They let me buy some Chrome

Continuing on with my cry cry cry theme about 2020 baseball cards and the things that happen anyway, I can report another wish fulfilled: I found 3 "cello" packs of 2020 Topps Chrome, the kind that include 12 cards + 5 pink parallels.

I was working just a few miles away from a tree I needed to check for this fall's seed collecting work, and in between me and that tree were 2 Big Box stores. As I approached the doors to the first one, I just about ran smack into the doors. Still closed, on that side of the building.

Something to do with the virus, I know, but can not understand. How does forcing all of the customers to use less infrastructure somehow make the customers safer? Inside the store features the same pointless reductionist thinking - one set of self serve registers are still closed, so all of the registers now feature longer lines than normal. But of course that probably frees up an employee or two who would normally have to monitor those, so ... thanks Big Box. Not.

On my way back down the parking lot to the other set of doors, I started to think - maybe this will help keep a few people from making the long walk from the open doors, all the way to the opposite corner of the building, where the baseball cards are kept.

I was right. There on the ever shrinking baseball card space, squeezed in between Pokey and Yugi and a couple years worth of Panini football card products, was a little stack of 2020 Topps Chrome cellos, laying flat. Maybe that also threw off the 'flippers', dunno. Maybe they are running out of steam on losing money hauling baseball cards back and forth between the Big Box store and the Post Office, who knows.

I selected 3 packs of packs from the middle and left a few for the 'children'. Sometimes, I like 'shiny'; this card from the first pack comes off very well:

Scans, however, don't always come off as well as every tiny bit of dust that meets the sleeve on the 2 foot transfer from card desk to scanner deck gets picked up oh so efficiently, and Chrome backgrounds can sometimes make every card seem like a night card, particularly when scanned.

But you gotta like the slowly building resurgence of the powder blues; this is probably the Cardinals' "road alternate" uniform now I would guess.

Over the last week+ I have listened to the White Sox take my favorite team apart, night after night, lead by their on-fire lead off man:

He does seem to be getting some good cards from Topps lately, as does the man following him in the stacked Sox batting order, Yoan Moncada.

Now since I am definitely finished buying Series Two already, a decision made even simpler by the total absence of it on store shelves, I was hoping Chrome could hook me up with some cards I have been waiting to see, like this one:

BROOS-dar!

This is one player I am hoping to find a Players Weekend Nickname card for some day. What will it be? Da Bruiser? The Gatorade Man? Time will tell. Who wouldn't want a Brusdar Graterol Rookie Card?

Speaking of Rookie Cards, Topps Chrome is yet another Home of the Rookie Card cards. Sometimes this year, being officially situated in a bottom corner of the card, they aren't as noticeable as a 'top corner' year. Other times, they can catch your eyes in odd ways:

Now that's quite a 'load up' getting ready to just stomp that poor little RC logo there. The odds I see the Colorado Rockies play baseball on a television screen are none to never, so I am glad Topps showed me this intriguing, possibly exaggerated, hitting mechanic, on the extremely off chance bars ever open again I might be able to remember to keep an eye up on the screen for a Hilliard At Bat, should Colorado play in October again, which seems possible this year.

Other times, Topps Rookie Cards can be a bit of a head scratcher, which is what I did when I found this card:

Because a few weeks ago I pulled this card:

So, what team does this kid play for? Let's go to the tape:

Always impressive when a team trades with itself, Topps. I was mentioning putting some cards in a binder page 'backwards' yesterday; I think I will start up a page like that for these types of cards, which are rare but not unknown in the Topps universe.

Hey, look, here comes Alex Gordon around the bases!

Oh, wait. I think that is going to happen for several years to come, even and especially when there are no more Alex Gordon cards, which will probably be the case from this point forward. I like how on the back of this Hunter Dozier card, his Complete Minor League Batting Record has him playing at NW Arkansas before moving on to Northwest Arkansas for a couple seasons, then a bit later skipping back to NW Arkansas.

Now I do like just regular ole base cards just fine, but I don't think I have ever pulled a Chrome 'Tatooine' card; I like how 'Tatooine' is carefully spell checked by our computer helpers these days:

Neat.

Though everyone else wants to see more exciting base cards, of famous peeps -

I have always liked Topps Rookie Cup cards; have been thinking about doing a set of them in Chrome some year. Or maybe Pink Chrome, we'll see.

Meanwhile, it wouldn't be Topps Chrome without a slew of trippy parallels of every kind of every card, like this one -

(dig the Goldschmidt cameo on a D'backs card)

These are fun cards, the "prism refractors," which are still somewhat new in the product. I have been quite looking forward to see how they scan, and that is as impressive as they are in hand. I would like to collect these, but see two problems with the idea - they are obviously mostly enjoyable 'in hand' to see the prism tech do it's thing, so I don't think they would be as nice in convenient binder page storage. Also, despite my whining about the difficulty in finding Chrome to buy, print runs these days are so high that base parallels are actually fairly tough pulls. Of the 36 regular cards I purchased in a $40 purchase, I pulled only one "prism" and one "refractor" card. You don't even want to know the price of a hobby box lottery ticket of this stuff any more. So I somewhat doubt I will be collecting these prisms, unless perhaps I find a bunch of them listed real real cheap on COMC next year. Maybe.

