Contested Shots 16: A Guessing Game at Highly Subjective and Completely Arbitrary

Back in early October there was a contest on the Highly Subjective and Completely Arbitrary blog. The task was to make some guesses about the game between the Toronto Blue Jays and the Baltimore Orioles, like which team would hit the most home runs, how many total home runs would be hit in the game, and which player would hit the first home run of the game. I got enough answers right to be considered a winner, and the other day a PWE stuffed with cards arrived in the mailbox as my prize.

Up first we have a few cards for various teams that I follow/collect. The Blue Jays, Astros, and Athletics are all represented here. I am torn on whether that Jose Canseco card shows him as a Ranger or a Blue Jay. I am leaning toward Rangers, though, as the pinstripes seem to be the right colors. Someone with more baseball smarts than me could probably tell right away, but my cursory image search didn't turn up much outside of a lot of people wearing pajamas. Either way, I find Canseco's post-baseball antics to be much more entertaining than his on-field exploits.

I had to scan the horizontal cards separately. I don't know how Brian got 12 cards into one PWE. There were extra stamps on it, though, so that probably helped to grease the wheels of post office bureaucracy. My wife and I are currently trying to get our hands on a package that a substitute mail carrier dropped off at a house with the same number on the wrong street. It is not a fast process. I hope the person who got the box is enjoying our bottle of dog mouthwash. I personally don't think mouthwash is going to improve the freshness of my wife's dog's breath anyway, but it's not worth it to me to fight that battle.

If this were a box break, these would be the hits. That shiny card in the upper left is a Gold parallel from 2016 Topps of Athletics pitcher Ryan Madson. He had 30 saves this year, although he wasn't one of those sub-2.00 ERA knockout closers. Carlos Gomez didn't fit well with the Astros and spent the last bit of 2016 playing much better for the Rangers than he did in Houston. It looks like the card is a Platinum parallel from the 2016 Topps Bunt product. I like the design and price point on Bunt, but for whatever reason I didn't pick up any of it this year. I've purchased a lot less baseball stuff this year than in years past. I don't know if that's a permanent change or just how things played out in 2016. Tyler White is a retail-exclusive Black parallel from 2016 Topps Heritage High Number, and George Springer is from one of the cooler releases this year, the Topps Marketside cards that were packaged with Wal-Mart's Marketside pizza and breadsticks for a couple of months.

All around this was a very cool prize package, and I was pretty happy to be a winner, especially in a contest that required guesses. I am going to go ahead and say that it was a contest of skills, and that my skills and training were good enough to propel my guesses to the top of the heap. Thanks, Brian!

2016 Topps Series 1 Inserts

For the price of a couple packs of cards I was able to acquire 5 complete insert sets from 2016 Topps Series 1 Baseball. It seems like most inserts have become devalued these days, outside of a few that are particularly innovative or rare. I know that I am guilty of ignoring most inserts in favor of base cards, numbered parallels, and relics or autographs. It's a shame, because many inserts have creative themes or offer something that isn't covered in the base sets. I would like it if inserts felt a little more special when they came out of a pack. I guess the place to look for inspiration would be the card sets of the late 1990's, the heyday of the insert. There needs to be foil, acetate, crazy colors, and variance in pack ratios so that your flashy inserts are harder to get than your basic inserts. Maybe that ship has already sailed, but I just wish there were insert sets out there that gave me the same feeling I had as a kid in the 90's when I busted a pack and saw a glimmer of colorful foil in the middle of the stack of cards. I get a hint of that these days when I see the colorful border of a nice parallel card, but I'd like it if that excitement extended to the insert sets.

This Pressed Into Service set covers times in baseball history when position players were called on to pitch in games as emergency relievers. It's a good idea for an insert set, and although some of the cards in the set don't feature the players in pitching poses, some of them do. This is one of the inserts I had earmarked to pick up from the 2016 set, and the full checklist was part of this lot.

The Perspectives insert set focuses on photos taken from interesting angles and inserts the insert name and player name into the images. The photography is pretty nice, looking like the sort of stuff you might find in a Stadium Club product. The big gold lettering all over in the backgrounds and foregrounds of the pictures is distracting to varying degrees, but this is a nice enough set that I had it on my list of inserts to complete.

Even the backs of the Perspectives cards look a little like what you'd find in a Stadium Club set. If we hadn't already seen the sell sheet for 2016 Stadium Club I'd be wondering if this was a thinly-veiled teaser for that product.

I didn't really care about these Wacky Packages cards, but they were part of the lot and I scanned them. For some reason the whole Garbage Pail Kids / Wacky Packages / MAD Magazine / Cracked Magazine scene passed me by. I had cousins and friends who were in to that stuff, but I never really got it.

