A Couple Blaster Boxes of 2024 Topps Series 1 Baseball

I've opened a couple of 2024 Topps Series 1 Baseball blaster boxes over the last few weeks. I figured I'd hit the highlights from them in one post rather than trying to squeeze two posts out of a couple blasters.

 

My official first card of 2024 Topps was...Spencer Torkelson. I really like the design of this set. The colorful foil really pops in the right light, and I think most of the elements are well-placed and easy to read. I'm sure the graphic designers of the world could pick it apart, but to a layman like me it's a fun set design, and that's all I really want from a baseball card set.

The backs are fine, with plenty of information and stats. I can't find anything to complain about with the card backs.

This photo is kind of washed-out, but it's a selection of some of my favorite horizontal cards from the selection I had on-hand. I had to include the Miguel Cabrera farewell card, along with a couple of young stars in Corbin Carroll and Bobby Witt Jr.

And here are some of the vertical cards I pulled from my blasters. I had to get a couple of Astros in this post, Chas McCormick with a nice action photo and Hunter Brown to show the Future Stars design. I figured the Jasson Dominguez and Julio Rodriguez cards probably warranted posting as well.

I got a handful of these shiny blue holiday parallels. Nothing that lit my collection on fire, but here they are. This is a parallel I could see myself trying to build a set of if card prices were at 2014 levels rather than 2024 price points.

I got one Rainbow Foil card and one Easter Egg parallel across the two blasters. I guess the season-themed parallels are pretty fun as opposed to the standard different border colors of most years.

The first blaster yielded this /999 Blue Sparkle Angels team card. This is another set that would be considered for a set build at 2014 prices and print runs. It would have been achievable then. Now, not so much.

This flowery Jhoan Duran parallel is /50 and came out of the second blaster I opened. I doubt that most blasters drop a numbered card, but I got lucky and pulled one from each of the blasters I opened.

Stars of MLB is the most common insert in the boxes. I pulled quite a few of them, and these are the four best by my reckoning. I'm always happy to add another Yordan Alvarez card to my collection.

Each blaster box also dropped one Stars of MLB Chrome card. These are the two I got. Corbin Carroll is a pretty good pull, I suppose, although his card doesn't qualify for the coveted RC shield this year.

These 1989 Topps throwbacks are pretty cool, and I got a couple of good players from them, with Nolan Ryan in an Astros uniform and Bo Jackson running hard. 1989 Topps is one of the first sets I remember from my youth, so the design hits the nostalgia button for me.

I got a mix of other inserts from the set in my boxes. I reckon the Shohei Ohtani and Ichiro cards are my favorites here. The Mike Schmidt photo is pretty cool, too, with the old-school uniform on display.

Finally, I got a couple of Home Run Challenge cards. I typically don't scratch the codes and play the game of trying to pick a home run date for the players, but maybe I'd consider it if I pulled doubles of a card.

That does it for a quick rundown of 2024 Topps Series One Baseball. It marks the official start of the 2024 baseball year for many collectors, and I think Topps did a good job of designing the cards for this year. I probably won't open a ton of this stuff, as I prefer to just buy a factory set and grab an Update set on eBay each year, but I could see myself sampling a bit of basic Topps this year when I find it on the shelves at retail.

Some of My Favorite 2023 Topps Stadium Club Photos

I bought a set of Stadium Club cards on eBay a little while ago, and flipped through the cards a bit to look at the pictures. Stadium Club would be a fun set to build through packs, but I can't justify the cost of building sets that way when I can get a base set for so little compared to busting a handful of boxes. The hits you pull rarely make up the difference, especially as most breaks I've seen of Stadium Club this year feature a whole lot of no-name autographs. I thought I'd post a few pictures here of cards I liked when I looked through the set.

That Yogi Berra photo is pretty cool, with the lounge chair, the big TV, and the neat cart in the background. The Joc Pederson photo hit me with nostalgia, as I collected the Chevron cars pretty hard when they first came out. After I had kids I opened all the packages and let my kids play with them, so they were all pretty well destroyed after a few years. I don't regret doing it, though.

Next up are a couple of intimidating fireballers, in Nolan Ryan and Randy Johnson. I love that particular Astros uniform, and Johnson looks as intimidating as ever in this photo.

Not much to say here, just a nice shot of a play at the plate and a good wide photo showing the catcher and umpire at work.

