Showing posts with label Hockey Sticks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hockey Sticks. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 17, 2021

Kicking off card season with a Blast(er)

I wouldn't normally make my first baseball card purchase of the year via the Blaster format. I rarely buy the things at all, though I do have a weakness for the "box cards" in the Big League product. It just feels like I am paying a premium for the so-called "Patch" card in each one, that I very rarely ever wish to own at all, for one.

The other problem with blasters is the way collation works in baseball card packaging. The sheet-cutting and partially random assemblage of the cards is designed to do one thing: there will not be a repeat card, inside a given package. 

However, when one buys two such packages, you will "hit" identical sequences of cards - and then you don't get just a duplicate card, you receive multiple duplicates. Many multiples. This is probably magnified even more in the "hanger box" format, although that has usually offered the lowest price per card. So far, I haven't seen any hanger boxes or "rack"/"fat" packs, either, this year and I have to wonder if I ever will.

This year however, anyone wishing to just buy a few brand new baseball cards while grocery shopping can't take any chances on hoping to find some desired pack format. It is a minor miracle to find new baseball cards on a shelf at all, so if any are seen they must be purchased on the spot. Which is how I found my first blaster of the 2021 baseball card season - a single solitary blaster, half hidden behind some Magic The Gathering boxes of some sort.

A little later on I did find just a few examples of my preferred format but that will make for a nice future post, with some interesting, non-blaster cards to look at. Today I want to check out the rest of the blaster as a way to ponder 2021 Series One a little more. Fully absorbing the "first pack" is nice and all, but there are 84 other cards in each blaster - now a $25 blaster, where I shop. What did I find?


This is a perfect example of why I grade this design a "so close" - everything works here, except those almost vertical design elements, and outside of the ridiculous player name size. Many have commented on how they make the cards "line up" in a stack and would even in a binder page, but I don't think that is why they exist like this. Rather, aligned elements like this make it easier to print and most importantly, cut the cards accurately. Something ever more important in the collecting era of "10 Snobs" who insist that every single baseball card Topps makes MUST arrive to their greed focused hands in 100.0% flawless condition, including "centering," or it is off to Social Media they go. Not just some of the time, but instantly.

I still quite like this Alex Verdugo card, with his cool glove, harmoniously color balancing the Green Monster and the team colors, and the way the wall even makes it looks like he has a green wristband on. Perhaps the perfect card to post today - St. Patrick's Day.

Meanwhile I think this card will kick off another random little side collection for me - cards featuring these - "full wrap?" - sunglasses that I am seeing on more and more cards lately. How long will baseball players favor these? I fully expect my Topps Baseball cards to document this.

But I'm just not sure I will ever quite get used to looking at 2021 Topps Baseball cards in the horizontal format.

An S1 card I always anticipate is some World Series cards from the previous Fall Classic, like this one:
I didn't have much invested in the Series last year, with 2 teams from the coasts featured, and was unable to watch it at all while out on a remote job at the time, and no ability to head into a pleasant little drinking establishment with a television, either. So I was depending on Topps to show me at least a little of what I missed. This card does that wonderfully, with a great image break taking primacy over the design elements. Overall, this is probably my favorite Kershaw card in some time.

Another routine part of Topps Baseball is the Rookie Cup -
Floating player, floating Cup.

And it's always nice to pull card #1 in a new set:
And card #27, too:
Mike Trout is routinely card #27 on many Topps checklists these days, a tiny holdover from the then firm break with tradition in 2013, which I could now write as "way back in...2013" - when I started this blog. Time flies, when brand new baseball cards appear for me to purchase on a relentless, basically year-round schedule these days.

That card makes me think State Farm has certainly got it's money worth from that bit of advertising placement at Angel Stadium of Anaheim. And also makes me wonder if they have ever considered hiring Mike Trout as a promo guy of some sort. Seems like it would be a good fit - the perfect wholesome baseball player, who would surely make a good neighbor, and one with basically perfect statistical production, year in & year out - a sure bet almost like - insurance.

I did find a bit of a surprise in terms of a year in, year out tradition in Topps Baseball for about 25 years now - a special handling of card #7.
That long run of Topps Baseball sets going back to 1996, of either a Mickey Mantle card, no card, or a carefully selected Yankees card at card #7 is over now. The Mantle family moved on to do business with Panini rather than Topps back in about 2017, iirc, but Topps kept some minor tip o' the cap to The Mick in the Topps Baseball set even afterwards.

2021 #7 is such an odd card. The center of the card is basically empty space while a touch more care in overall composition might have nicely accented the basic card design. And I certainly never expected to find the word "dab" on a baseball card of all places, given it's 21st century association with something else altogether.