Despite the low rates of parallel insertions, I once again managed to pull a "hit" from my baseball card chump change purchase. An on-card autograph of an actual baseball player, and for a change not a future back-up Catcher who can't even make an Update checklist. My 2020 card shopping Mojo persists:

Definitely a decision point card in that I could sell it right now and make my meager little Topps Chrome purchase essentially break-even = free. Or I could put it in my "Rookie" box with all the crucial Brandon Nimmo Rookie Card cards I pulled, and wait. I think I will wait.

That covers most of the basic cards I pulled; Topps Chrome always has inserts of course, and one is becoming a regular feature now:

I like Willians Astudillo, and hope to assemble a random 9 fun cards of his to keep. Those hopes are looking dim now as he tested positive for the virus upon intake to 'Summer Camp' back in July and though he has recovered and has now been cleared to participate in Major League Baseball, the fairly hot Twins team has declined to use his fan favorite services so far.

It was nice of Topps to hand him this optimistic insert checklist spot, but the very next card in the little Chrome pack made that a little extra questionable:

I know it is hard to keep up with baseball in the flyover states, Topps.

Chrome does seem to be settling in to multiple recurring insert themes the last several years, including this one -

Because, Rookies.

I like these cards though I don't quite see myself assembling them. And I like Sean Murphy cards so far, which is good, because I keep pulling them lately and we will see more of his cards soon enough.

Another easy-to-just-repeat decision for Topps for nearly a decade now is re-running previous designs inside other products, and not just the special re-run products. I like the idea on a previous design by previous design basis:

Though when it comes to '85 Topps, I have a love-hate-love relationship with the design. Sometimes I love those primary baseball colors, the dynamic diagonal there, and a large team logo. I then find myself wandering off to eBay to dream about busting a nice 500 card vending box from the set. But then I assemble a little stack of the re-runs and I notice how many of the cards (design+logo+uniform) repeat the team name 3 times (or even 4) and that is just too busy for me and then I get busy doing something else and I forget about the idea until I run across another 'new' copy in a pack and that starts all over again. These seem to fall 1 '85 insert per 3 pack cello pack as I pulled 3 in 3 packs, and all 3 had the team name on there 3 times. Too much.

That leaves only the special pack of one of my favorite kinds of baseball cards - pink ones!

Yaz! Yay!

That was another card I have been looking to pull this year, but had been eluding me so far. His grandfather was a favorite player of mine when I opened my first pack of baseball cards, and I particularly like how his 2019 Rookie Cards were considered low grade stuff amidst Vlad Jr. mania. "Too old, just a courtesy cup of coffee based on his last name, going nowhere" sniffed the prospectors. I hope he makes an All-Star team soon. I have a binder page ready to go...

Now the base Topps Baseball design this year doesn't really move me, which is probably why I haven't pulled Yaz jr. jr.'s regular baseball card from Series One already. It comes off particularly poorly when a player is sporting their 'road grey' uniform on a card, and even shiny Chrome can't rescue us from the blahs sometimes -

But the pink cards can:

A nice thing about the pink Chrome cards is the way the pink color is applied to the whole card, not just the design frame as on most regular Topps Baseball parallels. So we get to see things like pink Umpires:

Now if I could just get a pink chrome card of the Oakland A's mascot... Opening Day Chrome? Why not? Given the proliferation of Chrome sets lately - Topps Chrome Sapphire, Topps Chrome Black, Allen & Ginter Chrome, Stadium Club Chrome - again why not? It's not like there is no room on the baseball card shelves for them.

Last year I had some good luck pulling a couple Topps Rookie Cup cards in the pink parallel edition, and it made me think of perhaps collecting those cards that way. I did manage to pull one in my first 15 tries this year:

Classy.

So normally that might lead me to pick up a few discounted cellos of these, which was possible where I live all the way until Spring Training 2020 was rolling. But I suspect discounted baseball cards are now (or at least will be for a while), a thing of the past. I mean when a Mike Trout Superfractor sells for 3.5 Million Dollars and there is a standing $500,000 bounty on a brand new Zion Williamson basketball card, I think sports cards will continue to fly off the shelves, when they are actually even placed on a shelf for me to start with.

Which might be a good thing for me, as long as I can still just slip together a nice nifty binder cage of the cards I do like once in a while.

Mission Accomplished.

How Not To Do It #6

I missed baseball cards so much a few times this year that I was glad to find a sweet, sweet stack of 100 cards that came out of a $5 repack sometime last year. Though I had enjoyed the cards when I first purchased them, I hadn't really finished absorbing ALL of the treasured details they held, like this one:

That's a 100% worthless off-center water damaged 1993 Donruss "common" with a wonky corner. Until I flipped this card over, I would peg several early Upper Deck sets as the champions for including a good photo on the back. But this is an excellent application of the idea and I will be paying a little more attention to these card backs when they randomly appear in my hand now. I also always like Donruss card backs that include 'Contract Status' - a key detail for every player that I am always interested in, but Topps never (?) is.

This image though - what is Dascenzo up to here?

I just don't think he is going to reach Third Base safely there. Which made me nominate him for the post title up there. 

There is a hint of a shadow of the actual third baseman showing in the bottom right corner of the image. Now my first hunch is that Dascenzo is trying to break up a Double Play perhaps. Is another runner on his way to 2nd behind him? If the ball was hit somewhere, why isn't the batter showing on his way to First Base on the other base line off in the distance? Is this a Steal?

