Jon Singleton 2015 Bowman Red

I picked up this card for a decent price on eBay recently. It's the Red parallel of Jon Singleton's 2015 Bowman card. Singleton's cards have been available at a pretty deep discount since he got sent back down to AAA at the end of Spring Training, but I imagine they'll heat back up here pretty quickly as his recall to the Astros is imminent. He recently had a 10-RBI game and is pretty much mashing the baseball. That kind of stuff tends to get people pretty excited. Here's his grand slam from that game:

While I am glad to see that he is playing well and flirting with promotion, I imagine that when the call does come his card prices will go back up, causing me to miss out on low-numbered stuff like this card. This one is numbered # 3 / 5.

Now that school has ended it's been hard to gain some direction in my life. Today I finally dug in and started working on getting my office/hobby room cleaned out and organized. Over the last couple years I've been focused so hard on school that shipping boxes, comics, cards, games, books, and magazines all just piled up down there. I made good progress on that project, and soon I should have enough space to finish the big card-sorting project I tried to get through during the Christmas holiday break.

The Houston Rockets somehow won Game 6 in their playoff series with the Los Angeles Clippers to force a Game 7 tomorrow. I really hope they can pull it off, but that will be a tall order. I was following Game 6 on my computer as I don't get cable or satellite and can't watch the NBA except the finals, which are televised on ABC. The Rockets were down by 19 points and I closed the browser window in defeat. I came back a while later and they were up by like 12 points with just a little time left in the 4th quarter. I had to refresh the screen a couple of times to make sure it was right. If they can get past the Clippers they will have the tough task of trying to beat the Golden State Warriors in order to move on to the NBA Finals against whoever emerges from the East bracket. But before all of that they have to win this Game 7.

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.

A Few Scarce R.A. Dickey Panini Pickups

Over the past little while I have picked up some R.A. Dickey cards with relatively small print runs. This first one is a parallel of the Golden Leather insert from 2014 Panini Prizm. Cardboard Connection tells me that this is the Gold parallel, but it looks Yellow to me. In the past I picked up the Blue and Red parallels, too. I'm pretty sure I have the base version but I can't find it here on the blog, so I won't link to it. This copy is numbered # 04 / 10. It's a nice shiny card.

This card hails from 2013 Panini Prizm. It's part of the 2013 Panini Prizm USA Baseball set, and features an autograph that stayed mostly on the sticker. It's also a shiny card, and is numbered # 04 / 25.

Finally, here is a Gold parallel from 2013 Panini America's Pastime Baseball. It's numbered # 03 / 25, and the scan features a nice dog hair that I missed on the initial run-through. I haven't been paying much attention to the Blue Jays this year as the Astros are finally good enough to watch with some regularity. R.A. Dickey has had a pretty rough go of it so far, though, looking at his numbers. So far this year he is 1-4 with a 5.00 ERA and a 1.29 WHIP. His deeper stats are similarly ugly. It seems like he starts out slow most years, so maybe he'll find a way to get the knuckleball tamed again and finish strong, but right now he is struggling.

2013 BBM True Heart Women's Pro Wrestling

I enjoy a lot of the regular trading card fare just as much as the next guy, but I also really like collecting things that practically no one else collects. I guess it makes me feel special; like I belong to some sort of secret club that collects things no one else cares about. Or maybe I just like being frustrated because the things I collect are hard to find and overly expensive. And in the case of the collection I am discussing in this post, I can't even read the cards I collect.

It all started when I stumbled across a thread on the Blowout Cards forums with the title 'Anyone else collect BBM True Heart cards?' The True Heart cards are Baseball Magazine's (BBM) card set based on women's wrestling in Japan. There are several different promotions covered, and the promotions seem to have agreements in place with each other, so that one wrestler might wrestle with different companies at the same time or move back and forth. I still don't fully understand the structure of it all, but I am working on it. Some of the promotions post their matches on Youtube or similar video sites, and a lot of the wrestlers have their own channels or Twitter feeds. I read on a Facebook group that one of the promotions recently celebrated an attendance record with around 150 people attending an event, so this isn't a huge group of leagues. I guess it would be similar to the amateur wrestling here in the United States, where hopefuls compete with each other for a chance to join the WWE and become famous. I like it because it allows for the wrestlers to be a little more varied, especially on the women's side. The men in WWE tend to cover a wide range of gimmicks and appearances, while the WWE Divas are a pretty homogeneous group.