Meanwhile, I also pulled the Yankees team card from this blaster (why not make it #7?), which is also odd -
On some of the horizontal team cards, the white line around the "design element" (what else can you call those weird parallelogram like 'things') just inexplicably disappears. 2020 strikes again I guess, with more baseball cards being produced than ever before, all done via Zoom meetings, perhaps. Meanwhile on this card at least, the design element has a clear antithesis in a whole 'nother professionally played sport, which at least gives you a mental name for the design elements on these graphic error cards.

Another card I always watch for in particular, this time of year, is one featuring a previous equal to the #27 card, Miggy:
And Miggy is looking good here - this bodes well for the 2021 Tigers.

Speaking of which, for the first time in a long time the Tigers have highly anticipated Rookie Cards in a new Topps Baseball release, and I pulled one in my first purchase -
What I particularly like about Tarik Skubal is that he is not some high-rated first round prospect who already has Bowman cards selling for 4 or even 5 figures. Rather, he is a normal product of baseball scouting, drafting, and development. It's way past time that my team gets some fresh young talent this way, rather than whatever they could get via their timid trades of two month rentals, which is how they picked up another Series One Tigers card I was looking forward to:
Though I am a little less optimistic about Paredes than Skubal, I do quite like the prominent view of the Al Kaline patch the Tigers wore last year, when I had the lowest chances to see them on TV of any year of my life. Those 3 cards pretty much satisfied me completely on the Favorite Team portion of the beginning of my 2021 baseball card season. I guess there are upsides to starting with a blaster after all.

2020 was of course a completely unique year in basically every way, and along that way, we all knew this card was coming -
and this one:
which was my first card to show me a fan cut-out in the stands. I know there will be more, and better, such cards in my future S1 purchases, but this is a card image I was expecting (and oddly looking forward to) from the first rip of the first pack.

A great thing about the Topps Baseball genre is the occasional repeat of a classic -
This new entry in the Wrigley Ivy checklist perfectly shows off the possibilities of this design + image and I can almost forgive that too long left side design element. Almost. I will return to that shortly. This year's Topps Baseball features an even more classic Wrigley Ivy card I quite enjoy:
It's like Topps has brought the Social Media concept of "trolling" into the set with this one, which perfectly cardboard-encapsulates the probable rise of the South Side of this year, while the North Side likely treads water.

As for images that perfectly match this design, I found several -



Now this Spencer Howard RC has me wondering - does this set feature the most Powder Blue uniforms since, oh, maybe 1982 or so?
I would say - Yes, yes it does. Probably later this year I will attempt to tally up how many Powder Blue baseball cards I find this year. I think it will be - a lot.

That is another of those 1952 "Redux" cards though I can't for the life of me figure out the need to use the weird psuedo-word "Redux" for these, nor why an insert clearly included to mark the 70th anniversary of Topps Baseball sets doesn't include the special Topps 70 (or is it 70 Topps?) logo - but for once I am glad to see Topps basically miss an obvious chance to thematically tie a few things together, as these "Action 52s" that I quite like are much better without any superfluous graphical notations.

Especially since such sure, why not appellations will likely be found on all the other inserts in the release:
I have always been a fan of 1986 Topps so I quite look forward to obtaining some "new" 1986 cards. But I don't know anyone who celebrates the 35th anniversary of anything and that notation on these reprint inserts is pretty much played out - but you know it will be a huge deal all over the Topps Baseball set, next year. A prediction so easy, it's like falling off a log.

Meanwhile I might need a duplicate of this Ortiz card to help fill out some binder pages of a half-baked Opening Day insert checklist from a few years ago called "Heavy Hitters" which well illustrates the comical challenge of maintaining upper torso muscle mass as you get older.

Inserts have changed over the last several years; I believe Topps dialed down the insertion ratios of most of them to give collectors more of a chase challenge and possibly to up the re-sale value of their products; something I can only partially agree with. When I like an insert, I don't want it to be rare. When I don't like an insert, I am more happy to not find them in my packs. Particularly all those insert checklists that mix certified Hall of Famers with maybe-maybe Rookies which then makes for big holes in the checklist years later after most of the Rookies inevitably fail to reach Cooperstown immediately after their first At Bat.

This year there are a couple ridiculously low input low hanging fruit type inserts given the "Anniversary" theme of the Topps Baseball set, and one upside is that the design of these inserts locks out brand new Rookies completely, as with this one:

These are nifty little reprints I would quite like to assemble - but they are also basically low insertion rate reprints that I am unlikely to find more than a couple three of over my coming S1 purchases. But since they are just reprints without hot Rookie Card cards included, I'm thinking they will be very cheap to acquire in the "aftermarket."