Yet if the Third Baseman is so far off the base that his glove is nowhere near the base - why is Dascenzo so far offline with his slide? Attempting to break up a Double Play is expected of runners coming in to Second Base, and that makes for many a good baseball card.

But here at Third ... wouldn't your team rather have a man on Third, safely, even if that allows a runner to reach Second or First afterwards?

This card also makes me wonder if the "Neighborhood Play" is allowed at Third Base, with the newest version of it, or however that was called (was it?) twenty-seven years ago.

Overall neither the base runner nor the anonymous Third Baseman seem very interested in the actual base that should be the goal of the action here.

One of my new 2020 Series Two cards supplies a more expected view of this baseball action vignette:

SAFE!

Now that is how to make a horizontal baseball card. No matter how I feel about any given design of any Topps set, those sets always do manage to include baseball cards I like very much. Even for a Rookie I have never ever heard of and suspect I will never ever hear of ever again.

Now in all fairness to Doug Dascenzo here, I should show the front of the card:

Which is a perfectly fine live action baseball card. It says to me that the always near perfectly live action baseball cards I pull routinely these days weren't so hard to create 27 years ago, though it sometimes seems that way when I pull a card like that Jack Mayfield card.

Overall I have never really warmed up to 93 Donruss even though it is a clean functional design with nice colors and a nice combination of baseball iconography (the base) and team logo. But the whole thing just says so plainly "Look Ma, I bought a Personal Computer" that clearly pegs it to a time in my life when I was walking away from personally computing and starting to embrace living and working outdoors instead.

So like all of the random sets that appear in random stacks of "re" packed cards that I like to purchase when I can (very difficult this year, of course), I have just been filing away all copies of 93 Donruss cards I run across until I get such a huge supply of Free Time that I can pick out my 9 favorites to file away in my personal baseball card archives. Except for this set, I am starting to lean towards placing them in the binder page "backwards."

Bitch and Ye Shall Receive

Alternate Title: I guess I have to stop ripping packs now.

Alternate Alternate Title: I hate being caught up in a technology war.

Blogger has not been kind to me lately. It keeps telling me I have to migrate to the "new" version. But whenever I do, I can't edit my Pages, or do routine things like upload a scan of a baseball card. Then it lets me revert to the old tried and true, but tells me the clock is ticking on the way I've always done it...really, this time, for real...

...meanwhile more and more websites don't work with my browser, including, for example, Google Earth, a kinda popular thing on the web. My old man old timey wrong software sin? I use Safari, the web browser basically built in to Mac OS.

Yes, yes, I can get another browser easily enough. I have been using personal computers since I was 13 years old and walked away from a life programming these devices, which would have quite a bit more lucrative than the way my tree planting with the amigos life turned out. But I don't regret that at all.

Sometimes in my work I run into clients, etc., who refuse to adapt a new technology, though I am referring to just techniques for growing tree seedlings. "But that's the way we've always done it." My reply: "yeah, and your office used to have typewriters in it too." The problem with that snappy comeback is probably that more and more people never did ever touch or see a "typewriter" in their lives in the first place.

Now, I am the stick in the mud refusing / neglecting to keep my devices up to date, add more to them just to keep them working, yaddayaddayadda. Life is too short for software updates, quite often, in my opinion. I've got baseball cards to sort.

To make this all even more fun, my wireless wifi internet provider, via dish on the roof, has developed fun signal latency problems that can make web pages randomly refuse to load. And it wouldn't be 2020 if we all didn't use up more bandwidth than allowed, resulting in speed throttling at times too lately. Even just streaming audio calls of baseball games has a cost, elsewhere.

Eventually I will adapt and overcome, particularly as I am looking forward to getting back to the wonderfully relaxing habit of writing up one baseball card per day for my 2013 set blog. But with the clock ticking towards a couple months of work on the road collecting tree seed, those hopes are dimming for now.

Meanwhile, 2020 rages on. The economy seems headed for trouble no matter how many Reichsmarks the peeps in Weimar print, "doomscrolling" is the new nationwide addiction, paranoia into our lives has crept --- add that all up and the result is: I can't buy a pack of baseball cards? Really?

I am sure you have all seen it, where you live. I live in the middle of nowhere and routinely try my best to get out from the middle, out to the bleeding edge of Nowhere, where I can no longer doomscroll the news for a most excellent reason: my phone reports "No Service." Along the way to that Nirvana, I do always try and take my last possible chances to take along a pack of fresh new baseball cards, to have a little reading material as I try to tune in a long distance radio broadcast, hopefully.

In a few weeks I will discover just how far the "flippers" have penetrated out towards Nowhere, when I stop at a Wal-Mart where just a month ago, the store still offered every packaging format of 2019 Update. In July 2020. I bought a couple packs, and a pack of Big League, and my ripping jones was satisfied, or at least my acquisition jones was, as I didn't have the energy to actually open those packs till games finally resumed.

Little did I know it would be almost the last time I saw baseball cards this year, except for one oddball type of pack, one I have enjoyed ripping ever since Topps started offering them back in 2012. But the things I have seen (or not seen, really) since then, man.

