Who knew?
As I recently teased on Twitter, I bought a few of the drug store variety repack boxes over at Walgreen's on Monday. I was only going to grab one as my reward for running errands that actually involved said drug store, but they happened to be on sale ($3.99!) for some weird reason, so I bought all three that were on the shelf. As those who are familiar with these sorts of dealings know, there is a supposed 1:4 "hit" ratio on these boxes. I have to say that I was surprised that two of these boxes contained what some would call "hits", and not entirely worthless ones at that. Stolmy Pimentel is a young pitcher who hasn't received a ton of big league playing time so far, but he has a fun name!
And Randy Wolf... seriously, Randy Wolf? To be honest, when I saw an old minor league auto fall out of the first box I opened, I was expecting some long forgotten player name I could barely pronounce who hadn't so much as sniffed the big leagues. Wolf may not be Halladay or Hamels, but he spent 16 (!) years in MLB, so I'm sure someone will enjoy this.
Now, not everything was on the "hit" level, but there were some interesting parallels to be found, including a couple of (retail exclusive?) purple refractor prospects from 2013 Bowman Platinum.
Jonathan Schoop has proven to be a pretty good player with a strange last name.
Nineties gold! This is like, I don't know... shiny grunge?
David (not Daniel) Murphy on a Target exclusive parallel.
Unfortunately, I did not need this retail Heritage parallel card of Jon Lester, though there are a ton of these that I do need from this set as well as similar cards from other years. Stupid collection.
I have no idea how these HTA stamped cards were originally distributed (packs? factory set? thrown at random passers-by?) I don't think I have any Cardinals like this, unfortunately.
The font is so hard to read on these 2015 Bowman cards that I originally read this prospect's last name as "Prank", which got my hopes up for nothing.
Of course, the bulk of the boxes were mostly full of pesky base cards. Nomar was the shiniest of the bunch. A small handful of Cardinals were found, but there was nothing that ticked any boxes in my collection. These will all get distributed in future trades.
Thanks for reading, and enjoy your long holiday weekends, everyone. Don't blow off any of your digits.