Speaking of which, the point of most box break recaps for most readers is the hits, man, the hits - did I "hit" anything in this blaster? Anything worth more than 0¢, the basic value of all of the cards I have just scanned in for you, (possibly temporarily) outside of the 2 RCs shown? Why yes, yes I did:

This is technically a "super" short print, though it took me quite a while to realize that. Usually the photo variations have some sort of theme to the image selections. Other times, Topps simply phones it in, as with this card. Nonetheless if I can get around to ever selling this it would probably pay for the price of the blaster. Which is both good, and bad. 

'Bad?' Yes, this "hit" card I found is the reason it is so hard to find baseball cards for sale, and I don't care to encounter problems when I just want the simple pleasure of ripping a few packs of brand new baseball cards. Of course I enjoy the faint chance of "hitting" a card worth more than 0¢ in my packs (the 'good'), but if I had to choose between buying packs that might hold a $20 bill and a guaranteed chance to simply buy a few packs of baseball cards, I would take the the guaranteed availability. Meanwhile that intoxicating chance to find a $20 bill in a pack of cards, or $200, or, even - $2,000 - leads people to purchase so many of these baseball cards that this all now makes it difficult for people who just want to buy the cards, a few packs at a time. Like me.

Ultimately, a Topps Baseball set is remembered for the basic design of the basic baseball card and how that works out for any random player your mind selects when thinking about the set. Over the years I have started to notice the way I think a few teams put uniform #s in odd spots, though I can't recall another specific team example right now, when I need one to share. I have noticed the Reds uni style including the uniform # on the player's belt before this card. 

But it took until I found this card to even notice the player name is written in a team color match, normally a basic, and good, part of a baseball card design. In 2021 Topps Baseball, however, the uniforms have to do the talking:











Friday, February 1, 2019

The new Phonebook's here! The new Phonebook's here!





Adams, Chance.

Welcome to 2019 Topps Baseball.

I don't think I have ever pulled a First Card so well predicted on the wrapper, that's for sure. Maybe I shouldn't have picked a Yankees Card of the Year last year.

I like the card, and I already need another copy of it. And then another copy after that. I make a side collection of the RC logo cards as a bit of a living set of all the players that debut in MLB. Yes, I know sometimes players slip through the inevitable Topps cracks in that idea. But then there used to be people that didn't get listed in the phone book, either.

I also like to collect The Pitcher Is Smiling At Me cards, though I don't think I have even found 9 of those to show you fine folks yet. Chance Adams gets me +1 I guess.

The cards man, the cards, what about the cards? An initial impression: they feel a little thicker this year. Someone would have to weigh an identical # of them across a few years to figure it out definitively.

The card man, the card, what about this card? It strikes me that with the constant pining for the old days & ways in this hobby, I think I might have an example of such right here in my 2019 First Card. It's blurry. I don't think that is just the edges of Adams, Chance's body parts straying into the graphical special effects along the edges, either.

Now it could be that Topps, or the original photographer, has purposely dialed back the digital crispness of the images. That is fine with me. All those 'Photo Day' cards Topps issues in other sets are often a bit frighteningly over-lit and digitally cold and sterile. These cards in 2019 Series One aren't like that, they have some basic warmth. If a little blur here and there is the price paid, I'm good with that.

What else is going on here? I'm sure the words "Hockey Sticks" and "1982" are circulating around collectors' minds right now. Reverse Hockey Stick? No, that doesn't fit. Hold that thought for now. Goalie Stick?

It is nice that Adams, Chance is printed on the card - with ink. (Or the absence of ink, I guess). The only use of foil present is in the Topps logo.

Oh dear, we are getting far from a picture on the tl;dr blog. Let's flip the card over.
As usual for more than a decade now, the design elements on the back repeat the ones from the front. This is a pretty explicit example of such. The use of a pale/pastel color makes for a nice bed for some text.

And the text is basically a complete paragraph this year - quite expansive compared to past efforts. I know that since this particular card is an Official MLB Rookie Card© card, the one year stat line format is pre-ordained. I would just say that it would be nice if Topps would use up all the empty space by increasing the point size of the text a little. I would think that in the 21st Century, high-end image composition software could even do that automatically on cards like this one.

This card back did cheer me up with it's opening line: "The Yankees are grateful that they took a Chance with their fifth-round....." Yes, the Topps card back writer is still unable to resist the low-hanging fruit of a cheap pun construction like that one. It should be a decent season for reading the backs of the cards, as long as your squinting skills have a good Spring Training I guess.

Now let's try another card.
This card does partially answer a mystery from the first card - why so much white space? Because every last name is different, duh-huhhh. Now I get it.

Except, couldn't the image interact with the design frame on an individual card basis? Would that be too much to ask? I guess on a set of 22¢ baseball cards, the answer is yes.

