2013 Topps Stickers & Opening Day: Topps Keeps Giving Me The Bird!

I was in Target yesterday intending to buy a pack or two of Opening Day, and I was surprised to find that they also had Topps Stickers.  Of course, I bought packs of both. In for a penny, in for a pound.

Neither set is the pinnacle of excitement, but I did well Oriole-wise;  From the Opening Day packs I got the Bird (one of the few times it’s good to get the Bird)…

…and I got a Manny Machado “Ballpark Fun” insert.  Two cards I probably would’ve sought out anyway, so that’s all good.

The stickers aren’t bad looking, and look!  I got the Bird AGAIN!

There are also HOFers in the set;  I didn’t buy the album, so I don’t know what the story is with these.  Pretty cool, though.  Reggie Jackson with the A’s, as nature intended…

…And Robin Yount in the ball-in-glove Brewers logo that seems to be the favorite of everybody but me.  I’ll admit it’s fairly clever, but it doesn’t do much for me.  It is better than what they wear now, which is completely unobjectionable but also completely uninteresting.

I like the Stickers, but I’ll only buy them when I’m looking for a cheap pack bustin’ fix.  Sticking them in the album seems wrong to me (I wasn’t raised on stickers), but they’re too small to put in plastic sheets, so these will just sit in a box with its 2011 and 2012 brethren.

…Oh, and BTW the backs of the stickers mainly consist of the card number and legal info.  You were expecting something different?

Opening Day is a set I want to like, but since it’s essentially a parallel of the regular set and I don’t do parallels, that pretty much means I don’t do OD.  I’d buy a lot more OD if they’d use different photos, but then it probably wouldn’t be as cheap.  I do like the Mascot cards though.  I’ll have to track down Mr. Met and maybe the Phanatic (who I like despite his affiliation to a certain team).

Pack Animal: 2003 BBM 1st Version

This is one of a number of Japanese packs I bought at The National this past summer; they’ve remained unopened through a combination of restraint and a phenomenon known as “out of sight, out of mind”.

I’ll confess up front that while I’ve been fascinated by Japanese baseball for much of my life, I know very few players who hadn’t played in MLB at some point… so if I list the name of your favorite player or a 10-time Japanese All-Star, and didn’t show their card, just leave me a comment; I’d be happy to do an additional post featuring that card.

One thing that struck me immediately when opening this pack is that the wrapper material is a bit odd; it’s more like a foil than mylar; it feels kinda metallic, and when you fold or bend it, it tends to stay in that position to a large degree.

Getting on to the cards…

Roberto Petagine – Giants
Right off the bat I’ve got a former Met!  Well, OK, he only played in 62 games over two seasons, but it counts.  He also spent time with the Astros, Padres, Reds, Red Sox and Mariners.  Roberto made more of a name for himself in Japan, having played for 6 years and hit 223 homers. 2003 was his first with the Giants after 4 seasons with the Yakult Swallows, so this set must not have gone to press until sometime after the start of their Spring Training.

Yukinaga Maeda – Giants

Masayoshi Izumi – Swallows

Makato Yoshino – Tigers

Fumiya Nishiguchi – Lions

Hisanori Takahashi – Giants

Another former Met, only this one goes in the other direction; it pictures him with the Yomiuri Giants before he played with the Mets (and Angels and Pirates). Takahashi will be in camp with the Cubs this spring, as he’s signed a minor league contract with the Northsiders.

Takayuki Ohnishi – Dragons

I’m not sure what to make of this card… I initially thought I’d pulled an autographed card, but when I looked closer there’s no evidence of ink on top of a card, it seems more like the autograph is printed on the card.  I guess it’s a parallel… Too bad I can’t read the Kanji on the wrapper to see what inserts come in the set (assuming that this information is there in the first place).

Hitoshi Taneda – Bay Stars

Goki Ikeda – Fighters

Chris Holt – Bay Stars

I couldn’t quite place this guy until I found this image of his 1998 card…

1998 Topps Chrome Refractors #373 – Chris Holt – Courtesy of COMC.com

…then I said “Oh, THAT Chris Holt.”   He pitched for the Astros & Tigers from 1996 to 2001.

Being a fan of “Arrested Development”, when I saw Chris Holt’s name I went fists-to-the-sky and said “CHRIS HOLT!” I pretty much do that whenever I run across anyone with the name of Holt (although I only do it in my head when I meet them in person).

…If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s really not worth explaining.

