My 4th of July didn't go exactly as planned. We were going to take the kids to the water park, but I woke up with a headache, dizzy spells, and an upset stomach. So my wife and kids went to the water park and I mostly stayed in bed. I did manage to go out and get a handful of fireworks in the late afternoon, and after my family came home I went outside to set them off. It kind of stunk to be sick on the holiday, but I am feeling a little better this evening and should be able to make it in to work in the morning.
I have a full set of 2013 SEGA Card Gen cards and a pretty large number of cards from the 2012 set, but I don't have many from the earlier versions of the product out of Japan. A bunch of 2010 SEGA Card Gen cards came up on eBay recently, and I grabbed a fair number of them. For the most part I didn't bite on any of the higher-priced big names, but I got a lot of other guys from the set. Kendrys Morales' Wikipedia page says that MLB mistakenly called him 'Kendry' until May 2011, and you can see that on his card here.
I did wind up grabbing one big name in this lot, opting to pay a little more to get that Lance Berkman card into my collection. Other than that, this scan has a lot of relief pitchers and a couple of starters. And Nate McLouth.
Here are some card backs for you. I love all of the trading card game / video game imagery on these cards, with the star ratings and the power bars for different attributes. It seems odd to me that Lance Berkman has a relatively low total score of 75 and an 8-star rating, but I am guessing that certain attributes are worth more stars than others.
Here are the last eight cards from this lot. Carlos Gomez made the GIF and video circuit today for beating up a cooler with his bat. I hope he feels better now. I like that picture of Rod Barajas in his catching gear.
The seller also included a quartet of shiny bonus cards in the package. The highlight is probably that Jose Bautista in the upper left, but I also like that Refractory Dylan Bundy in the lower left.
I feel bad for not posting about this package earlier. It arrived right in the middle of my Cyber Week breaks. Stealing Home from the All Trade Bait, All The Time blog sent out a bunch of Christmas packages in December, and I was one of the lucky recipients of a bubble mailer full of baseball cards. He hit on several of my player and team collections.
I was happy to see a bunch of Randy Johnson cards in this package. The Big Unit just seemed like such an intense and dominating guy on the field. I really should pursue more of his cardboard. There are also a couple of Astros pitchers here, one maybe a little more well-known than the other. Goose Gossage also makes an appearance here, with a Topps Archives issue.
Next up are some more Astros and some Athletics from a variety of years and card brands. I was primarily a basketball collector during my teen years in the 90's, so most baseball cards from earlier than 2012 or so are going to be new to my collection.
Following the Astros and A's, we have some Blue Jays content and a couple of guys with impressive mustaches. For a second I was confused as to why Franco and Aase made it into the package, but then I noticed that they are both sporting some impressive lip fur.
Closing things out are a couple of horizontal cards, a Heritage card celebrating the Astros, who would go on to win the World Series, and the other showing Eddie Murray at different points in his career, but always sporting an impressive caterpillar under his nose.
Thanks for the fun card package, Stealing Home! I had a great Christmas, and I hope that you did too!
I can't stomach the current box prices on most new baseball products, so I've been buying retail and singles. I do really like the Stadium Club offerings that Topps has been putting out, so I picked up a complete set on eBay. I shuffled through it and pulled some of my favorite photos to scan for a post. I sometimes let negativity take over my posts, so I thought with this post I'd focus on something positive. I like the card stock and glossiness of the Stadium Club cards, and the photos are awesome.
Here's the front and back of Paul Goldschmidt's card. I like that a poster with his likeness on it appears in the foreground, with the actual player as more of a background element. There are a ton of pictures in this set that could be used for various mini-collections around the blogs, like players signing autographs, turning two, players blowing gum bubbles, and awards on cards.
I tried not to pay attention to player names when selecting cards for this post, just focusing on photos that jumped out at me. Plenty of big names from the past and present still managed to find their way in, but that's mostly because there were a lot of big names in the checklist. That Tim Raines card has already been featured on a few blogs, and I think Night Owl highlighted the Rod Carew card a while back (actually, he complained about which version of the card he pulled).
I love that Denard Span photo. I don't know what that grimace is all about, but it's a good photo. I like the picture of Aaron Judge standing for the anthem. There are some other good pictures here, including a bubble gum photo, Bryce Harper holding Katie Ledecky's medals, Mark Trumbo signing autographs, and a couple of uniform variations.
There's some good stuff here, including Evan Longoria with a football, some comedy from David Ortiz and A.J. Ramos, and a really nice photo on the Jonathan Lucroy card in the upper right.