This card also reveals more of what all those little square things Topps likes so much will be up to this year. They are kept out of the left side of the card by the team color wall, and the bottom of the card by the name wall, but they battle with the image on the left side. Last year, they mercifully kind of disintegrated off the color name stripes just a wee little bit. This year, they are more like that weird 'smoke' in 2016 that didn't really catch fire with many collectors in that design.

The fade to that design element on the left side, combined with the fade effect of the white name plate area, seem to me to be tricking my brain into projecting blurriness into the image. Perhaps that creates that warmth I like, dunno. We are getting into baseball card design thesis program stuff now.

But since we are this deep into collecting Topps Baseball cards for this many years of our lives, let's consider a nice part of baseball cards, and these cards in particular. Team Color!

Solid, this year. And there are even 2 of them! Well, maybe if you squint some.

Let's zoom in. Here are Adams, Chance's colors:

(If you are thinking - Yankees, Red, where does that come from, you should be better prepared for this class - you can click away for an instant refresher if needed.)

Now here are the team colors on the Laureano, Ramon card:

Advantage: Athletics. The A's get a nice Gold stripe on their Team Color wall; everyone knows they are the Green & Gold team. The Yankees get a much thinner Red stripe, losing half of the space the A's get for their Gold stripe to an extra layer of White, or Grey.

And you thought the designer picked out square tiles for all that space above the rim of the bath tub for the bathroom remodel? Nope. Individually inlaid, randomly patterned, perfectly round little tiles. No cheapskating on Topps Baseball cards.

I am starting to get a Sea Turtle flashback here - I recently realized the workings of a certain design feature on those cards somewhat similar to this one, though I won't be illustrating it on my new 2013 set blog for another 28 cards or so. The perfect illustration in that set is a White Sox card, and luckily enough, here comes one now:

Team Color #1: Black. Team Color #2: Grey. The Chicago White Sox. Check. But another card like the A's card, where Team Color #2 doesn't give away half of itself to White.

There is a little bit more going on with this and I think it relates to printing registration perhaps. It's a bit of a deep dive into baseball card construction, so for now I will just note that the A's and the White Sox are off to a better start in the set than the Yankees, with better Team Color #2 strengthening their cards. The reveal of more on this technique on the Sea Turtle cards will come on the Chris Sale card a month or more from now.

As for this Kopech, Michael card, my 3rd sequential RC in my first pack, I already have a love/hate relationship with it. This card is shot in Detroit, as are a lot of Topps cards these days. I know this because of several things in the photo, like the small portion of the back wall, and a quite blurry yellow line at the top of the outfield wall. I don't quite understand why they are so blurry though. In weeks to come I will show you some more Made in Detroit cards for comparison. Kopech, Michael's legs seem almost as blurry as Adams, Chance's are.

The more definitive visual cue to the stadium location is the word "bit" on it, which is part of an ad for a candy product backed by one Miguel Cabrera - "bitbits" - which sadly hasn't penetrated all the way to the farthest corners of Michigan, where I hang out, so I have yet to try any. I do hope a more clear picture of this ad appears on a Topps Baseball card sometime soon.

So Kopech, Michael's RC card turns out to be from his 2nd Major League game, which was quite triumphant - for him. 6 Innings, only 1 Run - but 7 Hits, to the credit of my team. The next time the Tigers faced him was in Chicago, and they absolutely shelled him for 7 Runs in just 3 Innings Pitched. Taken apart by the 2018 Detroit Tigers. Hope is still alive for my team, I guess - they were able to 'write the book' on an opponent, rather than the other way around. The jury is still out on Kopech, Michael, so far.

This next card is also quite illustrative of this set, and I am only four cards in:
A nice, 100% complete baseball player, with no body parts disappearing into the White Hole that appears will be a part of each and every card. Instead of nice soothing white borders, we get a randomly shaped piece of them, inside the card, in a set that is neither full-bleed nor full-border. This card makes me ask - couldn't Bettis, Chad's foot have been placed right on the purple team color wall and allow the photograph to use up all that white space? That would require individualized baseball card construction though.

And I doubt many, even long-time baseball card collectors, could project a Team Color #2 for the Colorado Rockies, after Purple. I would have guessed Black. But then Purple and Black might make a better football card somehow. So Topps selected Grey, and the two Team Colors get the job done.

Sometimes, perhaps, they get the job done too well. Look out Springer, George!
I guess he didn't get the memo that there would a Team Colors pole standing in front of Home Plate in that game.

My first 2019 horizontal card - pretty epic. Show me a collector who says they don't like a Play @ The Plate card and I will show you a liar. Lately I have been thinking Topps is just getting their reps in now, preparing for a key card in 2020 Heritage - I hope there is a dynamic Rookie Catcher in MLB this year.

