Contested Shots 3: I Tried to Guess Zippy Zappy's SEGA Card-Gen Roster!

It has been forever since it happened (nearly a month!), but Zippy Zappy over at Cervin' Up Cards held a contest to see who could guess the last lineup of players he had used in the SEGA Card-Gen game. My roster was not close to being right, but you don't need skill to win the randomized consolation prize, which is where my name came up! The advertised prize for the Randomly Selected Participant Award was the 1993 Topps Derek Jeter RC card shown above. That's a pretty decent prize, even for someone who is not a Yankees fan.

Additionally, he included a couple of SEGA Card-Gen cards in the prize package. In this case it is a pair of catchers, Miguel Olivo and Humberto Quintero. Miguel Olivo is currently catching for the Dodgers after being called up from the minors a little bit ago. Quintero, it seems, is currently playing in the Mariners minor league system. Either way, these are both cool 2012 SEGA Card-Gen cards that I didn't have in my collection yet.

Although I was not very successful at selecting the right roster, it was fun to go through and try to determine which players Zippy Zappy might have used on his team. It was a pretty good contest, and I was happy to win a prize. Thank you!

What eBay Hath Wrought 73: Metal Dreams

I was on a bit of a Metal kick off and on over the last couple of months, and I grabbed a couple Metal cards of my favorite basketball player, Hakeem Olajuwon. I am still recovering from the Houston Rockets' first-round exit from the playoffs thanks to a dagger 3-pointer by Damian Lillard of the Portland Trail Blazers. And what better way is there to overcome my pain than to live in the past, dreaming of the days when Olajuwon led the Rockets to two straight NBA Championships?

These first two cards are true Metal cards from the late 90's. They are shiny and foil-etched and all kinds of crazy. That one there on the right has to be spun around in circles just so you can read it. 

This next card comes from Upper Deck's recent Retro brand, which takes favorite insert sets and concepts from basketball cards of the past and replicates them, all at a relatively high price point. The die-cut portion of the card is cool, but the card is severely lacking in the foil etching that makes a card truly 'Metal.' They really could have done a number on that big shiny basketball at the top, the webbing of the net, and the logo down at the bottom. And the college licensing is kind of a downer, but at least Olajuwon played college ball in the same city and wore the same number as he did in his pro career (aside from a relatively forgettable stint with the Raptors prior to his retirement).

The person who I purchased the Upper Deck Retro card form also included a few base cards from the set. I will forgive them for sending a card of the hated Karl Malone because they also included some decent cards of Hakeem and Clyde "the Glide" Drexler, a player who spent most of his career with the Trail Blazers (boo!) but reunited with Olajuwon in Houston to win a Championship. I don't necessarily love or hate Dennis Rodman, as I kind of thought he was cool during his playing career until he really went off the deep end. His post-basketball years have similarly been full of weird decisions and I can't help thinking less of him every time the news trots out his latest exploit.

What eBay Hath Wrought 72: More 2012 SEGA Card-Gen

I snagged a few more 2012 SEGA Card-Gen cards from that eBay seller before his auctions ended, mostly filling in some guys from favorite teams, some big names, and some of my player collections. Kicking off the group is Astros 2nd Baseman Jose Altuve.

I also added a key Blue Jay in the form of Jose Bautista, who gets 8 stars on the front of his card, probably because he had just come off of two massive seasons where he led the league in Home Runs and was in the discussion for the MVP Award. That uniform is butt-ugly.

Next up is another slugger, this time Jay Bruce of the Cincinnati Reds. He doesn't get 8 stars, though. I lived in Ohio for a while as a kid, so I have a little affinity for the Reds. 

Ryan Dempster's card describes him as 'The Inning Eater.' I tend to think of players in fantasy baseball terms, and I think I had him on my rosters from time to time as a useful guy from approximately 2004-2012, or basically three quarters of the time that I have played fantasy baseball. This is also a pretty interesting photo selection, with Dempster tossing around the rosin bag.

I also picked up a card of Adam Dunn, a power hitter who I mentally lump in with Paul Konerko and Jim Thome, I guess because of the White Sox connection. Dunn and Thome weren't ever on the same roster, but I guess they were there as complements to Konerko. In looking all that up, I noticed that Dunn's Wikipedia page seems pretty critical of him. I guess he isn't seen as a real high-effort guy.

Edwin Encarnacion is another Blue Jays player that I was happy to add to my collection. I like all of the red, white, and blue in the background of this picture. I guess the blue is really part of the border and not the picture, but that doesn't stop me from liking it.