One detail I didn't add to my story of finally finding Series 2 on the shelves on Opening Day itself was that for this first time I actually saw my local baseball card "rep" in person, there was a small team of people placing the cards on the shelf - the rep, his young son, and what seemed to be probably his girlfriend.

As I, and 2 other people, waited for them to reach those packages with Mike Trout on every surface, the girlfriend asked the young boy where a certain box of gaming cards should go. "Oh, my Dad usually takes those for himself." This from the mouths of babes bon mot prompted a flurry of activity and subject changing comments by the rep, but the cat was out of the bag, as they say.

Finally they reached the Series 2 and I happened to be standing the closest to that spot on the shelf, so I was able to enjoy 3 whole packs of cards and share them with you fine individuals the last time I convinced Blogger to work with me, not against me. By the next day, when I finally remembered I needed a loaf of bread after all that baseball card excitement, all baseball cards had been stripped from the building once again.

But now I knew 2 things: what day the rep stocked my shelves, and that he dabbles in re-selling them.

Does he re-sell baseball, or only gaming cards? I will never know. I also don't know if I will ever see many baseball cards again, the way things are going. Except those one kind of packs, I guess.

The next week, I didn't make it to the store on Friday. Big mistake. I had like, Real Life going on or something, I forget. I was quite looking forward to buying a pack or 3 of Chrome, cuz I like pink baseball cards, and I just have this modest desire to simply purchase enough packs to see about a dozen and a half of those bubble-gum-flashback-inducing baseball cards, to keep a random set of 9 pleasing examples of them in my binder of random baseball cards. Crazy wish, I know, right?

But I did need something or other from the store that Saturday, and on past the baseball cards I soon wandered, to find the now usual baseball card sight of 2020: an empty display box of Chrome. And an empty everything else, except a lonely looking row of the one pack blisters with the one purple card inside. Whomever or the whomevers it is that swallows every single baseball card delivered to my town now doesn't seem to like those blister packs. Part of the stupefying UnReality of 2020 here is that a mere 17 months ago, this very same store offered more 2018 Update packages of all types than 2019 Series One and 2019 Heritage, because the shelves were still overloaded with all those packs showing Shohei Ohtani admiring a long ball he had just hit - because no one in my town was hardly buying any baseball cards, at all, and all those Oh Oh Ohtani packs had been there for a solid 6 months of gathering dust.

Now I enjoy the lottery ticket aspect of baseball cards as much as anyone else, so I liked my chance to "hit" something amongst the purple cards at least, after my first "SteeeeeeeeeRike" on buying some 2020 Chrome. So I went a touch to the greedy side I guess and splurged on 5 whole blister packs - 85 new baseball cards in the year 2020, all to myself!

And I was also quite pleased because in classic baseball card fashion, I am actually falling for a 'grey' set when I usually want nothing to do with that color and the game of baseball. Grey is the color for fishing - when it rains, the fish are a lot less shy without a flaming ball of fire in the sky revealing them to their predators, and it's Game On, especially out there in Nowhere. Sunshine and colors = Baseball; Grey = Fishing. My life can be that simple sometimes, and I don't expect much from it. Just an occasional nifty brand new baseball card like this one:

Or this one, my favorite player from the 1970s, sometimes, like when I pull a brand new card of his:

So that kind of helped me forget my disappointment over no mysterious-new-car-smell pink baseball cards. Plus, I now knew that when it came to baseball cards, there's always next week.

Friday afternoon would be the time. The Magic: The Cards guy would make his appointed round to my town and offer up the brand new pink shiny baseball cards. I set my alarm for 5:15 to make sure I didn't go out of my brain and miss my chance. Plus, I had to work till about 5 anyway.

Alas, 'twas not to be. SteeeeeeeeeRike Twooo! The store remained 100% empty of baseball cards. By this point, even the 2019 Opening Day cards with the all-same images from S1/S2 and the now boring inserts (since the kid like insert mojo has moved to Big League), yes, even 2019 Opening Day had finally sold out. And since there were no empty display boxes, I knew my rep had let me down. Especially since the stock of Panini/Score Football cards with Tom Brady in a Pats uniform (brilliant!) as the cover boy - well, that stock was still exactly the same. The one way to know, in the crazy summer of 2020, if the sports card rep has appeared, is that more Score Football cards are on the shelf than were there the week before.

"Every Friday, between 2 and 5," he had said. Promised, even. Doesn't this rep know that Rain Man gets kind of upset when his routine enjoyment of baseball cards gets disrupted in any way?

Fortunately, I was able to quickly reason my way to a hopeful future - the rep would show the next day, and distribute the glorious sports cards the way he was supposed to. Saturday, it would be. Yes, my precious.

SteeeeeeeeeRike Threeeee! At least in terms of baseball cards. I was correct - the rep had come a day late. I knew this via 2 obvious sigils he left for me - another empty display rack box whatever of 2020 Topps Chrome, and now 2 kinds of 2020 Panini Football cards, pristine in their perfectly full box rack display of Aaron Rogers seemingly on the run from some pursuers. Maybe they had pink cards inside, I briefly wondered? No, Football cards of future concussion victims are just not my thing any more. Will Aaron Rogers remain a Packer? Hmmmm.