So we are going to have "frame break" cards, another thing few if any collectors would disagree with. These seemingly require an individual construction effort for a given card. So why couldn't the design elements sometimes just overlay the imagery, if the imagery can sometimes overlay the design elements? Then the White Hole on every card could be banished, and put to better use.

After a string of 3 cards with thick secondary Team Color lines, I see the Astros will have a skinny Blue one for theirs - approaching superfluousity, which my PC's auto-dictionary doesn't even think is a word.

It does appear another long-time Topps tradition will continue in these packs -
Plenty of horizontal cards, appearing together fresh off the die-cutting machine. I really do look forward to seeing some uncut sheets from the 2010s some day.

Greinke, Zack does seem pleased with his card, and so am I - another +1 on my The Pitcher Is Smiling At Me collection; whole years go by without adding to it and now I have 2 new entries from the same pack.

It has only been recently that I have started noticing the Blue uniform #s they wear in Arizona; maybe that says something about things that are missed when you live in the desert.

I do like whenever Team Color #1 is Black, though that is almost always only done for the Pirates. A new member of the club is fine with me, and the Diamondbacks don't quite seem to be sent to skinny Team Color purgatory, either.

Another regular member of the Black Team Color club is the Orioles, for whom it is usually the secondary color. Will it be this year?
Ummm, maybe. There is a black line there, I guess.

At first I thought I had sort of pulled my first 2019 Detroit Tigers card, but, alas, the Tigers actually signed a different, negative-WAR infielder named Beckham, though I would be mighty surprised to see him appear in Update this coming fall. At least the Tigers get to play the Orioles 6 times this year, and vice-versa. That will help both clubs.

Now with all this Team Color action and at least a Half Border design this year, we should be primed for some pretty nice parallel versions of these cards to appear. Here is my first pull of such:
Yes, that is technically a parallel. The "150 Years" parallel - just the stamp, done in gold foil rather than silver, along with the Topps logo also being in gold. A totally useless exploitation of the collector impulse by Topps. Obsessive Player and some Team Set collectors will want to track down these "parallels" just, because. I am so glad I am able to focus my collecting on to cards that I enjoy looking at later on down the road, rather than just mindlessly attempting to collect every tiny variation of basically the same thing just, because, Topps made it, so I have to collect it.

Now one major bit of news coming from the large-scale "breakers" of Topps sets this week is that inserts will be much more scarce this year. For me, this is good news. I occasionally like to complete an insert set, but probably nowhere close to a majority of them. Inserts are good for Player and Team collectors, supplying more unique cards for them to enjoy. If they are to be printed in smaller quantities now, that will make them easier to trade in for something else, via COMC in particular. So I was quite looking forward to my first 2019 insert -
I do like the authenticity here as Jose Altuve is wearing a Spring Training patch on his right arm, and probably that is a Spring Training only uniform for Houston. That particular insert, however, is a "retail only" insert appearing in every other pack in a blaster, and I will wager one per hanger pack, and probably one in every other 'rack' pack too. There will be piles of these building up everywhere, I imagine.

I have a few better ones to show you in another post; today I am just wandering through that quintessential baseball card experience, the First Pack:
This is a card I was quite looking forward to. I lost track of how many Hoskins, Rhys Rookie Card cards I pulled in 2018. And since I am always far from and ignorant of much of the goings on in the NL East, all those RCs here, RCs there, everywhere an RC left me with one question - would his sophomore campaign deliver on all the hype? Yeah, I could look it up instantly whenever I wish these days. But often I would rather just wait and turn over a baseball card, like this one.

And this card has a wonderful new design feature - a blue Liberty Bell. Unfortunately, the Phillies are also stuck with a skinny Team Color #2 to go along with it.

As are the Indians -
Where Clevinger, Mike illustrates once again why the White Hole is there on all the other cards, though not on this well constructed card. This card makes me laugh though - is he about to do the Funky Chicken, or is he about to Balk, Balk, Balk? If a baseball card can't make you chuckle once in a while, you need a new Hobby.

Another classic team for combining Team Colors and baseball cards is the New York Mets. How will they fare in this erratic set?
Sigh. Even a card with a classical "Hero Number" - #200 for the reigning National League Cy Young Award winner - can't convince Topps to put a little more blue ink into their nifty new baseball card frame. Overall though, a mighty fine baseball card and a good example of my suspicion that I will have a fine season of collecting baseball cards ahead.

But wait - there's more! These packs have 14 cards this year. I would have had to drive some 30 or 50 miles to reach a store that would sell me a classic single "pack" of Topps Baseball, something not really an option in the midst of the Polar Vortex. So to get as close as possible to that beloved First Pack memory, I picked up a blaster of 2019 Series One, which has a new packaging format - 7 packs of 14 cards. A change I am fine with, as I have never understood why we need all those extra wrappers inside a blaster anyway.

