A Double Dose of Loot

Baseball and basketball from @thelootlocker - both kinds! 

It had been quite awhile since I'd picked up a Loot Locker box, but I decided to dive back in after a bit of a difficult work week. I had only dabbled in baseball before and never basketball, or any of the more expensive options for that matter. For this time out, I decided to get the basic baseball box option as well as the same thing for basketball, a first for me.

If you don't know the drill, they put a few hobby packs in a well packed cardboard storage box and add a dash of hobby supplies (and candy!) on top. There are top loaders and penny sleeves for all the sweet hits you're gonna pull. (Of course, this is sports cards, so your mileage may and will vary.)

For baseball, the packs included were (all Topps) 2019 Allen & Ginter, 2019 Archives (x2) and 2019 Chrome. I opened the Chrome pack and set it aside for a future APTBNL post and will show the most intriguing card from each of the rest of the packages. This includes this mini Ozzie Albies of the A&G back variety. It's crazy that I don't hear a lot about Albies these days, for someone who has improved (offensively at least) on his All-Star rookie campaign and is also only 22(!). Of course, I do tend to have a thing for shortstops, but Albies would definitely be someone I'd want to start a team with.

Speaking of excellent NL shortstops, this is Javy Baez's short printed card from Topps Archives. He's a Cub, though, so I'm just going to keep my mouth shut.

The other Archives pack also had a short printed card. It's one of the Padres top prospects.

The hoops packs were (all Panini, of course) 2013-14 Prestige, 2018-19 Donruss Optic Fast Break (x2) and 2018-19 Prizm Fast Break. The 2013-14 Prestige pack was an interesting and welcome choice, as Loot Locker tends to stick to mostly newer if not brand new stuff. They do have a Twitter voting process if I recall, so it's kind of fun to have a bit of a say in what will end up in the next month's loot. I think this set was probably picked because it was the Giannis rookie year, but I had to make do with a sticker auto of this Jon Leuer guy instead. He's actually still kicking around the league and played in 41 games last year in a limited role with Detroit.

The shiny new stuff was all in the "Fast Break" configuration, which offers an exclusive Fast Break googly-eyed parallel and a chance at other more limited parallels. That the parallel landed on a rookie is pretty good, but I honestly have no idea if this guy is going to be good yet or not.

Ben Simmons was the parallel in the other Optic pack. Simmons is one of the stranger players in recent memory, as he absolutely refuses to shoot and plays point guard like a center. He's not like when Jason Kidd came into the league and couldn't shoot at all, because Kidd was apparently content to throw up brick after brick until they had to replace the dented rims. Simmons just refuses to participate in the whole shooting game. It's weird. I kind of like it, actually, but it has to be limiting to the team as a whole.

The Prizm Fast Break parallel looks very similar to the Optic. Are there any Tyreke Evans collectors out there? Probably not.