But that was about it for my random attempt to enjoy sports cards last weekend. I should be building a set of Big League, right about...now. Nope. A night of randomly absorbing 50-ish cards from a Complete Set of 2020 Topps Baseball, just to keep some side collections going through a sad year of 3/4 bleed, overly grey baseball cards. Nope. No cards for you.

Of course I have stacks and stacks of old baseball cards to enjoy, and I have been retreating to the past a fair bit this year, and I would have been sharing those retreats with you absent this absurd battle with Blogger.

Don't, however, forget my new baseball card motto, to go along with my old motto that titles this post. "There's always next week." Put some more Panini football cards down on that shelf, Lucy, I'm uhh gonna kick the winning field goal this time, for sure! Especially since a need for esoteric repair items meant a drive to the Big City an hour away, the one with 3 Big Box stores, not just one.

Alas, 2020 is relentless. The Big City had even less Panini Football cards than my town does. Which meant a whole lot of Nope on the idea of any baseball cards of any kind. But then I had no idea what magical day those stores receive the manna from on high anyway, so I wasn't too discouraged. I mean, you have to know what hour the rep arrives to buy baseball cards, right? Isn't that the way we have always bought baseball cards? But I was still calm cool and collected, since on my way home I had no choice but to drive right by my regular little Big Box store, early on one more Friday night.

I am beginning to think that we as a Society might need to watch the movie Groundhog Day very very closely for clues on how to escape from 2020 and its incredible sense of same same every day after day. Especially since my cousin told me recently that the very first Mad Max movie is set in the year 2021. Start stashing extra fuel, now.

So in my cozy hometown store, it was the same same empty blue box of 2020 Topps Chrome. And empty boxes of everything else, again, except the Panini Football cards now offer 3 sets of untouched display boxes to pick from. Given the amount of 2019 Panini Football cards also on offer this whole time, who plays for which set of cards is starting to get more than a little blurry, as are their set names. Maybe the newest one was Chronicles of Prizm Mosaics and I could have suddenly been rich, I dunno.

All I knew was: No pink baseball cards for you. Just, purple ones:

I always like the purple Pirates.

And, since I have been thinking of these as 'Turkey Red' packs despite a distinct lack of red in this design, grey ones:

Once again a full rack of over a dozen single pack blisters was there waiting for me. So, I bought some. I selected 3 from the middle, and once again left the rest for whomever else around here also has no other baseball card option.

By this point, I have done my homework. These blister pack things are instant money on the flip, as they say; a routine doubling in price when they are re-sold on eBay, minus shipping, eBay fees, PayPal fees, and gas, maintenance, and insurance on a vehicle to drive to the Big Box stores all the time, of course. The IRS hands out a 55¢ credit per mile, you know, and eBay does hand over the 1099 deets when someone pulls in over $10K on there. Or maybe less by now. Might not hurt to check. And keep a mileage log like a good little taxpayer.

So now I still don't know if a flipper crew makes a routine visit to my town, or if my diligent efforts to always leave some packs on the shelves for the children, the children have now resulted in a rabid horde of same desperate for all the baseball cards around here, or if the rep just walks straight from the baseball card shelves to the cash registers, or what is going on except this: these purple packs are the only baseball cards I can buy.

Personally, I refuse to purchase packs of baseball cards online. I don't mind buying old cards online, at all. But buying new cards this way, Nope. I just refuse to add another middle-man to the equation. One thing I learned in my business is that the more people there are in between the person owning the land and the person doing the work on it, the more poor the actual worker, and the outcome of the work, tends to be.

I mean normally for me to enjoy a nice colorful baseball card showing me the boys of summer (well, aside from first Topps having to get back to creating colorful baseball cards) a lot of businesses have to get a slice of my 22¢ for each one: Major League Baseball, Major League Baseball Player's Association, Getty, Topps, MJ Holdings/Fairfield/Excel/Beckett Distr., and finally WalMart/Target/Meijers. I am fine with all that. What I will never be fine with is adding eBay, PayPal, USPS, and some random dude who drives around buying (or deliverying) things from (or to) Big Box stores all day every day, so that my soon to be worth 0¢ baseball card now costs 44¢.

If I can't buy a couple packs of baseball cards once a week or so on a grocery trip, I guess I have to stop ripping packs now. It is something I have done for most of my life and is one of life's simple pleasures. Spend a couple dollars, and your mind is taken back out to the old ballgame. Now, 2020 has almost taken away even that, somehow.

To me, the craziest thing about this mania for just regular baseball cards is that no one will actually want the vast majority of them. Even 'Complete Sets' have become just lottery ticket packs of cards with a random chance at a /13 special only-in-this-box type of shiny of the Rookie of the Month. I truly believe that such sets are cracked open, the RC logo cards are laboriously extracted (why can't Topps just put them all together in the front of the box?) and the rest of the cards simply thrown in the trash.

My one hope lately is that someone will do a serious Return on Investment study of sports cards vs. lottery tickets. Though that would make no difference to all of this. And I never buy lottery tickets anyway, only baseball cards.

And there it was, in the 2nd blister pack:

THE card everyone wants, or at least the card from this particular packaging format. One of the more desirable Rookie Card cards, as I like to call them. Say it with me now kids, "Rookie Card cards."

And, the reason I have had very few chances to buy many baseball cards this summer: some of the lottery tickets really do have a prize underneath the grey (coincidence?) scratch off ink. Bitch, and Ye Shall Receive.