I found a shop in Japan that sells boxes of the BBM True Heart cards at decent prices and doesn't kill me too hard on shipping, and I have made a couple of orders with them. I am not sure how hard these cards are to get, but they've had boxes of 2013, 2014, and 2015 available at different times and they go in and out of availability frequently. I imagine they will dry up all the way soon enough, but hopefully the 2016 set will be released by then. I also was able to pick up a few sets from the 2006-2012 time frame on eBay. In this post I'll be talking about the 2013 set, starting with the packaging: 

The top of the box shows off a few popular wrestlers, samples of some of the cards, and information about the contents. The woman in the upper left is Mio Shirai, who is a pretty popular wrestler that recently announced her retirement.

The bottom of the box is actually pretty useful, featuring a checklist and showing off a few more photos of cards that can be found in the product. This set has 117 cards in the base checklist, and also features rarer stuff like autographs, cards with multiple autographs, and Polaroid photos that have been signed with inscriptions and stamped with the BBM logo. I didn't pull any of the Polaroids from the two boxes of 2013, but I did pull four autographs per box with one being a dual autograph.

The front of the pack features the same design as the box lid, and the back appears to show a simplified breakdown of the checklist as well as all the company information.

The 2013 base cards feature a swirling tie-dyed design, using mostly posed photographs with a full image in the foreground and a second cropped image in the background. Most of the cards use the same picture for both photos, but there are a couple that have different pictures. The top two cards in the scan feature the youngest and the oldest wrestlers featured in the set. Kurumi is shown on the left, and Jaguar Yokota is the name of the wrestler on the right.

There are plenty of costumed characters among the wrestlers. One translated checklist I found says the cat's name is Nyanba, although I haven't been able to verify that against any other websites. I really don't know yet. The wrestler dressed as the Mario Brothers' sister is Yapper Man No. 3, an alter ego for a wrestler named Misaki Ohata.

The card backs have biographical information, most of which I cannot read. The parts I can make out are birthdates, height / weight statistics, and an additional date that I presume is the debut date for the wrestler. The lines at the top of the cards are, I believe, the promotion the wrestler is affiliated with followed by the wrestler's name. Many of the alter-egos and costumed characters have birthdates that do not match, are missing, or consist of just the month and day without a year. You can see that Kurumi was born in 2000, making her about 13 when this set was released. Jaguar Yokota was born in 1961, making her about 52 when this set came out. The wrestling cat does not appear to have the usual statistics outside of a debut date in March of 2012. Yapper Man No. 3 is featured in another costume reminiscent of Catwoman, and you can see that her birthdate is omitted.

Here are a few more cards to show the different types of wrestler you can find in this set. In the upper left is Misaki Guriko, who is another alter-ego of Misaki Ohata, the wrestler shown in the previous scans as Yapper Man No. 3. Confused yet? I am. In the upper right is Sayaka Obihiro, a technical-style wrestler who used to play baseball. The wrestlers run the gamut from the very gimmicky and supernatural types to athletic and technical wrestlers.

In the lower left is Ayako Hamada, a wrestler who spent some time wrestling in America in the Total Nonstop Action promotion. Her birthday is February 14th, so I believe she has been featured over at Sportscards From The Dollar Store as part of that blogger's series on athletes who share his birthday. I have a few doubles of 2 / 14 wrestlers from these sets to send his way as soon as I can get my act together. Next up is GAMI, who it appears has retired but still helps to run the wrestling scene from her laptop.

The previous set of scans showed mostly posed shots on the backs, but here we can see a couple that look to be taken from actual event action.

