A few days before Christmas, my LCS mentioned they are prepping some new $1 and 50¢ boxes. Oooh, that was gonna make for a nice Winter Break at some point over the dreary weeks, I hoped, if I could get back "up home" to my little ole home town. (Narrator: still hasn't happened, sigh).
Until then, I'm still scanning and deliberating on my 2024 finds from those boxes...
Why I selected it: At some point, hopefully in 2025, I will be launching my "Stadium Club Project," which will be to shop each set of Stadium Club, starting in 2015, and selecting 9 favorite horizontals, 9 favorite verticals, and a copy of every card originally printed with a black&white photo (not any of the parallels that changed a color image to b&w).
I'm quite looking forward to it and I expect it to be a lot cheaper than just buying random containers of Stadium Club cards, new or old. It should make for bunches of enjoyable $3 binder pages of Baseball Cards.
Will this 2020 Juan Soto card make it to 2020 SC Nifty Nine status? I'm skeptical, but I do like seeing the "Postseason" uniform patch on a card that doesn't otherwise say anything about the postseason on it. So, maybe. If not by then every stock broker on Wall Street will be wanting every Juan Soto Baseball Card ever made.
Why I selected it: Just, mostly, to scan it. Although this is one of the better recent Team Cards I can ever recall in that it sure makes the viewer want to catch a game at Fenway (bucket list thing, for me), I was hoping it would make a dramatic scan well "lit up" by the scanner, for a small "digital-only" project I plan to follow through on, with all of my otherwise essentially worthless "Rainbow Foil" parallels I have pulled since they began appearing in Topps Baseball sets in about 2015 or so.
There is a pretty good chance that the 2022 Topps Baseball Boston Red Sox® card #519 will become my 1/year best Horizontal Rainbow Foil card from 22 Topps, even if it doesn't become part of a little folder for "screen saver" use, as this scan just didn't light up like I hoped it would.
Why I selected these: I am a Topps addict. I forget what 2010s set these inserts appeared in, but I am "working on" the checklist - that means I want to finish it, someday, but since I can't recall what year these are from, "some" day is probably still a ways off. But that's OK, because I am fairly sure these will never be expensive, unless maybe Topps created a Rookie Card card for itself, which is always possible. They have also essentially already repeated this exercise in a 2020s set I am also 'working" on. Maybe when the 2030s version appears I will have a few more cards in each.
I definitely already had a copy of the Sy Berger card, but that's OK, cuz everyone loves Baseball Cards that show Baseball Cards on them. Don't you?
Why I selected it: A new collection effort, of these "Hobby only" inserts I only discovered courtesy of these cheap single card boxes at my LCS.
A 219 Ft "Avg Distance" seems like it will have some hidden trickery involved, since 219 feet is never a Home Run. So what are we looking at here? Let's find out:
Ok, so Mike Trout still relatively "bombed" the ball in 2022, to the tune of ten feet more than anyone else. Neat.
Why I selected it: Always a lot goin' on on an Acuña card. I just love the miniature "Logoman" the scan revealed, to me anyways. I am now rebuilding a modest collection of these 2021 1986 Topps cards. Maybe I will sync up MVP wins with inclusion in a few pages of these. Or, maybe I will just dive into the pool.
Why I selected it: I think the relatively few "re-dos" of 1988 Topps Baseball are really showing the design in a more positive light, particularly given it's deployment on modern, always-crisp-results printing technology.
It is -very- functional, and memorable, but lets the image be the memory. In this way it is very reminiscent of 1978 Topps - could that have been deliberate, at the time? The 2 designs may seem a bit of plain-jane, however when the photo is as fresh and illuminative as this one, the design seems to be astutely getting the heck out of the way of viewer enjoyment.
I also liked this card because I can't recall having seen this Clemente photo before. Maybe a Clemente collector will have; I am certainly familiar with repeat images on other Clemente cards.
So with 2023 1988 Topps I am on the same cusp-of-decision as I am with the 86s.
