Card 1, Series 2:

Card 1, Series 3:

TBA.

If the Brewers had any hotshot rookies, we know who it would be.  Is it too late for Strasburg to get traded?

Slowly but surely the gaps in my late 70′s hockey sets are filling in.  Anything before the 76/77 set is a bit of a wasteland, which is too bad since I love the 72/73 and 73/74 sets.  If I ever got my focus down, I could probably nail those down, too.  But there’s just so many sets to chase, so instead I’m like a dog with four tails – over eager to catch them all or to warn out to chase any of them.

All of this is too bad, since it keeps me out of touch with the history of former Ranger greats. Before receiving this card, for example, I’d never heard of Don Murdoch, who for some reason earned the nickname “Murder” from the fans.  Sadly, it was another vice that ruined Murdoch’s career. 

In 1977, Murdoch was found with 4.8 grams of cocaine in a Toronto airport.  The courts fined him $400 and gave him a suspended sentence, but the league came down harder and suspended him for the entire 78/79 season.  The suspension was lifted early after Murdoch proved he was clean, but this coupled with injuries would keep him from realizing the potential he showed at the beginning of his career.

And what a beginning it was, too.  After two 80 goal season in the WCJHL, Murdoch scored 8 goals in his first 3 NHL games for the Rangers, and was well on his way to establish the rookie record when an ankle injury slowed him down.  His quick success made him a celebrity, and he was often seen in bars soaking up both praise and alcohol from his fans.  That, in turn helped lead to his chemical dependence.

While Murdoch’s career didn’t turn out as he hoped, he was able to use his disappointment to his advantage as a scout:

When I was scouting and recruiting, I ran into kids I was going to talk to that I knew they had off-ice problems. I used to go tell them, `Listen, you better get it together or this is where you’re going to be.’ They would say, `What the hell does this guy know?’ I would tell them my story. Once I told them my story, that I should have played 15 years in the NHL but my career was cut short because I didn’t focus, I can see the look in their eyes like, `holy cow, this guy is the real deal right here.’

While Murdoch never “made it” as a hockey player, it’s nice to see that he’s using his mistakes to help keep younger kids from following his path.

But I still don’t get the nickname “Murder.” I am pretty sure you’ll never see anyone in sports with that nickname again.

I’ve opened about half of the first hobby box I ordered, and I’m still on the fence about the thing.  No “hit” yet, but it seems like my typical Topps experience.  I’ll have more if/when I ever get the thing finished.  One oddity I will report is the inclusion of a 37th pack.  It would be a secret weapon in Tete-a-Topps, the lesser known cousin of Gint-A-Cuffs.

And speaking of Ginter, the prices of hobby boxes are slowly beginning their fall once more.  The last time I mentioned a price, they ended up shooting back up as if sales skyrocketed on my buy recommendation, so I’m nervous to mention this again.  But I think things will finally settle into my range thanks to both the debut of retail and the wpreading word of mouth on the difficulty of pulling a Strasburg thanks to the 2010 Sports Card Bloggers Matholympics representative dayf.

I almost bought my second blaster of Allen & Ginter and my first rack pack (with a Joey Votto peaking through) the other day, but my son decided that he wanted a Toy Story card blaster box as well.  We had already told him that this trip to the store would not result in the purchase of things for him since his birthday is coming and he had just spent his allowance on a new garbage truck.  It seemed he was on the line between patient understanding and tearful blowout, so in a sign of solidarity I put my cards back as well and agreed to save my money with his so we could buy them together.  This worked wonders for him, but meant no cards for me, and I’m wondering if this was a good parenting move or unnecessary sacrifice.  I still have no idea.

And as proof that Allen & Ginter mania has slowed, no one’s bought any blasters from the shelf but me.  Or they bought so many of them that Target had to restock.

And finally, Topps base sets have started to ship, so beware of people claiming they have a Topps Million Card Giveaway of Stephen Strasburg for sale.

Here’s the card from the factory set, which recently sold for $31 on eBay.  Factory sets go for around $52, and a complete set (1-660) recently sold for $30 or so, so if you want to go through the hassle you can probably make about $10 for your trouble.  Probably not worth it.

And for comparison’s sake, here’s the Million Card Giveaway Strasburg.

Now it’s time for me to watch the Reds take on Mr. Hype until we leave for a miniature golf outing.  So far a Miguel Cairo walk accounts for the Reds offense, but it’s still early enough for them to figure it out.  Go Reds!

The blaster lists them as 1:12 packs, but I didn’t see them listed on your checklist scans from your hobby box. Luckily, the checklist card I pulled has them:
Right there under the original sketches.

That’s all I know for now.  Oh, I can scan the odds for you, too, if you’d like.

