during his best statistical season in 2014, going 2-7 in the first half for the Cubs in spite of a 2.83 ERA across 17 starts, and then 5-6 in the second half for Oakland in spite of a 3.14 ERA over 16 starts. I guess the takeaway is that even a good pitcher needs run support.

Marcus Stroman made his big-league debut in 2014, and did pretty well for himself. He missed most of 2015 with an ACL injury, but came back for four starts at the end of the year, plus a few starts in the playoffs. His numbers dipped in 2016, but he is still the probable #3 starter for the Blue Jays this season.

I grabbed both of these cards from eBay on different occasions. Outside of the superstars, these tend to fly under the radar, as they aren't serially-numbered and don't stand out much. The only distinction between them and the base cards is the little foil Members Only stamp.

Gint-a-Cuffs VIII: Pack 21

I couldn't help thinking that I'd seen that Ted Williams card previously, and sure enough, I pulled the same one from Pack 7. While looking into that, I also saw that the Bob Feller Baseball Legends card from the previous post was another double from the Baseball Legends insert. I haven't noticed any other doubles yet, but they could be there.

Ted Williams: +2 (Baseball Legends +2)
Dallas Keuchel: +6 (My Favorite Player Mini +5, My Favorite Team Mini +1)

Pack Total: 8.00
Running Total: 100.00

Average Per Pack: 4.55
Box Pace: 113.64

2014 Topps Stadium Club Box Break - A Case Hit and a Redemption Card

I am trying to clear out my folder of card scans, and there is some old stuff in there. This is a box of 2014 Topps Stadium Club that I opened last year, probably in November or December. I vaguely remember some of the cards in this box.

These were the eight most interesting horizontal base cards I found in the box. Actually, the Hyun-Jin Ryu and Jeff Samardzija cards probably weren't the most interesting in the box. They are (kind of) PC guys for me. I like that Todd Helton farewell card. Tim Lincecum looks a lot like Mario's brother Luigi, and also like a guy I knew in one of my Army units. I don't remember that guy's name, but I remember he was kind of a funny dude. Adam Eaton got his own post a while back, and I think Jose Bautista did too (I guess Bautista had to share his post with three other guys).

These Rainbow Foil parallels came one per mini-box, or three per Hobby box. This is kind of a tragic group, as both Oscar Taveras (DUI car wreck) and Tony Gwynn (cancer) died during 2014.

That Gold Victor Martinez is a one-per-box parallel, and the Matt Carpenter Members Only card is a one-per-case hit. Martinez is having a terrible season after a massive 2014. Some people (like me) drafted him in fantasy baseball this year and are also having very bad years. Matt Carpenter is having a very good year for the Cardinals, helping to fill the void left by several key injuries. The Cardinals have signed some dark pact that keeps them consistently winning games from year to year.

These are all of the inserts that fall one per Hobby box. My Triumvirate card is Masahiro Tanaka, which was a pretty good pull at the time. He's been pretty good this year, too, but the big crop of hot rookies this season has kind of pushed him and Jose Abreu to the back burner as far as hype is concerned. Jose Fernandez is my Beam Team insert. Speedster Billy Hamilton is my Future Stars card. He's on the DL right now. Imagine how many bases he would steal if he got on base a little more. My favorite of this bunch is the Randy Johnson Legends die-cut.

These Field Access inserts come one per mini-box. If I remember right, that Randy Johnson card is a parallel insert numbered out of # / 99. I guess I could go look it up, but I'd have to dig through some boxes to find it and I don't want to. McCutchen, Jeter, and Mays are all good pulls, too, but I like the Johnson card best. Update: I did not remember correctly. In looking through my scans I found the actual Randy Johnson parallel I pulled in the photos for another box break. This one is probably the base version. I still like it.

Each box of Stadium Club promised three autographs, but the relatively weak checklist helped boxes to stay affordable for people like me. There were sales last year where you could get boxes for less than 50% of the original MSRP. One of my autographs was a redemption for a Chris Owings base autograph. James Jones has been in the minors for most of 2015. Yangervis Solarte has been toiling away with pretty good success for the Padres this year. Unfortunately for his collecting value, he is having success with the Padres and not the Yankees. Chris Owing has been playing all season for the Diamondbacks, but he hasn't found a lot of success with a negative WAR so far this season.