These Back To Back cards weren't really on my want list either, but now I have them. It's a decent idea for an insert, but the execution is a bit off-putting. The pixelated area between the featured players comes off as looking more like a corrupted JPEG than it does some cool visual effect from The Matrix. The checklist is decent enough.

This is another set that was on my list to acquire. While I've heard mixed reviews around the blogosphere regarding the First Pitch concept, I like the idea of featuring various folks who have been called on to throw out the first pitch in a baseball game. There are bound to be a few cards in the set that don't interest me personally each year, but I like the variety that a set like this allows for in a checklist. I hope that Topps keeps putting the First Pitch insert in the flagship product, because each time it comes out there are a handful of cards that I definitely want to add to my collection, as well as a few others that make me say, "Oh yeah! I remember that D-list celebrity!"

Even some of the non-celebrity cards are cool, as that Rebekah Gregory card carries an inspirational story with it. Sports are one thing that America uses to cope with tragedy, and sports history tends to intertwine with U.S. and world history in interesting ways. It's good to see baseball cards that document that interaction from time to time.

So those are all the insert sets I got in the lot. There was another slightly more expensive lot that included the 100 Years of Wrigley set, but I wasn't interested in that one. I got all five insert sets for $11 after shipping was figured in, good for a per-card price of less than fifteen cents. I am still holding out on a factory set this year for the base Topps set, but it's been hard to keep away from buying packs here and there. I did buy a hanger box when Series 1 was first released and two Toys"R"Us packs a couple of weeks ago, but that's been it so far. The release of Heritage has presented me with yet another test of willpower. I'll probably pick up a couple packs of that sometime soon to tide me over until I can pick up a complete set from some online seller.

At the Trade Deadline 36: The Prowling Cat Cleans Out His Clutter, and I'm Reaping All the Benefits, Part 1

The Prowling Cat has recently been clearing out his clutter, placing excess items from his collection on the block for other collectors to claim before he sends them off to Goodwill. I have claimed a couple of items from the offerings available, and recently received a nice box of goodies in the mail. First up is this 1993 Hostess Baseballs set, which was distributed in 3-card packs paired with baseball-themed snack cakes. It seems that you would need to eat a whole lot of snack cakes to collect the full 32-card set, especially if you pulled doubles. John Kruk seems like a guy who knows his way around a snack cake, so I chose him to headline this post.

The checklist contains many of the big names of the day. I wasn't watching a lot of baseball in 1993, so I don't have many enduring memories of these guys outside of seeing them on the baseball cards I accumulated in my youth. Bobby Bonilla comes up in the news every year because of his annual $1.2 million buyout payments from the Mets, an amount that he will receive annually until 2035. Although that seems outlandish to the layperson, it actually might not be a bad deal for the Mets overall.

It's weird to see familiar names in unfamiliar uniforms. I always associate Gary Sheffield with the Marlins and Darryl Strawberry with the Mets, although both guys spent plenty of time on other teams.

Dennis Eckersley is probably my favorite from this bunch, but that probably has a lot to do with his big-head doppelganger, as featured in 2015 Topps Stadium Club:

The dude's got a serious hair and mustache game, although you can see the real Eckersley has a clean upper lip these days.

Frank Thomas always seemed larger than life. In my memory it seems like he showed up on more posters and magazine covers than most other baseball players of the era, up there in a group with Griffey, Ripken Jr., and Bo Jackson. There are probably other guys who were just as prolific, but those are the guys I remember as being everywhere. 

It's nice to see that colorful Astros uniform make an appearance, with Jeff Bagwell making an appearance on this checklist. He's been on the Hall of Fame ballot for a few years, but his percentage hasn't been climbing at a rate that suggests he'll make it in. I guess it's largely because he played in the steroid era and everyone from that time is under suspicion for PED usage.

This set is pretty heavy on hitters, but a handful of pitchers made it onto the checklist, with Tom Glavine being one of them. This is one of my favorite Rickey Henderson anecdotes:

"During a game in Seattle an on-deck batter overheard Rickey muttering to himself after he struck out. As the next batter was walking past him, he heard Henderson say, 'Don’t worry, Rickey, you’re still the best.'"

Positive self-talk and visualization is a great psychological tool. It seems like there is a line where it can become too much, though. Rickey probably spends a great deal of time on the far side of that line. 

This is probably the most star-studded scan in this post. Most of the others feature at least one guy who falls a bit short or only got hot for a year or two. The lowest guy in this group is Don Mattingly, and he still had an MVP award and six All-Star appearances.

I like all of the cards that used to be packaged with food and snacks. I don't have a lot of them in my collection, so it is nice to add them when I can. The Prowling Cat has been awfully generous with his closet-clearing and has offered up items to suit a variety of interests. I'm gonna have to come up with a good trade package in return for all this goodness.