Jeff Francoeur is one of those high-effort guys that you want to see succeed wherever they go. He has managed to stick around for a long time, but never quite materialized into the superstar he was projected to become. Again with the Royals players who don't quite ever live up to the hype. Francoeur was recently in the sports news world for being the victim of a weeks-long prank instigated by his AAA teammates, who convinced him that one of the other players on the roster was deaf.

J.J. Hardy is (was?) a pretty good player to have on a fantasy team the last few years, as you don't often find a guy who will hit 25-ish homers from the SS position. He appears to be off to a slow start this year, compounded by injury. But he is locked in my memory as a shortstop with some pop in his bat.

I am rapidly running out of stamina for this blog post. It feels like I've been writing for days. And I kind of have been, just off and on every time I get some time to work. Todd Helton basically IS the Colorado Rockies, although I guess CarGo and Tulo had kind of taken over that mantle in recent years.

Isringhausen was around FOREVER. He came into the league the year before I started high school, and before this 2012 card for him was issued I had graduated from high school, served two years as a missionary in California, gone to Iraq twice, been married for 8 years and had three kids. Crazy. That's FOREVER! Not quite Jamie Moyer FOREVVVARRRR!!! (he made his debut when I was starting kindergarten and was still pitching in 2012), but it is a long time. It has been quite a while since Isringhausen was relevant in fantasy baseball, though, probably a decade or so.

I mentioned Konerko above in the Adam Dunn snippet. He definitely had some good years as a hitter. I guess it's pretty good if you can last in this league long enough to have multiple peaks instead of one peak and one decline. He doesn't quite have Hall of Fame numbers, but he was pretty good.

I don't have much to say about Pedroia, but how often do you get a relatively rare card of a star from a big market for under $2? Not very often.

I don't remember why I grabbed this card over the other cards that were on offer. I guess because Rauch was in a Blue Jays uniform? Anyway, I am getting to the point in the post where I am moving quickly in anticipation of being done with it.

Chris Sale gets a coveted 20 rating on the back of his card, and seems to be a bit underrated according to the gold star-based salary cap.

I should have saved this card for last, with Jim Thome tipping his helmet to the crowd, but there is one more card in this group and my plan is ruined. I've always liked Thome, probably a little bit more than Konerko and Dunn. I don't know why, but that's how it is.

The formatting on this last duo of pictures is going wonky on me, and I hope that Blogger doesn't dump my whole post before I get through writing this. I love these Card-Gen cards, and I will probably work to put together as many of them as I can even if a full set doesn't ever materialize.

Pack of the Day 67: Two Rack Packs of 2014 Bowman

Thursday was an eventful day for me. I have been sick off and on for the last couple of weeks, exacerbated by the stress of closing out the semester at school and dealing with family and work without a lot of time for sleep, exercise, or proper nutrition. So I had a sore throat and stayed home from work. My plan was to sit in my chair all day and study for the final I had in the evening. It was actually a final and a midterm. The grades were so bad on the original midterm that the instructor scrapped the grades and scheduled two tests for the last class session, covering material from the whole semester. Yuck!

One of my youngest sons was up most of the night feeling sick, so he had a doctor's appointment in the middle of the day. While my wife was gone with him she parked the other two boys in front of the television so I could keep studying while she made the doctor visit. That went okay, although the boys did their share of fighting and pestering me for this or that.

Some time after she got home I heard water running. 'Hmmm,' I thought, 'Those kids are messing around in the sink again.' So I jumped up to go sort it out. As I got to the stairs I realized that the sound wasn't coming from upstairs like I had thought, it was coming from the unoccupied bathroom downstairs. I opened the door and saw water cascading from the central air vent in the ceiling and pooling on the floor. That's not supposed to be happening.

Then I went upstairs and saw a ring of water extending out across the carpet, centered on the upstairs bathroom door. Sure enough, our oldest son had managed to clog the toilet and lock up the mechanism so that the water just kept running and running, spilling over the top of the bowl and falling through the floor vent into the ducts. It also soaked through the floor. Later it started coming down through various other parts of the ceiling and walls downstairs. I don't really know the full extent of the damage yet, but I hope we are able to get things all cleaned up without too much ruination.

Shortly after cleanup operations started, I had to leave for class to take my tests. My wife wound up doing most of the mopping and water collection because she is a good person.