Why I selected it: More progress on the 2024 Significant Statistics checklist. I think I only have 1 card each from 2 other years of this insert, which has more history than I suspected, though not always in contiguous years. Although there is near zero mystery to the concept of a 100.2 mph average velocity on a Sinker, these cards are ALL about the back, so -
and as it turns out, I learned a few intriguing factoids, including a shout-out to a player who has been hard to collect lately, probably due to a combination of Topps' disdain for Middle Relievers and that he missed a lot of time to injury (I think?) - dat would be da Brooze-Darr. I hope to see him on more cardboard in 2025. Otherwise, I am enjoying these inserts, every time I find one.
Why I selected it: So, let's review. I like Pink Baseball Cards. I like Powder Blue Baseball Cards. I like Racing Stripe Baseball Cards.
3 boxes checked. I also like the Pitcher-Plays-Hard Baseball Cards - show me another Dirty Pitcher card.
I however, do not like 1991 Donruss and I had to laugh when someone succeeded at making the whole thing much worse. They must have been taking notes from 2021 Topps or something. I also don't like no-license = no cap logo, so a couple boxes checked on the other, negatory, side of the ledger.
So this is one of those hideous but ultimately love-hate cards. Here's to hoping that this image can somehow appear on another, better Baseball Card some future year.
Why I selected it: Now here is much improved take on an old Donruss design. It rather begs the question of why, back-in-the-day, they made the regular red version, and the sneaky issue blue version, rather than just super intelligently combining the 2 primary Baseball and American colors, just like this?
Meanwhile, I am launching a small Jackson Chourio collection. So this pretty card will fit in there though I would rather have his Nashville Sounds cards. The back of this card is one of the laziest I have seen lately, with oceans of blank space and a report that Chourio is "From: Venezuela." The super teeny-tiny card back text never even identifies what team name might have been the source of this image, other than "Biloxi."
I do largely expect this is a totally faked approximation of Milwaukee's Powder Blue Throwback uniform (the new Brew Crew uniforms don't have the colored armbands). But there is an outside chance their MiLB affiliate in Biloxi does use them, so I wanna find out.
I also suspect this is some sort of parallel, not a base, and thus the regular 2023 Donruss probably doesn't use this best-possible approach to this design. But there is a teeny-tiny chance such a checklist holds a few other neato lookin' cards on it. Maybe.
Why I selected it: I keep sayn' I'm gonna quit these 2009 Legends of the Game inserts, but here they keep appearing in my little stacks of purchases. I automatically pick up Christy Mathewson cards because they just aren't commonly seen. Mostly I grabbed this one because of the image, which is probably well on its way to a hey, look at these 9 cards page, some day. This is likely the single most common Mathewson card image.
Why I selected it: This card was supposed to the fated 13th card for one of these posts, but I couldn't leave you with a card this hideous, now could I.
So why did I buy it? I don't know. Maybe to make sure I don't buy it again? Does that make any sense?
This was an insert in 2022 Topps Chrome but these (the card does say "Diamond Greats" in pointlessly tiny text) first appeared in 2022 Topps as decent enough die-cut cards. That clearly then became an all-too-easily repeated insert in that year's Chrome. And somehow one that got significantly worse once Chromed, but then no amount of design could save a card from this turrible, just turrible pic.
The card back writer went quickly to the standard description of Mathewson in the 1905 World Series and probably clicked this one off the office computer screen as fast as possible. Maybe I bought it just to see how many Christy Mathewson card backs can just float on the one World Series. Blech.
Why I selected it: I have a small collection of Hunter Pence cards that needs to be wrapped up = placed on a binder page. He had a good number of memorable cards in the 2010s, but I can't recall having a choice Astros selection, so I thought a Topps Gold would be a nice add. I heard him call one game in 2024, when the Giants were on ESPN Sunday Night Baseball so he moved over to help out the radio crew. I expect he is otherwise routinely on the TV crew. Maybe that will happen again sometime. I hope so.
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