This is about the most 90's pair of cards you could come up with. That Frank Thomas photo could have been a poster sold at the Scholastic book fair.

I had to get a picture of the home team in here with that Jeremy Peña card, and the Starling Marte photo features a beautiful sky as the afternoon turns to evening, a perfect time to be at the ballpark.

Closing things out is a silly photo of Joey Votto and a pic of Xander Bogaerts signing autographs. These may not be the 12 greatest photos in 2023 Topps Stadium Club, but they are 12 that stood out to me as I flipped through the set.

Haven't been feeling the blogging vibe lately, so it's been a few days since I posted anything. I'm trying to stick with it, but sometimes I don't feel like I have anything to say. I'd like for the blog to be more than just a showcase of what I've picked up lately, but sometimes it feels like those are the easiest posts to write.

Pack of the Day 189: I Missed the Gint-a-Cuffs Entry Deadline, but Here's What I Pulled

I announced my intent to join in on Gint-a-Cuffs again this year, but I must have missed the official sign-up deadline. I had already ordered a box, though, so let's bust it open and see what Allen & Ginter looks like for 2018.

2018 Topps Allen & Ginter offers 3 hits per Hobby box, with a variety of cards acting as hits. Most often you get one 'A-design' full-size relic card, one 'B-design' full-size relic card, and then one of the other hit types.

The bottom of the box lists the Box Loader odds, as well as the No Purchase Necessary rules.

The pack looks like an Allen & Ginter pack. A box contains 24 packs, with 8 cards in each pack, unless you pull a thick hit. If you do, your box will be short a few base cards.

Here are the odds for all the stuff you might pull in a pack of Allen & Ginter. Each pack contains a mini card of some kind.

My box loader features Cal Ripken Jr, posing on a baseball field near a house in the woods.

Here are some of the base cards I liked. The set looks like a pretty typical Allen & Ginter set. I am not a details guy, so I can't tell you specifics about how it differs from previous sets. It just looks like Allen & Ginter to me.

You should get 12 short-prints in a box. Here are the first 6 that I pulled. I'm not sure how Topps goes about choosing who makes the short-print checklist.

Here are the other 6 short-prints from my box. Eckersley is probably my favorite of the bunch. Julia Morales, part of Houston's TV broadcast team, recently ran as Eckersley in Oakland's mascot race at a game. That was pretty entertaining.

I think these are the 9 regular minis I pulled from the box. Pretty standard stuff, although it was nice to pull an Astro.

It looks like I got three black-bordered minis, a couple of SP minis, and 5 A&G-back minis. The Bo Jackson is probably the best one here.

Here are the Fantasy Goldmine inserts I pulled. I kind of like seeing a set based around the WAR stat. I acknowledge that WAR probably still isn't a perfect measure of a player, but I like to use it because it's relatively easy. I am not enough of a math-head to understand it all, but I do know a lot of folks take issue with how defensive WAR is calculated.

World Talent is another neat set, with MLB players hailing from so many different countries around the globe. I got a nice mix of countries represented in this group.

Baseball Equipment of the Ages isn't my favorite insert ever, but it's a nice enough set that matches the theme of this product.

World's Greatest Beaches is another insert that fits the product well, but doesn't interest me a whole lot. Fun fact: I hate the ocean and other large bodies of water. They are fascinating, but I don't want to be in or on them. I love tide pools and frog ponds, though.

I do like the Magnificent Moons insert set. It's a little funny to me that all these other moons have cool names, and our moon is just 'Moon.'

Here is my Home Run Challenge card of the box. Pretty decent player to get. I guessed September 10th, and Goldschmidt did not hit a home run on that day. Oh well.

Here are some mini inserts. I guess Postage Required is my favorite in this group. I really enjoyed stamp collecting when I was young, but fell out of it at some point. I think I would like Folio of Fears better as a set if they used different pictures. This ghost just looks like a poorly-filtered photo. I would prefer a drawing or a picture over a picture doctored to look kind of drawn.

These are the other two mini inserts I pulled. Much has been said about the Flags of Lost Nations set, which appears to be a favorite among bloggers. I think I prefer The World's Hottest Peppers, though. I don't have a high tolerance for stuff like that, but I will test my limits every so often. The Trinidad Moruga Scorpion has a cool name, too.