Sometime between then and now the redemption was filled and I got this card in the mail, signed by Owings with a nice big pair of initials. Overall this was a pretty good box as I pulled a case hit with the Matt Carpenter parallel and a couple of nice Randy Johnson inserts.

Gint-a-Cuffs VII: Pack 24

+2 Starting Points

Pack 24 Points: 2.00

Box Running Total: 137.60

Per Pack Average: 5.73

Box Pace: 143.33

Pack of the Day 91: 2014 Topps Heritage High Numbers Box Set

The 2015 sets are rolling out now, but my mind has been on the past. Thinking about completing upcoming sets serves to remind me that each passing year adds a number of partially-completed sets to my card collection. One of the worst examples from 2014 was the Topps Heritage set, with cruddy collation and those damnable short-printed cards (SPs). I determined that since I am not extremely fond of this year's Heritage design, I would instead focus on finishing off my 2014 set. I ordered a bunch of the SPs I was missing from sellers on Check Out My Cards, but none of those appear in this post.

I had thus far avoided the Heritage High Numbers box set as an extraneous and irritating addition to an already frustrating set, but I kind of like some of the players included in the checklist. The set was packed out as a 101-card box set, with the 100 cards from 501-600 in the checklist and one autograph card. I shopped around and tried to decide whether I should order a sealed set or an opened set that had the autograph already removed. Eventually I decided to place a Best Offer with Dave & Adam's eBay store for a sealed set. It wasn't that much more than a set missing an autograph, and there was a chance I could pull something good.

As far as I know, you get the same 100 cards in every set. I don't think there are photo variations or anything tricky in the Heritage High Numbers set. I heard rumors of sets showing up with a lot of damage after the release last year, but mine arrived in great shape. I pulled a few cards and scanned them for this post. Tanaka was one of the Big 2 rookies last year, pitching extremely well prior to his arm injury. Dee Gordon had a good year for his fantasy baseball managers, stealing approximately ten thousand bases. Collin McHugh had a pretty good year for the Astros last year. Hopefully he can keep it up this year. Oscar Taveras had a promising career (and life) cut short by making a poor decision about alcohol and driving, and unfortunately also wound up killing his young girlfriend in the wreck, too. It's to bad, but it's hard to feel overly sorry for a guy who gets himself into that situation.

Doolittle had a pretty solid season in 2014, making the All-Star team, but he is injured and will miss some amount of time. The closer role is one that can be hard to reclaim if your injury replacement is lighting it up, so we'll see what role he gets this year. Billy Hamilton is the super-speedy prospect who is projected to steal approximately 5000 bases per year, but last year he got caught stealing a whole lot and had a hard time getting on base so that he could actually run wild on the basepaths. Neshek is a very good reliever who signed with the Astros and might even get a chance to close for them this year. He also is a card collector and a friend to hobbyists. Mike Morse just gets included because of his card photo, in which he is channeling the spirit of a sleepy Keanu Reeves.

George Springer is one of the Astros other hot young players, and hopefully this year the team will take some steps forward. Betances had ridiculous numbers last year, and will hopefully be able to keep it up this season. I think he is going to get a shot at the closer role with the Yankees now that Robertson has moved on. That should be a pretty good gig. Samardzija got into some sets as an Athletic after his mid-season move from the Cubs, but now he's with the White Sox. Hopefully he does well with his new team. Jose Abreu should provide plenty of run support for Samardzija's starts as he was last year's big story, mashing the ball all over the place on his way to an All-Star berth, a Rookie of the Year award, a Silver Slugger award, and a 4th-place finish in the MVP race. That's all the base cards I scanned, which leaves me with just the autograph. Unfortunately my autograph was a redemption card...

...but it was a pretty good one. I got a Real One Autograph of Jose Abreu. It's the base version rather than the photo variation or the short-printed Red Ink version, but this is one of the best cards I could have pulled from this set. It looks like there are some of these live at the moment, so I shouldn't have any trouble getting the card from Topps. I am pretty happy that my gamble to go with the sealed set paid off. I am not sure whether I will sell the card when it gets here. It might be kind of cool to keep it. I don't have an Abreu auto, and the Heritage autographs tend to look pretty nice.

