Welcome to the Club

Stadium Club, that is. 

Topps is in the 4th year of their Stadium Club revival (let's just forget all about that mess in 2008), and their latest effort just hit the streets recently. With the baseball card aisles completely devoid of anything useful these days (thanks in part to Judgemania and Bellingermadness), I decided to venture out into the World Wide Web to purchase a blaster of the latest and greatest. The font is weird, once again, aping 2000s Fleer Ultra with a weird Coke swoosh on the end of the last letter of each name. Otherwise, this looks a lot like the last two year's offerings. Those were pretty good, although I doubt I'll be chasing this year's set.

The inserts are notable because they're not glossy on the back. The base cards and their assorted parallels are coated in the familiar slickness, and Topps doubled down on this by also making the card backs this way. You could probably fashion a slip-n-slide out of them.

Gold parallels such as this struggling Cub are a fairly common pull.

Wow, no one has trotted out the Faux '80s Graffiti font in awhile. I'm not impressed with these Contact Sheet inserts.

This, on the other hand, is pretty nice. For every hitter focused insert set, you need one for the pitchers I assume.

Sepia-toned parallels fall at 1:8 packs, or basically one per blaster. Seeing a team with black and white as its primary colors kind of ruins the sepia effect, though.

As with the other recent years, the black parallels are a bit of a tougher pull than the golds.

Moose Tacos is inexplicably one of the players I enjoy outside of any connection to the Cardinals. Actually, it's really not that hard to explain. It's the name.

Ozzie Smith's base card photo is in black and white for whatever reason, which briefly me had me thinking I'd pulled some sort of sweet parallel of the Wizard. Ah, too bad.

On the other hand, vintage Rickey is in full color glory here. I would love to see the A's bring these jerseys back as their alternates.

The backs of the card are light on stats (never really Stadium Club's thing unless you liked their weird attempts at '90s style advanced stats), but the little photo in the upper left is a nice touch. This is like a sunny day version of Ultra.

I was never good at pulling those coveted Beam Team inserts (I still need lots of '90s ones for my various collections I'm sure), so it was satisfying to get one of one of the game's best -- even if he doesn't fit into my collection.

As I mentioned, I'm not really collecting these, so feel free to think about sending some Cardinals from this set my way if you're interested in any of these and have picked up any yourself. I only have the Ozzie, so far.