I can still hardly believe this. 11 chances to hit a 1/350 chance at "the only card in the set worth any money." All I really wanted was another Turkey Red card.

And now I have to thank all those card fanatics that routinely cleaned out every Chrome card in my town through 3 go-rounds of putting them out on the shelf. I couldna pulled that purple without them.

One of the nice things about blister packs w/purples has often been, for me, some pretty good luck inside the pack inside the blister, too. Way back in 2012, I hit a crazy rare card in one, a /10 Cal Ripken bat relic card, and have seen plenty of other random baseball card goodness inside those single packs over the years.

This year, these 16 card single packs suggest there is a 1:8 chance of hitting a Topps Gold card inside. However of the 11 purple packs I have ripped, I have hit 5 Topps Golds. Including this one, in the 3rd blister pack:

OK, Topps, ok, I will quit bitching now. You did your job and you did it well. Well enough, anyway. All my baseball cards will eventually be free and then some, this year. With these 2 cards in hand. I do have a pair of difficult decisions on my event horizon I guess, starting with whether to try out this fad called "grading" I hear so much about. Seems like a no-brainer for these 2 cards, and I think Topps might have came through here with no detectable corner dings that make the "10 Nazis" sneer at lowly 'raw' cards. That bottom right on the Gold is starting to nag at me though. And my brain is starting to fret about 'centering' for the first time ever. No soup.

And then there will be the almost un-wished for decision point with cards like these: Sell, or Hold? The living ghost of US175 hovers over all, of course, a card which has been very very good to me. And I guess I would like to have a Rookie Card of an exciting young Center Fielder (hands down the best baseball card position) like Luis Robert. If only there was a way I could hold his plain ole regular Rookie Card card, too, especially since I am beginning to doubt whether I will be able to buy a Complete Set on a shelf in an actual store.

And then I recalled another common feature of enjoying parallel Topps baseball cards. The parallel version quite sometimes kinda seems to appear in the same pack as the plain ole boring regular version:

So I guess I have to stop ripping packs now. Since there won't be any to buy anyway, and if even if there were I know I would pull nothing but dupes after a 3 pack run like that one.

And, yeah, it's still the year 2020. I'm not sure what will happen next. Are you?

All New Series!

This is definitely a good year to be absorbing some brand new baseball cards. I have been buying some on and off this year, but lost the enthusiasm for cards when it was uncertain if we would even have a baseball season.

That has worked itself out, for now, so I have been quite enjoying listening to some live baseball, that actually "counts," and ripping some packs.

The other day I lucked into finding Series Two on my local shelf, when it had only been there for a few minutes, I think. The MJ Holdings rep was still there setting out new cards when I walked up to the section. Otherwise, I kind of doubt I would have been able to see this card as my First Card in this year's Series Two:

That's the Meijer's exclusive purple parallel, from the 'Big Box' chain that conveniently built a store in my hometown a few years ago now. I quite like these parallels this year; I guess 1/4 of a colorful frame is better than no frame at all. And I like the tint and pattern to the special 'parallel' section of the card - bright. I like nice bright, colorful baseball cards.

But overall, this continuing 'full bleed' era in the Topps Baseball set is wearing me down and these cards in particular are bleeding into my memories of the 2017 set. Oh how grey life can be sometimes - I don't want grey on my baseball cards, outside of the traditional road grey uniforms on the players. I kind of doubt I want a binder full of a set of these, so I am looking at buying a Complete Set / Factory Set, whenever those actually appear this year, if the ravenous 'retail flippers' happen to leave one on a store shelf for me to buy, complete with my 1-in-ten-thousand-comes-for-the-no-name-cards-inside chance at some special Chromed /13 version of yet another Luis Robert Rookie Card sure to be worth a million dollars, some day. Could become an ongoing dilemma, possibly.

But that's a bit of a cheat for a 'First Card', so let's see what was inside the pack that came inside a blister pack with that purple card.

Sweet! I got that New Guy that hit all those Home Runs for the Mets last year. I mean, that has to be good, even though I already have like 3-4 cards of him from last year and this year that look just like this one. 

Oh, wait? Wasn't that guy on the cover of Series One packs? How could he be my First Card in Series Two, too? I guess I will have to read these action image baseball cards a little more closely.

Oh, well, I always manage to find things I like in a brand new series of Topps Baseball cards, like a cool blue glove:

The Topps gaze does seem to like Walker Buehler, regardless of glove. Spiffy gloves do always jump out at me, and perhaps they look even better on a Night Card:

That card supplies a good trivia question to maybe win a bar bet, if we can ever go back in bars. First Elvis to play for an expansion team? Nope. That might depend on how you define 'expansion' perhaps. No, sometimes there is nothing quite like discovering new young baseball players, via baseball cards, to make a baseball fan feel a little old sometimes. Elvis Luciano is the first player to appear in Major League Baseball that was born in the 21st Century - 2-15-00, as Topps kindly informs us on the back of this card. Thanks, Topps, thanks. Nice card though.