One of the nicer stories in 2018 Major League Baseball was the experiences of Piscotty, Stephen:
So I was just a little disappointed that Topps didn't include some easy feel-good back-story on the back of this card. Oh well. Another card I was looking forward to this year, with what proved to be some wonderful light on it. It will look good amidst 8 of it's buddies on a binder page, some day.... as will this card:
An early contender for the Psychedelic card of the year? One never knows when a Psychedelic cartoon car might start driving straight off a baseball card and straight into your consciousness. Blackburn, Paul is another keeper.

And to launch 2019, I have an Oakland A's Hot Pack. Now if only my local casino would finish up the inevitable opening of a Sports Book. Should be a good year, out West.

Overall, I basically always enjoy 21st Century Topps Baseball cards. The 2010s are drawing to a close nicely here. I was totally unable to resist opening all 7 packs in my blaster, despite a grim initial plan of knowing I probably can't be buying many new cards for several weeks, and a hope I could somehow just open just one of the packs, once in a while, through that period. Fat chance! In the other packs I did pull some fun cards to share with you in a future post.

And I also look forward to discovering some new nicknames for this set of baseball cards. Because I can get that excited about nothing. And no one knows what a Phone Book is any more, anyway.

Saturday, November 22, 2014

The Siren calls, gives up Mojo

So last night I had to stop at my local K-Mart for a new winter hat to help me through the monochromatic white Autumn we are having up here. Yeah, that's the ticket. (I drove through my first snowstorm on Halloween, actually).

Anyhow the original Blue Light store is one of only two outlets for Topps products in my town; Dollar Tree being the other one. Lately the big K has been rather erratic at stocking new baseball cards, but I had that urge to rip just a sample pack of Update. Yeah, just one. No, really.

I also had this odd feeling that maybe their card-distributor-rack-jobber-must-be-a-kinda-sweet-job-to-have person might have brought over some discounted blasters from some other store where neglected baseball cards just sat around not enticing the disinterested customers for too long.

And there it was:

Is there anything that catches the eye of today's baseball card consumer better than that red sticker? Once the blaster gets that cheap … My name is Brian, and I am … all about baseball cards sometimes.

Oh sure, I can get on my high horse and explain my pure wisdom of not ripping new product any more. But old product doesn't count. So why was I hoping to find a little Update? Samples don't count either. 

This was on a blaster of 2013 Archives. I had some pretty good Mojo with those when they were hot off the presses, and I wrote up one of my longest blog stories connecting it to that Mojo. Not coincidentally I had just been pondering 1985 Topps due to selecting a card from it as the lead-off card for a repack purchase. (Just hit Older Post down at the bottom if you missed that one, my previous post). 

Also, I needed just one of the '72 style cards to Complete the Set after some good trades, and there are two Short Prints I desire just because of the base design used - 1975, and a few others just because of the image, like the Tom Brunansky. I had my baseball-cards-on-sale-Mojo working before I even walked in the store thinking "cheap blaster," so, yeah, I pulled the $12 trigger.

Let's rip the first pack:
The last card I needed to Complete That Set! Basically-cheap card Mojo is still Mojo. If I had purchased loose packs, I could have just taken the rest back to the store right then and there. But you can't take back blaster packs, fortunately.

Don't you hate it, though, when at any point in the last 2 years, the last card you needed for a full set or an insert set was the Jeter? I have pulled his memorabilia items from every random baseball memorabilia package I purchase, but can never get his cards in the sets I actually complete. (Anyone want his Qubi stamper? A deckle-edge? Several different blaster manu-patches (eww, I hate that word), a Chip?).

I like Derek Jeter and I usually like his cards. But I suspect this won't be the last time I need a DJ to get it done.

That left 7 & 7/8 packs to go through. There should be some more cards I like in there somewhere:
1985 Mojo! Of course, there was a 25% chance that each card had 1985 Mojo, but that didn't slow me down. I was happy to see this card when I first pulled it and set it aside to share with y'all. But as today has gone by I've grown very disenchanted with this card. I realized I was just reacting to the sharp yellow-on-blue ROYALS design, I like that. But this blaster has me putting 2013 Archives away finally, with cards going into binders and dupes going into the ever-heavier goodbye box that I have to figure out what to do with. Which all means I will have two more blog posts on this set to wrap it all up.

And though I needed few of the cards as I opened the packs, I also enjoy and want doubles of some of the cards:
This is one of my favorite Miggy cards. It's just a plain torso crop-down from a game action shot, but it's a happy card. It will look nice on the Miguel Cabrera binder pages with the other Miggys, and in the 1972 binder pages from this set.

