Munched

Baseball is a funny game. Baseball cards are a funny thing.

Its's amazing that you can watch a guy take some of the worst looking at-bats in the history of the game in one moment only to end up the hero after nearly five hours of game of game is played. Hats off to Sal Perez, who should be thrilled he couldn't hear what I was yelling at him through my TV earlier tonight.

On another note, I actually bought some new baseball cards on Saturday. The Target I frequent cleared out every single loose pack of baseball cards since I was last there to make room for football and hockey... and lots of empty shelf space. The empty shelf space makes no sense to me. There is no way that they sold all of the stuff they had sitting out all summer, and these silly things aren't exactly perishable. They did still have Bowman Platinum and Topps Chrome "value" rack packs as well as Topps Chrome blasters, but even though I had some coupons I decided to invest in something I would actually consider collecting. I reached for the very last Allen & Ginter blaster.

For the second year in a row, I pretty much completely forgot to collect new Allen & Ginter cards this year, so I'm playing catch-up again. And the first Cardinals card to fall out was... this... monstrosity:

Yes, yes, this happens to everyone these days, but it's especially frustrating to me because it seems to only happen to cards I care about or cards that are easily tradeable. (This never happens to A's cards.) And now I have to go look up what you should do about damaged cards and find out if it's worth it to try to send this back to the manufacturer.

There were other cards in the blaster that I cared about, fortunately, including this A&G backed Gibby mini. The design is nice, I guess, but I miss old crappy Old Planter.

This card references genre art and other things I don't know anything about. Maybe I'll collect 'em all and learn something?

This is where we learn that Mark McGwire is as boring as a sack of rocks. His pastime is "Family Man". While there's nobility in that, we're not learning anything here.

'Sup.