*UPDATE*  And looking at eBay, there seems to be more.  Here’s a scan I stole of WB21, the World’s Biggest Particle Accelerator.

Not on my checklist at all.  And I definitely got gypped if all I pulled was a tree and this card was out there, too.

*UPDATED AGAIN*

How about one more, again from eBay:

It’s Goliath Birdeater, the World’s Biggest Spider.

From what I’ve read, they are, in fact, retail inserts only.  There’s at least twenty-one of them, but I’d guess that number is really twenty-five.

They are running anywhere from $5-$40 on eBay right now.

… and how about a checklist, cobbled together from the bay:

WB1 Blue Whale

WB2 Burj Khalifa

WB3 Prague Castle

WB4 General Sherman (Sequoia)

WB5 Mount Everest

WB7 The Sahara

WB8 Angel Falls

WB9 The Amazon

WB10 Steamboat Geyser

WB12 The Nile

WB14 Three Gorges Dam

WB15 The Golden Jubilee

WB16 The Polar Bear

WB19 Goliath Birdeater

WB20 World’s Largest Collection of the World’s Smallest Versions of the World’s Smallest Things

WB23 Sedan Crater

I’m not going to lie, I love the idea of the Gint-a-Cuffs.  But man, looking at all those Ginter scans ages quickly, especially when you don’t have any cards of your own.  And since only the scoring cards get scanned, you get the same looks over an over again.

Well, I’m not constrained by rules!  In fact, I’ve got some punk on the speakers as a voice of defiance as I break this blaster and hopefully show of some otherwise unseen cards.  Ready? Pack one coming soon…

Pack 1

232 Hubertus Wawra (It seems the fire eater is a popular first card this year.  Ugh)
147 Christian Guzman
301 Gaby Sanchez
37 Andrew McCutchen Allen and Ginter backed mini
Checklist 3 of 4
TDH50 – Alex Rodriguez, Born July 27th, 1975

It’s supposed to be six cards to a pack, so I’m short changed from the gate. Unless a checklist counts as a “picture card” this year.

And my scanner is making the cards look darker then they actually are, including the pit stains on the Logan Morrison blocking Gaby Sanchez.  Not sure I’m sold on the new design.  I think the lack of actual lines is a negative this go round.  And that Wawra card is friggin’ ugly, too.

Pack 2

192 Tom Knapp
224 Ian Stewart
244 Aaron Cook
337 Joe Nathan
144 Stuart Scott black bordered mini
TDH59 Hunter Pence, April 13th 1983

Nine clay targets in less than two seconds is an impressive feat. Coming up with “Boo-yah?” Not so much. Both warrant cards in this years A&G. And I would have thought that “This Day in History” cards would have gone in calendrical order. Apparently not. A clue to the code? A red herring? Who knows.

Pack 3

156 Cameron Maybin
248 Jason Marquis
234 Nick the Stick Johnson
340 Brad Lidge
242 Jules Verne A&G back mini
TDH33 Kosuke Fukudome, April 26th 1977

Jules Verne!  Friggin’ sweet.  I’m a sucker for the authors, though looking over a list of his fifty-four novels, I realize I haven’t read much of his work.  Sounds like a trip to the library is in order.  I’m open to reccomendations.

And 112 years after the John Wilkes Booth is killed, Kosuke Fukudome is born.  Also on this date:  Jamestown settlers land at Cape Henry in modern Virginia, the establishment of the Gestapo, and the Chernobyl accident occur.

Pack 4

99 Anthony Gatto
245 Michael Dunn
102 Torii Hunter
306 Brandon Phillips
341 Jon Garland mini
TDH47 Brandon Phillips, June 28th 1981

I showed my wife the Phillips “This Day in History” card and after seeing the dateshe said, “Brandon Phillips was born in 1981? Gosh, we’re old.” Yep.

My fourth short print in as many packs. Either 300-350 aren’t the SPs, it’s a lucky box, or I’ve pulled my allotment for this blaster already. I’m holding out for lucky box.

Pack 5

291 Ron Teasley
207 Wandy Rodriguez
269 A.J. Burnett
261 Adam Jones
LO17 Dionysus Lords of Olympus mini
TDH1 Chase Utley, December 17th, 1978

Pack of the box so far. Nice to see the return of the Nero Leaguers this this years A&G. I swear Topps listens to the bloggers when it comes to things like this. If enough of us wrote that we wanted a famous cheeses insert set next year I’d give 50-50 odds that it would be done.

On top of the Teasley, a Dionysus mini, too. It seems a odds shattering box when it comes to the minis, since I’m still waiting for my first plain old regular issue one. Or are they the short prints and everything else is in abundant supply?