That's it for my Heritage High numbers box set. I imagine I will do a post on the Abreu card whenever it arrives in the mail. Once my COMC order comes in I should be pretty close to finishing my 2014 Topps Heritage set, with just a couple more cards to locate.

What's in the Box 2: Collector Crate Bronze Level Unboxing

I saw somewhere that a new outfit called Collector Crate were unveiling a monthly mystery box program similar to Loot Crate, which sends out a monthly box full of geek and gamer paraphernalia. The Collector Crate version would be sports collector specific, and consists of three different pricing tiers, which in turn offer a different level of merchandise in each mystery box. The tiers are Bronze (10 low-mid end packs, 1 relic card, 1 autograph card, various odds and ends), Silver (10 mid end packs, 2 relic cards, 2 autograph cards, various odds and ends), and Gold (10 mid-high end packs, 3 relic cards, 3 autographs, various odds and ends).

They were offering a $5 discount on the inaugural October boxes, so I ordered a Bronze box to see what it was all about. It arrived in the mail last week. There is a Bronze sticker on the front and four little boxes denoting which sport the box contains. There is a checkbox for hockey, although they don't yet offer a hockey option. My choice was baseball. When it arrived the seal holding the box shut had been cut, but the contents all seemed to be intact.

Here are the various odds and ends that were included in the box. In the upper left is a Big League Chew gumball. It was not as satisfying as real Big League Chew which was shredded bubble gum that came in a pouch, like Red Man chewing tobacco. There was a small foam finger, which you could place on your finger, a little plastic baseball with an Angels logo on it, a Houston Astros pennant, and a Boston Red Sox sticker. The Collector Crate card talks about how you could win a Collector Crate box through their social media sites, and the little yellow envelope contains the bonus hits. I chewed the gumball and will probably find a place on my wall for the Astros pennant, but this stuff is probably not anything that I would go out and buy on my own. And I am just lucky that the pennant featured a team that I am a fan of.

Here are the 10 packs that came in the box. The only real difference between this and your basic repack from Target is that some of the packs are Hobby packs, so the odds are maybe a little better of pulling something decent. Let's see how I did. I'll start off with the bonus hits.

I got a couple of Mets hits in the box, with a relic/auto of Mike Cameron and a relic of Robin Ventura. They are two guys who had long careers in baseball and both were All-Stars at least once. The Cameron card is even pretty limited, being serially-numbered # 03 / 45. The hair on the Ventura swatch is probably a Duke relic from my Basset Hound, who sheds pretty much everywhere, even on the scanner. He has never even been in my car, but his hair is in my car.

In addition to the relic and autograph hits, the envelope contained this 1989 Donruss Ken Griffey Jr. Rated Rookie card. You can't say no to a free Griffey. So the hits were pretty decent, even if they weren't anything I would seek out on the secondary market. We all know that they could have been much, much less exciting.

I didn't bother to scan everything from the packs, but I did scan the cards that were most interesting to me. First up are the horizontal-format cards, because they have to be scanned in their own little group.

The Jeff Samardzija is a base card, but it fits into my player collections. I don't know anything about that Upper Deck X Baseball stuff, but the Troy Tulowitzki card was super-shiny and I figured it was special. The 2008 Upper Deck Heroes pack featured a couple of card with players I collect on them, but the card design was so ugly that I didn't scan them.

Homer Bailey is another player I knid of collect, as is Chris Johnson. Carlos Lee is an Astro and a die-cut, so I included him in the scan. I may already have that card, though. I pulled three 'hits' from the packs, which seems like a better-than-average ratio to me. Eddie Butler is supposedly one of the top prospects in the Rockies' system, but had pretty horrid stats in the three starts he made for them in 2014. He is also injured, and when he comes back from that he will probably get some more seasoning in the minors before (hopefully) getting another chance with the Rockies. Brad Sullivan was a first-round pick for the Athletics in 2003 and pitched in the lower end of their minor league system until 2007, never really getting anything going. The Mike Trout Elite Dominator card from 2014 Donruss is numbered # 774 / 999 and features an X-Fractor-like pattern that doesn't really show up in the scan.