The tests were relatively uneventful, and because the midterm retake used most of the same questions and answers from the original midterm and the final was almost entirely multiple-choice I passed them without too much trouble. I should get around a B in the course, which is better than I deserve by at least one letter grade.

On the way home I decided to stop at the store to see if there was any Bowman on the shelf. There was an empty box where the Bowman packs were supposed to go. I imagine that either 1) someone was super desperate to buy some Bowman and bought all the packs in one go or 2) the local pack searcher had beat me to the cards and had taken the packs to some more remote location in the store to feel them up out of direct sight of the customer service desk. There was also a peg where the rack packs were supposed to go, but there weren't any on there. There were two off to the side, though, so I picked them up. Here is what I got from my two rack packs:

My first impression is that the pictures are kind of blurry and washed-out. The foil is very difficult to read, especially the logos at the bottom of the cards. And I wish those little wing-things at the bottom corners were just solid colors or designs instead of having the photos bleed into them. As they are now, they are weird blobs of green, grey, and white that distract from the central images. That is a lot of negativity in one paragraph, but these cards are not my favorite design so far. It is kind of nice to get that Encarnacion card, with some Blue Jays love in the first pack. 

Matt Carpenter is a State & Hometown parallel, continuing the theme of putting a flag in as the backdrop for the player photo. I didn't really collect before last year, so I don't know how long that has been going on. I actually think it is a little better than the super-blurry backgrounds on the base cards. 

The foil logos actually stand out a lot better in the scans than they do in-hand. The player's names are easier to read (at most angles) in person, while the position designations vary from card to card depending on what color the bar in the background is. So far I don't have a lot to say about the individual cards in this pack.

The top half of the rack packs contain 11 base cards and 1 insert, with the bottom half containing 4 Prospect cards and 4 Chrome Prospect cards. I didn't pull any of the Chrome parallels, so I don't know if the Refractory stuff shows up in the top or bottom when it drops. I think I like the design on the Prospects cards a little better than the base set, mostly because the wing-things at the bottom are colored in. I think these look a little pinched at the bottom, though. The nameplates are easier to read. It is nice to get an Astros prospect in my pack, even if he isn't one of the big names.

Speaking of the bigger-hype Astros prospects, one of my Chrome Prospect cards is pitcher Mark Appel. The Chrome cards are probably the best-looking cards here, with the foil names replaced by easily-read black printed type. There are also a couple of A's prospects here, but I don't recognize the names. And that does it for the first pack. I am not exactly overwhelmed with joy here, but you know I'll probably wind up buying a bunch of it and try to complete the set. I actually have a hobby box on order that will be arriving on a UPS truck, hopefully on Friday evening.

Pack 2 starts off with some relatively young guys. I guess Xander Bogaerts is the big name here, although the other guys are all decent on their own. Freeman is a Brave, and I seem to have developed quite a grudge against Braves (and former Braves named McCann). Teheran is also a Brave, but I don't really have any feelings about him. I must have thought he was a Marlin or a Ray or something.

Well, I might as well stop buying Bowman now. I pulled a Masahiro Tanaka Rookie Card. He's been off to quite a start for the Yankees. I also pulled a card of my favorite player, R.A. Dickey, who has been on a bit of a roller-coaster this season. I guess that's what the knuckleball will do to you. The Tyler Austin card is a Chrome mini, which falls 1:8 packs. The State & Hometown parallels also fall 1:8 packs and between the two of them they are the easiest inserts to pull from Bowman retail. It looks like Topps may have done away with the 1-per-pack Gold parallels. 

Here are four more dudes that I don't have a lot to say about. Semien is off to a bit of a run the last little bit. I picked him up as a backup guy in one of my fantasy leagues recently because he is eligible at second and third base and can sub in when one of my main guys sits down for a night. Ventura has got quite the duck face going on, and he isn't even taking a selfie to post on Instagram or Twitter. 

Here are some more prospects, with a couple more A's that I've never heard of. I think I am familiar with the name Kris Bryant, but I couldn't tell you anything about him. Trey Ball I know I've never heard of.

And to close things off, here are another four guys I've never heard of, but at least one of them is an Astro! I guess if you want to pull Astros players, bust open the products that are prospect-heavy.

Overall I am not incredibly impressed with the cards, but I will probably chase a full base set and you know I will wind up chasing rainbows or partial rainbows of the R.A. Dickey and Josh Reddick cards. The best part of these two packs was probably the Tanaka, Austin mini, and R.A. Dickey run early in the second pack.