Some of my favorite cards show wrestlers wearing masks. There are a variety of masked wrestlers, and many of them are alternate identities for other unmasked wrestlers. I am having some trouble finding names for the masked wrestlers, although with some more research I will probably be able to figure it out. The wrestler wearing the cape and hood in the lower left is Miyako Matsumoto, who is apparently quite accomplished and has won several different championship belts.

Here are a few more card backs, showing the usual mixture of photos and information. There are 105 cards in this base portion of the set, with a couple of subsets following.

The first subset is the Hall of Fame and features three cards from # 106 - 108. Most years have a Hall of Fame subset, so my assumption is that they feature wrestlers who were elected to the Hall in the previous year. The backs of the cards show scenes that seem to come from their respective induction ceremonies. A lot of the Hall of Fame cards show scenes where the wrestler is covered in a boatload of ribbons, so that must be a pretty important part of the celebration. The card fronts depart from the base set in that they show the wrestler's name in anglicized form, with this particular scan showing Toshie Uematsu and You-You Ran. I am having trouble finding information on You-You Ran, so there may be some kind of mix-up in my assumption on that one. Toshie Uematsu does show up when Googled, though, and it looks like she wrestled in the WCW at some point. Doing a little more searching brings up that a wrestler named Ran Yu-Yu was Toshie Uematsu's tag team partner and retired in late 2012, so I guess it is just a matter of formatting and spelling that kept me from finding her at first.

After the Hall of Fame subset comes a group of 8 cards with the Story Fact designation. They feature some rather risque images. I chose a tame one to show here on the blog, as this is supposed to be a family-friendly affair. They aren't overtly sexual in nature, but they do show a fair bit of skin. I could probably do without them in this set. I think Story Fact might be some sort of idol card producer or brand who partnered with BBM to create these cards? I'm not sure. Anyway, they are part of this set.

Closing out the base set is a checklist, which features what I believe is a prominent tag team on the front of the card.

Up next are the autographs that I pulled, which fell at about 4 per box. The woman in the upper left wielding a chain is Mayumi Ozaki, who has been wrestling since August 1986. In the upper right is Moeka Haruhi, who is apparently a teen model turned wrestler. That is not her real name, and Wikipedia tells me that the name was chosen to evoke her cutesy, cosplaying persona. She has held several minor titles in a career that goes back to 2005. The wrestler in the cape in the lower left is Hikaru Shida, a former idol and actress who became a wrestler in 2008. Finally, in the lower right is Rydeen Hagane, who debuted in 2012 and might have a background in Judo.

Most of the autographs are serially-numbered to around 100 copies, although a few wrestlers vary from that number by a few cards. I am told that there doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to the differences in numbering. Maybe a handful of cards from those wrestlers got damaged in transit or something like that.

In the upper left is Hanako Nakamori, who has been wrestling since 2006. In the upper right is my dual autograph, which features signatures by Kyusei Ninja Ranmaru (apparently a fan favorite known for appearing in comedic skits and matches) and Apple Miyuki / Hibiscus Mii. I had a heck of a time locating that second name, as the 2013 checklist has her under one name and the 2015 checklist in English that I've been working from has her under the other name. This might prompt me to actually work on learning a new language, at least on a superficial level. On the lower left is Yuu Yamagata, who has been wrestling since 2002. Her profile says that she loses more than she wins and has not necessarily been an extremely popular wrestler, but she apparently has got something keeping her in the game. Her last match, a team victory, happened today, so she is still relevant and active as a wrestler. Finally, in the lower right is Sakura Hirota, who doesn't have a lot of information out there, but does have a few match videos posted. It seems to me that she appears in some of the more comedic matches rather than more serious wrestling.

You might notice a lot of inscriptions, emojis, and doodles on the autograph cards, especially as I move into the 2014 and 2015 sets. The 2013 cards are on a glossy stock, while the later years feature a matte cardstock that takes ink better. Again, you can see that these cards are all numbered to around 100. 