Most of this set used images from the Topps photographer's annual visit to Spring Training, so many of the images can be repeats from Heritage or Series One/Series Two or all the other Topps products. But many of those Spring Training photos bring back fond memories of vintage baseball cards of my youth, because of the ever-photogenic sky in the background. So I was also happy to pull this duplicate for a certain binder page:
The ultimate Sunset Card? Well, a contender at least. I'm not totally convinced that isn't a lurking Eye of Sauron down there in the corner though.

Typing of nice cloud shots and Spring Training, I'll note you'll see a few more nice ones from the '72~2013 set when I take a look at the whole thing in an upcoming blog post, but in the meantime I'll scan a card I pulled previously that I have been waiting to work into a post:
That card pretty much hits all my Spring Training buttons - Clouds, Palm Trees, and a Light-Tower that could even be called a Lurking Light-Tower. 

I did pull a new card here and there:
Ahhh, no, I won't be collecting these. This card is as bad as the David Ortiz card I posted the first time I bought blasters from this product. I do like the 1990 design; I just hate the execution.  And I must admit that for some reason the scanner made this card look much worse than in-hand, but in-hand it is still a mess of pointlessly assembled colors.

I will say this about the 1990 cards - a stack of them is pleasingly colorful on the edge. But my life is a little too cluttered already to keep a stack of baseball cards just because I like how the edge looks.

Topps used the same border for each card from the same team in this 50 card portion of the checklist, and there are a few they did a decent job on:
That just leaves the Hockey Sticks. I pulled a double I did enjoy the first time, but didn't post:
If I were to put together a binder page of Cheshire Cat cards, this would make that page, but I can't think of another card with such a sly grin on it. I don't think it would all fit with baseball. If you like the idea of Cheshire Cat imagery, I can tell you I recently discovered the early 20th century work of Louis Wain; that would make for some fun art cards.

Joe Morgan is about as popular these days as Kirk Gibson, but I do like his baseball cards. Baseball cards don't say anything.

With 1982 Topps, I don't get too concerned about whether the hockey sticks have any relation to the team's colors. And I have my doubts whether Topps would either. Thus, the Mariners get the classic blue-and-orange of the Mets, but the Diamondbacks inexplicably get a nice set of red-and-black sticks. I'll leave those cards for you to ponder from some cheap Archives packs you can find for sale cheap somewhere, some day.

The Hockey Stick cards and the Archives product do make me wish Topps still had a license for Hockey. 'cuz the obvious thing to do now would be to release a set of Hockey cards using the 1982 Topps baseball design.

Well I did mention I am putting the final touches on my collection of this set. Aside from binding up the 72 style set, I decided to keep just 3 examples of the other 3 styles in the binder:

I suspect if any truly modern collectors ever wander into this blog about generally worthless baseball cards, they are starting to get a little itchy by now. They can remind me of some other subculture sometimes, with their fascination with the hits, man, the hits. 'sssst, did you get any hits?

Every blaster of Archives has "hits" in it, though if any word has a flexible definition, it would be that one. And this blaster was no exception:
More the-card-I-was-hoping-for Mojo! 1975!

It's always a treat to pull a 1975 baseball card from a pack. Always. Of course, it will be a good ten years before that glorious day when Topps prints a whole set of 1975 style cards again in Heritage. What a day that will be. Does it really have to be ten years? Of course before then I will get a whole new set of 1972 to enjoy, and a barrel of laughs listening to people complain about black border 1971 style cards, and even a rather enjoyable look at '73 and '74. Do we really have to sit through '67~70 along the way?

Ahh well, if Christmas came every month it would be as boring as all those Bowman sets that come out these days. I sure do love that Lynn card though. Especially since for his fabulous rookie season in 1975, he had the classical Rookie Card shared with other players.

This is actually the second time Topps has made a 1975 style Fred Lynn card all of his own; there is also one in the massively printed K-Mart 20th Anniversary set from 1982, which, come to think of it, I purchased at the very same K-Mart where I picked up this Fred Lynn, though that only cost me a dime - for the whole set! The '82 K-Mart is a neat card in it's own right (I always like Topps' random attempts to make new-old cards before the concept of "retro" sets came along), but that '82 doesn't have a true 1975 style card-back. So I was eagerly anticipating seeing this:
And, FAIL. It's totally white! All wrong. I can get past the thin card-stock of these retro cards. They are just going to be in a binder page for me to enjoy in the long run, though I do much prefer the tactile experience of sorting Heritage cards due to the authentic card stock.

And actually that is a very nice, very faithful card back with a very nice trivia cartoon and a great write-up about Lynn as if it really was 1975 when I pulled this. Quite well done.

The white though - one reason this disappoints so much is that the 1972 cards have accurate grey backs (I'll have some scans of those in a post quite soon, though they have other issues as you'll see); the other 3 retro style card-backs are accurate in that regard as well.