Time permitting, I’ll open it live here later tonight for all you night birds who aren’t tired of the stuff quite yet.

So far this season he sports a 2.41 ERA and fifteen K’s in almost nineteen innings.  He’ll need to show better control to be successful where ever he ends up, having walked nine batters over that same span.  I’m pretty confident that he has some value and have made a play or two for him in a keeper league, but so far I’ve been shot down.  As for card value, well, it’s a reliever.  For the Cubs.  I think that says it all.

Topps is attempting to ease the letdown from redemption #6 and still make the rest of the season relevant by announcing that the Cashner cards will all be autographed.  So good luck finding an overenthusiastic Cubs fan on eBay to pawn this one off on.

“…been used in an official NHL game.”

“…used in an official Bruins NHL game.”

I’m not sure why you would go more specific on one and less on the other, since it only leads to the logical questioning of whether the Phillips jersey was used in a Senators game or not.  And it’s still two degrees from just stating that the player pictured wore the jersey themselves.

The only reasoning I’ve got is that the Stuart card pictures him with the Red Wings and is a black swatch.  So to avoid confusion, UD added the word “Bruins” so people wouldn’t wonder when the Red Wings wore black.  Oddly, all three of my swatches were black, including a not pictured Blake Wheeler photo shoot card.  I’m pretty sure that means I beat the odds.  At least when it comes to the jersey cards.

The main draw, even more so than the jersey cards, are the Young Guns, and I only got five of these.  Pictured is the best of the bunch, Nathan Gerbe of the Buffalo Sabres.  He’s a former Hobey Baker finalist and was an AHL rookie of the year.  He looked good in ten games last season with Buffalo, and while critics claim he’s too small to succeed, he just keeps finding a way to do so.  Two or three years down the line will be a better gauge of how successful my Young Guns pulls actually were.

I was even surprised when I found myself liking an insert set:

You may guess by the foreign spelling of “favourite” that this set celebrates current Canadian born hockey players.  You’d be correct, and it is to me what the Hometown Heroes inserts from year’s past should have been.  Nice looking, decent sized picture of the player, and I learn more about the player than the city skyline of the team that he plays for.

We’ll see how big of a “favourite” Price is in Montreal as he attempts to become this year’s Jaroslav Halak since they traded last year’s Halak in the off-season to St. Louis.  The other insert sets were a bit overwrought (Spectacular Saves with it’s large cursive lettering) or simply lacking (why so much dead space on the Tales of the Cup, Upper Deck?).  Not to be negative, but that’s just how it is.  You’d be hard pressed to come up with an Upper Deck hockey insert set that generated any sort of excitement in the last five years.

What was going to be a quick post has quickly morphed into an impromptu box review, so I’ll include my favorite base card for good measure.  It almost appears that Backstrom has taken control of that puck with his mind and has decided to levitate it in front of him.  Or that there’s something on that puck that Backstrom just does not want to touch.  Whatever the reason, it’s the kind of candid card that adds some spark to the base set, and there seemed to be a lot fewer of these in this incantation.

I also beat the odds (I think) by pulling three gold parallel Victory Update cards, which would be much more thrilling if anyone actually collected that sort of thing.  That aside, it felt like a pretty standard box of Upper Deck hockey.  No one’s buying this particular series to strike it rich, and that’s okay by me.  Without a strong collection of Young Guns, this stuff just doesn’t generate much interest, and I’d love to see Upper Deck work on that with the 2010 release.

It’s not like they have anything else to work on, right?

That was about three weeks ago. I finally made it back to the store a few days ago to try another go round and even hoping for some Ginter, but the cupboard was bare. I can only hope that the rest of those blasters were bought by kids eager to pull their favorite prospects, but I’m pretty sure it was some investor instead who has them up on eBay as I write this. I can’t believe that people are willing to pay $40 for one of these on eBay.  I can tell you right now it’s not worth it.

And that’s even after I pulled one of these. Chromojo, I suppose, even with that printer’s line. Or Strasbling, perhaps? If I sold this on eBay I’d probably recoup the cost of the blaster itself, meaning paying $40 for one of these is outright lunacy. To be honest, I would have been happy with an Aroldis Chapman, and I could get about twenty of those if I was willing to sell this guy. But the collector in me says to keep it since I’d never actively seek one of these out on its own.  I’m not in this for the money, after all, so it’s worth it just to say I’ve got one of my own.

Here’s the Chrome Red I actually did pull. He’s no Aroldis Chapman, that’s for sure. The back of the card makes Oliveras sound like a fringe/utility prospect at best and even though I follow the Reds I had never heard of him until now. Last year he showed some doubles power and hit .307 in A ball, but this year he’s struggling to clear .250 in his second season there.