I also like special hats:

That's the Cardinals' special Home Sunday cap with the single Redbird on it. I like seeing it on Cards' cards; this isn't even the first Wainwright card to feature it. And those cool socks, yeah, I like those too:

Actually what I like best about that card is not the 2nd example of the snazzy socks, but the way we can see Dexter's eyes focused on the incoming fly ball. That crisp detail, along with being able to see a complete baseball player, In Action, is quite probably made possible by the nameplate being vertical on the side there. That is to this design's credit; now just imagine this card without so much grey space and also with the interlocking STL logo being something other than white-on-grey, like, say, white-on-red, as on their regular everyday caps.

I do like captured motion on baseball cards though, and as with the Luciano card, and also that Fowler card, a player shown with a foot off the ground always supplies a great sense of watching live Baseball:

I have also always liked how a seating rail in the stands can really positively contribute to the overall set of lines in a baseball card image, well, sometimes, at least:

Cards like that one have been amusing me for several years now. By 'like that one' I mean a Dodgers RC issue. Series One had 2 such cards lighting up the $ signs in the eyes of the purchasers of the lottery tickets, err, the packs of baseball cards. Hey, look, here comes another one:

I dunno, not sure 'Garlick' is the best baseball name I have ever come across. I wonder what his Player's Weekend Nickname card will reveal, some day? If he actually appears on such a card some day. The Dodgers line-up has been so stacked for so long now, I sometimes have to wonder what is the point of Topps sending me so many Dodgers rookie cards, series after series.

At least Dodgers cards always have that classic red white & blue baseball look, so those 2 cards will look presentable in the RC binder at least, even if I never hear of these 2 players ever again. I just wish the high draft picks my team makes could hit bushels of Home Runs in the Minors the way obscure Dodgers draft picks can.

Oh well, sometimes I do get a second chance to see anonymous RC players again in a subsequent series, like this player:

Sadly, Isiah is now down to just 2 positions as assigned by Topps there in the really small type, down one from the 3B/2B/C combo on his RC. I know it is wrong to make fun of someone's last name, but I like finding one of Kiner-Falefa's cards in packs, they always make me hungry and since I live so very very far from a working Middle Eastern restaurant, they also are always a tiny bit of motivation to just get un-lazy and make my own darn falafel, some day.

Now that card has a brand new feature down there in the corner, though it is hard to notice amidst all the colorful Catcher gear - an "Inaugural Season" logo for the Rangers' new stadium. I often feel for the Rangers fans, more particularly their baseball card collecting fans, as Brooklyn HQ frequently does an even worse job covering them than they do with my favorite team in Detroit. They both are regular contenders to be card #666 (though given to Colorado this year), and of course Topps completely punted the effort when they issued Series 1 with just one Texas Rangers card. Which, in classic Topps fashion, didn't have this special logo. I just hope they got it right on the blister pack issued Team Set cards, perhaps, the ones they would possibly sell in the spiffy new stadium....oh, wait. 2020 strikes again, sorry Texas. I did hear some interesting talk, now that live baseball analysis has returned, about the dimensions of that new park and how they favor the Pitchers now, rather than the Hitters, which will be quite a change in Arlington. On a team largely guided by Nolan Ryan, hmm, how could that happen?

That somewhat not-out-of-baseball-card-history - logo? stamp? icon? is not so noticeable on that particular card, down there in the right-hand corner. This year's design lifts the eyes up, and away from the bottom corner, as on this card:

With even the Cardinals on the uniform contributing to the great flow of lines in this image, making you ponder what will happen with that baseball your eyes end up on, the now famous RC logo becomes a bit lost all the way down there in the corner. This card is a good example of how captivating the baseball can be on a baseball card - it includes that special Sunday hat and a colorful glove, too, but all I can see when I look at this card is a great example of a Pitcher's grip on the baseball.

Overall that corner logo now is making me wonder what happens on a Rangers' RC, in Series Two at least. I guess I will have to rip some more packs to find out, perhaps.

One long-standing Series Two tradition returns, for players who changed teams but were not included in Series One:

The classic Road Grey PhotoShop job. 

Sometimes that is a bit less noticeable somehow -

- but overall I will always wish Topps would spring for a brand new photo taken in Spring Training for this recurring Topps Baseball checklist situation.

With the grey design this year, 'alternate' uniforms really improve a given single baseball card, like this one:

Romo always seems to get good cards, and he does seem excited to be spiffed out in Minnesota's Road Alternate duds. The Twins also have a Home Alternate uni -

I like that yellow bat knob there, will be watching to see one of those again on a card.

Ultimately though what I hope to find when ripping some packs of cards, finally listening to live Major League Baseball, is cards of my favorite team:

That's probably another PhotoShop job; recall the t-shirt sleeves on those last 2 cards. Schoop is well into a journey-ing type career now, but he did get the Tigers first hit of the season the other day and had a pretty good opening series overall.

My next Tigers card was a bit surprising -

- but only in terms of thinking like it was 2018, when Reyes was a Rule 5 pick who made it all the way through his first season in Detroit to 'stick' on the roster permanently. He really blossomed in 2019 and this pick proved to be shrewd indeed, as did this particular 'pull' from a pack of baseball cards, as Reyes just hit a home run while I was gazing upon his nifty horizontal card here.

5 packs, 3 Tigers:

That's the Tigers new closer, who also had a great opening series with 2 Saves already. This card, a bit less than the previous card, illustrates a little of what could have been on this design as you can partially see that the olde English "D" is blue on the uniform, and white on the cap. Topps always seems to favor the cap logo, even when the uni logo would make for a more colorful card.