I'm closing out this post with a few more vertically-oriented cards that caught my eye. Highlights here include a couple of bubble gum pictures, another interview about to be interrupted by pies, a catcher's mask close-up, and a dramatic shot of Joey Votto getting ready to do some damage to a baseball.
That's my quick round-up of the photographs that jumped out at me from this year's Stadium Club set. There are plenty of gems that I left out, and probably some I just plain missed as I flipped through the stack. I really like what Topps has done with this particular product line, and I am looking forward to seeing which pictures get chosen for 2018. It would also be pretty cool to see a Stadium Club product release for the UFC, although that may be a pipe dream.
Way back in August of 2014 I started posting about the 2014 Topps Finest baseball set, working through the checklist in groups of ten. I got four posts done between August and October 2014, then skipped over a year and posted about cards 41-50 in early 2016. I still have the scans in my folder, but I just never make the time to get them cropped and loaded into the blog. At this point, a base set from 2014 is maybe not the most exciting thing in the world. It feels weird to leave it incomplete, though, so I've got another couple of posts queued up. Today, I talk about cards 51-60. Today's post is pretty heavy on the AL East and recently-retired greats.
Taijuan Walker spent a couple of years being touted as a breakout candidate in Seattle, but never really got going there. He showed flashes, but they traded him to Arizona this year in a deal that included Jean Segura going the other way. He was doing pretty well for them, with an ERA about a run lower than he'd produced the last two years in Seattle, but recently landed on the DL with a blister.
Christian Bethancourt's story has become kind of interesting recently. He hadn't found much success with his bat over a couple of seasons with the Braves and Padres, so he is currently working on converting himself into a bullpen pitcher. He has struggled so far in the role, but I guess that's to be expected.
Here is a guy with plenty of controversy lately, as he continues to flip his bat and jaw with other teams. After a down 2016, Jose Bautista started off pretty slowly for 2017. He's turned things up a bit lately, though, so maybe he hasn't fallen all the way off the cliff in his age-36 season.
Although he retired at the end of 2014, Jeter still appears in the news so much that it's like he never left. The Yankees just recently retired his number, blocking any future Yankees from wearing any single-digit numbers on their jerseys. He'll probably waltz into the Hall of Fame when he's eligible, so he should remain prominent in the news cycle for a while still.
David Ortiz is another recently-retired player in the Hall of Fame discussion. If he does struggle to get in, it will probably be due to PED issues and the amount of time he spent playing at DH rather than in the field. I think he's popular enough that he gets in at some point.
Manny Machado is a guy I targeted in most of my fantasy baseball drafts this year. I didn't land him in any leagues, though. He's struggled (by first-round fantasy draft standards) this year so far, but he's still no slouch. His 162-game pace according to Baseball Reference is still 87 runs, 40 home runs, 95 RBI, and 8 stolen bases.
Felix Hernandez has been the ace for the Mariners for about as long as I can remember, but last year he started to regress a bit in his age-30 season. This year he made five starts, with his last start on April 25th ending after two innings with a shoulder injury and a DL stint. He might be back in June. I wonder if he'll return to his 'King Felix' form?
Adam Jones has been his usual consistent self this season, doing a little bit of everything. I used to pick him up in fantasy baseball nearly every year, but I didn't get him on any of my four teams this season. He has a reputation as being underrated, and it's come full circle so that now he's so underrated that he's overrated.
I picked up Schoop in a couple of my leagues, hoping for some power out of my 2B slot. He delivered in April, with 5 home runs and a good average. That has all disappeared in May, as he hasn't hit a home run this month and has only generated 2 RBI. Hopefully he can get back on track going into June.
Joe Mauer has been okay this year, although you definitely want some more production out of your 1B spot. When it comes to 1B-eligible players in fantasy, he barely cracks the top 50. His glory days are well behind him.
And that's another 10 cards knocked off the checklist of 2014 Topps Finest. It's still a cool-looking set, with all those crazy colors, but I'll be happy when I post the last ten cards and close out this series. At my current pace, I should be able to finish it in 2021. I'm going to dig deep and try to get it done by the end of this year, though.
Robert over at $30 a Week Habit recently offered cards to twenty bloggers, on the condition that contestants had to write 100-word posts about the cards received.
R.A. Dickey was never really an ace with the Blue Jays. The Mets sold high on him after he put up three good years for them.
I am still a fan, and I hope he does well with the Braves.
I wonder if Bautista will bounce back or decline further this year?