My Reward For Being A Courteous Holiday Shopper

I went out on the Saturday before Christmas and braved the area of concentrated retail surrounding the local Open-Air Upscale Shopping Experience (once referred to as a “mall”).  My next-to-last stop was at Target, so I decided to reward myself for meeting the pre-Xmas frenzy with a smile.  I walked into the card aisle, and the first Fairfield repack I saw hanging there had this on the front:

David Wright & Mr. Met said “Psst, Joe!  You can’t NOT buy this repack!”

I’d assumed it was a card from a Topps Mets team set, but when I got home and opened the pack, it was numbered TB5.  What the…?

I did a little Googling and found that it’s from an 8-card 2008 “Back To School” set. You can read about these cards via some 4-year-old posts from JayBee (he of the Blogroll and Topps Baseball Card Blog) and Paul (he of the Random Baseball Stuff).

Should you not feel like linking, the gist of it is that Target (and perhaps other stores) sold a “Back To School” bundle which included 2 packs of series 1, 2 packs of series 2 and two cards from a special 8-card set (numbered TB1 – TB8).  If I saw those “Back To School” packages in my local Target in 2008, I probably only saw ones which had Chipper and A-Rod in them.

The repack also contained this lovely 1984 Donruss Ron Cey.

It’s funny how I largely ignored this set in 1984, bought maybe one or two packs and said the Eighties equivalent of “meh”;  yet I now like the set, I value it for it’s relative scarcity, and I hang on to any cards that come my way.

Finally, I got this Darryl Strawberry All-Star Glossy which has somehow eluded my grasp for all these years. The 4 Fairfield repacks I’ve bought over the past month or two have contained so many All-Star and Rookie Glossies from the 1980′s that I’m going to have to make those the next sets that I inventory, just to see how many of these I really, really need.

Since I didn’t wish everybody a Merry Christmas – Hey, I was busy! – I’ll wish everybody a happy Boxing Day.  I hope that, whether for Christmas or Hanukkah or Kwanzaa or whichever December holiday you observe, you all got some cool stuff.

Pack Animal! 2012 Panini Gridiron

I saw someone else’s pack break of Gridiron – my apologies, I don’t remember who, otherwise I’d give them a link – and those cards caught my eye enough to try my own pack.

I really like these cards, but I’m having a hard time figuring out what I find so appealing about them. On one hand, there’s so much detail in the photos as to almost lose the featured players in everything that’s going on. On the other hand, there’s just so much to look at, so much going on, it just gives you a feel for being on the sidelines at an NFL game.

Even though these cards feature individual players, it almost feels like these are the 21st century version of those old “Fleer Team Action” cards which were licensed by the NFL but not the players.

I like the way Mike Williams stands out from a field of Packers green and gold.  This card could almost fit into a Packers collection as well as it would a Buccaneers collection.

My favorite part of this photo is the blurry, pensive-looking cheerleader in the background.  She could be looking at the video board.  She could be wondering if she put the garage door down when she left the house that morning.  She could be pondering the use of embryonic-stem-cell-derived dopaminergic neurons in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease. We’ll never know, but it’s more fun to guess anyway.

I didn’t get any inserts of note in my pack, but that was fine with me because it’s the photography of the base cards that I find so appealing.

If I were more of an NFL fan than a Steelers fan, I’d be buying a lot more of these packs.  As it is, I’m going to keep an eye out for Steelers and any other cool cards.

Pack Animal! 2012 Bowman Draft Picks & Prospects

I’ll freely admit it:  Bowman products confuse the heck out of me.

It wasn’t until this year that I realized that Bowman Chrome has different cards than Bowman.  I’d thought they were just Chrome-y versions of the Bowman cards.

And numbering… there are cards with numbers, and those prefixed with BDP, BDPP, BDPDPBPDPBPBP and so on.  …Not to mention that Bowman has a #42 card which is different from the Bowman Chrome #42 card, and both are different from the Bowman DP&P #42 card, but they all  have the same card design… How the hell am I supposed to keep all this stuff straight?

You know what?  I don’t give a flying “Future”, it’s all far more effort than it’s worth to me.  Let’s just rip into this pack of DP&P and look at some cards.  I’ll bet some of them are SHINY.

Joseph Almaraz is from San Antonio, was a 28th round pick and played in the Gulf Coast League in 2012.

Marcus Stroman seems familiar to me, but I’m not sure why… In looking him up I found out that, like me, he’s from Long Island and not what you’d call tall.  He’s also the first-ever 1st round draft pick out of Duke University, and Baseball America recently listed him as the #7 Blue Jays prospect.  For what it’s worth, he was #7 before the Jays traded a bunch of prospects to the Marlins, and he’ll probably move up more if/when the R.A. Dickey trade goes through.