Oliveras and a Jay Bruce gold parallel are the only Reds I pulled.  And let me tell you the whole gold parallel thing is a waste of time. Now, I realize that most people don’t buy Bowman boxes to put together a set, but I pulled 29 commons from my blaster.  There are 80 cards total in one of these things, so less than 3/8′s of the box for cards to build the base set with. Replacing the gold parallels would be a big first step.

At 1:99 boxes, you think this would be something worthwhile, but eBay shows it selling for around a buck.  It’s probably because most people haven’t heard of “But Mel” before. 

In actuality, Brent Morel was rated the “best hitter” in the White Sox organization by Baseball America, and was generally seen as the fourth or fifth best prospect in their system coming into 2010.  Most articles refered to him as the “third baseman of the future” in Chicago, so perhaps I’ll hang on to it and see what happens.  Perhaps I’ll send it to some White sox collector if I ever get caught up on trades.

Moving on…

While checking out the numbers for Moustakas this year, I came across one of the neater stories about a prospect I’ve ever seen.  He was on his way to dinner with his friends when he saw a little girl crying in the hotel lobby. He stopped to check on her, finds out she’s having homework trouble, and tells his teammates to go on without him so he can help her do third grade math.  How cool is that?

He’s a pretty good ballplayer, too, tearing up AA after a disappointing 2009. He should be on a cut out Topps base card in no time.

Here’s another interesting story of a prospect, this time featuring this year’s 2nd round pick by the Texas Rangers Cody Buckel.  Buckel caught the eye of the drama club president at his school and she convinced him to try out for his high school musical, “High School Musical.”  Cody won the lead to become a real life– uh, whatever the name of the guy from High School Musical is.  My daughter is nowhere near old enough for me to know something like that.

So there you have it.  A successful box, I suppose, considering the price I paid was retail.  The best part of it was reading stories about some of the guys I pulled, so if you aren’t into prospecting, and you aren’t into learning useless facts about baseball players that may or may not make the majors, I can’t say I recommend the thing.  Not that you can find one at your local retail store anyway.

Hey, look, it’s a Mini Mario!  You can keep him in your pocket!  You could win table top hockey games wherever you go! Do they still have table top hockey games somewhere?  I haven’t seen one since I was a kid.  Ah, nostalgia…

I think I may have mentioned this set here before, and I still can’t figure out how I ended up with so many of these when I don’t remember opening a pack.  Mario’s one of the bigger obstacles to overcome in the set, and I’m happy to have him finally checked off the list. 

These I do recall, and I’ve never been more disappointed when opening a box of cards in my life then I was with 1993-94 Score series 2 hockey.  I liked the look of Series 1 and when I saw series 2 for cheap at a card show all those many years ago I thought, ‘Why not?’  Here’s why:

1.   U-G-L-Y.  There’s no alibi for that, from what I hear
2.  Piss poor collation. There should have been enough of these for a set, but instead I ended up with triples of some cards and none of others.
3. The one-a-pack “Gold Rush” cards. I think this was the first box I opened that had a parallel in every pack, which further hampered my ability to put this set together quickly.

Plus it’s clear no one proofread these cards.  According to the back of this Gaetan Duchense card, he played with some team named the “North Stars” and helped San Jose beat a team from “Hartford.”  Everyone knows those teams don’t exist.   Maybe it was some sort of exhibition game or something. 

I had almost forgotten that Eddie the Eagle played for the Florida Panthers.  It would be his last season in the NHL before playing in Sweden for a year.  I’m reasonably sure that makes him eligible for the Hall of Fame next year and he should be a shoe-in when the time comes.  464 wins and two Vezina trophies should see to that.I had thought Michael Ryan had been successful in the NHL, but I realize now that I’m thinking of Bobby Ryan.    Michael has put up only fifteen points in seventy-nine NHL games over the course of three seasons.  Last season he played three games for the Albany River Rats, so I’m not sure if Michael has reached the end of his career or not.  I’ve reached the end of my quest for his card, though.

Ryan did score a goal in his NHL debut, tipping a shot past Ryan Miller and into his own net.  The Sabres would overcome and win the game 7-4.

And finally, the big prize of the bunch.  No, not Randy Pierce, but a number of 79-80 Topps hockey cards to help whittle down my wantlists.  I’m a sucker for players pictured on now defunct teams, so the former Colorado Rockies winger was the clear choice even though he had a mediocre career playing for sub-mediocre teams.

Not pictured are any of the fifty some cards from the various Victory update sets that I foolishly decided to collect, mostly because they are boring cards.  Upper Deck sure sucked me in for a couple of years, though. 

And with that, I’m down to my self-imposed guidelines before breaking open my now outdated 2010 Topps Series 2 box.  A Bowman Blaster break is yet to come.