I hope you enjoyed reading about the BBM True Heart Wrestling cards. I still have a lot to learn about them and I may have butchered some names or been misinformed on some details. They are certainly a lot of fun to sort through and you get enough autographs in a box to feel like you're getting your money worth, even if I don't really know yet the relative popularity of the different wrestlers. Based on costume and demeanor, though, it is pretty easy to build impressions and imagine what their storylines might look like.

Rainbow in the Dark 28: Jon Singleton 2014 Topps High Tek Red Storm Diffractor

I picked up this wild-looking card some time ago, but have never got around to posting about it. It's a Red Storm Diffractor of Jon Singleton from the 2014 Topps High Tek release. This example is numbered # 10 / 10, making it possibly the rarest card in my Singleton High Tek rainbow. The Stripes parallel was not serially numbered, and some estimates say that only 5-10 copies of those were made, so in real life that one might actually have a lower print run than this one. One of the # 1 / 1 cards popped up on eBay a week or so ago, but the price went past my comfort zone and I let it go. 

The Astros went on a big tear recently, winning 10 games in a row before the streak was broken with two losses in a row to the Rangers. Interestingly, they are 8-7 at home and 10-2 on the road. They currently lead the Angels by six games for the division lead, but there is still a lot of baseball to be played.

Last week was my last week of school, so this week is graduation. That's a pretty big deal, although I mostly feel like this is something I should have finished a decade ago. I'm still waiting on one grade to come in but I am told that I will probably pass the class, as I completed all the work and scored in the 97th percentile on my exit exams. So sometime next week I will be an official graduate of Northwest Nazarene University with a dual B.S. in Accounting / Business Administration.

Patrick Press Pass Power Picks Parallels

Here are a couple more cards from the batch of Danica Patrick parallels I picked up near the end of last year. They come from the 2012 Press Pass Power Picks set, which I believe was distributed as a loyalty program, where dealers who purchased a large amount of different Press Pass products got special boxes with Power Picks packs attached to them. In this case, I got a Gold parallel numbered # 07 / 50 and a Holofoil parallel numbered # 06 / 50. Both feature the # 7 GoDaddy.com car piloted by Patrick in the Nationwide Series. Just recently it was announced that starting next season GoDaddy will no longer be a primary sponsor of her NASCAR ride, but will retain her as a personality representative.

Danica has had a pretty good run lately, with four Top 20 finishes in the last five races, and two of those finishes were in the Top 10, giving her the record for most career Top 10 finishes by a female driver. The chances seem pretty good that this could be the season when she finally puts together a race good enough for a Top 5 finish.

Star Wars Masterwork Artist Return Sketch Card - Princess Leia by Mary Bellamy

When the Star Wars Masterwork set was released I set out to look for a few decent sketch cards for my collection. I pulled a couple of sketches from the box I opened and I purchased one sketch from eBay. One artist whose sketches interested me was Mary Bellamy. I had exchanged messages with her on the Blowout Cards forums and purchased/commissioned some stuff from her.

When companies do a product with sketch cards, they often give the artists a handful of cards to do sketches on and sell on their own. Sometimes the cards look the same as the pack-pulled sketch cards and sometimes they have an 'Artist's Proof' or 'Artist Return' stamp on them. I believe these cards make up a large portion of an artist's income from a set. I saw some of Bellamy's Star Wars Masterwork Artist Returns cards in the video she did to show off her cards from the set and inquired about one of the Princess Leia sketches she had done. She told me that Topps had kept them and she was having a little trouble getting them back, but that she would reserve one if Topps sent anything back to her. 

Eventually Topps got some of her cards back to her and I was able to get this one to add to my collection, an illustration of Leia in her hooded white dress. I like the colors that Bellamy uses, and her style is cartoony without being too simple. I'm not sure I remember that wallpaper in the background from the movies, though, but perhaps this is from some off-screen scene where Leia visits her grandmother's house.

Here is the back of the card. I can't find any markings on this card to differentiate it from the pack-pulled sketches, so in this case it looks like Topps didn't do anything special to mark the Artist Returns. Eventually I need to get around to showing the other sketches I got from Mary Bellamy, but that's not going to happen today.