The Eddie Butler autograph is a Refractor autograph and is numbered # 484 / 499.

And that's about it from the box. Even with the $5 discount and the extra autographs and inserts I pulled from my 10 packs of cards it's a bit borderline on whether the box was worthwhile. I can get a 10-pack repack from Target for around $12. I am not sure that the two bonus hits, the odds and ends, and the upgrade in some of the packs from Retail to Hobby adds an extra $13-18 in value for me personally. I can't imagine that I would even pull a couple of autographs and a Mike Trout insert or equivalent every time I busted a box.

Maybe I am just soured a bit on opening randomly-packed stuff altogether, when it generally works out to be cheaper to take the direct route and buy the cards I want outright on the secondary market.

Collector Crate may be good as an occasional purchase for me, but I can't see myself dropping the money to buy one every month. I don't know if things work out better at the higher tiers (the Gold tier seems to feature some pretty high-end packs, for example, with guaranteed hits), but the Bronze tier just doesn't quite hold enough value for me to strongly recommend it. I can scratch the repack itch at a lower price point, and the pennants/baseballs/bubble gum/stickers are stuff I normally wouldn't spend money on anyway, so I don't really include it in my mental value calculation.

Gint-a-Cuffs 6: Pack 24

Jose Canseco: +1 (My Favorite Team +1)
Tim Lincecum: +2 (Other Favorite Player +2)

Jeff Samardzija: +2 (SP Base Card +2)

Ivan Nova: +5 (Yankee -1, SP A&G Back Mini +6)



Pack 24 Points: 10.00
Box Running Total: 144.00
Per Pack Average: 6.00

Box Pace: 150.00

Pack of the Day 68: Hobby Box of 2014 Bowman

I busted open a Hobby box of 2014 Bowman to see what it was all about. My initial impressions of the product seemed fairly negative, and I think I still feel that way for the most part. But ultimately it is just pictures of ball-players on cardboard. I think the best thing about this product is the way the Chrome cards smell, especially just as they come out of the pack. I guess it's weird to sniff your cards, and that smell is probably just an indicator of the presence of some cancer-causing chemical residue, but I can't help it. It's better than being out there huffing gasoline in the lawnmower shed.

There are essentially three different base sets in this product, which makes things interesting when breaking down a box. The base set contains 220 cards and features Veterans and Rookies. Then there is a Prospects set made up of 110 cards and features your minor league guys. Then there are Prospect Chrome cards which are essentially a parallel of the Prospect cards but feature their own complement of parallels.

In my box I pulled 127 / 220 cards from the base set with no doubles, or 57.73% of the cards in the set. If you got two boxes with pretty good collation you could complete the base set, but more than likely you'd need three boxes to be sure.

One thing that continues to irk me about Topps products is the company's habit of reusing photos of players across multiple products. The first card I noticed right away was the Craig Kimbrel card in the first scan, which is the same as his SP card in 2014 Topps Series 1 with a slightly different crop. And I am pretty sure that Josh Reddick and Fernando Rodney's photos are the same ones that appear on their 2014 Gypsy Queen cards. Those are the images that jumped out at me right away as being reused. I imagine there are plenty of others in the set. Why can't Topps find more photos of players to show off from product to product. Does the company think we don't notice? Do they save that much money by reusing the same photo several times over? Once a Cub is pretty good at finding alternate images of players during his research on the 2014 Topps Blog, so it can't be that difficult to find photos to use on the fronts of trading cards. So I have to assume it is either too expensive to get reprints rights and pay graphic designers to process new photos, or Topps hates collectors and trolls us by reusing images because they know we'll buy the cards anyway.

Continuing with the 220-card base set, I got three of the State & Hometown parallel cards. The three players depicted were Starling Marte, Jose Iglesias, and David Price. There is not much surprising here, as this is a parallel that's been around for a while in Bowman. Marte is a player collection guy, but the others are just trade fodder or will spend the next few decades sitting in my box of extras.

The Silver Ice parallels come one per box and I got another player collection guy, with a copy of Max Scherzer's card. I really felt like this was a reused photo, too, but the only similar picture I found featured some slightly different angles on Scherzer's arms and his belt buckle was slid around to the other side. I don't know. These inserts are not serially-numbered, although the other Ice Parallels are (Red to 25, Purple to 10, and White to 1).