This is the big hit in the pack… it’s a Blue Refractor, numbered 11/250.  Kole Calhoun was the Angels’ 2011 Minor League Player Of The Year, and appeared in 21 Major League games in 2012.

The guys in these packs are so generic to me that I hadn’t realized until after I’d scanned these cards that I had the regular and Chrome versions of the same Andre Martinez card in this pack.  Even though I don’t prefer shiny cards, I like the Chrome version better, if only because the player’s name is larger and legible.  Those tiny foil letters are a pain in the arse to read.

I searched on Andre Martinez and found that he recently launched a new Fresco Bath collection, giving new Luxury design ideas for small bathrooms… but I think that’s the wrong Andre Martinez.  OK, here we go….  Andre Martinez was the 6th round pick of the Twins in 2012.

This pack was completely an impulse buy.  My friendly neighborhood comic store had some packs; I don’t normally buy anything beyond comics there, but everybody that works there is very nice and knows me by name, so I try to “throw ‘em a frickin’ bone” every now and then.  I hadn’t planned on buying any packs of DP&P, and this pack didn’t inspire any future purchases.

Pack Animal: Fairfield 100-Card Repack

Last weekend I was jonesing to buy something other than 2012 packs, but the “local” card shop is 25 miles away and the next card show within a 2-hour drive is in… oh, let’s see… April.

I’d read some decent comments about these 100-card repacks, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

I’ve got to say, I was pleased with the surprisingly decent payoff. Don’t get me wrong, this was the biggest “hit” in the repack (and the reason I bought this particular repack):

…but there were a number of cards which I would’ve gladly bought from a dime or quarter box, so I certainly can’t complain.

As you’d expect, there was a fair amount of junk wax, especially late 1980’s Topps and Donruss… but as it worked out, I ended up needing a few of the junk wax cards for sets that I collected at the time, but never quite completed, including The Earl Of Baltimore:

There were also 2-year-old Topps Update cards (also needed)…

…some “premium junk wax”… And I never stop thinking that it was a mistake to put the ‘tail’ underlining the team name in the 1990′s.  I doesn’t register much on the grand scale of uniform mistakes, but it looked wrong then, and it looks wrong now.

I also got a needed “junk insert”.

It sounds stupid, but the inclusion of one sole Topps Total card made me very happy… I’m foolish enough to try to complete the 4-year run of Total (2002 down, 3 more to go), and I don’t run across Total very often in my travels, so it was cool to get a card I wanted, even if it’s just for Juan Castro.

What surprised me most is that I didn’t get many of the “filler sets” that so often clog these repacks, like Upper Deck X or Documentary.

I also got an unopened pack of 1988 Score, another set which I never quite completed. I’ll open this pack in another post.

For the $4 spent, I could’ve bought a pack of Chrowman Bome and gotten absolutely nothing I wanted, or picked up yet another tedious “heroes beating the snot out of other heroes” issue of Marvel’s Avengers. I think I did pretty damn good in terms of entertainment and filling my needs.

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At this point, I’d like to wish a happy Thanksgiving to all; I hope that everybody gets to spend a relaxing and enjoyable day with their family and friends.

…And just be thankful for what you got…

Pack Animal: 1990 Pro Set Series II (And The Steeler-y Goodness Contained Within)

I’ll be up-front about this; this isn’t much of a pack busting because I’m only going to show you one card. This is one of those packs I’ve had laying about for years, and I’ve finally decided to bust it. Most of it was the usual junk and went into the recycling. What made the pack a good one for me was this card:

This is a really nice card, and although I watched football in the 1970′s, I didn’t become a Steelers fan until the 80′s…  I knew all about Bradshaw, but I wasn’t a particular fan.

This card just makes me long for something similar in baseball. It’s such a nice painting; artistic but without all the extraneous background stuff that often goes with these photos.

Maybe if Panini gets some headway going with baseball they’ll reintroduce Donruss and it’s Diamond Kings. I could live with logoless uniforms better if the whole image is painted (and painted well).

Pack Animal: 2001 Konami Field Of 9 Booster Pack Vol. 1

Wayyyy back at the 2012 National, I bought a bunch of packs of Japanese baseball cards, figuring I’d bust them one at a time and share them with you good people. This is the first one I’m busting. Will I get an Ichiro?  Will I get a Matsui?  Will I get a refractor?  Stay tuned!

Here’s the front and back of the wrapper… I don’t read Kanji, so all I can tell you is that this is a booster pack from a collectible card game… but you can read that for yourself, so why am I telling you that?