On to the hits! This would have been a great box for a Cubs collector, just to foreshadow things a bit.

First up is a basic B-version relic (1:20 packs) of the Cubs' star second baseman, Javier Baez. He's having a pretty good year.

Next up is a framed mini relic (1:56 packs) of Yu Darvish, who struggled for the Dodgers in the World Series last year, pitched a little for the Cubs this year, and then went down with an injury. He had an elbow surgery a couple of days ago.

The last hit is a Rip Card (1:161 packs) of another Cub, Anthony Rizzo. It is numbered # 03 / 75. I debated on whether or not to rip it for a couple of hours, but I couldn't resist the urge to see what was inside.

The prize inside was an extended-checklist mini of Boston's Rafael Devers. He has struggled this year, but he's also just 21 years old. There is plenty of time for his talent to catch hold.

Here is the back of the mini. The Devers card is number 360 in the extended set.

That does it for this box of Allen & Ginter. It wasn't the most exciting box for me, an Astros fan, but it probably would have earned a decent Gint-a-Cuffs score and it's always fun to get a Rip Card. Maybe next year I'll get my entry in by the deadline. I have gathered most of the non-baseball autographs and relics I wanted from the 2018 set, so I probably won't be buying much more Allen & Ginter this season.

Astros and an Abbott from ATBATT

I recently (well, within the last month or so) got a package of cards from Stealing Home of the All Trade Bait All the Time blog. I haven't exactly been active on my blog lately, so I Tweeted out a thank you shortly after the package arrived, but I am only now getting around to writing a blog post. I am still collecting cards, but I just have not had the urge to write about them much for the last few months.

First up in the package were a couple of shiny Bowman's Best Astros, Yulieski Gurriel and Jose Altuve. Bowman's Best isn't a product I see a lot of, so it was nice to get a look at a couple of cards from the set.

The next few cards feature some recent Astros cardboard, with a few Gypsy Queen examples and a Yulieski Gurriel insert from the flagship Topps set.

Some older cards also appeared in the shipment, with Hall of Famers Nolan Ryan and Jeff Bagwell making appearances. I don't have a lot of Bagwell cards in my collection, so it was nice to get a couple more of his cards into my collection. Dave Meads and Danny Darwin aren't Hall of Famers, but they are at least sporting some sweet rainbow uniforms. Jim Abbott's fame probably exceeds his stat line by a bit, but he's got quite a story, too.

This was a pretty fun group of cards to flip through, and I always love to get mail. I don't like to trade, but I do like sending cards back and forth with other bloggers. Thank you for the fun package!

Contested Shots 32: World Series Door Prize from Collector's Crack

Cynical Buddha of the blog Collector's Crack held his 7th Annual Almost the Easiest World Series Contest on the Web last year. I guessed the right participants and the winner, but I was off on the number of games it would take, so I didn't win the contest. I did, however, win the random door prize drawing, so I got a prize package anyway. It was mailed out promptly, and I have unfortunately delayed posting about it until now, as the new baseball season is about to get under way.

First up is this winter-themed parallel from Topps' 2017 Holiday offering. I went hard after this set last year, trying to get the accidentally short-printed Cole Hamels card by busting blaster boxes. I think I opened at least 10 blasters before I gave up and bought the Hamels card on eBay.

That Jon Singleton relic card out of Gypsy Queen is a welcome addition to that player collection. He also included some shiny Astros and a retro Yulieski Gurriel insert from Gypsy Queen. The Joe Musgrove card is numbered # 032 / 250. That Randy Johnson Upper Deck Artifacts card is especially nice, and numbered # 01 / 50. There is also a Nolan Ryan phone card, a collectible that went on a pretty big run in the 90's.

The Nolan Ryan phone card is unused, but the one minute of air time expired a little over 17 years ago. Even if the minute hadn't yet expired, it might be a chore to find a pay phone to make the call from. I'd have to search for nearby pay phones on my smartphone.

Closing things out are a Harmon Killebrew / Mike Schmidt Classic Combos card numbered # 160 / 400 and a Future Phenoms relic card of Edwin Jackson, who has played for 12 different teams in his 15 season career so far.

Thank you so much for the prize package, Cynical Buddha! There was a lot of really cool stuff here, and I really enjoyed these cards! I'm sorry I took so long to post about them.