I got three different colored-border parallels from the base set. These are the three most common colors. The Green have a print run of 150, the Orange have 250 copies, and 500 of each Blue card are inserted into packs. There are also Yellow (99), Silver (75), Gold (50), Black (25), Purple (10), Red (1), and Printing Plate parallels for each card in the set. I don't have much use for the Enny Romero # 072 / 150 or the Matt Davidson # 018 / 250 cards, but the Joey Votto # 192 / 500 might stick around in my collection for a while.

And that about does it for the veteran side of the set. With Bowman being 'The First Place to Find the Game's Future Stars!" the emphasis of most of the inserts is on the prospects.

This box delivered 48 / 110 of the base prospect cards, or 43.64 % of a set. At that rate it would take about three boxes of cards to make a complete set, although you'd probably have quite a few doubles left over at the end. I don't know much about any of these guys. I recognize Appel's name as one of Houston's bigger prospects, but I don't know who the other guys are. Tapia's photo makes his neck look about twice as long as it ought to, but I can't find any evidence online that suggests he actually has a giraffe neck. It's probably just an unflattering angle. I chose to include the Mookie Betts card in the scan because his name is Mookie and it looks like he's got the start to a pretty nasty thin mustache growing on his lip.

For Chrome prospects I pulled 45 / 110 cards in the set, or 40.91% of the set. The best thing about these cards is their sweet chemical Chrome smell. There isn't much rhyme or reason to the cards I selected for this scan. I don't really know who any of these guys are.

I got three of the State & Hometown parallels on the prospect side of things, with Kris Bryant, Daniel Robertson, and Tim Cooney. I hear that Kris Bryant is a pretty big deal. The rumor is that he and Javier Baez might be ready to turn the Cubs upside down in the next couple of years.

You can't really tell it from the scan, but these four cards are the Bowman Scout Top 5 Chrome Mini cards, which feature one guy on the front and a list of the organization's top five prospects on the back. I've heard of Alen Hanson, mostly because I pulled some of his cards from last year's Bowman products.Tyler Naquin's name sounds familiar, too, but I don't know why.

This is an insert set that I liked last year and still like this year. It's the Top 100 Prospects set, and pretty much what you see is what you get. There are 100 players in the set, with their individual rank on the Top 100 list in big numerals at the bottom of the card. Raul Mondesi I again recognize because I got some of his cards last year. Gallo is another big-time prospect. It looks like the top portion of this checklist features a number of guys who already have some service time with their respective big-league teams. I wish Topps had seeded these at a little better than 2 per box, because this is one set I would have fun putting together if they were a little more common.

I am kind of jumping around here with the cards. I really should have done parallels first, then inserts, but I didn't. It bugs me a little, but not enough to go to the hassle of rearranging the photos and text. This is a Chrome Refractor of Tim Cooney numbered # 253 / 500. I also got his State & Hometown parallel in this box. Tim Cooney Hot Box!

This is another of the Bowman Scout Top 5 mini cards, this time a Black Refractor parallel of Courtney Hawkins. It is relatively rare, numbered # 08 / 15. Of course, the White Sox player that you would want featured on this card is Jose Abreu. Going by eBay auction results, you'd be lucky to get $5 from this card. But it's cool to pull something rare from a box anyway, even if it isn't worth the Chromey cardstock it's printed on.

This Francisco Lindor card is from the 1989 Bowman is Back Silver Diamond Refractor set, which are packed out one per box. This is one of those few cards that looks better in the scan than it does in person. Or maybe I've just been looking at it under poor lighting.

And finally, here is the box's promised autograph, from a guy named Seth Mejias-Brean. Who? I don't know. He is sporting a pretty slick mustache, but he's apparently buried pretty deep in the minors. I couldn't find a lot of information on the guy. This is the Black parallel of the autograph, which is numbered # 58 / 99.

And that does it for the box. For what it is I guess it was a pretty good break. I got a decent number of low print run cards, even though they weren't necessarily the big money guys in the set. I'd like to get the complete base set, but I don't know if I will be buying another couple of boxes in order to do it.