I also like pulling cards of the opposing team while I am absorbing Major League action, and Topps came through for me with the Reds' Opening Day starter:

That's the "Turkey Red" insert, which appear one / pack, the now 16 card loose single pack, to be specific. Last year each loose pack held a "Superstars of Baseball" insert, which did not appear in other packaging configurations. Given how collation works in Topps products, and this style of unique inserts in the loose packs, they are becoming my preferred format to pick up a few new baseball cards. Especially when I can still get the Meijers blister packs with the purple cards.

I think Sonny Gray looks good in his new uniform; I never thought the pinstripes suited him, in several ways. At 5'10" he is not a typical starting Pitcher, and for whatever reason I always think the shorter players look smaller yet in a pinstripe uniform. The deal that brought him to Cincinnati was convoluted to say the least and prospect results on a couple other teams remain to be seen, but I think overall Cincy pushing some chips in to the center of the table with the Gray deal will make the NL Central that much more interesting the next few years.

These Turkey Red cards are starting to grow on me:

Even though they are a grey border insert in a grey set of baseball cards, the always colorful backgrounds and that crisp faux-inset image border just make these cards:

Classy.

I am fairly sure I have seen this image of Lou Gehrig on a baseball card before, though I don't specifically collect his new issue cards. But I am also quite certain the image has never been melded with an artsy sunset background like that. Thus, I am starting to think a set of these classic cards of classic players might look pretty nice on a binder page:

Oh, wait. All-time Hall of Famers, current stars, & ... Rookies I've never heard of. So much for a desire to complete that set; probably these Turkey Red inserts are destined for Nifty Nine(s) status in my collection. Especially since I have more than enough collecting efforts under way to absorb too much of my scarce extra dollars, anyway.

So though each loose pack I might buy will deliver me another Turkey Red insert card, the packs do also contain examples of the other inserts in Series Two, like this one:

Boo-Yah!

Can't go wrong with a new Willie McCovey card and as a sucker for 70s 'flair', I think I will be looking into these a bit more. And maybe these, too:

I like/don't like how that particular card recalls the randomly sterile design efforts on Topps baseball cards in the 2010s - hexagons? Really? But I collected a lot of baseball cards in the 2010s and enjoyed following the game of baseball a bit more closely than usual all through that decade, so I look forward to checking out more of this insert checklist.

A Topps Baseball set and summer time often mean: a contest card -

And that is a pretty darn good baseball card in it's own right, right there. I barely have time to blog with y'all so I doubt I will be trying out the Home Run Challenge any time soon, or really, ever. But at least I will enjoy seeing the cards for it this year, as it is starting to look like a few more packs of this stuff will fall in the grocery cart again, presuming I have some luck with the 2020 retail baseball card challenge, which is on a whole 'nother level from previous years and years of collecting baseball cards.

Sometimes I wonder if my decision to like/not like an insert set might depend on the player I first see on one. That certainly didn't hurt with that cool Willie McCovey card I pulled. On this one -

- that's not the issue as I like Pedro Martinez well enough, particularly these days when I am randomly fortunate enough to catch some of his commentary on TV. But overall I am not always that interested in WAR stats, so I doubt I will be keeping any more of these. I prefer straight stats to 'new formula' stats, and with a fair bit of irony, this card did pleasingly tell me that Pedro's season in the year 2000, which generated the 11.7 WAR being celebrated here, also featured a 0.737 WHIP stat, which is the All-Time Record.

& that's why I keep buying baseball cards. I like pondering WHIP on the backs of cards, a regular stat feature of Topps Baseball cards now, but I was unfamiliar with that minor tidbit of baseball info.

I will leave you with a final 'insert' - one that is generally expected to be found when one buys packs of Topps Baseball cards - the Topps Gold. This one doesn't excite me; "Gold" can go a lot of ways on these cards depending on design, and just how the "Gold" is formulated. On this example here, I am having a hard time not thinking of it as a Padres card. The absurdly white edges of the should-be-in-shadow Rays logo 'shopped onto it are quite distracting, and the "Gold" is a bit dark for my tastes:

I picked up 5 packs to open the 2020 season, such as it is; these fall 1:8 packs this year, which is surely a pretty low ratio compared to years past. But that indicates a lot of people are buying Topps Baseball cards these days, and overall, that is a pretty heartening fact to me, in a year when we can use all such heartening things more than ever; most especially these brand new Topps Baseball cards.

Ready

2020, what more can be said?

I even ran out of energy to be ripping packs of baseball cards. But occasionally I would still put a pack or three in the basket with the groceries.

Just now I went to the Big Box to stock up on various supplies for Opening Late Afternoon, and finally discovered when the local 'rep' appears in my town to stock the crucial baseball card section: Friday afternoon, 2 to 5 usually, he says. And there was the first appearance of Series Two in my little ole home-town, some 3 weeks after averyone else. 2020, what can be said about that?

I hope you all have been bloggling away as much as possible. My 2020 has been the same as most any year; the opening of baseball season is always a very busy, 25/8 type schedule for me, which rolls right on into summer. I do have a little less time-sensitive work right now, so I can hang out with you fine individuals for a few weeks. 

Looking forward to it, see you soon!