And here are the cards…

Jun Inoue of the BayStars

Yu Sugimoto of the Blue Wave…

Junji Kuroki of the Fighters (No idea why this scan shows up smaller than the others…)

Kosuke Fukudome of the Dragons… Hey!  Somebody I know!

Mitsuo Tatsukawa was the manager of the Carp in 1999 and 2000, at least according to Wikipedia.

Here’s the back of the card.  The card stock is pretty much what you’d expect from a collectible card game, the only thing remotely unusual is that the corners aren’t rounded like most CCG’s.

No hits, but it was a fun pack to bust anyway… something different, right?

Hold Me Closer, Tiny Blaster

I almost missed the Topps Update blaster when I went to Target yesterday; the blaster box is much smaller than had been used before … well, on the brands that I buy. Now that I think about it, the Football blasters might have been this size as well. I picked the box up thinking it was a “cereal box” and was surprised to see the $19.99 MSRP, and then I saw the part about 10 packs plus a mannypatch card.

In the category of “One man’s meat…”, I was annoyed as anything to have pulled a blaster with two packs of red Target parallel cards. I don’t collect parallels, so these are of no use to me, other than something to send in my next shipment to COMC so I can hopefully use the credit to buy something far more interesting (which wouldn’t be hard – Did I mention I really don’t like parallels?)

The Blockbuster cards are pretty nice-looking; here’s the patch card I pulled, which is nicer in person than in this scan. This is also going to COMC in the next shipment.

I’ll have more about the cards tomorrow, when I have more time (and if I’m late for work, it’s ALL YOUR FAULT! I hope you’re satisfied!). For those who like the numbers, here’s the breakdown of what was in my blaster:
50 base cards
12 Target red parallels
5 Gold parallels
3 minis
3 Golden Moments
2 Blockbuster cards
2 “Beerfractor” parallels
2 Golden Giveaway Cards (I got a Lou Gehrig virtual coin – my first HOFer, for whatever that’s worth. I also got a Dustin Pedrioa virtual coin, which gave me 6 unique player coins, which got me a $10 e-gift card code.  Ooh.)
1 Golden Great
and, of course, one mannypatch card.

In my case, 20 of the 81 cards are going to COMC, and two more were Golden Giveaway cards which were redeemed and recycled.  Not a promising start.

Pack Animal: 2012 Topps Football

My involvement with each year’s football set is the same:  I buy a pack for the heck of it, and then I buy a Steelers team set from my local card shop.  On the rare occasion, my pack contains something I’ll keep, like this card for Paul Posluszny (a fine Hungarian name,  if I’m not mistaken). 

It looks very much like Posluszny is about to sack Steelers QB Ben Roethlisberger, which is something which happens a lot more often than many of us Steelers fans would like.  Apparently, the new offensive coordinator is on the same page, because he’s also trying to take some of the heat off of Big Ben.

This next card is included because it’s one of the better-looking cards in my pack.  I’ll make a confession here;  I’m a loyal Steelers fan, but I’m not much of a football fan.  I don’t know most of the guys in this pack, which probably makes me look  completely ignorant, and also proves that I don’t play fantasy football.

I like the design of this year’s football set because it’s a nice looking design, but specifically for the fact that it’s a different design from the baseball set.  I think it’s kind of amusing that the 2005 football set celebrated the 50th anniversary of Topps football, and then for 5 of the next 6 years afterwards they created football sets which had essentially the same design as used for other sets.  It’s like they say “Congratulations!  You’re nothing special!”

I got one of the “Tall Boy” inserts, which is pretty cool and a bit odd at the same time. They’re a good looking insert, but since the original tall boys were… well… TALL, these are sort of mini tall boys. Or tall mini boys. The originals were 2.5 inches wide and something like 4.75 inches tall, and these are 3.5 inches tall and however many inches wide. One of these days, someone’s going to figure out a way to get oversized cards into wax packs.

I’ll finish off with a photoshopped Tebow, since he and Cam Newton are the only guys I’ve heard of in my pack, and because I don’t remember a whole lot of photoshopping going on in football.  Then again, the  majority of the football cards in my collection are old enough to have the logos airbrushed out.

In case anybody’s interested, here’s what the rest of the pack contained:
Cam Newton, Panthers
Early Doucet, Cardinals
Justin Smith, Niners
Johnny Knox, Bears
Paramount Pairs insert: Vincent Jackson & Mike Williams
DeVier Posey, Texans
Kevin Zeitler, Bengals
Luke Kuechly, Panthers (Rookie)