I went out a couple of days ago and got myself a blaster of 2016 Topps Opening Day. If you've been reading my blog recently you know that I recently purchased some 2016 Topps Heritage and went on a big rant about how buying retail packs is a huge waste of money. And that's still true when it comes to Heritage, mostly because of my expectations and my desired end-state with that product. Opening Day is a different animal just because it's cheap and fun and my expectations are lower.
The box says that it has 10 packs plus 1 extra pack. I couldn't tell which was which, so I am going to just lump them together and say it has 11 packs. Opening Day doesn't have a lot to it. You get one regular parallel, one super rare parallel, printing plates, some photo variations, a number of easy inserts, 2 slightly more difficult inserts, and some autographs and relics. The Mascot Autographs are arguably the big draw here, although the player autograph and relic checklists have some good names on them. Really, with the autograph checklist being so small and the odds being what they are, you could open about 4,665 packs and have a pretty good chance of having yourself a Kris Bryant or Carlos Correa autographed card.
I didn't scan all the base cards, but I picked out a few of the cards that stood out as I sorted through the stack. I've noticed that Budweiser signs are popping up more often in the background of cards. I know that there are periods when that stuff gets whitewashed out of trading cards, but I guess maybe that's gone out the window. Toronto should put up a statue of Bautista and find a way to suspend the bat so it just sits in the air and spins.
That method would probably require the bat to spin too fast, but I'm sure they could find some way to have it just spin lazily.
Here are another few standouts from the box. I like that Garcia photo, with fielding shot and the high socks. I hear that Kris Bryant guy is fairly popular. Jean Segura's bunting image is pretty nice, too, with the ball in the frame of the photo. I had to include R.A. Dickey because he's one of my main PC guys and I didn't get a lot of those among the base cards.
The Opening Day Edition blue foil parallels are marked on the packs as being serially-numbered and we all just take for granted that they are numbered to the year of the card, just like the Gold parallel in flagship Topps, but they aren't numbered. They are shiny and blue, though, and since I've collected this set each year since I got back into collecting in 2013 I am chasing this year's set. I already had these two cards, so this box wasn't any help in that regard. I bought one big lot on eBay and another on Just Commons, so I'm currently 35 cards away from finishing the set. I have Kris Bryant, but I am missing a lot of other big names like Mike Trout, Bryce Harper, Carlos Correa, and some of the rookies who are selling for more than they're worth (in my opinion).
The Striking Distance insert features players who are close to hitting certain statistical milestones. I got Miguel Cabrera and Francisco Rodriguez. The Heavy Hitters insert features players with powerful bats. I've got Miguel Sano on one of my fantasy baseball teams, so I hope he does some heavy hitting this season.
Superstar Celebrations shows players celebrating, usually by getting mobbed, pied in the face, or having some beverage dumped on them. It's a good fun insert for this kind of card set. Although I am in favor of a little bit of flair and bat flipping and face-pieing, something about the home plate mob bugs me. I haven't nailed down what exactly it is about that specific practice that bothers me, but I don't like it. Maybe I'm just part curmudgeon.
I like the Alternate Reality insert, which shows and discusses some of the alternate uniforms baseball teams wear. I probably couldn't have asked for three better players in this box, either. Manny Machado, Kris Bryant, and Carlos Correa are three of the hottest young players in the game right now. They should combine for about 3000 hits this year, with half of those being home runs.
One big calling card of Opening Day is mascot content. The mascot autographs are pretty desirable hits, but a lot of collectors chase the Mascots insert set. Neither of these mascots is a personal favorite of mine, but I could see myself chasing down the set.
I didn't get any of the 1:36 Bubble Trouble cards, but I did pull a 1:24 Opening Day Stars insert of Clayton Kershaw. Past iterations of this insert were shiny and lenticular, and I'm kind of disappointed that Topps did away with that. This card is more rare than the other inserts, but there isn't anything special about it to set it apart. I want my lenticular cards back!
Opening Day is just about the perfect card set, in my opinion. I think it could be perfect if Topps added a couple of intermediate parallels like one # / 50 and one # / 250 or something, brought back lenticular cards, added one superstar and one gimmick insert that were pretty tough to pull (like 1:288 packs or something), and increased the checklist a little for the relics and autographs. It would basically be combining some of the best things about today's cards (parallels, autographs, relics) with the best things about the 90's cards (gimmicky inserts, hard-to-pull inserts).
I was pretty happy with this box of cards. There wasn't anything crazy amazing in it and the blue foil parallels were ones I already have, but I got a few nice inserts and had a good time looking through the base cards. This is the one set I could see myself chasing through pack purchases, although I wouldn't have nearly all of the Opening Day Stars and Bubble Trouble cards before I had multiple base sets.
