Remember earlier when I name-dropped a famous Rookie-of-the-Year who fell off the map faster than Chris Coghlan? Who? Baseball is a hard game. What's old is perhaps inevitably new again, or something. Not the most memorable insert, no matter how hard the card back tries to convince us we will never forget Corbin Carroll. Maybe if the Diamondbacks had actually won that World Series, he would be on the front of this very pack of Baseball Cards, rather than the player who did. CC is an exciting player; I doubt anyone doesn't want him to re-figure out how to "read the book" the opposition data miners seemed to have created about him in 2024. Let's get back to the regular checklist, shall we?
Just a red parallel, the easiest one to pull; a quick bit of Googling informs me there is one of these in every single $10 "fat" pack. i.e. is totally worthless, though if that was the Jackson Merrill card from the front of the pack, well, yeah, I would be setting that one aside even more carefully. But this is precisely where Stadium Club always falls apart for me, every time. I purchased this pack knowing it would happen.
Parallels.of.full.bleed.style.cards.are.100%.pointless. Please, make it stop.
I know that will never happen. The vast majority of purchasers of Baseball Cards demand a chance to hit the #311 Mickey Mantle card, every time they open every pack of Baseball Cards, so they can instantly retire happily ever after. So there has to be some way to trick us into thinking that, maybe, we just did.
I now have a copy of card #256 in the checklist, the Rookie Card card for Johan Rojas. But if I were to assemble, i.e. "collect," a full set of the 300 base cards on this checklist - do I have a copy of card #256? Would I just randomly mix in parallels with such a collection? I could, I guess. Would it make any difference? On a binder page, it would. To me.
Enough, enough. I just like memorable Baseball Picture Cards. A washed-out red background takes away from such memories. Is Rojas' hand red now, too? Let's keep it together and shuffle that one to the back of the stack and see what appears:
What trickery is this?
"Pink" parallel.
I used to quite enjoy the pink parallels in Topps Chrome. They appeared 3 per odd hanger pack of 3+1 packs of TC. At least that particularly wasteful-of-plastic format is gone, which is something Topps should really consider now in their products in my opinion - specifically the silliness of all the superfluous wrappers in a "blaster."
Those enjoyable memories of pink bubble gum are gone now though, as the pink parallels now appear in a blaster of Chrome at the rate of 2/blaster. Given that all of the base cards, except the eventual MVP I guess, are 100% worthless and a blaster costs $40 now, the pink cards sorta cost $20 each, if you buy them lottery ticket style. No thanks.
Now this little gimmick of each package format (an "SKU" in retailese) having some special not-available-elsewhere card in it has come to Stadium Club, which ALREADY had far too many parallels - did I mention yet they are 199% completely useless?
I totally missed the explanation of the pinks right there on the top of the package when I bought it, oops. I probably would have bought it anyway, just to see what 2024 Stadium Club looks like.
But let's do some financial calculations here. This "pack" has 15 cards in it. The "3 Exclusive Pink Foil Parallels" are part of the 15, not a "bonus." This package of Baseball Cards done costed me $9.99 + 6% sales tax, or $10.59, or 70.6¢ per card.
Just a few years ago, Stadium Club cards cost right around an even 50¢ per card. Yet since every kind of pack in every kind of box of these cards has inserts (acceptable enough, as sometime inserts are very, very good), and those useless parallels. I'll jump the card image reveals here to note that this pack had only 9 base cards. Of the one insert and 5 parallels, none of them are worth any money, which is not why I buy Baseball Cards, at all. Nonetheless, the filler cards promising a possible prize under the scratch ink are just that, filler - if you actually want to build this whole set by purchasing packages of it. That means the 9 base cards thus cost $1.18 - each! Pretty similar to the costs of Topps Chrome.
Let's go check another reality of all this, on that giant buying and selling site we all know, and, essentially, love: eBay. There, a full set of of 300 2024 Topps Stadium Club Baseball Cards currently as I type costs: oh, about $250 - right now - a bit more than I expected when I began this paragraph.
But a set of 2023 Topps Stadium Club, also of 300 cards, costs only around $60, delivered. That's only 20¢ a card, and 1/6th of the price of the 2024 SC base cards I just purchased.
Opening packages of Baseball Cards is just plain, stupid.
I expect everyone reading this already knows the basics of those numbers, which only ever go ever upwards. For me, it is a good exercise to really take a look at my spending on this info-tainment I enjoy so much. I pretty much knew before I opened this pack of 24 Stadium Club it would be the only pack of the product I would purchase, despite the potential enjoyment the cards coulda/woulda offer.
It is just, well, 6 times smarter to purchase these cards, later, outside of their randomly assembled packages.
Like - that fantastic Justin Steele card up there you might have already forgotten about. Let's see it again -
Are we back in 1960s Shea Stadium?
Talk about some Vintage warm fuzzies here. This card will absolutely make it to my eventual 9 Best of 2024 Topps Stadium Club binder page. Too bad I have to purchase a new, not-parallel copy for that little collection, which I am sure will be a lot of tough decision making on first COMC and then Sportlots (cheaper), once all 300 cards are available to scroll through some 6 months from now. Or, any random quantity of years from now when I get around to deliberately assembling such a page.
I fully expect 2024 Topps Stadium Club will have plenty of cards like that Justin Steele card; maybe I will have to purchase 18 of the cards as there will be too many that I just can't possibly "cut" from the roster. Like all Stadium Club projects, I will be looking forward to that, some day.
Maybe this pack will show me part of that future:
Yeah, no.
What did Sammy Sosa do to Brooklyn, anyway?
Let's try again -First Horizontal
& - Cubs Hot Pack
One thing I particularly enjoy in Stadium Club is the horizontal cards, usually. This one will not likely "make the cut" though perhaps the non-Pink version will be a lot more interesting with all those scoreboard (?) whatevers becoming legible. So many horizontal cards are like this lately; this one is even more NOT-improved in it's parallel-ness than the red Rojas card. Thankfully I didn't have to gaze upon any of the 200% pointless "Sepia" cards this year. Who ever truly wanted one of those?
Three cards each from 3 different teams? Just like the game of Baseball, no matter how many packs you open you will never see everything that can happen inside a pack.
That Ian Happ card is #14 of 15 in the pack. The final card is quite fitting for the player on it, who is reported to be saying goodbye to his position on the field over concerns about his defense, though he will have DH work for a while to come, and of course could still sometimes "back up" a regular starter.
Additionally, this last card is yet another parallel - a Stadium Club Chrome, 1/pack for these ten spot packs. All 300 cards in the checklist have a Chrome version this year. Whatevs.
It is also just exactly perfect for the theoretical potentiality of me purchasing more 2024 Stadium Club, hot off the shelf...