So close, Topps, so close. I made a nice trade last year with Fuji  in which I gave up the Denny McLain on-card autograph I pulled to help Fuji complete that set and I will have to continue my quest for a single Tiger's on-card autograph elsewhere, but then I never did like 1968 cards or Denny McLain. Anyway for that I picked up the Al Hrabosky Fan Favorite Autograph which is also done in the 1975 style, but my own stash of hits seems to be hiding in an undisclosed remote location right now and I can't scan that one for you. Only collectors lose cards. So now I just need the John Mayberry short-print from this set and my 1975 jones will be a little more sated, for a time.

I also hope to find the Tom Brunansky short-print, because it is every bit as great as this awesome Night Card:
Which I have posted before, but it is definitely one of my favorite cards of 2013 that doesn't have a Sea Turtle looking design on the front. So, what the hey, you pull doubles from packs, baseball card blogs can post doubles too.

I did pull one other short-print:
A card I quite like from a set design I quite like. After the debacle of the 1990 style cards, we get an understated design in matching team colors. Well done, Topps. But I can't for the life of me figure out why Keith Miller is a "Fan Favorite." I guess any brief glimmer of hope from a Rookie with a high batting average in a half season's worth of games is enough to get Mets fans excited, and I've always suspected that Topps is chock full of Mets sleeper agents. Which is OK with me, because classic Mets orange-and-blue always makes for nice baseball cards like this one. I think I'll keep it, and keep one less of those goofy 1990 style cards on that page up there.

Of course, there are lots of little insert sets in Archives, and if you consider those cards "hits," I certainly squared-up the bat and connected on this one, in the minds of most collectors today:
Bryce Harper cards make me laugh, because if I had enough free time on my hands and computer software skills to do it, I would use my baseball cards to run a contest to see which baseball player puts the most square centimeters of eye-black on their face. I think I know who will be the odds-on favorite.

If I keep this card, it will be because of the back:
Collecting cards in Michigan we always suspected Topps did not like the Tigers for some reason, and the Night Owl figured out one source of our suspicion recently. But though McLain has somewhat earned some kidding about choices in life, I am quite amused to see this printed on the back of a baseball card. Imagine the scandal today if some All-Star starter who makes in the high four figures for each pitch he throws in the regular season were to show up late for the All-Star game!

This quickly led me to scramble to my other pulls from this insert set, which led me to this card:
Imagine that - a starter in the All-Star game still playing in the 8th inning. And a Babe Ruth story on a baseball card. I do like the modern All-Star game quite a bit, with something on the line in the game. I can't agree with all the baseball fans who complain about that and just can't understand the criticism. It is a real game between the game's biggest players. Would they rather go back to the year the game was just called a Draw due to general disinterest? I actually would like to see the starters play most of the game, Babe Ruth style, though he was just playing to entertain the fans, but seemingly playing hard.

I should have saved those two cards to post next summer, but they were just too good to wait that long. I briefly considered starting up a chase of this small insert set to find some more Great All•Star Moments, but the other one I pulled yesterday, Giancarlo Stanton, has a ho-hum game write-up (and is the third copy I have pulled from minimal purchases of this product), as does the Jim Rice I pulled. I still want to see the Fred Lynn edition because I will probably start keeping a small Fred Lynn collection, which will be nice and simple because he doesn't get a flood of new cards all the time in modern sets.

The '33 Comiskey story came from the back of a great card, matched to a player who called Comiskey home for a while:
Nice In Action shot of Fisk that still manages to convey action after being zoomed in like all the other nearly all-torso shots in this set. One of the All-Time leaders in getting great baseball cards from Topps.

I wish I could remember which blog I traded for that nice card for a proper shout-out. I am due for a really good trade post to show you some great cards. It might get posted almost on the anniversary of receiving those cards.

The Archives product generally has all sorts of fun inserts, and I pulled several, such as a Jered Weaver Dual Fan Favorites that is just not a favorite of mine. Weaver never gets good baseball cards from Topps, but I'm OK with that. I also got a Dave Stewart "Tall Boy" - yawn. But I did like this insert last year:

And I found this one binder-worthy. I would find it a little odd to put a four-way sticker "card" on a binder page, but that's not where this is going. Willie McCovey there will be gracing the cover of one of my binders. I've always liked his baseball picture products whenever I find them.

I don't have much of an opinion on those other Giants as I know or care very little about their fortunes in the 80s and 90s (fan in the 70s, a topic to share some day), and Buster Posey is great, but, ahh, if you'd like to stick those stickers on something, you can have them, just drop me a note. I doubt very many collectors will want a sticker "card" ruined by sticking one of the stickers on something.

So it's past nighty-night time, but a nice night it was, putting a set of baseball cards to bed.